by Emma Smith
Shakespeare writes Richard III as a final part of a historical story, written after a series of plays on the reign of Henry VI, the king whose corpse ‘bleed[s] afresh’ (1.2.56) as his murderer Richard comes to woo his daughter-in-law Lady Anne. We’ll return to the notion of Richard III as a play in a series below, noting for now that Richard’s dramatic dominance registers a new political and theatrical order. The contrast between the turbulent maelstrom of competing interests in the Henry VI plays is striking. Those previous historical dramas on the Wars of the Roses dramatize the absence of any authoritative leader by distributing the roles widely across the theatrical company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, originally formed in 1594 by a group of eight shareholders, including Shakespeare. The plays’ historical politics and their dramaturgical politics are aligned: no single character is any more important than any other. By contrast, Richard registers his own ambition, seizing his own play by the scruff of the neck right from the start, and he doesn’t let go: his hold on the politics of his country is matched by Shakespeare’s fascist dramaturgy which is designed explicitly to showcase his charismatic authority.
Richard’s role is huge. He speaks around a third of the play’s lines, a proportion not far off that of Hamlet in his play. He is on stage for two-thirds of the play, around two-and-a-quarter demanding hours of stage time. The part is sometimes identified as Shakespeare’s first major collaboration with the leading actor and fellow Chamberlain’s Men shareholder, Richard Burbage; his first play that is a star-vehicle rather than an ensemble piece. This is the partnership that will bring us Othello and Lear and Macbeth and Prospero over the next two decades, and here, at its inception, it irresistibly elides the charisma of both Richards. Richard (III) is himself a consummate actor, so much so that we wonder if there is anything underneath. He performs his own role self-consciously: his cues to his loyal sidekick Buckingham in his appearance before the Lord Mayor and citizens, when he appears as a devout hermit between two bishops, are good examples of his actorly delight (he’s the opposite, in a way, of the theatre-phobic Coriolanus, discussed in Chapter 18). The long history of the performances of this play, from Colley Cibber to David Garrick, and from Laurence Olivier to Antony Sher, demonstrates that it is almost impossible for Richard to overact: the histrionic quality of his deformed and manic self-presentation is intrinsic to the hammy part. Subtlety is not part of Richard’s armoury; hyperbole and self-conscious excess are the keynotes from that first long opening soliloquy.
There’s so much to dislike about Richard, and yet – or so – he is beguiling, seductive, ravishing, within the play and outside it. It’s almost as if the play’s popularity itself testifies to a kind of audience masochism. And within the drama, there is little chance of resistance to Richard’s will, as we see in the early scene with Lady Anne. As the most extreme, circumstantially unsympathetic person with regard to Richard – he has, as he cheerfully acknowledges, ‘butcherèd’ (1.2.67) her husband and father-in-law – Anne plays the role of the sceptical audience deciding whether to take up Richard or turn against him. Inevitably, the scene gets us signing on the dotted line after being softened up by that opening speech: like her, we choose him. Richard’s rhetoric works to make Lady Anne feel she is complicit in, or culpable for, his behaviour: ‘I did kill King Henry; / But ’twas thy beauty that provokèd me.’ ‘’Twas I that stabbed young Edward; / But ’twas thy heavenly face that set me on’ (1.2.167–8, 169–70). And as we laugh at his callous epigram ‘I’ll have her, but I will not keep her long’ (1.2.217), we too have entered into a masochistic compact with this alluring protagonist. Part of the audience’s role in relation to Richard is encapsulated in this feminized, enchanted revulsion. Perhaps it’s not surprising, therefore, that one of the only anecdotes we have about Shakespeare actually tells us more about the desirability of Richard Burbage as Richard III. A joke in the diary of the law student John Manningham at the beginning of the seventeenth century reports that: ‘Upon a time when Burbage played Richard III there was a citizen grew so far in liking with him, that before she went from the play she appointed him to come that night unto her by the name of Richard III. Shakespeare, overhearing their conclusion, went before, was entertained, and at his game ere Burbage came. Then message being brought that Richard III was at the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard III.’ This jest mobilizes Richard’s sexual magnetism for his audience. Like Lady Anne, we (both men and women) are violently, masochistically smitten with this ruthless celebrity actor.
But there’s a structural problem in making Richard so alluring. In the chapter on 1 Henry IV I suggest that in his fat, roguish anti-hero Falstaff, Shakespeare created a moral monster. For the prodigal son plot of that play to work out, the young prince needs to reject the baleful influence of Falstaff and distance himself from his former drinking companion. But the audience can’t get enough of this funny, disreputable figure: they want more Falstaff. The morality of the story and the pleasure of the performance are at odds. By the time he came to write 1 Henry IV, Shakespeare had already experienced a similar impasse in Richard III. Because the end of Richard’s story can’t really be the jubilant accession to the throne he has so long plotted to possess. No: in Richard III Shakespeare’s pragmatic end-goal is actually the defeat of Richard by Henry, Earl of Richmond, better known to history as Henry VII and more familiar to his own audiences as the grandfather of the Tudor dynasty and of Queen Elizabeth I.
Richmond thus has a vital historical role. He is Richard’s nemesis, the end of his megalomaniac progress to the English throne. But he also symbolizes and enacts the end of the Wars of the Roses, that long historical fallout from the deposition of Richard II that scarred the second half of the fifteenth century and animates Shakespeare’s history plays. Richmond enters Shakespeare’s play in the last act. On the eve of battle, Richard is cursed in a dream by the ghosts of his victims, who then go to Richmond to bless his enterprise. Richmond marries the daughter of Edward, Elizabeth of York – Richard’s niece. At Bosworth Field, Richard is defeated by Richmond in single combat; Richmond is crowned and announces that ‘We will unite the white rose and the red’ – the houses of York and Lancaster – and bring an end to conflict: ‘Now civil wounds are stopped; peace lives again’ (5.8.19, 40).
Mid-twentieth century approaches to Shakespeare were very clear that in Richmond Shakespeare presented the idealized solution to all that dynastic and political turmoil he had previously dramatized. The standard critic on this is E. M. W. Tillyard, who argued that Shakespeare’s history plays were broadly propagandistic, a means of consolidating Elizabeth’s power by providing a genealogical and historical sanction for Tudor rule. Richmond’s victory at Bosworth Field at the end of Richard III marks the establishment of the Tudor dynasty, and the play suggests that the Tudors have thus delivered England from tyranny: ‘The bloody dog’, Richmond proclaims, ‘is dead’ (5.8.2). Following Tillyard, in an influential argument that still pertains in some critical and theatrical quarters now, the ‘Tudor myth’ that was Shakespeare’s subject in his history plays reaches its culmination in the presentation of Richmond: the providentialist arc of the history play sequence is completed in this act of reparation and restitution. After a sequence of illegitimate kings following the deposition of Richard II, and a period of violent and turbulent civil expiation for this political and ethical crime, according to Tillyard, Richmond comes to reinstate the tarnished monarchy in the blessed form of the Tudors. In this play, writes Tillyard, Shakespeare ‘accepted the prevalent belief that God had guided England into her haven of Tudor prosperity’.
It’s slightly unpalatable to think of Shakespeare as an early recipient of the toadying prize Private Eye awards as the OBN (Order of the Brown Nose), and indeed, there are lots of ways to challenge this vision of Elizabethan politics in general and Richard III in particular. Not least, it’s good to remember that Tillyard was writing in the war-weary England of 1944, when co-optin
g Shakespeare to a buoyant vision of eventual delivery from hostilities and suffering was all too important: we tend to find the meanings we need to in Shakespeare’s plays (which also explains why more comfortable times have felt more able to excavate the violent and unresolved politics of his histories). For another thing, the establishment of the Tudors by Henry VII was by no means the end of the dynastic problems: we might recall those six wives and the struggle for an heir to Henry VIII, for example. More immediately, presenting the Tudors as the only sanctified antidote to civil war would have been a backhanded compliment in the early 1590s, when even the most optimistic and gallant politicians had given up on the idea of the fifty-year-old queen marrying and having an heir. By the time Shakespeare had begun his career as a playwright, the Tudors were – although it wasn’t advisable to say it out loud – toast, a dynasty that had run out of heirs and steam.
Many more recent critics, trying to assess how Shakespeare’s history plays might intervene in contemporary political debates, have suggested that their role is rather to rehearse repressed anxieties about the Elizabethan succession. This argument goes that history plays try out different versions of monarchies in decline, different versions of power changing hands, so they are documents of political uncertainty rather than of historical triumph. The turn to history in the culture of the late sixteenth century can itself be seen as a sign of cultural anxiety – a turn to the past rather than a step forward into the future. The political future, for the Elizabethans, was decidedly uncertain, so they looked instead to the lessons of the past. Finally, perhaps Richmond’s underdeveloped characterization in the play allows for a different interpretation. A disturbing conclusion to Michael Boyd’s 2007 Royal Shakespeare Company production had Richmond delivering his pious and platitudinous final speech as his flak-jacketed troops watched the audience through the sights of their machine guns. Is it peace that Richmond brings, or military dictatorship? History is full of examples of tyrants who looked like liberators. Does his victory really register as the triumphant conclusion to the politics of conflict, or does it appear rather as another contingent version of the theatre’s appetite for parables of regime change?
Is Richmond, then, the play’s hero? Perhaps we could phrase the question another way. Imagine you are an ambitious actor going to a casting call for Richard III. What’s the part you’re hoping for? Right. Shakespeare has done as much as he possibly can, I think, to minimize and to downplay Richmond’s role. We know that Shakespeare cannot, in writing history plays, change historical fact, although he does lots of work to shape the baggy narratives of the chronicles into drama. Winners and losers, kings and challengers, appear in his plays as they do in the historical record, even as events, battles and motives are collapsed or manipulated. Henry, Earl of Richmond, won the Battle of Bosworth Field on 22 August 1485, killing King Richard III to take the throne. The play acknowledges this historical fact. But it does so quite grudgingly, quite minimally, without any real attempt to characterize Richmond, to integrate him as Richard’s antagonist, to make him attractive, or to counter whispered suggestions that his own claim to the throne is questionable. He is in three scenes only, perhaps about fifteen minutes of stage time. He doesn’t even exist until Act 4, where he is first mentioned, and doesn’t appear on stage until Act 5, scene 2. In the play in performance he is the necessary but personally uninteresting sap who will speak the dead protagonist’s eulogy, whose presence calls time on the whole play. He has to appear, but in silencing the interesting, charismatic, dramatic Richard, he is almost an anti-theatrical figure. Once Richard has gone, the play is over. This is a play resolutely about Richard, not Richmond.
So the structure of the play reinforces those audience sympathies with which it begins. Richmond’s role is as nemesis, but it is also as the figure known to classical drama as the deus ex machina – a person, sometimes divine, sometimes human – who comes in unexpectedly at the end of the play to sort things out. The phrase was originally used by Horace as a negative: playwrights, he instructed, should not resort to this lame mechanical trick, a classical version of ‘and then I woke up and it was all a dream’. In Shakespeare’s hands it seems that the inadequacies of the device are being consciously deployed for bathetic effect: Richard’s personal charisma, his will to power, his dramatic vitality, can only be defeated by the inevitability of historical fact, not by any dramatic rival. Richmond is no match for him. Only the clunkily unlikely deus ex machina device can manufacture Richard’s downfall. Richard Loncraine’s 1995 film set in 1930s fascist London, with Ian McKellen as Richard, ends with his refusal to be captured, jumping from an impossible height into the inferno of the battle, set against Al Jolson’s disconcertingly jaunty ‘I’m Sitting on Top of the World’. It’s a discordant ending but one that emphasizes Richard’s irrepressible will as an invincible victory over his duller enemies. Richmond has only that most equivocal of triumphs, that of being alive at the end of a Shakespearean tragedy. This is the hallmark of the nonentity (the Prince in Romeo and Juliet, Fortinbras in Hamlet, Malcolm in Macbeth: who cares?).
Richmond’s minor presence in the play disrupts the historical telos – from the Greek, meaning the end or purpose, from which we get ‘teleology’, the movement towards that end or purpose. The play’s position in a wider sequence of Shakespearean history plays also complicates that telos. Shakespeare writes his histories rather as George Lucas makes his Star Wars films; that’s to say, he writes towards an ‘end of history’ moment. For Lucas this is Luke Skywalker becoming a fully fledged Jedi and destroying the Empire; for Shakespeare it is the victory of Richmond at Bosworth Field. So the end of Richard III takes the historical story to a point where there is no possibility of pursuing it any further. ‘Abate the edge of traitors, gracious Lord’ (5.8.35), prays the godly Richmond, as he predicts that his descendants will ‘Enrich the time to come with smooth-faced peace, / With smiling plenty, and fair prosperous days’ (5.8.33–4). But while this may be a worthy political aspiration, it is not a very dramatic one. Who’d want to go to a play about ‘smiling plenty and fair prosperous days’? And a play about the Tudor monarchs might be a political minefield: it’s not until much later, in the relative monarchical safety of the Stuart King James that Shakespeare writes his collaborative play about Henry VIII. So, what both Shakespeare and George Lucas do is to pursue their popular and audience-tested themes by reverting to an earlier, prequel part of the story. After the end, that’s to say, we go back to the beginning. The next plays, on Richard II and Henry IV, return us to an earlier chronological point in the story, just as they return us anew to a world of conflict and embattled sovereignty. Only if we order the plays in the order of their historical reigns do we get Richmond’s victory as the final instalment: as audiences experienced these plays in the Elizabethan theatre, Richmond’s victory was only provisional, temporary – rather like the victory at Shrewsbury at the end of 1 Henry IV, or the Battle of Agincourt in Henry V. It concluded only an episode, a single afternoon at the theatre, not the whole story. Next time they came to the playhouse it was all swords and conspiracies and jostling for the crown again.
Since the twentieth century, it’s been fashionable to perform complete sequences of Shakespeare’s history plays so that audiences can trace the entire arc from the historically earliest, Richard II, to the latest, Richard III. There is no evidence from the Shakespearean period that these history plays were seen as serial or episodic in their own time, or ever performed in this way back then: rather they were complete and self-standing dramatic entertainments. The habit of reading them as a sequence has been cued by their arrangement in the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays of 1623. The First Folio collection was compiled after Shakespeare’s death, and therefore we cannot attribute its organization and presentation to the author. This volume is divided into comedies, histories and tragedies, and although there’s no obvious order of the plays in the other two categories, the histories genre has been carefully organized,
and in some cases the plays have been retitled, to make historical chronology the organizing principle. They are presented here as a serial epic rather than a set of individual plays – what the theatre director Trevor Nunn called the ‘first box set’. It is in print in the First Folio that Richard III takes on its conclusive position, and it is this arrangement of the history plays that gives rise to Tillyard’s providentialist telos. It’s not surprising that the Folio misses out all the description of Richard’s crimes that animated the solo publication of the play, and instead gives us this extended title: ‘The Tragedy of Richard the Third: with the landing of Earl Richmond, and the Battle at Bosworth Field’. The First Folio arrangement of the history plays thus makes Richmond’s climactic entry into Richard III overdetermined as the ending not only of this play, but of a sequence, and a larger morally structured historical narrative of crime, violent expiation and restitution.
It’s worth reiterating that this idea of historical and ethical sequence is a later construction, not the experience of the first playgoers to the histories. Nor is it necessarily the experience of Richard III itself. To be sure, the play can only end one way, but it also puts off that conclusion as long as it can. Partly because of Richard’s personal dominance, and partly because of the play’s nostalgic themes, this is a play that keeps resisting forward momentum. And crucial to this anti-teleology are the play’s women.