Hi, folks, and welcome to the Classic English Literature Podcast, where rhyme gets its reason. And so does blank verse! Because today, at long last, though we have waited, and waiting so be hell, we are finally arrived at our first Shakespeare play.
Sorry that this episode is a little late, too. I crave your indulgence. Over the spring and summer, I was able to hit a stride of an episode a week, but now it's September, school is back in, and I’m on my hind legs teaching literature and philosophy full time. So please understand that new shows will come probably a couple times a month for a while.
One more brief pause before we leap headlong into Billy the Bard. My email is classicenglishliterature@gmail.com. Please send me a note with comments, questions, or suggestions for the show. I’d love to hear from you. If you search “classic english literature podcast” on any of the big social media sites, you’ll find quirky little videos about “this day in literary history,” silly joke videos about famous books and characters, and notices about upcoming episodes. Please do like those posts and subscribe to the feeds. The lifeline of any podcast is positive reviews on whatever listening platform you use – the almighty algorithm raises the profile of well-reviewed podcasts and more folks will be able to find us. Please take a moment to give the Classic English Literature Podcast a five-star thumbs-up and some encouraging words – I will love you forever. And, finally, yes, a little monetary donation goes a long way to help me keep this show going – helps pay the rent for hosting sites and other expenses incurred by sending our little chats out to the universe. Thank you so much for whatever you can do.
pause
You may know that, since the printing of what we call the First Folio – a beautifully bound collection of Shakespeare’s plays which was overseen by his actors John Heminges and Henry Clondell in 1623, seven years after his death – we have traditionally divided Shakeapeare’s plays into three major categories: tragedies, histories, and comedies. The boundaries of these are somewhat contested, and there is an unofficial category used by some scholars called the problem plays, which are formally comedies but have very ambiguous moral visions and dark subtexts. Though the beginnings of Shakespeare’s theatrical career are a bit murky, it's generally agreed that he began his career writing history plays – perhaps the earliest are the three parts of Henry VI, his retelling of the 15th century Wars of the Roses, or the Cousins’ War. I didn’t want to begin our Shakespeare series with these plays and, indeed, I have no intentions of covering them in this podcast. They are in many ways manifestly early works, and despite some really snappy scenes – Jack Cade’s rebellion, a nasty portrayal of Joan of Arc, the awesome Margaret of Anjou – they are often pretty dull and presume a knowledge of 15th century English history that modern readers don’t often possess.
But the putative fourth play in that series, The Tragedy of Richard III, is a great place to start. It’s got a fascinating and charismatic villain-protagonist. There’s treachery, betrayal, seduction, murder. There’s the fall of a dynasty and some disturbingly funny dark irony. It does presume a bit of historical knowledge, but one needn’t be fully expert since the drama’s focus is on Richard’s Machiavellian machinations and a general theory of history rather than on particular figures and events.
I say “putative” fourth play because modern scholars are not convinced, as earlier critics were, that Shakespeare intended Henry VI parts 1, 2, and 3 and Richard III as a serial, what has been called the “minor tetralogy.” The Henry plays were not written in chronological order and there is tremendous evidence that Christopher Marlowe wrote substantial parts of them. Richard III probably hit the stage around 1593, post-Marlowe. And you probably noticed that the play calls itself a tragedy despite the fact that we now consider it a history, an example of those porous taxonomic borders I mentioned earlier.
So let’s get a brief overview of the play’s plot. In form, it’s your basic rise and fall story. Richard, Duke of Gloucester, brother to King Edward IV, is determined to gain the crown of England for himself, no matter what. He opens the play with a soliloquy in which he spurns the recent peace between the Lancaster and York families occasioned by his family’s victory in the War of the Roses. It’s worth quoting the speech in toto, for not only is it prologue to the entire drama, but it also is Richard’s first act of seduction – he seduces us.
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front;
And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the king
In deadly hate the one against the other:
And if King Edward be as true and just
As I am subtle, false and treacherous,
This day should Clarence closely be mew'd up,
About a prophecy, which says that 'G'
Of Edward's heirs the murderer shall be.
The first line is one of those that nearly everybody has heard – it’s just part of the cultural vocabulary now. The “sun of York” is a pun – son as in offspring and heir of a family who used an estoile type sun symbol on their heraldry. So Edward IV is the rising sun, both ways.
From there, one may notice the subtle use of alliteration in the monologue. Not regularized, as in Old English poetry or in the 14th century Middle English alliterative revival, but strategically and almost “naturally” placed to reflect the speaker’s mood. Like this sentence:
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Those “m” sounds throughout – a humming, almost (dare I say it?) nursing sound. The sound of a precocious but disgruntled child musing his way forward. Of course, he also leans on sibilant sounds, the “s,” that reminds one of the hissing and duplicitous serpent. Dental sounds, like “d”s and “t”s intimate a staccato, percussive force. There’s an entire psychology in Gloucester’s use of consonants.
He goes on to lament that “Grim-visaged war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front.” That war, Ares or Mars, has now left the battlefield and become a courtly lover, capering in a lady’s bedchamber and playing the lute (a musical instrument with definite feminizing connotations at the time). Why does he miss war and death and despise the love games of courtiers? Because he is “rudely stamped” – misshapen, with a hunchback, a withered arm, and a lame leg, “Cheated of feature by dissembling nature, / Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time / Into this breathing world, scarce half made up.” Hardly any woman’s idea of Prince Charming, so he will thus “prove a villain.”
His onstage villainy begins with his second seduction, the pursuit of Lady Anne, the widow of Edward, Prince of Wales and daughter-in-law of the late King Henry VI (both of whom Richard murdered, by the way). Yeah, that’s right, he proposes to the woman he has victimized as she accompanies the funeral procession and, after excoriating him for his vile crimes, she accepts his proposal! Richard addresses us directly: “Was ever woman in this humour wooed? / Was ever woman in this humour won?” He assures, though, in a wicked and arrogant aside, that he will not keep her long, however. Richard gets his elder brother, Clarence, tossed in the Tower of London on phony charges. While there, Clarence tells the jailer a dream he had. He fears the dream foretells his death by drowning. On cue, Richard's hired assassins whack him and stash the body in a cask of malmsey wine.
Richard becomes governor while King Edward IV lies ill. Lord Hastings and the Duke of Buckingham are his advisers. Margaret, former queen of Henry VI, Queen Elizabeth, Edward's wife, and the widowed Duchess of York, Richard's mother, lament the turbulence in the kingdom and in their lives. Margaret curses Richard:
If heaven have any grievous plague in store
Exceeding those that I can wish upon thee,
O, let them keep it till thy sins be ripe,
And then hurl down their indignation
On thee, the troubler of the poor world's peace!
The worm of conscience still begnaw thy soul!
Thy friends suspect for traitors while thou livest,
And take deep traitors for thy dearest friends!
No sleep close up that deadly eye of thine,
Unless it be whilst some tormenting dream
Affrights thee with a hell of ugly devils!
Most listeners have probably heard about the Princes in the Tower. Richard imprisons his nephews there – since Clarence isn’t using his cell anymore – to obviate their claims to the crown. Buckingham, meanwhile, persuades the Lord Mayor and the citizens of London to support Richard’s ascent. When Edward succumbs to his disease, the Duke of Gloucester is proclaimed King Richard III.
Richard executes Lord Hastings, for a twinge of conscience. He smothers the princes (by proxy) in the tower. Buckingham feels his own twinge of conscience and presumably begins wearing extra-starchy collars. But when Richard refuses to make him an earl, Buckingham tries to raise a rebellion. Richard captures and executes him, despite the starchy collar.
As predicted, Richard’s wife Anne becomes politically obsolete, so he wastes her and sets about on seduction number three: Elizabeth of York, Edward IV's daughter, who would prop up his reign.
Meanwhile, over the channel and far away, Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, decides to enforce his Lancastrian claim to the throne, gathering an army in France to topple the tyrannical Yorkist usurper. Richmond lands at Milford Haven in Wales, his family’s ancestral home and marches to meet Richard’s army at Bosworth in Leicestershire. The night before the battle, the ghosts of Richard’s victims haunt his dreams, foretelling his doom,then move on to bless Richmond in the coming day’s trial. During the battle, Richard famously mislays his horse, offers to trade his kingdom for one, then gets wasted himself by Richmond, who is then proclaimed Henry VII of England, the first Tudor monarch. He will end the Cousins War by marrying Elizabeth of York, cross-pollinating the white rose of York to the red rose of Lancaster. Under the Tudors, a golden age of peace, stability, and prosperity will ensue, free of poverty, anxiety, and bigotry – an iteration of the heavenly kingdom right here on God’s green earth.
pause
Or so we are supposed to believe. Shakespeare’s sources for the play’s historical material have a decidedly pro-Tudor, anti-Richard slant. This should not be surprising – we’ve all heard the old saying that history is written by the winners, and since the Plantagenet line died on Bosworth field and the Tudor rose bloomed, we should expect the historiography to support the status quo, especially in an age that more explicitly saw history as a political tool and for which censorship or worse enforced an approved interpretation of events.
The earliest of the sources Shakespeare consulted is Sir Thomas More’s “The History of King Richard III” from the year 1513. It’s from More that we get the description of Richard’s alleged physical deformities. He avers that the Duke of Gloucester was “little of stature, ill featured of limbs, crook backed, his left shoulder much higher than his right, hard favoured of visage … he was malicious, wrathful, envious, and from afore his birth, ever froward . . . close and secret, a deep dissimuler’ and ‘not letting to kiss whom he thought to kill.” Hardly a flattering portrait, but entirely predictable from a member of Henry VIII’s Parliament and undersheriff of London who would become a member of the Privy Council the year after printing his history. The description does seem quite extreme, from clearly perceptible physical malformations to speculative personality traits. One should remember that this is an age which saw a symmetrical order to the Universe – God’s Providence shaped the Cosmos. Such symmetry demanded that physical disabilities must be reflective of moral disabilities – if one’s body looked ugly, one’s soul was surely ugly, too. More is also the first chronicler to explicitly blame Richard for the murder of the Princes in the Tower, naming James Tyrell as the actual assassin (this fella, incidentally, was executed for treason in 1502). While More tries to faithfully record facts in his account, he also includes dramatized scenes (for narrative flair) and considers potential psychological motivations. This would, of course, appeal to a playwright like Shakespeare, but it also complicates the authenticity of the book’s historical analysis.
I must be careful, however, not to presume that 21st century ideas of history as the record and interpretation of verifiable facts held sway in the early modern period. Another source consulted by Shakespeare is Edward Hall’s “The Union of the Two Noble and Illustrate Families of Lancaster and York,” which hit the shelves in 1548. Hall recounts English history from the forced abdication of Richard II and the accession of Henry IV in 1399 through the reign of Henry VIII. Hall introduces moralizing to historiography and thus a sense of drama: Richard is a usurper, Henry VIII glorious. This moralizing explicitly invokes God’s providence as intervening in human history. The turbulence and turmoil of the Wars of the Roses are part of God’s grand design to glorify England. Hall writes, as he says, “so that all men, more clearer than the sun, may apparently perceive that as by discord great things decay and fall to ruin, so the same by concord be revived and erected.” God’s concord culminates, for Hall, in the ascension of Henry VIII, which is “a thing by God elected and provided and by his especial favor and gracious aspect compassed and achieved.”
So, two of Shakespeare’s main sources for Richard III lean quite heavily on the moral purpose of God’s universe. We’re talking a sort of historical determinism here, an argument that the Tudor regime was always already intended to establish an exalted social order blessed by God. The final source for the play is the famous Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland by Raphael Holinshed. I suppose anyone who’s ever taken a Shakespeare course in college has heard of Holinshed. His 1577 work is the touchstone of early modern English historiography and Shakespeare relied upon the second edition of 1587 for nearly all of his English history plays. Unlike the other sources, Holinshed downplays the narrative of the Tudor dynasty as God’s instrument. It’s not absent, but not as prominent.
Which gets us a bit closer to the dichotomy between the Richard of Tudor historiography and the Richard of history. You may know that Richard III is the only English monarch with a society dedicated to correcting what they see as the vile slanders of propagandists. They point out that Gloucester never betrayed his brother Clarence – rather they had a very close relationship. Nor was Gloucester responsible for the deaths of Henry VI or Edward IV. The Princes in the tower? Well, that one is a wicket most sticky. While there is some difference of opinion among historians as to whether Richard ordered the deaths of his nephews, those pleading “not guilty” dwindle to an ever more desperate minority. Others stoop to pleading “whataboutism,” pointing out that other monarchs have committed murders too terrible for the ear yet have not had their names forever sullied. Hmmm . . . but there’s something about killing children, isn’t there, that most folks think goes beyond the pale of political expediency. Historian David Baldwin points out that the historical Richard was quite a good fellow until 1483, had not coveted the crown really, but perhaps sought to save the kingdom from the topsy-turviness of a child king and a regency. A body discovered beneath a Leicester, England car park in 2012 was confirmed as that of the late king. While the remains did show signs of scoliosis, with one shoulder somewhat higher than the other, there was no evidence of the grave deformities described by Sir Thomas More and amplified in Shakespeare’s play.
So why has the image of a villainous Richard persisted? E.M.W. Tillyard, perhaps the preeminent 20th-century scholar on this question, puts forward the idea of the Tudor Myth. Firstly, he argues that the myth posits the union between the houses of York and Lancaster was providential, that is, ordained by God. Secondly, he notes that the myth emphasizes the Tudor line’s Welsh roots, including descendancy from Cadwallader, the last British king, and the notion that King Arthur – yes, that Arthur – the once and future king who would revive from his deathlike slumber in his country’s time of need – is reincarnate in Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond. That Richmond’s historical claim to the crown was tenuous at best necessitates a bit of retrofitting. Indeed, Henry VII names his eldest son Arthur to drive the point of his ancient lineage home. One can easily argue that Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is the greatest flowering of Tudor Arthurian mythmaking.
Such a mythos requires a cosmic villain to vanquish, and the one literally vanquished at Bosworth will do nicely, thank you very much. It follows that the character of Gloucester is akin to the Vice figure from the medieval morality plays. Richard himself plays this up; he says, “Thus, like the formal vice, Iniquity, / I moralize two meanings in one word.” Queen Margaret calls him, “the troubler of the poor world’s peace.” Whatever the particular political exigencies under which More wrote his history of Richard, or the teleological moral purposes of Edward Hall, these strands weave together to present a pre-ordained plan to have England, like a phoenix, rise from the ashes of Plantagenet decadence. Tillyard maintains that Shakespeare “accepted the prevalent belief that God had guided England into her haven of Tudor prosperity.” He points to Richmond’s prayer before the battle of Bosworth, in which the pretender positions himself as a minister of God’s providence:
O Thou, whose captain I account myself,
Look on my forces with a gracious eye.
Put in their hands Thy bruising irons of wrath,
That they may crush down with a heavy fall
The usurping helmets of our adversaries.
Make us Thy ministers of chastisement,
That we may praise Thee in the victory.
And when Richmond fires up his men before they take the field, he cries,
Then if you fight against God’s enemy
God will in justice ward you as his soldiers;
If you do sweat to put a tyrant down,
You sleep in peace, the tyrant being slain.
Here’s the part where I’m going to be something of an arrogant jerk. Like, who am I to challenge E.M.W. Tillyard, the guy who literally wrote the book on Shakespeare’s history plays? But, with all humility, I think I disagree, sir.
I’m also about to appall the scholars here, too, by blithely and recklessly mixing critical-theoretical approaches. Whatever. You see, in the mid 20th century, the dominant theory of literary analysis was something we can broadly call formalism. That is, literary critique should focus solely on the form and style of a text and pay scant, if any, regard to the social, cultural, historical, or biographical forces that may have born upon that text’s composition or reception. Such critics felt that such forces lay beyond a reader’s certain knowledge. One could only really guess, or at best hypothesize, about how a writer’s cultural milieu or intentions may inflect a text’s construction. Therefore, any such propositions lacked sufficient scholarly rigor. All we have before us are the words on the page, and consequently we should restrict commentary to what those words and their particular arrangement indicate.
All well and good. I understand the position. I should note, however, that such formally scrupulous critique fell out of favor by the 1980s in the face of socio-political theories of literary analysis such as feminism, post-colonialism, queer theory, as well as, and especially, from deconstruction and post-structuralist models from France, which primarily see literature as a political construction.
All that being said, what I mean to get at is that, while Tillyard does make great gestures toward the historical implications of Richard III’s composition, his focus is still primarily on the text as a sovereign work of art, and I think his argument that the play is an artifact of Tudor propaganda and myth-making fails to take into account what Shakespeare and his audience would have understood at the time.
As I said about the character of Lorenzo in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, the Machiavel figure – of which Richard of Gloucester is a supreme example – is not entirely analogous to the medieval figure of Vice. That character is an embodiment of iniquity, an immoral force that transcends any immanent human action. The Machiavel is a human agent – much more in line with the humanistic thinking of the Renaissance than with the allegorical conceptions of the medieval world. Thus, the Machiavel acts upon free will, and is less technically immoral – which would imply the recognition and acceptance of a primordial moral principle, though the rejection of the same – and certainly more amoral – that is, disallowing the existence of such a principle. There is no such thing as right or wrong, good or evil. There is only self-interested expediency.
This is how Shakespeare constructs the play’s protagonist. Gloucester’s opening speech indicates his intention to, as he says, “prove a villain.” And this line comes, as it were, as the conclusion to a logical argument – there is something pseudo-syllogistic about this resolution: if I am “rudely stamped”, “deformed,” and “unfinished,” then I cannot “prove a lover” with courtly “sportive tricks,” therefore “I am determined to prove a villain.” He is no pawn of fate or providence, or at least he is convinced of his own agency. The verb “prove,” used twice in this speech, also could indicate a certain empirical, logical state of mind. Its most common meaning for us is “to show to be true.” There is a demonstrative aspect to proving. But in the early modern era, prove could also mean to test or to experiment. In this definition, one is searching for what may be true. Note such a usage in Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” where the shepherd says that they
will all the pleasures prove
that Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
The lovers will test, try out, the pleasures of Nature. We find such a usage again in the old saying “the exception proves the rule.” Originally, this meant that an exception tested or challenged the rule and not, as we now blithely accept despite its counter-intuitiveness, that the existence of exceptions shows that the rule is true.
Anyway, I’m in danger of straying from the steep and thorny way to the primrose path of dalliance. What I’m getting at is that Richard consciously takes on the role he plays: he will test its limits and its outcomes to see if it reveals who he is. Remember, he too is aware that a misshapen body may betoken a misshapen soul – he will find out. He will fulfill everyone’s expectations.
So Richard is not a cosmic personification of Vice sent to hasten a providential rebirth of England under a victorious Richmond. Because another reason for Shakespeare’s audience to doubt the notion of a peaceful and glorious Tudor tenancy is that they know what happened in the last hundred years, which, I think no one would disagree, was not a century marked by tranquility, prosperity, or stability. One, Henry VII’s claim is weak as water and much of his time is spent attempting to legitimize it. Then, his oldest son Arthur dies, shifting the succession to young Henry, who marries Arthur’s widow Catherine – which had to be dispensed by the Church. Then he gets tired of Catherine because of the whole “no son” thing, which he thinks may be God’s punishment for technically committing incest. Then he fights with Pope, breaks up with him and forces the whole country to ghost the Pontiff. Then Anne Boleyn, who inaugurates a series of wives. She, of course, is beheaded, then the others, in order: die, get divorced, get beheaded, get widowed. We get also, of course, the executions and banishments of several chief counselors, including Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Sir Thomas More, and Thomas Cromwell. Henry’s youthful son, Edward VI, has a brief but tumultuous reign, hardlining his father’s rather more ameliorated Protestantism. He dies of a fever and after a squabble with Lady Jane Grey, Mary Tudor, the infamous Bloody Mary, gains the crown and swings the nation back to Catholicism. She pegs out after a few years which feature hysterical pregnancies and no heirs, and finally her half-sister Elizabeth takes over. Elizabeth must see off Catholic conspiracies, Spanish invasions, and plots concerning Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, whom Elizabeth executes.
Hardly a quiet century. In fact, one full of whiplash religious reform and constant opacity as to the succession. Church and State both were wildly unpredictable during the Tudor period. By the 1590s, when everyone’s enjoying Shakespeare’s tale of a Machiavellian duke clearing the way for his own succession, it was clear that, despite the white lead makeup, Good Queen Bess was feeling her age and there would be no direct heir to her throne. Everyone knew the Tudor dynasty, though not yet dead, was coughing up blood. What they could not have known at the time, of course, was that the century to follow would be even more chaotic, including a full blown civil war, the execution of a king, the establishment of a dictatorship, a restoration, then another invasion resulting in a Dutch king of England.
So clearly, England’s turmoil does not end with the Tudor ascension. Indeed, the centralization of monarchical power so often attributed to this dynasty may have intensified the struggles that were once somewhat more diffuse in a decentralized feudal system.
With apologies to Professor Tillyard, I must say that William Shakespeare’s play Richard III is not a jingoistic celebration of the forces of order triumphing over the forces of chaos. Given the history, Richmond's speeches at the play’s end can only have seemed naive and ironic to the people in the theatre. When he asserts that England shall “reap the harvest of perpetual peace / By this one bloody trial of sharp war” the metaphor is not as mixed as the results. The one bloody trial never did end. Rather than seeing the play as chronicling the dawn of a new era, I see it as an almost – well, maybe cynical is too strong a word. Bitter? I don’t know. Seems that the play argues less for providential teleology and more for the paradoxically stable instability of the rota fortunae. The wheel spins, but we never really get anywhere.