In the past few weeks, I’ve been disturbed by online
questions I’ve seen posed about Shakespeare’s 1592 play, Richard III. These
have ranged from wondering why the playwright was a liar, to a complete
rejection of all of his plays by devoted Ricardians. In which case, they’d be
missing out, not just on a piece of spellbinding drama but also on the bard’s
unconcealed affection for the dead King. Yes, that’s right: Shakespeare actually
loved Richard but he couldn’t change the course of history or challenge what he
did not know.
No political motivation underpins the charisma of
Shakespeare’s Richard at the start of this play. If the bard was simply using
the dead King as a villain, following the lead of Rous, More, Vergil and
Holinshed, he need not have gone to such lengths to create an engaging,
charismatic figure. Rather, it seems, Shakespeare infused his Richard with a
life force that went against the historical grain, compelling an audience to
connect with him as an individual and drawing on the very British sympathy for
the underdog that underpins much of Richard’s following today. The character’s
tone is expansive, confiding, he draws us in with soliloquy and confidences. By
speaking directly to the audience he makes us complicit in his exclusion from life
and love; he “must prove a villain” and invites us to share his journey. And he
does it with such destructive energy, such personal allure in spite of his
outward deformities that we cannot help but be charmed.
No writer can escape from the times in which they
lived and worked. By definition, they are a composite of the mores of the day,
of cultural constructs and received wisdom. Over a century after Richard’s
death, Shakespeare could no more think of questioning his “deformity” and
villainy that he might have questioned the sun rising in the morning and setting
at night. Equally, we wouldn’t expect him to be able to step outside the
Elizabethan perception of “Moors” while exploiting them to justify the
character of his Othello. He wasn’t the unwitting dupe or co-conspirator of
Tudor politics, he was exploiting the popular perception of recent history for
purposes of entertainment and didacticism. It doesn’t mean he didn’t believe in
the popular portrayals of Richard’s appearance but he did not invent them and
their robust tradition scarcely needed his endorsement by that point. In them,
he saw the seeds of inevitability that he could juxtapose with a personal magnetism
in order to create compelling drama. He was not a politician or a liar, he was
an artist of genius.
Shakespeare’s portrayal of Richard’s physical
deformity needs to be recognised as dramatic rhetoric, an ideological
distortion, a piece of neo-Platonic determinism, in the same way that
Shakespeare had to make Othello black. It is an essential part of the
Elizabethan rhetoric that encodes villainy in physicality. In fact, it
illuminates for us just how far history itself had been deformed. The
juxtaposition of attraction and repulsion was a moral lesson for the
Elizabethans and regardless of hindsight, they all knew how it was going to
end. So Richard must prove himself a villain in order to justify the
inevitability of fate and the re-establishment of calm. He transgresses the
boundaries established by the Tudors’ ancestors therefore he has to pay the
price. Shakespeare’s message is not a political one here; Richard is merely his
vehicle for the confirmation of the Elizabethan moral code. This is a literary
device in line with centuries of defamation of monarchs, politicians and public
figures. It just happens to have been a more successful one.
As the play progresses, Richard gradually alienates all
the other characters, even his family. He interacts less and less with the
audience, so our initial bond is weakened, in a process of detachment which
is necessary for us to be able to accept his death. He is not our Richard by
the end, he has undergone a process of transformation; under increasing pressure,
the audience see him closing down. He speaks to us less, confides less and his
responses impart information rather than confiding his inner landscape. Increasingly,
though, we are privy to the discussion of those who oppose him; we hear fear, hatred,
criticism and sense his inevitable fall, so by increments, we transfer our
interest and connection to Tudor. Even when we resist this, Shakespeare forces
our attention on to Richard’s adversary by the use ennobling imagery and
literally, letting Tudor take centre stage. An Elizabethan audience were wired
to feel gratitude and relief for the persona of the Revenger, the genre’s
answer to chaos, by which order would be restored. As Francis Bacon wrote, a
few years after the first performance of Richard III, man may offend laws but
“the revenge of that wrong putteth the law out of office.”
Where modern Ricardians may have fallen out of love
with Shakespeare’s play is the discrepancy between our sense of morality and
that of the Elizabethans. We don’t just require the victory of the abstract
personification of Revenge; we have a far more sophisticated sense of personal
merit and Shakespeare’s sympathetic development of Richard’s character means we
bridle more when the playwright conforms to structural convention. In fact,
Shakespeare makes his audience’s relationship with Richard into something of a
love affair. First we are attracted, compelled, committed even, then after the
initial flush of connection, we feel our hero has begun to lose faith with us,
to withdraw, to disconnect and we lose ownership of him. Richard was our guide,
our conduit into the mise-en-scène of the play but as the action develops, he
steps back inside it and the divide between character and audience widens. He
turns from hero to anti-hero, protagonist to antagonist, in order to become the
sacrifice that the fates demand. It is essential for the arc of the plot that
we lose sympathy with Richard by the end, even if we don’t fully side with the
Lancastrian Henry Tudor, whose character is barely developed. He is merely the
dramatic instrument of fate. This doesn’t mean we dislike Shakespeare’s Richard,
we can still think of him with compassion, even fondly. Ultimately though, the
dramatist has a higher intent. We are touched by the pathos of Richard’s death
and learn the moral lesson that was a requirement of Elizabethan literature.
Shakespeare’s context compelled him to create a
Richard in the model that he understood. That was his job and exposes the
limits of his era. He can’t be criticised for not rehabilitating the King when
he did not understand that there was a wrong that needed righting. However,
there was no compulsion to develop his character along the lines that the
playwright chose. It was Shakespeare’s own decision to present us with the
charismatic, captivating character which, for a perceptive and informed
audience, is the play’s most lasting legacy.
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