Richard III – William Shakespeare, c. 1593 ★★★★½

Best of the Baddies

That Richard III is Shakespeare’s most successful history play is a view not everyone shares; I likely have more company in declaring the title character Shakespeare’s most enjoyable villain. Few in English literature are so good at being bad as Richard Crookback, the Duke of Gloucester.

As delightful as it is to read on its own, Richard III comes alive even more after reading the other three plays that together make up Shakespeare’s first historical tetralogy, Henry VI, Part I; Part II; and Part III. While Richard is riveting in his own right, he really comes alive as the end note of this four-part tragical history tour, the culmination of the War of the Roses with its rule of terror and catch-as-catch-can.

RICHARD

Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe:
Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law.
March on, join bravely, let us to’t pell-mell
If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell. [Act V, scene iii, lines 348-352]

Two things make Richard so engaging: His ever-active voice and his mordant humor. Richard as a character first emerges as distinctive in this way in Henry VI, Part III, where he interjects many fire-breathing comments in scenes with his father, the Duke of York; and two brothers, Edward and George. In his own play, from its famous first line forward, Richard stamps the proceedings with his physically and morally twisted character, unreconciled even to nature itself: “Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this sun of York.” [I, i, 1-2]

The tone is hard, mocking, yet musical all the same. When I first read this play, it was hard not to hear Laurence Olivier’s dulcet tones and silvery cadence in the 1955 film adaptation, still my favorite of any Shakespeare play. But Richard is a character harsh in voice and choppy in manner, probably closer in spirit to the other notable Richard on film, Ian McKellen in 1995. Shakespeare’s Richard isn’t charming and doesn’t particularly care to be, except when it suits his short-term interests.

Laurence Olivier confides with the audience as Richard III in the 1955 film he also directed. Sir Larry does a marvelous job playing up the funny side of evil. "Simple, plain Clarence, I do love thee so/That I will shortly send thy soul to heaven." Image from http://moviecitynews.com/2013/12/20w2o-oscar-iii-legit-awards-so-far-1/

What Olivier captures and McKellen doesn’t is the humor of Richard, the secret sauce behind the play’s lasting success. From first to last, we have scenes that would scream “over-the-top” to any serious playwright, especially one who had labored over the dramatic framework that are the Henry VI plays, a dutifully sober-sided series of histories.

There’s almost a Ferris Bueller quality in the way Richard confides in us through various soliloquies and asides before setting into motion some vile deed. Olivier plays this up by having him glance conspiratorially at the camera; you feel Shakespeare’s character do the same on the page.

Just take in this send-up of a classic wooing scene, featuring Richard and Lady Anne, who is in the process of escorting the bier of her father-in-law, King Henry VI, a victim like her husband Prince Edward of the man now romancing her, Richard, Duke of Gloucester:

LADY ANNE

He is in heaven, where thou shalt never come.

GLOUCESTER

Let him thank me, that holp to send him thither;
For he was fitter for that place than earth.

LADY ANNE

And thou unfit for any place but hell.

GLOUCESTER

Yes, one place else, if you will hear me name it.

LADY ANNE

Some dungeon.

GLOUCESTER

Your bed-chamber. [I, ii, 117-126]

She blames Richard for killing her husband; Richard in turn blames her for making him love her so much he could not help but kill the man who stood between them. To make the scene more mad, Richard’s love-making finds the mark, leaving him amused and perplexed. “Was ever woman in this humor wooed?/Was ever woman in this humor won?” [I, ii, 258-259]

Richard III and his first wife Anne Neville, as depicted in a stained-glass window at Cardiff Castle in Wales. Hanging from his necklace is his signature device, a white boar. Image from https://kingrichardarmitage.rgcwp.com/2012/08/24/kra-week-day-3/riii-and-queen-anne-neville-stained-glass-window-at-cardiff-castle/.

Lady Anne interests Richard not in any romantic or sexual way but as strategy. If he is to be a king, he will need a queen. What best for him, as a member of the Yorkist faction of the War of the Roses, than to find his mate among the Lancastrians, thus bringing together the white and red roses? It’s the first of many ploys we see Richard undertake, and like all the ploys he undertakes in the first three acts, dismayingly successful.

What makes Richard so dastardly? Richard himself offers his appearance as an excuse. He explains at the beginning how he is not shaped for sportive tricks, to attract women like his brother Edward, now a sickly king still quenching his adulterous appetites:

GLOUCESTER

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. [I, I, 24-27]

No doubt such a play would have failed a politically-correct smell test. Being a hunchback, it seems, makes him vile, both to himself and everyone else. But this device works. Richard is depicted as a product of his age, twisted and withered like the moral values that infect and define the ruling family of Plantagenet, who cheated and slew their way to the throne. The Lancaster Queen Margaret even finds her way back from French exile to appear in court and taunt the Yorkist survivors facing Richard’s wrath.  “Here in these confines slyly have I lurk’d/To watch the waning of mine adversaries.” [IV, iv, 3-4]

Margaret’s savage joy is understandable; in Henry VI, Part III we watched her son and husband wantonly murdered by Richard and the other Yorkist leaders. But why is she back in England, her presence silently tolerated by her tormentors? It is an entirely fictional device (the real Margaret died almost a year before Richard’s coronation.) Like a later scene where a number of Richard’s victims appear in ghostly form to forecast his doom and his rival Richmond’s rise as Henry VII, it feels too artificial, reminding one that Shakespeare was at this point of his career still an emerging novice as a playwright, straining at dramatic effect as well as a chance to positively acknowledge the ruling power of the moment, Henry VII’s granddaughter Elizabeth.

But the bulk of this play works wonderfully, showcasing Shakespeare’s ability at developing scenes and underscoring dramatic tension. Unlike the Henry VI plays, there is no deadweight here, no static tableau staging. Shakespeare doesn’t lean on bloodletting as much, and spends time examining the subtlety of Richard’s schemes and how they find root amid the opportunistic nobles he plays with and discards.

Getting to watch Richard’s comeuppance is fun. After toiling so effectively in the first three acts, and doing away with all rivals both real and perceived, he reaches a kind of zenith, until his own success becomes his undoing. He pushes away one critical lieutenant, the labile Duke of Buckingham, for not agreeing at once to Richard’s idea to murder the rightful heirs, Richard’s nephews, and later trying to get Richard to honor an easily-delivered promise. Richard sneers: “I am not in the giving vein to-day.” [IV, ii, 129] This not only costs him Buckingham but naturally enough causes other nobles in Richard’s court to rethink their loyalties.

A self-avowed Machiavellian, Richard’s adherence to that stern code becomes his undoing. Reading this in succession after the Henry VI plays, one senses a dialogue about the nature of kingship, that an evil king can be his own worst enemy the same way King Henry VI’s otherworldly mildness and soft manner did him in.

The wages of sin: Richard III faces ruin near the end of the play, in this 1745 painting of the famous English actor David Garrick in the role by William Hogarth. Image from https://www.mcgoodwin.net/pages/otherbooks/ws_richard3.html

By the finale, Richard presides over a shambles of a court, as if Shakespeare was drawing upon his fabled prescience for a peek at Hitler’s Bunker in its final days. He is reduced to slapping innocent messengers for the crime of delivering bad news. Worse for him, he imagines he can somehow save his throne by trying once again his ploy of fooling a woman to trust him, this time by getting her to agree to his marrying his own niece, the woman’s daughter and sister of the boys Richard had slain in the Tower. Richard pleads his case in a surreal manner:

KING RICHARD III

Look, what is done cannot be now amended:
Men shall deal unadvisedly sometimes,
Which after hours give leisure to repent.
If I did take the kingdom from your sons,
To make amends, I’ll give it to your daughter.
If I have kill’d the issue of your womb,
To quicken your increase, I will beget
Mine issue of your blood upon your daughter... [IV, iv, 329-336]

This time Richard is the one who gets played; the play swiftly moves to his downfall at Bosworth Field. The bounds of human deviousness are demonstrated, amusingly and with zest.

I think this is what makes Richard III so great, beyond the fantastic language, outrageous black humor, and the luminous brutality of the main character: the way it lays him out as a medieval aristocratic sociopath. He’s really not in it for the crown, but the evil he can do in pursuit of it. Hurting people, whether for gain or revenge, is his only joy in life, and this appetite proves his ruin. Centuries before modern psychology, Shakespeare seemed to have a handle on pathology and the criminal mind.

Was Richard III historically like this? Doubtful. The record indicates a brutal man, yet in tune with the spirit of the times. We know for example he didn’t have his brother George murdered the way it happens in the play (George was executed for treason, my Folger Library edition notes, quite justly and without Richard’s help). The murder of the Princes in the Tower, Richard’s most legendary crime, may have been committed by his successor, Henry VII, who unlike Richard really did adopt a scorched-earth policy regarding rivals when he won at Bosworth Field.

Despite being one of Shakespeare’s longest plays, there is little real fat here, and much to enjoy. With one of literature’s most beguilingly twisted figures in the driver’s seat, Richard III is a play that withstands the buffets of time and provides pleasure in its many convolutions.