Wilson 1

Jeffrey R. Wilson Harvard University

Stigmatizing Richard III’s Deformities up to Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI: The Figural Paradigm

During a lull in Shakespeare’s Richard III, the king’s tiresome nephew, the young Duke of York, precociously gossips about his uncle’s unnatural body at birth, specifically the legend that Richard was born with teeth. “They say my uncle grew so fast,” the youth whispers to

Richard’s mother, “That he could gnaw a crust at two hours old.”1 In the ensuing exchange,

Shakespeare satirized the Tudor historians who trumped up and transmitted the legend of

Richard’s prodigious birth:

Duch. I pray thee, pretty York, who told thee this?

York. Grandam, his nurse.

Duch. His nurse! Why, she was dead ere thou wert born.

York. If ‘twere not she, I cannot tell who told me. (2.4.31-34)

The gossipy discussion, exaggeration, and symbolization of Richard’s deformity was part and parcel of what E. M. W. Tillyard called “the Tudor myth,” which he saw as the organizing force of Shakespeare’s history plays.2 The Tudor myth suggests that Henry IV’s usurpation of Richard

II, an anointed king ruling by divine right, prompted almost a century of disorder that culminated in the and Richard III, evil incarnate, usurping the English throne; calamity plagued until Henry Tudor, the last Lancastrian and God’s lieutenant here on earth, cast

1 , Richard III, in The Riverside Shakespeare, second edition, ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 2.4.27-28. All references to Shakespeare’s plays are to this edition and will be noted parenthetically in the text. 2 E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1944). For the afterlife of Tillyard’s argument, see Robert P. Merrix, “Shakespeare's Histories and the New Bardolators,” Studies in English Literature 19 (1979): 179-96; Paul N. Siegel, “Tillyard Lives: Historicism and Shakespeare's History,” Clio 9 (1979): 5-23; and Robin Headlam Wells, “The Fortunes of Tillyard: Twentieth-Century Critical Debate on Shakespeare's History Plays,” English Studies 66.4 (Winter, 1985): 391–403. Wilson 2

Richard down at the Battle of Bosworth and, by marrying the heiress of the , united the two rival dynasties. Modern historians have charted how this myth was invented by chroniclers commissioned directly by the new king, Henry VII, and his son, Henry VIII, who himself fathered Elizabeth I, the Queen of England when Shakespeare wrote Richard III.

Historians have also discussed how the Tudor mythologers stigmatized, and sometimes invented, a series of deformities meant to disgrace Richard, most memorably a large hunchback.3 The recent discovery of Richard’s scoliotic skeleton has confirmed his physical deformity as a historical fact. At the same time, the Tudor chroniclers turned Richard from a man with a physical deformity into a monster inside and out. In other words, the Tudors did not invent

Richard’s deformity, but they did invent its meaning. Richard III is the original site of stigma in

English literature.

3 See George Bosworth Churchill, Richard the Third up to Shakespeare (Berlin: Mayer & Müller, 1900); Alison Hanham, Richard III and his Early Historians, 1483-1535 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); Roxane C. Murph, Richard III: The Making of a Legend (Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1977); Charles Ross, “The Historical Reputation of Richard III: Fact and Fiction,” in Richard III (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981): xix-liii; Jeremy Potter, “The Posthumous Hunchback,” in Good King Richard?: An Account of Richard III and His Reputation, 1483-1983 (London: Constable, 1983), 136-44; and P. W. Hammond, “The Reputation of Richard III,” in Richard III: A Medieval Kingship, ed. John Gillingham (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993), 133- 49. Wilson 3

The Complete Skeleton (2012), photograph. Image from the University of Leicester. Making Richard alternately a villain and a victim, the stigmatization of his deformity has provoked more passion than any other event in England’s historical record: for centuries now, professional historians have indignantly dismissed the image of an evil, deformed tyrant, yet popular demagogues sheepishly preserve it. I am interested in neither denouncing nor excusing the stigmatization of Richard’s deformity. I want to show how it works and what it means.

Obviously, the Tudor chroniclers mythologized their record for the sake of political legitimacy, and stigma was one way to demonize their enemy.4 It is easy to see why the Tudor writers stigmatized Richard, but I want to examine exactly how, rhetorically, these authors went about discrediting the king. It is the literary quality of sixteenth-century history, and its cooperation with narrative verse and drama, that directs our interpretation of this tradition to the discipline of rhetoric. A rhetorical reading of Richard’s body can show how stigma is made, how physical

4 On the propagandistic quality of the Tudor chronicles, see Fred Jacob Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1967); F. Smith Fussner, Tudor History and the Historians (New York,: Basic Books, 1970); and Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England: c. 1307 to the Early Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982). Wilson 4 deformity comes to acquire meaning, how the denigration of deformity is mixed up with moral commitments, motives, and assumptions – with, in short, a constructed view of nature. Thus,

Thomas Kuhn’s constructivist reading of scientific knowledge can help us see how Tudor writers invented and sustained a reading of Richard’s body that flew in the face of fact and reason.5

In this section, the theory of paradigms in Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

(1962) helps me describe the inconsistent treatment of Richard’s deformity in the pre-paradigm period during the reign of Henry VII, the emergence of a paradigm in the age of Henry VIII, then the perpetuation of this paradigm by later Tudor writers up to and including William

Shakespeare. On the most basic level, a paradigm is a pattern or model of scientific practice. As

Kuhn describes it, a paradigm succeeds and achieves consensus because it helps a group of practitioners solve a pressing problem (23). If so, then Tudor chroniclers treated Richard’s deformity as a God-given sign of his evil mind, soul, or morals most obviously because this mystified metaphor helped them solve the political problem of the Tudor dynasty’s dubious claim to a divine right monarchy in England. As Kuhn notes, however, “The road to a firm research consensus is extraordinarily arduous” (15). To see how Shakespeare was working with an established paradigm, we must trace the history of Richard’s deformity beyond its roots in a civil war, a bloody battle, and a scramble for political authority, and to the rush to find the rhetoric for remembering Richard during what Kuhn calls a “pre-paradigm” period (17).

During Richard’s lifetime, several writers depicted him favorably, some mentioning a smallish size, but none a deformity. One commentator, a Warwick antiquary named John Rous,

5 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), second edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). Kuhn’s conceptual framework was first introduced to literary theory by W. Keith Percival, “The Applicability of Kuhn's Paradigms to the History of Linguistics,” Language 52.2 (Jun. 1976): 285-294; and Patricia Bizzell, “Thomas Kuhn, Scientism, and English Studies” College English 40.7 (Mar., 1979): 764-771. Steven Mailloux, Disciplinary Identities: Rhetorical Paths of English, Speech, and Composition (New York: MLA, 2006) describes how Kuhn “contributed significantly to the return of rhetoric to the humanities and related social sciences” (16). Wilson 5 undoubtedly saw Richard firsthand. Two drawings in a document now known as the Rous Roll

(1484) depict Richard with no discernable deformity. After the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, however, Rous needed to make amends with Henry VII for having publicly praised Richard in the Rous Roll. Stigmatizing the deformity of Henry’s enemy, Rous’s History of the Kings of

England (1486) says Richard was “retained within his mother's womb for two years, emerging with teeth and hair to his shoulders…. He was small of stature, with a short face and unequal shoulders, the right higher and the left lower.”6 From a Kuhnian perspective, Rous’s representations of Richard are inconsistent because he works “in the absence of a paradigm,” which makes “early fact-gathering” a “nearly random activity” (15). For the same reason, other early chroniclers, even those hostile to Richard, do not mention any deformities.7

6 John Rous, Historia Regum Angliae (1486), ed. T. Hearne (Oxford: Sheldonian Theatre, 1716), trans. Alison Hanham, in Richard III and his Early Historians, 120-21. 7 See The Crowland Chronicle Continuations, 1459-1486, ed. Nicholas Pronay and John Cox (London: The Richard III and Yorkist History Trust, 1986); Dominic Mancini, The Usurpation of Richard the Third (1483), trans. C.A.J. Armstrong (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936); Bernard Andrè, Vita Regis Henrici Septimi (ca. 1500-03), ed. James Gairdner (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1858), 3-77; Robert Fabyan, Newe Cronycles of Englande and of Fraunce (London: Richard Pynson, 1516); and two poems by Humphrey Brereton, “The Song of the Lady Bessy” (early 16th c.), in The Most Pleasant Song of Lady Bessy; and How She Married King Henry the Seventh, of the , ed. James Orchard Halliwell (London: Printed for the Percy Society by T. Richards, 1847), 14.56, and “The Ballad of Bosworth Field” (early 16th c.), in Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript, Ballads and Romances, ed. J.W. Hales and F.J. Furnivall, (London, N Trubner & Co.: 1868), 3.233-59, 2.6-8. Wilson 6

Richard III in The Rous Roll Richard III in The Rous (1484), ed. Charles Ross Roll (1484), ed. Charles (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1980) Ross (Gloucester: Alan 17. Sutton, 1980) 63.

The Royal Collections portrait of Richard III commemorates this pre-paradigm period in a fascinating way. The painting shows Richard’s uneven shoulder line, his right higher than his left, but x-ray examination has revealed that the portrait originally did not depict a deformed

Richard. After its initial composition in the age of Henry VIII, someone modified the portrait Wilson 7 later in the sixteenth century to suggest a hunchback, a tight frown, and sneering eyes.8 In other words, as the Tudor myth grew and became codified, Richard’s face became more villainous, and his body became more hideous, a connection of villainy and deformity that would become paradigmatic in sixteenth-century representations of Richard.

Richard III (ca. 1520), oil on canvas, 56.5 x Roy Strong, X-ray of Richard III, in Tudor & Jacobean 35.6 cm, in the Royal Collection (London, Portraits (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, England). Image from Artstor. 1969). Image from The Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.

8 See Pamela Tudor-Craig, Richard III: National Portrait Gallery, 27 June-7 October 1973 (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1973), 93. See also Roland Mushat Frye, “The 'Shakespearean' Portrait of Richard III in Edward Alleyn's Picture Collection,” Shakespeare Quarterly 32.3 (1981), 352-54. Wilson 8

In Rous’s History, the connection of deformity and villainy is only implicit. It was

Polydore Vergil’s English History (1512-13), a text commissioned by Henry VII, that clearly connected Richard’s body to his behavior for the first time:

He was lyttle of stature, deformyd of body, thone showlder being higher than thother, a

short and sowre cowntenance, which semyd to savor of mischief, and utter evydently

craft and deceyt. The whyle he was thinking of any matter, he dyd contynually byte his

nether lyppe, as thowgh that crewell nature of his did so rage agaynst yt self in that lyttle

carkase. Also he was woont to be ever with his right hand pulling out of the sheath to the

myddest, and putting in agane, the dagger which he did alway were.9

Rous gave Richard a toothed birth, but Vergil made those teeth meaningful by having Richard gnaw his lip while thinking unnatural thoughts. Rous gave Richard a hump on his right shoulder, but Vergil made that hump meaningful by having Richard’s right hand fidget with his deadly dagger. If Rous was the first to represent Richard’s deformity, Vergil was the first to stigmatize

Richard by making meaning out of that deformity. The proximity of physical to moral descriptions in Vergil’s account encourages a reader to see Richard’s body as the expression of his character. Vergil posits an internal immorality that is just as offensive as Richard’s external appearance, splitting mind and body only to then parallel an evil mind with an evil body. Only in a world where one has an essential moral character sealed away behind his body could Richard have a “cowntenance” that “seemyd to … utter evydently” what existed underneath. Guided by a belief in changeless human character, as well as a desire (or an obligation) to trumpet the Tudor myth, Vergil’s research into Richard collects, in Kuhn’s words, “more than ‘mere facts’ ” (17).

9 , English History (1512-13), anonymous trans., ed. Henry Ellis (London: For the Camden Society by J. B. Nichols and Son, 1844), 226-27. See Denys Hay, Polydore Vergil; Renaissance Historian and Man of Letters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952). Wilson 9

Working either from Vergil’s History or some common source, ’s History of King Richard the Thirde (1513) includes a similar passage that suggests the presence of a paradigm for representing Richard’s body and behavior:

Richarde the third sonne, of whom we now entreat, was in witte and courage egall with

either of [his brothers], in bodye and prowesse farre vnder them bothe, little of stature, ill

fetured of limes, croke backed, his left shoulder much higher than his right, hard fauoured

of visage, and suche as in states called warlye, in other menne other wise. He was

malicious, wrathful, enuious, and from afor his birth, euer frowarde. It is for trouth

reported, that the Duches his mother had so muche a doe in her trauaile, that shee could

not bee deliuered of hym vncutte: and that hee came into the worlde with the feete

forwarde, as menne bee borne outwarde, and (as fame runneth) also not vntothed, whither

men of hatred reporte aboue the trouthe, or elles that nature changed her course in hys

beginninge, whiche in the course of his lyfe many thinges vnnaturallye committed.10

Beginning with an isocolon, More contrasts Richard’s mental and spiritual virtues (“in witte and courage”) with his physical and moral vices (“in bodye and prowesse”). The isocolon polarizes both aesthetics and ethics into categories of the desirable and the undesirable even as it collapses the distinction between undesirable aesthetics and undesirable ethics by lumping ugliness and impudence into a single category, namely the undesirable. More reiterates this partnership of aesthetics and ethics by placing his physical description of Richard (“little of stature … hard fauoured of visage”) directly adjacent to his moral description (“He was malicious … euer frowarde”), making biology a way into morality. Indeed, More’s antanaclasis (repetition with a

10 Thomas More, The History of King Richard the Thirde (1513), in Workes, ed. William Rastall (London: Iohn Cawod, Iohn Waly, and Richarde Tottell, 1557), 37. See Elizabeth Story Donno, “Thomas More and Richard III,” in Renaissance Quarterly 35.3 (Autumn, 1982): 401-47. Wilson 10 different meaning) with the word “forwarde” collapses the moral insolence of the “euer forward”

Richard with the physical position of a fetus in the breech position with “feete forwarde.” His birth omens his later behavior, which recalls his earlier birth, so More speaks about the two seemingly discrete moments with the same word. Then More describes either a cesarean section or an episiotomy – “shee could not bee deliuered of hym vncutte” – making the infant Richard into a violent slasher even in infancy. Thus the antimetabole in More’s last line (“nature changed

… vnnaturallye committed”) suggests that Richard’s unnatural birth foreboded an unnatural life.

Recent critics of More’s History have emphasized how he dutifully tempers his treatment of Richard’s birth by acknowledging that these slanders are the fabulous reports of inimical men:

“it is for trouth reported,” “as fame runneth,” “whither men of hatred reporte aboue the trouthe.”11 In this regard, More’s History might be a fascinating anticipation of Shakespeare’s first tetralogy, for it shows how a skeptical or even ironic representation of a traditional paradigm can nevertheless perpetuate that paradigm when an innovative authorial mode is missed by audiences trained up in the tradition. As Kuhn puts it, the paradigm “often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments” (5).

For example, Richard Grafton’s Continuacion of the Chronicle of England (1543) is wary enough of More’s passage to quote Vergil instead.12 ’s The Vnion of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre Yorke (1548) does quote More verbatim, but a text like

Richard Rainolde’s The Foundacion of Rhetorike (1563) repeats More’s rhetorical flowers with none of More’s skeptical reservations:

11 See Hanan Yoran, “Thomas More's Richard III: Probing the Limits of Humanism,” Renaissance Studies 15 (2001): 514–36; Gillian Day, “Sceptical Historiography: Thomas More’s History of Richard III,” in The Anatomy of Tudor Literature: Proceedings of the First International Conference of the Tudor Symposium, ed. Mike Pincombe (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001), 24–33; and Dan Breen, “Thomas More’s History of Richard III: Genre, Humanism, and Moral Education,” Studies in Philology 107.4 (Fall, 2010): 465-92. 12 Richard Grafton, A Continuacion of the Chronicle of England, in The Chronicle of Ihon Hardyng (London: Richard Grafton, 1543), cvi. Wilson 11

This kyng Richard was small of stature, deformed, and ill shaped, his shoulders beared

not equalitie, a pulyng face, yet of countenaunce and looke cruell, malicious, deceiptfull,

bityng and chawing his nether lippe: of minde vnquiet, pregnaunt of witte, quicke and

liuely, a worde and a blowe, wilie, deceiptfull, proude, arrogant in life and cogitacion

bloodie.13

Rainolde uses moral judgments to describe Richard’s “countenaunce and looke” as if “cruell, malicious, deceiptfull” were categorically no different than physical descriptions like “bityng and chawing his nether lippe.” Meanwhile Rainolde’s isocolon separates only to parallel qualities “of countenaunce” with those “of minde.” In fact, Richard is “of countenaunce … deceiptfull” and

“of minde … deceiptfull,” not just a comparison but an exact identification of corporal and mental attributes. When someone in the sixteenth century says Richard’s body and behavior are alike, what that writer means (without really knowing it) is that the writer has a similar emotional response to each. The disgust, fear, and aversion felt for the way Richard both looks and acts are confused for an actual likeness in the two objects under consideration, which are of course quite different things. Perception is thrown out upon reality, aligning two isolated phenomena because the same judgment has been attributed to each. Thus, it is the conceptual force of similitude that lures Tudor writers to draw their rhetoric for Richard’s body from figures that encourage comparison and, in their more radical moments, collapse the very terms being compared – figures like isocolon, antanaclasis, and antimetabole.

Kuhn writes that “men whose research is based on shared paradigms are committed to the same rules and standards” (11). In the sixteenth century, the Tudor myth was the rule, and the

13 Edward Hall, The Vnion of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre Yorke (London: Richard Grafton, 1548), Edward V, i. Richard Rainolde, “A Narracion Historicall vpon Kyng Ri|chard the Third, the Cruell Tiraunt,” in The Foundacion of Rhetorike (London: Ihon Kingston, 1563). Wilson 12 analogy between Richard’s body and behavior was the paradigm that followed from a commitment to that rule. Like the Tudor chronicles, William Baldwin’s verse collection, A

Myrroure for Magistrates (1559), is committed to the providential historical narrative of the

Tudor myth. For example, George Ferrers’ contribution to the Myrroure, a ballad from the perspective of Richard’s brother, the Duke of Clarence, glosses Richard’s royal emblem thus:

My brother was the Bore,

Whose tuskes should teare my brothers boyes & me,

And gave me warning therof long before.

But wit nor warning can in no degree

Let things to hap, which are ordained to bee.14

In these lines, Richard’s “tuskes” are an omen, a “warning” of his murderous ways, which are

“ordained” by God. Here, for the first time, the providential political theology of the Tudor myth appears explicitly in a reading of Richard’s deformities, insofar as the boar’s tusks amplify the toothed birth described by Rous and More. Richard’s tusks reappear in the second edition of the

Myrroure (1563), in John Dolman’s ballad from the perspective of Lord Hastings, which gives this particularly grotesque image of Richard:

And lowryng on me with the google eye,

The whetted tuske, and furrowed forehead hye,

His Crooked shoulder bristellyke set vp,

With frothy Iawes, whose foame he chawed and suppd.15

14 A Myrroure for Magistrates, ed. William Baldwin (London: Thomas Marshe, 1559), lxxx. See Paul Vincent Budra, A Mirror for Magistrates and the de casibus Tradition (Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2000). Wilson 13

By associating Richard’s teeth with the tusks of the boar, the poets in the Myrroure were

“achieving the anticipated in a new way,” which is what Kuhn calls “normal research” (36). He compares paradigms to puzzles, and normal research to puzzling out how to fit the pieces together to arrive at an image that is already known because it is printed on the outside of the box. The emblem of the boar may be a new piece to the Richardian puzzle, but it easily fits – or is shaped to fit – into the paradigm that the Tudor writers had already been practicing for decades.

In sum, the comparative rhetoric Vergil and More used to align Richard’s body with his behavior produced what Kuhn calls “a synthesis able to attract most of the next generation's practitioners” (18), namely Grafton, Hall, Rainolde, Ferrers, and Dolman. Furthermore, by connecting this conceit to the Tudor myth, sixteenth-century prose and verse writers were, to again quote Kuhn, “extending the knowledge of those facts that the paradigm displays” (24).

Richard’s troubled birth was made to signify the evils of his adulthood because these two events, although of entirely different orders, elicited similar emotions in the Tudor historians: disgust, fear, aversion, and the like. But this specter of evil was simultaneously problematic for someone

(like a Tudor mythologer) who thought that heaven had established a universal order that is both rational and satisfying; thus the analogy of Richard’s body and behavior was attached to an additional event, the establishment of the Tudor monarchy, which assured the weary historian by eliciting emotions opposite to those that Richard roused: comfort, security, relief, and so forth.

Two more pieces to this puzzle – “monstrosity” and “physiognomy” – appeared in

Shakespeare’s most revered source, ’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and

15 “Howe the Lord Hastynges was Betrayed by Trustyng to Much to his Evyl Consayler Catesby, and Vilanously Murdered in the Tower of London by Richarde Duke of Glocestre,” in A Myrroure for Magistrates, ed. William Baldwin (London: Thomas Marshe, 1563), cxi. Wilson 14

Ireland, which connects Richard’s body and behavior in two places. The first edition (1577) includes only one short statement on “this monster of nature & cruell tyrant Richard the third.”16

Like his predecessors, Holinshed puts deformity (“monster”) so close to villainy (“tyrant”) that body and behavior effectively signify each other. Such a construction is by this point conventional, but (you may have noticed) Holinshed is the first writer to refer to Richard as a

“monster.”

Holinshed takes the word “monster” from the flurry of broadsides reporting monstrous births early in the Elizabethan age.17 What distinguishes these broadsides from previous monster literature is the proto-scientific attempt to interpret what modern physicians call congenital malformations, as opposed to preternatural prodigies like a woman giving birth to a dog with a snake’s head. But the deformities on the broadsides are not just biological abnormalities; as one broadside reports, “They ar lessons & scholynges for vs all (as the word monster shewith).”18

From the Latin monere, “to warn,” monsters are admonitions that an iniquitous England must mend its ways or face the wrath of an angry God. These monstrous births could be human or animal; the most common animals were swine, like Richard’s royal emblem. In the Myrrour, the boar’s “tuskes” were a “warning” of an “ordained” evil, just as the prodigious pigs in the ballads

16 Raphael Holinshed, The Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande (London: Henry Bynneman and Henry Denham, 1577), 2.79. 17 On these broadsides, see Alan W. Bates, “Good, Common, Regular, and Orderly: Early Modern Classifications of Monstrous Births” Social History of Medicine 18.2 (Aug. 2005): 141-58; Anna Dunthorne, “How to Approach a Monster: A Comparison of Different Approaches in the Historiography of Early Modern Monster Literature,” History Compass 6.4 (2008): 1107-20. For a fine consideration of Shakespeare’s Richard III in light of this discourse, see Richard Marienstras, “Of a Monstrous Body,” in French Essays on Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: 'What Would France with Us’, ed. Jean-Marie Maguin and Michèle Willems (Newark: Delaware University Press, 1995): Shakespeare’s character was neither legally nor even physically a monster (he had ‘blemishes’), yet because of the position he coveted and the way he conquered it, because of his distorted self and the way he experienced and controlled his own body, and because of the number of his physical and moral flaws, he probably inspired the awe, horror, and fascination of a monstrously warped and misshapen creature. (159) 18 The True Discription of Two Monsterous Chyldren Borne at Herne in Kent (London: Thomas Colwell for Owen Rogers, 1565). Wilson 15 on the broadsides are “wonderful tokens, wherby we ought to be warned.”19 With human monsters, it was usually unmarried or incestuous parents whose sins were shaped out in physical form, but often it was the entire nation: “This monstrous shape to thee England / Playn shewes thy monstrous vice.”20 In other words, the discourse of “monstrosity” gave Tudor writers a way to extend the immorality of Richard III to his family, the Yorks, then to his entire society,

Plantagenet England, including the Lancastrians.

The broadsides say that the life of a monster is but short, as is the time remaining for the sinners and Sodoms they signify. Like the prodigies and portents in the Biblical book of

Revelation, English monsters were eschatological, foreboding the end of an age, if not all time:

“These be tokens now sent foorth / To preache the later daye.”21 Thus, with the language and the logic of “monstrosity,” Elizabethan broadsides gave Tudor writers the means to connect the metaphorical reading of Richard’s deformities with the teleological account of an English eschaton. That is, the God who punishes sinful parents and iniquitous societies by sending a sign of his anger is the same God who guided England out of the Wars of the Roses and into the holy hands of Henry Tudor.

Now, when the wickedness that deformity signifies belongs to the child’s parents or their society, the infant himself is innocent, as some of the broadsides explicitly say. This observation endangers the very foundation of the Tudor Richard, the analogy between his innate deformity and his innate villainy. With no need for coherence or consistency, Tudor writers took what worked from the discourse of monstrosity (the guilty family and society) and left what did not

19 The Description of a Monstrous Pig the Which was Farrowed at Hamsted (London: Alexander Lacy for Garat Devves, 1562). 20 The Forme and Shape of a Monstrous Child, Borne at Maydstone in Kent (London: John Awdeley, 1568). 21 A Discription of a Monstrous Chylde, Borne at Chychester in Sussex (London: Leonard Askel for Fraunces Godlyf, 1562). Wilson 16

(the innocent child). In this case, the paradigm suppressed the anomalous novelty it encountered as it assimilated the language of monstrosity. As Kuhn says, normal research is “an attempt to force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies,” so the paradigm actually influences the phenomena we perceive, and “those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all” (24). At the same time, the notion that deformed children are born with a mental and moral table rasa (to use Locke’s term) would eventually power Shakespeare’s production of an anomalous interpretation of Richard, one which would be suppressed for only so long until it would effect a paradigm shift in the eighteenth century.

In the generation before Shakespeare, Thomas Legge’s university play

(ca. 1580) treated the Tudor Richard with the language of monstrosity (in Latin). Richard’s body and behavior repeatedly combine in the form of an “abominable monstrosity [monstrum nefandum],” a “monstrous … depravity [immane portentum],” and a “monstrous villainy

[immane … scelus].”22 Nouns and adjectives have a tendency to fall into each other in the Tudor treatment of Richard, his body becoming more and more like his behavior. Legge also includes the image of an England “torn by the impious teeth [dente lacerata impio] of the raging boar”

(444). There are about a dozen references to Richard’s teeth in Legge’s text, while another play,

The True Tragedie of Richard the Third (ca. 1590), includes another conceit I have already noted. Here Richard’s deformed arm takes on a bloodthirsty life of its own, as he says: “I hope with this lame hand of mine, to rake out that hateful heart of Richmond, and when I have it, to

22 Thomas Legge, Richardus Tertius (ca. 1580), trans. Robert J. Lordi (New York: Garland Publishing, 1979), 396, 340, 440, and 457. George Whetstone’s The English Mirror (London: I. Windet, 1586) also speaks of “the monstrous murders of king Richard the third” (9). Wilson 17 eate it panting hote with salt.”23 With each iteration of the paradigm, Richard’s tyranny is more deeply written into his deformity, and this analogy of body and behavior is more clearly connected to the Tudor myth that manages (both invents and vanquishes) the Richardian evil.

Thus, on the one hand, the allegorical induction to the True Tragedie has Truth tell Poetry that

Richard is “A man ill shaped, crooked backed, lame armed, withal, / Valiantly minded, but tyrannous in authoritie” (57-58); and, on the other hand, the play’s conclusion breaks the actors out of character and the audience out of the dramatic illusion to trumpet the Tudor myth by detailing the genealogical descent from Henry VII to Elizabeth I.

The second new piece Holinshed added to the Richardian puzzle came in the second edition of his Chronicles (1587). Holinshed quoted More’s vignette verbatim, but Holinshed added his own coda: “The full confluence of these qualities, with the defects of fauour and amiable proportion, gaue proofe to this rule of physiognomie: Distor tum vultum sequitur distorsio morum [‘A deformity in appearance follows a deformity in character’]” (3.712). From the Greek physis, “nature,” and gnomon, “interpreter,” physiognomy is the art or science of interpreting the nature of an individual, which implies that we all have a distinct and definite nature to interpret, one we have at birth, one that stays with us. Physiognomy started with some scattered suggestions in Hippocrates’ medical tracts, but it gained an air of philosophical authority in the myth of Er that concluded Plato’s Republic. Here Socrates described the souls of famous Greek men going into the afterlife, where each assumes the shape of the animal whose nature he shares: the warrior Ajax becomes a lion, and the idiot Thersites an ape. There are two points to make about this myth. First, like humans, animals have natures, and physiognomy often

23 The True Tragedie of Richard the Third (London: Thomas Creede, 1594). See John Dover Wilson, “Shakespeare’s Richard III and The True Tragedy of Richard the Third, 1594,” Shakespeare Quarterly 3 (1952), 299-306. Wilson 18 asks which animal you look like in order to attribute the manners of that creature to your nature.

Thus, Richard both looks and acts like the animal on his emblem, the boar. Second, in order to function, physiognomy needs spirituality, or the belief that, somehow, somewhere, we have souls stashed away inside our bodies, and that these souls are permanent and real in a way that our bodies are not. With extreme caution, Aristotle entertained the possibility that we can interpret souls from bodies “if …” – this is a big if – “ … there is a single sign for a single thing.”24

Overlooking the importance of this provision, Aristotle’s students systematized physiognomy in a text often mistaken as his own. They compiled a manual sorting both bodies and behaviors into schematic categories, then connecting those categories on the basis of “congruity,” as in this reading of a man who looks like the Tudor image of Richard: “An ill-proportioned body indicates a rogue, the argument being partly from congruity and partly from the female sex. But, if bad proportions mean villainy, a well-proportioned frame must be characteristic of upright men and brave.”25 The misogyny here only exacerbates the ruthless categorical thinking in this text, yet historically this thinking was authorized (though I would say it was exposed) when

Galen created a physiognomy for the four temperaments in his humoral medicine.

Variously Hippocratic, Socratic, Aristotelian, pseudo-Aristotelian, and Galenic, physiognomy weaseled its way into Renaissance culture in two ways, one popular and one professional. First, as a rule of thumb, European aristocrats abided by the ethical ideal of kalokagathia, “the beautiful and the good,” with its concomitant antipathy to ugliness and deformity. As Baldassarre Castiglione’s book of The Courtyer (1529) says, “The foule therfore

24 Aristotle, Prior Analytics (ca. 350 BCE), trans. Robin Smith (Indianapolis: Hacket, 1989), 2.27. 25 Physiognomonics (ca. 300 BCE), in Aristotle, The Complete Works, ed. J. Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 814a. Wilson 19 for the most part be also yuell & the beawtifull, good.”26 Wildly popular in Tudor England,

Castiglione’s book promotes the popular physiognomy that also produces the Tudor image of

Richard: “A man hath that default or blemishe (as it were) for a patent and token of his ill inclination.” Physiognomy also survived in a second way, as a practical science, with a litter of textbooks, each more determined and more detailed than the last. The 1504 Italian physiognomy of Bartolommeo della Rocca (called Cocles) was translated into English by Thomas Hill in 1556; the 1522 German physiognomy of Johannes Indagine by Fabian Withers in 1558; and the 1542

French physiognomy of Richard Roussat (called Arcandam) by William Warde in 1564.27 Tudor

England’s most prolific physiognomer, Thomas Hill, wrote his own text in 1571. He made the spirituality of physiognomy into a specifically Christian spirituality, and he described a fascinating new dimension to the discipline: “This Phisiognomie is a knowledge which leadeth a man to the vnderstanding and knowing both of the naturall motions, and conditions of the spirit: and the good or euill fortune, by the outwarde notes and lines of the face and body.”28 There is something new here, in the interpolated phrase, “and the good or euill fortune.” It is the same innovation added by Shakespeare’s Italian contemporary, Giambattista della Porta, when he wrote On Human Physiognomy (1586): “Everyone knows that amongst the Philosophers it is a commonplace that the monster in the body is a monster in the soul, and being a monster in the soul, what can be expected of such a person, what should become of him, if not evils and

26 Baldassarre Castiglione, The Courtyer (1529), trans. Thomas Hoby (London: Wyllyam Seres, 1561). 27 Bartolommeo della Rocca (called Cocles), The Rebirth of Chiromancy and Physiognomy (1504), trans. Thomas Hill, as The Whole Art of Phisiognomie (London: Iohn Waylande, 1556); Johannes Indagine, The Arte of Phisiognomy, in Briefe Introductions, both Naturall, Pleasaunte, and also Delectable vnto the Art of Chiromancy, or Manuel Diuination, and Physiognomy (1522), trans. Fabian Withers (London: Iohannis Day for Richarde Iugge, 1558); Richard Roussat, Of Physiognomie (1542), trans. William Warde, in The Most Excellent, Profitable, and Pleasant Booke of the Famous Doctour and Expert Astrologian Arcandam or Aleandrin (London: Henry Denham for James Rowbothum, 1562). 28 Thomas Hill, The Contemplation of Mankind (London: Henry Denham for , 1571), “Of Phisiognomie in generall. Capit. j.” Wilson 20 misfortune.”29 Here deformity signifies more than villainy; it signifies tragedy as well. If ancient

Greek physiognomy linked the body to the soul, Renaissance physiognomy added a temporal dimension to this connection. Thus, physiognomy provided Tudor courtiers with the image of a universe where deformity is congruent with villainy – this is the “rule of physiognomie”

Holinshed cited – but also with an account of time in which deformity and villainy are congruent with tragedy, allowing the beautiful and the good – the Tudors – to establish their messianic state. In sum, “monstrosity” gave Tudor writers a way to ascribe Richard’s evil nature to his family and society, and then to imagine an angry God ending this age of iniquity, while

“physiognomy” explained how Richard’s body signified his evil nature, prophesied his criminal behavior, and certified his death at the hands of England’s savior.

Physiognomy was extremely popular in the sixteenth century, yet it took Tudor writers decades to invoke the “rule of physiognomie” in their readings of Richard III, illustrating Kuhn’s claim that “rules … derive from paradigms, but paradigms can guide research even in the absence of rules” (42). Physiognomy was not the philosophical principal or methodical set of rules followed to read villainy and tragedy from Richard’s deformity. Instead, physiognomy was an explanation and justification of what the Tudor writers had been doing all along. By simply interpreting Richard, rather than formulating rules for interpreting him, the Tudor writers display what Kuhn calls “tacit knowledge” (44n1), a term he takes from Michael Polanyi’s Personal

Knowledge (1958):

The premises of a skill cannot be discovered focally prior to its performance, nor even

understood if explicitly stated by others, before we ourselves have experienced its

29 As there is no English translation of Porta’s On Human Physiognomy, I quote from Zakiya Hanafi, The Monster in the Machine: Magic, Medicine, and the Marvelous in the Time of the Scientific Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 100. Wilson 21

performance, whether by watching it or by engaging in it ourselves. In performing a skill

we are therefore acting on certain premises of which we are focally ignorant, but which

we know subsidiarily as part of our mastery of that skill, and which we may get to know

focally by analysing the way we achieve success (or what we believe to be success) in the

skill in question. The rules of success which we thus derive can help us to improve our

skill and to teach it to others – but only if these principles are first re-integrated into the

art of which they are the maxims. For though no art can be exercised according to its

explicit rules, such rules can be of great assistance to an art if observed subsidiarily

within the context of its skilful performance.30

Rather than an explicit scientific theory, the constellation of assumptions, values, commitments, and practices surrounding the representation of Richard III in the sixteenth century amounts to what Kuhn calls a “disciplinary matrix” (182): the metaphorical treatment of Richard’s deformities as a paradigmatic model, the figure of the boar as an additional example, comparative rhetoric as a technique for normal research, Tudor historians as a professional community, the Tudor myth as its standard, Christian spirituality as a shared belief, monstrosity as an assimilated discourse, and physiognomy as a recognized rule.

Needless to say, modern historians of Richard III do not share this disciplinary matrix.

They write English history from a perspective that is secular, not spiritual, and the Tudor myth is seen as a myth. The comparative rhetoric Tudor writers used to connect Richard’s body and behavior is seen as either naivety or propaganda, a quaint relic surpassed by our modern historical rhetoric which explains events in terms of their material causes and effects, an approach to reality called materialism, naturalism, realism, or – in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis:

30 Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago, IL: Psychology Press, 1958), 172. Wilson 22

The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946) – “historism.”31 If historism is the mimesis of modernity in Auerbach’s account of Western literature, the mimesis of antiquity is called “figural interpretation.” The philology in Auerbach’s essay “Figura” (1938) and the literary history in Mimesis describe much more than the Pauline typological exegesis that explains events of the Old Testament through those in the New. To differentiate such exegesis from a general way of reading and representing the entire world, Auerbach coined the term

“figural realism.” Figural realism builds a horizontal bridge between two historical events and connects this bridge vertically with a mystical and ultimately felicitous view of space and time. If something happens, the reason it happens is that God makes it happen, but this greater meaning never trivializes the concrete historical events that do happen. The figure and its fulfillment have the same meaning, as it were, but different registers of significance. Figural realism preserves the historical particularity of the events it connects, but it uses this connection to glimpse an understanding of truth in its final form. Thus Auerbach treats figural realism as a theory of history that sees God shaping space and time through a system of figures and their fulfillment, events joined by a perceived similitude in such a way that illuminates the rational organization of the world.

I would like to suggest that the historical imagination Auerbach calls figural realism is put into words by the comparative rhetorical devices Tudor writers used to address Richard’s body and behavior. First, his deformities at birth prefigure his villainies later in life. Second, the murders he commits fulfill the prophecy of his prodigious deformity. And third, the Tudor chroniclers place the horizontal connection between the figure and its fulfillment in a vertical relationship with a divinely governed narrative of their nation’s history, namely the Tudor myth.

31 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 433. Wilson 23

The connection of Richard’s body and behavior may have been a fairly facile analogy at the start of the sixteenth century, but by the end of the century this symbol was the centerpiece of a systematic mimesis of English history. A way of writing about Richard became a way to read the world: rhetoric became history, then theology and philosophy, and in effect reality.

During the sixteenth century, the figural representation of Richard crossed the borders of artistic medium and literary kind, from the visual arts to the written word in prose, verse, and drama. It can therefore be said, along with Kuhn, that Tudor historians “achieved a paradigm that proved able to guide the whole group’s research” (22), including the research of William

Shakespeare. The figural representation of Richard’s deformity appears at the end of

Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI (1590-91), where “crookbacke Richard” first appears (5.1.121sd in

Quarto). When some of his very first words offend Lord Clifford, this Lancastrian lashes out at

Richard with two figural epithets and a memorable simile: “Heap of wrath, foul indigested lump,

/ As crooked in thy manners as thy shape!” (5.1.157-58). The simile explicitly associates

Richard’s deformed body (“shape”) with his deformed behavior (“manners”), while the epithets put the physical (“heap” and “lump”) in such close proximity to the moral (“wrath” and “foul”) that they form a single unit. By the same token, according to Lord Clifford’s son, Richard is a

“crooktbacke villaine,” (after 5.2.65sd in Quarto), an adjective and a noun that fall into each other to form a single unit: in this phrase, and in the account of Richard’s life that it represents, deformity points forward to villainy, and villainy points backward to deformity. Adjective and noun again form a figural relationship when Young Clifford calls Richard a “foul stigmatic”

(5.1.215), and the history of this term, from the Greek stigma, “brand,” indicates the vertical connection in the figural reading of Richard’s body. In ancient Greece, a stigma was a tattoo or brand given to a criminal or slave by someone who wanted others to be cautious of such a rascal. Wilson 24

Even though Richard’s deformity is congenital, Young Clifford sees it as stigma because he sees it as a mark made by God at the time of Richard’s birth, a mark meant to warn other Englishmen of crimes not yet committed, crimes yet to be committed, but crimes to be eventually overcome by Henry Tudor.