Literary Horizon An International Peer-Reviewed English Journal Vol. 1, Issue 3 www.literaryhorizon.com August, 2021

History and Memory in Shakespeare’s Richard III

Kunal Kardam M. A. (Final) Department of English, University of Delhi, India.

Since I cannot prove a lover To entertain these fair well-spoken days, I am determined to prove a villain, And hate the idle pleasure of the days. (1.1.28-31) The opening soliloquy from ‘s Richard III sets the stage for the rest of the play. Richard announces his arrival as a Machiavellian prince with extreme ambition and the subsequent events of the play confirm this portrayal, as a string of murders and executions secure his hold on the throne. Richard III was a problematic character, a treacherous, scheming prince who stops at nothing in his quest to become the ruler makes for an exciting character to follow partly because of his charismatic personality and partly because as viewers, or readers, we are aware of the unstable ground on which Richard establishes his rule. E. M. W. Tillyard wrote that Richard was ‗the great ulcer of the body politic into which all its impurity is drained‘ showing how he was not just a sinner whose sins bred more sins, but in fact the nature and extremity of his sins makes it necessary for him to be destroyed so that God‘s order on earth can be re-established (208). In this paper, I would like to discuss how Shakespeare describes the last years of the Plantagenet rulers of by combining both historical evidence and dramatic elements in his play Richard III.

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To understand Shakespeare‘s depiction of King Richard III, we need to first take a look at historiography in Elizabethan times. History-writing was popularised in England by the Tudor monarchs, especially King Henry VII. However, the knowledge of the general public was usually shaped by the new genre of history plays of the time. These plays were not always historically accurate and usually had the writer‘s own moral and political ideology mixed in them (Kamps 5). This creates an uncertainty regarding the descriptions of characters and events as provided by these playwrights. Sixteenth century historians were proponents of the ‗Tudor myth‘ which was popularised by King Henry VII in order to dampen the concerns regarding his legitimacy (Bickley, Stevens 242). The myth aimed to show Henry VII as the liberator of England from the prolonged civil war between the houses of York and Lancaster, and it also upheld the legitimacy of the Tudors by showing him as a descendant of the legendary King Arthur (Tillyard 29). Many historians of the time followed this providential reading of history including ‘s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families, an influential historical text in the Tudor times, and served as an important source for Shakespeare while writing his history plays. As Gordon Zeeveld notes, in writing his history plays, Shakespeare utilised the dramatic expression of Hall which had been ignored by subsequent historians like Holinshed (Zeeveld 325). This also had the result of Shakespeare adopting some of the more controversial descriptions promulgated in the Tudor histories. The most striking description of Richard III in both Shakespeare and his sources is the description of the deformities of the king. This disfigured description can be dated back to ‘s The History of King Richard the Third and it was subsequently adopted by later writers. While there exists little doubt among historians regarding the deformed nature of Richard, it is agreed that the Tudor historians had exaggerated these physical traits, with Shakespeare describing Richard with a limp, a withered hand and a crooked back. The

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vocabulary used establishes Richard as not just ugly of feature but as a man wicked of nature. Richard becomes a sort of devil incarnate with his left shoulder higher than the right, as the left side of the body was associated with evil. His diabolical dialogues and devilish nature make him a hellish, parodic inversion of Christ (Jowett 32-34). Going back to the events of the play 3 Henry VI, Richard kisses the infant Prince Edward V while comparing himself to Judas, a strong premonition of the kin-murder that he will undertake in the subsequent play Richard III (9). Further, critics like Scott Colley have compared Richard to the Biblical character of Herod, as both of these were tyrants who had murdered innocents to further their goals (451). This image of Richard would have been considered disturbing in a Christian society and the Elizabethan viewers of the play would be immediately aware of the problematic nature of his character. The deformities of Richard were not only means for his moral denigration but they also defined his personal and political life in Shakespeare‘s plays. In the play 3 Henry VI, Richard is presented as the fiercest of the three sons of Richard, Duke of York (Jowett 9). This warriorlike depiction, however, does not fit well with his physically deformed description. The opening soliloquy of Richard gives an insight into how he is an anomaly in a peacetime society. While the rest of the court celebrates the supposed end of the by the ascension of King Edward IV, Richard shies away from the festivities. Instead, the play begins with a lonely Richard, with only an armour hung on the wall as his company, narrating his hideous plans to the audience (Besnault, Bitot 112-113). Richard feels like a misplaced warrior in a peaceful society and the idle, unused armour placed as a decoration amplifies his position. In an effort to counter his inability to survive during peacetime, Richard tries to assert his own will and decides to play folly to ‗these well-spoken days‘. Richard‘s sexual deprivation is another interesting aspect of his life that is shown by Shakespeare with the help of his physical deformities. Richard feels cheated and blames Nature,

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whom he describes as a dissembling woman, for having curtailed his growth before he was even born. Richard‘s resentment for women translates into his malicious nature. Thus, Richard‘s evil nature is not independent and can in fact, be considered to have been caused by his deformities and it is strengthened by his belief that he has been cheated by the disruptive nature of femininity. His hostile nature and his physical deformities create a personality that is unfit for love, just like his treachery and maliciousness make him unfit for being a ruler (Jowett 35-36). The play is set in the late Medieval English society which was marked by masculine scenarios of war and destruction. However, Shakespeare‘s play depicts a highly feminised version of this society featuring three queens and a queen mother, and as the play progresses, this community of women is shown as enablers in the downfall of Richard, a hyper-masculine protagonist, especially the Old Queen Margaret (1). Of all the women present in the play, both the strongest and the strangest presence is that of the Old Queen Margaret. Historically, Margaret had left England for her native France after the deaths of both her husband Henry VI and her son Prince Edward. Her anachronistic presence in this play also makes her the only character to feature in all the four plays of the first tetralogy, becoming a thread that connects the long drawn-out events of the English civil war (Tillyard 212). In the play as well, even though Richard exercises the most autonomy and power, it is through Margaret that Shakespeare really progresses the story. In Act 1 Scene 3, she places a curse on each of the surviving members of the House of York and also on Queen Elizabeth‘s relations, and as the story progresses, each of her cursed character becomes a victim of Richard‘s treachery. By adding Margaret to Richard III, Shakespeare creates a counter to Richard‘s theatricality as she is also a dominant egotist like Richard (Besnault, Bitot 117). Richard then becomes only a vessel for Margaret‘s curse (Jowett 25). Richard‘s actions become the immediate

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cause for the divine intervention that was necessary for the purgation of late medieval English society. While Richard is described as a monstrous person, his personality is quite opposite. According to Tillyard Shakespeare does not create Richard as a monster in every scene, instead his Richard displays human traits quite often. In the first two scenes of Act 1, we see the inner workings of Richard‘s mind in his opening soliloquy, dealings with Clarence, disruption of the funeral of Henry VI and his courtship of Lady Anne. Once his private self has been established, Shakespeare then gives him a more public role where no character other than the Old Queen is able to cause him any trouble (Tillyard 210-11). His actions, while not justified, do lead him to the throne, however, when he orders the execution of the two princes he crosses the boundaries of crimes that can be considered acceptable for gaining power (Besnault, Bitot 107-108). All of his victims until then were perpetrators of crimes themselves, but the murder of the innocent princes is deemed extremely dishonourable (Jowett 38-39). The ending of the play, and with it the first tetralogy of Shakespeare‘s histories, serves as the end of an era of extreme violence and instability in England. Shakespeare also upholds the Tudor myth of showing Henry VII as the ruler that liberated England from both the tyranny of Richard III and the civil war that had engulfed the country for more than half a century (Jowett 1). Richard‘s monstrosity of body and spirit is a result of the national strife into which he was born and which his death finally gets rid of. His death leads to the creation of a new world order in which memory does not have the same retributive power that it did before the reign of the Tudors (9-10). Tillyard notes that the first tetralogy of Shakespeare‘s history plays deals with the themes of order and chaos, and God‘s justice and mercy (Tillyard 200-201). Therefore, it may be stated that in the culmination of the tetralogy with Richard III, Shakespeare shows how God had guided England to its prosperous reign under the rule of the Tudors. The scene before the final

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battle between Richard and Henry shows how Shakespeare used divine forces as the deciding factor for the confrontation. While on one side Richard is cursed by the ghosts of all the people he had murdered during the play, and in the previous three Henry VI plays as well, on the other side Henry is blessed by them as the saviour of England and the future unifier of the two houses of York and Lancaster (204, 208). There is a peculiarity in the absence of Henry, as the Earl of Richmond, for most of the events of the play which has led some critics to believe that Shakespeare did not completely follow the Tudor myth. The play ends abruptly after the death of Richard which could also be an effect of the increasing disillusionment with Tudor rule. Henry‘s absenteeism also highlights the importance of characters like the Old Queen, whose curse seems to have caused Richard‘s downfall more than Henry‘s rebellion. The demonization of Richard III is now considered as a conscious attempt by Henry VII in order to establish his weak claim over the throne of England (Jowett 15, 18). Henry resorted to blackening the image of Richard in order to justify his overthrow of a ruler with a better claim to rule than himself. According to the medieval doctrine of kingship, Richard was a crowned ruler and it would be a terrible act to rebel against him (Tillyard 212). However, once it is established that Richard was a tyrant and a usurper himself, then Henry‘s rebellion becomes lawful. We can see how Shakespeare created a character for Richard that made him the focal point of all the evil actions of the play, while also making him a symbol of the corrupt times during which he had reigned. While historically inaccurate in places, with the play Richard III Shakespeare displayed the final years of the Wars of the Roses and recreated, with dramatic freedom, the eponymous king‘s actions that led to his downfall.

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Works Cited: Besnault, Marie-Helene, and Bitot, Michel. ―Historical legacy and fiction: the poetical reinvention of King Richard III‖. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare‘s History Plays, pp. 106-125. Cambridge University Press, 2009. Bickley, Pamela, and Stevens, Jenny. Essential Shakespeare: The Arden Guide to Text and Interpretation. Bloomsbury, 2014. Colley, Scott. ―Richard III and Herod.‖ Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 4, 1986, pp. 451 458. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2870676. Accessed 15 Dec. 2019. Jowett, John. ―Introduction‖. The Tragedy of King Richard III. Edited by John Jowett, Oxford University Press, 2008. Kamps, Ivo. ―The Writing of History in Shakespeare‘s England‖. A Companion to Shakespeare's Works, Volume II: The Histories, pp. 4-25. Blackwell, 2006. Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of King Richard III. Edited by John Jowett, Oxford University Press, 2008. Tillyard, E. M. W. Shakespeare‘s History Plays. Chatto & Windus, 1974. Zeeveld, W. Gordon. ―The Influence of Hall on Shakespeare's English Historical Plays.‖ ELH, vol. 3, no. 4, 1936, pp. 317–353. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2871549. Accessed 26 Dec. 2019.

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