Wilson 1 Jeffrey R. Wilson Harvard University Stigmatizing

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Jeffrey R. Wilson Harvard University

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

Academic Information

Text: This essay concerns the representation of Richard III’s deformities in sixteenth-century English literature up to and including Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI.

Occasion: It is easy to see why sixteenth-century English writers stigmatized the physical deformity of Richard III as a way to legitimize the Tudor dynasty, but I want to ask how, rhetorically, those writers went about the process of that stigmatization. That is, how did historians draw upon the resources of literary representation to make Tudor history into Tudor mythology, to make Richard the man into Richard the monster.

Method: 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.

Terms: In Kuhn’s lexicon, a paradigm is a pattern or model of scientific practice.

Thesis: I would like to propose the existence of a paradigm for the representation of Richard III’s deformities in sixteenth-century English literature. I call this paradigm the figural paradigm because Tudor writers treated the deformity of Richard’s body at birth as a figure for both his villainous life and his tragic death. That is, deformity figured both villainy and tragedy.

Stakes: Kuhn’s theory of paradigms helps us recognize the inconsistent treatment of Richard’s deformity in a pre-paradigm period during the reign of Henry VII, the emergence of the figural paradigm in the age of Henry VIII, and the perpetuation of this paradigm by later Tudor writers up to and including William Shakespeare. At the same time, Kuhn’s notion of the anomaly provides us with a way of thinking about Shakespeare’s departure from the Tudor tradition with the suggestion that Richard’s body was not the sign but the cause of his villainy and eventual tragedy. Wilson 1

Jeffrey R. Wilson Harvard University

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

Basic Outline

I. Intro a. Para 1 i. Exemplar: The Duke of York in Shakespeare’s Richard III ii. Hist.Cit: Tillyard on the Tudor myth b. Para 2 i. Occasion: Not why but how Richard was stigmatized ii. Text: Richard III’s deformities in sixteenth-centuryEnglish literature c. Para 3 i. Method: Rhetorical analysis; Kuhn’s constructivist reading of science ii. Term: Paradigm iii. Thesis: The figural paradigm for Richard III’s deformities iv. Stakes: Shakespeare as both paradigmatic and anomalous

II. Body a. Section 1 (Text.Ev): Inconsistent treatment of Richard in the pre-paradigm period i. Para 1: Rous ii. Para 2: Royal Collections Portrait b. Section 2 (Text.Ev): The emergence of a paradigm i. Para 1: Vergil ii. Para 2: More c. Section 3 (Text.Ev): The perpetuation of the paradigm i. Para 1: Hall, Rainolde ii. Para 2: Mirror for Magistrates d. Section 4: Holinshed (Text.Ev.) i. Subsection 1 (Hist.Ev): Monstrosity 1. Para 1: Monstrosity in Elizabethan England 2. Para 2: Richard’s Monstrosity in Legge ii. Subsection 2 (Hist.Ev): Physiognomy 1. Para 1: Aristotle on Physiognomy 2. Para 2: Physiognomy in the Renaissance e. Section 5 (Theor.Cit): Kuhn and Polanyi on “Tacit Knowledge” f. Section 6 (Hist.Ev./Hist.Cit.): Auerbach on “Figural Interpretation”

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III. Conclusion a. Argument: Representation of Richard’s deformities manifests Auerbach’s theory of figural realism b. Utility: Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI as paradigmatic c. Utility: Shakespeare’s 3 Henry VI as anomalous

Wilson 1

Jeffrey R. Wilson Harvard University

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

Detailed Outline

Introduction

Exemplar: 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.” • 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)

Hist.Cit: The gossipy discussion, exaggeration, and stigmatization 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. • 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 Wars of the Roses and Richard III, evil incarnate, usurping the English throne; calamity plagued England until Henry Tudor, the last Lancastrian and God’s lieutenant here on earth, cast Richard down at the Battle of Bosworth and, by marrying the heiress of the house of York, 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, Richard’s physical deformity. • 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.

Text: This essay concerns the representation of Richard III’s deformities in sixteenth-century English literature up to and including William Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI.

Occasion: Making Richard alternately a villain in the Tudor myth and a victim of the Tudor myth, the stigmatization of his deformity has provoked more passion than any other event in Wilson 2

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. 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.

Method: 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 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.

Terms: In Kuhn’s lexicon, a “paradigm” is a pattern or model of scientific practice.

Theor.Cit.: 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).

Stakes: Kuhn’s theory of paradigms can help us recognize the inconsistent treatment of Richard’s deformity in a pre-paradigm period during the reign of Henry VII, the emergence of a paradigm in the age of Henry VIII, and the perpetuation of this paradigm by later Tudor writers up to and including William Shakespeare. At the same time, Kuhn’s notion of the anomaly provides us with a way of thinking about Shakespeare’s departure from the Tudor tradition with the suggestion that Richard’s body was not the sign but the cause of his villainy and eventual tragedy.

Body

Assert for Section: 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).

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Assert for Para: During Richard’s lifetime, several writers depicted him favorably, some mentioning a smallish size, but none a deformity. • Text.Ev: John Rous, Rous Roll (1484) • Text.Ev: John Rous, History of the Kings of England (1486)

Assert for Para: The Royal Collections portrait of Richard III commemorates this pre-paradigm period in a fascinating way. • Text.Ev: The Royal Collections portrait

Occasion for Section: In Rous’s History, the connection of deformity and villainy is only implicit.

Assert for Para: 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. • Polydore Vergil, English History (1512-13)

Assert for Para: Working either from Vergil’s History or some common source, Thomas More’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. • Thomas More, History of King Richard the Thirde (1513)

Counter: 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.”

Reponse: 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.

Assert for Section: Mid-century representations of Richard’s deformities reproduce More’s stigmatizing rhetoric with none of his skeptical qualifications.

Assert for Para: For example, Richard Grafton’s Continuacion of the Chronicle of England (1543) is wary enough of More’s passage to quote Vergil instead. • Richard Grafton, Continuacion of the Chronicle of England (1543) • Edward Hall, The Vnion of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre Yorke (1548) • Richard Rainolde, The Foundacion of Rhetorike (1563)

Assert for Para: In the sixteenth century, the Tudor myth was the rule, and the analogy between Richard’s body and behavior was the paradigm that followed from a commitment to that rule. • William Baldwin, A Myrroure for Magistrates (1559)

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Arg: 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.

Assert for Section: Two more pieces to this puzzle – “monstrosity” and “physiognomy” – appeared in Shakespeare’s most revered source, Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, which connects Richard’s body and behavior in two places. • The first edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1577)

Assert for Para: Holinshed takes the word “monster” from the flurry of broadsides reporting monstrous births early in the Elizabethan age. • Hist.Ev.: Elizabethan Ballads and Broadsides

Assert for Para: The broadsides say that the life of a monster is but short, as is the time remaining for the sinners and Sodoms they signify. • Hist.Ev.: Elizabethan Ballads and Broadsides

Assert for Para: 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. • Hist.Ev.: Elizabethan Ballads and Broadsides

Assert for Para: In the generation before Shakespeare, Thomas Legge’s university play Richardus Tertius (ca. 1580) treated the Tudor Richard with the language of monstrosity (in Latin). • Text.Ev: Thomas Legge’s university play Richardus Tertius (ca. 1580)

Assert for Section: The second new piece Holinshed added to the Richardian puzzle came in the second edition of his Chronicles (1587). • Text.Ev: The second edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587). • Hist.Ev: Physiognomy in Ancient Greece

Assert for Para: Variously Hippocratic, Socratic, Aristotelian, pseudo-Aristotelian, and Galenic, physiognomy weaseled its way into Renaissance culture in two ways, one popular and one professional. • Hist.Ev: Physiognomy in the Renaissance

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Assert for Section: 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). • Theor..Cit: Kuhn on paradigms

Assert for Section: Needless to say, modern historians of Richard III do not share this disciplinary matrix. • Hist.Cit. Auernach on Figural Realism

Arg: 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. 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.

Utility: 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. 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.