Shakespeare's Plays: Richard III and Henry VI

Shakespeare's Plays: Richard III and Henry VI

Richard III

Richard III is the last of a series of four plays that began with the three parts of Henry VI. These plays, though not strictly speaking a tetralogy, trace the bloody conflicts between the houses of Lancaster and York and interpret the events leading up to the establishment of the Tudor dynasty. Despite Richard's painful experiences, the drama remains a history rather than a tragedy. Richard does not have the moral stature to be a tragic hero, who may murder, but only in violation of his own nature. Richard, by contrast, is a natural intriguer and murderer. Even as bloody a character as Macbeth contains within him an earlier, nobler, Macbeth. Richard is too intelligent and self-aware, and too much in control of himself and those around him, to raise any of the moral ambiguities or dilemmas that are necessary to tragedy. Nor does Richard achieve any transcendent understanding of his actions.

Richard is, nevertheless, the dominating figure in the play and a fascinating one. All the other characters pale before him. The play is primarily a series of encounters between him and the opponents who surround him. Because Richard is physically small and has a humpback, many commentators have suggested that his behavior is a compensation for his physical deformity. However, Richard is not a paranoid; everyone really does hate him. The deformity, a gross exaggeration of the historical reality, is more likely a physical representation of the grotesque shape of Richard's soul in a Renaissance world that took such correspondences seriously. In any case, Shakespeare created good theater by representing Richard as deformed, by which means his plots seem all the more grotesque (Neill 1988, 234).

Richard is also the master rhetorician in a play in which Shakespeare for the first time shows the full power of his language. Richard's speeches and the staccato exchanges among characters present the nervous energy that informs the more ambitious later plays. From his opening soliloquy, Richard fascinates not only with his language but also with his intelligence and candor. Until the very end, he is the stage manager of all that occurs. As a villain, he is unique in his total control and in the virtuosity of his performance. Even Iago pales before him, for Richard, in soliloquies and asides, explains to the audience exactly what he is going to do and then carries it off (Farrell 1987, 17).

In his opening speech, it is immediately clear that Richard will preside if not eventually prevail. He reveals not only a self-confident awareness of his own physical limitations and intellectual superiority but also a disarming perception of his own evil and isolation. His honest villainy is more total than Iago's both in the way that he is able to convince every character that he is his only friend and in the full step-by-step disclosure of his intentions to the audience. Since everyone is against him, he almost generates involuntary ...