Richard III as Tragedy

Shakespeare’s Richard III is categorized as a History Play (see previous post), but its official title is The Tragedy of King Richard III.  Given its deliberate distortion of historical fact and its well-established role in Tudor propaganda, perhaps it does make more sense to read the play as fictional tragedy than historical dramatization.  But how to turn a monstrous villain into a tragic hero?  This is where Shakespeare’s brilliance shows itself in this work.

Shakespeare’s tragedies grew out of the history plays, and it was not impossible for a tragic hero to have villainous qualities.  Consider Othello, who murders his wife, or Macbeth, who sinks deeper and deeper in blood as the play unfolds.  But the essence of tragedy involves a hero for whom the audience can feel some sympathy.  Othello is cruelly manipulated and urged on by Iago, as Macbeth is by Lady Macbeth.  The classical tragic hero is a larger than life character with great potential, whose tragic flaw leads to his (or her) downfall.  In the case of Othello, it’s jealousy and in the case of MacBeth, “vaulting ambition.” 

In some ways Richard III could be seen as a trial run for Macbeth, since ambition and lust for power are Richard’s downfalls, but no one eggs him on.  He is a larger than life character who simply chooses to get rid of anyone who stands in his way to the throne.  The classical tragic hero evokes “pity and fear,” pity for the hero and fear that, as human beings with our own flaws, we could fall as they do.  How to create sympathy for a purposeful villain like Richard?  How to make him a character that the audience can identify with?  And how to do so, and at the same time curry favor with your Tudor monarch by perpetuating the myth of Richard as a complete monster?

Shakespeare solved this problem by subtly psychologizing Richard as an unloved and unlovable man whose desperate desire for love twists him into a criminal.  His deformed body is merely an outward sign of a misshapen psyche, which becomes what it most hates.  And, tragically, Richard is fully conscious of his own depravity.

This theme is introduced in Richard’s opening speech: 

“But I…that am rudely stamped, and want love’s majesty/To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;/I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,/Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,/Deform’d, unfinish’d…/And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover/…I am determined to prove a villain…”

The idea of “dissembling nature” that has cheated him of a normal life continually recurs.  Margaret, widow of the lately dead King Henry VI, attacks Richard as a “slave of nature” and “son of hell.”  She goes on, “Thou slander of thy heavy mother’s womb!/And loathed issue of thy father’s loins!”  Richard’s own mother refers to her “accursed womb, the bed of death!” and refers to Richard as a “cockatrice” that she has “hatch’d to the world.”  Later she gives him her “most grievous curse.”  Richard is literally denied a mother’s love. 

And in the end, Richard struggles with his own self-loathing:  “Richard loves Richard…/O no! Alas, I rather hate myself…/I shall despair; there is no creature loves me,/And if I die no soul will pity me.”  Ironically, however, it is hard not to pity this man, alone in the end, facing the defeat he has brought on himself, having been deprived of a normal body, a mother’s love, and a healthy life.

Of all the murders Richard is accused of in the play, the worst is that of the two sons of his brother Edward IV, the young princes in line for the throne after Edward’s death.  The rumor was that Richard had had them smothered in their beds while they were supposedly housed in the Tower of London for their own protection. 

Shakespeare takes this image of innocent nature being suffocated and creates a powerful motif that applies to the smothering of Richard’s innocence, as well as to his victims. 

During the War of the Roses (according to Henry VI, Part 3) Richard’s own twelve-year-old brother, Rutland, had been murdered by a supporter of Margaret and Henry VI.  When Margaret confronts Richard with the murder of her husband and son, Richard reminds her of “the faultless blood of pretty Rutland.”  Later, children appear on stage, the son and daughter of Richard’s brother Clarence, grieving their father’s death, and then the two young sons of Edward IV, heirs to the throne before their murder.  A young Page is called on by Richard to name someone who would kill the young princes for money.  Thus are innocence and violence repeatedly linked.

At one point there is a reference to Richard growing so fast “That he could gnaw a crust at two hours old,” as if young Richard had outpaced his innocence and grown into maturity too soon. 

And when the murder of the young princes is described, the smothering of innocent nature is explicitly invoked:

“…thus…lay the gentle babes/…girdling one another/Within their alabaster innocent arms./Their lips were four red roses on a stalk,/…a book of prayers on their pillow lay…/…We smothered/The most replenished sweet work of Nature/That from the prime creation e’er she framed.”

Richard’s own childhood innocence, the text implies, had been stolen from him by his deformity from birth and the blood of family history, all of which culminates in a twisted psyche that substitutes the brutal pursuit of power for the love he has been denied and that ends as the victim of its own self-loathing.

Richard III is not only a tragedy of love and innocence, but also a tragedy of conscience.  When Richard’s innocence was smothered, his conscience was also suffocated. 

Early on Margaret curses Richard: “The worm of conscience shall begnaw thy soul!”  Later his mother and Elizabeth, mother of the young princes, seek to “smother” him with “the breath of bitter words.”  The ghost of Prince Edward, son of Henry VI, speaks to Richard using the same image of suffocation: “Let me sit heavy on thy soul…”  When the ghosts of all his victims appear, and speak, and disturb his sleep, Richard is temporarily stricken with the pangs of conscience:  “My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,/…And every tale condemns me for a villain.”  Yet, even while conscious of his own guilt, he resists:  “Conscience is but a word that cowards use.”

Shakespeare’s texts are saturated with the theme of love and death, and in Richard III, we see lust transformed into the desire to destroy.  Scenes of courtship alternate with scenes of murder, just as Richard’s longing for love is perverted by his sense of being unloved and unlovable.  He mocks the value of love because he feels he cannot have it.

Ultimately, Richard’s tragedy reaches beyond himself.  Frequent references in the play evoke dark depths of history, time, events, and human psychology beyond the control of even such a larger-than-life character as Richard.

The opening lines suggest a tempest temporarily over, a stormy sea, and ocean depths.  Clarence’s dream takes place at sea, expresses his fear of drowning in “the tumbling billows of the main,” and calls up images of secrets in the deep.  As Hastings is taken to his own beheading, he bewails the “fatal bowels of the deep.”  Elsewhere, there are references to the “mighty sea” and the “swallowing gulf/Of dark forgetfulness and deep oblivion.”  Despite Richard’s dominance in the action of the play, there is that pervading sense that he too is caught in the roiling sea of life and in the ocean depths of his own unconscious urges.

Thus does Shakespeare turn this play, not only into Tudor propaganda that paints Richard III as a monster of history, but also into the transcendent tragedy of a character trapped in a catastrophe of his own making and in a universal human dilemma beyond his own making.

So what does Richard III tell us about the criminal mind?  It seems to suggest that destructive acts (both physical and verbal), assault, aggression, and abuse grow out of a deep-seated, unhealed wound.  Those who harm others have themselves been deeply hurt.*

*For the bulk of this commentary I am heavily indebted to my graduate school Shakespeare professor Dr. Gerald Chapman.  (Gerald Chapman, Professor of English Emeritus, University of Denver, scholar of Renaissance and 18th-century English studies, Department Chair for twelve years, has also taught at Northwestern, Harvard, and the University of Texas.)