Smoke and Mirrors: Identity in Richard III

[TL;DR – Go to the yellow-highlighted section at the end for an essential fact about Shakespeare.] 

[bold suggests elements that could be discussed with a class] 

My interpretation of the play is that the plot centres around the disintegration of Richard’s character. When we first really meet Richard III in Henry VI pt III, the play’s ‘prequel’, he has the longest speech in Shakespeare, outlining how much of a victim he is and what evil he means to do. You could frame this in terms of an inferiority complex. The striking thing is that Richard sees himself only through others’ eyes. In the Henry VI pt III monologue, he compares himself to an unshaped ‘chaos’ (3.3.162), unlovable because of his ‘deformity’ (3.3.159) – and sets out to gain power by out-acting everyone else with ‘artificial tears’ (3.3.185), with his many-faced Proteus-like behaviour (3.3.193) mirroring the chaos he believes his body represents. You might have a class discussion about disability then and now. But one of the points of Richard III is how successful Richard is at tricking people, with his artificial tears fooling his own brother: ‘It cannot be, for he bewept my fortune’ (1.4.224). 

Richard is a Machiavellian villain of the type popular on the Elizabethan stage. Machiavelli’s The Prince was controversial for showing how to get power by any means necessary. Richard himself announces this in Henry VI Pt III, boasting that he could ‘set the murderous Machevil to school’ (3.3.194). At the same time, he is plainly a Vice character out of the medieval morality plays Shakespeare would have seen in his childhood. The Vice character would corrupt innocent Christians by tricking them, but their jokey asides made them so popular in contrast to the pious goodies that the makers of the Morality plays had to quietly phase them out... This tension is also present in Richard III, where we find ourselves rooting for Richard a little. Richard acknowledges the Vice character in one of Richard III’s many metatheatrical moments when he declares, ‘Thus, like the formal Vice, iniquity, / I moralize two meanings in one word’ (3.1.82-3), in a very Vice-like aside to the audience. But there’s an important point here: just as the Vice must be eventually defeated, Richard makes everyone a dupe only to be duped himself by higher powers: all of the prophesies against him that he dismisses in the play come true. 

It’s important then that much of the imagery throughout Richard III revolves around Richard’s self-image. In his opening monologue, he sarcastically says he isn’t shaped ‘to court an amorous looking-glass’ (1.1.15), and that he has nothing better to do in peace-time than ‘see my shadow in the sun / And descant on mine own deformity’ (1.1.26-27). After Richard woos Anne, we learn that he doesn’t own a mirror: ‘Shine out, fair sun, till I have bought a glass, / That I may see my shadow as I pass’ (1.2.272-273). He also refers to Buckingham as ‘My other self’ (2.3.150), echoing the pseudo-Aristotelian Magna Moralia, in which true friendship is described as a mirror, teaching the other how to behave. Beneath the images of shadows and mirrors, however, is Richard’s haunting emptiness. Richard’s lack of a centred self has, I believe, its roots in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics – a very popular text of the time – in which it was written that evil-doers cannot have a solid identity because part of them knows they are wrong. Richard’s identity is based on action, and the theme of acting is very prevalent in the play… 

Early on, Richard says he will ‘seem a saint when most I play the devil’ (1.3.339). He finds his ideal sidekick in Buckingham, who distances himself from their crimes through metatheatrical language: ‘Had you not come upon your cue, my lord, / William Lord Hastings had pronounced your part’ (3.4.26)...‘Tut, I can counterfeit the deep tragedian’ (3.5.5)... ‘I’ll play the orator’ (3.5.95). Together, they put on a piece of political theatre, in which Richard uses his own body as a prop: ‘Look how I am bewitched: behold, mine arm / Is like a blasted sapling, withered up’ (3.4.67-8). They cast Richard as a holy king, with Buckingham tellingly describing the clergymen either side of Richard as ‘Two props of virtue for a Christian prince’ (3.7.95). 

Richard, however, is a far better actor, as Buckingham’s rather amateurish list of acting traits (3.5.5) suggests: Richard’s Protean nature means he uses the other person’s language to get inside their heads. In the bravura second scene, he manages to woo Anne at her husband’s funeral through the use of stichomythia, a staple of romantic texts at the time when lovers speak in single lines ‘reflecting’ each other (see: Romeo and Juliet). It is telling, then, that he tries to get Buckingham to kill the Princes using Buckingham’s language: ‘now do I play the touch’ (4.2.9). Buckingham refuses and is swiftly disposed of, finally realising the truth of what was practically a motto between the two crooks: ‘No more can you distinguish of a man / Than of his outward show’ (3.1.9-10).  

But Richard is running out of people to improvise with. He tries using stichomythia again (4.4.39) but doesn’t seem to have the gift of the gab any more; he runs through the guilty tyrant’s checklist of nightmares (4.1.86), indecisiveness (4.4.469) and depression (5.3.76-7). (See: Macbeth). When, referring to his throne, he rages, ‘Is the chair empty?’ (4.4.484), he speaks truer than he knows. Eventually his identity totally falls apart after he is confronted by the ghosts of his victims. The speech begins, ‘Richard loves Richard: that is, I am I’ (5.3.187), but soon that ‘I’ is interrogated and found to be hollow. He argues with himself – ‘I am a villain: yet I lie, I am not. / Fool, of thyself speak well: fool, do not flatter’ (5.3.195-6) – before realising that he is unloved by anyone (5.3.204). Benedict Cumberbatch’s version of this speech is worth seeking out.  

Richard’s enemy, the Tudor Richmond, depicts Richard to his assorted troops as God’s enemy (5.3.254). Richard, in stark contrast, gives probably the worst pep talk of all time, first saying to his generals, ‘Let not our babbling dreams affright our souls / For conscience is a word that cowards use’ (5.3.311-12), and then turning to his troops and using the despot’s old trick of trying to appeal to base instincts: ‘Shall these enjoy our lands? Lie with our wives? / Ravish our daughters?’ (5.3.339-340). (C.f. a famous modern instance describing Mexicans as ‘rapists and drug-dealers’…). 

At this point I should bring up Margaret, whose prophesies all come true. She is the only other person to use a lot of metatheatrical language. In fact, she functions in the place of a chorus as she does: ‘A dire induction am I witness to, / And will to France, hoping the consequence / Will prove as bitter, black and tragical’ (4.4.5-7) – later speaking of ‘the beholders of this frantic play’ (4.4.67). Her metatheatrical language has the effect of showing that the stage is bigger than Richard thinks it to be, and that beyond his thespian banter there is a divine audience whom she frequently appeals to. The mad, choric Margaret is the most Senecan thing in the play. So here’s the fun fact: the reason that Elizabethan monologues are so long is that Elizabethans didn’t realise that certain Roman plays like Seneca’s were more like radio-plays, to be orated rather than acted. In an age where the older something was, the more respected, Elizabethans thought that’s how plays should be. If they had known, their dialogue would have been very different.  

Senecan choruses abound throughout, sounding ridiculous to modern ears, e.g. the bit beginning, ‘Ah for our father, for our dear lord Clarence!’ (2.2.72-79) – the stichomythia discussed above was a trademark of Seneca’s as well. Seneca was published in English in the 1580s and was quickly snatched up by the burgeoning theatre scene, turning Seneca into the guy Shakespeare must have measured himself against. By 1595, he must have been starting to think Seneca was over-rated, because thankfully he started to phase a lot of the hyper-stylised dialogue out. Whatever the playwright capable of Hamlet thought of Richard III when looking back at his career, the play was good to him; it was published five times in his lifetime, and was the first star-vehicle for Richard Burbage, propelling them both onto unprecedented heights.