Shakespeare's Richards: Interpreting Prophecies, Myths and History
Impressions about Richard II and Richard III
Dear reader, I thought it might be helpful for you to have a brief synopsis of the plays I’ll be discussing. So if you are not familiar with Shakespeare’s Richard II or Richard III, read below:
Richard III is the last play of Shakespeare’s eight English Histories, a series that begins with Richard II, which was the subject of my undergrad thesis, and is also composed by Henry IV pt. 1 & 2, Henry V and Henry VI pt. 1-3. Together they form a remarkable theatrical chronicle about the historical events during the Wars of the Roses, which came to an end at the battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 with Richard III’s demise.
I have been obsessed with Shakespeare’s Histories for years now, as I find them deeply interesting yet strangely underrated. After two years studying Richard II, I couldn't help comparing the Richards to each other when I came to the last play. Indeed, there are thematic links between all the historical plays. Still, the Richards have particular aspects such as the fall of a controversial monarch, polemic disputes involving historical interpretations, a sinister plasticity of language with its equivocal use, and questions about fate, fortune and predestination. Both kings are deposed by a noble warrior, both end isolated and murdered, and both plays are ambiguous enough to inspire conflicting interpretations about how we see history and historical redemption.
Similar to Richard II (and perhaps this is a characteristic of most of Shakespeare’s best plays), not only are there entirely antagonistic views of Richard III, but the play accommodates them. When I studied Richard II, I noticed an intriguing dissonance among researchers as to the appropriate historical perspective for interpreting the history plays, with a particular emphasis on E. M. Tillyard’s Shakespeare's History Plays (1944), a book that despite being constantly attacked and refuted by contemporary critics, remains an indispensable source for the study of these works, precisely because it serves as a starting point for literary inquiry.
Regarding Richard II, the work of Tillyard finds opposition with authors such as Peter G. Phialas, presenting divergent views on the relevance of the characteristically medieval elements employed by Shakespeare and what they mean – there is no consensus as to how ‘modern’ Shakespeare would be compared to the world of his English histories, and as to the level of secularization of his audience's mentality, that is, the level of faith that Elizabethan citizens had in the ‘divine right of the king’.
Yet in Richard III, the most pressing historical question is about the ‘Tudor Myth’ and the extent to which the play endorses it. The Tudor Myth is part of a traditional view of history that believes in providence and redemption of time/life: ‘By giving historical cycles a profound regenerative meaning, it invests the moment of suffering with a quality of meaningful, historical necessity’. Much like his criticism of Richard II, Tillyard sees Richard III as a deeply religious play, and believes that through it, Shakespeare portrayed divine providence legitimizing the Tudor reign. Countering this idea, Jan Kott in Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964) stated that Shakespeare actually presents a completely demythologized version of the concept of History, in which there are no divine plans, but only the historical pendulum that places facts in inescapable cycles.
Concerning Richard II, I agree with some of Tillyard's arguments, as I believe that the marked contrast between Richard's medievalism and Bolingbroke's worldly Machiavellianism, as well as their respective correspondences to their political-philosophical beliefs, indicate the type of government they promote and, consequently, signify the type of power each one exercises: the former based on theological precepts, the latter on secular ones. However, I completely disagree with Tillyard about Richard III. For most current readers of Shakespeare, imagining him as a staunch defender of a mystical-religious cause sounds incongruous, to say the least. Richard III is much more complex than that, which does justice to the subtle ambiguities that I find characteristic of Shakespeare. In short, as Richard P. Wheeler puts it in History, Character and Conscience in “Richard III” (1971), ‘the play asks us to endorse such a view [Tudor Myth being divinely prophesied], but also invites us to question it'.
Janis Lull in Plantagenets, Lancastrians, Yorkists, and Tudors: 1–3 Henry VI, Richard III, Edward III (2002) shares a valuable understanding of the Tudor historical point of view:
Tudor historians were generally less interested in true accounts of distant events than in using those events to point out good examples and cautionary tales. Sir Philip Sidney’s assertion that literature (‘poetry’) was a loftier form than history relied on the perceived moral superiority of literature. The purpose of studying both history and literature was to see ‘virtue exalted and vice punished’, and in Sidney’s view, ‘that commendation is peculiar to poetry, and far off from history’. (p. 89)
The presence of prophetic figures is recurrent in all historical plays, which challenges strict rationalist perspectives of history. The Elizabethan era, as part of the Renaissance, belongs to a transitional moment in which the mysticism of the Middle Ages still lingered while the Modern Era was in its early stages, as science and the arts made profoundly transformative progress. With this in mind, it is hardly surprising that there are so many conflicting interpretations of the same work, since the ambiguities and uncertainties of the text reflect the unstable cultural scenario of which it is a product.
Thus, even if we adopt a secular point of view to criticize the plays, some degree of mysticism must be allowed – the prophecies cannot be wholly brushed aside due to their relevance in the plot (and it must be said that their presence in the play does not make Shakespeare a superstitious man with a moral purpose).
Perhaps the strongest prophetic scene in all eight plays is Gaunt's deathbed speech in Richard II, in which he says:
Methinks I am a prophet new inspired
And thus, expiring, do foretell of him:
His rash fierce blaze of riot cannot last
For violent fires soon burn out themselves.
Small showers last long, but sudden storms are short;
He tires betimes that spurs too fast betimes;
With eager feeding, food doth choke the feeder;
Light vanity, insatiate cormorant,
Consuming means, soon preys upon itself
(Richard II - II.i.31-39)
And he continues for another 28 lines one of Shakespeare's most famous passages. Perhaps Richard II is so marked by prophecy because, besides being the opening play in the series, it is distinctly concerned with the future of England and its monarchical succession. Later, we see the Bishop of Carlisle practically summarise the 15th century in England, presenting both an ominous vision in the play and an unfortunate portrait of the past for Elizabethan audiences:
My lord of Hereford here, whom you call king,
Is a foul traitor to proud Hereford’s king
And if you crown him, let me prophesy
The blood of English shall manure the ground
And future ages groan for this foul act.
Peace shall go sleep with Turks and infidels
And in this seat of peace tumultuous wars
Shall kin with kin and kind with kind confound.
Disorder, horror, fear and mutiny
Shall here inhabit and this land be called
The field of Golgotha and dead men’s skulls.
(Richard II - IV.i.135-145)
In Richard III, it is a prophecy that initiates the first conflict: Richard tells King Edward that someone whose name begins with the letter ‘G’ will kill him, causing their brother George (the Duke of Clarence) to be sent to the Tower of London. The prophecy that began as a ruse to get Clarence out of the way becomes true when we remember that Richard is the Duke of Gloucester.
RICHARD
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the King
In deadly hate, the one against the other;
And if King Edward be as true and just
As I am subtle, false, and treacherous,
This day should Clarence closely be mewed up
About a prophecy which says that “G”
Of Edward’s heirs the murderer shall be
(Richard III - I.i.32-40)
The presence and confirmation of prophecies give a deterministic air to history, as if causes and consequences were clear and inevitable, a theory highly susceptible to criticism and which I don’t think Shakespeare particularly believed in. However, there is a comfortable aspect to this idea, as explained by Wheeler:
To the extent that a profane man can ‘create' history without submission to archetypal prescriptives, he has a freedom and individuality that mythic, sacred history denies. On the other hand, profane history has no means of justifying the terrors of history because it can neither escape nor regenerate time. Patterns continue to repeat themselves, but devoid of their redemptive content.
Wheeler's argument belongs to the same interpretative framework as that of A.P. Rossiter in his brilliant essay Angel with Horns: The Unity of Richard III (1961), in which he states that
Men have always looked for such predictability in history: it gives the illusion of a comfortably ordered world. They have also often read — and written — historical records to show that the course of events has been guided by a simple process of divine justice, dispensing rewards and punishments here on earth (p. 2)
Thus, we see in Richard III a tension between two ways of looking at history: one in which revenge and retribution are guaranteed, and another in which violence is just an aspect of chaos and is not guided by a destiny made of causality. This tension (like the dispute between medievalism and early-modernism in Richard II) is what makes the dissonant interpretations of Shakespeare's work possible, and the challenge that some scholars seek to address is to identify where the author himself lies on this spectrum, and ultimately unravel the ‘real’ standpoint of the play. I don't think such a thing exists – in any of his plays, for that matter. One cannot look at Richard III as a treatise disguised as a play, as if Shakespeare had a secret didactic agenda. Indeed, Richard is too fantastically (and charmingly) evil to be taken as a serious historical portrait. On this subject, Rossiter gives us a more balanced perspective:
To think that we are seeing anything like sober history in this play is derisible naivety. What we are offered is a formally patterned sequence presenting two things: on the one hand, a rigid Tudor schema of retributive justice (a sort of analogy to Newton’s Third Law in the field of moral dynamics: ‘Action and reaction are equal and opposite’); and, on the other, a huge triumphant stage-personality, an early old masterpiece of the art of rhetorical stage writing, a monstrous being incredible in any sober, historical scheme of things — Richard himself (p. 2)
Janis Lull explains that ‘For the Elizabethans, history meant political history, particularly stories of kings and high officials, who were seen as embodying the health of the state’. Observing the Histories’ chronology, we see that during the 1590s, Shakespeare seemed preoccupied with his country’s political past and future, given that he wrote all eight plays during this decade: Richard III was written between 1592 and 1594, and Richard II was estimated to date from 1595. The short interval places them in the same historical and cultural context. Both plays develop a historical theme with political repercussions for their first audiences, largely due to the general concern about the royal succession and the threat of national instability, since Queen Elizabeth was in old age and childless. While Richard II seems to reflect the Elizabethan reign in terms of future monarchical legitimacy, in Richard III, there seems to be a preoccupation with the past of the Tudor lineage. In both plays, Shakespeare confronts the political uncertainties of the present, projecting certain anxieties onto characters like the Richards – terrible rulers but for completely different reasons.
The Richards are, in many ways, opposites of each other. Character-wise, Richard III is the apex of the negative image of Machiavelli as a manipulative menace, while Richard II is a weak, inconsistent and defeatist pageant-king. One is similar to Milton's Satan, and the other thinks he is a martyr, constantly comparing himself to Christ.
Much of what happens in Richard III is a result (or retribution, depending on your historical point of view) of the events narrated in the three parts of Henry VI. The treasons committed by characters such as Clarence (who switched sides twice) and King Edward (who killed the Prince of Wales, Henry’s heir, after promising not to harm him) are seen as causes for the tragic deaths that follow, including the death of Richard himself.
Being the last instalment of a century-long war procession, Richard III is not a play that can successfully stand on its own without context: the reader (or viewer) who comes across it with knowledge of the events of the three parts of Henry VI will find it much easier to grasp the dramatic irony that looms over the characters. Queen Margaret, for example, is an incomprehensible character if we meet her for the first time in Richard III – her obstinacy and fearless temper, as well as the depth of her grief and frustration, are important pieces of information to understand the implications of her tragic prophecies in Richard III – but which are only available in the earlier plays.
QUEEN MARGARET
What, dost thou scorn me for my gentle counsel,
And soothe the devil that I warn thee from?
O, but remember this another day,
When he shall split thy very heart with sorrow,
And say poor Margaret was a prophetess.—
Live each of you the subjects to his hate,
And he to yours, and all of you to God’s.
(Richard III - I.iii.316-322)
An example of the important connection between Richard II and Richard III (and indeed the history plays as a whole) concerns the principle that governs the Tudor historical point of view, namely, that England is cursed due to the deposition of a rightful, albeit incompetent, monarch: Richard II. The magnitude of what happened to the older Richard can be ascertained throughout the history plays, as it is something repeatedly discussed. In 2 Henry IV, Richard’s death is mentioned by King Henry himself (formerly Henry Bolingbroke) in a moment full of guilt and regret, haunted by prophecies again:
KING
You, cousin Nevil, as I may
remember—
When Richard, with his eye brimful of tears,
Then checked and rated by Northumberland,
Did speak these words, now proved a prophecy?
“Northumberland, thou ladder by the which
My cousin Bolingbroke ascends my throne”—
Though then, God knows, I had no such intent,
But that necessity so bowed the state
That I and greatness were compelled to kiss—
“The time shall come,” thus did he follow it,
“The time will come that foul sin, gathering head,
Shall break into corruption” —so went on,
Foretelling this same time’s condition
And the division of our amity.
(2 Henry IV - III.i.66-79)
Indeed, Richard does offer such prophecy as he is taken to Pomfret, his last dwelling on earth, and knowing it beforehand is what enriches the effect of dramatic irony in future plays:
RICHARD:
Northumberland, thou ladder wherewithal
The mounting Bolingbroke ascends my throne,
The time shall not be many hours of age
More than it is, ere foul sin gathering head
Shall break into corruption. Thou shalt think
Though he divide the realm and give thee half
It is too little, helping him to all.
He shall think that thou, which know’st the way
To plant unrightful kings, wilt know again,
Being ne’er so little urged, another way
To pluck him headlong from the usurped throne.
The love of wicked men converts to fear,
That fear to hate and hate turns one or both
To worthy danger and deservèd death.
(Richard II - V.i.55-68)
But what is truly interesting is Warwick’s response to King Henry back in 2 Henry IV, because, beyond being philosophically fascinating in itself, I believe it offers the closest glimpse of what may have been Shakespeare’s concept of History, including predestination, prophecy and the Tudor Myth:
WARWICK
There is a history in all men’s lives
Figuring the natures of the times deceased,
The which observed, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life, who in their seeds
And weak beginning lie intreasurèd.
Such things become the hatch and brood of time,
And by the necessary form of this,
King Richard might create a perfect guess
That great Northumberland, then false to him,
Would of that seed grow to a greater falseness,
Which should not find a ground to root upon
Unless on you.
(2 Henry IV - III.i.80-93)
In other words, observing a pattern of behaviour and proclaiming that it is going to happen again is what lies behind the fanciful pretence of ‘prophecy’ – a traitor will betray again given the chance, a murderer will kill again, and so on. Yet the human mind appears to be designed to search for patterns and repetitions, in order to ease our understanding of what is virtually incomprehensible: the passage of time and the question of theodicy.
Throughout the English Histories, events from past plays are reflected and developed in future ones. This aspect of continuity not only makes this theatrical complex utterly unique in Shakespeare's oeuvre but also supports the idea of a historical chain of causation, through which we can trace the sources of England's misfortunes. Certainly, such an idea is conducive to the emergence of prophecies, myths, divine predestinations and deterministic historical visions, so it's no wonder that so many scholars like Tillyard consider Richard III to be ‘a deeply religious play’ that reinforces the Tudor Myth. According to Rossiter:
Far more important than these details is the simple overriding principle derived from the Tudor historians: that England rests under a chronic curse — the curse of faction, civil dissention and fundamental anarchy, resulting from the deposition and murder of the Lord’s Anointed (Richard II) and the usurpation of the House of Lancaster. The savageries of the Wars of the Roses follow logically (almost theologically) from that… It is a world of absolute and hereditary moral ill, in which everyone (till the appearance of Richmond-Tudor in Act V) is tainted with treacheries, the blood and the barbarities of civil strife… (p. 6)
In my undergrad thesis, I argued that Richard II’s deposition represented, in fiction and reality, a fundamental breach with the medieval past, for it symbolised the deconsecration followed by the secularisation of kingship, forever transforming how the future English kings dealt with monarchical power — and we see such tension clearly in the other seven plays.
It is not my intention to reduce the plays to their historical base material; I’m just particularly fascinated with the relationship between the sources, Shakespeare’s interpretation of it, and scholars’ interpretation of his interpretation. There are hazy limits between fact and fiction, regarding the Richards; both Kings have been so mythologised by their cultural personas (and much of that is due to Shakespeare), that I can't help but wonder how much of their myths have turned into ‘real’ history. On this subject, Rossiter argues:
But, start where you will, you come back to history; or to the pattern made out of the conflict of two ‘historical myths’. The orthodox Tudor myth made history God-controlled, divinely prescribed and dispensed, to move things towards a God-ordained perfection: Tudor England. Such was the frame that Shakespeare took. But the total effect of Shakespeare’s ‘plot’ has quite a different effect from Hall: a very different meaning. (p. 20)
After reading all of the English Histories, I still believe Richard II is the most political one, and Richard III the most tragic. In the former, Shakespeare uses his country's past not to extract independent meanings from history, but to dramatise the political issues contained in this material. He combines historical records with the imperative issues of the Elizabethan era, seeking to bring out all the complexity of the conflict between a legitimate but incompetent king and an efficient usurper. The latter is more akin to the great Shakespearean tragedy, which usually has an ‘apocalyptic’ ending, with the collapse of that enclosed world, following the death of the majority of its cast, as in King Lear or Hamlet.
Richard II ends not with the end of the tragedy, but with unfinished business to be resolved in the future, and this suggestion of continuity adds a tangible historical dimension to the play; after all, history is an eternally developing process. Richard III, as a representative of the end of the War of the Roses and the rise of a new dynasty, has a more solid sense of finality — the war is over, the evil has been purged, a new era is coming, and the legitimate lineage brought peace to the realm. But don’t be fooled: it almost looks as if I described a fairy-tale ending, but there's no escaping the violent path the play takes to its conclusion.
Shakespeare’s speculative power is endlessly stimulating for investigations such as those in this essay. His personal views of history are something I will never be entirely sure of, although we could argue that he believed in the Great Chain of Being. Still, he always goes beyond mere theories or moralisms: a chain of historical causation connecting historical events to ‘a religious standard of virtue and vice’ seems too simplistic to explain all of the English Histories’ dramatic nuances. The causality frame does exist, but it is just a frame — the picture is much more intricate due to powerful demonstrations of individual will.
Overall, I always find Shakespeare to be on the side of individuality as opposed to abstract universal laws. I’d like to quote Rossiter a final time, since I share his opinion, and very much enjoyed my dialogue with his essay so far.
But do not suppose that I am saying that the play is a ‘debunking of Tudor Myth’, or that Shakespeare is disproving it. He is not ‘proving’ anything: not even that ‘Blind belief is sure to err | And scan his works in vain’… This historic myth offered absolutes, certainties. Shakespeare in the Histories always leaves us with relatives, ambiguities, irony, a process thoroughly dialectical. Had he entirely accepted the Tudor Myth, the frame and pattern of order, his way would have led, I suppose, towards writing moral history (which is what Dr. Tillyard and Dr. Dover Wilson and Professor Duthie have made out of him). Instead, his way led him towards writing comic history. The former would never have taken him to tragedy: the latter (paradoxically) did. (p. 22)
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Wonderful discussion!