As part of my rereading of Shakespeare, I finally finished reading Richard III. I've been struggling to get much of the Bard read--a process that's my own fault, really. In all actuality, I should be able to read a play in an afternoon, since that's about how long it takes to have one performed and I read faster than actors speak. But I don't read Shakespeare that way: I read with a pencil in hand, cross-references to other plays when I think of them, and a careful attention to what I'm reading. The result is that I go through very, very slowly. I finished Richard III at the end of April, despite having started it in January.
Still, I did it, and I've some things to say about this one. Richard III marks a genuine beginning to his writing style that he flirted with in Titus Andronicus but set aside until this play, and that is a focus on a single character. All of his plays are filled with characters, of course--as a writer of plays, he had to consider how his fellow actors would be given their jobs, after all. The early comedies and even the first histories that he wrote, however, are ensemble pieces. Two Gentlemen of Verona has, of course, two main characters and their attendant love interests. Because Taming of the Shrew is a comedy, it has to have the A-plot love interest and the B-plot love interest. History plays are (up to Richard III) split in focus among the different factions and battles. Only in Titus Andronicus do we finally see the intimations of a main character in the plays. Unfortunately, that play is pretty gruesome and lands poorly. It's a bit like The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. He wanted to write a novel that would hit America in the heart (and instill the desire to spread socialism throughout the country, to cease the exploitation of the American worker); instead, he hit it in the stomach, which led to regulations about how slaughterhouses worked. Titus Andronicus might have been intended for a different effect, but the result is that the blood-soaked stage covers anything that might have been happening inside of the characters. Enter Richard of Gloucester. This malevolent Machiavel had already been showcased in 3 Henry VI (where Prince Edward says to Richard "Thou, misshapen Dick", much to the hilarity of future sophomores throughout centuries), and the foundation of what Richard will become in his own play are set down brilliantly. However, Richard's presence in the background of 3 Henry VI is inversely proportional to his presence in its sequel: From the first line he speaks (the famously misunderstood first line: "Now is the winter of our discontent…") until his enduring bargain, "My kingdom for a horse!", he is a force to be reckoned with. With the adroitness of an acrobat, Richard manipulates everyone around him, tugging and cajoling, threatening and promising, nimbly dancing through the many obstacles between him and his goal: The crown. To me, Richard III is the pivot of Shakespeare's genius. (I don't doubt that other Bardolators would disagree with me, by the way: Most hermeneutics are polemics by another name anyway.) It's here that we start to see his mastery of the soliloquy--the unpacking of a character's heart with words* becomes one of the greatest tools within Shakespeare's heady arsenal of dramatic representation of humankind. Couple with his unparalleled poetry, Shakespeare really starts to move into a new level of expression through his protracted examination of Richard III. For Shakespeare to achieve this analysis, he has to do what he always does with his histories: He telescopes events, conflates historical characters, abridges conflicts, and places people in the wrong place at the wrong time.** This is all secondary--or even tertiary--to what he's trying to accomplish. And what is that? Well, it's a theme that seems to preoccupy the Bard: What happens when you give a mortal man too much power? Much of Shakespeare's canon is ruminations on power. He often comes to similar conclusions: Bad things transpire. Indeed, when I read his work under this light, it makes The Tempest an even more powerful story…but that's an analysis for a different day. There is a sense of legitimate power--legitimate use of power, I should say--within some of the plays. I get the sense that he wasn't particularly impressed with the house of York*** and that they ended up "getting theirs". However, when it comes to Richard III, he documents an ambitious man's obsession with power at any cost, up to and including the seduction of his niece (4.4) and the ordering for his nephews to be killed and buried in the walls of the Tower (4.2). This sort of sustained attention helps to generate two conflicting emotions: Admiration for Richard's tenacity and reprehension for his behaviors. Tyrants have long been a part of the makeup of the world. Though we've few historical examples of the Platonic Philosopher-King who rules despite not wanting the job, our drama prefers people of greater drive and motivation. And that's what really makes Richard III (and much of the play Richard III) so compelling: The main character, though we loathe him, actually does what he sets out to do. That's storytelling 101: Give the character a goal, put obstacles in front of that goal, and the pleasure of the story is seeing how the character overcomes those difficulties to achieve the goal. And that leads to the flaws of the piece: Richard III is a bloated play. It is the second longest play in the canon (Hamlet clocks in at 29,844 words; Richard III has 28,439), and it feels it. Unlike the longer (and superior) Hamlet, Richard III struggles to maintain its full narrative drive the entire time. The reason for this is simple: Both Hamlet and Richard have goals. Hamlet doesn't succeed in achieving his goal until 5.2, the final scene of the play. Richard, however, gets what he's after by 4.2, thus leaving the rest of Act 4 and all of Act 5 to finish off the story. Shakespeare manages to keep Richard's attempts to remain king--his new goal--worthwhile; unfortunately, there's also a lot of cursing going on with Queen Margaret and the other women in the play, plus the machinations of events outside of Richard's control. The result of this is that the play doesn't contain the same intensity in the latter portion as in the earlier acts.‡ These are quibbles: Richard himself is such a compelling and charismatic character that it's hard not to like him--at least, in the same way that one likes horror movies, war stories, or rubber-necks a bad accident on the freeway. There's a vile charm about him that we can't help but enjoy. We want him to succeed only so that his fall is stronger and more potent having seen what he did to attain such heights. In this he's a precursor to Milton's Satan, giving us the insights into the darkness of ambition- and pride-gilded minds. This is only possible because of Shakespeare's shift from ensemble to lead. Surely Richard Burbage--the best actor of the company and the man who first voiced all of Shakespeare's most iconic roles--had something to do with it. Perhaps Shakespeare finally understood how well his characters could be expressed and so gave greater attention to the way he represented humanity. Or, maybe, it was happenstance: Perhaps the Bard grew tired of always writing sprawling stories of (comparatively) shallow characters and was ready to try something new. Maybe the structure of history allowed him to expand in interesting ways. (This is something I've found to be true in my own writing: Rewriting an already-told tale takes some of the burden off of the mind, allowing growth in different directions.) Whatever prompted Mr. Shakespeare to do what he did, I'm glad it happened. The arrival of this bad-guy-as-protagonist changed the way Shakespeare wrote, shifting his abilities toward even more powerful representations. Though I highly doubt it was clear to William Shakespeare when he wrote Richard III, the "lump of foul deformity" (1.2.57) ended up becoming the foundation for the apotheosis of dramatic representation: Macbeth, Lear, and--above all--Hamlet. Pretty good for someone not even yet 30 years old. --- * I couldn't help myself from this little allusion to Hamlet 2.2. Nor could I help myself from pointing out the allusion, which is just bad manners. ** This is most obvious when you look at the deposed Queen Margaret, who is still in the English court--basically as a tool to harass the characters--even though in reality she had, for much of the time the play is covering, already returned to her native France and/or was dead (the play covers a fair swath of years). *** I'm not going to weigh in on the idea that Shakespeare wrote Richard III as propaganda for the Tudors, or that he was secretly persuaded by the White Rose side of the Wars of the Roses; I'm talking about how he portrays the historical characters in the plays. ‡ When Shakespeare addresses this kind of story again in Macbeth, he solves the problem in a couple of ways: One, he shortens the story (Macbeth only has 16,372 words--a full 12,000 fewer words than Richard III); and two, he drops this line into Macbeth's mouth, rendering the shift in goals so clearly that it's easy to understand Macbeth's intellectual movement: "To be thus is nothing/But to be safely thus…" (3.1.49-50). |
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