Richard III

“Why dost thou run so many mile about, When thou mayst tell thy tale a nearer way?”

     Shakespeare’s writing skills takes a noticeable step forward in RIchard III.  With three plays under his belt, lines end more naturally, events rely more on imagination than history, and the title character is vividly drawn. Ambitious, intelligent, and blissfully detached from any moral sense, Richard has bamboozled four centuries worth of actors, audiences, and historians.  But it’s a needlessly long play.  Shakespeare still has the habit of giving all the good lines to the characters he’s interested in and treating the others as hollow sounding boards.

     The opening soliloquy of Richard III is so well know that people often neglect to notice where the play begins: London. A street.   He’s so anxious to set things into motion that he’s started without us.  Waiting near the Tower of London to confirm Clarence’s arrest and the release of Hastings, he takes us into confidence, explaining his schemes and inductions. He confides in us, offering witty asides to amuse us and inspire sympathy for his cause. By the end of the second scene, the audience has a decision to make:  Do we buy into his seduction of Lady Anne?  If so, then we are on his side and will continue to enjoy the benefit of being among his inner circle.  If not,... well, we’d best be heading to France to wait things out with Richmond.  But what would be the fun of that?  

     This play is as much about the seductive power of language as it is about the power of evil and Richard’s first victim is the audience. It’s a straight forward play and Richard is so large a character, that there is no room for subplots.    Richard himself explains the first half of the of the story, his rise to the crown.  Margaret gleefully foreshadows the second half of the play with her curses. Yet, despite all the prophecies by Margaret, the warnings of dreams, and calls for devine retribution, each character is doomed by their own actions.

     Shakespeare’s use of language starts to bloom in this play and he sometimes shows off as much as his lead character.  Previously, he was incapable of such lines as: 

He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber

to the lascivious pleasing of a lute.

     It’s a wonderfully musical line, yet a bitter and condescending assessment of his brother and the efffeminizing effects of peace.  

Yet he still has Margaret and Duchess of York stiffly recite the formalized:

Tell o'er your woes again by viewing mine:

I had an Edward, till a Richard kill'd him;

I had a Harry, till a Richard kill'd him:

Thou hadst an Edward, till a Richard kill'd him;...

I had a Richard too, and thou didst kill him;

I had a Rutland too, thou holp'st to kill him.

   Richard uses many voices to achieve his ends: he bullies, flatters, provokes, cajoles, repents, and makes promises in order to manipulate those around him.  In a way, Richard’s versatility is Shakespeare learning to move away from the formalities of rhetoric and to use words and tone to establish individual voices. Unfortunately, only Richard enjoys the benefits of these new skills.  Had Shakespeare manage to invest such word power to other characters, there were be greater natural tension within the scenes.  Instead,  only the young Prince York (“Mini-Richard”) gets the better of of him (Act III, Scene 1.)

     Shakespeare’s portrayal of children improves with the introduction of the young princes.  In Henry VI part 2, Rutland speaks like an adult imitating a child.  The same is true of Clarence’s children when they suspect his demise.  But the Young princes sound more like precocious kids and young York, in particular, is very much like his uncle.  It’s almost understandable why Richard wants them dead:  Edward is the true heir and York the true threat.

     By this time, one of Shakespeare’s favorite techniques is parallel scenes, similar in design, but different in effect. For instance, Richard woos two women in the play, first Lady Anne, and later Queen Elizabeth. These scenes sum up his progress toward taking, and losing, the crown. Richard probes both women for weak spots, as they engage in tennis-like rallies of word play.  With Anne he is confident and in control of the conversation.  “I’ll have her, but I will not keep her long,” he says, unwittingly making a prophecy of his own time on the throne. By the time he tries to convince the Queen that he must marry her daughter, he no longer controls the situation.  Richard dismisses her with: “Relenting fool, and shallow, changing woman.”  He does not suspect the changes to come. What once was affirmation, ends in self delusion.  

      In another set of scenes, Clarence’s dream is evocative and surreal.  It works because Clarence relates the terrifying experience second hand to his guard.  It’s a rare example of when “telling” is more effective than “showing.”  The audience witnesses the second dream sequence, shared by Richmond and Richard.  Here, Shakespeare reverts to a morality play sequence. The ghost parade onto the stage in the order they were killed.  Typically repetitive and heavy-handed, they curse Richard and wish Richmond well.  Richard then awakens and delivers a 40 line soliloquy, caught between dream and reality.   The first line, “Give me another horse!  Bind up my wounds!”  sounds like Richard, but everything that follows does not.  The problem with the speech isn’t that the lines are short and choppy.  Nor that it seems a little late for his conscience to be making a cameo appearance.  It’s bad poetry expressed in a voice beneath what both Richard and Shakespeare have achieved to this point.  It’s a great idea, poorly executed.

Learning Points:

Oppa Genre Style: Is Richard III a history play?  A tragedy?  A darkly comic character study?  Though reared on Latin Classics, Elizabethan playwrights operated in an atmosphere similar to America’s Wild West. Or the Sixties.  Or Wall Street in the early 21st Century.  There were rules, and then there weren’t rules. A cardinal rule of any period is this:  Thou Shalt Experiment.  Every discipline, from poetry to technical writing has its own peculiar guidelines and each can be adapted to another.  A writer’s reading habits should be as wide and diverse as possible.  Reading only what one agrees with or is interested in limits one’s understanding and access to possibilities.  The more rules you know, the more rules you can break.

Marlowe’s Ghost: Marlowe’s influence still haunts Shakespeare’s work.  Richard’s over-the-top character and his opening soliloquy are very similar to Tamburlaine and Barabas, from Marlowe’s “The Jew of Malta.”  But Richard is much more human than those two. He speaks to the audience as an equal, shows fallibility, and his assumed superiority is at the root of his demise. In Richard, Shakespeare’s character portrayal moves further away from representing a sculpted idea (a god, a myth, a hero, a type) and closer to representing an actual human being.

History Repeats Itself:  Shakespeare didn’t invent the idea of Richard’s physical deformities as a clue to his character.  He borrowed it from that man of all seasons, Sir Thomas More.  But in reading More, Holinshed, Hall, and others, he found  themes that he would revisit and re-examine throughout the later plays.  Chaos in society, the family, and the individual: ambition, revenge, and justice; the nature of love and the nature of evil; the role of dreams and prophecy; even to act or not to act.  The early history plays not only provided Shakespeare with the opportunity to grow as a writer, but as a thinker as well. 

Next: Two Gentlemen of Verona

Henry VI, Part 1

  “Speak on, but be not over-tedious.”

     Henry Vi, Part 1 is a noisy, overt celebration of English patriotism and their moral superiority over the French.  It was a huge hit, but like most box office blockbusters it has not aged well. 

     All three parts of the Henry VI plays were written in the space of a year.  As in Parts 2 and 3, Shakespeare used the same history sources and familiar characters in this prequel.  He also worked on structural techniques, created “historical” events, and continued to experiment with character development.  He even borrowed from his own earlier plays.  

      Henry VI, Part 1 is not a good play.  Most of the dialogue reverts to the declamations of Part 2 and most of the characters are as static as they were in Parts 2 and 3. If it didn’t have Shakespeare’s name attached to it, the play would be the kind of thing graduate students have to slog through on their way to something more interesting.  But in charting Shakespeare’s early career, it remains worth studying.

     By the time he starting writing the chronicle plays, Shakespeare possessed a keen understanding of story telling in the five act format:  Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action, Denouement.  In the first two scenes of Henry VI, Part 1, he introduces an interesting symmetrical pattern. 

     Act I, Scene i opens at the funeral of Henry V.  There are three noble, three generals, and three messengers.   Bedford speaks first, followed by Gloucester, Exeter, and Winchester.  After three messages of loss, revolt, and Talbot’s capture, the scene ends with the four men speaking and exiting in the opposite order.   An admirably balanced piece of writing, it succeeds in establishing the problems facing the English, but fails in establishing characters or motivation.  It’s like watching carved figures circling the works of an intricate clock.

      Towards the end of Scene ii, Shakespeare repeats the device, but on a smaller scale and with French characters. Facing losses of his own, the Dauphin speaks, followed by Reinier and Alanson. The Bastard of Orleans arrives with a message: the French have an answer to Talbot and her name is Joan Pucelle.  The scene ends with remarks from Alanson, Reinier, and the Dauphin.   Again, the French dilemma is made clear and the solution made clearer by the introduction of Joan.  

     Joan Pucelle and Lord Talbot are the central characters in the play and it’s significant that neither is noble by birth.  In John Talbot, Shakespeare tries to create a hero for the common Englishman.  A gentleman by birth, but noble in thought and action, Talbot’s name alone is enough to chase the enemy away.  He is old school chivalrous, a fierce warrior with a clear sense of right and wrong.  As demonstrated when he meets the Countess of Auvergne, he possesses the humility to credit his army and the good manners not to take advantage of the scheming Countess.  Unlike the nobles, he is a man of action who puts his country before himself.

     His decline is the decline of England’s honor and Shakespeare dedicates most of the fourth act to showing that English and French treachery are responsible.  Abandoned by York and Somerset, betrayed by Burgundy and trapped by the Dauphin, Talbot faces his doom.

     Remember the Father/Son-Son/Father scene from Henry VI, Part 3?  Shakespeare tries to re-enact the emotional impact of that scene by having Talbot and his son die together as heroes

“Come, come, and lay him in his father’s arms;

My spirit can no longer bear these harms.

Soldiers, adieu!  I have what I would have,

Now my old arms are young John Talbot’s grave.”

     This death scene was enormously popular in 1592, but it was pure pathos then and pure pathos now, tugging at the heartstrings with one hand, while straight-arming the brain with the other.  Firstly, for all of his heroic qualities, Lord Talbot is not fully enough formed as a character to  merit the kind of emotional involvement need to make the scene work. Secondly, John Talbot arrives so late in the play that no involvement is possible (it doesn’t help that we quickly learn that young John refused to fight the woman who gave his father all he could handle.)  Thirdly, it lacks context.  Directly contrasted against Henry’s pastoral dream, the scene in Part 3 brings home the horrors of war.  In Part 1, the audience saw this coming four scenes ago.  Lastly, it’s not very well written.  At this point of his career, Shakespeare’s command of structure far exceeds his command of language.

     Joan Pucelle’s fate is even more disappointing.  So much so, some scholars believe some one else wrote her final scenes.  The most interesting character in the play, she deserves better.  Heaven sent to the French, condemned to Hell by the English, Shakespeare crafts her character with solid earthiness.  If Talbot is old school chivalry, Joan is new school mischief.  A mere shepherdess, chosen by the Virgin Mary to push the English out of France, she does so with as much wit as witchcraft.  Men don’t fool her.  She conquers them with her sword, her tactics, and her skills as an orator.  That she can persuade Burgundy to abandon his allegiance to Talbot and immediately react with the aside:

“Done like a Frenchman: turn and turn again!”

makes her more compelling and believable than most of the men and all of the women in any of Shakespeare first three plays.  Even after being captured, she remains feisty, insulting York and sarcastically asking permission to curse some more.

     So why does Joan’s character fall apart so miserably at the end?  There are reasons:

  The historical events of Joan’s trial didn’t fit with the aims of this play.

It was Act V and, however knotty, loose ends had to be tied. 

She was French.

     Whatever his reasons, he failed Joan as a character and the audience.  It feels like a rush job.

Learning Points:

Invented Scenes:  Eventually, Shakespeare must have felt handcuffed by history.  By inventing scenes such as the meeting between Talbot and the Countess and the plucking of roses among the supporters of York and Somerset, Shakespeare moves from exposition to demonstration, from what to who and why.  Facts and data can be interesting but static.  They don’t move the story, they don’t move the characters, and they don’t engage the audience.  The stringing together of episodes is coming to an end. Soon, events in one scene will cause the events of the next. 

Imagery: There’s much less reliance on religion, myths, and the animal kingdom.  Instead, Shakespeare creates images that are more reality based  and more accessible.  When the English fight, “(t)heir arms are set, like clocks, still to strike on.”  Talbot’s “thoughts are whirled like a potter’s wheel.”  Note, too, that Shakespeare chose “whirled,” instead of “spun.”  The requirements of iambic pentameter forced Shakespeare to search beyond the first verb that came to mind.  The same should apply to prose writing as well.  As Mark Twain said, “the difference between the almost right word & the right word is... the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”  And verbs are your most important words.

Dialogue: While declaiming among the nobles continues, Shakespeare starts to pare things down.  When Suffolk falls for Margaret, his befuddled asides are believable and funny.  Shakespeare possibly witnessed such a scene in a local tavern.  The same befuddled conversation probably takes in a bar or tavern every night of the week to this day. Likewise, the rhyming couplets between Lord Talbot and his son convey an intimacy between them.  At first.  Dragging the conversation through the battle scene over-plays the point.  Like gratuitous violence, gratuitous pathos is bad for everybody.

Next: Richard III