History, Character and Conscience in Richard III

Abstract

History, Character and Conscience in Richard III Richard P. Wheeler Criticism of Shakespeare’s second tetralogy of English his­ tory plays has moved away from the attempt to correlate precisely the history dramatized in these plays with that presented by official Tudor apologists. C. L. Barber’s essay on the Henry IV plays,1 for instance, finds in them a much more profound understanding of historical rhythms and of human involvement in the dynamics of power than E. M. W. Tillyard could establish by interpreting Shakespeare through concepts expressed in the chronicles and other sixteenth century poetry.2 Alvin B. Keman, in his recent essay on the Henriad, demonstrates the sophisticated artistry through which Shakespeare comprehends the essential conflict of power and self as it is presented to modem western civilization.3 The first tetralogy and King John perhaps fail to achieve this sophistication, but in these plays Shakespeare begins to win for himself a difficult and sobering emancipation from official historical attitudes. I will examine this struggle as it shapes the drama of Richard III. A wide range of historical attitudes have been assigned to Richard III. The extremes are represented by Jan Kott’s stunning, free-wheeling essay on “The Kings” and Tillyard’s scholarly, background-oriented study of Shakespeare’s History Plays. From Shakespeare’s histories, writes Kott, “there gradually emerges the image of history itself. The image of the Grand Mechanism.”4 Shakespeare presents a history stripped of all illusion and myth­ ology, indeed, of all meaning, a cruel, amoral, impersonal history of manipulators and victims. Inevitably the manipulators, the kings and the king-makers, become the victims of history’s “recurring and unchanging circles” (p. 8). Gloucester under301 302 Comparative Drama stands and expresses the essence of this history, though he, too, becomes its “victim, caught in the wheel” (p. 51). Richmond’s victory at Bosworth Field begins a new variation of the old pattern of kingship. Henry VII becomes the new face and voice of history, smoother, higher sounding, but equally implicated in the power process. Tillyard, on the other hand, sees Shakespeare faithfully dramatizing the Tudor myth of a divinely ordained unification of the houses of York and Lancaster. For Tillyard, Richard III is a profoundly religious play: “The play’s main end is to show the working out of God’s will in English his­ tory . . . .”5 Victorious Richmond represents the sacred force of right providentially triumphing over the forces of evil. What is remarkable is not that these polar approaches to Richard III have been made, but that the play can so readily accommodate both. Historical outlooks close to each are essential to this play. Richard III dramatizes a struggle, never quite re­ solved, between conflicting ways of interpreting historical experience. In this play Shakespeare is finding his way toward an understanding that ultimately undermines a simple adherence to Tudor historic myth, but is not yet in full awareness and control of its disturbing implications. Caught between contradictory conceptions of history, Shake­ speare is profoundly drawn toward both. The two point toward views which, according to Mircea Eliade,6 distinguish the modern historical sense from that of earlier cultures. The Tudor historic myth—a strange adaptation of reactionary trends in Reformation and Counter-reformation political thought to the need for an official apologetic which could celebrate and stabilize Tudor succession—develops a traditional view of history which denies that life is tied to an irreversible procession of time which cannot be redeemed. Throughout the various levels of sophis­ tication developed within this view of history, there runs the central idea of redeeming time-bound, worldy experience by immersing it in transcendent systems of meaning. Redemptive destiny makes the suffering of life bearable. By giving historical cycles a profound regenerative meaning, it invests the moment of suffering with a quality of meaningful, historical necessity: . . . whether history was governed by the movements of the heavenly bodies or purely and simply by the cosmic process, which necessarily demanded a disintegration inevitably linked to an original integration, whether, again, it was subject to the Richard P. Wheeler 303 will of God, a will that the prophets had been able to glimpse, the result was the...