Silliman's Papers

Villainy and Violence:
Richard III and the English monarchy in transition

In Shakespeare’s Richard III, we are shown a conflict between two ages and the subsequent conflict of the roles of the conscience in politics. Richard is a political man caught between two ages, embracing the vigor and violence of the feudal king and the centralized authoritarianism of the modern king. Because of this, he is the unabashed villain and hellion who lives by violence, deceit, and betrayal.

The plot of Richard III is a familiar one, common to his history plays, the rise of one claim to the throne against another. Richard the Third serves as a pivot to the transition shown throughout the histories, the transition of the English monarchy from the feudal to the modern system. As Paul A. Canto said in his lecture at Hillsdale College, “Shakespeare’s history plays trace England’s movements from a decentralized, feudal monarchy to a centralized, modern monarchy.” The plays move from the feudalism of King John to the modernism of Henry VIII. Richard is caught in between these two and attempts to overcome the weaknesses of both with his tyranny.

Cantor says that a “careful reading of the history plays reveals that Shakespeare is using them to explore the nature of monarchy, its particular virtues and effects as a regime, and the range of forms it took in English history.” With Richard’s methods of naked villainy, denial of conscience, and unmitigated devilry we see an attempt to bridge the division between ages while overcoming the weaknesses of both. Cantor tells us that a “careful reading of the history plays reveals that Shakespeare is using them to explore the nature of monarchy, its particular virtues and effects as a regime, and the range of forms it took in English history.” With Richard we see one attempt to overcome the political problem of weakness, especially moral weakness, and the problems weakness causes for a monarch.

In a feudal system, power was divided, and in a modern system, force was limited by the morals of the decorum of civilization. Both are fundamentally weak, taking power away from the king. Both systems inherently limit the rule of the monarch. Richard, acting beyond the ascribed of both systems and exemplifying his stretch between them, grasps at absolute power by combining the brutal force of a feudal king with the centralization of the modern king.
Richard—embracing the power in the monarchical systems of both ages—is acting fully as a Machiavellian Prince. Richard draws a veil over his Machiavellian actions only in order perpetuate more Machiavellian actions. He will deceive the world, if he can but he does not deceive himself. He calls himself a villain in the opening lines and claims he will march to hell in the closing lines. “I am determined to prove a villain,” he tells us as he launches his quest for the throne. In the final scenes of war Richard repudiates any last dregs of conscience, embraces his place as devil and claims he and his army will march “[i]f not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell.” He does not quail at any form of treachery, deceit, or murder. He is a fully concentrated on his victory.
Richard fully engages the brutality of the political world, neither apologizing not hiding from the fullness of the requisite actions. Contrast this with the modern monarch Henry V, who shifts the blame of his actions to others and who veils his actions under civilized and semi-acceptable pretexts.

Henry actually wants to be moral by the modern definition and appears weak in his own need to deceive himself. When Henry decided to take the brutal and feudal action of murdering his prisoners, he shifts the blame to his enemies instead of taking on, in a Machiavellian or Nietzschean fashion, the role of the fierce and victorious lord. “Henry likes to draw a veil over his Machiavellian actions. From his father he has learned that a king needs to be tough—especially with nobles—and must often contemplate and perform cruel deeds” yet, he fundamentally doesn’t believe a good king ought to perform such acts. Henry has not embraced the fullness of the Machiavellian principle of Realpolitik, because he denies the brutality and attempts to disguise his actions, especially to himself. Where “Henry V rejects this quintessentially medieval enterprise and chooses something more modern,” Richard personally embraces his brutal actions and rejects of the modern limitations of conscience. Where Henry talks of a minimum of force and violence, “Use mercy on them all,” Richard talks of harsh victory, “Spur your proud horses hard, and ride in blood.”

Despising all forms of weakness, Richard even seeks to rid himself of the weak and easily deceived whom he deceives. Richard shows some respect for his fierce and bold adversaries, in an attitude fitting the warlike and the suiting visions of Machiavelli and (later) Hobbs or Nietzsche. He respects his fiercest enemy, Queen Margaret, specifically because she boldly curses him and does not bend. She curses him vociferously and teaches others to do the same. While Richard plots against many and has many enemies, she emerges as the worthy adversary in the sense that she hates him and doesn’t hide from the barbaric violence of her hatred. She does more than oppose him, she hates him and rallies those around her to hate him and beseech for his death. In the harshest curse of a play filled with reviling curses, she calls Richard “hell’s black intelligencer” and proclaims:

Earth gapes, hell burns, fiends roar, saints pray,
To have him suddenly conveyed from hence.
Cancel his bond on life, dear God, I pray,
That I may live and say, ‘The dog is dead.’

Queen Elizabeth joins Margaret, learning from her, and calls him a “villain-slave,” an incestuous murderer, and a man with a blasphemed saint, pawned virtue and a usurped crown.

Richard respects this sort of fierce opposition and is more comfortable with it than he is with the sops he persuades to think of him kindly, the naïve fools who have “not yet dived into the world’s deceit:/ No more can you distinguish of a man/ Than of his outward show.” He killed his nephew immediately after the boy spoke of his “good uncle Gloucester.” He killed his brother while the man was hoping and waiting for Richard’s rescue. As his murderer told him, he was “deceived. Your brother Gloucester hates you.” The men Richard III prefers to keep around him are violent, daring, and have put the dregs of conscience behind them.

Consider the contrast between the differing invocations of St. George as Richard and Richmond go to war. Richmond invokes St. George as one who defends the innocents linking England’s patron saint with wronged souls. Richard, meanwhile, invokes St. George as courageous and victorious, calling him “Our ancient word of courage, fair Saint George” and asking for the “spleen of fiery dragons.” If the tide of war had turned against Richmond, he could have invoked St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes, while Richard knows only violence and victory. For him, nothing else will do. Dieing, he rejects retreat and safety, casting himself fully into his actions and accepting the doom of his fate with the style and flare of his evilness.
Richard embraces the act of kingship and its consequences. He is aggrandizing himself, certainly, but this isn’t necessarily unhealthy as he is the king and thus the all of the kingdom. As Leo Paul S. de Alvarez says, “The wine of life, the blood of Christ, and therefore grace, flows from the king, who need only be, to put all things in order.”

It was a reeling world, and Richard believed that it could only be controlled with the brutal authoritarianism that was the combining of the might of the feudal and modern monarchs. He lives and dies in this play with a Machiavellian will to power and an unmodified embrace of the despised deeds he commits. He lives as a man between the feudal and the modern reign of kings, ride through blood as of his villainy and violence, making Richard III an example of the complication of the monarchical transition to modernism and an ever-popular play.