RICHARD III

Enter Richard, Duke of Gloucester solus.

So the scene is set at the beginning of Richard III, the only of Shakespeare’s plays to open with a soliloquy by its central character. Here Richard is isolated both by this stage direction (indicating his physical solitude on stage) and by the themes and images of his first soliloquy, which emblematically set the stage for the solitary characteristics he will enact throughout the play. It is the form and recurrence of such asides, however, that are of particular interest, for they form a direct line between audience and character through which we receive a series of confessional narratives.

The self proclaimed villain of the play, Richard makes no illusions in the opening soliloquy about his character. He self consciously outlines the elements of willful solitude: ambition, egotism, ruthless disregard of other men, Machiavellian skill in dissembling, absolute determination to have his own will. Coupled with these traditional aspects of the villain, though, is the theme of involuntary separation from humanity: his physical deformity. The first person pronoun dominates the soliloquy with its implications of the voluntary isolation of egotism and self love, but each time it is emphasized it is also linked with the unwilling isolation of deformity and self pity:

Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
. . . .
I am determined to prove a villain
and hate the idle pleasures of these days. (I.i.19,30 1)

It is a physical quality, setting him involuntarily apart from other men, which mirrors the inward solitude he cultivates voluntarily in keeping his thoughts to himself, refusing to acknowledge the social bonds which bind men to one another. In consciously constructing a division between his face and heart, deliberately keeping his inner self apart from the calculated public face he presents to the world, Richard remains necessarily enigmatic to those around him.

Of course, the audience is privy to his falsehood all along for we enjoy a completely confessional relationship with Richard. Ironically, this relationship also sets him structurally apart from the other characters in the play, rather as though he is standing outside the play, watching. This self conscious movement between play and audience is made explicit from the first lines. Soliloquies and asides become a characteristic mode of speech for him, enabling Richard to declare his techniques and wallow in the hollow pride he derives from his bitter deceptions. This element of Richard III emerges as a unique and strangely post modern twist on the play within a play motif that appears in several of Shakespeare’s other plays. He later acknowledges his archetypal literary ancestry in a way that sets him further beyond the fiction of the play: “Thus, like the formal vice, Iniquity, I moralize two meanings in one word”(III. i. 82 3). Richard comes to wear his structural isolation also as a badge of his social and moral isolation. As he refuses to become fully committed to the artifice of the play, stepping outside of it as a mocking observer, so he refuses to commit himself to humanity and its governing tenets, posing himself in opposition to the framework of traditional values as a moral and social outlaw. That Richard stands so removed from the arena of human fellowship is evident, albeit obliquely, to those around him as well; even those that would become his dupes. Anne’s first speech on meeting Richard, before he has manipulated her responses, expresses her sense that Richard is somehow grotesquely outside of humanity, outside the natural order:

Dead Henry’s wounds
Open their congealed mouths and bleed afresh.
Blush, blush thou lump of foul deformity,

For ‘tis thy presence that exhales this blood
From cold and empty veins where no blood dwells; (I.ii.55 9)

In addition to the association between Richard’s physical deformity and his villainous soul that Anne suggests here, there also is a profound sense that Richard’s evil and iconoclasm can transgress even natural law; the newly gurgling corpse of her husband as evidence.

Richard’s fight to sever himself from all social laws and values, to become a self defining whole in himself, rather than simply a part in the social whole, parallels Richard’s struggle as a character to break out of the laws and framework of the play. He refuses to confine himself to the limits of the play by expressing himself in communion with the other characters, but instead insists on dissembling within the play and restricting communication of his true self to the soliloquies and asides through which he develops a special relationship with the audience. He insists on forming his own circles and laying down his own terms of accommodating himself to the wider circles of society, humanity, and the play itself. In these respects Richard elicits an awe akin to admiration and displays a defiance which is as heroic as it is villainous.

Sadly for Richard, contrary to his plans for cultivating and maintaining his autonomy and self sufficiency, our unlikely hero is ultimately trapped and destroyed by both the voluntary and involuntary aspects of his isolation. Shakespeare undercuts Richard’s heroic aspect by making his gestures finally futile, showing that his solitude cannot achieve for him the status he seeks, of pure self referentiality. Richard’s mutual rejection of and isolation from the circles of human discourse renders him impotent in his own machinations while making him a disruptive wrench in the works of the larger social paradigm he sought to escape.

Shakespeare thus offers us an essentially medieval perspective of history in which ostensibly natural forces prevent the deviant, the iconoclast, the aspiring solitary from creating his own laws. As Richard III moves toward its close, the focus widens, shifting from the solitary individual outward towards the re ordering society to which Richard finally succumbs. With the anarchic solitary dead, all believe the kingdom can look forward again to order and harmony. Richmond’s closing line ends the play with a sense that society may mend itself under the auspices of God himself in the wake of Richard’s chaotic passage through history:

Now civil wounds are stopp’d, peace lives again
That she may long live here, God say amen! (V.v.40 1)