Richard III (2 page)

The master actor needs a “straight man.” For Richard, this role is played by Buckingham, who assists him as he stage-manages his public image for his appearance before the Lord Mayor and citizens of London:

In the previous play in the sequence, Henry VI’s prayer-book was a sign that he did not want to be king. Richard’s is a sign that he is pretending not to want to be king, thus leading the Londoners to beg him to take on the office. “Will you enforce me to a world of cares?” he says, feigning reluctance—and in the next breath he whispers, “Call them again,” ensuring that the offer is renewed so that this time it can be accepted. In all this, he is, as always, the consummate actor.

There are two key turning points for Richard. One is when he contrives to lose his right-hand man, Buckingham. The comedian begins to flounder without his stooge. The other is when the lamenting women who serve as a kind of Greek chorus to the action come together and confront him in the enormously long fourth scene of the fourth act. Richard’s bravura seduction of the Lady Anne had revealed his skill with words, but now his verbal power is matched by the combined forces of Queen Margaret and Queen Elizabeth. If one innovation in the writing of
Richard the Third
was the conversion of the ensemble chronicle play into a star vehicle for a single huge theatrical personality, the other was the feminization of this traditionally masculine form. In Shakespeare’s earlier history plays, in those of other authors, and indeed in the tragedies of Marlowe, women are bit-part players. Here, however, the boy-actors who play Elizabeth, Margaret, and Anne are given larger parts and more richly inflected rhetoric than all of their adult colleagues save the leading three who play Richard, Buckingham, and Clarence. Symbolically, given that Richard explains his own lust for power as a consequence of his inadequacy in the arts of love, it is fitting that he meets his match in the form of women and boys.

It is Richard’s theatrical self-consciousness that ultimately sets his play above the three parts of
Henry the Sixth
. In
The First Part of Henry the Sixth
, Talbot is a manly hero and Joan an intriguing semi-comic villain; in
The Second Part
, there is splendid energy (Queen Margaret running amok) and variety (Jack Cade and the voice of the discontented commons); in
The Third Part
, we witness a scene of high drama when York is taunted with a paper crown before being stabbed to death. But it is not until Richard of Gloucester gets into his stride that we meet a figure with the compelling theatrical presence of a Falstaff or an Iago. At the climax of his first long soliloquy in Act 3 of
The Third Part of Henry the Sixth
—a speech that the theatrical tradition has often imported into
Richard the Third
—he announces that he will “play the orator,” “add colors to the chameleon,” and “change shapes with Proteus for advantages.” Each image is of the art of the actor, with his persuasive tongue and power of self-transformation.

Richard adds that he will “set the murderous Machevil to school.” In his black farce
The Jew of Malta
, Christopher Marlowe had brought on a representation of Machiavelli, the Renaissance archetype of the scheming politician, to speak the prologue. As soon as the Prologue leaves the stage, Barabas the Jew is revealed, speaking his opening soliloquy. The audience thus makes the equation that Barabas is a Machiavellian schemer. In
Richard the Third
, Shakespeare made a bold advance on this device. He dispensed with a prologue and began the action with Richard’s riveting soliloquy, “Now is the winter of our discontent.” Where Marlowe had cast Barabas in the role of the machiavel by means of a pointed structural device, Shakespeare’s Richard casts himself. He announces that since his crookback prevents him from playing the role of a stage lover, he will self-consciously adopt that of a stage villain. For good measure, he goes on in the second scene to show that he can in fact play the lover—with such accomplishment that he successfully woos Lady Anne over the very corpse of her father-in-law when she knows that he has been responsible for the murder of her first husband. As promised, he plays the orator to supreme effect. By the third act, he is changing shapes with Proteus and, as we have seen, appearing between two bishops in the color of a holy man. By means of the orator’s art of saying the opposite of what he means—“I cannot, nor I will not” accept the crown—he wins over the Mayor and the citizens of London.

The character of Richard III is Shakespeare’s overstepping of the Marlovian antihero. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Barabas, and Dr. Faustus fashion their identities by assuming roles—scourge of God, machiavel, conjuror. They do not stop to think that such roles are precisely that: flimsy theatrical impersonations. If they did stop, the whole Marlovian house of cards would come tumbling down. But Shakespeare began from a different place. He was an actor himself. This was the one trump card that was unavailable to Marlowe. Richard is quintessentially Shakespearean, supremely charismatic in the theater, because he knows that he is a role-player. He revels, and makes the audience revel, in playacting. He is the first full embodiment of a Shakespearean obsession that culminates in Macbeth’s “poor player” and Prospero’s “These our actors.” It is Iago in
Othello
who says, “I am not what I am.” But Richard could have said it too. And, as the critic Lionel Trilling remarked in a study of
Sincerity and Authenticity
(1972), so could almost every one of Shakespeare’s most memorable characters: Hamlet has no sooner heard out the Ghost than he resolves to be what he is not, a madman. Rosalind in
As You Like It
is not a boy, Portia in
The Merchant of Venice
is not a doctor of law, Romeo’s beloved Juliet is not a corpse, in
Measure for Measure
the Duke is not a friar and Mariana is not Isabella (nor is Helen Diana in
All’s Well That Ends Well
), Edgar in
King Lear
is not Tom o’ Bedlam, Hermione in
The Winter’s Tale
is neither dead nor a statue.

Marlowe’s characters invest everything in their aspirations. Shakespeare’s are more flexible. They are not what they are. That is surely because Shakespeare was an actor and Marlowe was not. It is also one reason why Shakespeare’s characters have a richer, more varied and continuous stage afterlife than Marlowe’s. Only in his dreams does Richard stop acting. And when that happens, his identity collapses:

Since he has forged his identity through acting, Richard denies the possibility of an essential being that is anterior to performance. He cannot sustain a language of being—“I am,” “I am not”—because he keeps coming back to particular roles (“villain”) and actions (murdering). The moment when an authentic self ought to be asserted, as in a deathbed repentance, becomes that when the self collapses. This is an actor-dramatist’s way of looking at the nature of human being.

The Ghosts who appear to him in his dream the night before the last battle force him into the realization that actions have consequences: murder will bring him “to the bar” and a verdict of “guilty” will be pronounced. This final emphasis upon guilt is the pragmatic Shakespeare’s correction of the blasphemous Marlowe toward religious and moral orthodoxy. Having been granted his earthly crown, Richard is defeated by Henry of Richmond, who has spent the night before the battle of Bosworth Field in pious prayer to the Christian God: “O thou, whose captain I account myself, / Look on my forces with a gracious eye.” The fall of the overreacher is thus yoked to the Tudor myth of that providential scheme of history which combined the Houses of York and Lancaster and established the dynasty that brought unity, then Reformation and ambition for imperial glory to the nation.

Further selections from critical commentaries on the play, with linking narrative, are available on the edition website,
www.therscshakespeare.com
.

Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare’s classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can’t).

But because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, editors also have to make decisions about the relative authority of the early printed editions. Half of the sum of his plays only appeared posthumously, in the elaborately produced First Folio text of 1623, the original “Complete Works” prepared for the press by Shakespeare’s fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else. The other half had appeared in print in his lifetime, in the more compact and cheaper form of “Quarto” editions, some of which reproduced good quality texts, others of which were to a greater or lesser degree garbled and error-strewn. In the case of
Richard III
, there are hundreds of differences between the two early editions, the Quarto of 1597 and the Folio.

Generations of editors have adopted a “pick and mix” approach, moving between Quarto and Folio readings, making choices on either aesthetic or bibliographic grounds, and creating a composite text that Shakespeare never actually wrote. Not until the 1980s did editors follow the logic of what ought to have been obvious to anyone who works in the theater: that the Quarto and the Folio texts represent two discrete moments in the life of
Richard III;
that plays change in the course of rehearsal, production, and revival, and that the major variants between the early printed versions almost certainly reflect this process.

If you look at printers’ handbooks from the age of Shakespeare, you quickly discover that one of the first rules was that, whenever possible, compositors were recommended to set their type from existing printed books rather than manuscripts. This was the age before mechanical typesetting, when each individual letter had to be picked out by hand from the compositor’s case and placed on a stick (upside down and back to front) before being laid on the press. It was an age of murky rushlight and of manuscripts written in a secretary hand that had dozens of different, hard-to-decipher forms. Printers’ lives were a lot easier when they were reprinting existing books rather than struggling with handwritten copy. Easily the quickest way to have created the First Folio would have been simply to reprint those eighteen plays that had already appeared in Quarto and only work from manuscript on the other eighteen.

But that is not what happened. Whenever Quartos were used, playhouse “promptbooks” were also consulted and stage directions copied in from them. And in the case of several major plays where a reasonably well-printed Quarto was available,
Richard III
notable among them, the Folio printers were instructed to work from an alternative, playhouse-derived manuscript. This meant that the whole process of producing the first complete Shakespeare took months, even years, longer than it might have done. But for the men overseeing the project, John Hemings and Henry Condell, friends and fellow actors who had been remembered in Shakespeare’s will, the additional labor and cost were worth the effort for the sake of producing an edition that was close to the practice of the theater. They wanted all the plays in print so that people could, as they wrote in their prefatory address to the reader, “read him and again and again,” but they also wanted “the great variety of readers” to work from texts that were close to the theater life for which Shakespeare originally intended them. For this reason, the
RSC Shakespeare
, in both
Complete Works
and individual volumes, uses the Folio as base text wherever possible. Significant Quarto variants are, however, noted in the Textual Notes, and Quarto-only passages are appended after the text of
Richard III
.

The following notes highlight various aspects of the editorial process and indicate conventions used in the text of this edition:

Lists of Parts
are supplied in the First Folio for only six plays, not including
Richard III
, so the list at the beginning of the play is provided by the editors, arranged by groups of characters. Capitals indicate that part of the name which is used for speech headings in the script. Thus “Lord Stanley, Earl of
DERBY
” indicates that lines spoken by this character are always headed “
DERBY
,” even though he is sometimes addressed as “Stanley.”

Locations
are provided by the Folio for only two plays. Eighteenth-century editors, working in an age of elaborately realistic stage sets, were the first to provide detailed locations. Given that Shakespeare wrote for a bare stage and often an imprecise sense of place, we have relegated locations to the explanatory notes, where they are given at the beginning of each scene where the imaginary location is different from the one before. We have emphasized broad geographical settings rather than specifics of the kind that suggest anachronistically realistic staging. We have therefore avoided such niceties as “another room in the palace.”