Shakespeare’s Richard the Third – His Own and Almost Only Expositor
Published in Spirit of the Mountains: Tributes in Honour of James Tulip
by William W Emilsen (Editor)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/532 ... -mountains
In helping my Dad sort through his papers a few years ago, I wanted to see his PhD thesis, Richard III: A Study of the Elizabethan Villain-Hero. Dad and I had discussed themes in his doctorate, how Shakespeare drew from the rich legacy of English cultural traditions of popular religious theatre in forming his depiction of King Richard as villain-hero, how the motiveless malignity of the dramatic villain has an enduring popular fascination, and how ‘glorious villains’ from Elizabethan theatre, such as Iago, Richard, Volpone and others, as well as inglorious rogues like Macbeth, conceal deeply complex moral dilemmas and traumas beneath a seemingly simple surface appearance, producing the paradox of heroism within villainy.
The continuity that his thesis analyzed between Richard and Satan as main characters in English drama reveals much about Dad’s basic views on theology, exploring depictions of God as a metaphor for historical characters and events. The medieval morality and mystery plays, with God and Satan in lead roles, provided important cultural antecedents for the Elizabethan dramatists, even though these Catholic traditions had been suppressed by the Protestant Reformation. Finding the links of memetic cultural evolution and analogy in the Christian framing of Richard III became for Dad a forensic detective exercise, showing how the modern secular world of court politics in Shakespeare’s portrayal had a metaphorical relationship with divine themes that previously had been presented in the theatre in terms of sacred myth.
A thesis in the humanities should be a window on the soul. The veins of symbolism, metaphor, culture and politics in this thesis reveal much about Dad’s worldview, while providing fascinating and insightful scholarly angles on Shakespeare and his world. In particular, Dad’s attitude toward theology had a sophistication and wisdom far more subtle and complex than most people understand. Rather than treating figures like Satan and God against the scientific hypothesis that they are existing entities, he ignored such crude literalism in favour of the much more profound and important context of what these divine myths mean in their enduring cultural function as social constructs. The depth of character created by the hypothesis that Shakespeare deliberately based his construction of Richard on the old cultural typology of Satan places the work in a vast and rich cultural space, opening realms of meaning not available to a merely secular interpretation.
The political importance of this analysis is that the modern world tends to discount the rationality of culture dating from before the Renaissance, and thereby frames its understanding against the scientific enlightenment as the founding story. Showing the great debt that Shakespeare owed to the medieval world, and especially to Christianity, is essential to placing our modern search for meaning in its real historical context.
However, there was a problem. Dad was not sure where his doctorate was. He had left Chicago in such a rush in 1962, together with my mother Marie and my elder brother Peter, to take up his new position in the English Department at the University of Sydney, that he never obtained a bound copy. So I was pleased in hunting through his filing cabinets to find a chapter of the thesis with his final pencil notes to the typist. But that was all. Perhaps it was lost. Some good news came a few weeks later. Dad’s wife Peggy and my brother Bill were continuing to help arrange Dad’s papers, with some more urgency following his mesothelioma cancer diagnosis. An old rusty filing cabinet with no key had turned up under the house, and the bumping noises when it was tipped over showed it had something inside. But what? A kind neighbour helped to open this treasure chest with an angle grinder, and lo and behold out fell the rest of the final draft. But still no clean copy.
The quest had me intrigued. I went to the website of the library of the University of Chicago, and found Dad’s thesis in the catalogue. I rang them to request a copy, and very promptly, for about $50, they emailed a full pdf. Next Dad’s good friend and colleague Michael Griffith converted this file to machine readable form, and uploaded it on dad’s blog, nanojim.com, where everyone can now read it. And it is very worth reading.
Dad commented at his blog that the villain-hero theme of the thesis highlights his life-time absorption in this central location of creative energy in English literature, in the historical and political dynamics of evil. For Dad, travelling across the world from the cultural wasteland of North Queensland to the great intellectual metropolis of Chicago to study the sublime dramatic genius of Shakespeare gave him a rather unique global triangulation on key points of the Anglosphere, from Australia, the USA and England. This broad wholistic perspective on the world, considered through the lens of villain as hero, was philosophical as well as literary and geographic. He explains in his thesis that he sought to follow Aristotle’s causal model to analyze the text, not by the common method of isolating some narrow feature, but looking for its formal cause, its unified meaning as a whole. This search for formal meaning in the structure of evil is the aspect of the thesis that I will focus on, leaving aside the equally interesting material on Shakespeare’s material sources.
The thesis has six chapters, exploring Shakespeare’s sources in the historical chronicles and in the early drama of the popular morality and mystery and miracle texts, while also looking at how the rival playwrights Jonson and Marlowe also made use of this earlier material and of the Roman theatrical tradition from Seneca. The analogy between Richard and the medieval vices is the theme that most strongly resonates with Dad’s subsequent interests in the relationship between literature and spirituality, although the droll irony in his analysis of Thomas More’s History of King Richard is equally captivating. A key observation is that “while Shakespeare found the material for his play in the Chronicles, he found the form of his protagonist and of his play's structure generally in the tradition of the native stage.”
As ever, the opening line of a literary work sets its tone and direction. Richard’s ‘winter of discontent made glorious summer’ is among the most famous scene-setters for its ironic reversal. Dad opens his thesis by observing that “the many ‘glorious’ villains of the Elizabethan stage have long suffered from being their own, and almost only, expositors”. Scoundrels such as Richard, Barabas, Volpone and Iago gratuitously announce their villainy to the audience, presenting a caricature that somehow reduces the level of interest they create as dramatic characters. Such simplicity has origins in the morality play figure of Satan and ongoing popularity from Mister Punch through to Hollywood.
Richard says at the outset “And thus I clothe my naked villainy with old odd ends stolen out of holy writ; And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.” This announcement of his evil intent has made Richard seem a simple character to some scholarship. The devilish trope connects the simplistic surface appearance with the punitive morality of the dramatic genre, setting up the wicked for the inevitable fall. While entertaining on the stage, this blatancy of evil leaves critics with less of the meaty ambiguity offered by a melancholy tragedy like Hamlet. Therefore, the thesis observes that Richard and his fellow criminals have languished with a relative lack of critical attention. The uncomfortable admiration the audience feels for the villain-hero despite his comeuppance leads in criticism to an air of disdain and neglect, with scholarly work tending to give more attention to the true tragedy where the hero does not deserve his fate. Yet the complexity emerges as we see how Shakespeare himself conceals his own theft in the depiction of Richard, if not out of holy writ then from its staging in popular tradition.
My focus here is the core argument in the thesis that “the essence … of the villain-hero can only be apprehended through the historical tradition from which this character sprang, the tradition of the Devils and Vices of the native English stage”. Shakespeare’s brilliance emerges perhaps most clearly in his deft construction of character. With Richard his hidden method is to bring the deep symbolic meaning in mythological stories into the historical drama of the clash of kings, weaving from methods hitherto used in sacred material to inform a modern secular work.
The genius of Shakespeare in distinguishing characters is explored in the thesis by comparing Richard with Macbeth. Both are anti-heroes punished as usurpers in a moral fable, but their personalities could not be more different. As the Bard draws us into the contrasting minds and personalities of his villains, we begin to understand the artistry of allowing their own voices to typify human traits, whether of mischief, pride, ambition or weakness. And the type of Richard as Devil has a universal resonance in the history of ideas through its mythological continuity.
The popular English medieval pageants provide a near exact analogue for the career of Richard: “Satan finds himself in a world completely ordered by God. He smarts under the orthodoxy of this Establishment, finding in himself powers and qualities that demand an outlet. This obsession with his own strength or beauty then directs itself to the throne of God, and the opportunity presents itself when God absents himself for a short while. Satan proceeds to sit on the throne to the dismay of his fellow angels. The denouement simply awaits the return of God, who punishes the usurper by casting him out of heaven.”
The thesis explains that Satan’s few exulting moments on the throne parallel the brief pleasure that Shakespeare observes in downplaying the coronation scenes of Richard and Macbeth. The many pertinent parallels extend from Richard's opening monologue to the presentation of his entire career. “In the three pageants at the beginning of the Mysteries— the Fall of Lucifer, the Temptation of Eve, and the Cain and Abel story- a significant pattern appears that corresponds to the pattern of Richard's opening monologue, his wooing of Anne, and the murder of Clarence. The general sequence from the presentation of Satanic nature to the temptation of a woman to the fratricide leads the spectator to infer Richard's demonic nature. To an Elizabethan audience it would surely have been an elaborate and sustained sign of Richard as the devil incarnate.”
Further to this use of Satan, Shakespeare’s key formal source for his characterization of Richard is the Morality tradition, with its character of Vice, whom Richard explicitly compares himself to as “the formal Vice Iniquity”. Structural devices such as ritual and stylized depiction reveal this debt, even while the political story is wrapped within the ontology of the Tudor Myth, “God’s plan to restore England to prosperity”. This formal archetypal level of derivation from the Morality Play raises Richard III above its material story, creating a timeless character, abstracted from history.
The Mystery cycles follow Satan's career from his fall from heaven to his role in the Crucifixion to his defeat on Judgment Day. “He is presented as a figure of absolute evil who for being thwarted in his beginnings turns to deceit and dissimulation in order to destroy the divine scheme first through Eve then through God's chosen People until he attains a moment of triumph in the Crucifixion. But no sooner is he victorious than he falls, for his victim, Jesus Christ, shows his symbolic superiority in harrowing hell to its very foundations. The Resurrection is an earnest of the new dispensation and the numbered days of Satan close with the Last Judgment. In his end, however, Satan makes one last desperate attempt to fulfill his nature through the Antichrist. The general correspondence of the career of Shakespeare’s Richard to this pattern must be obvious; the Antichrist legend in itself is an epitome of usurpation.”
Shakespeare’s intimate connection with the popular timeless religious dramatic traditions of political morality, with their simple direct character titles, is further analysed in the thesis against an Elizabethan morality play dating from 1553, Respublica – A Play on the Social Conditions of England at the Accession of Queen Mary. Respublica “describes how Avarice and his three accomplices Insolence, Adulation, and Oppression conspire to deceive the helpless widow Respublica. They do so by assuming the names of Policy, Authority, Honesty, and Reformation, and are successful in duping her but not in silencing the complaints of People. Respublica’s state is one of perplexed ignorance as to what is wrong with her ailing nation and she has to be shown the truth by a supernatural visitation on the part of the four daughters of God - Mercy, Truth, Peace, and Justice. They reveal the true natures of the Vices but it is left for the figure of Nemesis to resolve the play by punishing the Vices each according to his degree of villainy.” Respublica has “virtually all the structural elements of our villain-hero plays worked out on a generic level. In plot, theme, and character the analogues to Richard III are striking.”
With this traditional style of naming each character for a moral trait, in order to show the hypocrisy at large in the world (and with ongoing relevance today), Respublica forms a bridge between Shakespeare’s Richard and the old Easter folk traditions of the native mystery cycles, some of which are now again performed at cathedrals and theatres such as in Chester, York, Lincoln and Lichfield. In drawing on these traditions, Shakespeare reflects the gradual evolutionary secularization of mythology, from Satan as an imaginary Lord of Hell to Richard as an actual king who serves as a convenient butt for demonization.
“Richard loves Richard”, as Shakespeare has the evil king mutter to himself on Bosworth Field, retaining his isolated self-absorption as he faces his destruction. A sad irony in Dad’s opening observation that Richard is his own best expositor is that Dad himself, while entirely the opposite of a villain, could have benefited from a keener focus on self-promotion. He never achieved the career potential that could have come from converting his PhD into a book, with the public influence and recognition that publishing such a valuable work of scholarly exposition would have brought. The broadness of his theme - how Shakespeare’s approach to character reflected English cultural traditions - led Dad to leave aside any direct follow up on his doctorate, and instead to pursue wider interests including the interrelationships between literature and spirituality. Valuable as his subsequent research into Ben Jonson and modern American and Australian poetry was, his lack of scholarly self-promotion was unfortunate, considering the rich material in his thesis as a powerful exposition of the religious influence on Shakespeare.
The scholarly method used in the thesis finds structural parallels between different works in order to understand the history of ideas in terms of cultural evolution. This is undoubtedly controversial and somewhat speculative. Similar methods have been used to compare Jesus Christ to a range of earlier mythological figures, often in ways not broadly accepted. My sense is that this method is of immense importance in forming a good appreciation of the influences and motives that act upon writers of great literature. As in Isaac Newton’s phrase about himself, Shakespeare saw further by standing on the shoulders of giants. Understanding who these giants were, including in popular religious theatre, helps us to understand Shakespeare’s often understated relation to Christianity, and also to appreciate the intimate links between literature and spirituality that informed all of Dad’s scholarship.
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Shakespeare’s Richard the Third – His Own and Almost Only Expositor
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