Determined To Prove A Villain Criticism Pedagogy and Richard III

"Determined to Prove a Villain": Criticism, Pedagogy, and "Richard III"
Author(s): Martine van Elk

Source: College Literature, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Fall, 2007), pp. 1-21
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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"Determined to prove a villain":
Criticism, Pedagogy, and Richard III
Martine van Elk
Surprisingly little scholarly work has been Martine van Elk is an Associate
done on how to teach William
Professor at California State
Shakespeare's Richard HI at the college
University, Long Beach. She has
level, even though it presents specific textual
and thematic problems for undergraduates. published on Shakespeare,
Aside from the play s reliance on a broad his
vagrancy, and Tudor drama and
torical familiarity with the Wars of the Roses,
students are often confused by its peculiar is currently working on a com
combination of archaic-sounding language parative study of early modern

and a modern-seeming protagonist and have
women writers.
to adjust to reading an early modern text
about a late-medieval moment. This essay
proposes a new approach to teaching Richard
III, one that is informed by recent critical
readings of the play as well as by theoretical
models of subjectivity. I offer suggestions for
teaching that aim to have students explore
the simultaneous and contradictory presence
in the play of different notions of selfhood,
including the metaphysical and secular
2 College Literature 34.4 [Fall 2007]
humanist views, but also more modern constructions that take us into the
realms of psychology and metatheatricality.
In addition to this historical and theoretical focus, this essay looks to
bridge the gap between performance-based pedagogy and text-based class
room practice by arguing for a treatment of the play that joins the two
approaches in a meaningful way. In spite of the continued dominance of new
historicism in criticism, the subfield of teaching Shakespeare has been, since
the early 1980s, overwhelmingly oriented towards performance, whether this
means having students act out scenes and discuss performance techniques or
using film, video, and various electronic media in the classroom.1 In the final
pages of the essay, I explore the openings and closings of three of the best
known film versions of Richard III and consider how they can enrich a dis
cussion of Shakespeares complex treatment of subjectivity Paradoxically, per
haps, modern film can enhance a historically aware conversation about
Shakespeare, asking students ultimately to reflect on themselves and their sit
uatedness in history and to consider where their own ideas about identity
come from. As Bruce Smith has put it in a succinct discussion of teaching
Shakespeare, "we project our own concerns, but they come back to us?or,
at least, they should come back to us?transformed by the solidities of
Shakespeare as a historical phenomenon. They come back to us in the form
of dialogue" (1997, 454). Enabling students to engage in this dialogue with
Richard III is my central concern in teaching the play.
The long-standing critical debate on Richard III (1592-93), initiated by
E. M. W. Tillyard, has centered on the overall presentation of history in the
play, and specifically on its status as a providential narrative in support of the
Tudor Myth or as a secular, humanist, or even Machiavellian text that looks
to human action in this world as a primary cause for historical change. In
Stages of History Phyllis Rackin explains the uneven development in
Renaissance historiography, which shows the same ambivalence. She notes
that history writing of the period reveals the "gradual separation of history
from theology: explanations of events in terms of their first cause in divine
providence were giving way to Machiavellian analyses of second causes?the
effects of political situations and the impact of human will and capabilities"
(1990,6). Although Rackin herself sees Richard ///as dominated by the prov
idential perspective, something she claims has meant a "long-standing prefer
ence of conservative critics" (55) for this play, the question of Shakespeare s
treatment of history has by no means been resolved, as recent studies make
clear. The play s plot structure, poetic formality, and final push for moralistic
closure do not unequivocally overcome its Machiavellian protagonist, whose
appeal undermines an appreciation of the final outcome. Both in
Renaissance historiography and in Richard III, then, we encounter two ways
Martine van Elk 3
of viewing historical events and the world at large?as governed by a divine

being or by human agency. Because of the play's foregrounding of Richard's
intense concern with the latter, these debates on the larger question of his
tory should also return us to the question of identity. After all, the providen
tial view of history has at times been aligned with the traditional medieval
notion of the subject and the Machiavellian view with the Renaissance s
newly emerging notion of a humanist subject.2
Students, in other words, can come to recognize the conflicting models
of subjectivity in the play. Two other factors complicate this cultural divide.
Shakespeare's sources, Stephen Greenblatt argues in his introduction to
Richard III in the Norton Shakespeare, mingle "three distinct explanatory
accounts of Richard's behavior: political, psychological, and metaphysical"
(1997, 507). How does the psychological account relate to the political and
the metaphysical readings of Richard? A presentation of Richard as motivat
ed by his deformity might, after all, be used to support both secular and prov
idential perspectives. As the history of Richard HI criticism makes clear,
Shakespeare does not clearly prioritize any one of these three explanations,
but instead has them blend, conflict with, and enhance each other. Second,
as has long been noted, Shakespeare links his own contribution to these
explanations of Richard's behavior to his medium by introducing allusions to
and reflections on theater and theatrical performance. The play's metatheatri
cal moments allow audiences to consider the theater itself as a vehicle through
which history is presented and explore the ways in which politics and theater
are implicated in each other. Contrary to what is sometimes argued, these
metatheatrical moments do not simply contribute to a secular or a providen
tial perspective on the events in the play. Instead, as we shall see, they construct
a slippery view of subjectivity that supports and conflicts with both.
How can we enable students to ask and answer questions about these
various modes of thought at work in Richard IIP And how do students' own
notions of identity compare to or come out of the different positions offered
by the text? I have found it useful to introduce these tricky questions by
entering into a rudimentary theoretical discussion of identity. Students usu
ally come up with a spectrum of possible sources of the self, such as the body,
gender, culture, economic structure, social background, childhood, day-to
day action, and language, among others. Most students agree that there are
basic conflicts between views that privilege the body as the origin of sub
jectivity, those that identify some outside, cultural determinant or divine
presence as primary, and those that point to the individual as the maker of
his or her own self. Following this discussion, I acquaint students with the
long-standing debates about the history of the subject and the idea that with
the Reformation a shift took place in the conception of subjectivity (from
the outward to the inward, from a collective to an individual sense of self).

All of this prepares us for reading the play with an eye for theoretical impli
cations of words and behavior and encourages us to think of our own ideas
as a product of a long and complex historical development.
Before students tackle the play's varying and contradictory presentations
of identity, we need to establish a larger cultural and historical context. This,
I want to suggest, can be done by using selections from The Bedford
Companion to Shakespeare, edited by Russ McDonald, a text that has become
a staple in Shakespeare classes with its well-informed introductions and range
of selections from primary texts by Shakespeare's contemporaries. Chapter 9,
"Politics and Religion: Early Modern Ideologies," includes a sophisticated
introduction to early modern absolutism and views about the social order. In
having students read the introduction and the excerpts, I hope to establish
early on that early modern culture was by no means ruled by a uniform ide
ology of order based on the Great Chain of Being and the Divine Right of
Kings, however important culturally those ideas may have been. This can be
achieved by pairing excerpts by monarchs with excerpts by their subjects.
McDonald includes, for instance, Queen Elizabeth's 1588 Tilbury speech and
King James's speech to Parliament of 1610, but also Simon Formans 1597
diary entry, "On a Dream about an Encounter with Queen Elizabeth" and
Sir John Harington's "Letter Describing the Revels at King James's Court,"
dated 1606. The speeches by the monarchs give us their strategic self-repre
sentations, each appealing to and working with absolutist ideology in differ
ent ways. Students get a feel for their different styles as well as the dominant
tropes of absolutism (the king as father, head of the body politic, and God's
representative on earth).While Elizabeth bolsters her position through man
aging the public perception of her gender, King James argues more explicit
ly in favor of an essentialist, providential model of kingship in the face of par
liamentary opposition. And yet, the speech shows, even his absolutism is
moderated, as he acknowledges that kings are determined by their actions,
for "a king governing in a settled kingdom leaves to be a king, and degener
ates into a tyrant, as soon as he leaves off to rule according to his laws"
(McDonald 2001,330). Harington's letter discussing the riotous and disorgan
ized revels at James's court puts forward a good counter to the view of the King
as in a position of perfect control, while Formans well-known diary entry in
which he recounts his dream of Queen Elizabeth gives us a surprising instance
of romantic fantasizing and sexualizing of the monarch, suggesting the possi
ble intermingling of sexuality, psychology, and politics at the time.3
Another interesting pairing is a shortened version of An Homily against
Disobedience and Willful Rebellion (1570) and a passage from Niccol?
Machiavelli's The Prince (1513).The two exemplify the conflicting perspec
Martine van Elk 5
tives on identity we find in the play: while Machiavelli's humanism moves

towards a new, secular notion of leadership, the homily bolsters the Divine
Right of Kings by barring any judgment on the part of the individual sub
ject as antithetical to Christianity. Finally, a short and famous excerpt from
Philip Stubbes's The Anatomy of Abuses (1583) explains the threat posed to
ideologies of order by the theater and acquaints students with the Protestant
anti-theatrical prejudice. McDonald's introduction tells us of the ambiguous
relationship between players and authority and the monarchs' own fascina
tion with the theater as well as their political uses of it. Elizabeth's Tilbury
speech shows us, McDonald writes, "her acute sense of audience and her
understanding of how to make the spectators adore her" (2001, 328). This
encourages students to read in historical terms the theatrical spectacles that
allow for Richard's ultimate coronation. As Forman s dream and the muted
crowds at Buckingham's speeches suggest, though, the effect on the audience
of royal playmaking and acting can never be fully controlled by the performer.
Having prepared for our discussion of the play with this multivalent col
lection of readings, we can take on the opening speech of Richard HI with an
acute sense of its intricacies. I ask students to keep in mind Greenblatt's ref
erence to the threefold explanations for Richard's behavior?political, psy
chological, and metaphysical?as they set out to read the speech, to which
we return after having discussed the entire text. I also ask them to look espe
cially at the effect of theatrical allusions on these explanations. On their first
reading, it quickly becomes clear to students, as it has long been to critics,
that the speech can be broken up into three parts: while the first part of the
speech, lines 1 to 13, is public or political in orientation, the second, lines 14
to 27, is psychological in orientation; finally, the third section, lines 28 to 40,
is most explicitly metatheatrical.4 But how does the metaphysical fit in? And
what model of subjectivity is presented to us?
Beginning with the first section, students immediately remark on
Richard's skills as a politician and orator. The speech, partly for the sake of
exposition, begins as a political set piece, seemingly articulated to celebrate
victory in front of a large audience, as it gives us multiple variations on the
notion that the country has shifted from war into peace. The second section
builds on this introduction by elaborating on the individual consequences for
Richard of this victory. He tells us that he has been isolated from others due
to his deformity and now, perhaps understandably, must turn to power poli
tics to occupy him. Like other Shakespearean men, he shows how burden
some the transition from soldier to courtier-lover is for him, being forced to
switch from a model of masculinity that emphasizes heroic action to anoth
er that emphasizes courtliness, love, and, especially troubling for Richard,
physical appearance. Having established a psychological motive for his behav
ior, Richard moves on to highlight his theatrical sense of himself, in a series

of small, but significant references towards the end of the speech.
Theatricality is aligned with evil Machiavellianism, as he celebrates his out
sider status as a prompt to action: "I am determined to prove a villain / And
hate the idle pleasures of these days" (1.1.30-31). In traditional Vice-manner,
Richard tells us, "Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous" (32), setting a play
in motion that he himself has not yet fully worked out, it seems.5
On returning to the speech after having read the play in its entirety, the
class takes a much closer look at the constructions of identity it offers and
relates these to the debate on providential history versus secular history.
Students now find more contradictions throughout the speech, but also
begin to see more clearly what threat Richard represents to the divinely
ordained social order as it is reestablished by Richmond at the end. The
opening, political section of the speech appears to be based on a humanist
view of identity as shaped through male heroic action. But this model is
troubled by Richard s own ambivalence about the outcome of the war.
Where, I ask students, does Richard stop convincing us that he is pleased
with the Yorkist victory? Where does his political imagery break down?
Some will point to the end of the section, with the ridiculous image of
"Grim-visaged war . . . caper[ing] nimbly in a lady's chamber" (1.1.9-12);
others find that from the start something is not quite right. The opening two
lines, "Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this
son of York," already teeter uneasily on the threshold between opposing
views of selfhood. Explicitly the emphasis on "this son of York" (Edward),
who has single-handedly made winter into summer and banished discon
tent, would appear to celebrate a secular view of man as in control of des
tiny and even of nature. Yet, the seasonal imagery also suggests that the cycle
of violence followed by peace will return. Similarly, the treatment of the
civil wars as "all the clouds that loured upon our house," now safely
"buried" in the "deep bosom of the ocean" (3-4), has the effect of mystify
ing the conflict, dehumanizing the opponent, and, in so doing, exposing the
unnatural aspects to the current peace. It is impossible to bury clouds in the
ocean, an image that suggests the world is upside down and that something
has been repressed rather than permanently eradicated. The reference to
"clouds" implies that the York family is not opposed by the Lancastrians
alone but also by nature, or perhaps even Jupiter, in his association with
thunderclouds. We have to wonder, then, to what extent Richard is in
charge of these incongruous connotations in the imagery he deploys. Is his
use of what seems to be conventional political rhetoric deliberately ambigu
ous so that we come to see the insufficiency of the current situation and that
type of language? Is he presenting us with a parody of a political speech?
Martine van Elk 7
Are his lines undermining a humanist model of selfhood only to reassert his
agency more forcefully by mocking it?
The misogyny of the end of the first section prepares us for a psycho
logical explanation of Richard's discontent, but again, agency is presented
ambiguously: while the Yorkists themselves have abandoned their instruments
of war, it is unclear whether this is a cause for or a consequence of the new
occupations of "Grim-visaged war," one of a number of unnamed pagan
divine presences in the speech, presumably Mars. The psychological view is
closely linked to Richard's deformity, so that identity becomes firmly locat
ed in the body as formed in the womb. This essentialism is not overtly
explained in providential terms, but vaguely assigned to some power that has
acted upon him at birth (and "rudely stamped" him as a coin, 1. 16), only to
be explicitly rendered in line 19 as "dissembling nature."This feminized god
dess-figure, a counterpart to the masculine war of the first section, may be
linked with the mother, as she is made to bear responsibility for the unfin
ished pregnancy.6 This makes us reread the earlier sections of the speech. Is
war to be linked with a betraying father figure? The earlier burial of the civil
war in the feminine figure of the ocean, whose "deep bosom" hides much
violence and resentment, now also comes to suggest maternity, so that the
mother becomes both an actively vengeful figure, responsible for the defor
mity of her child, and a passive repository of memories of war and death.
Janet Adelman's reading of Richard in her introduction to Suffocating Mothers
proves enlightening in this respect, and it is a short discussion that is easily
distributed in class. Students are usually fascinated to hear of Adelman's use
of historical materials about childbearing, nursing, and infancy and her argu
ment that Shakespeare works out and is himself prone to his culture's psy
chological fantasies about mothers. For Adelman, it is fear of the maternal
body that leads to Richard's role-playing:
Richard himself empties himself out in Richard III, doing away with self
hood and its nightmare origins and remaking himself in the shape of the
perfect actor who has no being except in the roles he plays. ... [It is] a
defensive response to his fear that his shape and his selfhood had been given
him, fixed by his deformation in his mother's womb. (Adelman 1992, 8-9)
This is a compelling explanation from a psychological perspective, which

validates the second part of the speech as "true" on a deep level. It is an
explanation that usually holds considerable appeal for students and may,
though Adelman does not do this, introduce the metaphysical worldview: if
Richard has been deformed by divine decree, he can never be in charge of
his self-presentation. After all, early moderns frequently tied physical defor
mity to an evil and envious disposition.
Recent criticism, however, has called attention to the ambiguity of texts

on physiognomy when it comes to the connection between body and soul.7
As is the case for absolutism, we cannot assume that the early modern out
look on deformity was uniform. Shakespeare shows that deformity itself is
not necessarily only limiting. It may, and does, in fact prove to be somewhat
of an asset to Richard, as we see when he justifies his attack on Hastings by
exposing his withered hand and attributing his deformity to witchcraft. It is
a complex moment: nobody in the Privy Council appears to believe
Richard, but he has forged a social and political situation that blocks any
contradiction.8 Even in the opening speech, Richard's talk of his deformity
is not what it seems to be. I ask students to read the confrontation between
Henry VI and Richard in 3 Henry VI, in which Henry recounts the myths
on Richard's birth, including the notion that he was born with teeth (5.6.44
54). His speech is interrupted by Richard's stabbing of him, a desperate
attempt on Richard's part to silence his culture's myth-making about him.
Having read that speech, we can appreciate Linda Chames s argument that at
the start of Richard III, Richard is not reiterating but revising legend, by claim
ing he was born before, not after his time, in what she calls an act of "fetal
self-revisionism" (1999, 276).This crucial effort in a passage that appears to
dwell on his victimization and lack of responsibility for his deformity thus
again takes precedence over a passive construction of the self. What we get is
a complex view of identity as created in subversive performance, a view that
takes us back to Machiavelli's The Prince and that, in spite of Richard's asser
tions that he is no courtier, marks him as a supremely gifted courtly per
former. Even when complaining about his lack of agency, Richard rhetori
cally manages to reassert it, overcoming the terrifying possibility that God or
his mother or nature or some other person or force is responsible for his
deformity and thus for his identity. Through speech, then, Richard tries to
turn his deformity from a liability into signifier whose signified can be
manipulated.9 The degree to which Richard is and is not in charge of this
passage leads to interesting class discussions that I do not try to resolve in
favor of one view or the other, but instead want to direct towards an exam
ination of what is at stake in our differences of opinion about it?what do
our readings of Richard's presentation of his body and mind entail for our
views of identity in the play? How does Richard's self-presentation compare
to what we have seen in the speeches by Queen Elizabeth and King James?
In the final section, the speech culminates in Richard's presentation of
himself as Vice character, playmaker, and actor. His performative concept of
identity shows it to be constituted not merely in action but specifically in
improvisation.10 Richard's declaration that he has nothing to do but "spy my
shadow in the sun / And descant on mine own deformity" (1.1.26-27) brings
Martine van Elk 9
together the realm of politics and the realm of psychology: it returns us to

the first line in stating that Richard can only see his identity as a poor reflec
tion of Edward's political fate while the musical image of "descanting"
emphasizes his isolation from the feminine realm of wooing and courtliness
dwelled on in the second section.The Norton Shakespeare simply glosses "des
cant on" as "remark upon," a phrase close to the definition in the Oxford
English Dictionary that cites this passage, though a bit more casual sounding
than the dictionary's "To make remarks, comments, or observations; to com
ment (on, upon, of a text, theme, etc.)" (s.v. "descant," i^.2).The word is, of
course, more interesting. It is an instructive exercise for students to go to the
OED, available on-line at many institutions, and begin to think for them
selves about editing and other issues of textual transmission. The OED's first
gloss is a musical one, "To play or sing an air in harmony with fixed theme"
(f.l), a definition that should be supplemented by the definition for descant
as a noun: "A melodious accompaniment to a simple musical theme (the
plainsong), sung or played, and often merely extemporized, above it, and thus
forming an air to its bass: the earliest form of counterpoint" (n.l).
Descanting, in other words, may happen in harmony with the musical base,
but it may also counter it, as Shakespeare's only other use of the word in a
play makes clear. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Lucetta tells Julia, "now you
are too flat, / And mar the concord with too harsh a descant" (1.2.94-95).
The musical sense of the word allows us to unpack the complications of
Richard's usage: deformity is a base to which Richard's words can only serve
as an accompaniment, but, as the OED tells us, the descant may improvise
against the base. Richard as the master improviser is always trying to create
his own sense of self in opposition to what he tells us is an identity imposed
upon him by others.
As we have seen, a strong case has been made, by Adelman for instance,
that Richard's presentation of himself as actor is a compensatory psycholog
ical mechanism. But at the same time, this strategic move might also retroac
tively be seen to undercut the representations of his political self and the psy
chological self in the previous sections of the speech. In fact, his theatrical
rhetoric of improvisation makes any other explanation of his behavior look
questionable. Over the course of the play, having witnessed Richard's ability
to construct himself as a public spectacle, students have learned to distrust his
soliloquies and to take them as deliberate interventions in the way in which
he is represented, both by everyone else in the play and by historians to
come. A look back at the opening speech reveals that at least early on, per
formance troubles providential, psychological, and political readings of
Richard. From this perspective, his references to "Grim-visaged War . . .
[capering] nimbly in a lady's chamber" (1.1.9-12) and to "dogs [barking] at
me as I halt by them" (23) seem ludicrously and deliberately overdone. The

performative, in other words, breaks through the political, providential, and
psychological modes to parody them, mocking the explicit content of the
earlier sections and winking at a sophisticated audience that, unlike his vic
tims, does not fall for any of this. Can we any longer believe that Richard is
acting out of true psychological aggravation over his deformity and social
isolation? Can we trust his assertion that a time of peace simply has nothing
to offer him? Do his words ever point to anything other than his relentless
ambition for the crown, his so-called "secret close intent" (1.1.158)?11
Certainly, different answers are possible to these questions, which are not
intended to be simply rhetorical. In embracing students' various answers, I
also put forward as a possibility that theatricality and a performative, or per
haps we should say "improvisational," model of identity complicates our abil
ity to assess character. With the introduction of Richard the actor, the audi
ence must come to terms with a slippery view of the self as a role that is
formed in moments of exchange and in response to particular circumstances.
Such a view undercuts the social order in that rituals of state, political ideol
ogy, and class are made to seem mere products of a particularly effective
action in a particular moment.
Yet, as Richard Wheeler has argued, this more modern view of identity
is not one that Shakespeare leaves us with (1999,191-92).The play counters
it with providential machinery, reminiscent of the divine "present absence"
that overcomes the protagonist in Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus
(1592). Richard's struggle for agency is bound to fail in the face of history's
working out of the divine plan. In light of this, we may need to reread
Richard's line,"I am determined to prove a villain" (1.1.30), R. L. Smallwood
has noted, not as a proud act of self-assertion, but as a pun: God has deter
mined that Richard will prove a villain (1986, 155). The repetitive formal
poetry of the curses and prophecies, often aligned with women in the play,
is on the side of divine providence as well, forging not only a model of sub
jectivity that is devoid of agency but also a language that has become utter
ly a matter of ritual form, rather than individual expression. The question stu
dents need to answer is whether they feel that this apparatus of curses, puns,
prophecies, and repetitive poetry effectively undoes the threat to order posed
by Richard's improvisations. And if this is the case, should we be happy with
this victory? Our modern sensibilities tend to make us feel more comfort
able with Richard s evil but entertaining machinations than with the sinister
wailing and cursing of the women in the play. Can we even relegate their
fierce language to the realm of providence and if so, is it a kind of providence
that appeals to us?
Martine van Elk il
Barbara Hodgdon offers an alternative to the psychoanalytic interpreta

tions of Richard's acting as compensation. She asserts that the latter half of
the play undercuts the theatrical sense of self that Richard puts forward so
effectively with a more intimidating providential use of theatricality, in effect
displacing one model of theater and play-acting with another. It is a religious
form of theater that Stubbes does not include in his invective against players
and play-going. Hodgdon locates this transformation of theater primarily in
the dream sequence on the eve of the battle at Bosworth field. We also see it
powerfully in a speech Margaret gives to before the final act. She paints for
Queen Elizabeth an image of a performative world ruled by providence
when she says, recalling an earlier curse:
I called thee then "vain flourish of my fortune";
I called thee then, poor shadow, "painted queen"?

The presentation of but what I was
The flattering index of a direful pageant,
One heaved a-high to be hurled down below,
A mother only mocked with two fair babes,
A dream of what thou wast, a garish flag
To be the aim of every dangerous shot,
A sign of dignity, a breath, a bubble,
A queen in jest, only to fill the scene. (Richard III 4.4.82-91)
This theatricality opposes Richard's version in that it is uncontrolled by indi

vidual human agency. It leaves Elizabeth in a position of complete, terrifying
passivity, a position that Richard also finds himself in by the end of the play.
In Richard's theater, we may enjoy the entertainment of human interaction
and Richard's playing on the false beliefs, narrow-minded expectations,
pride, and jealousies of others. By the end, impersonal divine forces deter
mine historical outcomes and leave even kings and queens mere pawns in a
larger game. Individuals are signifiers ("flag," "sign," "breath," "bubble") with
out true signified to back them up.
But is this not what Richard makes of others too? I like to propose to
students the possibility that neither vision of theatricality leaves us with a
sense of characterological plenitude. Instead, we might consider if Richard's
performances too try to construct a world in which others are mere ciphers
and their internal estimations of him do not matter. He is content to pro
duce the conditions within which others can no longer feasibly counteract
him. The inner self of his victims, we notice, is not necessarily affected by
Richard's performances; it has merely become irrelevant.12 Similarly, the
divinely ordained theatricality of Margaret's speech has the profound effect
of leaving human beings without a core of agency or will. Finding himself

effectively vanquished, not by any one person but instead by a frighteningly
communal counter-theater, Richard faces the torture of self-division on the
eve of the Battle at Bosworth, a self-division from which there is no way out
and that leaves him feeling as if he is nothing?if he is both villain and not
villain, if he both loves and hates himself, the equation adds up to zero.
How, finally, does Richmond fit in? Does he represent an individual in
control of his own destiny, a more effective king? Is he a pawn in a divine
plan for England? While on the face of it, Richmond seems to fulfill God's
plan with a heroic masculinity to match, combining contradictory Christian
and warrior mentalities, few critics are now content to read him as a positive
replacement for Richard. With King James's speech as well as the Homily
Against Disobedience in mind, students appreciate the ideological obstacles
Richmond has to overcome in order not to be seen as a satanic rebel.William
Carroll claims that Richmond ironically gets away with seizing the crown
rather than going through the more legitimate channels of succession by
offering to reestablish order and ritual (1992). E. Pearlman appears to voice
a consensus when he remarks, "Richmond's thoroughly conventional lan
guage is disciplined, ordered, measured, and drab. It demonstrates compe
tence but lacks charisma and inspires loyalty but not love" (1992,59). Barbara
Hodgdon's view of Richmond hinges on both a providential and a secular
reading, as she calls him an "ideological function," whose word choices so
resemble his enemy's that we find that "replacing a false tyrant with a true
king simply exchanges one fiction for another, each marked by the same
rhetorical mask" (1991,114-15).That such arguments are, each in their own
way, persuasive suggests to students that we need not necessarily read a play's
explicit conclusion as the final determination of its argument with regard to
kingship. Students are sometimes deeply troubled by the possibility that
Richmond may be no different from Richard or such an empty figurehead
that his accession leaves us with a feeling of loss rather than jubilation.
The discussion that ensues from this helps students turn their interpre
tive skills on themselves, find out where they stand, and see where their own
opinions come from and how their own readings are ideologically and his
torically formed. The larger question is whether our twenty-first-century
views of identity and history as shaped by human action as well as larger
social forces rather than providence conflict with Shakespeare's early modern
perspective or whether the play itself invites a subversive understanding of its
ending. Of course, critics have answered this question in widely different
ways, and much room is left for debate. In our multiple readings, I try to
show the class, we can see this play as not simply presenting a providential or
secular reading of history and identity, but as being about the struggle
Martine van Elk 13
between these views. In this sense, Richard III does precisely what Phyllis
Rackin claims the entire sequence of history plays does.13
A look at how twentieth-century filmmakers have addressed these ques
tions helps the students recognize that modern texts are no less mediated,
ideologically motivated, and historically determined than the early modern
play. For me, the most efficient and effective way to introduce film has been
to show clips of the openings and closings of three of the best-known film
versions of the play, Laurence Olivier's 1955 film, Jane Howell's 1983 BBC
version, and Richard Loncraine's 1995 Richard III, featuring Ian McKellen. I
begin by showing students the BBC opening, which most closely follows the
text and presents us with what might be called a "neutral" version, in prop
er costume, with few filmic effects, and with little in the way of setting that
could not be achieved on stage. Small touches direct us to an assessment of
the character, such as the way in which Richard is associated with the dark
when he walks over to the center of the stage, but on the whole it is quite
difficult to know what to make of him in this version. Ron Cook delivers
his lines quickly, intelligently, with the occasional serious look or slight smile,
but the production does not overtly tell us whether the psychological motive
is key or whether Richard is fooling us, whether we should take his politi
cal oratory as genuine or false, and whether he is going to be entertaining or
not. In other words, for much of the speech, especially the first two sections,
we cannot quite tell who is speaking: is Richard delivering the known facts
about his character? Is he making fun of the historical accounts of him?
Howell does a fine job of leaving these matters undecided at the outset.
Predictably, Olivier makes much more of the medium of film than
Howell, introducing a shot of a drawing of the crown, followed by the spec
tacular coronation of Edward IV, including an indoor ceremony and an out
door parade. Under his directorial guidance, Olivier lets us know, the text
will be changed to fit his specific narrative and cinematic interests. Jack
Jorgens argues that the movie centers on how Richard hollows out the
medieval habit of placing tremendous value on ritual as an ordering mecha
nism. This reading works very well for the opening of the film, which dwells
on ritual only to have it briefly but effectively interrupted by Richard's sly
turn to the camera. Richard proceeds to take us from the outdoor revelry
back into the empty space of ceremony, which he can now, all by himself, fill
with his equally spectacular ego. Olivier tackles the speech as an elaborate
virtuoso performance that shows students the degree to which acting con
ventions have changed between 1955 and now. Rather than giving us a sub
dued yet appealing introduction to the character, as in the BBC version,
Olivier takes pains to place his hero utterly at the center of everything and
make him attractive in a devilish sort of way. Emphasizing the metatheatrical
aspects of the opening speech, Oliviers Richard at one point takes the cam
era by the "hand" and leads it to the throne, establishing intimacy with the
viewer to announce his privileged relation with us but also to reflect on cin
ematic codes and their ability to suggest this type of intimate rapport.
Though the exposition element at times takes over from a more contempla
tive treatment of the opening speech, Olivier cleverly has the camera take
shots from different angles and at different distances of his protagonist so that
we become aware of the possibility of multiple perspectives on him and the
difficulty of coming close unless he lets us.
After having watched a stage version and a highly cinematic version, we
move to a film that is, like the play, aware of its own medium in a subversive
way.14 Unlike Olivier, Loncraine leaves exposition out of the speech itself, by
giving us first a pre-credit opening in which Richard kills Henry VI in the
style of a gangster movie, followed by a long, wordless sequence in which we
are introduced to all of the characters as well as the 1930s setting. The filmic
prologue serves to establish its and the original stage production's interest in
imagining a fascist take-over in England between the World Wars. Students
love to explore the complex use of cinematic form and quotation in the
opening: before any word is spoken, we have already been exposed to the
genres of war film, gangster movie, and the "heritage film" without any of
these being dominant. This mixing of genres allows us to consider what
models of identity and masculinity are traditionally offered in these types of
movies and how this movie parodies and yet exploits them all.
Loncraine is generally at pains to suggest different explanations for
Richard's behavior, treating him as a product of his society, of his childhood,
and of his own ambition. The wordless sequence at the beginning empha
sizes that the privilege of the English royals has been made possible by
Richard's brutal violence. This society's veneer of civilization masks fascist
cruelty and is bound to be destroyed because of it. Richard's brief encounter
with his mother and her troubled looks when he begins to utter his speech
show where McKellen feels the problem with the character lies: it suggests a
loveless childhood and maternal rejection as a second, important rationaliza
tion for Richard's behavior in the psychological realm.15 Already, we have
been provided with psychological and political explanations for Richard,
though Loncraine moves on to introduce further possibilities.
Highlighting the political nature of the very first section of the opening
speech, McKellen delivers the first few lines as a public oration to celebrate
the York victory. The film cuts in mid-sentence right before "capers nimbly
in a lady's chamber" (Richard HI 1983, 12) by zooming in on Richard's
mouth and transferring the scene to the most private and most explicitly
physical of places, the lavatory, for the "psychological" second section of the
Martine van Elk 15
speech?body and psyche are closely linked. Interestingly, the cut happens
precisely where many students place the beginning of more overt parody of
the political rhetoric in the opening. After urinating while discussing his
deformity (and flushing the toilet exactly on the word "Deformed" in line
20), Richard looks in the mirror. He reflects in a quiet, pensive voice on his
inability to "court an amorous looking-glass" (15) and his ability to "smile,
and murder whiles I smile," the metatheatrical lines taken from 3 Henry VI
(3.2.182). But just as we are fooled into thinking that Richard is finally
showing us his true self, he notices the camera in the mirror and begins to
address us gleefully regarding his plans for his enemies, in the "theatrical"
final part of the speech. From here, he speaks to us directly, in a manner that
has by now become a parody of Olivier's groundbreaking use of the method
in 1955. Complicating the political and psychological readings of Richard
with his cinematic theatricality, Loncraine chooses to pre-empt any meta
physical reading. It is characteristic of his film is that the script omits the final
lines of the soliloquy that refer to the prophecy; systematically any trace of
the providential and the Tudor Myth is erased in this film, which is the least
interested in religion of the three. Instead, we feel that we have been treated
to three different performances, public Richard, private Richard, and
Richard the actor, all of which merge with and reject each other.
After watching these three movie versions of the same speech, the class
explores what in each makes Richard attractive to the audience and to what
degree he is already problematized from the start. We also look at the range
of explanations offered for his character: in previous history by the BBC
(which relies on a viewing of other history plays), in his Machiavellian ambi
tion by Olivier, and in a combination of social ostracizing, violent tenden
cies, and maternal loathing by Loncraine. Each of these, we note, is ground
ed in a different sense of history and its causes, but none follows the provi
dential narrative. This conclusion brings us to a viewing of the ending of the
three films. Students are often struck by the fact that not one of these ver
sions is content to rest with the original ending. Each director adds some sort
of statement to distance him- or herself from a providential conclusion, and
this can be seen, for instance, in the fact that no one has Richmond single
handedly kill Richard, in spite of the clear stage directions to this effect:
"Enter [KING] RICHARD [at one door] and [HENRY EARL OF] RICH
MOND [at another]. They fight. RICHARD is slain' (at 5.8.1).
Olivier stages Richard's death most explicitly as a ritual slaughter of an
animal or scapegoat, a reading that also seems to have inspired the BBC ver
sion. The butchering of Richard (with a knife cutting his throat) ends with
a dying moment in which, H. R. Coursen proposes, Richard's look at the
cross on the hilt of his sword suggests a multiplicity of possible readings, rang
ing from his final repentance to his sure damnation (2000, 101). Is Richard
looking at his sword or at the cross? How do we feel when we watch him
die? Students are divided in their responses. Olivier skips Richmond's final
speech. Instead, he has Lord Stanley find the recklessly discarded crown in a
bush and hold up it up for Richmond, who is only seen from a distance. No
actual coronation ends the film to return us to the opening. Ceremony has
for ever been transformed, it seems, and we can no longer naively believe in
its worth. Instead the crown is left suspended in the air during the last shot.
While the ending may not tell us whether Richard is saved or damned, a
providential reading of his evil is all the same hinted at in his dying moments.
The final shift to the central symbol of crown allows the viewer to consider
it both a physical object and an abstraction. But what do we feel about the
crown as a symbol? Are we led to critique its centrality to this society and
the handling of the problem of Richard, or do we respect its power and
respond with satisfaction at its having finally been properly placed? Olivier
does not provide us with unequivocal answers to these questions.
Howell's version more explicitly overcomes a providential reading, by
adding material that makes the play a perverse parody of it: in the final direc
tor's coda after Richmond's last, re-ordering speech, we see Margaret in what
the director considers the "image ... of a reverse Piet?" (Fenwick 1999,237),
sitting on a pile of dead bodies, holding the naked, wounded corpse of
Richard and laughing hysterically. If there is a benign providence at work
here, it is hard to see why the blood-thirsty Margaret would be rewarded in
this way, and her positioning as Mary and Richard as Christ rather suggests
a human perversion of divine purpose. Howell brings us close to an
Adelman-like vision of Margaret as a stand-in for the evil mother, enjoying
her son's dreadful murder, a vision that is also part of McKellen's reading of
Richard; as in McKellen's case, Howell may fail to distance herself from
Richard's or, depending on your perspective, Shakespeare's matrophobia.The
fact that this short ending comes after giving us Richmond's speech in full
undercuts the Tudor myth further than Olivier does by simply leaving it out.
While we may be happy that all the slaughter is now over, the witch-like
cackling we are left with continues to resonate.
Finally, Loncraine gives us the most comic ending of the three. After a
lengthy interval in which Richard's psychological anxieties and astonishing
cruelty have made us feel awkward, to say the least, we are left laughing once
again at his theatricality. In the widely lauded final battle scene, Richard runs
up a partly demolished building, followed by an armed Richmond who has
waved off all his fellow soldiers. In following the conventions of the gangster
movie, the lead-up to the end encourages us to expect a final showdown
between good and evil, but then subverts our expectations with the film's
Martine van Elk 17
most explicitly meta-filmic moment. Richmond points his gun, while

Richard offers his hand to him, saying "Let us to't, pell mell? / If not to
heaven, then hand in hand to hell" (5.6.42-43), the lines preceding his "ora
tion" to his army in the play. On making the offer, Richard falls back of his
own volition into the burning fire below. Richmond pointlessly fires at him
and slyly smiles into the camera. We end up watching Richard's sardonic
laughter as he falls into a fire, while the soundtrack plays Al Jolson's "I'm sit
ting on top of the world."
In Loncraine 's version, we get the sense that Richmond is no different
from Richard. He is another performer happy to make it look as if he has
killed Richard and appreciative of him as a player. Richmond's solemn
Christian speeches have been cut, and we are reminded that, in having
Richmond present for a number of the scenes in which Richard play-acts
his way to power, the new king has had an excellent schooling in the
Machiavellian arts of politics. The Jolson song, like so much else in this film,
is a self-conscious reference to cinema as a medium, as critics have noted.16
And the final shot of the laughing Richard is a deliberately artificial ending
that directs us more to the medium and history of cinema than to the his
torical Richard. This means students can forego the question of the more
faithful representation of Richard and explore the medium of film itself, a
move that is also present in the play, which allows us to consider the theater
in a similarly self-conscious way, without worrying about an authentic rep
resentation of the king.
With the partial exception of Olivier, these modern readings, then, are
unwilling to abandon Richard's theatricality entirely or to celebrate
unequivocally a providential overcoming of his evil machinations. My ques
tion to the class is to what extent the play itself may warrant such a reading
and whether these endings are modern impositions designed to appeal to a
more secular audience with a sense of identity that matches Richard's. My
hope is that students have learned to see that this issue is a complex one and
that multiple answers are open to them. One semester, a particular group of
students responded to the discussion in a performance of the opening speech
at the end of term. All dressed in black, six students performed the speech,
each taking a particular set of lines and moving from one person to another
at a point where they felt Richard's self-presentation shifted. It was an effec
tive comment on the slipperiness of the character and our difficulty in reach
ing final conclusions about him.
My aim in teaching Richard III, like other texts from the period, is to
focus our discussion not only on our sense of history, but also on how any
particular view of the nature of historical change must be based on an ideo
logically and historically determined perspective on subjectivity, class, gen
der, and the social order at large. In other words, we do not simply argue for
our varying positions on the text itself, but must become self-conscious
about what is at stake in our differences of opinion. Such a focus enables stu
dents to become sophisticated interpreters, not only of the literary text, but
also of themselves and their own perspectives on the world around them.
This is what makes up the "dialogue" between text and reader that Smith
advocates. As this essay has shown, such a dialogue, which is, or should be, a
key component of teaching Shakespeare in the twenty-first century, can be
incorporated into a classroom experience that is informed not only by ample
reference to historical context but also by modern film production. Our
teaching practices do not have to be either historicist or performance-ori
ented. If combine the two approaches successfully, we may offer students a
richer experience of the text and of themselves as readers of it.
Notes
1 This orientation towards performance has been especially important in sec

ondary school education, but also in studies that deal with teaching Shakespeare at
the college level. A key early advocate of such an approach was Miriam Gilbert
(1984); now the work of people like Milla Riggio, also editor of an MLA volume
on the subject (1999), continues to argue for such an approach.
2 See Howard and Rackin (1997) for this type of reading of the play and
Richard as a character. For the debates on the history of the subject, there is a fine
summary of its problems and complications in the introduction to Elizabeth
Hansons Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England (1998, 1-23).
3 Louis Montrose's essay on A Midsummer Nights Dream (1988) connects
Forman's dream with patriarchal anxieties about female rule in the period.
Greenblatt tells the famous anecdote from the dairy of John Manningham in which
Shakespeare preempts Burbage, who had been playing Richard III and was invited
to a female spectator's house, by ensuring he was "entertained and at his game ere
Burbage came." The anecdote ends with Shakespeare's punch line message to
Burbage that "William the Conqueror was before Richard III" (1997, 507).
Greenblatt reads it as evidence of the attraction of the role of Richard III, in spite of
his deformity. Whether we believe the anecdote or not, we have here another diary
entry that records an instance in which a monarch is linked, albeit indirectly, with a
sexual encounter with a subject.
4 All references to this and other plays by Shakespeare are to the Norton edi
tion, edited by Stephen Greenblatt (1997).
5 See Spivack (1958) andWeimann (1978) for the classic discussions of the con
nections between Richard and the morality tradition.
6 Here, it is useful to refer students to 3 Henry VI (entitled Richard Duke of York
in the Norton edition), 3.2.153-81, where Richard makes the relationship of nature
and love to his mother explicit.
Martine van Elk 19
7 See Torey s essay (2000) on Richard III and early modern physiognomy, which
draws connections with some fascinating other texts on deformity and appearance,
from oft-quoted sources by Bacon and Montaigne to lesser known works of the
period.
8 See Richard Wheeler on this moment (especially 1999, 183). Wheeler makes
the important point that few are actually convinced by Richard's manipulations.
Richard does not feel the need to convince others that his deformity actually means
what he says it means. He simply shapes the circumstances so that his deformity can
be used to his advantage rather than to his disadvantage, regardless of what everyone
knows it means. For this reason, Wheeler calls Richard, "an actor who imposes the
conditions of stage onto the real world" (184), an effort that is doomed to fail
because, Wheeler argues, eventually reality overrides the artificiality of the stage. This
is where my reading of the play departs from Wheeler's, because I believe that the
"reality" that overcomes Richard's playmaking is itself another theatrical creation?
it is not a matter of the real overcoming art, but a matter of which artificial creation
is more effective in harnessing public consent and imposing its ideology on the audi
ence. From Wheeler s psychoanalytic standpoint, the limitations of Richard's power
return us to his childhood. Cf. also Adelman (1992).
9 See Garber (1987), Chames (1999), and Torey (2000) for different arguments
about this ability on Richard's part to manipulate what others think of his deformity.
10 Greenblatt (1997, 507-512) and Hodgdon (1991, 123) highlight the role of
improvisation in Richard's character.
11 Alexander Leggatt reminds us that Richard may confide in the audience at
times but he also hides a lot from us and by the end of the play retreats more and
more into his own sphere (1988, 35-36).
12 Numerous critics have discussed the seduction scenes with Lady Anne and
Queen Elizabeth in terms of their inner consent. Yet, it is not necessary to conclude
anything about whether they are ultimately persuaded by Richard. In fact, all
Richard appears to be after is their explicit consent, without really bothering to
know what goes on within, because their possible inner dissent does not have any
impact on his position. For students, then, the key question when it comes to the
seduction scenes is not so much why the women behave in the way they do, but
what is at stake in our perception of them. What does our opinion of the women's
responses to Richard tell us about our views of gender, the power of persuasion, and
the relationship between power and subjectivity in general?
13 As noted before, Rackin does not make this claim for Richard HI, which she
treats as an early play that is as yet unabashedly providential (1990).
14 For compelling arguments about how Loncraine plays with cinema and cin
ematic history, see especially Loehlin (1997), Buhler (2000), and Howlett (2000).
15 Ian McKellen makes clear in his screenplay version that he attributes a good
deal of significance to Richard's relationship with his mother and the possible con
sequences of maternal rejection for his current behavior. He writes, "Whatever jus
tice there is in the Duchess of York's disaffection towards her youngest son, it is based
on her disappointment and disgust at his physique. Perhaps it was from his mother
that Richard learnt how to hate so fiercely" (1996, 236). Key visual exchanges such
as these and the scene in which the Duchess curses Richard (4.4 in the play) do
much to bring out McKellen's thesis.
16 Loncraine's is alluding to the ending of White Heat, the 1949 James Cagney
gangster film, which has Cagney saying, "Made it, Ma, top of the world!" before
killing himself in an explosion. It is one of the many moments of pastiche in the film,
which render it a comment on cinema, not 1930s history, as Coursen has argued
(2000). Again, see Loehlin (1997), Buhler (2000), and Howlett (2000).
Works Cited
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Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest. New York: Routledge.
Buhler, Stephen M. 2000. "Camp Richard III and the Burdens of (Stage/Film)
History." In Shakespeare, Film, Fin de Si?cle, ed. Mark Thornton Burnett and
Ramona Wray. Houndmills, Eng: Macmillan.
Carroll, William. 1992. "'The Form of Law': Ritual and Succession in Richard ///." In
True Rites and Maimed Rites: Ritual and Anti-Ritual in Shakespeare and His Age, ed.
Linda Woodbridge and Edward Berry. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Chames, Linda. 1999. "The Monstrous Body in King Richard III!91993. Reprint. In
Critical Essays on Shakespeare's Richard III, ed. Hugh Macrael Richmond.
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Coursen, H. R. 2000. "Filming Shakespeare's History: Three Films of Richard HI." In
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, ed. Russell Jackson.
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Fenwick, Henry. 1999. "The BBC Production of Richard ///." 1983. Reprint. In
Critical Essays on Shakespeare's Richard III, ed. Hugh Macrael Pdchmond.
Garber, Marjorie. 1987. Shakespeare's Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality.
New York: Methuen.
Gilbert, Miriam. 1984. "Teaching Shakespeare through Performance." Shakespeare
Quarterly 35: 601-08.
Greenblatt, Stephen, gen. ed. 1997. The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford
Edition. New York: Norton.
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Hodgdon, Barbara. 1991. The End Crowns All: Closure and Contradiction in
Shakespeare's History. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Howard, Jean, and Phyllis Rackin. 1997. Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of
Shakespeare's English Histories. London: Routledge.
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Jorgens,Jack J. 1977. Shakespeare on Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Leggatt, Alexander. 1988. Shakespeare's Political Drama:The History Plays and the Roman
Plays. London: Routledge.
Martine van Elk 21
Loehlin, James. 1997. '"Top of the world, ma': Richard HI and Cinematic
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Determined To Prove A Villain Criticism Pedagogy and Richard III

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"Determined to Prove a Villain": Criticism, Pedagogy, and "Richard III"

Author(s): Martine van Elk

Martine van Elk

combination of archaic-sounding language parative study of early modern

of viewing historical events and the world at large?as governed by a divine

the outward to the inward, from a collective to an individual sense of self).

tives on identity we find in the play: while Machiavelli's humanism moves

ior, Richard moves on to highlight his theatrical sense of himself, in a series

This is a compelling explanation from a psychological perspective, which

Recent criticism, however, has called attention to the ambiguity of texts

together the realm of politics and the realm of psychology: it returns us to

me as I halt by them" (23) seem ludicrously and deliberately overdone. The

Barbara Hodgdon offers an alternative to the psychoanalytic interpreta

I called thee then, poor shadow, "painted queen"?

This theatricality opposes Richard's version in that it is uncontrolled by indi

of leaving human beings without a core of agency or will. Finding himself

most explicitly meta-filmic moment. Richmond points his gun, while

1 This orientation towards performance has been especially important in sec

Adelman, Janet. 1992. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeares

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