Richard the Third—Who Died and Made Him King?

There’s no other play like Shakespeare’s Richard III, in which the main character, and a villain at that, has so much communication with the audience.  From the first scene we’re taken into Richard’s confidence.  He tells us his disappointments, his dreams, his plans.  Lame, hunchbacked, and seriously lacking in girl friends, Richard makes his “heaven to dream upon the crown.”  He intends to become king, and to do this he’s going to get rid of everyone who stands in his way.

Now this is as bad as it sounds, because Richard has already told a pack of lies about his brother the Duke of Clarence in the hope that their oldest brother, King Edward IV, will get rid of Clarence for him.  Richard is quite honest about his plans and their execution.  But, because he has established a relationship with us, we want to root for him.  We become his friends.  After all, he deserves to be king as much as anybody; his brothers are no paragons of virtue.  Clarence betrayed his own family the Yorks and sided with the Lancasters, then he betrayed the Lancasters.  King Edward is a shameless womanizer who at this point is dying of venereal disease.  And, if you’ve read Henry VI Part Three, the prequel to Richard III, you know that Richard is the best fighter of all the Yorks, a real go-getter on the battlefield.  In addition to all this, he’s the underdog; he has all his handicaps to deal with as well as being the third son.

So at the start of the play we’re all right with Richard’s designs, as questionable as they are, because he’s not much worse than the rest of the crew.  And he goes about his quest with such aplomb; no challenge is too daunting for him.  This includes getting Lady Anne to marry him, giving him a better claim to the throne, even though he killed her husband Prince Edward and her father-in-law King Henry VI.  He shrugs off these obstacles, reasoning that marrying her is “the readiest way to make the wench amends.”  So he intercepts her as she follows King Henry’s body and makes his proposal.  Incredibly, he succeeds, resorting to flattery and playing on her grief and loneliness.  He must have her for “your beauty, which did haunt me in my sleep /to undertake the death of all the world.”  When she leaves wearing his ring, even he can’t believe he’s actually done it.  “Was ever woman in this humor wooed?” he says, in wondering delight at his own persuasiveness, and we’re delighted along with him.  This is still all right with us, even when he ominously adds, “I will not keep her long.”  We have to admire the sheer audacity of it, and besides, how could she fall for that snow job?  She should have known better.

Switch to the Tower of London, where Clarence is in the slammer (thanks to Richard’s lies).  Richard tells all his friends how upset he is about it, and blames the Queen’s relatives for Clarence’s imprisonment.  But King Edward might still pardon Clarence, so Richard secretly hires his own murderers to get the job done, just in case.  Now this is a bad thing, but Clarence is not a sympathetic character.  He’s a serial traitor, and, at the end, a great whiner.  By the time he’s in the cask of wine, you want to say, “Thank heaven he’s finally quiet.”

So Richard still has our support.  We’re not going to miss any of his victims so far.  Nor will we miss Lord Hastings, who openly declines to support Richard for the crown, but still brags about how close he and Richard are.  That is, until Richard has him arrested on trumped-up charges of treason.  We wonder, what was this guy thinking?  Hastings himself must be wondering the same thing just before he loses his head.

By this time King Edward has died, leaving two sons.  Richard has been named Lord Protector; he’s to rule until Edward’s oldest son reaches the age of majority.  This gives him a great deal of power.  He uses it to have both of Edward’s sons locked in the Tower of London—an ominous move.  With the Duke of Buckingham’s help, he also uses it to have himself crowned king.  Now we should be happy for Richard because he’s finally reached his goal but, for the first time, we’re getting uneasy about the way things are going.  What happened to Richard’s responsibilities as Lord Protector?  If Richard is king, what about Edward’s oldest son?

The real rift comes when Richard proposes to Buckingham that the little princes be eliminated.  Buckingham, like us, recoils.  Instead of agreeing, he demands the reward he’s been promised, and Richard tells him to get lost.  Angry, and somewhat scared, Buckingham leaves Richard for good, and so do we.  Our split with Richard coincides with Buckingham’s.

Of course, Richard hires more murderers and the little princes are soon dispatched.  And we realize how his charm, wit, and daring have taken us in.  Now we see what a devil he really is, and he’s all the worse because he’s betrayed everyone, including us.  We’re horrified at his behavior and angry at the betrayal.  We’re also angry at ourselves for not seeing this coming; we had enough hints.  We want to say, “Somebody do something about this.”

So somebody does.  Henry, Earl of Richmond, gathers together the many nobles who oppose Richard, and brings an army to defeat him.  Richard collects his own army, and begins to think what else he needs to do to keep his crown.  Richmond intends to marry the dead King Edward’s daughter to strengthen his claim to the crown.  But Richard plans to beat him to it.

Here there’s still a flash of the old Richard left.  He tells us that he needs to marry King Edward’s daughter (also his niece and the sister of the two murdered princes!) “or else my kingdom stands on brittle glass.”  So he’ll go to her “a jolly thriving wooer.”  The little joke is hollow, though.  He’s lost us.  We’re no longer behind him.  We’re ready for Richmond to come and give it to him good.

Richard doesn’t talk to us anymore after that.  He’s isolated himself.  He’s focused only on keeping his crown.  He’s sacrificed his humanity for it; he’s obsessed with it.  One of the saddest scenes in the play is the one between Richard and his mother, when long-standing tensions between them become a permanent break.  She curses him and throws her support to his enemies.  “Thou camest on earth to make the earth my hell,” she tells him bitterly.  Richard doesn’t care and doesn’t bother to answer; he only cares about his crown and rushes off to defend it.  The irony is that it’s slipping away and will most certainly soon be gone.

So we stand by and watch until Richard is so consumed with guilt that he has no confidence left.  The night before his decisive battle, the ghosts of all the people he’s murdered beset him.  He wakes up in a panic, and never recovers.  That’s another irony--the crown has cost him his ability to keep it.  Richard’s life has become a torment to himself and everyone else, and when he finally dies in the Battle of Bosworth Field, we’re happy for the victors and almost relieved for him and ourselves.

In a rare flash of self-awareness, Richard says, “If I die, no soul will pity me.”  That truth hits home all the more because he had a relationship with us, his friends, and lost it by his own actions.  Because we participated in the play, the drama that is Richard’s life is all the more real to us.  This, I think, is the real power of Richard III.