I spent the weekend obsessing on Shakespeare, having received Richard III from Netflix. The version set in 1930s England—which is fantastic. Ian McKellen is astonishingly evil as Richard, and I loved it so much I bought a copy. I’d never read or seen Richard III before, and I enjoyed it so much I also listened to the audio version (also marvelous) and watched the Laurence Olivier version. I tend to get really into things, sometimes.
Anyway, I was astonished by Shakespeare’s brilliant meditation on tyranny. This is, I’m sure, old hat to people who are familiar with the play, but it was new to me. Richard III is about how the tyrant’s effort to put himself above the law is, at bottom, an effort to put himself above reality—to escape from the moral law which cannot be escaped. Richard believes morality is a game he’s risen above; like Hobbes or Holmes or Nietzsche, morality is to him simply an arbitrary product of force or convention:
Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe:
Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law.
And throughout the play, Richard focuses on nothing but naked and temporary self-interest. When he approaches Queen Elizabeth about marrying her daughter (after having killed her sons) he seems to expect her to consult nothing more than her immediate self-interest in the deal. He cannot even imagine people acting from any nobler motive. He doesn’t for a minute expect that she’s fooled by his various concocted moral and emotional arguments—she very effectively demolishes every statement he makes in that direction. But he thinks she’ll come around and be, as they say, “practical.”
(In some sense, she is, as is Anne at the beginning of the play, when she marries Richard after his killing of her first husband. Richard makes scornful comments about women’s fickleness in both of these cases, but these women are, of course, living in a world where they have no rights; no protection. It’s hardly any wonder that they might just accept their suffering situation, as no doubt did many women in the days of Soviet Russia or American slavery.)
But while Richard thinks himself so clever because he’s able to play the game of conquering men in the world of words, what he’s really doing is realizing an hallucination; not, as he imagines, triumping over the world of things. With nobody to say no, there is no limit to his ambition, his speculation, his imagination, his whims, except reality. When he succeeds he will have reached a point where there can be no losses...and hence no real victories; where none can refuse...so none can truly accede. He seems even to imagine at times that nature itself should bend to his whims, and becomes so accustomed to being obeyed by lackeys that he grows irritated at even having to tell them what to do before they do it!:
Richard: (To Catesby) Fly to the duke.
(To Ratcliff) Post thou to Salisbury
When thou comest thither—
(To Catesby)
Dull, unmindful villain,
Why stand'st thou still, and go'st not to the duke?Catesby: First, mighty sovereign, let me know your mind,
What from your grace I shall deliver to him.Richard: O, true, good Catesby: bid him....*
Richard becomes increasingly irritable and paranoid throughout the play, too, because having succeeded in gaining the throne through deceit and violence, and the willingness of his friends to lie for him, he of course cannot trust anyone. And here we get to what I think is the real theme of Richard’s experience—he succeeds in substituting fear for love. He started out saying that he would—“since I cannot prove a lover.../ I am determined to prove a villain”—and he manages to replace a world of order, law, and voluntary attachment with a world of violence, coercion, and terror, all of which is, of course, under the disguise of love. He has the false love of a people who have been beaten into submission, like Elizabeth’s (apparent) yielding to coercion in his confrontation with her:
In her [Elizabeth’s daughter] consists my happiness and thine;
Without her, follows to this land and me,
To thee, herself, and many a Christian soul,
Death, desolation, ruin and decay:
It cannot be avoided but by this;
It will not be avoided but by this.
Love me or I’ll kill you, in other words; the very slogan of tyranny. But you cannot force love—just as you cannot truly escape conscience—whether it be the love of a woman or the love of a people. (“Those whom we fight against,” says Richmond, “Had rather have us win than him they follow: / For what is he they follow? truly, gentlemen, / A bloody tyrant and a homicide”). This Richard learns and expresses in his beautifully revealing climactic speech after being visited in his nightmares by his victims:
O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me...!
What do I fear? myself? there’s none else by:
Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.
He knows nobody loves him—they obey him only out of fear. But that’s okay, right? Needing love is weakness, just like conscience is weakness. He has himself, and that’s all he needs—he is, like all tyrants, a solipsist. But does Richard really love Richard? Of course not. Nobody else does, because he has not acted in a way that deserves love, and he doesn’t love himself for the same reason and because he has not done good to himself. Still, the tyrant tries to talk himself into believing that he loves himself:
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am:
Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why:
Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?
Alack. I love myself. Wherefore? for any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O, no! alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself!
I am a villain: yet I lie. I am not.
Fool, of thyself speak well: fool, do not flatter.
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain....
There is no creature loves me;
And if I die, no soul shall pity me:
Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself
Find in myself no pity to myself?
In the end, Richard III is a takedown of those who think they are too sophisticated and clever for the moral philosophers; who think such things are only matters of convention, and that the moral can be transcended for some other purpose. But you cannot escape the laws of human nature. The tyrant can kill, but he cannot give life; he can destroy, but he cannot build; he can ignore, but cannot escape the moral order of the universe, that all men know—and that he knows they know. In the end, the tyrant truly is a solipsist—and thus lives only in sterility and vacuum.
The theme is beautifully captured early in the play, when Brakenbury and the assassins speak to Clarence in the dungeon. First, Clarence relates his nightmare to Brakenbury, who reflects on the fact that even royals are subject to such normal human weaknesses as nightmares:
Princes have but their tides for their glories,
An outward honour for an inward toil...
betwixt their tides and low names,
There's nothing differs but the outward fame.
Soon the assasins arrive, and they reflect on their own consciences. Though played as comedy, their ideas are profound. The commands of the state cannot override justice:
First Murderer: What, art thou afraid?
Second Murderer: Not to kill him, having a warrant for it; but to be damned for killing him, from which no warrant can defend us.
The First Murderer counsels the Second to silence his conscience. He can only cover its mouth, or block his own sight of it, or try to focus only on his monetary rewards for evading it—but he cannot truly eradicate it:
Second Murderer: ‘Faith, some certain dregs of conscience are yet within me.
First Murderer: Remember our reward, when the deed is done.
Second Murderer: ‘Zounds, he dies: I had forgot the reward.
First Murderer: Where is thy conscience now?
Second Murderer: In the Duke of Gloucester’s purse.
The knowledge of wrong, the Second Murderer reflects, is “a dangerous thing,” because—as Richard will discover—“it makes a man a coward.” It can’t be escaped:
a man cannot steal, but it accuseth him; he cannot swear, but it cheques him; he cannot lie with his neighbour’s wife, but it detects him: ‘tis a blushing shamefast spirit that mutinies in a man’s bosom; it fills one full of obstacles....
These two conversations at the jail work like a syllogism: Brakenbury reflects a) that even royals are but men; the assassins that b) all men are subject to justice and conscience. The conclusion that follows from these premises is dramatized in the action of the play.
Is Shakespeare right? Was Stalin haunted in his nightmares? (His daughter defected; his wife shot herself.) Was Hitler? Is Kim Jong Il? I can only think so. Like a drunk man, a tyrant may temporarily ignore the law nature has set down for him, but he cannot escape it. He cannot escape the fact that there are poisons for the soul as well as for the body, or that love cannot be forced. This is a theme beautifully addressed in Auden’s poem “The Hidden Law.” Of course, maybe I’m just foolish to think that the tyrant is haunted in his dreams. But if he is not, why must the tyrant lie to everyone, at all times, and most of all to himself?—convincing himself that he is doing his people a favor, and that the world trembles at him (when really they’re shivering with laughter)? For myself, I agree with Shakespeare.
*-Another example, when Richard strikes a messenger...and then tries to pay him off:
Third Messenger: My lord, the army of the Duke of Buckingham--
Richard: Out on you, owls! nothing but songs of death? [strikes him] Take that, until thou bring me better news.
Third Messenger: The news I have to tell your majesty
Is, that by sudden floods and fall of waters,
Buckingham's army is dispersed and scatter'd;
And he himself wander'd away alone,
No man knows whither.Richard: I cry thee mercy:
There is my purse to cure that blow of thine...
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