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COPYRIGHT 2000 Rice University
Well, say there is no kingdom then for Richard;
What other pleasure can the world afford?
I'll make my heaven in a lady's lap,
And deck my body in gay ornaments,
And witch sweet ladies with my words and looks.
O miserable thought, and more unlikely
Than to accomplish twenty golden crowns!
III Henry VI(III.ii.146-52)
Grim-visaged War hath smoothed his wrinkled front;
And now instead of mounting barb[grave{e}d] steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking glass;
I, that am rudely stamped, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to see my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity.
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determin[grave{e}d to prove a villain.
Richard III (I.i.9-30)
For New Historicist Stephen Greenblatt, "The study of the literary is the study of contingent, particular, intended, and historical embedded works." [1] In Greenblatt's opinion, documents from the past, whether they are nominally "historical" or "literary," "cannot be divorced from textuality, and all texts can be compelled to confront the crisis of undecidability revealed in the literary text. Hence history loses its epistemological innocence, while literature loses an isolation that had come to seem more a prison than a privilege." [2] If we agree with Greenblatt, we might argue, then, that all texts are "historical" and all texts are "literary." Thus, if we will understand one text, we must necessarily examine its conversation with or "embeddedness" within its contingent texts. I intend in this paper to examine such a conversation between Shakespeare's Richard III and three other texts, which are both historical and literary: Ovid's Ars amatoria and Amores from first-century B.C. Rome and Andreas Capellan us's Tractatus de amore from late-twelfth-century France.
Scholarly attention to the character of Shakespeare's Richard III has been anything but convergent over the years. Richard has been variously described as an intrepid warrior, a comic or satirical Vice, a diabolic Machiavel, a "heartless villain of Senecan melodrama," a "spurned child," a deft deceiver, a proficient rhetorician, and even a tragic or picaresque hero. [3] Certainly, we have confronted the "crisis of undecidability" in this text and its portrayal of this character. Our problem stems, I believe, from the fact that most readers have failed to place Shakespeare's Richard III (at least act I, scene ii) within its appropriate set of kindred works and that they have taken Richard at his word that he could not "prove a lover." Thus, in this scene, where, in the space of merely 200 lines, he transforms Anne from a spitting, vituperative virago to his submissive bride-to-be, these readers relish with astonishment that he is able to do such wooing, but they do not often resolve how he does it. [4]
In fact, according to John Palmer, "The critics are divided upon the merits of this famous scene. Some wish that Shakespeare had never written it, or declare that he could never have done so. Others are of the opinion that only Shakespeare could have succeeded or even attempted such an astonishing performance." [5] Some critics assert, "This courting scene[ldots]is a great triumph," a "tou[r] de force," and "one of the most remarkable in the play." [6] Others describe it as "bravado in brazenness"--"seldom surpassed for sheer audacity"--and "unparalleled, high-fantastical wooing!" [7] Still others muse that the scene is "rather bewildering" but "by no means unnatural." [8] Some maintain that it "exceeds the limits of probability" because "it is altogether too violent to be convincing"; others, in fact, say that "it defies belief." [9] Violent, bewildering, brazen, audacious, or not, in these few lines (just forty-three speeches), Richard persuades the woman whose husband, father, and father-in-law he has mur dered to enter his bedchamber as his wife. How does he do it? While interpretations of Richard as Vice, Machiavel, or rhetorician certainly have their applications, the fact that has been assumed but scarcely addressed in any systematic way is that he wins Anne specifically because he "proves a lover." Indeed, he is a consummately skillful "courtly" lover. Although he denies that he can play such a role, the very skills he needs to be a successful lover are the same confrontatiousness and brilliant use of stratagems or ruses which have served him well in the past as both soldier and villain and will serve him well in the future in winning a kingship. He needs only to become a "soldier of love." I intend to examine, then, what it means for Richard to be a courtly lover--as the dark underbelly of that code of behavior is embedded in classical and medieval essays on love conquest--and to examine how our understanding of Anne's seduction is enhanced by our understanding of these historical/literary, contingent wr itings.
At the onset, we must search out the appropriate adjunctive texts. Nearly all of the chronicles, friendly to Richard or not, agree that he was a superlative soldier. So that is a "given." However, the whole scene between Richard and Anne is unhistorical--or at least we have long since "redecided" the history of this man. We have long known, contrary to the Tudor political propaganda of Polydore Vergil, Edward Hall, Sir Thomas More, Raphael Holinshed, and John Rous [10] --all of whom, either directly or indirectly, were Shakespeare's "historical" sources--that Richard was not a hunchback, but was tolerably fair of form, feature, and character. We know that Richard and Anne probably played together as children and that they may have loved each other for years. We know that he actually courted her for two years, remained married to her for over a decade, and fathered her son Edward, over whose death as a child both he and Anne grieved. According to Sir Clements Markham's study, originally published early in thi s century, they lived at Middleham in the North, "winning golden opinions from the people [ldots] and acquiring great popularity in Yorkshire." [11] Moreover, Anne was only technically married (betrothed or contracted) to Edward of Lancaster, a marriage that his mother, Margaret of Anjou, approved for political reasons alone. Thus, if Richard did murder Henry VI and Edward (but there is a "loss of epistemological innocence" in the "historical" accounts of these events), they would not have been Anne's husband and father-in-law anyway. [12] Most importantly, the actual wooing scene that appears in Richard III does not exist in any of these chronicles. It is a literary fiction created by Shakespeare for a specific purpose. Therefore, while Shakespeare may have created Richard as a hunchbacked villain, based on the Tudor-spawned histories with which he was familiar, those texts have nothing to do with how he succeeds in this scene. We must look at other texts for the "history" in which this scene is embedded.
Neither will another contemporaneous "Richard" play help us. Thomas Legge's Richardus Tertius, performed at St. John's College, Cambridge, in 1579--80, seems at first to be that contingent text. In a wooing scene between then King Richard and his niece Elizabeth, we find some similarities with the wooing scene in Shakespeare. Such similarities have caused some scholars to assert a relationship between the two plays. [13] In the third play of Legge's trilogy, Richard has just received the news of his queen's death. After seeming to react with despair ("O cruel fates! O too cruel will of the Gods!" [IV.iv]), [14] Richard immediately turns to his next project at hand--"But hither my niece comes with a hesitating step. As a wooer, I shall begin to entice her to marriage"(IV.iv). In the following scene, Richard proposes marriage to Elizabeth, which she refuses, on grounds similar to Anne's, that he has killed her two brothers and, even more important to her, that the union would be incestuous. As in Shakespeare's play, this Richard's very forthright response is an admission of guilt, for which he grieves but does not weep, and a practical observation that he does not see why even the murders should prevent their marriage. However, to prove his love, he offers his breast to the sword, even at her hand. When she answers that she would rather die than marry him, he first threatens to kill her but then determines to "put off these things."
Several decades ago, George B. Churchill maintained that "it is difficult to compare the wooing scenes and not cherish the suspicion" that Richardus Tertius was one of Shakespeare's sources, albeit at...
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