Richard III, or What's that coming over the hill, is it a monster?
It is interesting now having read for two days and finished Richard III how amazing I find this play again. The drama begins with this glorious opening speech.
Made glorious summer by this sun of York..."
I really think that speech sums up the play, or at least the major theme of the play. Here’s a war veteran, who from birth has either been physically unattractive or thought himself physically unattractive; a man not suited to be able to
(wonderful onomatopoeia in that line – all those luxurious Luling about what the lick lick lick L sound. Perfect) but built for war, survival, strength. I think that’s what others like Ann see in him at the crucial moments in the play – he will keep them alive, or he’ll roll over them if they get in his way. A very dangerous man.
I think that the opening speech also sets us up to consider the legitimacy of Richard’s claims. Peace has been purchased at a tremendously high price and now all the court, heck all of England, seems well content to forget all that and think that comfort and luxury are the normal when Richard sees correctly or incorrectly that the normal is hard scrabble danger suffering pain and struggle. He even seems like some slightly edgy prophet telling the audience at least that even in "this weak piping time of peace" danger is around every corner and now they will see how someone survives it. This is a bit like the controversy between Thomas Hobbes and John Locke on whether the original state of nature is happy and joyful or “solitary poor nasty brutish and short”. Even in the play itself we see the defeated enemies of past wars lurking in the shadows, planning future disasters. Edward chooses to ignore such shadows as though by choosing to ignore them they will go away. Yet he is like the pacifist criticized by George Orwell who said
"One can only abjure violence because others are prepared to endure violence on their behalf."
The relationship here between Gloucester and Edward reminds me a great deal of the relationship between Shylock and Antonio in "Merchant of Venice"; just as Edward seems to choose a willed ignorance, so too does Antonio choose a generosity that borders on recklessness. Men like Gloucester and Shylock who are survivors look with contempt on such man, see them as marks or fools, and probably grow angry that those are the people in charge. It is, after all, well and good to have naïve, happy go lucky leaders running the ship of state ...until the ship hits an iceberg.
Sure Richard is a monster, murderous, rapacious, ruthless, strong, predatory. But he lives in an era (as I must say did Shakespeare) where that sort of personality is more capable of surviving both the tigers of the political jungle and the physical travails thrown at them by the world. There is I would venture to say almost a nobility about him like Homer's Odysseus, or John Milton’s Satan, or, as someone else has pointed out, Mary Shelley‘s later construct of the creature in Frankenstein. Like those other authors it seems Shakespeare is asking an age old question going back to the Greeks;
“Is life peace with the inconvenience of occasional war? or is life war with the illusion of occasional peace?"
We tend to judge Richard harshly because our modern experience is one of peace, luxury and self indulgence. We're all really very woke. But is it possible that this is the sort of personality which would allow the race to survive a calamity of tremendous proportions? IDK but I like that Shakespeare raises such a question in so wonderful a character. If we are able to look at the character of Richard not as some monster out there but rather as the monster we might have to become in order to fight the monsters (as Nietzsche suggested) I think the play takes on a whole new dimension.
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