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Shakespeare's Second Richard

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Travis Bogard
Travis Bogard*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley 4
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Extract

A writer is moulded out of faults, and the greatest become much more the better for having had the courage to be a little bad. All writers experiment in some degree with technique, but not many, after their apprenticeship has been served, appear willing to desert the manner in which one achievement has been attained for another, untried, yet potentially permitting fuller and more complex expressiveness. Even less frequently does an established writer change the manner of expression midway in the work, destroying the unity of effect by radical alterations in technique while the work is in progress. In a novel or poem, at least, the new manner is not likely to emerge unexpectedly; a work written for publication can be withheld until its parts are integrated. A dramatist, however—especially one working in close conjunction with a voracious theatre—may not have such an opportunity. Deadlines render revisions luxuries and make beneficial experimentation a catch-as-catch-can matter. Under such circumstances, discoveries that cannot be ignored are likely to be dangerous to both the art and the commerce of the theatre.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 70 , Issue 1 , March 1955 , pp. 192 - 209
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1955

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References

1 Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (New York, 1952), p. 244.

2 I am here concerned only with the techniques of characterization of the hero in the non-comic drama. To the developmental “Une” I am experimentally tracing, neither King John nor Romeo and Juliet is particularly relevant. I am assuming that Richard II follows Richard III by about two years. In so doing, I do not mean to imply that there is any inevitable connection between the plays or any special continuity between the characters of the heroes. Because of their revealing contrast, I link them as way-stops on Shakespeare's development of the technical skills which made his tragedy possible.

3 One historian bothered by the same problem is C. R. Markham, who considers the implications in “Richard III: A Doubtful Verdict Reviewed,” English Historical Review, VI, 250–283, 806–813.

4 The Use of the Drama (Princeton, 1945), pp. 43–44.

5 All quotations from Shakespeare are from The Complete Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, ed. W. A. Neilson and C. J. Hill (New York, 1942).

6 To say this is not for a moment to agree with Stopford Brooke's similar statement about the mirror episode in the Deposition Scene. Brooke writes: “Shakespeare has evidently spent so much trouble over this scene that he has over-done his work. He has introduced that spectacular scene with the mirror which is quite unnecessary, which sins against the ‘Not too much,‘ and which, worst of all, not only lowers our pity for Richard because it exhibits his theatrical folly in public, but also degrades the character of Bolingbroke. … I wonder Shakespeare's exquisite delicacy toward human nature could have permitted it” (Lectures on Shakespeare, London, 1905, pp. 94–95). The affair of the mirror is, indeed, the crux of the matter, but Brooke's conclusion is in total opposition to mine.

7 The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Craig (New York, 1951), p. 645; Shakespeare, the Major Plays and the Sonnets, ed. Harrison (New York, 1948), p. 192; Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (London, 1937), pp. 20, 22, n. 2; Chambers, Shakespeare, a Survey (London, 1925), pp. 90–91; Webster, Shakespeare Without Tears (New York, 1942), p. 170.

8 To say this of the character and the techniques which produced it is not to deny that the play has the singleness of mood, the unity of tone which Wilson claims for it. Cf. King Richard II, ed. John Dover Wilson (Cambridge, 1939), p. xiv.

9 Margaret Webster notes that the director has a difficult job of work bringing the play into focus in the first two acts (op. cit., p. 170). Wilson apparently accepts a twofold image of Richard at the same time as he defends it, when he remarks that Shakespeare constructed his play from two “legends” about Richard: “that of his supporters, which represented him as a saint and martyr, compared his sufferings and death with those of Christ himself, while they accounted for his capture by an act of base betrayal; and secondly, that of the Lancastrians which depicted him as a weak, cowardly, moody man who surrendered himself and abdicated of his own free will.” My position is in tentative disagreement with that of Wilson, who comments that “Shakespeare's genius succeeded in fusing these originally contradictory conceptions and in composing therefrom the figure of a king who seems to us one of the most living of his characters” (op. cit., p. lix).

10 Granville-Barker noted a similar uncertainty in the portrait of Polonius (Prefaces to Shakespeare, Princeton, 1946, i, 204). Something of the kind may have happened in the characterization of Angelo, whose hypocrisy in the affair of Mariana is never really reconciled with the initial characterization of his uprightness.

11 It is needless to add that the sustained lyricism of Romeo and Juliet would be inadequate to the uses of the chronicle history.

12 There is nothing, for instance, even in the most ceremonial moments of Richard II to parallel such scenes as ii.ii in Richard III, where all individuating characteristics of the queens are obscured in their choric lamentations. On the transitional aspects of the rhetoric of Richard II see Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art (Madison, 1954), pp. 240–241.

13 Richard's acting, of course, is not merely a technical convenience but an integral part of his character. Shakespeare from the first could evolve the spirit from the mechanical operations of his stage. Yet it is important to see that, all differences between their characters aside, Richard II and Richard III are projected by the identical technical means: both are shown to be acting. Their acting suggests the presence though it does not reveal, implicitly or explicitly, the substance of a deeper reality in the character.

14 Shakespeare's History Plays (New York, 1946), pp. 245 ff.

15 An actor could presumably make the image false, as some commentators have found it to be in reading the lines. Cf. the comment by G. B. Harrison (op. cit., p. 192). In view of the opinion expressed about Richard's deposition in the later plays of the tetralogy, however, to read the lines as mere rhetoric would appear to do violence to the central conception of the king's divinity.

16 Cf. Doran, op. cit., pp. 342–343, for a different view of the same lines. Miss Doran's conclusion that after Richard “the evidence of rhetorical device becomes less; style is put to more oblique uses” is parallel to mine.

17 It is perhaps noteworthy that in the York episodes (v.ii.23 ff.) Richard is compared explicitly with a tedious actor.