In all this, he is, as always, the consummate actor.

There are two key turning points for Richard. One is when he contrives to lose his right-hand man, Buckingham. The comedian begins to flounder without his stooge. The other is when the lamenting women who serve as a kind of Greek chorus to the action come together and confront him in the enormously long fourth scene of the fourth act. Richard’s bravura seduction of the Lady Anne had revealed his skill with words, but now his verbal power is matched by the combined forces of Queen Margaret and Queen Elizabeth. If one innovation in the writing of Richard the Third was the conversion of the ensemble chronicle play into a star vehicle for a single huge theatrical personality, the other was the feminization of this traditionally masculine form. In Shakespeare’s earlier history plays, in those of other authors, and indeed in the tragedies of Marlowe, women are bit-part players. Here, however, the boy-actors who play Elizabeth, Margaret, and Anne are given larger parts and more richly inflected rhetoric than all of their adult colleagues save the leading three who play Richard, Buckingham, and Clarence. Symbolically, given that Richard explains his own lust for power as a consequence of his inadequacy in the arts of love, it is fitting that he meets his match in the form of women and boys.

It is Richard’s theatrical self-consciousness that ultimately sets his play above the three parts of Henry the Sixth. In The First Part of Henry the Sixth, Talbot is a manly hero and Joan an intriguing semi-comic villain; in The Second Part, there is splendid energy (Queen Margaret running amok) and variety (Jack Cade and the voice of the discontented commons); in The Third Part, we witness a scene of high drama when York is taunted with a paper crown before being stabbed to death. But it is not until Richard of Gloucester gets into his stride that we meet a figure with the compelling theatrical presence of a Falstaff or an Iago. At the climax of his first long soliloquy in Act 3 of The Third Part of Henry the Sixth—a speech that the theatrical tradition has often imported into Richard the Third—he announces that he will “play the orator,” “add colors to the chameleon,” and “change shapes with Proteus for advantages.” Each image is of the art of the actor, with his persuasive tongue and power of self-transformation.

BEYOND MARLOWE

Richard adds that he will “set the murderous Machevil to school.” In his black farce The Jew of Malta, Christopher Marlowe had brought on a representation of Machiavelli, the Renaissance archetype of the scheming politician, to speak the prologue. As soon as the Prologue leaves the stage, Barabas the Jew is revealed, speaking his opening soliloquy. The audience thus makes the equation that Barabas is a Machiavellian schemer. In Richard the Third, Shakespeare made a bold advance on this device. He dispensed with a prologue and began the action with Richard’s riveting soliloquy, “Now is the winter of our discontent.” Where Marlowe had cast Barabas in the role of the machiavel by means of a pointed structural device, Shakespeare’s Richard casts himself. He announces that since his crookback prevents him from playing the role of a stage lover, he will self-consciously adopt that of a stage villain. For good measure, he goes on in the second scene to show that he can in fact play the lover—with such accomplishment that he successfully woos Lady Anne over the very corpse of her father-in-law when she knows that he has been responsible for the murder of her first husband. As promised, he plays the orator to supreme effect. By the third act, he is changing shapes with Proteus and, as we have seen, appearing between two bishops in the color of a holy man. By means of the orator’s art of saying the opposite of what he means—“I cannot, nor I will not” accept the crown—he wins over the Mayor and the citizens of London.

The character of Richard III is Shakespeare’s overstepping of the Marlovian antihero. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Barabas, and Dr. Faustus fashion their identities by assuming roles—scourge of God, machiavel, conjuror. They do not stop to think that such roles are precisely that: flimsy theatrical impersonations. If they did stop, the whole Marlovian house of cards would come tumbling down. But Shakespeare began from a different place. He was an actor himself. This was the one trump card that was unavailable to Marlowe. Richard is quintessentially Shakespearean, supremely charismatic in the theater, because he knows that he is a role-player. He revels, and makes the audience revel, in playacting.