Shakspeare and His Times

by François Guizot

Richard III. is one of those men who have produced upon the time in which they lived an impression of horror and dread which is always based upon some real cause, although it may afterward lead to an exaggeration of the realities of the case. Holinshed calls him "one of those bad persons who will not live an hour without doing and exercising cruelty, mischief, and an outrageous manner of living." Undoubtedly—and historical criticism has supplied the proof of this—the life of Richard has been charged with several crimes which do not properly belong to him; but these errors and exaggerations, the natural result of the popular feeling, explain, though they do not justify, the whimsical attempt of Horace Walpole to rehabilitate the memory of Richard, by purging him of most of the crimes of which he is accused. This is one of those paradoxical questions upon which the mind of the critic who allows himself to engage in it becomes excited, and in which the most ingenious discussion serves only to prove to what extent the mind may be employed to embarrass the simple and steady progress of truth. Doubtless we must not judge a person who lived in those times of disorder by the gentle and regular habits of our modern ideas, and many things must be laid to the charge of the men and facts in the midst of which historical characters appear. But when, at the epoch at which Richard III. lived, after the horrors of the Red and White Roses, the public hatred chose out one man from among all to present him as a model of cruelty and perfidy, there must assuredly have been something extraordinary in his crimes, were it only the distinction which is added to them by superiority of talents and character, which, when it is employed in the service of crime, renders it at once more dangerous and more insulting.

The generally received opinion regarding Richard may have contributed to the success of the play which bears his name; and, perhaps, not one of Shakspeare's works has attained more abiding popularity in England. The critics have not usually treated it so favorably as the public; some of them, and Johnson among the number, have expressed their astonishment at its prodigious success. We might, on the other hand, feel astonished at their surprise, if we did not know, by experience, that the critic, whose duty it is to introduce order into riches which the public has enjoyed at first confusedly, sometimes becomes so attached to this order, and particularly to the manner in which he has conceived it, that he allows himself easily to be induced to condemn those beauties for which he can not find a convenient place within the limits of his system.

"Richard III.," more than any other of Shakspeare's great works, presents the defects common to the historical dramas which, before his time, held possession of the stage; we find in it that accumulation of facts, that aggregation of catastrophes, that improbability of dramatic progress and theatrical execution, which are the necessary results of all that material movement which Shakspeare has reduced, as much as possible, in those objects which he had more freely at his disposal, but which could not be avoided in national subjects of such recent date, all the details of which were so freshly present to the memory of the spectators. Perhaps we ought, therefore, to admire all the more that genius which could trace out its course through this chaos, and follow up in this labyrinth a thread which is never broken or lost. One idea dominates the whole drama, and that is, the just punishment of the crimes which stained the quarrels of York and Lancaster with blood. At once an example and an organ of the divine wrath, Margaret, by her cries of agony, incessantly invokes vengeance upon those who have committed so many evil deeds, and even upon those who have profited by them; she it is who appears to them when this vengeance has fallen upon them; her name is mingled with the terror of their last moments; and they believe they fall as much beneath her curse as under the blows of Richard—the sacrificial priest of the bloody temple of which Margaret is the sibyl, and who will himself fall, the last victim of the holocaust, carrying with him all the crimes he has avenged, as well as all that he has committed.

That fatality which, in "Macbeth," is revealed in the shape of the witches, and in "Richard III." in the person of Margaret, is nevertheless by no means the same in both dramas. Macbeth, drawn aside from virtue into crime, presents to our imagination a terrible picture of the power of the enemy of man—a power which is, however, subject to the eternal and supreme Master, who prepares its punishment with the same stroke which effects its overthrow. Richard, a much more direct and voluntary agent of the spirit of evil, seems rather to play with him than to obey him; and in this terrible sport of the infernal powers, it is, as it were en passant, that the justice of Heaven is exercised, until the final moment when it bursts forth without mitigation upon the guilty and insolent wretch who fancied he was braving it, while he was working out its designs.

This difference in the progress of the ideas is carried out in all the details of the character and destiny of the personages. Macbeth, when once fallen, sustains himself only by the intoxicating influence of the blood into which he plunges deeper and deeper; and he reaches his term, fatigued by a movement so alien to his nature, disabused with regard to the possessions which have cost him so dear, and deriving from the natural elevation of his character alone the force to defend that which he hardly desires any longer to preserve. Richard, as inferior to Macbeth for depth of feeling as he is superior to him in strength of mind, has sought in crime itself the pleasure of exercising his stifled faculties, and of making others feel a superiority which they had ignored or disdained. He deceives, that he may at once succeed and deceive—that he may subject men to himself, and give himself the pleasure of despising them. He laughs both at his dupes and at the means which he has employed to dupe them; and to the satisfaction which he feels at having conquered them is added that of having acquired a proof of their weakness. His discoveries, however, are not yet sufficient to satisfy the tyranny of his will; baseness never goes quite so far as he intended, and as he found it necessary to suppose. Compelled afterward to sacrifice the means which he had first corrupted, he is incessantly obliged to seduce new agents in order to ruin new victims. But at length the moment arrives when his means of seduction are no longer sufficient to surmount the difficulties which he has created, and when the bait which he can offer to the passions of men is no longer strong enough to overcome the terror with which he has inspired them regarding their most pressing interests; and then those whom he had divided, in order to make them fall by means of one another, unite against himself. He once felt himself too strong for each of them; he is now alone against them all, and he has ceased to hope for himself; he does himself justice, but without abandoning his own cause, and goes to wreck upon the obstacle which he is indignant at being no longer able to overcome.

The portraiture of such a personage, and of the passions which he can bring into play in order to make them subserve his interests, presents a spectacle which is all the more striking because we clearly see that Richard's hypocrisy acts only upon those whose interest it is to allow themselves to be blinded by it. The people remain mute to the cowardly appeals by which they are invited to unite with the men in power, who are about to give their voice in favor of injustice; or, if a few inferior voices be raised, it is to express a general feeling of alienation and disquietude, and to disclose the existence of a discontented nation, side by side with a servile court. The expectations which result from this state of things, the pathos of several scenes, the sombre energy of Margaret's character, and the restless curiosity connected with projects so threatening in their nature and so animated in their conduct, unite to impart to this work an interest which fully explains the constancy of its success.

The style of "Richard III." is tolerably simple, and, with the exception of one or two dialogues, it is marked by few of those subtleties which sometimes fatigue us even in Shakspeare's finest dramas. In the part of Richard, one of the wittiest of the tragic portion of the play, the wit is almost entirely exempt from refinement.

This drama comprises a space of fourteen years, from 1471 until 1485. It appears to have been performed in 1597; but before its production several other plays had been written on the same subject.