And I nothing to back my suit at all,
But the plain devil and dissembling looks,
And yet to win her, all the world to nothing!
The tone in this passage is of the highest: it is the tone of a musician fresh from a triumph of his art, the sweetest point in which has been that he has condescended to no adventitious aids, no assistance of patronage or concessions to popular tastes; it has been won by pure music. So the artist in villainy celebrates a triumph of plain devil!
The villainy ideal in success: a fascination of irresistibility in Richard.
This view of Richard as an artist in crime is sufficient to explain the hold which villainy has on Richard himself: but ideal villainy must be ideal also in its success; and on this side of the analysis another conception in Shakespeare's portraiture becomes of first importance. It is obvious enough that Richard has all the elements of success which can be reduced to the form of skill: but he has something more. No theory of human action will be complete which does not recognise a dominion of will over will operating by mere contact, without further explanation so far as conscious influence is concerned. What is it that takes the bird into the jaws of the serpent? No persuasion or other influence on the bird's consciousness, for it struggles to keep back; we can only recognise the attraction as a force, and give it a name, fascination. In Richard there is a similar Fascination of Irresistibility, which also operates by his mere presence, and which fights for him in the same way in which the idea of their invincibility fought for conquerors like Napoleon, and was on occasions as good to them as an extra twenty or thirty thousand men. A consideration like this will be appreciated in the case of tours de force like the Wooing of Lady Anne, which is a stumblingblock to many readers—a widow beside the bier of her murdered husband's murdered father wooed and won by the man who makes no secret that he is the murderer of them both. The analysis of ordinary human motives would make it appear that Anne would not yield at points at which the scene represents her as yielding; some other force is wanted to explain her surrender, and it is found in this secret force of irresistible will which Richard bears about with him. But, it will be asked, in what does this fascination appear? The answer is that the idea of it is furnished to us by the other scenes of the play. Such a consideration illustrates the distinction between real and ideal. An ideal incident is not an incident of real life simply clothed in beauty of expression; nor, on the other hand, is an ideal incident divorced from the laws of real possibility. Ideal implies that the transcendental has been made possible by treatment: that an incident (for example) which might be impossible in itself becomes possible through other incidents with which it is associated, just as in actual life the action of a public personage which may have appeared strange at the time becomes intelligible when at his death we can review his life as a whole. Such a scene as the Wooing Scene might be impossible as a fragment; it becomes possible enough in the play, where it has to be taken in connection with the rest of the plot, throughout which the irresistibility of the hero is prominent as one of the chief threads of connection. The fascination is to be conveyed in the acting.Nor is it any objection that the Wooing Scene comes early in the action. The play is not the book, but the actor's interpretation on the stage, and the actor will have collected even from the latest scenes elements of the interpretation he throws into the earliest: the actor is a lens for concentrating the light of the whole play upon every single detail. The fascination of irresistibility, then, which is to act by instinct in every scene, may be arrived at analytically when we survey the play as a whole—when we see how by Richard's innate genius, by the reversal in him of the ordinary relation of human nature to crime, especially by his perfect mastery of the successive situations as they arise, the dramatist steadily builds up an irresistibility which becomes a secret force clinging to Richard's presence, and through the operation of which his feats are half accomplished by the fact of his attempting them.
The irresistibility analysed. Unlikely means.
To begin with: the sense of irresistible power is brought out by the way in which the unlikeliest things are continually drawn into his schemes and utilised as means. i. i, from 42.Not to speak of his regular affectation of blunt sincerity, he makes use of the simple brotherly confidence of Clarence as an engine of fratricide, iii. iv; esp. 76 compared with iii. i. 184.and founds on the frank familiarity existing between himself and Hastings a plot by which he brings him to the block. The Queen's compunction at the thought of leaving Clarence out of the general reconciliation around the dying king's bedside is the fruit of a conscience tenderer than her neighbours': ii. i, from 73: cf. 134.Richard adroitly seizes it as an opportunity for shifting on to the Queen and her friends the suspicion of the duke's murder. iii. i. 154.The childish prattle of little York Richard manages to suggest to the bystanders as dangerous treason; ii. i. 52-72.the solemnity of the king's deathbed he turns to his own purposes by outdoing all the rest in Christian forgiveness and humility; iii. v. 99, &c.and he selects devout meditation as the card to play with the Lord Mayor and citizens. On the other hand, amongst other devices for the usurpation conspiracy, he starts a slander upon his own mother's purity; iii. v. 75-94.and further—by one of the greatest strokes in the whole play—makes capital in the Wooing Scene out of his own heartlessness, i. ii. 156-167.describing in a burst of startling eloquence the scenes of horror he has passed through, the only man unmoved to tears, in order to add:
And what these sorrows could not thence exhale,
Thy beauty hath, and made them blind with weeping.