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From Medieval to Modern: "Richard III" and "Macbeth"
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Janis Lull |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
 King Richard III and Macbeth are perhaps the two most compelling villains in Shakespeare's universe. And the plays that bear their names--"Richard III," probably written in 1592-3, and "Macbeth," written more than a decade later, around 1605--contain many similarities. But it is the differences between the handling of the central characters, argues Janis Lull, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, that reveals Shakespeare's development as a psychological dramatist. "Richard III," she suggests, has a medieval conception of character, while "Macbeth" unquestionably explores a modern one. |
 hakespeareans have long recognised the similarities between Macbeth and Richard III. In 1817, for example, the actor-manager John Philip Kemble published Macbeth and King Richard III, in which he defended Macbeth's personal courage against a charge by Thomas Whately that, by contrast with the intrepid Richard, Macbeth was constitutionally timid. Although Whately and Kemble differed in their opinions of the leading characters, the fact that they compared the protagonists at all implies that they saw fundamental likenesses in the two plays. The many parallels suggest that Shakespeare saw such likenesses, too. |
Macbeth revisits the issue of the villain-hero that Shakespeare first addressed in Richard III. As Rossiter says, "Richard Plantagenet is alone with Macbeth as the Shakespearian version of the thoroughly bad man in the role of monarch and hero" (A.P. Rossiter, English Drama from Early Times to the Elizabethans, 1950, p76). Both protagonists are warriors, at their best when they "bustle," and both maintain their warrior defiance to the end. Yet their own energies transform these soldiers into schemers who end up wallowing in rivers of blood. |
Richard, after ordering the young princes killed, muses that "I am in / So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin" (4.2.64-5). Macbeth, contemplating the murders of Banquo and Fleance, repeats and expands Richard's figure: "I am in blood / Stepped in so far, that should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o'er" (3.4.135-7). The relationship of Macbeth's line to Richard's may serve as an emblem for the relationship of the two plays. Macbeth echoes, revises and deepens Richard III, exploring again the tragic contradiction between a universe ordered by causation and a heroic conception of human free choice. |
Richard ambiguously asserts that he is "determined to prove a villain," but the cosmic joke is on him. The play he inhabits suggests that his half of the pun, his determination, is illusory. Since Richard cannot be other than he is, cannot do other than he does, how can he be either a hero or a villain? Yet dramatically, he is both. The play makes him so, not by examining his inner life, but structurally, by provoking first identification and then distance in its audience. |
Macbeth treats the same paradoxes, but in another style. As A.R. Braunmuller puts the questions for Macbeth, "If the prophecies are true before the play begins, or before Macbeth and Banquo hear them, or before Macbeth and Banquo have acted, where is the willed action that allows the audience to discover responsibility and hence to experience guilt? If Macbeth could never act otherwise, could never not choose to murder Duncan, and if, putatively, Banquo could never resist thoughts of usurpation, 'the cursèd thoughts that nature / Gives way to in repose' (2.1.8-9), where is the tragedy, the dire consequence of an ignorant or misunderstood act, of these events? If, alternatively, the prophecies only become true when they are enacted by responsible and hence arguably tragic and guilty human agents, how may they be called 'prophecies' at all?" (A.R. Braunmuller (ed.), Macbeth, 1997, p. 42). |
Conceptions of character
Where Richard III uses dramatic technique and cultural memory to involve the audience in the clash between Richard's individualism and his fate, Macbeth uses psychology. Only following the dream scene in Richard III, and then only once, does Richard talk to himself rather than about himself. Macbeth does it from the first: |
This supernatural soliciting
Cannot be ill, cannot be good. If ill,
Why hath it given me earnest of success,
Commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor.
If good, why do I yield to that suggestion,
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs
Against the use of nature? (1.3.130-7) |
Between the two plays, Shakespeare has shifted from a medieval to a modern conception of character. Yet structural and verbal memories of Richard III pervade Macbeth. The recurring female-triad scenes of Richard III are echoed in Macbeth by the highly dramatic appearances of the three witches. In both plays, groups of three women are associated with fate. When the female characters in Richard III appear together in triads, they align themselves not just with destiny but with a distinctly Christian providence. |
Three women, three witches
Macbeth makes the symbolic association between female triads and fate even clearer by linking the women overtly to prophecy and the supernatural. At the same time, by transforming the three women into witches, Macbeth renders their connection to the liturgical-theatrical tradition of the Three Marys almost untraceable, allowing the audience to regard them as suspicious and alien. Like many of the other common elements shared by Richard III and Macbeth, the motif of the three women becomes more equivocal in the latter. |
The association between female triads and witchcraft may have been suggested in part by Margaret's first scene in Richard III (1.3). She assumes the same kind of prophetic role as the witches in Macbeth, and Richard calls her a "Foul wrinkled witch" (162). Margaret also seems to be magically immune from retaliation, either for cursing the queen and courtiers or for violating her banishment. Although she only later (4.4) becomes part of a threesome of women, perhaps the idea of the three fates as witches arose from these two different aspects of Margaret in Richard III. |
Certainly some modern students of Shakespeare have made the connection between the witches of Macbeth and the women of Richard III. In a recent regional production of Richard III, Margaret had the power to freeze the other actors in their tracks while she spoke her asides to the audience, and in 4.4 she executed a trancelike circle dance with Elizabeth and the Duchess of York, the three of them chanting Margaret's lines: "Earth gapes, hell burns, fiends roar, saints pray, / To have him suddenly conveyed from hence" (4.4.75-6). |
Another device that works similarly in both plays is child murder. Both protagonists recognise that they have crossed a moral line when they first decide to move against the young: Richard against the princes, Macbeth against Fleance. Both killers defend the step by recalling that they are deep in blood already, but this self-justification can only alienate further an audience previously conditioned to regard the murder of innocents with horror. |
When he fails to kill Fleance, Macbeth turns savagely on the family of Macduff. Reflecting the greater psychological immediacy of Macbeth, Shakespeare stages the later child killings, which he clearly avoided doing in Richard III. Macbeth's mother-and-child murder scene, 4.1, focuses on little Macduff, a direct descendant of sharp-witted little York. |
After the children are killed, both plays raise doubts about divine concern for innocents. Macduff's anguished question at the deaths of his family, "did heaven look on, / And would not take their part?" (4.3.223-4), recalls Elizabeth's protests to God over her own slaughtered children, "When didst thou sleep when such a deed was done?" (4.4-24). |
A reply of a sort seems to come in the mental experiences of the protagonists. God's wakefulness shows in the wakefulness of Richard and Macbeth; they have murdered their own sleep. The first hint of Richard's disturbed rest comes from Anne, who complains that "never yet one hour in his bed / Did I enjoy the golden dew of sleep, / But with his timorous dreams was still awaked" (4.1.83-5). Macbeth speaks of "these terrible dreams / That shake us nightly" (3.3.18-19). |
After their climactic child killings, both tyrants are also haunted by the ghosts of their victims. In the double dream of Richard and Richmond, the ghosts of the slain princes predict that Richmond will survive the battle "and beget a happy race of kings," the Tudor dynasty (5.3 160). In a mirror moment in Macbeth, the witches show Macbeth a line of future kings (including James I) who will spring from Banquo (4.1.111-23). |
In the end, both tyrant-heroes are alone. Just as Blunt observes that Richard "hath no friends but what are friends for fear, / Which in his dearest need will fly from him" (5.2.20-1), Macbeth tells the doctor that "the thanes fly from me" (5.3.49), and Malcolm describes Macbeth as deserted: "none serve with him but constrainéd things / Whose hearts are absent too" (5.4.13-14). |
Richard has his moment of conscience on Bosworth morning, but reverts quickly to his usual ruthless behaviour. (Colley Cibber's adaptation of 1700 underscores the reversion by having Richard announce, "Richard's himself again." Cibber's line, making explicit what Shakespeare only implies, endured in the performance tradition for more than two centuries.) |
Macbeth also has a last moment of doubt near the end: "I pull in resolution, and begin / To doubt th'equivocation of the fiend / That lies like truth" (5.5.41-3). Then he, too, becomes "himself again," warlike and doomed: "Blow wind, come wrack; / At least we'll die with harness on our back" (Macbeth 5.5.50-1). Both villains go out fighting, speaking memorably brave exit lines; Richard's "A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!" (5.4.7, 13) parallels Macbeth's "Lay on, Macduff, / And damned be him that first cries, 'Hold, enough!'" (5.8.33-4). |
The list of correspondences large and small between the two plays might be lengthened, but these are enough to show that Shakespeare, like Whately and Kemble, regarded the two dramas as closely related. Macbeth reworks themes and issues from Richard III in light of all the ways the author's writing had changed in the decade or more that separated the plays. |
Returning to the problem of the villain as tragic protagonist, Macbeth again raises issues of fate and personal responsibility. It poses similar questions about audience identification with a strong, smart "hero" who is also evil. To modern spectators, Macbeth probably leaves the answers even less clear than Richard III does. With its steady stream of introspective soliloquies, Macbeth places the audience inside the central character, which is a harder place for contemporary playgoers to retreat from than the moral theatre of Richard III. |
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