Publication: Philological Quarterly
Publication Date: 22-JUN-03
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Author: Olson, Greta
Article Excerpt
Distortum vultum sequitur distortio morum
--Thomas More History of Richard III
Contemporary criminal reporting often likens perpetrators to animals when their crimes are considered particularly reprehensible. Witness this recent headline from the New York Daily News:. "One of the most savage entries in New York's crime annals--the 1989 Central Park wilding attack on a female jogger--may have to be rewritten after DNA testing now clearly points to a new suspect, the Daily News has learned" (September 4, 2002). The adjectives "savage" and "wilding" to describe the crime stress its inhuman qualities and awaken the racial and class tensions that have marked this case. Such comparisons also reify divisions between the species: humans, they suggest, are morally superior to their amoral animal counterparts. Moreover, making the division between human and animal in terms of their capacity for crime serves a definitional purpose that includes a normative component: human beings are perforce that species that does not partake in "beastly" criminal acts. This conflation of the animalistic and the criminal is by no means the invention of current crime news.
Shakespeare's was one period in which this motif was rampant. Pamphleteers characterized cozeners, those who commit fraud, and rogues, for example, by pointing out their proximity to animals. For instance, in 1566, Thomas Harman, a landowner and local officer from Kent, described a "wild rogue" by comparing him to a beast: "He is more subtle and more given by nature to all kind of knavery than the other [a regular rogue], as beastly begotten in barn or bushes, and from his infancy trade up in treachery; yea, and before ripeness of years doth permit, wallowing in lewd lechery--but that is counted amongst them no sin." (1) Harman's characterization implies that an animal-like birth is conducive to learning the sinfulness and lechery of criminal life, and then, like a pig, wallowing in this life without compunction. This characterization may also serve to remind readers that the words "crime" and "criminals," in the sense we now use them are inventions of the late nineteenth century when criminology first became established as a scientific discipline. During the Renaissance, citizens worried about the "sin of all sorts" rather than crime and, instead of criminals, those "evildoers [that] go on with all licence and impunity" as another Kent magistrate put it in 1582. (2) Many sixteenth-century statements about the dangers presented by those who commit acts of "lechery" and "sin" may be likened to current preoccupations with the perceived threat of violent crime.
In this essay I wish to trace associations of the criminal with the animal into the past by examining the characterization of Shakespeare's Richard York, Duke of Gloucester, who later became Richard III. Specifically, I will analyze the repeated associations of this character's criminal behavior, or sins, and his physical abnormalities with animals. Rather than focusing on Richard's deformity as an indication of his monstrosity, a subject that has been well documented, (3) I intend to show how Richard's extraordinary physicality is connected both with his crimes and with specific animal images. My argument is prefaced by an overview of how Shakespeare repeatedly foregrounds the Duke of Gloucester's anomalous body as a central aspect of his characterization. I then explain the audience's response to this fascinating and repulsive body by revisiting Lady Anne's reluctant sexual attraction to Richard as evidenced in the wooing scene. Concentrating on the cursing scene (act 1, scene 3), I trace in the third part of this essay the individual lines of animal imagery associated with Richard, including those related to dogs, boars, toads, and spiders. An analysis of specific types of animal imagery will demonstrate, on the one hand, that Richard's individual crimes are conflated with his supposedly beastlike physical characteristics; on the other hand, note will be taken of those less numerous allusions to Richard's animalistic characteristics that underscore his cleverness and strength. By documenting Shakespeare's specific use of animal imagery, I wish to show how the playwright uniquely blends images of exaggerated physicality with specific animals and crimes to create a character whose criminality is scripted onto his body. In the last section of this essay I relate the depiction of Richard III to the history of nineteenth-century criminal anthropology to argue that Shakespeare's characterization of Richard contributed to the scientific discovery of innate inborn criminality.
1
Like hardly another character in Shakespearean drama, Richard III commands the audience's attention to his body. Opening the action of Richard III, Richard famously blames his having been born "Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time" (1.1.20) (4) for the necessity of his acting a villain who is in every way different from his ladies-man brother Edward IV. Audiences familiar with the tetralogy will recall that even Richard's birth had been marked by signs of his physical alterity. As related in Henry VI, Part 3, it caused his mother inordinate pain (5.6.49) and was either premature--"Like to a chaos, or unlick'd bear whelp" (3.2.161) (5)--or belated: he was born with teeth. Note that the comparisons of the Duke to a bear cub and to chaos stress his non-human qualities, which will be borne out in his inhuman crimes. Dramatic means further stress Richard's corporality. As Marie Plasse has pointed out, Richard begins the play in contradistinction to any other major Shakespeare character with a direct address to the audience. (6) With appearances in 15 of the play's 25 scenes, the role of Richard III presents a physical challenge to any actor: he must assume the guise of disability and move through a series of scenarios in which his body must appear in rapid turns threatening, pleading, and pious. Since the actor playing Richard probably will not have the limp, shortened arm, and hunched back, his depiction will draw attention to the double nature of the staged body (actor's body and enacted character's body). Performing the Duke of Gloucester's embodiment becomes then a trope for dramatic enactment itself. Accordingly, Samuel Johnson described the quintessential actor as "a fellow who claps a hump on his back, and a lump on his leg, and cries, 'I am Richard the Third." (7)
Rendering Richard extraordinarily ugly serves the play's partisan ends and helps to legitimate the power of Shakespeare's sovereign, the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I. Yet before Shakespeare wrote the play about him, Richard York's body had already been fashioned into that of a severely disabled person. A contemporary portrait shows nothing unusual in Richard's form, another one features him with uneven shoulders. Closer examination of this second portrait reveals that the original was painted over so as to make its subject appear deformed. (8) Thomas More's History of Richard III (written 1513-1518) and the various Tudor histories that use More's text as a source, such as Edward Hall's and Raphael Holinshed's, describe Richard as hunchbacked and having odd features. Furthermore, they associate Richard's strange looks with his being mean-tempered from birth, because, as Thomas More tells it, the rule of physiognomy insists that ugliness of form denotes ugliness of character. (9)
What is called the Tudor myth--the official historiography of the Tudor period--represented the usurpation of the English throne by Henry IV, the wars in France, as well as the civil wars that followed as a series of devastating national crises. Since history is written by the victor's historians, this period of chaos officially ended when Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond and later Henry VII, defeated Richard III in the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, and the Tudors ascended the throne. (10) The historical Richard had to be depicted as ugly so as to stress the attractiveness of Tudor rule.
Like the Tudor historians, Shakespeare vividly contrasts the beauty of the Tudors' leading man with the ugliness of the Yorkists' leader in Richard III. This difference in looks and personality traits associated with them is underlined by the personifications of war and peace linked to Richard and Henry. In the opening soliloquy Richard describes himself not only as deformed but also as having a face unsuited to peace. Whereas with the defeat of Henry VI and Edward's ascension, "[g]rim-visaged war hath smoothed his wrinkled front" (1.1.9), Richard has not been made any less wrinkled. He remains poorly disposed "to court an amorous looking-glass" (1.1.15). By contrast, Henry Tudor closes the play by associating himself with "smooth-faced peace." Newly crowned as Henry VII, he intones a blessing on England that echoes the imagery in the play's first scene: "Enrich the time to come with smooth-faced peace, / With smiling plenty, and fair, prosperous days" (5.7.33-34). In both Sir Laurence Olivier's 1955 and Richard Loncraine's 1995 films of Richard III, Henry is depicted by young, muscular actors, who fulfill conventional expectations of masculine attractiveness. His statement that "[a]ll this divided York and Lancaster, / Deformed in their dire division" recalls the physical anomalies that Richard cited in the opening soliloquy as a motivation for his villainy (5.7.27-28). Following More's statement that a distorted form inevitably marks a twisted character, Henry suggests that the deformed Richard has caused the deformation of England's politics. (11) That Henry has just...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.
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