A Poem from Stanley Kunitz

Full as I am with off-the-wall ideas, I copied the following Stanley Kunitz poem off the wall of a subway train in New York (Gilbert, where were you?). It struck me as vaguely relate-able to Gilbert's remarks about the Richard III that more likely was -- from his alternate self's point of view:

My name is Solomon Levy
The desert is my house
My mother's breast was thorny
and fathers had I none.
The sands whispered Be separate.
The stones taught me Be hard.
I dance for the joy of surviving
on the edge of the road.

Sorry about that naughty Monmouth Henry, oh misjudged R III.

Other thoughts on the play? Please?

Ernst

RE: Richard III - Richard the Good

Well, it all shows what a poor reader I am. I DID send an e-mail, that must have been lost, asking if the senior Findlays were going to New York. And then I started imagining. We, on the other hand, have made a trip to Peoria/Chicago/Milwaukee and back. That was a trip! En route, we saw Hansel and Gretel in Milwaukee (a wonderful production that made me wish I had the list of boy-appropriate actions the young woman playing Hansel studied) and the new The Queen, which Ernst managed to download to show us last night in Ithaca (I ask no questions).

The whole reason I bring this up is that the film (which I think I liked better than Anthony Lane, who looks ever-so-slightly down his nose at it) is, like More's Richard III (and, subsequently, Shakespeare's), a re-working of relatively recent history (things pass into the past more rapidly today than in 16th-century England, perhaps). It is and it isn't revisionist. It isn't in that it seems to me less about rewriting history than about the curious ways random happenings and human motivation interact to create "history." It is revisionist, but less in the way it biases our opinions than in how it tries to adjust the ways the still-very-present Queen and Prime Minister might see themselves.

Ernst

Richard III - Richard the Good

Folks,

At the end of my hurried recapitulation of Richard in Henry VI, I said I would be off-(my)Island for a week, but I promised an anecdote about the guide on a sightseeing bus in York. Since then, Ernst who is currently in NEW York has been sending me his Manhattan phone number, hoping I found a cheap hotel, and asking for reviews of any shows I might see. Actually, I was only in dark and mysterious Tacoma, whose motto is "the wired city" -- I'm not making that up -- to go with the state's tourist motto, "just say WA" -- ditto.

So back to OLD York. Jean and I rented a car in Yorkshire in 1994, drove to the village where I lived when I was an adolescent, Great Ayton, birthplace of Capt. Cook and site of the River Leavin (Leavin what? Leavin' Great Ayton), drove to my old school, Wennington, now closed, in Wetherby where we visited my English master, a poet, who once had me memorize Sonnet 29 to salve adolescent heartbreak; then, in York, visited my old headmaster, who, indifferent to my professorial career in English, boasted of the Old Wenningtonians who had degrees in Science. We saw The Madness of King George at a York theatre said to be haunted by the Grey Lady, and indeed there was moaning and mumbled dialogue during the performance, but the ushers escorted the inebriated unghostly woman out at intermission. (Otherwise, a good show, Ernst.) We ate at a pub owned by -- alas! -- Budweiser, which has a brewery in Fort Collins, Colorado, so I amused myself by teaching the buxom Yorkshire lasses how to say "Buhdd."

We walked the York wall, looked at both Roman and Saxon ruins (try to get a building permit in York), then took a double-decker sightseeing bus around the city. The guide was bright, hugely informed, and both witty and joke-inclined, but when we arrived at York Minster, he turned passionately serious, and denounced the villainous William Shakespeare for slandering, libeling, and otherwise lying about the great Yorkist king, Richard III. How quaint, thought I, this is an anachronistic salvo in the War of the Roses.

Well, you will remember that I thought the Henry VI plays were choked with history and the obligation to get almost everyone who lived in England in the 15th century into the dramatis personae. Notes made clear that Shakespeare had taken some liberties for dramatic effect: Henry should have been a baby when he is bring crowned in 1 Henry VI or Rutland an adolescent warrior killed in battle rather than a boy murdered by Clifford in 3 Henry VI. Shakespeare sends Richard into the battle of Tewksbury when he was, historically, eight. Riverside or Signet notes often say, historically, Shakespeare has conflated two battles or placed a death several years earlier than history.

But, our impression was that the Henry VIs are overwhelmingly historical, taken from the chronicles of Hall and Holinshed. Ernst's starter, then, was to explore how Richard III is different from the Richards we see in the Henry VI plays. I tried to summarize that earlier Richard, straight-forward dutiful son and successful warrior up to act III, scene ii of 3 Henry VI, when in soliloquy, Richard gives us an outline of how his deformity will shape (sic) his ambition for the crown. Then, Randall took on the first scenes of Richard III, especially the war imagery, and we can confront, at last, Richard III's Richard.

But not so fast (well, fast is the wrong word). After my "Crookback Dick" posting, I reread Josephine Tey's detective novel The Daughter of Time (1951) in which her detective, Alan Grant, is hospitalized with a sprained back and a broken leg (apparently, such injuries in 1951 England confined one to a hospital for several months). Intrigued by the suffering implied in a portrait of Richard III and to pass the time, he connects with an American graduate student who is hanging out at the British Museum. Recognizing that the popular "knowledge" of Richard is a monster, the crunchbacked murderer of the princes in the Tower, Grant sends young Carradine on multiple research missions, and "solves" the historical truth ("Truth is the daughter of time") about the king.

The history that we all know was written by John Morton (Bishop of Ely in our play), transcribed by Saint Sir Thomas More as The History of King Richard the Third, adapted by Hall, then Holinshed, and the latter three were Shakespeare's sources. All were writing under the patronage of the Tudors, Henry VII, Henry VIII, and then Elizabeth. Winners write history. Henry VII had a most marginal claim to the throne, his father Owen Tudor, married the granddaughter of John of Gaunt's illegitimate son. We know from Henry IV through Henry VI how usurpation is the stain from which there is no escape. Henry VII, with such tenuous legitimacy, then disposed of every more legitimate claimant, including -- TA DA! -- the princes in the tower. Then, his historians "murdered" Richard's reputation post mortem. Richard was not even deformed, though apparently thin and one shoulder was slightly higher than the other.

Yeah, it's only a detective novel, but it apparently is built on the more accurate account of Richard who, after the Tudor reign and their creation of the Tudor myth, has been rehabilitated. So, instead of being at a show in NEW York, I have spent the fortnight back on a sightseeing bus in old York, screwing up my ability to read Shakespeare. Start with Horace Walpole, Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third (1768), Sir Clements R. Markham, Richard III, A Doubtful Verdict Reviewed (1891), Alec R. Myers, "The Character of Richard III" (1954) and Peter Saccio, Shakespeare's English Kings (1976), 156-186. Richard Plantagenet was apparently quite an admirable personage, who ably administered the North as deputy to his brother Edward IV, to whom he was unwaveringly loyal. According to Myers, he showed zeal for trade and English interests abroad; he tried to repress disorder and promote justice; he showed generous magnanimity toward the dependents of some of his fallen opponents; he made it easier for poor suitors to present their petitions to him and his council; he strove to make financial reforms; he instituted law on land uses.

He did not kill Prince Edward of Lancaster (so much for Margaret's curses in I.iii). He did not kill his brother Clarence, whose death was the responsibility of Edward IV, against whom Clarence had madly plotted (though I am pleased that my favorite part of the myth, death by drowning in a butt of malmsey, is apparently accurate). He did not poison his wife Anne. "The existing historical evidence does not permit a firm conclusion on the fate of the princes. There is really no courtroom evidence upon which to convict anyone. We must rest content with a probability, and the probability points to Richard" (Saccio, 177). Still Sir James Tyrell did not confess to killing the princes until nineteen years later, having lived abroad with good livings provided by the Tudors. But disaffected nobles began to support the insurgency of Henry Tudor, our Richmond, and Richard died ("courageously," say even the Tudors) at the Battle of Market Bosworth, leaving the ruthless Henry Tudor to exterminate the remaining Plantagenets, and reign over the revision of history.

I'm left with four Richards: 1) the historically accurate, in so far as post-Tudor historians are able to reconstruct him; 2) Thomas More's and others' Tudor mythical monster, twisted of body and mind; 3) the young, valiant, loyal Richard of Henry VI, except for that little out-of-character soliloquy in 3 Henry VI, Act III, Scene ii, 124-195 ("Why, I can smile, and murther whiles I smile"); then 4) Shakespeare's Richard constructed from the sources and legends available to him. Unlike the Henry VIs, Richard III is not history; it is a complex drama, constructed and directed, then acted in by Shakespeare's fascinating character, Richard. "As myth, the Tudor Richard is indestructible, nor should one try to destroy him. This demonic jester and archetypal wicked uncle is far too satisfying a creation, and the works of More and Shakespeare are far too vigorous, for us to wish them otherwise" (Saccio, 159). So, once more, "now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this crunchback Dick."

Gilbert

Richard III - Poetry

From Chicago:

Dick Three rocks
Ya to your socks
He beats Sid Vicious
In deeds malicious,
He's worth a week more
So we can tweak or
Think more deeply,
Not come off cheaply.

OK
(I say)

Ernst

Richard III - Of Crookback Dick

Richard of Gloucester has a character flaw. Well, no, I'm not thinking of megalomania, mass murder, exploitation of widows and orphans, violation of oaths and contracts, filial and fraternal betrayal, or insufficient equestrian planning. Instead, from mid-3 Henry VI onward, he seems too much fixated on his physical appearance.

His father, Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, invokes his sons:

Call hitherto the stake my two brave bears,
That with the very shaking of their chains
They may astonish these fell-lurking curs. (2 Henry VI, V.i.144-46)

And Clifford gives us our first description of the younger:

Hence, heap of wrath, foul indigested lump,
As crooked in thy manners as thy shape! (2 Henry VI, V.i.157-8)

Young Clifford, his father's son, curses Richard: "Foul stigmatic" (l. 215), and soon Richard kills Somerset under the sign for the Castle Inn (so the prophesy "beware of castles" wonderfully comes true), and utters a warrior's coda: "Sword, hold thy temper; heart, be wrathful still:/ Priests pray for enemies, but princes kill" (2 Henry VI, V.ii.70-71). He is praised for extraordinary prowess on the battlefield, and when he displays the Duke of Somerset's head, York declaims "Richard hath best deserv'd of all my sons" (3 Henry VI, I.i.17).

So far, we have only an heroic young warrior, despite York's enemies stigmatizing (smile) him. Meanwhile, his father, York, negotiates that Henry can remain king until death, when the crown will pass to the Yorks, and it is Richard with tortured logic who disputes this, pointing out that York swore before the King, but "an oath is of no moment, being not took/ Before a true and lawful magistrate," which Henry was not, having held a usurped throne and therefore the oath was frivolous and vain, and York is not held by it. "And father, do but think/How sweet it is to wear a crown" (3 Henry VI, I.ii.22-3, 28-9). Specious logic indeed, yet the first hint of Richard's ability to create illusions out of words. Young brother Rutland is slain, defenseless York is captured and tortured, and Queen Margaret taunts him:

Where are your mess of sons to back you now,
The wanton Edward, and the lusty George?
And where's that valiant crook-back prodigy,
Dicky, your boy, that with his grumbling voice,
Was wont to cheer his dad in mutinies. (3 Henry VI, I.iv.73-77)

Before learning of York's death, Richard tells his brother Edward, "Methinks 'tis enough to be his son" (3 Henry VI, II.i.20). This seems a direct and sufficient declaration, unmasked, of Richard's true self- evaluation. York is slain. Richard responds, "Tears then for babes; blows and revenge for me/ Richard, I bear thy name, I'll venge thy death,/ Or die renowned by attempting it" (3 Henry VI, II.i.86-8), a tradition of son avenging father, independent of the insults directed at him by Queen Margaret, "But like a foul misshapen stigmatic,/ Mark'd by the destinies to be avoided,/ As venom toads, or lizards' dreadful stings" (3 Henry VI, II.ii.136-38). Indeed, Clifford dies, Richard mocks the corpse, and "King" Edward names him Duke of Gloucester.

Edward barters for Lady Grey's body, and when rebuffed, marries her instead, while Richard and Clarence keep up a patter of witty asides. Only when the bargain is struck (this encounter reveals the "wanton Edward," a characteristic I had not previously noticed), Richard is left, solus, to muse on love. This soliloquy, III.ii.124-195, reveals the first time the audience sees Richard other than son and warrior. He refers to "the golden time I look for," "between my soul'd desire and me," "a cold premeditation of my purpose," "Why then I do but dream on sovereignty," "I do so wish the crown...I'll cut the causes [that keep me from it] off." And the motivation: "why love forswore me in my mother's womb," "to shrink mine arm up like a wither'd shrub [no comments allowed on Dubya Bush here]/ To make an envious mountain on my back/ Where sits deformity to mock my body," etc. To compensate "I'll make my heaven to dream upon the crown,/ And whiles I live, t'account this world but hell,/ Until my misshap'd trunk that bears this head/ Be round impaled with a glorious crown," "Why I can smile, and murther whiles I smile..., And set the murtherous Machevil to school."

Ernst originally asked how Richard is different from the versions of his character we see in the Henry VI plays. What I have tried to do is summarize the earlier Richard (s): first warrior son of Richard of York, called politically incorrect names by the Lancasters, but no less than a knight errant for the House of York. Then, suddenly, with no more foreshadowing than the depiction of King Edward Hotpants prostituting Elizabeth, Lady Grey (sleep with me and I'll give you your land back; no? then how about a crown?), his soliloquy (3 Henry VI, III.ii.124-195) outlines all of Richard III, the ambition for the crown, the motivation of being physically limited to the one career choice, and his chosen means for achieving kingship, murder. His soliloquy could be a program note for Richard III, but it is devoid of humanization or tragic character. The "tragic flaw" as articulated in the Henry VI plays is no more than being pissed off at being called "thou misshapen Dick." And lest you think I trivialize, notice in Richard III both Lady Anne and Queen Elizabeth, on behalf of her daughter, Elizabeth, seek to frustrate Richard's marital advances by threatening to mar their physical beauty.

But then, we turn to Act VI, "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York," and Richard of Gloucester is transformed to humanized, witty, tragic, and, as Ernst begins, "supreme self-dramatizer and director/manipulator.

Gilbert

[NOTES:]

I'm not sure this is Richard's character but I see Richard III as (forgive the term) metadrama in which Richard is the playwright, director and casts himself in a variety of roles, so what we see is a variety of masks, wonderfully fashioned to convince or overpower adversaries. But this series of staged scenes is interrupted by soliloquies, that dramatic device in which we, as audience, are addressed directly and invited to accept the speaker as without mask, revealing his true self as well as critiquing both his persona and those he has fooled.

The seduction of Lady Anne before the coffin of Henry VI, her father-in-law, is followed by "was ever woman in this humor wooed?/ Was ever in this humor won?" (remember similar lines from Chiron and Demetrius in II.i of Titus?) The proxy wooing of Elizabeth, during which Richard seems to have to work far more and against the greater burden of having killed almost everyone Elizabeth has ever met seems more convincing or perhaps self -- convinced of reformation -- Richard has achieved the crown at this point; yet Queen Elizabeth's apparent acquiescence to the betrothal of her daughter is followed, immediately, with Richard, solus, "Relenting fool, and shallow, changing woman!"

Actually, here Elizabeth has won, because she immediately tops Richard by betrothing her daughter to Richmond. Curious that Richard, the master of duplicity, is not able to project his own trickery onto others.

The phoniest role is the staged piety of Richard between to prelates with a holy book as prop to fool the Mayor of London into supporting him as king: "Long live Richard, England's worthy king!" Here he even has a stage manager, Buckingham, who doubles as prompter to those who are too ignorant to know their parts. One maskless scene involves Buckingham, when the latter comes to Richard for his promised reward as henchman, and Richard chooses to talk about the weather, ending with "I am not in the giving vein to-day."

RE: Richard III - Getting Going

Thou rags of honor,

I'm confessing. I am just now finishing the play, and so I'm only just beginning to consider the very intriguing questions Ernst sent along two weeks ago. Mea culpa. (Did anyone else catch Jon Stewart's coining the non-apology apology so commonly used by celebs and, now, Popes as the "kinda culpa." Genius.) So what am I doing here? Well gosh. I loved Act I, to my mind the best single act we've read yet. To begin ...

"Now is the winter of our discontent ...". I'm sure someone will speak to the glorious language here, but I was struck by the power of war suggested by the imagery. There is a sobering little book out by New York Times writer Chris Hedges called War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. In it, Hedges writes "The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its desctruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much of our lives become apparent. ... And war is an enticing elixir. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble" (Hedges 3). When Richard III opens we find Richard, lamenting the calm shallowness of peace time.

"And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
[War] capers nimbly in a lady's chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute." (1.1.10-13)

The idea of "grim-visaged War" prancing about in some woman's bedroom with a little wanton lute music on the boombox is a bit arresting, and Richard's scorn is clear. Such dalliance, of War personified, demonstrates the triviality Richard hates about non-miliatry life. In the subsequent lines, lines that neatly recap his two soliloquies from 3 Henry VI, he goes on to explain why – he wasn't made for love or delight. So he has nothing to do.

Well, the devil makes work for idle hands.

"And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain thse fair-well spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days." (1.1.28-31)

Hence, Richard continues his war, or rather he makes war, in the midst of people who might otherwise be at peace. Act 1 is full of references to Richard as devil, as Ernst noted, but I rather think he is Ares. Perhaps this is just another way of suggesting that Richard is the sort of Vice that Ernst mentioned, engaging in personal, and later military, skirmishes. But Richard's actions go so much further than picking fights with others until he conquers his antagonists. He also sets his antagonists on each other. He sows antagonism.

Yet I am struck by Richard's lack of a specific goal in Act 1. A number of times he explains that he will be a disruptive, malevolent force, but he does not say here, as he did in the last Henry play, that he wants to be king. His pleasure is in all in the mayhem. Take this strange moment for instance. After opening with his sour soliloquy, then wooing Anne in the most hideous seduction scene ever imagined, then trading seemingly endless curses with Margaret, Richard finally gets a moment alone and sends forth another soliloquy:

"The secret mischiefs that I set abroach
I lay unto the grievous charge of others.
...
And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stol'n forth of holy writ,
And seem a saint when I most play a devil." (1.3.324-337).

Curiously he makes explicit what he has been doing implicitly for two and a half scenes. Why is this speech here? I tell my students the basic stuff about a soliloquy being the inner thoughts of the character made audible by the playwright. But Richard's thoughts here do not explore anything he is not already sure of. He is not talking to himself (Macbeth), not weighing a course of action (Hamlet), not philosophizing (Jaques). He's summarizing. And because he already told us he was going to do this, and because we've already seen him doing it, this solilquy summary is a little like a ninth-grade English essay conclusion – it's pretty redundant.

So if he can't be talking to himself, he must be talking to us. (Look out! There goes the fourth wall.) Even though we've watched him doing these things, it seems very important to Richard that he take credit. To act, as Richard and Iago do, maliciously but in secret, pretending to be what one is not, denies one the reward of an audience's "appreciation." In modern times, Richard would be the terrorist who calls up the press after a car bomb takes out a public market and says "we did that."

I think my favorite line of Richard's in Act 1 is "Ha!" It is monosyllabic celebration of his successful seduction of Anne, and again, it allows him to take credit for the action in front of the audience. The battle, his private war against all those who would not make war, gives him purpose, a reason for living. In waging the war, though, he becomes a performer or a director, and we, the play-goers, are his audience. Are we meant to delight in his machinations? Are we meant to be repulsed? Are we to find secret joy in our revulsion? What I find that I enjoy a lot about this play is how much it engages me directly as I read it.

Randall

Richard III - Getting Going

I know I'm supposed to spur you on to further thoughts, but I think my "introduction" raised, what are, for me, central questions. If you can't work with anything I've sent out, please invent areas of exploration for yourselves and delve in. Or is the responsive lethargy of 3 Henry VI continuing on into its follow-up?

One other question I would ask involves the mixture of comedy and tragedy in Richard III. As I have suggested before, Richard is in many ways a character out of the comic tradition found in "vices" like Ambidexter in Cambises and realized – perhaps – most fully in Marlowe's Mephistopheles. Such characters are frequently a mixture of detached cynicism and restlessness. They know they have no hope in any larger view of the world. "Why this is hell, nor am I out of it," says Mephistopheles famously. They, like their boss the Devil, are damned and without hope. This helps make them flat "types" – i.e. characters fit for comedies.

Well, Richard is sort of like this, and, in a sense, he is a comic character, and his play is a comedy (doubly so if he can persuade the audience that HIS world outlook is valid). Despite its "tragic form," we go to the play not to be cleansed through experiencing it, but to be entertained by the vivacious trickery and double-dealing of its chief comic trickster, knowing full well that he will be tossed out (something like Malvolio) for being too narrow to fit into the comic world's regenerative pattern.

Is there any sense in this way of looking at the play?

Note: The average temperature of New England has risen 4 degrees in the last 30 years.

Ernst

Richard III - Opening Remarks

Ah, Falstaff! Art thou the Grand Vice? Art thou not also the great Pan or his drunken devotee? Art thou not, as well, the penultimate Miles Gloriosus, the braggart soldier extraordinaire? And the trickster, the local Loki? How many archetypes can so great a body encompass?

We are all familiar with Richard III. It is a dramatic tour de force, but also a pretty simple play with lots of grand moments before the final rising tension of Richard’s confrontation with Elizabeth of York (who holds out against him longer than most), the ringing in of fate with the visitation of the ghosts, and the rapid denouement, which casts out the Devil and restores peace, amity, and a legitimate pair of rulers to England.

1. The most interesting questions may focus on Richard’s character and its relationship to fated necessity.

How is Richard different from the versions of his character we see in the Henry VI plays? Is he humanized to the point that he can be seen as a tragic character — and, if so, how? And if he is some sort of tragic hero, what are the particularities of his “tragic flaw” — beyond simple pride? To what point is his character less human through being “necessitated” by what may be Shakespeare’s larger plan, in which Richard seems meant to be the devil-come-to-earth (the “Scourge of God” as seen in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine), the ultimate result of Richard II’s overthrow and the necessary precursor of the Tudor ascendancy? And, of course, what is one to make of Richard the actor--the supreme self-dramatizer and director/manipulator of show-piece scenes involving others?

2. Productions of the play. I saw two the year before last. One was at Ashland with what’s-his-name playing Richard with a leer and a metal crutch. I found it tedious and the character too “cute” and thus uninterestingly narrow.

Much better, to my way of thinking, was a production at Chico’s Blue Room Theatre in which a much more intense focus was placed on the tightly-built Richard’s (Joe Hilsee) ever-restlessly-moving mind. It was also a production in which Buckingham was played by a fine actor, a man who must weigh 300 pounds, and one who played the role with a kind of unreflective buff joviality that made his conniving with Richard larger-than-life and his fall tremendous.

And then there’s Olivier’s film, which certainly leaves some grand moments imprinted on the mind, but which I haven’t seen for years.

3. As a kind of “vice,” Richard engages many of those he encounters in a kind of battle. Until the end, he wins each such confrontation. Who puts up the most effective losing battles/arguments? A classroom exercise would be to list these battles (at least ten of them) and then rank them in terms of the effectiveness of Richard’s antagonists.

Many workmen
Built a huge ball of masonry
Upon a mountain-top.
Then they went to the valley below,
And turned to behold their work.
"It is grand," they said;
They loved the thing.
Of a sudden, it moved:
It came upon them swiftly;
It crushed them all to blood.
But some had opportunity to squeal.
--Stephen Crane

4. So language is key here—both in winning arguments and in fighting back. I don’t really know how to deal any further with language than this assertion. Ideas, anyone? Also, what are we to make of the formulaic speeches running from Elizabeth’s argument with Richard, to the ghosts threatening him near the play’s end, to Richmond’s wrap-it-all-up final speech. And what of the relative brevity of the last two scenes?

5. The play’s three women (Margaret was actually in France, where she died during the years the play covers). They provide a fine, irony-rich chorus to the tragedy and heighten the moral issues weighing in on it. Is there any more we can say about them?

Sorry, that’s the best I can do at the moment. Feel free to raise (and answer) other questions.

Ernst

RE: 3 Henry VI

Chaps,

The Vice – I, too, think of Iago, whose destruction of Othello always drove my students to seek psychological motivation (recall Randall's story about Don John having an unhappy childhood). And he is certainly never a laugh riot. But I primarily think of Falstaff as "the Vice." He fits Ernst's description of "comic character," and we can look forward to exploring our affection, amusement, even admiration for him.

Robert Torrance has a book entitled The Comic Hero (a contradiction of terms) which features Falstaff. However, Germaine Greer, in Shakespeare, says "Because he is entertaining, scholars persist in finding excuses for Falstaff, forgetting perhaps that the Vice was always an ingratiating, lively, and amusing fellow. Falstaff's ancestor is the Morality figure of Good Fellowship, who always lets people down and cannot bring the protagonist one step on his way to heaven" (71). Greer also addresses Iago. "In Shakespearean tragedy there is always an element of psychomachia, or the struggle within the soul. One of the simplest, that Shakespeare would have taken over from the morality plays, is to show evil working on the protagonist in the person of a Vice. The Vice may be a lineal descendant of the intriguing servant of classical comedy or he may be a less self-conscious, more homegrown product. It is futile to demand motivation from the Vice, or reasons for his actions, for the point about evil is that it is absurd, unmotivated, and inconsistent" (45).

Could we offer Jack Cade (2 Henry VI) as the Vice? He is a buffoon, especially in the production Randall and I saw, comic yet with deadly outcomes, such as executing the guildsman after Cade has declared he should only be addressed as "Mortimer." As with Falstaff, he charges through the civil state as the Lord of Misrule. However, as John commented, the Henry VI plays seldom find either a narrative structure within the history, nor does Shakespeare rely on the conventions of drama, certainly not genre, but neither, I think, any temptation to import the established figures from medieval drama. So, I don't find The Vice here nor "evil." What we see in Richard is the emergence of a complex character imposed on history, devoted to ambition, to exploiting, overwhelming weakness where he encounters it, and to political individualism. Richard is already "modern" as he sees into the instability of the medieval world. When Randall says "evil is the negative consequence of what we do, not who we are," he expands Mike's introduction of 3 Henry VI as "an early map for existential isolation."

I have a big (long) argument about the evolution of words, something I think of as "the Jacobean Moment," which Randall worked through, but I think I will save it for a more substantial play. But welcome, John, for what I hope to learn from you about this subject.

I'm just a little burned out on Henry VI, yet it is tempting to dwell just a little longer on Edward's seduction of Lady Gray. (Isn't there a punch line: "we've established what you are, so now we're just negotiating about the price"?) What a curious little bit of Restoration hanky-panky. Does it strike anyone else as not fitting into this play, just as I tried to argue that the father-who-kills-son, etc. seemed out of place?

Gil

P.S. Greer's book has been rereleased with a new title, Shakespeare: A Very Short Introduction. Same book, but with pictures.

Much Ado About Reading

by Maureen Dowd (NY Times, 9/2/06)

’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. W., the most simple, unreflective and Manichaean of men, communing with Will, the most subtle, reflective and myriad-minded of men.

Under Laura the Librarian’s tutelage, the president is discovering the little black dress of 60’s education, as one scholar referred to the president’s summer reading list of “The Stranger,” “Hamlet” and “Macbeth.”

Mr. Bush’s bristly distaste for the intellectual elite has been so much a part of his persona, from Yale on, that it’s hard to wrap one’s mind around a heavy W., steeped in French existentialism and Elizabethan tragedy.

On the 2000 campaign trail, W. told me that he did not identify with any literary hero, that baseball was his favorite “cultural experience,” and that he liked “John La Care, Le Carrier, or however you pronounce his name.”

He was a gym rat, not a bookworm. He told Brit Hume in 2003 that he rarely read newspaper articles, preferring to get his information through aides, and he told Brian Lamb in 2005 that he would fall asleep after 20 or 30 pages of bedside reading.

But the first lady must have grown alarmed at seeing her husband mocked as a buff bubblehead wrapped in a bubble. She began giving interviews saying her man did too read newspapers, and she slipped W. some Camus and other serious fare.

Jackie Kennedy once complained that the Kennedys could turn anything into a competition — even oil painting. Just so, W. tried to keep his new gravitas homework interesting by engaging in a book competition with Karl Rove. Bush aides told Ken Walsh of U.S. News & World Report that the president wants it known that he is a man of letters.

W.’s claim of having read 53 to 60 books already this year has been met with some partisan skepticism — The American Prospect calls it “demonstrably ridiculous” — despite a Wall Street Journal article pronouncing speed-reading back in fashion among busy executives.

But I’m tickled that W. is reading Shakespeare, even if it’s just to please his wife or win a bet with his strategist. The president has been so tone-deaf in dealing with the world, and even with his own father, that he can only benefit from a dip in the Bard’s ocean of insight about the vicissitudes of human nature and war. Not to mention the benefits of being exposed to the beauty and precision of the language.

Stephen Greenblatt, the Harvard professor and author of “Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare,” demurs, noting that “there’s no reason to think reading Shakespeare necessarily makes you a more reflective or deeper person. Otherwise, the Nazis who kept the German Shakespeare Society going in the 30’s and 40’s would have learned something.”

Shakespeare’s texts are so complex, he says, that they “allow a huge range of readings and political views, like the Bible.”

Take “Macbeth,” Professor Greenblatt says. Bush critics might see irony in W.’s reading a play about a leader who makes a catastrophic decision to overturn a regime that ultimately brings his country and himself to ruin. But the president may be reading it differently, seeing shades of Saddam Hussein in Macbeth, a homicidal tyrant who gets his bloody comeuppance.

But he agrees there are some trenchant lessons that W. could glean, including Shakespeare’s doubt about quick and easy wars, and his conviction that what the professor calls “the rose-petal view” is an illusion; Shakespeare found a gigantic gap between what we imagine and what is actually likely to happen.

Ken Adelman, the former professor of Shakespeare and arms control director under Reagan, has compared W. to Prince Hal. But the Republican consultant, who teaches a management seminar with his wife, Carol, on Shakespeare, agrees that W.’s insulation prevents him from having the leadership strength of Henry V, who mingled among the common folk in the taverns and the soldiers on the battlefield.

Sometimes the second-term President Bush seems more like Henry’s opponent, the Dauphin of France, who has no sense of the reality of battle or his troops, misunderstands the situation and treats Henry with undeserved scorn.

The relentlessly black-and-white Bush could learn from the playwright’s riveting grays. “With Shakespeare,” says Marjorie Garber, a Harvard professor and the author of “Shakespeare After All,” “nothing is ever finished. You never close the door on anything. There’s never any ‘Mission Accomplished.’ ”