Richard D.

Erlich
English Department
Miami University
Oxford, Ohio 45056

Drama and Comedy Session, Group 17 (Room 307), Fifth Medieval Forum, Plymouth
State College, Plymouth, NH, 13-14 April 1984 [DRAFT: Work in Progess—which should
be indicated in any quotations or other references.]

Shakespeare and the Psychology of Evil:

Richard of Gloucester/Richard III in the First Tetralogy

I'll begin with two disclaimers. First, this paper is a racical condensa-
tion and revision of my 1966 Cornell master's essay, "Of Monster's and Malice:
The Symbolic Vicehood of Richard of Gloucester," directed by Barry Adams, an
essay that sunk without a trace somewhere in the Cornell research library.
It's already older than some of my freshman students, and I thought I'd
better return to it before it gets older than my graduate students. Secondly,
I'd like to wish any Rickardians in the audience a joyous 500th anniversary
of the reign of Richard III and note that I'll be with you in spirit in
August of next year if you plan any demonstrations denouncing the Tudor
usurpation. The historical Richard III died mostly a victim (if certainly no
martyr), "and this is not the man." I'll be talking about Shakespeare's
Richard of Gloucester and Richard III, a man in a series of plays that pass
on--delightfully--some rather nasty Tudor propaganda.

In Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil, Bernard Spivack proves

that Richard of Gloucester/Richard III is a member of "the family of Iago"
and a descendant of the old Vice of the Morality Plays.1 Spivack goes on to
contend, however, that the Vicehood of the family of Iago is both necessary
and nearly sufficient to explain the psychology of these villains, whose
criminality Spivack finds otherwise unintelligible, otherwise lacking in
"moral verisimilitude." With Richard, Spivack finds two quite different
roles: the role of the morally and theatrically verisimilar aspiring Machiavel
and villainous tyrant and the role of the cheerful seducer and sower of
dissension--i.e. Richard as Vice.

Richard's criminality becomes "intelligible," however, and the consis-

tency of his characterization becomes clear, if we see his Vicehood as sym-
bolic. He is indeed "like the formal Vice, Iniquity," but he is also a
recognizably human human being: a man suffering from Hatred, a man in a state
of malice.
 In 2 and 3 Henry VI and Richard III, we see Richard developing in close
correspondence to the pattern Scholastic psychology outlined for the course
of the "malicious sinner," who has become habituated to the usually passionate
"capital vices" and has moved beyond them to will "evil for its own sake,
with no deluding ignorance or passion."2 What Spivack sees as the essential
characteristic of a Vice-figure, the cold "motiveless malignity" Samuel
Taylor Coleridge recognized in Iago, is also the central characteristic of a
perverse kind of human personality, the maliciousness analyzed in detail
during the Middle Ages.

Spivack argues that in the First Tetralogy,

. . . the character of Richard remains consistent with itself from
first to last. His end fulfills his beginning, and the tyrant who
dies at [the Battle of] Bosworth [Field] is incipient in "Dicky your
boy, that . . . / Was wont to cheer his dad in mutinies." . . . But
what filament of character or experience can unite the doomed tyrant
tormented by bad conscience on the night before Bosworth with the
merry, and motiveless, genius of seduction and dissension earlier in
. . . [Richard III]? . . . Under the single name of Richard there
exist two roles in different dimensions, with no continuous life in
between. . . . Shakespeare's rendition of Richard does not recast
the historical figure, but from time to time it abrogates him entirely.
(pp. 388-9, 41, 393)
Richard, Spivack demonstrates, generally takes the role of aspiring Machiavel,
a role which Shakeapeare "abrogates" briefly in 3 Henry VI and for the first
three acts of Richard III--replacing it with the role of a member of the
family of Iago: a variation on the Vice figure of the late Morality Plays
given enough semblance of humanity to be acceptable to the more sophisticated,
more realistic theater of the late sisteenth century.
Iago and his family do not need reasonable motives for their "motiveless
malignity"; they merely express their natures as lineal descendants of abstract
vice. They are by derivation artists of villainy and are motivated by their
essential function of bringing about the aesthetically pleasing destruction
of "human beings who express those values and relationships which defined for
the Elizabethans the highest possibilities in human life"; their traditional
tools are "dissimulation, seduction, and intrigue," used for "the destruction
of unity and love" (Spivack, pp. 46-47).
In the late Morality Plays (from about 1550-1585), the Vice was shown
destroying love and concord in a series of episodes, pausing in monolog now
and then, not to ruminate over some inward conflict, but to share with his
audience some particularly masterful touch. Clearly, Iago in Othello, Aaron
the Moor in Titus Andronicus, and Don John in Much Ado do their best to
destroy the virtuous characters in their worlds. Richard's world is nearly
devoid of virtue, but, making do with what is at hand, he uses the techniques
of the Vice to destroy whatever semblance of good he can find. Seeing Richard
as Vice, Spivack analyzes his actions through the reconciliation arranged
in Richard III by the dying Edward IV. All through these episodes, Spivack
asserts,
. . . we shall look in vain for anything in the temper of . . .
[Richard's] performance that corresponds to a passion for sovereignty,
or to any other motive that is morally intelligible. For as long as
the archaic role grips him he is compelled by its homiletic principle
to display himself as the type of villainy, his regal ambitions
lapsing into . . . obscurity . . . . (pp. 403-4)
Spivack is undoubtedly correct in seeing Richard as a descendent of the
old Vice, but is he errs in his contention that such Vicehood is morally
unintelligible.
Love him, love him, love him, he's a lib-er-al (Spivack that is), and,
like too many of my sisters and brothers on the Left, Spivack has problems
with gratuitous evil. "Who steals my purse steals trash," as Iago says
(hypocritically), but we have no trouble understanding such a theft: the
money in my purse can buy useful goods and services; and the motivations of
desperation or greed are readily intelligible. "But he who filches from me
my good name," Iago continues, takes that which enriches not him and makes me poor
indeed" (Oth. III.3.155-61).3

Why would anyone steal my good name, slander me? What--usually--can he gain
from it? Well, some people are just no damn good, and when I quoted Spivack and
described Iago and his "family" to a cousin of mine who was a clinical
psychologist, he responded with something like, Iago may be unintelligible
to Mr. Spivack, but I run into that sort every day; you've just described a
classical psychopath."
Shakespeare wouldn't have known about psychopaths, sociopaths, or such,
as such--classical or otherwise--but he did know about evil people; and there
was a traditional theory to account for such sorts of evil. How Shakespeare
might have known such a theory we can debate, but I think it's clear that we
can reunify Richard of Gloucester and Richard III if we take his Vicehood as
a kind of dramatic symbol: the outward manifestation of a man in a spiritual
state of malitia, a man making others suffer from his state of malice.
Shakespeare's Richard III is a monstrous tyrant, but W. A. Armstrong's
description of "The Elizabethan Conception of the Tyrant" shows that he wasn't
a psychologically absurd tyrant.4 Shakespeare's Richard of Gloucester--and
Richard III, from time to time after his ascension--is a monster, but a
human one.5 Surely he'd be no great surprise to the writer who condemns in
Proverbs those "Who leave the paths of uprightness to walk in the ways of
darkness; / Who rejoice to do evil, and delight in the frowardness of the
wicked" (2.10-14). His "squirming," as E. G. Fogel used to call it, would be
no surprise to Isaiah, who saw the wicked as "like the tossing sea; / for it
cannot rest, / and its waters toss up mire and dirt. / There is no peace . . .
for the wicked" (57.20-21; see also 48.22).
More immediately relevant, Richard isn't exactly a surprise to Queen Eliza-
beth toward the end of Richard III, nor to his mother. Richard tells Elizabeth
that "All unavoided is the doom of destiny," and she caps his line with "True,
when avoided grace makes destiny" (IV.4.218-19). For a long while now, Richard
has foresaken Grace to quest after "the high imperial type of this earth's
glory," the crown (l. 245). Even before that, he's had a career that renders
decorous his state of malice. His mother summarizes:
Techy and wayward was thy infancy;
Thy schooldays frightful, desp'rate, wild, and furious;
Thy prime of manhood daring, bold, and venturous;
Thy age confirmed proud, subtle, sly, and bloody,
More mild, but yet more harmful--kind in hatred. (IV.4.169-73)
We'll have to take the old Duchess of York's word for Richard's infancy
and schooldays; his "prime of manhood" we've seen, though, in 2 and 3 Henry VI,
and his "age" we see in Richard III. Richard's manhood was formed in the
Wars of the Roses, which provided him unceasing habituation to ambition,
wrath, envy, pride, hatred--the more passionate sins. His age confirmed such
bad habits, making him, significantly, "kind in hatred": both hypocritically
"kind" in the modern sense and also "kind in hatred" with a frequent Shakes-
pearean pun. By the end of Richard III, Richard's "kind" is those who hate;
hatred has become intrinsic to his essence.
So part of the way Richard got monstrous was from poor nurture during the
upheavals of civil war. Part of the blame also, though, could go to nature
for making Richard son to the ambitious Richard of York, and for making Richard
deformed. In his 1612 essay "Of Deformity," Francis Bacon tells us that,
Deformed persons are commonly even with nature, for as nature hath
done ill by them, so do they by nature, being for the most part (as
the scripture saith) "void of natural affection" . . . . [Deformity
is a spur to the person] to deliver himself from scorn, therefore,
all deformed persons are extreme bold--first in their own defense
. . . but in the process of time by a general habit . . . . Also
it stirreth in them industry and especially of this kind, to watch
and observe the weakness of others that they might have somewhat to repay
. . . . [Moreover,] they will, if they be of spirit, seek to free
themselves from scorn, which must be either by virtue or malice.6
Richard's way won't be by virtue, and he explicitly and consciously chooses malice:
"Then, since the heavens have shaped my body so, / Let hell make crook'd my
mind to answer it." He explicitly rejects love and espouses an extension of
Stoic doctrine that is Shakespeare's formula for a villain:
I have no brother, I am like no brother;
And this word "love," which greybeards call divine,
Be resident in men like one another,
 And not in me. I am myself alone. (3H6 V.6.78-83, my emphasis)7
That Richard is an unloving and utimately unlovable villain, though, is not
what bothers Bernard Spivack. What bothers Spivack in Richard as a human
villain is Richard's frequent lack of any passion except alacrity and enthusiasm
in doing evil. Richard's artistry in evil does come from the Vice tradition,
and is psychologically verisimilar only in terms of relatively modern thought
(Reade, p. 261); Richard's usual lack of passion, however, can be explained using
commonplaces from the psychology of evil of Thomas Aquinas.
As we have seen, Richard's deformity would predispose him to envy, and it
is significant that Richard's first descent into Vicehood comes in his monolog
"Ay, Edward will use women honorably," occasioned by his envy of his brother
Edward's easy success with women (3H6 III.2.124-95). Supporting his father's
cause in the Wars of the Roses (and receiving his father's praise for his
violence) and his determination to revenge York's death (the loss of the one
person he's loved)-these experiences would train Richard in wrath, even if
he had inherited none of his father's very bad temper. With his father dead
and cruelly avenged, and with Edward on the throne, Richard has lost what
have been the center of his life. He finds a new goal in trying to achieve
the "false blessedness" of the English crown--and adds ambition and its
motivation of pride to his habitual sins.8 It is at this point in his
history that Richard first slips into Vicehood.
And this is exactly what we should expect, for "the long cherishing of
capital vices such as ira [wrath] and invidia [envy]" will always bring one
to hatred, and hatred "will always be associated with malitia." Such hatred,
W. H. V. Reade tells us,
is an ultimate condition of the will, possible only when passion is
extinguished. In fits of anger or envy, the sinner may desire his
neighbour's evil, but the phantom of good still hovers before him,
and he is not yet delivered over to the pale and malignant demon of
hatred. This hatred is caused by the capital vices . . . "efficiently,"
because they are its historical antecedents. Exactly the same thing
has been proved of malitia . . . for malitia implies the perfection
of habitus, and habit grows out of repeated indulgence in passionate
acts. In a certain sense, therefore, malitia is caused by the capital
vices, and in the same sense [hatred] is caused by [envy] . . . .9
Thus [hatred] supplements [malice]. The malicious sinner wills evil
for its own sake, with no deluding ignorance or passion; but evil
when willed for its own sake can only be [hatred for the Other]; and
[hatred for the Other] cannot be deliberately willed until mere anger
or envy have given place to [hatred]. We may call [hatred] the final
cause of malicious acts without interfering with the doctrine that the
act is an end in itself, for to hate, and to will murder or theft for
its own sake, are but two expressions of the same thing. (pp. 263-4)
 Richard does not complete the transition to pure malitia and Vicehood
until the regicide scene in which Richard kills the saintly Henry VI shortly
before the end of 3 Henry VI. Between the regicide and Richard's ascension
to the throne (R3 IV.1), Richard is certainly "like the formal Vice, Iniquity"
(R3 III.1.82). But upon his ascension to the throne, Richard becomes less the Vice
and more of the standard nervous tyrant, losing his distance and his sense of
irony--and starting to make mistakes. There is no problem here, just an
early instance of what will become a very effective Shakespearean theme: an
actor starting to live his part, as with Hamlet's "antic disposition" and, more
relevantly, Richard II's kingly obsessions. Richard starts to live his role
of king and tyrant and has his royal nephews murdered--not the act of a funny
villain, not the act of a comic Scourge of God with whom Shakespeare wants a
fair degree of identification.
Richard, though, does have one passionate scene I'll need to handle: his
reaction to his vision of the ghosts just before Bosworth. Richard who
declared his fearlessness and his autonomy, Richard who denied "pity, love"
and "fear" (3H6 V.6.68, 80-84)--this Richard awakes frightened, declares his
hatred of himself, and laments his state:
I shall despair. There is no creature loves me;
And if I die, no soul will pity me.
Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself
Find in myself no pity to myself? (R3 V.3.180-204)
Richard is of the family of Iago, and like Iago he lets the mask slip for a
moment, although for far longer than the completer villain Iago allows.10
Like Iago he is only a "demidevil." The "phantom of good," as Reade says,
"still hovers before him," and, for a brief while, Richard sees the good of
good and the vileness of his own evil. Only for a moment, though: with
sunrise Richard is himself again, and he goes off to be defeated by Richmond--
the good and glorious Henry Tudor (in Tudor propaganda), soon to be King
Henry VII.
In the Vicehood of Richard of Gloucester, then, Shakespeare shows that
human beings are capable of the perverse achievment of a state of hatred, or
malice. Deny love, Shakespeare tells us, deny the bonds of humanity--declare
that "I am myself alone"--and you may find yourself indeed alone, willing
only evil to anyone not self. But even in such a degenerate state of being
(Shakespeare insists), the desire for the good remains, primarily the desire
for human love. The message is an old one, and it's always relevant. One of
Shakespeare's ways of making it "new" and exciting is to convey it in part
through that entertaining comedian of evil, the Vice.

Notes
 1
Bernard Spivack, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil: The History of a
Metaphor in Relation to His Major Villains (New York: Columbia U. Press, 1958).
In this paper, citations after the first will be found in my text.

2
W. H. V. Reade, The Moral System of Dante's Inferno (1909; rpt. Port
Washington, NY, and London, UK: Kennikat), p. 264. (The pagination of the
Kennikat rpt. appears to be identical with that of the 1909 1st edn.)

3
All references to Shakespeare will be to Alfred Harbage, gen. ed.,
William Shakespeare: The Complete Works ["The Complete Pelican Shakespeare"]
(Baltimore: Penguin, 1969). Citations will be by act, scene, and line, which
are identical to that of the individual Pelican edns. of the play, but may
differ slightly in lineation from other edns. For abb. of Shakespeare's plays
I use the MLA/SQ system, which may be found in The MLA Handbook . . . .

4
W. A. Armstrong, "The Elizabethan Conception of the Tyrant," RES, 22
(July 1946), 161-81.

5
E. M. W. Tillyard--who is not a liberal in his Shakespearen criticism--
disagrees with the contention that Richard is psychologically verisimilar.
In his important treatment of Shakespeare's History Plays, he calls the Richard
of Acts IV and V of R3 "a symbol, psychologically absurd however useful
dramatically, of the diabolic" (1944; rpt. New York: Collier, 1962), p. 241.

6
Bacon's Essays, ed. Richard Whateley (London: xxxxxxxxxxxx, 1882), p. 161.

7
Two points here.
(1) As Robert Ornstein points out in A Kingdom for a Stage, there is
much to be said for the consciousness of Richard's villainy: "Completely
honest with himself, Richard is fully conscious of his hypocrisies and pretenses.
. . . and his frank sanctimony is a refreshing breeze in the stifling cant
of the Court. He does not release an audience from the burden of morality;
he frees it from the burden of the simpering hypocrisy that often passes for
moral conviction, from the clich/?es of brotherhood and charity that substitute
[in his world] for generous thought and Christian deeds" (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard U. Press, 1972), p. 70. Richard functions as a "Scourge of God,"
wiping out the generation of vipers victorious in the Wars of the Roses, and
we should sympathize with him, "objectively"; the comic irony his conscious
villainy gives him gets that sympathy even from audiences ignorant of the
history of the Wars of the Roses and of the theory of the Scourge of God.
We sympathize with Richard until he oversteps his commission and loses his
irony, with the murder of the Princes. Whether conscious villainy is superior
to unconscious villainy is a point we can debate. Traditional theory holds
unconscious villainy less culpable. Still, Joseph Conrad's Marlow in Heart
of Darkness, C. S. Lewis's Screwtape in his Toast, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. in
Slaughterhouse-Five strongly disagree and definitely have a point.
(2) Stoicism was an intellectual fad in the late 16th and early 17th
centuries, and Shakespeare presented a fashionable Stoic in Horatio in Ham.
Still, the Stoic ideal had been attacked from at least Erasmus' Praise of
Folly, and it's not hard to demonstrate that Shakespeare is none too keen on
the idea of self-sufficiency, or of self-sufficient intellect. E.g., in King Lear
contrast Cordelia and her idea of her "bond" with Edmund (in the forged letter)
on "bondage"--and Cordelia as loving fool with Edmund as a "wise" villain.

8
Ornstein notes that Richard at the beginning of R3 "wants work, an
opportunity to bustle, a goal worthy of his extraordinary energies and talnts"—
and also notes the nice irony in Richard's winning of Anne: that if
Richard had "applied himself to seduction," if not love, "he might have
rivaled Casanova" (Kingdom, pp. 67 & 68).
In his essay on "How the Soul Discharges her Passions Upon False
Objects When True Are Lacking" (ca. 1572), Montaigne makes some comments
useful for Richard's decision to try for the crown, esp. as we hear that
decision in monolog--or perhaps introspective soliloquy--in the "Ay, Edward"
speech in 3H6 (III.2.124-95):
. . . the mind in its passions rather deceives itself by creating a
false and fantastical object, even contrary to its own belief, than
not have something to work upon. It is thus that their fury incites
animals to fall upon the stone or object that has hurt them, and with
their teeth to execute vengeance upon themselves for the pain they feel.
So the firece boar made fiercer by the smart
Of the bold Lybian's mortal wounding dart,
Turns round upon the wound, and the tough spear
contorted o'er her breast doth, flying bear.
The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, ed. and trans. Jacob Zeitlin (New York:
XXXXXXXXXXX, 1934), I, 15. Note that Richard's symbol is a boar and that he
is sometimes called "the boar."

9
See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica II.2, Q. 34 Art. 6. Since Reade
understands the "moral system" of the Inferno to be Thomistic, he takes his ideas
from St. Thomas. That Shakespeare knew Scholastic psychology as well as
Reade did, though, or at all--that is a difficult question. If I err in my
assumption that Shakespeare was at least indirectly familiar with such lore,
I err in fairly good company: note Walter Clyde Currey's assertion that the
"moral philosophy of the Renaissance in general constituted at bottom a
restatement and elaboration of mediaeval conceptions; and the faculty psychology
of the time . . . was 'the psychology of Aristotle and Bacon and of all the
thinkers who lived between them'" (Shakespeare's Philosophical Patterns
[Baton Rouge: XXXXXXX, 1959], p. 23, quoting Hardin Craig, "Shakespeare's
Depiction of Passions," PQ, IV, 301).
Note also that Richard Hooker, whose Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity
began to appear about the same time as R3 (1593), called Thomas the "greatest
amongst the school-divines" and that W. D. J. Cargill Thompson finds Hooker
"steeped in the knowledge of Aristotle and Aquinas" (Laws, Bk III, section IX,
subsection [and paragraph] 2 [Everyman edn., ed. Ernest Rys (1907)], v. 1, 325;
"The Philosopher of the 'Politic Society': Richard Hooker as a Political
Thinker," in Studies in Richard Hooker, ed. W. Speed Hill [Cleveland & London:
The Press of Case Western Reserve U., 1972], p. 21 & passim). If Hooker could
rely extensively on Thomas on matters political, Thomistic ideas were, at least,
safe to be discussed and available to scholars.

10
Iago let's his "mask" slip while figuring out why he wants Roderigo to
murder Cassio. He recognizes that "the Moor / May unfold me to him," which
he knows might put him "in much peril" from Cassio, Othello, or both. Still,
that's only a "and besides"; the first reason is that,
If Cassio do remain,
He hath a daily beauty in his life
That makes me ugly . . . . (Oth. V.1.18-22)
If Cassio's "daily beauty" bothers Iago--Cassio!--then the beauty of Othello
and Desdemona must torment him.