Charnes, Linda. Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Richard III is the most “notorious” of all the historical kings Shakespeare chose to represent. This notoriety is twofold: Richard’s defeat ushered in the Tudor monarchy, and he was widely reputed to have been a physical and moral monster. Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI—all had existence in the histories and chronicles, all were “identified” by the place they occupied in English history and politics; but as dramatic figures, none were (or had to be) as politically and peculiarly “invested” as Richard III. None carried the almost mythic imaginative weight that the deformed Last Plantagenet had for the Elizabethans. But Richard is important for another reason as well. He is arguably the first subjectively “dense” figure to appear in Shakespeare’s plays. By this, I mean that he is the first figure in the corpus for whom the requirements of social identity produce a thematized disjunction or alterity: simultaneously a nexus of identification and a banned Otherness. Richard is “identified” by his portentous and overdetermined positioning in Tudor historiography; yet the play maps Richard’s dense disidentification, his efforts to evade a taxonomy that is always used to enforce his alignment with this textual history. Why is it that Shakespeare’s representation of a notoriously “known” figure produces such a pronounced “subjectivity effect”? (28)
Critics have often said that Shakespeare’s Richard III is memorable because of the pleasure he takes in his villainy. Like the medieval Vice (the clichéd Renaissance figure of the Machiavel) with which he is frequently aligned, Richard seems to embrace with relish and bravado the “stock” role of villain that Tudor history has cast him in. But the case has also been made that Richard is “psychologically complex,” a reading most frequently advanced by psychoanalytic critics who see in his misogyny and murderous aggression the effects of extraordinary narcissistic wounds…(29).
The apparent divergence of these views—Richard as stock figure versus Richard as narcissistically disturbed—is, however, revealing of a more general difficulty critics have negotiating the relationship between social and subjective structures. The difficulty is evident when critics argue that Richard represents Shakespeare’s “evolution” toward a more “realistic” kind of character with whom the audience is meant, presumably, to identify. The problem with this approach, as I see it, is that it opposes “figurativeness” to “realism” in a binary economy that fails to recognize their inherence in each other. Such a “choice” is in fact a false one. Whatever complexity the representation of Richard achieves is diacritically produced only in relation to the reified conventions that also and simultaneously hypostatize him as “historical” Vice (29).
In other words, whatever “inwardness” Shakespeare achieves with Richard depends precisely upon his construction as a stock villain. There is in the play a kind an overwhelming apparatus, a kind of Tudor “Harrow,” that demands that Richard be the Vice; and this brooding, inexorably structural habitus becomes for Richard what Slavoj Zizek has called “the big Other”: the “other presumed to know” against which subjectivity strains and out of which strain emerges the effect—both for the subject and the audience—of “inwardness” and complexity. It isn’t that Richard is either the Vice or the Psychological Individual. Rather, Richard is subjectively convincing precisely to the extent that the historical, textual, political, and dramaturgical necessity to “prove a villain” materializes him as a certain kind of subject: one who is strung out between demands that he be at once the pathological individual and the general sign of a politics gone wrong (29-30).
Shakespeare’s audience would immediately have recognized Richard’s physical deformity and moral depravity as a synecdoche for the state; and there are frequent references to the “unnatural” state of political affairs and their connection to the monstrous and unnatural Richard (30).
In Shakespeare’s Richard III, as in the authorized Tudor histories, Richard’s identity is inseparable from his physical “difference” (31).
The fascination Richard holds for the audience comes from his attempts to resist and escape the deformed and deforming signification the play insists upon—his attempts to counteract the Richard of Tudor legend, which I will henceforth call “the play’s Richard,” with his own version, or Richard’s Richard. The play’s Richard is the figure inherited from John Rous, Morton, Polydore Vergil, More, Grafton, Halle, and Holinshed; his deformity was deployed as “evidence” of moral and political depravity. This identity is continually referred to by others, particularly the women, including Anne Neville, Margaret, Elizabeth, and his mother the duchess; and it is characterized by a language of dehumanization: he is a bunch-backed toad, a bottled spider, a mad dog, a devil, a foul stone, a lump of foul deformity. Since Richard’s experience of himself is inseparable from how he “reads” the signs of his own body as a signifying text, his entire course of action can be seen as directed toward gaining control over the social construction, perception, and manipulation of bodily signifiers. Richard knows he cannot replace the perception of monstrosity with that of normalcy; but he can subrogate, by means of inversion, one ideology of exception with another. He can sublate his deformed body to the perfect “Body” of the king (32).
This is not to say that gaining the crown is a “psychological motivation” for Richard. At least, it’s not psychological in the sense of individual pathology. Overdetermined by a habitus in which bodies must signify, Richard’s “desire” for the crown is both an objective compulsion toward the only alternative structure for him to inhabit that equals, in its own symbolically mandated weight, his portentous body; and a desire to replace stigma, and its shameful sense of social exclusion, with charisma—the symbolic value attributed to someone who is perceived as being “near the heart of things” (32-3).
Looking at the play retroactively, when Richard says at 1.1.30 that he is “determined to prove a villain,” we know this to be true. But not because Richard wills it (62).
The extent to which Shakespeare supports Tudor myth means that we must see Richard as a monster. But the extent to which the play reveals legend as an apparatus that justifies particular regimes and versions of history means that we must also see everyone else in the play as a kind of monster (64).
Richard III is the most “notorious” of all the historical kings Shakespeare chose to represent. This notoriety is twofold: Richard’s defeat ushered in the Tudor monarchy, and he was widely reputed to have been a physical and moral monster. Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI—all had existence in the histories and chronicles, all were “identified” by the place they occupied in English history and politics; but as dramatic figures, none were (or had to be) as politically and peculiarly “invested” as Richard III. None carried the almost mythic imaginative weight that the deformed Last Plantagenet had for the Elizabethans. But Richard is important for another reason as well. He is arguably the first subjectively “dense” figure to appear in Shakespeare’s plays. By this, I mean that he is the first figure in the corpus for whom the requirements of social identity produce a thematized disjunction or alterity: simultaneously a nexus of identification and a banned Otherness. Richard is “identified” by his portentous and overdetermined positioning in Tudor historiography; yet the play maps Richard’s dense disidentification, his efforts to evade a taxonomy that is always used to enforce his alignment with this textual history. Why is it that Shakespeare’s representation of a notoriously “known” figure produces such a pronounced “subjectivity effect”? (28)
Critics have often said that Shakespeare’s Richard III is memorable because of the pleasure he takes in his villainy. Like the medieval Vice (the clichéd Renaissance figure of the Machiavel) with which he is frequently aligned, Richard seems to embrace with relish and bravado the “stock” role of villain that Tudor history has cast him in. But the case has also been made that Richard is “psychologically complex,” a reading most frequently advanced by psychoanalytic critics who see in his misogyny and murderous aggression the effects of extraordinary narcissistic wounds…(29).
The apparent divergence of these views—Richard as stock figure versus Richard as narcissistically disturbed—is, however, revealing of a more general difficulty critics have negotiating the relationship between social and subjective structures. The difficulty is evident when critics argue that Richard represents Shakespeare’s “evolution” toward a more “realistic” kind of character with whom the audience is meant, presumably, to identify. The problem with this approach, as I see it, is that it opposes “figurativeness” to “realism” in a binary economy that fails to recognize their inherence in each other. Such a “choice” is in fact a false one. Whatever complexity the representation of Richard achieves is diacritically produced only in relation to the reified conventions that also and simultaneously hypostatize him as “historical” Vice (29).
In other words, whatever “inwardness” Shakespeare achieves with Richard depends precisely upon his construction as a stock villain. There is in the play a kind an overwhelming apparatus, a kind of Tudor “Harrow,” that demands that Richard be the Vice; and this brooding, inexorably structural habitus becomes for Richard what Slavoj Zizek has called “the big Other”: the “other presumed to know” against which subjectivity strains and out of which strain emerges the effect—both for the subject and the audience—of “inwardness” and complexity. It isn’t that Richard is either the Vice or the Psychological Individual. Rather, Richard is subjectively convincing precisely to the extent that the historical, textual, political, and dramaturgical necessity to “prove a villain” materializes him as a certain kind of subject: one who is strung out between demands that he be at once the pathological individual and the general sign of a politics gone wrong (29-30).
Shakespeare’s audience would immediately have recognized Richard’s physical deformity and moral depravity as a synecdoche for the state; and there are frequent references to the “unnatural” state of political affairs and their connection to the monstrous and unnatural Richard (30).
In Shakespeare’s Richard III, as in the authorized Tudor histories, Richard’s identity is inseparable from his physical “difference” (31).
The fascination Richard holds for the audience comes from his attempts to resist and escape the deformed and deforming signification the play insists upon—his attempts to counteract the Richard of Tudor legend, which I will henceforth call “the play’s Richard,” with his own version, or Richard’s Richard. The play’s Richard is the figure inherited from John Rous, Morton, Polydore Vergil, More, Grafton, Halle, and Holinshed; his deformity was deployed as “evidence” of moral and political depravity. This identity is continually referred to by others, particularly the women, including Anne Neville, Margaret, Elizabeth, and his mother the duchess; and it is characterized by a language of dehumanization: he is a bunch-backed toad, a bottled spider, a mad dog, a devil, a foul stone, a lump of foul deformity. Since Richard’s experience of himself is inseparable from how he “reads” the signs of his own body as a signifying text, his entire course of action can be seen as directed toward gaining control over the social construction, perception, and manipulation of bodily signifiers. Richard knows he cannot replace the perception of monstrosity with that of normalcy; but he can subrogate, by means of inversion, one ideology of exception with another. He can sublate his deformed body to the perfect “Body” of the king (32).
This is not to say that gaining the crown is a “psychological motivation” for Richard. At least, it’s not psychological in the sense of individual pathology. Overdetermined by a habitus in which bodies must signify, Richard’s “desire” for the crown is both an objective compulsion toward the only alternative structure for him to inhabit that equals, in its own symbolically mandated weight, his portentous body; and a desire to replace stigma, and its shameful sense of social exclusion, with charisma—the symbolic value attributed to someone who is perceived as being “near the heart of things” (32-3).
Looking at the play retroactively, when Richard says at 1.1.30 that he is “determined to prove a villain,” we know this to be true. But not because Richard wills it (62).
The extent to which Shakespeare supports Tudor myth means that we must see Richard as a monster. But the extent to which the play reveals legend as an apparatus that justifies particular regimes and versions of history means that we must also see everyone else in the play as a kind of monster (64).
