Abstract
This article seeks to bring to light the role of performativity in shaping the politics and poetics of visibility in Shakespeare’s Richard III. It argues that performative games of (in)visibility are at the center of the play’s narrative structure. The hero-villain of the play uses them in his machinations. As a theatrically conscious villain, Richard uses the visual to manipulate the other characters and subject them to his will. On the stage, he uses his own body as his principal means of deception. Indeed, rather than shying away from the public gaze because of his deformity, Richard wants to be seen—albeit on his own terms. He constantly fashions and refashions himself to control the manner in which he is perceived by others. In the play, Richard is presented primarily as an actor but he also plays the director and controls how bodies are distributed and perceived within the performative space. Space and visuality are key to understanding the theme of political intrigue in Richard III. By analyzing the performative politics of visuality in the play, this article attempts to explain how the distribution of the performing entities within the visible and invisible performative spaces determines the power relations between them.
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Notes
- 1.
Davis explains that “performance scholars can be found under the mantle of philosophy, ethnography, art history, political theory, media studies, music, rhetoric, theater, and literary studies” (2008, 1).
- 2.
Major performance theorists like Philip Auslander and Richard Schechner do not avoid using the word “human” when they speak about the performer or the character being performed.
- 3.
At least because the material presence of the performing human subject (body and consciousness) invests the performed entity with recognizable human traits.
- 4.
This chapter will focus on the depiction of Richard in The Tragedy of King Richard the Third (referred to throughout this chapter as Richard III), but it will refer to other Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean works that also represent this historical figure whenever relevant. All quotes come from William Shakespeare, Richard III, ed. John Jowett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
- 5.
As he smiles Othello shall go mad
And his unbookish jealousy must construe
Poor Cassio’s smiles, gestures, and light behaviours
Quite in the wrong (Othello 4.1.98–101).
- 6.
This is the fruit of rashness. Marked you not
How that guilty kindred of the queen
Looked pale when they did hear of Clarence’s death?
O, they did urge it still into the King (Richard III 2.1.133–6).
- 7.
Puritans (who can, in many respects, be called Calvinists), for example, used to recite and improvise prayers “to recover assurances of their election” (Kaufman 1999, 61).
- 8.
Richard’s bawdy corporeal language is certainly rife with exaggerations and morbid distortions, but it reveals the importance of sex in the courtly life of the later days of Edward IV’s reign.
- 9.
In times of war, the body of Richard was valued for its strength and violence. His merit is based on his being a destroyer of bodies in Henry VI. In this play, he will play the same role but through intrigue and guile rather than open violence.
- 10.
The loss of Buckingham’s support was one of the major factors in the downfall of the historical Richard III. In the play, Shakespeare theatricalizes their relationship by making Buckingham one of the main sources of Richard’s theatrical power.
- 11.
Only when Richard is silenced in the dream-world are the ghosts of his dead victims able to challenge him and drain his discursive and performative energy to bestow it on Richmond (if he were to speak, he would certainly overpower them). The dream in Act Five, scene four seems to be an authorial tour de force that breaks Richard’s performative and discursive hegemony to pave the way for his military defeat.
- 12.
He cannot let them take the stage with him again.
- 13.
It is the unnamable and uncanny “that within which passeth show” (Hamlet, 1.2.86). It cannot be named or described. This is why it is beyond language.
- 14.
To perform the illegal act of executing a noble without trial (by his peers), the historical Richard is said to have stationed an army of about 6,000 men in and around London to crush any dissent. Shakespeare’s Richard does not seem to need an army. After he silences the other lords through his spectacular performance, he easily convinces the Mayor of London that Hastings deserved his fate.
- 15.
Vital to the control strategies of Richard in this scene is the distribution of the performing bodies across the performative space. He places his accomplices and henchman in key positions (Buckingham leads the crowd, Catesby is behind them, and the other henchmen are possibly in the middle) to maintain control over the crowd. Positioning his own body is also important as it helps him deceive the crowd and coordinate with his accomplices and henchmen.
- 16.
The account of his rise to power that was written by Dominic Mancini in 1483, which throws a different—more sympathetic—light on Richard’s actions, was not unearthed until the first half of the twentieth century (see Mancini 1969). It is unlikely that Shakespeare knew of it. In addition, the earliest surviving portrait of Richard is dated to the second decade of the sixteenth century, a time when the last Plantagenet king of England was the target of the demonizing propaganda of the Tudors. It is not possible to establish whether Shakespeare could have had access to that distorted portrait, let alone seen any alternative depictions of Richard.
- 17.
According to Stephen Greenblatt, “Richard III is among the few plays of Shakespeare to depict a mother-child relationship” (2018, 62). This relation, however, is not cordial. The Duchess tries to dissociate herself from Richard and even wants to kill him. As Greenblatt says, “it is clear that she is sickened by what she has brought into the world” (2018, 63). Richard does not hesitate to instruct his henchman Buckingham to question the honor of his mother in public by claiming that Edward, his brother, was a bastard.
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Zouidi, N. (2021). The Demon’s Amorous Looking Glass: Reflections on the Villain’s Performative Self-Fashioning in Richard III by William Shakespeare. In: Zouidi, N. (eds) Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7_8
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