Richard III as Shakespeare's Humbert: The Villain Protagonist

The Art of the Lovable Villain

Literature is filled with characters designed to be lovable. Cordelia from Shakespeare's King Lear, for instance, is the good sister: she cares nothing about Lear's bequest but focuses only on her love for her father. She is virtually sainted against the deep contrast of her mercenary sisters. Then there is Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov's lovable, absent-minded foreign professor in the novel of the same name. Pnin is constantly thwarted by the insensitive and impersonal nature of American society, and readers have no choice but to love him and feel for him.

The Nabokov example is selected because of another — much more famous — Nabokovian character: Humbert. A pedophile and accused murderer, Humbert is, on the surface, one of the least likable characters in literature and a highly questionable choice as a protagonist. However, Nabokov wields his magic, and the beauty of Lolita is that readers cannot help but root for Humbert, despite their abhorrence for the acts he has admittedly committed. Nabokov took it as a challenge to allow aesthetics to defeat common social and moral perceptions, and he won that challenge quite handily by constructing what is arguably the most aesthetically pleasing novel in history.

Shakespeare takes on a similar challenge in Richard III. Richard himself is an extremely violent, abrasive character who uses every opportunity to further himself and his interests. Yet through Shakespeare's employment of language — and through the powerful monologues and dialogue with which he arms Richard III — readers are compelled to feel for Richard's character despite the atrocities he commits throughout the play.

In other words, Richard's verbal skills, his intelligence, his ability to draw the common man to his leadership, his outsider's understanding of how people's minds and motivations work, and his grasp of how the politically charged world in which he operates truly functions — these are the very qualities that make him an attractive and dramatic protagonist, even if he is not a figure that readers or audiences can exactly like or wish to emulate.

As for the actual life of Richard III: "Richard's power was immense, and upon the death of Edward IV, he positioned himself to seize the throne from the young Edward V. He feared a continuance of internal feuding should Edward V, under the influence of his mother's Woodville relatives, remain on the throne — most of this feared conflict would have undoubtedly come from Richard." (Britannia, 2005)

The old nobility, also frightened of a strengthened Woodville clan, assembled and declared the succession of Edward V illegal, citing poor evidence suggesting that Edward IV's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was bigamous, thereby rendering his sons illegitimate and ineligible as successors to the crown. Edward V and his younger brother, Richard of York, were imprisoned in the Tower of London and never escaped those walls alive. Richard of Gloucester was then crowned Richard III on July 6, 1483. (Britannia, 2005)

Richard's 1472 marriage to sixteen-year-old Anne Neville resulted in disputes with Clarence — husband of Anne's older sister Isabella Neville — over the estates of their late father, reminiscent of King Lear. (Bookrags, 2005)

Richard III and the Historical Record

Richard was the last Plantagenet monarch. By the time of his final stand against the Lancastrians, he was a widower without a legitimate heir. After his son's death, Richard III had initially named his nephew Edward, Earl of Warwick — Clarence's young son and also the nephew of Queen Anne Neville — as his heir. After Anne's death, however, Richard named John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, as his successor instead. (Biography Channel, 2005)

In one particular speech near the end of Richard III, Richard mutters to himself as he attempts to shake off a nightmare and prepare for a battle he knows will come at dawn. It is "dead midnight" on the eve of battle — the witching hour, the moment of night when "the lights burn blue," a reference to the old superstition that when ghosts or spirits abound they play tricks on lamps. Richard has awoken violently in a cold sweat ("Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh") with only murder on his mind.

The central image of the speech occurs in lines 194–200:

My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.
Perjury, perjury, in the high'st degree:
Murther, stern murther, in the dir'st degree;
All several sins, all us'd in each degree,
Throng all to the bar, crying all, 'Guilty! guilty!'

In this nightmare, Richard's suppressed knowledge of his own sins and murderous deeds has transformed into a throng of shouting witnesses to his treachery, gathering in a courtroom or some place of judgment and vilifying him before the "bar" — the place of judgment. This courtroom metaphor is the same one Nabokov uses for Humbert, who addresses his readers directly as ladies and gentlemen of the jury.

In Richard III, the courtroom metaphor sounds oddly formal for a monarch shaking in a cold sweat after a morbid nightmare, but its formality underscores just how heinous his crimes are. On a physical level, the metaphor is effective because the thundering of the "thousand several tongues" contrasts so powerfully with the stillness of "dead midnight." The "throng" represents his solitude thrown into relief: he is alone with his sins, yet those sins crowd around him.

Richard's Nightmare Soliloquy

The tone of the speech shifts as it progresses, mirroring Richard's confusion upon first waking and his gradual reassertion of confidence. His initial lines are a string of questions that give us a flavor of the "thousand tongues" he experienced in the dream:

What? do I fear myself? there's none else by:
Is there a murtherer here? No. Yes, I am:
Then fly: what! from myself? Great reason: why?
Lest I revenge. What? myself upon myself?
Alack! I love myself. Wherefore? For any good
That I myself have done unto myself?

Asking questions and then answering them within the same breath reveals Richard's disorientation. He is neither fully awake nor fully asleep; he is uncertain whether he is alone or surrounded by spirits, and he is defending himself against the "thousand tongues" decrying him guilty. As he rises and begins to recognize that he has been dreaming, the tone of the monologue shifts entirely:

I am a villain. Yet I lie; I am not.
Fool, of thyself speak well: fool, do not flatter.

Now Richard is awake, and at last he recalls the nightmare. He describes it, but in doing so he is also interpreting it — "My conscience hath a thousand several tongues" — and assigning it its proper place.

It takes Richard a few moments to fully rid himself of the dream's effects even after he quickly dismisses his own self-pity as a moment of weakness (lines 201–204). When Ratcliff wakes him, he declares that he has had "a fearful dream" and that "shadows" have frightened him more than ten thousand armed soldiers ever could. A little later, commanding Norfolk to prepare his troops for battle, he states:

Let not our babbling dreams affright our souls
For conscience is a word that cowards use,
Devis'd at first to keep the strong in awe:
Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law.

The phrase "babbling dreams" suggests he still hears the "thousand tongues," and the double reference to "conscience" within four lines demonstrates that the voices of his past victims — the song of his own guilt — have not yet quieted.

There is little unusual in the content of Richard's battle oration; he is delivering the standard pre-battle address urging his men to drive out the rabble. Yet the reference to "sleeping safe" and being brought to "unrest" is unmistakably linked to what transpired to him the previous night:

Remember whom you are to cope withal:
A sort of vagabonds, rascals, and run-aways,
A scum of Britaines and base lackey peasants,
Whom their o'ercloyed country vomits forth
To desperate adventures and assur'd destruction.
You sleeping safe, they bring you to unrest;

There is one more, more critical, connection to Richard's nightmare in the same scene. As Richard, freshly risen, departs with Ratcliff to inspect his allies, Shakespeare gives us Richmond rising from his own bed before battle — happy, well-rested, and eager to declare how soundly he has slept: