Profane Icon: The Throne Scene of Shakespeare's Richard III

Profane Icon: The Throne Scene of Shakespeare's Richard III Peggy Endel GUIL: Retentive—he's a very retentive king, a royal retainer. . . . ROS: What are you playing at? GUIL: Words, words. They're all we have to go on. —Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead The English drama critic John Trewin first began to review Shakespeare's plays on the London stage in 1930. In 1978, when he was seventy years old, this dean of theater critics looked back over a lifetime of what he called "going to Shakespeare" and recalled an extraordinary moment at the Old Vic in London in 1944. Remembering Laurence Olivier enthroned as Richard III in Act IV, scene ii, of Shakespeare's play, Trewin writes, "One must always judge [Olivier's] famous portrait from its first presentation with the Old Vic company, and not from the film. . . . Richard distilled his own darkness; and I cannot return to the play now without picturing Olivier, a cauldron-figure, crowned and sceptred, as he brooded on the throne."l What Trewin evokes here is a stage image so potent and so compelling that it has impressed itself on his mind's eye for almost thirty years despite some element of resistance. Thus his negative formulation : "I cannot return to the play now without picturing . . . a cauldron-figure . . . brooding on the throne." Trewin is responding to Richard IH primarily as a playgoer, a spectator in the theater; and he represents all of those spectators who have found in Shakespeare's picture of Richard darkly brooding on the throne a dramatic icon that is at once memorable, powerful, and complex. PEGGY GOODMAN ENDEL is Assistant Professor of English at Florida International University. A contributor to Shakespeare Studies and Shakespeare Quarterly, she is completing a study of Richard III with the aid of a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies. 115 116Comparative Drama For many critics and editors of Richard HI, however, the climactic throne scene of Shakespeare's first great play has proven to be not merely complex, but positively disquieting. As the stage directions for this scene indicate, Shakespeare raises the expectations of his audience for a scene of state which, by tradition, ought to be societal and public: "Sound a sennet. Enter Richard in pomp, crowned; Buckingham, Catesby, Ratcliffe , Lovel, [a Page, and others]."2 But with Richard's first words, "Stand all apart," Shakespeare frustrates at once the expectations that he himself has raised. In Richard's first act as king, he plots his nephews' deaths as though he were in private; and, as though he were in private, King Richard broods on Richmond, leaving off his meditation only to refuse Buckingham the gift that he has promised with the lines toward which the entire scene tends: "[I am not in the giving vein to-day]" (1. 116); "Thou troublest me, I am not in the vein" (1. 118). As early as 1885, we find one distressed scholar proposing that because of the private nature of the business transacted on the throne the director of Richard HI ought to stage Act IV, scene ii, not in the throne-room, but in Richard's private chamber . Wilhelm Oechelhäuser complains: "The interviews with Buckingham and Tyrell, with the courtiers grouped at the back seem utterly unnatural." If the scene is moved to Richard's private chamber, he proposes, "The mounting of the play will . . . be much simplified and the illusion will not be destroyed."3 Writing almost a hundred years after Oechelhäuser, Bridget Geliert Lyons voices precisely the same discomfort at the spectacle of King Richard's treating the chair of state as a private place; and, because of her uneasiness, she supports those many editors of Richard HI who have accepted Edmond Malone's stage direction that Richard should descend the throne in the course of the scene, a direction that Malone first proposed in 1790. Lyons says in a footnote, "Many Shakespearean editors omit the interpolated stage direction at line 27, 'Descend from throne.' Richard's behavior, however, appears just as incongruous —probably more so—if he remains seated on the throne throughout the scene."4 Most modern editors reject Malone...