Harry Lawson
Professor Matthew Sergi
ENG331 Drama to 1603
17 February 2014
Rejecting the Monolith of
History; Shakespeare’s Richard III
‘Though the impact of Richard III was
instantaneous and ubiquitous, we should not think of it as monolithic. Later memories
were not simply stamped with the image of Shakespeare's play, but rather
refracted through it.’
Philip Schwyzer, Lees and Moonshine: Remembering Richard III,
1485–1635
The
monument of history is not cast in stone. A more appropriate metaphor for the
nature of historical memory, illuminated by Clarence’s dream scene in Shakespeare’s
Richard III, lies in “the association
of the past with watery burial” (Schwyzer 1). This association is at the centre
of Philip Schwyzer’s argument. He posits that “the play’s deep engagement with
memory and its transmission is key to its own immediate and enduring dominion
over all subsequent efforts to remember Richard III” (Schwyzer 20). Although I
agree, my concern exists not with Shakespeare’s postremembrance[1]
of Richard III, or with the impossible task of measuring the rupture between actual historical
events and Shakespeare’s theatrical realisation of those events almost a
century later. Moreover, I want to study
Clarence’s dream scene as an
insight into not only his conscience, but as an embodiment of memory, and
history at large. Indeed, through unpacking his ‘miserable night, / So full of fearful
dreams and ugly sights’ (I.IV.2), I seek to reproach the notion of any given
historical truth and expose history’s
dynamism and malleability, characteristics often not considered applicable to
history but which were central to both Shakespeare’s witty negotiation of the
past in writing Richard III and to my
understanding of the play.
Delving into the subconscious of Clarence
is on one level just a dream, a vehicle for Shakespeare’s discussion regarding
prophecy and a scene that serves to foretell Richard’s villainy. This passage
has many faces, and its ostensible meaning is but one of many. My reading
relies on the precursor that we allow dream to serve as a microcosm to memory’s
macrocosm. By this, Clarence’s dream embodies not only the vast recesses of his
mind but also the vast recesses of collective memory. Clarence’s drowning
embodies death, and is petrifying because of his consciousness: ‘O Lord, methought
what pain it was to drown, / What dreadful noise of water in mine ears, / What
sights of ugly death within mine eyes’ (I.IV.21-3). Imagine drowning into the
archival mass of history. There is evidence to suggest Shakespeare’s oceanic
metaphor extends to such a network of memories.
Indeed, Clarence is confronted with the
deceased, ‘A thousand men that fishes gnawed upon’ (I.IV.25); some forgotten
‘unvalued jewels’ (I.IV.27) juxtaposed against ‘Wedges of gold, great anchors,
heaps of pearl, / Inestimable stones’ (I.IV.26-7), the fondly remembered, the
celebrated dead. In light of Philip Schwyzer’s insistence upon the erroneous
nature of “monolithic” reading, we may read Shakespeare’s poetry without
shackles of interpretation. Not only is Shakespeare illuminating the terrifying
prospect of submergence into the past, of swimming amongst the dead, but he is
also asking questions of our approach to history. Appropriately placed in a
play whose protagonist suffered a “posthumous character assassination” (Schwyzer
4), Shakespeare illuminates the fragility of memory. We are invited to question
the validity of historical memories, to question the truth assigned to certain
collective memories and the ambivalence, disdain and disgust assigned to
others. Why is it that some historical figures are remembered as ‘great
anchors, heaps of pearl’ whilst others, namely Richard III, are remembered for
their shortcomings – as an ‘elvish-marked, abortive, rooting hog’ (I.III.228), as
a ‘lump of foul deformity’ (I.II.57);‘rudely stamped’ (I.I.16) upon history?
It is not only in Clarence’s dream
sequence that “the capacity of the past to become the present” (Schwyzer 19) is
laid bare. Shakespeare was seemingly hooked on the aforementioned “association of the past with watery burial”, and
the theme of memory continues to surface during Richard III. Whilst Clarence sees jewels ‘All scattered in the bottom of the sea’
(I.IV.28), Buckingham’s fears ‘…the swallowing gulf / Of dark forgetfulness and
deep oblivion’ (III.VII.127) and Hastings ruminates;
O momentary grace of mortal men,
Which we more hunt for than the grace of
God.
Who builds his hope in air of your good
looks
Lives like a drunken sailor on a mast,
Ready with every nod to tumble down
Into the fatal bowels of the deep.
(Richard III, Act III, Scene V, l. 96-101)
There
is a widespread fear of death, more acutely of sinking into ‘the fatal bowels
of the deep’ with a whimper, and although Philip Schwyzer is right in citing “Richard's
apparent war against memory, his determination to cut the ties between the
present and the past so that the future may be his” (Schwyzer 15), this
determination to secure one’s future on earth and one’s legacy in the
‘swallowing gulf’ of history is collectively desired.
Trying to distinguish what is actually going on in Clarence’s dream is
pointless; here we have Richard’s brother, Clarence, in Shakespeare’s fictional
refraction of historical events (a play), dreaming that, in the play’s
internally coherent future, Richard pushes him (accidentally) into the depths
of the sea. Only briefly touching on the quest for pinpointing what is going on here illuminates its futility.
No valid historical criticism can emanate from such a layered textual field.
Indeed, the affect of collective memory on Shakespeare’s perception of Richard
III looms large in the text, not to mention the undeniably propagandist tone he
seeks to engender in criticising a previous, nationally disliked (and,
therefore, easily targeted) monarch. Instead, let us read the ‘reflective gems’
(I.IV.31) of Clarence’s dreams as a metaphor for history projecting images onto
us, letting us understand traits or just speculate further. It denotes no
ultimate signifier, no absolute truth.
The Richard III Society is founded on
‘the belief that the truth is more powerful than lies: a faith that even after
all these centuries the truth is important.’ I want to conclude by suggesting
their aims are at fault, that a study of history seeking to locate the truth is
as erroneous as it is futile. History is written by victors, and is constantly
manipulated to propagandist intentions. Shakespeare’s Richard III is a product of the Jacobean court, and just as any
other historical document, must be read with caution. If we respect history’s
incessant imbrication of fact and fiction, as illustrated by Schwyzer in his
mapping out of the transformation of collective memories surrounding one figure
from the fifteenth century to the seventeenth, the monument of history is too
transformed from an immovable mass to a dynamic, nonlinear and sometimes
devious form. Schwyzer and Shakespeare alike “force the question of how, if at
all, we can know the past we did not ourselves experience.” (Schwyzer 12). The
authoritative, and reductive, monolith of history is useless. Perhaps it will
provide ontological stability, the closure and neatness of exact beginning and
end, for its seekers. But analysis, discussion and expansion emerge from an
altered and refractive approach to reading. Poetry, like history, can be read
as a set of oscillating and mutually exclusive truths. There is nothing
monolithic about it.
Works Cited
Hirsch, Marianne. Family
Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. (Harvard University
Press: Harvard, 1997)
Holland, Peter (ed.) Richard III (The
Pelican Shakespeare, 2nd edition; London: Penguin, 2000)
Richard III
Society (http://www.richardiii.net), 29 January 2014
Schwyzer,
Philip. ‘Lees and Moonshine: Remembering Richard III, 1485–1635’ in
Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 63, No. 3
(Fall 2010)
[1] Hirsch's term postmemory —
“distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep
personal connection”, cited in Schwyzer
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