1

Northwestern University

Richard III and The Theme of the Three CasketsA Psychoanalysis of Richard III

Sophia du Brul

Literature of Grief and Mourning, ENG 405

Dr. Kasey Evans

2

Abstract

Out of all of the villains of Shakespeare, Richard of Gloucester

is perhaps the most villainous of them all. Part of the explanation

lies in the Tudor propaganda machine; Richard III is the last Yorkist

king so he has to be bad, especially in light of the fact Henry Tudor

is not particularly good himself and dies an unpopular king: Richard

III must be made to look worse than Henry VII, but Richard also to be

believable as character. Shakespeare does this by creating a complex

interaction between Richard’s own nature and those around Richard who

nurtured him. The tools of Freudian and Lacanian analysis can shed

light on the psyche of Richard and therefore his evil nature. A

crucial element in Richard’s psyche is the role the women in nurturing

his nature through their condemnation and rejection of him that makes

Richard’s determination “to prove a villain” inevitable.

3

Out of all of the villains of Shakespeare, Richard of

Gloucester is perhaps the most villainous of them all: he

directly or indirectly murders eleven people prior to and during

the course of the play, far more than any other Shakespearean

antagonist, and frequently without a clear agenda; “one of the

most fearful thing about Shakespeare’s Richard is that there is

never a sufficient explanation for the evil he commits.”1 Part of

the explanation lies in the Tudor propaganda machine; Richard III

is the last Yorkist king before the Tudor dynasty, so he has to

be bad, especially in light of the fact that Richard’s adversary

Henry Tudor is not particularly good himself and dies an

unpopular king with the unsavory reputation of being both a miser

and a tyrant2: Richard III must be made to look worse than Henry

VII, but Richard also to be believable as character. Shakespeare

does this by creating a complex interaction between Richard’s own

nature and those around Richard who nurtured him. Perhaps at face

value, it is difficult to determine “a sufficient explanation”

for Richard’s evil; but, the tools of Freudian and Lacanian 1 Anthony Hammond, “Introduction”, King Richard III (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2007), 692 G.J. Meyer, The Tudors (New York: Bantam Books, 2010), 23

4

analysis can shed light on the psyche of Richard and therefore

his evil nature; and, while other scholars, including Sigmund

Freud, have psychoanalyzed Shakespeare’s Richard, a crucial

element in Richard’s psyche is the role the women in nurturing

his nature through their condemnation and rejection of him that

seems to have been missed and makes Richard’s determination “to

prove a villain”3 inevitable.

Unlike most of his plays, Shakespeare does not introduce his

main character or set the scene via a dialogue, but Shakespeare

chooses to give the audience Richard from the start with a

compelling soliloquy, immediately letting the audience in on

Richard’s evil plan. The effect is unsettling, especially when

one delves into the text of the speech. Richard starts by setting

the scene himself through a series of comparisons and metaphors

to let the spectator that the war is over and now it is a time of

peace. But at line 14, Richard suddenly changes his tone and

turns his speech onto himself: “But I, that am not shap’d for

sportive tricks/….I, that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s

3 William Shakespeare, King Richard III (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2007), 1:1 30,127

5

majesty/….Cheated of feature by dissembling Nature.”4 Sigmund

Freud finds it worthwhile to quote almost this entire speech in

“Some Character-Types Met With In Psycho-Analytic Work”. Freud

labelled Richard an “Exception”.5 Freud correctly states that

there is more to this speech than just Richard announcing that

since he is deformed and cannot be a lover that than he will be a

villain6 (“I am determined to prove a villain/ And hate the idle

pleasures of these days”7). Freud continues to explain that

Richard feels that he is exceptional as “nature has done [him] a

grievous wrong in denying [him] the beauty of form which wins

human love. Life owes [him] reparation for this, and [he] will

see that [he] gets it. [He has] a right to be an exception, to

disregard the scruples by which others let themselves be held

back. [He] may do wrong myself, since wrong has been done to

[him].”8 According to Freud, this is the mentality of the

Exception, a sense of entitlement that warps the moral center.

Uncharacteristic of Freud, who frequently went too far, in the

4 ibid, 1:1 14-18, 1265 Sigmund Freud, “Some Character-Types Met With In Psycho-Analytic Work (1916)”, www.webshare.uchicago.edu, accessed on 2013-12-09, 31016 Ibid, 31027 Shakespeare, 1:1 30-31, 1278 Freud, ibid, 3102

6

analysis, Freud did not go far enough. Freud focuses solely on

Richard’s deformities and misses the meaning behind that very

telling line, “I, that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s

majesty”9. Shakespeare set the middle part of the line (“rudely

stamp’d”) as an aside with commas, meaning that Richard really

wants “love’s majesty”: this is his dearest desire, but Freud

never examines this possibility which I find quite surprising

since Freud is so frequently fascinated with desire and the

mother in psycho-sexual development, and Richard had one doozy of

a mother.

The Duchess of York, mother of Richard III; Lady Anne, widow

of Edward, the Prince of Wales, and wife of Richard III; Queen

Elizabeth, wife of Edward IV and Richard’s sister-in-law; and

Queen Margaret, widow of Henry VI, are the play’s grieving and

avenging quartet. Every one of these women experiences loss at

Richard’s hands either through the deaths of their husbands or

their children or both. Although Shakespeare introduces the

audience to Lady Anne first, I will start with the Duchess of

York since she is Richard’s mother and has the longest

9 Shakespeare, ibid, 1:1 16, 126

7

relationship with him, and as Freud would have us believe, it all

starts with the mother.

Shakespeare does not introduce Richard’s mother until Act

II, scene 2, after the death of her son Clarence who died as a

result of Richard’s trickery. In front of her grandchildren, The

Duchess condemns her son, “He is my son, ay, and herein my

shame;/ Yet from my dugs he drew not this deceit.”10 It is

interesting to note that The Duchess takes no responsibility for

Richard’s wickedness; by having The Duchess absolve herself,

Shakespeare was keeping to one of his sources for this play, The

History of King Richard III by Sir Thomas More. More claims that

Richard’s birth was so difficult and he so “little of stature,

ill-featured of limbs….came into the world feet forward…and…also

not untoothed”11 that his mother turned from Richard at his

birth. Shakespeare confirms this sentiment as The Duchess grieves

the deaths of Clarence and Edward saying, “I have bewept a worthy

husband’s death,/….But no two mirrors of his princely semblance/

Are crack’d in pieces by malignant death;/ And I, for comfort,

10 Shakespeare, ibid, 2:2 29-30, 19511 Sir Thomas More, The History of Richard III (London, Hesperus Classics, 2005), 7

8

have but one false glass”.12 False is a double entendre in this

speech as Richard has been deceitful and false in his conduct,

but The Duchess also never accepted him as a son. Later in the

same scene, when Richard craves his mother’s blessing, she cannot

fully comply, even for the sake of appearance; Richard finishes

his mother’s halfhearted blessing, “Amen; and make me die a good

old man--/ That is the butt-end of a mother’s blessing:/ I marvel

that her Grace did leave it out.”13 Later in the play, The

Duchess makes her hatred, from the beginning, clear:

A grievous burden was thy birth to me;Tetchy and wayward was thy infancy;Thy school-days frightful, desp’rate, wild, and furiousThy prime of manhood daring, bold, and venturousThy age confirm’d, proud, subtle, sly, and bloody14

At their last meeting, she tells Richard “Bloody thou art; bloody

will be thy end. / Shame serves thy life and doth thy death

attend.”15 If his mother never loved him and given his

deformities, then how much more traumatic would the Oedipal and

Mirror Stages have been for Richard? According to Jacques Lacan,

the child’s first trauma is to realize that he is separate from

12 Shakespeare, ibid, 2:2 49-5313 Ibid, 109-11114 Shakespeare, ibid, 4:4 168-172, 28315 Ibid, 4:4 195-196, 284-5

9

the Mother “the primordial subject of demand”.16 The Mother

becomes the Other, an object of desire, that is at the root of

the Oedipal phase, but at least for most children, their mothers

love them and want to take care of them, just not enough to meet

la demande. In Richard’s case, he is left with an unloving mother

and an absent father who was killed when Richard was eight years

old. Is it Nature that cheated Richard so, as Freud suggests17,

or the rejection of his mother that damages Richard’s character?

In his analysis of Richard, Freud ignores Richard’s revealing

relationship with his mother. If we were to look at The Duchess

in terms of Freud’s “The Theme of The Three Caskets”, she would

be Clothos, the spinner18, but this spinner spun a nubby thread

only to cast it aside. Even if Richard wanted to return to the

first casket of his birth, he knows that lid remains shut to him,

so Richard has to transfer his desire for his mother to another

Object, the crown.

Compounding Richard’s troubles would have been the tragic

self-discovery of the Mirror Stage. According to Lacan, the 16 Jacques Lacan, “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet”, Yale French Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, No. 55/56, 1977), 1217 Freud, ibid, 310218 Sigmund Freud, "The Theme of the Three Caskets," in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1989), 514–22

10

Mirror Stage happens when a toddler sees himself in a mirror and

realizes that he is separate from the mother and sees himself for

the first time as a unified whole.19 This comes at a time when

the toddler still lacks motor control and is not yet the master

of his body, but the image in the mirror, the Imago, becomes the

ideal, the imagined I. One can only imagine what Richard must

have seen as not only would he have realized that he was

separate, but also that he, with his deformities, did even look

like other people: Richard could never be the ideal I. Richard

dwells on his appearance and the revulsion it causes in more than

one speech. In his opening soliloquy, Richard tells the audience

“That dogs bark at me, as I halt by them,”20 and later, after

Lady Anne agrees to wed Richard, he exclaims, “And will she yet

debase eyes on me/….that halts and am misshapen thus?”21 One

might conclude that Richard regresses to the Mirror Stage at the

end of the war because Richard can no longer be useful as a

soldier but must now transition to a peaceful world where Richard

19 Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience," in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2006), 74–81.20 Shakespeare, ibid, 1:1 23, 12621 Ibid, 1:2 251-255, 150

11

has no place,22 but before the war ended, Richard had been

contending with his mother’s rejection, two mirrors of her

husband versus a false one. Richard, even acknowledged by More

and then Shakespeare to be a brave and able soldier, would have

had almost a reversal of the Mirror Stage where he feels his

strength and ability only to see something distorted and

fragmented reflected back.23 While Richard’s mirror image could

be a cause of pain for Richard, his shadow, like most of our

shadows, would be elongated and more “normal” looking, perhaps

almost attractive, like the strong and capable soldier that

Richard knew himself to be but is not reflected back at him in

the mirror.

Peacetime would only have multiplied this sensation.

Interestingly, Shakespeare uses mirrors, reflections and shadows

several times throughout the play: Richard will “be at charges

for a looking-glass,”24 and The Duchess’ lines about true and

false reflections. But Richard refers to the sun and his shadow:

22  Aisling Hearns "'I am I': A Lacanian Analysis of Richard III". PSYART: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts. December 15, 2009. Available http://www.psyartjournal.com/article/show/hearns-i_am_i_a_lacanian_analysis_of_richard_ii. 2013-12-0923 ibid24 Shakespeare, ibid, 1:2 260, 150

12

later in the same speech in Act I, “Shine out, fair sun, till I

have bought a glass,/ That I may see my shadow as I pass”;25 and,

famously in the play’s opening lines, “Made glorious summer by

this son of York”26. The pun on son and sun is an important one.

First, the sun appears in the Yorks’ royal badge, so to be in the

sun refers to holding the royal badge and the crown, but

secondly, Shakespeare uses son where he could have easily used

the word sun. The way the line is written, it almost sounds as if

Richard is referring to himself, but then one realizes that he

means his brother Edward which emphasizes Richard’s rejection by

his mother—Edward is the true son while Richard is not. And

finally and prophetically in Act V, Richard asks, “Who saw the

sun today?”27 The sun sat atop the House of York’s royal crest,

so to be “in the sun” was literally to be king: that is a clear

allusion; but, from a Lacanian point of view, if Richard’s Mirror

Stage was reversed, the mirror image actually being the

fragmented one, then the shadow cast by the sun would be Imago,

25 Ibid, 1:2 267-268, 15026 Ibid 1:1 2, 12527 Ibid, 5:3 277, 323

13

the ideal I, the Richard strives for, all bound up with the power

and symbol of the crown.

Richard is so intent on gaining the crown for himself,

“Plots have I laid”28—note the sudden switch into the past

imperfect tense: this soliloquy is forty-one lines long, all in

present tense excepting line 32. Importantly, this tells the

audience that Richard planned and continues to plan to take the

crown, even before his brother took the throne; but, this also

indicates his complete transference of desire to the crown. So

much so that even when he meets Lady Anne and successfully woos

her, he merely regards as a stepping stone, “I’ll have her, but I

will not keep her long.”29 The verbal interchange between Lady

Anne and Richard is so engaging, very rhythmic and full of barbs,

like a flawless fencing match. The scene begins in anger: Lady

Anne calls Richard a devil and its equivalents four times in the

first fifty lines.30 Like the other women of the play, Lady Anne,

in addition to casting aspersions on Richard’s character,

comments on his physical appearance, calling him a “hedgehog”31

28 Ibid, 1:1 32, 12729 Ibid, 1:2 234, 14830 Ibid, 1:2 34, 45, 46, 50; 138-13931 Ibid, 1:2 105, 141

14

which is doubly insulting as a hedgehog is small, gnarled and

humped like Richard himself; but, also the boar serves as

Richard’s heraldic symbol and Lady Anne chooses to compare

Richard the boar to a small, shy, unthreatening hedgehog. Despite

her protestations, Richard wants her and his determined to have

her because she is stepping stone on his road to the crown. Lady

Anne is the widow of the last Lancaster of the male line, plus

she is a Lancaster herself through her great-grandmother Joan

Beaufort.32 Richard is so wrapped up in his transferred desire of

the crown that he is unable to take any pleasure in the fact that

a beautiful young women has agreed to marry him. According to

Freud, “if they succeed subsequently, as can so easily happen

with repressed sexual instincts, in struggling through by

roundabout paths, to a direct or substitutive satisfaction, that

event, which in other cases would have been an opportunity for

pleasure, is felt by the ego as unpleasure.”33 Richard takes so

little pleasure in this turn of events that he tells the audience32 Joan Beaufort was the daughter of John of Gaunt’s 3rd wife Katherine. Although Joan was born out of wedlock and technically barred from the succession, Henry Tudor would make his claim through the same line as his great-grandfather was John Beaufort, also born by Katherine.33 Sigmund Freud, “Beyond The Pleasure Principle”, The Standard Edition of The Complete Works of Sigmund Freud vol XVIII, trans. James Strachey and Anna Freud, (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955), 11

15

in the next soliloquy that he is already plotting Lady Anne’s

death. If Anne were to represent the second casket of “The Three

Caskets”34, marriage, Richard does not even care to delve into

the contents of Lady Anne’s casket as it is only a means to an

end.

After the death of Edward IV and the imprisonment of his

sons, Richard does gain the crown, but as Freud predicted,

Richard feels no pleasure in it because it is a substitution. In

fact, having the crown just fuels Richard’s paranoia and

deepening dissatisfaction so that he turns on his friends and

attempts even more barbarous acts, namely marriage to his niece

Elizabeth of York. Even though this outrageous marriage is

suggested by More in his highly suspect biography, there was

enough basis in fact that Richard “was goaded into denying to his

own council the rumor that he intended to marry his niece”35 in

March of 1485. Unlike his seduction of Lady Anne, Richard does

not directly woo his object, but instead turns his charms onto

her mother Queen Elizabeth, his eldest brother’s widow. Richard

34 Sigmund Freud, "The Theme of the Three Caskets," 514–2235 Paul Murray Kendall, Richard the Third (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995), 395

16

really wants to seduce Queen Elizabeth. Queen Elizabeth’s

daughter is yet another means to an end as she is Edward IV’s

last living heir, but Queen Elizabeth holds her own tantalizing

possibilities. Shakespeare creates this fascinating interchange

between Richard and Queen Elizabeth which occurs right after The

Duchess of York curses her son. As Richard makes his case, it

hard to tell which one, Elizabeth the daughter or Elizabeth the

mother, that he is really attracted to; and, considering all of

Richard’s bad acts, it is a very hard to case to make:

If I did take the kingdom from your sons,To make amends I’ll give it to your daughter;If I have kill’d the issue from your womb,To quicken your increase, I will begetMine issue of your blood upon your daughter….They are as children but one step below;Even of your metal, of your very blood;Of all one pain, save for a night of groansEndur’d of her, for whom you bid like sorrow….The loss you have is but a son being King;And by that loss your daughter is made Queen.I cannot make you what amends I would:Therefore accept such kindness as I can….Again shall you be mother to a king36

Richard seems to want the mother as much as the daughter. At

the end of this speech and dialogue, Richard exhorts Queen

36 Shakespeare, ibid, 4:4 294-317, 289

17

Elizabeth to “Bear her my true love’s kiss”37 and then kisses his

hoped-to-be future mother-in-law full on the mouth which has very

sexually overtones as does much of their dialogue. This mother

figure, embodied in Queen Elizabeth, is extremely desirable38:

“when the King [Edward IV] beheld her and heard her speak—as she

was both fair, of a good favour, moderate of stature, well made

and very wise—he not only pitied her, but also waxed enamoured on

her.”39 Now that his attainment of the crown has not fulfilled

his demand, Richard seeks to return to the mother and “love’s

majesty”, a new sexually attractive one without quite the same

taboos of incest. Queen Elizabeth becomes a curious combination

of Freud’s first and second caskets, a mother/wife figure, for

Richard. But unlike Lady Anne, Queen Elizabeth is not fooled by

Richard and merely pretends to consider his offer; “after the

rejection from his mother, Queen Elizabeth was Richard’s last

chance to redeem a motherly gaze of admiration”40: this was the

37 Ibid, 4:4 429, 29538 If her portrait does not lie, she was very beautiful and only 15 years older than Richard, just old enough to be his mother but still young enough tobe desirable.39 More, ibid, 5940 Hearns, ibid

18

final rejection. Now that Richard’s dreams have turned to ashes,

he has but one casket left.

Queen Margaret, the widow of Henry VI, is last women in the

play and the last woman in Richard’s life, but this is the one

woman that Richard does not to win affection from, seduce or

flatter. Queen Margaret fills an interesting role, similar to

that of the Fool from King Lear, the Gravedigger in Hamlet or the

Witches in Macbeth, as she is the truth teller of King Richard III.

But unlike the aforementioned characters, Queen Margaret’s role

is somewhat larger and she is not an inferior but a social equal.

Like the previously mentioned characters, no one really listens

to what Queen Margaret has to say even though she prophesizes

their doom. Shakespeare introduces Queen Margaret early in the

play, before most of Richard’s bad acts, and foreshadows the

upcoming plot and confirms Richard’s plots and his bloody end:

If heaven have any grievous plague in storeExceeding those I can wish upon thee,O, let them keep it till thy sins be ripe,And then hurl down their indignation,On thee, the troubler of the world’s peace.The worm of conscience still begnaw thy soul;Thy friends suspect for traitors while thou liv’st,And take deep traitors for thy dearest friends;No sleep close up that deadly eye of thine,

19

Unless it be while some tormenting dreamAffrights thee with a hell of ugly devils.41

Naturally, all these things come to pass, but then Queen

Margaret turns to a personal attack:

Thou elvish-mark’d, abortive rooting hog,Thou that wast seal’d in thy nativityThou slave of Nature, and the son of hell;Thou slander of thy heavy mother’s womb,Thou loathed issue of thy father’s loins,Thou rag of honour, thou detested--42

Queen Margaret also calls Richard “a bottled spider”43 and a

“poisonous bunch back’d toad.”44 She points out all of Richard’s

deformities and insecurities that would later be echoed by

Richard’s mother. Queen Margaret finally finishes her rant, “And

[you who] turns the sun to shade, alas, alas! /….Your aery

buildeth in our aery’s nest; / Oh God, that seest it, do not

suffer it: / As it is won with blood, lost be it so.”45 She uses

Richard’s pun about the sun and shadows to tell him that he not

be king for long. At first Richard politely protests and sues for

peace, but ends up dismissing her by feigning that he cannot

41 Shakespeare, ibid, 1:3 217-227, 16342 Ibid, 1:3 218-233, 163-16443 Ibid, 1:3 242, 16444 Ibid, 1:3 246, 16445 Ibid, 1:3 266-272, 165-166

20

understand what she says.46 Richard does not want to hear Queen

Margaret as she is the last, leaden casket: she is death both

literally and figuratively. Queen Margaret is the only woman to

be given the designation of “old”47 by Shakespeare even though

Queen Margaret’s age is actually about fifty at the opening of

the play whereas The Duchess of York was close to seventy, but

Queen Margaret really is dead, and this makes her a fascinating

choice for a character. Margaret of Anjou died in 1482, before

Edward IV’s death in 1483 which technically makes her a ghost,

but Shakespeare does not portrays her as a living character. Why

choose Margaret of Anjou to play this role as a prophetess? Why

not choose Margaret Beaufort, the Countess of Richmond and Derby?

Margaret Beaufort was alive, married to Lord Stanley, a key

figure in Richard III and The War of the Roses, mother to Henry

Tudor, and lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth. Shakespeare

chooses Margaret of Anjou, a dead woman, because she is the

death-crone, the third casket. Everyone that Margaret curses

comes to death. Like an all-knowing spirit, Margaret tells us

what will come to pass, and Richard wants nothing to do with her.

46 Ibid, 1:3 295, 16747 “Enter old QUEEN MARGARET” in the stage notes, 157

21

To embrace Margaret, to listen to Margaret, would be to accept

death.

In the end, this leaves Richard alone. In the last act,

Richard is either abandoned or betrayed by his remaining friends

or he executed them. Richard comes to this realization after he

is visited by the ghosts of all of his victims on the eve battle,

just like Queen Margaret predicted. The dream itself is standard,

but Richard’s reaction upon waking is very telling:

O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!....What do I fear? Myself? There’s none else by;Richard loves Richard, that is I and I.Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am!Then fly. What, from myself? Great reasons why,Lest I revenge? What, myself upon myself?Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any goodThat I myself have done unto myself?O no, alas, I rather hate myselfFor hateful deeds committed by myself,I am a villain—yet I lie, I am not!....I shall despair. There is no creature loves me,And if I die, no soul will pity me—And wherefore should they, since that I myselfFind in myself no pity to myself?48

Richard has fully arrived at the death drive.49 Richard can

no longer see his shadow and is at last resigned to the broken

48 Ibid, 5:3 180-204, 318-31949 Freud, “Beyond”, 4-23

22

image reflected in the mirror that has resided in his ego all

along, and to his inevitable death. Richard asks, “Who saw the

sun today?”50 When he is told that the sun is not out, Richard

knows his fate, “A black day will it be to somebody./….The sun

will not be seen today! / The sky doth frown and lour upon our

army.”51

In many ways, Richard is remarkably self-aware: he knows

that others find him hideous and hate him. Richard also knows

what he wants: love; but, also knows that he will never have it,

so Richard chooses a different path, that of a villain and

transfers his desire for love to power. The one quality that

Richard had going for him was his confidence in himself. In fact,

one might be tempted to brand Richard’s excessive confidence as

bordering on narcissism. At the beginning of the play, Richard

never doubts that he will succeed, but by the end of the play,

Richard not only doubts himself but also does not even love

himself anymore. We find out that Richard’s confidence was a

façade hiding a damaged, deformed and unsure shell. The women who

surround Richard contribute to his downfall by constantly

50 Shakespeare, ibid 5:3 277, 32351 Ibid, 5:3 281-284, 323

23

reinforcing Richard’s mirror image, not his ideal image, as

loathsome that it becomes true; so, of course, Richard is the

villain. Everyone told him so.