Clouded Reparation

In the opening soliloquy to Shakespeare’s Richard III., Gloucester, who subsequently becomes King, says:

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,

Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;

I, that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty

To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;

I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,

Cheated of feature by dissembling Nature,

Deform’d, unfinish’d, sent before my time

Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,

And that so lamely and unfashionable,

That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;

* * * * *

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,

To entertain these fair well-spoken days,

I am determined to prove a villain,

And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

Richard seems to say nothing more than ‘I find this idle way of life tedious, and I want to enjoy myself. As I cannot play the lover on account of my deformity, I will play the villain; I will intrigue, murder, do anything I please.’ So wanton a cause of action could not but stifle any stirring of sympathy in the audience, if it were not a screen for something much more serious. And besides, the play would be psychologically impossible, for the writer must know how to furnish us with a secret background of sympathy for his hero, if we are to admire his boldness and adroitness without some inward protest; and such sympathy can only be based on understanding or on a sense of a possible inner fellowship with him.

I think, therefore, that Richard’s soliloquy does not say everything; it merely gives a hint, and leaves us to fill up the indications. When we complete it, however, the appearance of wantonness vanishes, the bitterness and minuteness with which Richard has depicted his deformity make their full effect, and we clearly perceive the bond of fellowship which constraints us to sympathy with the miscreant. The soliloquy then signifies: ‘Nature has done me a grievous wrong in denying me that beauty of form which wins human love. Life owes me reparation for this, and I will see that I get it.

I have a right to be an exception, to overstep those bounds by which others let themselves be circumscribed. I may do wrong myself, since wrong has been done to me’ – and now we feel that we ourselves could be like Richard, or that we are already a little like him. Richard is an enormously magnified representation of something we can all discover in ourselves. We all think we have reason to reproach nature and our destiny for congenital and infantile disadvantages.