Dive, thoughts, down to my soul

It’s that time again—yes, Will Shakespeare’s birthday—when we bring out a couple of selections from the master. Always a highlight of National Poetry Month.

Much of Shakespeare’s life would have been spent amidst pestilence; smallpox, typhus, cholera were just some of the diseases swirling about. It’s surprising that his works aren’t more drenched with catastrophic events beyond the making of man. And here’s the thing about Shakespeare: all his plays about Big Men (Legends-in-Their-Own-Minds Bigly Men) end badly for the eponymous heroes. Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Titus Andronicus, Lear, Othello, Richard III (and probably I and II, too; I haven’t looked)—these guys all disappear up their own tailpipes and do not die of old age. 

(Well, Lear. Technically he was an old man. But turned out by his daughters to wander the moors with his Fool, descending into madness, his one loyal daughter executed...he drops dead in Act V. Not what he had planned, so I think my point stands.)

Today we’re taking on Richard III, the last of the kings from the House of York.

As you recall, Shakespeare’s Richard is deformed in body, mind and soul. As you’ll also recall, Shakespeare was getting his material from Tudor historians; all of them were in the pay (or patronage) of one Tudor or another, starting with the one (Henry VII) whose army killed Richard. (Think of it as being a historian or playwright with Stalin looking over your shoulder.)

Shakespeare’s Richard would strike us as a sort of incel, living in the Late Medieval equivalent of his mom’s basement while quill-scratching out whiny rage screeds on velum about how the hotte ladyes won’t give him the hourglass of day.

Yes, Richard is presumed to have ordered the murders of his nephews in the Tower of London in 1483; sons of Richard’s late brother Edward IV, they were alleged to have been got rid of to remove any question of legitimacy to his wearing the crown. There’s a whole lot of hoo-ha about this—whether Edward’s marriage to the princes’ mother was actually legal, whether the boys were legitimate heirs, and who would benefit most from their deaths. There’s also a lot of hoo-ha about Richard being a tyrant, a madman and a disastrous ruler. But I don’t believe the facts that have come down to us bear that second lot of hoo-ha out, and I do believe that the hoo-hawers ought to take a good look at the early years of Henry VII’s reign when he was solidifying the throne.

Bear in mind that despite his physical limitations (modern scholars speculate that he suffered from scoliosis, a sideways curving of the spine which would have made any Medieval means of transportation very painful for him), Richard rode a horse into battle more than once and inspired men to follow him. Unlike current incels who dress up like Meal Team 6 and shuffle into Subway shops in Kevlar vests and draped with long guns and AR-15s, Richard was both a warrior and an effective administrator.

Anyhow, Shakespeare sets up Richard’s wickedness right at the opening scene, which begins with his soliloquy, as Duke of Gloucester:

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front;
And now, instead of mounting barded steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
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,
Deformed, 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;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
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.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the king
In deadly hate the one against the other:
And if King Edward be as true and just
As I am subtle, false and treacherous,
This day should Clarence closely be mew'd up,
About a prophecy, which says that 'G'
Of Edward's heirs the murderer shall be.
Dive, thoughts, down to my soul: here
Clarence comes. 

There’s nothing at all subtle about this: Richard flat out says that—since he’s physically deformed and therefore no one will love him regardless of his actions—he’s fitting his morals to his ugliness. And, by the way, even though the Yorks have only just ascended to the throne (in the form of his tall, hunky brother Edward), he’s already mapping out how to kill the one brother and blame the other for regicide. 

Yikes! 

So let’s have something different by way of mitigation, then. I’m giving you Sonnet XXX, which speaks to the bonds of friendship, a concept utterly foreign to Shakespeare’s Richard.

“XXX”

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unus'd to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan th' expense of many a vanish'd sight;
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
   But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
   All losses are restor'd, and sorrows end.

 

 

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