The Plays of Shakespeare

After the events of 1471, King Edward IV seemed more secure on his throne than any English monarch in several decades. A king in such a position can afford to be munificent. Now that the House of York had won out, Edward strove for reconciliation with even the most fervent partisans of the Lancastrian side. He allowed Margaret of Anjou, who had fought harder for the cause of her deposed and murdered husband than Henry VI himself had in his own behalf, to return to her original homeland of France. And in 1472, he arranged a marriage between his youngest brother Richard, whose title was Duke of Gloucester, and Anne Neville, the daughter of the now-deceased Earl of Warwick and the widow of the equally deceased Lancastrian crown prince Edward, who had been killed just a year earlier at the Battle of Tewkesbury. Richard had fought in the same battle on the opposite side, may even have given the order to execute her husband. No matter.

Richard
I’ll marry Warwick’s youngest daughter.
What though I killed her husband and her father?
The readiest way to make the wench amends
Is to become her husband and her father…

What interesting bedroom conversations he must have had with his new wife!

The marriage created tension between Richard and the middle Plantagenet brother George, who had married another of Warwick’s daughters as a prelude to joining the Lancastrian cause and taking up arms against the rest of his family. He had recanted and rejoined the winning side in the nick of time, but it’s hard to imagine his two brothers trusting him entirely afterward. Richard’s marrying into the Neville family as well had the effect of reducing George’s share of the Nevilles’ wealth and estates. Unhindered by any sense of brotherly loyalty, whether misplaced or otherwise, Richard pressed his own claims to the hilt.

In July of 1477, George was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London for a long list of offenses, from witchcraft to treason. Richard had an obvious ground for wishing to see his brother disgraced or worse, since he stood to inherit most of the rest of the Neville property if that happened. Still, it’s worth pointing out that there is no firm contemporary evidence for Shakespeare’s assertion that he was behind his brother’s downfall. King Edward too was fed up with George, who had grown increasingly quarrelsome over time. Edward was the only person to bear witness against his brother at the trial, while Richard actually spoke in George’s defense by some accounts. Then again, what with Edward being the king, more witnesses for the prosecution were not needed. George was executed on February 18, 1478. This event took Richard from fourth to third in line for the throne, behind Edward’s two sons. Did he pause to consider this? We cannot say.

King Edward had by now become a thoroughly dissipated monarch, a slave to gluttony and lust; the once-proud warrior-king couldn’t even mount a horse anymore without the aid of a team of assistants. Meanwhile the Woodville family of his queen, whose open greed and corruption had done so much to get him chased out of England once before, were back to their old habits.

Edward collapsed into his cups for the last time at his Easter feast in 1483. On his deathbed, he nominated his brother Richard to serve as Lord Protector to his eldest son, who would become King Edward V upon his passing, much as Henry V had named Humphrey, a previous Duke of Gloucester, to serve Henry VI in that role. But Richard’s Protectorship would prove far shorter in duration.

In fact, if the Woodvilles had had their way, it would never have begun at all. It seems fairly clear that they moved immediately to sideline Richard. The new, twelve-year-old King Edward was  intensely devoted to his uncle Anthony Woodville, better known as the Earl Rivers; this left his other uncle Richard in danger of being stuck on the outside looking in right from the first. He sought to assert his own role, aided by other factions at court who were at odds with the Woodvilles. Aware that their futures hinged on who had the boy king’s person in their possession, a small band of nobles led by Richard waylaid the party that was taking Edward V to London for his coronation and seized him. Other members and supporters of the Woodville clan were rounded up at the same time, some of them to be summarily executed on various trumped-up charges.

Richard brought the new king — who was king in name but not yet formally crowned — to London on May 19, 1483. He put the boy up in the Tower of London, a place more familiar as a prison than as the accommodations of an allegedly sitting monarch. Edward was in reality something in between a king and a prisoner, the key playing piece in the perilous game of realpolitik that Richard was playing. With the king in his hands, Parliament saw no alternative but to confirm him as Lord Protector, with effectively unfettered power until Edward came into his majority three years hence. Fearing for her safety under such conditions, Queen Elizabeth, Edward IV’s widow, took up residence inside Westminster Cathedral with her second son, whose name was also Richard.

If the elder Richard hadn’t yet decided when he came to London with the young king that he wouldn’t be satisfied with the title of Lord Protector, that he would settle for nothing less than becoming the king of England himself, he must have done so very shortly thereafter. For on June 13, 1483, he suddenly accused William Hastings, one of the most respected nobles in the realm and heretofore a tacit supporter of his efforts to assert his Protectorship, of plotting to overthrow him with two strange bedfellows indeed: the former Queen Elizabeth and her dead husband’s favorite mistress, a woman named Jane Shore. The accusation was ludicrous on the face of it; everyone knew that there was no love lost between the Woodvilles and Hastings, who was so respected and even beloved precisely because he abhorred their corruption. But Richard, taking advantage of speed and surprise, had Hastings dragged away and beheaded before anyone quite understood what was happening. Looking at these events, it is difficult to come to any other conclusion than that Richard must have sounded out Hastings, learned that he wasn’t willing to go along with his plans to take the throne for himself, and decided to do away with him.

Three days after the shocking execution of Hastings, the older Richard sent armed men into what the former queen had believed to be the inviolable sanctuary of Westminster Cathedral. They abducted the nine-year-old Prince Richard and placed him in the Tower of London alongside his brother. The older Richard’s minions now began to circulate the message that these princes in the Tower were no legitimate princes at all: Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville had been bigamous by the rules of the Church, because his then-mentor and future antagonist Warwick had “pre-contracted” him to Bona of Savoy, the sister-in-law of King Louis XI of France. This was nonsense, even by the strict dictates of Church canon law; the marriage to Bona had never been formalized, much less consummated. Richard was simply throwing shade everywhere, hoping some of it would stick. His henchmen asked how it could be known whether the princes in the Tower really were the children of Elizabeth Woodville anyway, given Edward IV’s well-known licentiousness and his many other bastard children that were to be found scattered hither and yon. For that matter, was Edward IV really his father’s child? For Richard, Duke of York, had often been away campaigning, leaving his wife alone with the sweet-smelling dandies who were always hanging around the English court. A helpful priest spoke about how Edward was “in every way unlike the late Duke of York,” even as Richard, Duke of Gloucester, “altogether resembled his father.”

Henry Stafford, whose royal title was Duke of Buckingham, was Richard’s most valuable ally among the nobility after Hastings had been dispatched.

Richard
Go after, after, cousin Buckingham.
The Mayor towards Guildhall hies him in all post:
There, at your meet’st advantage of the time,
Infer the bastardy of Edward’s children.
Tell them how Edward put to death a citizen
Only for saying he would make his son
Heir to [a tavern named] the Crown, meaning indeed his house,
Which by the sign thereof was termed so.
Moreover, urge his hateful luxury
And bestial appetite in change of lust,
Which stretched unto their servants, daughters, wives,
Even where his raging eye or savage heart,
Without control, lusted to make a prey.
Nay, for a feed, thus far come near my person:
Tell them, when that my mother went with child
Of that insatiate Edward, noble York,
My princely father, then had wars in France,
And by true computation of the time
Found that the issue was not his begot;
Which well appeared in his lineaments,
Being nothing like the noble duke my father.
Yet touch this sparingly, as ’twere far off,
Because, my lord, you know my mother lives.

Buckingham publicly petitioned Richard to take the throne, in view of the doubts that were swirling — doubts that Buckingham himself had inculcated — about the legitimacy of Edward IV’s marriage and the two princes’ true line of descent. The campaign was as carefully orchestrated as it was patently disingenuous; it seems safe to say that it fooled no one.

This didn’t keep Richard from enacting the hackneyed drama with gusto, refusing the crown repeatedly, claiming he only wished to live a quiet, humble life in service to the kingdom and to God. But eventually, he grudgingly accepted, as everyone had known all along that he would.

Richard
Cousin of Buckingham, and sage grave men,
Since you will buckle fortune on my back,
To bear her burden, whe’er I will or no,
I must have patience to endure the load…

On July 6, 1483, King Edward V was stripped of his title in order to make his Lord Protector King Richard III. Edward and his brother were last seen in the Tower of London a few weeks after Richard’s coronation. Then they disappeared forever. Although no concrete details as to their fate have ever been recovered, it isn’t hard to guess what must have happened to them.

The people around Richard could make that leap every bit as easily as we can. After all of the backstabbing and mayhem of the previous decades, it took an extremely monstrous act indeed to prick the consciences and activate the moral indignation of the English nobility — but, in the eyes of some of them at least, this murder of two innocent boys qualified. Richard had disinherited them already. Why compound the cruelty by killing them as well? His cold-blooded caprice accomplished something which all of Edward IV’s calculated generosity toward his old enemies hadn’t fully succeeded in bringing off: it erased the divide between the House of York and the House of Lancaster. Some supporters of both houses were prepared to bury the hatchet, as long as doing so could rid all of them of Richard.

But who should become their champion? George Plantagenet had left behind one son, but he was just eight years old, hardly of age to lead a rebellion capable of taking the throne by force. Casting about for someone — anyone — they settled on Henry Tudor, the Duke of Richmond. His claim to the throne would have been considered laughably weak if the circumstances had been any different.

You may recall the prominent Lancastrian general Jasper Tudor, whom I mentioned in my last article. After the Lancastrians were defeated and their king and crown prince done away with in 1471, this Jasper had fled to France, taking with him his fourteen-year-old nephew Henry, whose father had died three months before he was born. Like the fourth, fifth, and sixth King Henrys, this boy was a direct descendant of John of Gaunt, the third son of old King Edward III. But, importantly, he did not share a female ancestor with those other Henrys. He was descended from John of Gaunt’s long-term mistress Katherine Swynford rather than his wife Blanche of Lancaster. After Blanche’s death, John had scandalously married his mistress and legitimized their issue, but they and theirs were still consigned to the status of a lesser, rump branch of the family tree — until now, that is. That so much of the English nobility, including many Yorkists who had been kicking and screaming about birthrights for decades, should be prepared to accept a candidate of such dubious lineage as Henry Tudor speaks to how thoroughly disgusted they were with Richard.

This is not to say that Henry Tudor had no qualities to recommend him. He had grown into a trim, well-spoken, pious, and altogether impressive young man during his decade-plus in exile. Many saw him as the antithesis of everything Richard represented. Aided by a swath of the English nobility and by the French King Louis XI, whose appetite for sowing chaos in the land across the English Channel remained voracious, Henry began raising an army in France.

Meanwhile Richard’s position in England appeared to become weaker almost by the day. The Duke of Buckingham, his most critical co-conspirator in the recent coup, switched sides to secretly pledge his support to Henry when Richard failed to deliver on all he had promised him in return for his help. Elizabeth Woodville, who had somehow managed to survive Richard’s depredations of the rest of her family, may have had no more sons, but she still had daughters. Burning with a mother’s rage against the assassin of her two boys, she pledged her eldest daughter, whose name was also Elizabeth, to Henry Tudor if he could topple Richard and take the throne for himself. Such a marriage between the Houses of Lancaster and York would be immensely resonant, a symbol of healing for a kingdom that had been riven in twain for so long, now united again. Sometimes the best way to bring enemies together is to present them with another right bastard whom they can all hate together.

Despite the rising tide of support for Henry, the first attempt to overthrow Richard misfired badly. Buckingham was to lead an army from the west of England while Henry landed with his forces on the southern coast in October of 1483. But poor weather stopped both assaults in their tracks. Catching wind of the plot, Richard arrested and made a great spectacle of publicly beheading Buckingham. Henry stayed in France for the time being.

Taking this fiasco as a lesson, Henry and his supporters took their time before making their next move. In April of 1484, Henry received some encouraging news from the other side of the English Channel: King Richard and Queen Anne’s only son, England’s current crown prince, had died of illness. This would make installing Henry Tudor as king still easier, if only he could eliminate the dead boy’s father. Queen Anne herself died eleven months later. Rumors which would later be stated by fact by Shakespeare had it that Richard had poisoned her in order to preempt Henry and marry Edward IV’s daughter Elizabeth himself. An uncle marrying his niece was an unpalatable proposition even by the standards of the European nobility of the time. In addition, it would undermine Richard’s own claim that Edward IV’s marriage had been illegitimate if he was to suddenly join himself to the issue of that marriage. But by this point nobody was inclined to put much of anything past Richard..

Henry finally landed in Wales, the ancestral seat of the Tudor family, in August of 1485 and began marching eastward. Richard marched westward to meet him. They came together on August 22 at Bosworth Field, almost at the exact center of England. After about an hour of fierce fighting, Richard, whose bravery in battle was difficult for even his fiercest detractors to dispute, led what has gone down in history as the last great Medieval cavalry charge into the heart of Henry’s army. It is said that the swords of the current king and his would-be usurper clashed against one another directly. Richard looked like he might be on the verge of winning the day, despite all of his enemy’s careful preparation and all of the tacit pledges of support Henry had collected from the nobility of England. But then Thomas and William Stanley, a pair of powerful magnates who prior to this pivotal moment hadn’t quite committed to one side or the other, swept down onto the battlefield with an army of their own, which they directed to fight on the side of Henry. The tide turned. Richard was toppled from his horse — “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” Shakespeare has him shout in vain — but continued to fight on doggedly on foot. He became the second English king in history to die on the battlefield with a sword in his hand, following in the footsteps of his legendary Crusades-era namesake Richard the Lionhearted.

The crown was taken from the dead king’s head right then and there and placed upon that of Henry Tudor — or, as he was now to be called, King Henry VII. Five months later, Henry married the younger Elizabeth Woodville, thus intertwining the red rose of his Lancaster clan with the white rose of the House of York.

Richmond
England hath long been mad and scarred herself;
The brother blindly shed the brother’s blood;
The father rashly slaughtered his own son;
The son, compelled, been butcher to the sire:
All this divided York and Lancaster,
Divided in their dire division,
O, now let Richmond and Elizabeth,
The true succeeders of each royal house,
By God’s fair ordinance conjoin together!

After several false endings, the Wars of the Roses were well and truly over with the birth of this new Tudor dynasty. The question we are left with is the one that comes at the end of so many wars: couldn’t the combatants have come up with a compromise solution like this one without spending so many years killing each other first?

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Richard III is the only play in this historical tetralogy which transcends its source material to become something complete and compelling in itself. It still has much to tell us about history, mind you, but the most important truths it reveals are more universal than who did what to whom when. Not for nothing do I want to call this Shakespeare’s first great work, marking the end of his creative adolescence and the beginning of a vibrant young adulthood.

Whereas the three Henry VI plays often made their eponymous king a bit player in his own story, no one can deny that Richard III is dominated by its titular character as completely as he briefly managed to dominate England. This capering grotesque of an anti-hero delights and fascinates and implicates us at the same time that he disgusts us. No villain out of a Marvel comic or a James Bond film has ever rejoiced so wholeheartedly in villainy for the sake of villainy. In his justifiably famous opening monologue, the best thing Shakespeare had written to this point in his career, he (re)introduces himself to us as the snake in the postwar English Garden of Eden.

Richard
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York;
And all the clouds that lowered 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 alarms changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged war hath smoothed his wrinkled front,
And now, instead of mounting barbed 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 stamped, and want love’s majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling Nature,
Deformed, unfinished, 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 see 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…

Shakespeare builds what follows around the dual nature of Richard. On the one hand, this is a man to make your skin crawl if ever there was one, a man for whom the epithet “toad” comes unbidden to the lips of those around him. Small wonder that the corpse of poor Henry VI begins to “bleed afresh” as soon as Richard enters its presence. He isn’t just a man who is willing to do terrible things to advance his own agenda; he is a sadist, a man who enjoys being cruel, who goes out of his way to twist every dagger with which he stabs a little bit more after it strikes home, as when he works to convince his brother Edward that the blood of their other brother George — whose death has most definitely been engineered by Richard in this play — is entirely on Edward’s hands: “But he (poor man) by your first order died.”

And yet, appalling and disgusting as he is, he sure can make us laugh sometimes, as when he flirts in his own inimitable way with Anne Neville, she whose father and husband he has slain.

Anne
Thou [are] unfit for any place, but Hell.

Richard
Yes, one place else, if you will hear me name it.

Anne
Some dungeon.

Richard
Your bedchamber.

“Was ever woman in this humor wooed?” he asks, in awe of his own audacity. And in the end his suit is successful, because being the wife of a man of power and prominence at court is more attractive to Anne Neville than being the widow of one whom everyone would prefer to forget. By so openly expecting the worst of those around him, Richard has a way of dragging them down to his level, where he is free to exploit them for his own purposes.

It’s wicked fun to watch Richard transgress every boundary of decency and taste with such lusty élan; this is undoubtedly at the root of this play’s enduring popular appeal, centuries after the three Henry VI plays have been pretty much forgotten by all but the serious Shakespeare aficionados. Yet the black humor papers over deeper concerns about power and politics, just as Richard’s surface flippancy conceals a deep well of pain, brought on by his physical deformity and social awkwardness: “I cannot flatter and look fair.” It is here that this centuries-old play becomes almost too timeless for comfort. For, as everyone from Elizabethan playwrights to 21st-century social scientists tell us, isolation from one’s fellow humans has always bred toxic anger like Richard’s, which serves as the only viable alternative to despair. It’s more of a problem than ever today, when the constant, universal connectivity of the Internet has paradoxically exacerbated loneliness rather than alleviated it. Our modern online spaces, where talk is cheap and largely consequence-free, swarm with a disproportionate number of Richards, airing their grievances, transgressing social boundaries, and indulging in gratuitous acts of cruelty small and large in futile attempts to ease their own pain.

The problem isn’t restricted to the proverbial parents’ basements. The ostracism that so many of our current Silicon Valley billionaire set experienced as children has left them almost equally socially stunted, unable to relate to the world that “ordinary” people inhabit.  Their disconnection from their own humanity echoes Richard’s inability to understand why Edward IV’s former queen may not find the murderer of her sons to be a suitable suitor to her daughter, who on top of everything else happens to be said murderer’s niece.

King Richard
If I did take the kingdom from your sons,
To make amends I’ll give it to your daughter;
If I have killed the issue of your womb,
To quicken your increase I will beget
Mine issue of your blood upon your daughter.

People such as these are like aliens from outer space, trying to comprehend why some values are ineffable and non-transactable, some transgressions irrevocable. As I wrote earlier: they would be pitiable, if only they weren’t so dangerous. I don’t know what to do about these people. I can only wish that all of us, myself included, could be more consistent about applying the (apocryphal) life advice of the novelist Henry James: “Be kind, be kind, be kind.” Surely that is the best way to keep the number of Richards among us to a minimum. For it seems to me that cruelty — especially childhood cruelty — begets more cruelty, while kindness begets more kindness.

During Shakespeare’s day, when kings had theoretically unchecked power to pursue their whims, the distance between the personal and the political was alarmingly short. And now? Well… now we seem to be in that same place once again, don’t we? This is as bizarre as it is disturbing. The whole point of liberal democracy was supposed to be to separate the personal from the political, to allow all of us to decide together what is best for the collective in the abstract. But darned if the country where I grew up, which used to consider itself the very bosom of those ideals, doesn’t now have its very own Richard. He glowers and lumbers instead of mugging and capering, and is nowhere near as clever as Shakespeare’s Richard (and thank God for that!). But still: we weren’t supposed to be here in 2026. And yet here we are. So, we turn to the Bard, whose play shows us how a single maladjusted individual’s pathologies can infect the entirety of a body politic that has failed to inoculate itself against them.

There are ample lessons here for those who care to listen.  Our own Richard’s minions, his equivalents of Hastings and Buckingham — these people who have traded conscience and responsibility for power and status, who stand there behind him at his press conferences with rictus smiles on their faces — should take some passages deeply to heart. Among them are the words of George Plantagenet to his own murderers: “O, sirs, consider, they that set you on to do this deed will hate you for the deed.” A brutal reckoning will indeed come at the hands of the very people who voted for this situation, to the minions if not to their unworthy monarch. For no scourger scourges so hard as the one who knows that he too is implicated in the sin.

Like our version of the tyrant, Shakespeare’s Richard could be oddly charming when we first met him, what with his willingness to wink and say the quiet part out loud, exposing the hypocrisy of those mincing souls around him even as he reveled in his own deceit, which was so naked and towering that it became a perverse sort of honesty. Richard was a villain who told us forthrightly that he was a villain, and that was refreshing. But as the play goes on, Shakespeare tears away the artifice of his anti-hero layer by layer, until by the end his villainy and his tyranny stand exposed for the shabby, pathetic things they are. Richard is left to rant alone and paranoid while all of England waits on Henry Tudor’s final assault on the rotten edifice of a government he has constructed. “You cannot guess wherefore the Welshman comes. Thou wilt revolt and fly to him, I fear,” he tells even his few remaining loyal henchmen. Perhaps I am not the only one to whom this situation rings more familiar every time I read the latest political news.

The penultimate scene of Shakespeare’s play is an extended one that brilliantly contrasts a good man and leader with a bad, self-aggrandizing one. While Henry Tudor sleeps soundly in his tent on one side of the stage on the night before the Battle of Bosworth Field, Richard is haunted by his demons on the other side of the stage: “Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh. What do I fear? Myself? There’s none else by. Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am: then fly. What, from myself?”

When morning comes, each man gives a final speech to his troops. Richard has only petty grievance and viperous insults to offer.

King Richard
Remember whom you are to cope withal —
A sort of vagabonds, rascals, and runaways,
A scum of Britains [people from the French province of Brittany] and base lackey peasants
Whom their o’ercloyed country vomits forth
To desperate adventures and assured destruction.
You sleeping safe, they bring you unrest;
You having lands, and blessed with beauteous wives,
They would restraint the one, distain the other.
And who doth lead them but a paltry fellow,
Long kept in Britain at our mother’s cost,
A milksop, one that never in his life
Felt so much as cold over shoes in snow?
Let’s whip these stragglers o’er the seas again,
Lash hence these overweening rags of France,
These famished beggars, weary of their lives,
Who (but for dreaming on this fond exploit)
For want of means (poor rats) had hanged themselves.
If we be conquered, let men conquer us,
And not these bastard Britains, whom our fathers
Have in their own land beaten, bobbed, and thumped,
And, in record, left them the heirs of shame.
Shall these enjoy our lands? Lie with our wives?
Ravish our daughters?

Richard can tell his men what they fight against, but not what they fight for. Our world would be a better place if we would all learn to distrust and reject such would-be leaders as unworthy of us.

Henry, by contrast, displays a stern resolve and a righteous anger. He offers his men a positive vision of the future for which to fight.

Richmond
Richard except, those whom we fight against
Had rather have us win than him they follow.
For what is he they follow? Truly, gentlemen,
A bloody tyrant and a homicide;
One raised in blood and in blood established;
One that made means to come by what he hath,
And slaughtered those that were the means to help him;
A base foul stone, made precious by the foil
Of England’s chair, where he is falsely set;
One that hath ever been God’s enemy.
Then in your fight against God’s enemy,
God will in justice ward you as his soldiers;
If you do sweat to put a tyrant down,
You sleep in peace, the tyrant being slain;
If you do fight against your country’s foes,
You country’s fat shall pay your pains the hire;
If you do fight in safeguard of your wives,
Your wives shall welcome home the conquerors;
If you do free your children from the sword,
Your children’s children quits it in your age;
Then in the name of God and all these rights,
Advance your standards, draw your willing swords.
For me, the ransom of my bold attempt
Shall be this cold corpse on the earth’s cold face;
But if I thrive, the gain of my attempt
The least of you shall share his part thereof.

There’s no denying that Shakespeare’s Richard is a lot of fun to watch. Nevertheless, it seems to me that we place all of our despots on all too high of a pedestal even as we are busily condemning them. We imagine them to be defined by the qualities they possess. But all of those qualities — cleverness, boldness, strength, etc. — can belong to heroes as easily as villains. No, our despots are actually defined by absences, as demonstrated by the other words we use to describe them: ruthless, heartless, shameless. (Surely no one in the history of the world has ridden shamelessness as far as our current Richard; it is his superpower, practically the sum total of his personality.) It is not, in other words, that these people have qualities that the rest of us lack. It is that we have qualities that they lack. They are twisted, half-formed creatures inside, of a piece with our poor misbegotten Richard even if their outward forms are more pleasant to behold. They are incapable of building anything enduring because all of the things that truly endure are built on exactly the qualities they do not possess: principle, integrity, the capacity to deeply and honestly love. Lacking these higher qualities, they can only lash out in the moment, leaving pain and destruction in their wake, until it all ends, as it ended for Shakespeare’s Richard, in some muddy ditch somewhere.

We’ve suffered with our Richard for way too many years now. We can only hope that our Henry is soon to emerge.

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(A full listing of print and online sources used will follow the final article in this series.)