Bent Dick

by

Nicki Leone

There is a vicious scene at the end of Henry Vi part iii where Richard, Duke of Gloucester, murders the hapless King. Henry dies, asking God for forgiveness for both his sins and those of his murderer, and Richard responds to the corpse with fury:

Down, down to hell, and say I sent thee thither—
         He stabs him again
I, that have neither pity, love, nor fear.
(Henry VI, part iii Act V, Scene 6)

It should have set me on my guard, that speech. It should have warned me that the confused, unfocused, erratic brilliance of the Henry VI plays I had been keeping company with for the last week thanks to my new copy of The Arkangel Shakespeare were about to bloom into something new and entirely different.

Unfortunately, as Richard—who has been called numerous names during the play, the most amusing of which was “Bent Dick”—was launching into his diatribe on my car’s CD player, I was pulling onto Route 74/76 east and found myself trapped in traffic by one of those annoying drivers who won’t speed up, won’t slow down, wouldn’t let me pass, wouldn’t even let me change lanes. I glanced over at him through the open window of his car, ready to glare, only to see him leering at me while he masturbated.

“Bent Dick!” I thought hysterically while I fished for my cell phone to call the highway patrol. “Ha ha ha ha!”

For the next several miles I barely paid attention to what was going on in the play, so concerned was I with not looking over to next lane, until at last I saw a sheriff barreling down on both of us in my rear view mirror. It was the only time I’ve ever seen flashing blue lights behind me and felt relief, rather than alarm. The pervert was pulled, and I tuned back to the play only to hear Edward, now King, exit the stage in a triumph of trumpets and drums. I allowed silence to reign in the car for about ten more miles before I reached for the next CD in the box: Richard III.

I had this in common with the Elizabethan audiences who first saw this play performed (probably somewhere around 1591 or 1592): I still had the plays of Henry VI, with all their characters, factions and intrigues, fresh in my mind. So I thought I knew what to expect from the story. But thanks to my perverted friend, one thing I didn’t have in common with the sixteenth-century audience was an idea of what to expect from Richard himself. While I was trying to avoid the swerving car in the next lane, the Duke of Gloucester had declared himself over the dead body of the murdered King Henry:

Then, since the heavens have shaped my body so,
Let hell make crooked my mind to answer it.
I had no father, I am like no father;
I have no brother, I am like no brother;
And this word “love,” which graybeards call divine,
Be resident in men like one another
And not in me – I am myself alone.
(Henry VI, part iii, Act V, scene 6)

“I am myself alone.”– a powerful statement of isolation, of self-determination.  And I missed it completely, thanks to another kind of bent dick.

So when at the beginning of Act I, Scene I of Richard III, Richard, Duke of Gloucester stepped out onto the stage and announced to the audience “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York.” I was utterly unprepared for the force of his personality and the force of the poetry. I found myself  mesmerized from the first moment, utterly swept up in the complicated character of “Bent Dick,”  this “hedgehog,” this “bottled spider,” this “hunched toad”—these are just some of the names people call him to his face—who is at war with the world and determined to exact his revenge. From its opening lines it was clear to me that Richard III was a different kind of play. Energetic, vivacious, focused and brilliantly constructed. It was as if the Henry VI dramas were “warm ups” and the orchestra had suddenly launched into a full symphony.

There is Shakespeare’s use of language, for one thing. It is . . . exuberant. Even I got the pun in the play’s opening lines; a “son” for the “sun” of York. I’m sure Shakespeare’s audience hooted. It was clever. Peter Ackroyd, in his biography of William Shakespeare, says of the dramatist that “Words elicited more words from him in an act of sympathetic magic.” He speaks of how words in Shakespeare often come paired—as much because of how they sound together, or because of some unconscious association, as because of any commonality of meaning. He notes, for example, that one often finds the words “geese” and “disease” in close proximity. “It’s as if,” he writes, “language was muttering to itself.”

In Richard III I could hear it muttering. Shakespeare plays with language almost constantly—he delights in constructing entire dialogues around the many different possible uses of a single word. He plays on words, puns with them, rhymes them and makes them do back flips, as in an odd little conversation where Richard is taunting Queen Elizabeth, accusing her of causing his brother the Duke of Clarence and Lord Hastings to be imprisoned. She hotly denies it:

Queen Elizabeth: . . . My lord, you do me shameful injury
Falsely to draw me in these vile suspects

Richard: You may  deny you were not the mean
Of my Lord Hastings’s late imprisonment

Rivers: She may, my lord, for—

Richard: She may, Lord Rivers! Why, who known not so?
She may do more, sir, than denying that:
She may help you to many fair preferments,
And then deny her aiding hand therein
And lay those honors on your high desert.
What may she not? She may—ay, marry, may she—

Rivers: What, marry may she?

Richard: What marry may she? Marry with a king . . . 
(Richard III, Act I, Scene 3)

It is a veritable waterfall of merry “marry, may she’s” unleashed upon the listener. And rather comic, too, since Richard and the audience know full well that he is the one who caused the imprisonment of Hastings and the Duke of Clarence.

But clever word play aside, there is real character development in Richard III, such as did not occur in any of the earlier Henry VI plays. He decorates his dialog with puns and rhymes, but it is a rare moment in the play when the characters are not speaking with deep earnest and import. There is, for example, a most amazing, well, I can’t exactly call it a love scene between Richard and Lady Anne, whom he has decided to marry as a way to come closer to the throne. Now mind you, Richard killed the lady’s husband and her father, and she knows this. She is under no illusions as to what kind of man is Richard, Duke of Gloucester. Most of the insulting names I listed above came first from her.

But Richard will not be put off. He stops her on the way to burying her husband, forces her to stand by his dead body, and woos her in an scene that is unique in English literature:

Anne: Villain, thou know’st nor law of God nor man:
No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity.

Richard: But I know none, and therefore am no beast.

Anne: O wonderful, when devils tell the truth!

Richard: More wonderful, when angels are so angry.

. . . and here, I realized as I listened to the two trade words like barbs, is why everyone should see Shakespeare performed at least once, rather than be content just to read the plays.  For the actor playing Richard in this production (David Troughton) purrs this line softly in Anne’s ears, like a tomcat.

The two spar with words, until Richard literally bullies Anne at knife point to accept him. The knife is actually pointed at his breast—he forces her to take it and dares her to use it, to spill his blood. She cannot—it is a terrible thing to kill a man, after all, even one who so deserves death—and in losing that battle loses the war.  When she departs, she is the reluctant wearer of Richard’s ring.

It is quite an amazing exchange. Richard is right to gloat on his success. For “was ever woman in this humour wooed? Was ever woman in this humour won?” And although Richard has no intention of staying true or loyal to her, no intention of even keeping her alive past the point she ceases to be of use to him, still he feels the exultant satisfaction of prevailing against all odds to win the lady.  I think, if he were alive today, Richard would be classified as a sociopath.

I suppose it is always true that in the realm of literature evil men are usually more interesting that good ones.  If so, then Richard, who is a study in unfettered, unapologetic malice, is fascinating. From the moment he announces he “unformed, unfinished . . . 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 is bent upon wreaking havoc and destruction to everyone near him. He can’t be handsome, so he will parade his ugliness. He can’t be considered gentle, or virtuous, or noble—this is an era when it was believed the state of the body mirrored the state of the soul—so he will be cruel and duplicitous. And because no one could love him, he is free to love no one but himself. He can’t be happy, but he can at least be powerful. A man driven by that kind of thirst for destruction is an irresistible force. Really, no one near him stands a chance.

It can’t last of course. Richard’s unchecked evil eventually drives even his most loyal supporters from him—some, because their loyalty was bought and for such men there is always another willing to offer a higher price. Others deserted him because, frankly, Richard had begun to frighten them. What they had seen as simple ambition was revealed to be ungoverned malevolence and a thirst for bloodletting. Even his most loyal friend, the Duke of Buckingham, who has arranged more than one murder on Richard’s behalf, falters when he realizes the king he has installed is intent on murdering children. From the moment Richard decides the famous Princes in the Tower must die, England deserts him. England, in fact, rises up against him. By the end of the play he is as alone and friendless as when he first walked out on stage to tell the audience his nefarious plans. He stands unhorsed in the midst of a battle, still shaking his sword, still at war with the world. He is nothing if not courageous.

And although he falls, and a new man, Lord Richmond,  steps up to take the crown and pronounce England free of tyranny “. . . now civil wounds are stopped, peace lives again,” yet it is Richard’s final defiant cry that lingers:

I have set my life upon a cast,
And I will stand the hazard of the die.
I think there be six Richmonds in the field;
Five have I slain today instead of him.
A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”

By the time the play closed, I had missed my exit and driven an hour out of my way. Listening to Richard III changed my ideas about Shakespearean drama irrevocably. Until now, my relationship with Shakespeare had always been one of academic curiosity. But from the moment Richard Duke of Gloucester stalked onto the stage, this changed. I was no longer merely interested in Shakespeare’s dramas. Because of Richard, I was in love.

Books mentioned in this column:
The Arkangel Shakespeare (Audio Partners, 2003)
Shakespeare: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd (Nan A. Talese, 2005) 

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by with the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.