Narcissism and Metadrama in Richard II

“Give me the glass, and therein will I read”

(Mark S. Graybill, University of South Carolina)

 

Over the last thirty years, Shakespeare criticism has demonstrated a growing awareness of the self-reflexive or metadramatic elements in his works. Lionel Abel’s 1963 study, Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form, provided perhaps the first significant analysis of the ways in which Shakespeare thematizes theatricality, in the broadest sense of the term, in his tragedies, comedies, and histories. In his discussion of Hamlet, he makes the observation—perhaps a bit commonplace and obvious to us thirty years later—that the famous “play within a play” is only the most blatant example of self-conscious technique found throughout the tragedy: once we begin to look closely, we notice that nearly “every important character acts at some moment like a playwright, employing a playwright’s consciousness of drama to impose a certain posture or attitude on another” (46). Elsewhere in his book, Abel argues implicitly that Shakespeare, though he often used metadramatic techniques more in the interest of developing character than creating “an event,” the way later playwrights do, nevertheless composed plays which “are theatre pieces about life seen as already theatricalized” (60). In making such statements, Abel laid the groundwork for a number of subsequent studies, from Thomas F. Van Laan’s Role-Playing in Shakespeare, which appeared in 1978, to Judd D. Hubert’s more recent Metatheatre: The Example of Shakespeare. Critics following Abel’s lead have been especially interested in Shakespeare’s second tetralogy. James L. Calderwood, for instance, reads the Henriad as Shakespeare’s reflection not only on a period of British history during which political authority, political “truth,” gave way to corruption and falseness, but also on the potentially disturbing artificiality of his own work. Calderwood identifies the “fall of speech” as the main metadramatic theme in the Henriad (5), and outlines a progression in which words and their meanings are severed by political corruption and then gradually reunited. Bolingbroke, by usurping Richard’s throne, in effect replaces a unified sacramental language, one in which “words have an inalienable right to their meanings,” with “a utilitarian one in which the relation between words and things is arbitrary, unsure, ephemeral” (5-6). Henry’s son, Hal, eventually achieves “an earned kingship,” thus restoring language for his people. Equally important, perhaps, is the process Shakespeare himself goes through, for in making “political affairs…metaphors for art,” he ultimately establishes the legitimacy of his own dramatic medium (164). Calderwood’s reading of the Henriad as an allegory of Shakespeare’s own development as a self-conscious artificer is intriguing, but of more interest to me here is his point that these plays dramatize a world in which signifiers and their signifieds are separated from one another. At the center of this world stands Richard II, perhaps the most flamboyantly theatrical, the most self-consciously lyrical, of all of Shakespeare’s characters prior to Hamlet. Richard personifies the disjunction between signs and meanings about which Calderwood writes; he is a man who, in losing his kingly name (signifier), subsequently loses the most basic vestiges of his identity (signified). Yet though he recognizes the disjunction, the “fall of language,” he continually tries to use discourse—and not just any discourse, but discourse at its most creative, its most metaphorical—to maintain an identity, a sense of self. Maintaining that sense is of paramount importance to Richard, whom more than one critic has called narcissistic because of self-absorption, his fanciful interiority. Marvin Glasser, for instance, has commented that “much of what Richard says sounds like a soliloquy because of his failure to relate to otherness,” to the exterior world. His “vision, while consciously self-dramatic, conflates within and without, self and other” (128). It is Richard’s narcissism with which I am primarily concerned in this essay, for it, especially when considered in light of some of Jacques Lacan’s theories, helps to illuminate the effect of Shakespeare’s metadrama in this play. Like the narcissistic Lacanian subject, Richard paradoxically needs others, even as he shuns them in favor of his own interior reality; he depends upon others to provide him a “mirror” in which to see his own complete image perpetually. In theatrical terms, he must have an “audience” at all times for his “role” to mean anything. And like Lacan’s subject, he is forever deluded; he is spoken by a discourse which he mistakenly believes he controls; he is just another signifier in a chain of signifiers for which there are no corresponding signifieds. Though Richard apparently recognizes his situation in the end, he nonetheless attempts to use language to deny his own lack of identity. Starting in Act 1, Shakespeare sets Richard up as an actor who loves to put on a show. Yet the king’s penchant for theatricality may be overlooked in the first scene, in which Richard hears the accusations of Bolingbroke and Mowbray against one another, because the ceremonial nature of that scene makes actors of all the characters. As Leonard F. Dean astutely observes, although Shakespeare deviates from his sources in much of Richard II, he evidently makes a “practical decision” to follow Edward Hall’s account of the Bolingbroke-Mowbray incident, and to open this play and the entire Henriad with it. Beginning with this scene, in which “the real feelings of Richard, Bolingbroke, Mowbray, and even Gaunt are necessarily masked to a large extent by the calculated neutrality of the ceremony,” allows Shakespeare to introduce immediately the “theatricalism of politics” and the extended analogy of “state” and “stage” (214). Thus metadrama is used to meditate on the general nature of political affairs. But in 1.3, when Richard dramatically interrupts Bolingbroke and Mowbray’s joust by “throw[ing] his warder down” and proclaiming, “Let them lay by their helmets and their spears” (118-119), Shakepeare begins to focus on Richard’s own individual theatricality.

As most critics have noticed, the soon-to-be-deposed ruler’s narcissism, which results in his flair for drama, becomes more pronounced with his return from Ireland. Upon learning that he no longer has any forces with which to fight, Richard gives several extended speeches which, as Glasser remarks, sound more like soliloquies than dialogues with those around him (128). He seems to want to “wallow” in his misery:

No matter where, of comfort no man speak/ Let’s talk of graves, of worms and epitaphs, / Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes / Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth. (3.2.144-147)

The writing metaphor is significant here, because it suggests Richard’s reluctance to give up his verbal powers as king even as he recognizes that they are diminishing. Even more important is the way in which Richard uses others to stage what is essentially a private performance directed at himself and by himself. “Let’s talk,” he says, and then ruminates until Carlisle protests, “My lord, wise men ne’er sit and wail their woes, / But presently prevent the ways to wail” (3.2.178-79). It is as if Richard uses his subjects as looking glasses in which he can see himself perform.

This, essentially, is the role Richard’s subject play throughout. Although the king complains that “He does me double wrong / That wounds me with the flatteries of his tongue” (3.2.215-16), Shakespeare makes it clear that he has survived previously on such flattery. Even earlier in the crucial second scene of Act 3, Richard needs Carlisle to tell him “That power that made you King / Hath power to keep you King in spite of all” (25-6), and the leader follows with a monologue whose self-assurance inspires in us both anger and pity toward him:

Not all the water in the rough rude sea / Can wash the balm off from an anointed king. / The breath of worldly men cannot depose / The deputy elected by the Lord. / For every man shrewd steel against our golden crown, / God for His Richard hath in heavenly pay / A glorious angel. Then, if angels fight, /Weak men must fall, for Heaven still guards the right. (3.2.55-62)

Richard’s performance here is only as good as his audience’s reaction, however, and though there are no lines from Carlisle, Aumerle, or any of the soldiers present, in production, some directors have these characters express their agreement through physical gestures. What we come to realize about Richard is that his royal power, and even his imagination, ultimately stem from sources external to him.

The external nature of Richard’s character, of his psychology, mark him as an excellent example of Lacan’s conception of the narcissist. For in Lacanian thought, the notion that any person has a distinctive psychic substance, a complete, internally-determined meaning, is pure illusion. We are defined by other people and their discourses; our unconscious resides not within us, but outside of us. This is partly what Lacan means when he makes the famous statement, “the unconscious is the discourse of the Other” (193). The narcissist is decidedly ambivalent toward others, but he nevertheless needs others for any conception of himself. This process of rejection and identification begins in the so-called “mirror stage,” when a child first recognizes itself in the reflection of a mirror or, perhaps more often, in the image of another person. Throughout our lives, we feel bound to and alienated from ourselves and others. The relationship which the mirror stage sets up is one of signification, as Terry Eagleton lucidly explains:

We can think of a small child contemplating itself before the mirror as a kind of ‘signifier’—something capable of bestowing meaning—and of the image it sees in the mirror as a kind of ‘signified.’ The image the child sees is somehow the ‘meaning’ of itself. (166)

Though this process is modified as we grow older and are introduced into language, it basically defines how we deal with reality, according to Lacan; he notes in the opening chapter of Ecrits that this “mirror stage” introduces “the dialectic that will henceforth link the I to socially elaborated situations” (5). And for the narcissist, the search for “meaning” is undertaken with an even greater sense of desperation than what the “average” person exhibits.

Richard II is, of course, precisely a narcissist in this mold. He puts on very theatrical performances, in which language is an integral prop, to give himself a definite position in reality, to perceive himself (through others) as a Gestalt. Why would a king, we might wonder, need to do so? If anyone is secure about his identity, it ought to be a ruler. Yet Richard’s world is an increasingly ambiguous one, as Shakespeare (and astute critics such as Calderwood) goes to great pains to show: with the passing of medieval absolutism and the divine right of kings, appearances and realities, signifiers and their signifieds, do not harmonize. Despite Richard’s several speeches confirming his faith in the old, unified order, he seems to know, at some level, the harsh reality of his world. This might explain why he “take[s] his correction” from Bolingbroke so “mildly,” as the queen puts it (5.1.32).

Even if Richard has some understanding of his situation, his conscious recognition of it still comes only gradually. He begins to see that he is simply an empty signifier, dependent on other empty signifiers for any sense of identity at all, as early as the scene in Wales. Yet perhaps it is in 4.1, the deposition scene, that Richard becomes most fully aware of his plight. There, he performs with all of his earlier fervor but receives an entirely different response, and he acknowledges the changed situation when he says, “God save the King! Will no man say amen? / Am I both priest and clerk? Well then, amen” (172-73). The struggle which Shakespeare presents in this scene is an intense one, as Richard summons all of his lyrical and dramatic powers to stave off loss of identity. He tries to turn his deposition, his very loss of self, into theatre, and thus, into a role. “Now mark me how I will undo myself,” he says to Bolingbroke and his former subjects (203). But there is more than theatre in the question he asks after he has ceremonially “undone” his kingship: “What more remains?” (222)

The audience recognizes, with Shakespeare, and with Richard himself to some degree, that all along this king has been, to use Thomas F. Van Laan’s words,

A series of gestures; either those belonging to his social office or, as now, those arising from his own dramatization of losing that office. And he has also been a series of responses by others, who—like mirrors—have let him see reflected by them the success of his performance. (123; emphasis mine)

This realization is heightened when Richard asks Bolingbroke for a mirror. When it is brought to him, he says, “Give me the glass, and therein will I read” (276), then proceeds to break it into “a hundred shivers” (289). Paradoxically, the act of shattering the mirror makes clear the “truth” about Richard’s subjectivity: that he has never been an autonomous individual, a self-determining Gestalt. His sense of self has been dependent on others; his little dramas have only been meaningful insofar as others have witnessed them. Within a Lacanian paradigm, Bolingbroke’s typically terse response to Richard’s histrionics here—he plays upon the former king’s lament that “sorrow hath destroyed my face” by commenting that “The shadow of your sorrow hath destroyed / The shadow of your face” (4.1.291-94)—becomes intriguingly suggestive. The “shadow” of Richard’s sorrow in this scene, or, in a more precise modern translation, the reflection of it, is Henry himself: he is the mirror, the other, who defines Richard from an external position, who dismantles from the outside Richard’s identity as king (metaphorically represented in the broken “shadow” of his face, the image in the shattered looking glass), despite the narcissist’s subsequent statement that “my grief lies all within” (4.11.295). Again, it is Richard’s audience, not himself, which bestows upon him an identity—an identity that can be taken away.

The newly deposed king’s subsequent stay in solitude in Pomfret castle confirms this for him. Although his former groom arrives in 5.5 to offer a last bit of flattery, to call up in Richard’s mind one more time his image as king by saying that he had relished the opportunity “to look upon my sometimes royal master’s face” (75), existence in solitude is disquieting for him. Prior to his conversation with the groom and his own death at the hands of Exton, Richard tries to perform once again, and though he knows that in his cell there “is not a creature by myself,” he resolves to “hammer…out” a play (5.5). Yet in the end, he knows he needs another for his own narcissism to be satisfying. In this production, he plays “in one person many people,” but is “contented” with none of them (5.5.31-32).

One wonders if Shakespeare, who also, in a sense, played “in one person many people,” was satisfied with his drama. He should have been. Richard II remains an important play in the Bard’s canon because it illuminates the complex relationship between the individual and social institutions, between the private and the public, between self and other. Viewed from a Lacanian perspective, Richard’s situation is our situation. As a king, he believes he is a stable signifier pregnant with meaning, when he is merely a variable sign with no ultimate substance of his own; he thinks he speaks the discourse of governmental, religious, and social authority when he is actually spoken by that discourse. Similarly, we conceive of ourselves “as free, unified, autonomous, self-generating individuals,” though we are, according to Louis Althusser’s reading of Lacan—once again summarized and clarified by Eagleton—merely “the ‘decentered’ function of several social determinants” (172-73). If one follows such reasoning, one begins to see oneself as an actor, much like Richard (though he perhaps achieves, in the end, a modicum of awareness about his situation which Lacan would probably not afford to most). The goal is to establish a role, an identity, in the presence of others, in the presence of the Other, the entire set of institutions which make up our culture. This goal is probably not the effect Shakespeare intended when he wrote his metadramatic history. But if Richard II conveys ideas which can be considered relevant some four hundred years later, he probably would not have minded.

 

Works Cited

Abel, Lionel. Metatheatre. New York: Hill and Wang, 1963.

Calderwood, James L. Metadrama in Shakespeare’s Henriad. Berkeley: U of California P, 1979.

Dean, Leonard F. “Richard II: The State and the Image of the Theatre.” PMLA 67 (1952): 211-18.

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.

Glasser, Marvin. “The Poet and the Royal Persona: Lyrical Structures in Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy.” Modern Language Quarterly 50 (1989): 125-44.

Hubert, Judd D. Metatheatre: The Example of Shakespeare. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1991.

Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977.

Shakespeare, William. Richard II. Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Ed. G. B. Harrison. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1948. 430-67.

Van Laan, Thomas F. Role-Playing in Shakespeare. Buffalo: U of Toronto P, 1