ABSTRACT

The chief historical source for Shakespeare’s play, Thomas More’s The History of King Richard the Third (ca.1513), which influenced Edward Hall and Raphael Holinshed in their sixteenth-century histories, describes Richard’s body in a brief digression at the outset of the narrative:

More’s account dissociates “wit and courage” from “body and prowess”, but the terms introduced for Richard’s body become the keywords for later representations: “crookbacked”, “ill-featured” and “hard-favored”. The description suggests that Richard is short, his shoulders are of different heights and his back is bent into a hunchback formation. While More describes Richard’s talent for dissimulation and his cruelty, this excursus on Richard’s body and disposition is only a small portion of the narrative, which concentrates instead on the multiple occasions of public performance that

test and subtend Richard’s political machinations. More considers what his audience can learn, not so much from Richard’s body, but from his mastery of cunning in the steady consolidation of tyrannical power. Yet the dramatic representations that precede Richard III seize upon the form of

“Richard, the third son”. The unattributed play The True Tragedie of Richard III (1594) opens with a dialogue between the characters of “Poetrie” and “Truth”, who introduce “Richard Duke of Gloster” through description. Poetrie asks: “What maner of man was this Richard Duke of Gloster?” and Truth replies: “A man ill shaped, crooked backed, lame armed, withal, / Valiantly minded, but tyrannous in authoritie.”14 Truth’s summation reads like an excerpt from More’s history, setting out the essential features of his body, and adding the “lame armed” to Richard. Truth’s account conjures an image and delivers the didactic takeaway (“Valiantly minded, but tyrannous”) before Richard himself appears on the stage. Richard, then, enters the dramatic action of the play within a moral framework: Truth and Poetrie explicate his character’s appearance and heighten audience expectations for the emblematic figure of tyranny they will see. The play that precedes Richard III in Shakespeare’s history cycle has the most exten-

sive discussion of the character’s body. In 3 Henry VI (ca.1591-92), Richard is called “scolding crookback” (5.5.30), “misshapen Dick” (5.5.35), “Hard-favoured Richard” (5.5.77) and “an indigested and deformed lump” (5.6.51).15 Repeating More’s epithets and adding new descriptions, the other characters in the play do not hesitate to explicate the meaning of these details. When Richard comes to kill King Henry, Henry claims that Richard’s pre-natal teeth were “To signify thou cam’st to bite the world; / And if the rest be true which I have heard / Thou cam’st-” (5.6.54-6), and breaks off as Richard, calling him a “prophet”, kills him. However, it is not just the other characters that proclaim the significance of his features: Richard himself adopts a prophetic framework that aligns his body as the cause of his disposition and future actions. After killing Henry, Richard returns to the question of his portentous birth with a belated answer:

Like Henry, the Richard of 3 Henry VI claims that his body should “signify”, wresting his “misshapen” form into “plainly” visible providential history.16 These brief

Performing Disability and

examples suggest that by Richard III, the “crookback” character is associated with a set of physical features-the hump, the uneven shoulders, the limp, the shortened armthat come to be expected at the outset as a site of explication when Richard shows up in a play.