Richard III: Act 4, Scene 4 – Analysis
Scene Profile – At a Glance
- Location: London, before the palace – then the road, as Richard marches to meet the rebellion.
- What Happens: Queen Margaret, Queen Elizabeth and the Duchess of York pool their griefs; Margaret teaches Elizabeth to curse and leaves for France. The Duchess curses her son to his face. Richard woos Elizabeth for her daughter and seems to win. Then the messengers come: risings everywhere, Buckingham taken, Richmond landed.
- Key Characters: King Richard, Queen Elizabeth, Queen Margaret, the Duchess of York, Lord Stanley, Ratcliffe, Catesby, four messengers.
- Dramatic Function: The play’s longest scene and its turning point: the women’s curses reach their target, Richard’s second wooing mirrors and reverses his first, and the news arrives that his reign is ending.
- Famous Quote:
"O thou well skilled in curses, stay awhile,
And teach me how to curse mine enemies!"
(Queen Elizabeth, Act 4, Scene 4) - Why It Matters: Everything Richard built by talking is dismantled here by talking – by three women who have learned his weapon, and by messengers he can no longer silence.
Scene Summary
Old Queen Margaret enters alone. She has lurked in England to watch her enemies wither, and now, satisfied that York’s prosperity is dropping into the rotten mouth of death, she will go to France – but first she hides to watch. Queen Elizabeth comes in mourning her murdered sons, and the Duchess of York mourning a son and grandson; the two women sit on the ground. Margaret steps out and joins them. In a formal exchange the three count their dead – an Edward for an Edward, a Richard for a Richard – and Margaret names the Duchess’s womb as the kennel from which the hell-hound crept. Margaret is hungry for revenge and has fed on it: Edward, the princes, Clarence, Hastings, Rivers, Vaughan and Grey are all dead, and only Richard remains, hell’s black intelligencer, whose end is at hand.
She turns on Elizabeth, whom she once called a painted queen, a queen in jest. Where is your husband now? Where are your brothers, your sons, the kneeling peers? Elizabeth, who scorned Margaret in Act 1, asks her to stay and teach her how to curse. Margaret’s lesson is a recipe – do not sleep, fast, compare dead happiness with living woe, think your babes sweeter than they were and their killer fouler than he is – and she leaves, promising that England’s woes will make her smile in France. The Duchess asks why calamity should be full of words; Elizabeth answers that words are windy attorneys, but they ease the heart. A trumpet sounds, and the Duchess proposes that they smother her damned son in bitter words.
Richard enters with drums and trumpets, marching to war, and the two women block his way, demanding to know where their children and kinsmen are. He orders the drums to drown them out. The Duchess asks whether he is her son, and delivers the history of his life from her side – a grievous birth, a tetchy infancy, frightful schooldays, a manhood daring and bloody – and asks what comfortable hour he ever gave her. He mocks her. She tells him she will never speak to him again, and leaves him her curse: either he dies by God’s justice in this war, or she dies of grief without seeing his face again; her prayers will fight on the other side; bloody he is, and bloody will be his end.
Elizabeth says amen to it and turns to go. Richard stops her: he must talk about her daughter Elizabeth, whom he means to make Queen of England. What follows is the play’s second great wooing, and this time the audience knows the first. Elizabeth parries every offer – send her a pair of bleeding hearts engraved Edward and York; tell her you killed her uncles and her aunt – and Richard argues that what is done cannot be amended, that he will bury her dead sons in her daughter’s womb, that a grandmother is nearly a mother, that Dorset will come home and the ruins of distressful times be repaired with double riches. She asks how long his “ever” will last. He swears by his George, his Garter and his crown, and she strikes each oath away – profaned, dishonoured, usurped; by himself, by the world, by his father’s death, by God, and she answers each. He swears at last by the time to come, calling ruin on himself if he does not love her daughter, and asks her to plead for him. Shall I be tempted of the devil thus? Ay, if the devil tempt you to do good. She goes, promising to write, and he calls her a relenting fool and a shallow, changing woman as she leaves.
Then the news. Ratcliffe reports a navy on the western coast and hollow-hearted friends gathering to welcome Richmond. Richard sends Catesby to Norfolk and Ratcliffe to Salisbury, forgets to give Catesby his message, and changes his mind about Ratcliffe. Stanley brings a riddle – news neither good nor bad – and then the fact: Richmond is on the seas, coming to claim the crown. Richard’s answer is a string of rhetorical questions – is the chair empty? is the King dead? – and an accusation: Stanley will revolt and fly to him. He lets Stanley go to raise troops but keeps his son George as security for his loyalty.
Four messengers follow one another. Courtney and the Bishop of Exeter are in arms in Devonshire; the Guildfords in Kent; the third begins to speak of Buckingham’s army and Richard strikes him before hearing that it has been scattered by floods and its leader has vanished; the fourth reports Lovel and Dorset in arms in Yorkshire, but Richmond’s fleet scattered by storm and turned back to Brittany. Richard gives the purse he owes for the blow and orders the march. Catesby returns: Buckingham is taken – the best news – and Richmond has landed with a mighty power at Milford. Away towards Salisbury, says Richard: while we reason here, a royal battle might be won and lost.
The Chorus of Widows
Margaret’s second appearance is her last, and she comes to collect. The three women who sit on the ground are the play’s whole female cast of survivors – a Lancastrian queen, a Yorkist queen, and the mother of the Yorkist kings – and the formal patterning of their laments turns grief into a ledger.
Original
I had an Edward, till a Richard killed him;
I had a Harry, till a Richard killed him:
Thou hadst an Edward, till a Richard killed him;
Thou hadst a Richard, till a Richard killed him.
(Queen Margaret, Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
My son was Edward, then a Richard killed him;
I married Henry, then a Richard killed him.
Your son was Edward, then a Richard killed him;
Your son was Richard, then a Richard killed him.
The four lines are a table: two Edwards, a Harry, a Richard, and one killer for all of them. The repeated phrase does what the ghost procession will do in Act 5 – names the dead in order and hangs them on one name – and the flat symmetry is the point: Margaret is not weeping, she is counting. Her speeches in this scene run the whole gamut of the play’s imagery for Richard – hell-hound, dog with teeth before his eyes, foul defacer of God’s handiwork, hell’s black intelligencer – and her prayer is that she may live to say “The dog is dead”, which is very nearly Richmond’s first line in Act 5, Scene 5. She then does to Elizabeth what she came to do, listing the titles Elizabeth has lost – wife, mother, queen, feared, obeyed – in a catalogue of “for” clauses that reads like a demotion. Where is thy husband now? The taunt is cruel, and it is also the scene’s engine, because it is what makes Elizabeth ask for lessons. The play’s thinking about prophecy and curses reaches its climax here: everything Margaret promised has come true, and she says so.
Teach Me How to Curse
Elizabeth’s request is one of the play’s great reversals. In Act 1, Scene 3 she was the queen Margaret cursed; here she runs after the old woman and asks to be taught. Margaret’s answer is a method, and it is spoken by someone who has used it on herself for four acts.
Original
Forbear to sleep the nights, and fast the days;
Compare dead happiness with living woe;
Think that thy babes were sweeter than they were,
And he that slew them fouler than he is.
Bett’ring thy loss makes the bad causer worse;
Revolving this will teach thee how to curse.
(Queen Margaret, Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Refrain from getting sleep, and starve by day;
Compare past happiness with current suffering;
Think of your kids as sweeter than they were,
And he that killed them worse than what he is.
By suffering more you’ll make the culprit worse;
And doing this will teach you how to curse.
The recipe is psychological, not magical: deprive yourself, compare, exaggerate, brood. “Bett’ring thy loss makes the bad causer worse” is the whole art – make the loss larger and the curse will carry. What the women then say about words matters as much as the curse itself. The Duchess asks why calamity should be full of words; Elizabeth’s answer – windy attorneys, poor breathing orators of miseries, but let them have scope, they ease the heart – is the play’s own defence of its long laments. And the Duchess’s proposal, to smother her son in the breath of bitter words, uses the verb Tyrrel used for the princes: the women will do to Richard with language what he did to the children with a pillow. The trumpet that interrupts them is his.
A Mother’s Curse
Richard’s answer to two women in his path is noise: drums and trumpets to drown their exclamations, so that heaven will not hear them rail on the Lord’s anointed. It does not work. His mother asks a question – art thou my son? – and then gives him the account of his life that nobody else in the play is placed to give.
Original
Therefore take with thee my most grievous curse,
Which in the day of battle tire thee more
Than all the complete armour that thou wear’st!
My prayers on the adverse party fight,
And there the little souls of Edward’s children
Whisper the spirits of thine enemies
And promise them success and victory.
Bloody thou art, bloody will be thy end;
Shame serves thy life and doth thy death attend.
(Duchess of York, Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
And therefore, take the worst curse I can muster,
For it will tire you out in battle more
Than all the heavy armour that you’re wearing!
My prayers will join the army that you’re fighting,
And Edward’s children’s souls will join the fight
By whispering to souls of all your foes
And promising that they will be victorious.
You’re bloody vile; you’ll die a bloody death,
And live in shame until your dying breath.
The Duchess’s biography of Richard – a grievous burden at birth, tetchy in infancy, frightful at school, bold in manhood, proud, subtle, sly and bloody in age – is the play’s only description of him from before the first scene, and it comes from the person who was there. His reply is a joke about breakfast, and the joke is the last thing she will hear from him: she tells him she will never speak to him again, and keeps the promise. Her curse is exact. It will tire him in battle more than his armour; her prayers will fight for the other side; the souls of Edward’s children will whisper success to his enemies – which is the ghost scene of Act 5, foretold by his mother – and the couplet, bloody life and bloody end, is the sentence. A mother’s curse was the heaviest a person could carry, and the Duchess adds a detail the play has been building to since Act 2: she wishes she had strangled him in her womb. Richard, who has answered everyone in the play, does not answer this; the Duchess leaves, and he turns immediately to the next piece of business.
The Second Wooing
Richard has just been cursed by his mother and told by his sister-in-law that her remaining daughters will be nuns rather than queens. He asks for one of them in marriage. The wooing of Elizabeth for her daughter is the mirror of the wooing of Anne, and Shakespeare writes it so that the audience can measure the distance between the two.
Original
RICHARD: Say I will love her everlastingly.
QUEEN ELIZABETH: But how long shall that title "ever" last?
RICHARD: Sweetly in force unto her fair live’s end.
QUEEN ELIZABETH: But how long fairly shall her sweet life last?
(Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
RICHARD: Tell her that I will love her evermore.
QUEEN ELIZABETH: But how long does that ‘ever’ really mean?
RICHARD: I’ll love her sweetly till her dying day.
QUEEN ELIZABETH: But how long is her sweet life going to last?
The exchange is line-for-line duelling, as it was with Anne, but this opponent is winning. Every phrase Richard offers, Elizabeth turns: everlastingly, but how long is ever; till her life’s end, but how long will that life last; as long as heaven and nature lengthen it, as long as hell and Richard like of it. She has learned the lesson Margaret gave her an hour earlier, and she uses Richard’s own trick against him – the double meaning, the word taken from the other mouth and turned. His arguments are the arguments of a man who cannot tell the difference between a bargain and an atrocity: he will bury her sons in her daughter’s womb; a grandmother is only one step below a mother; the tears she has shed will come back as pearls with interest. “Harp not on that string, madam, that is past” is the sound of a persuader who has run out of persuasion. In Act 1 he won Anne in about two hundred lines; here he spends two hundred and does not win. The scene’s study of manipulation is a study of the technique failing.
By Nothing, for This Is No Oath
When argument fails Richard reaches for oaths, and Elizabeth takes them away one by one. The George, the Garter and the crown are profaned, dishonoured and usurped; himself is self-misused; the world is full of his wrongs; his father’s death is dishonoured by his life; God’s wrong is the greatest of all, because the oath he broke to God is the one that killed her brothers and sons. He is left with the time to come, and she has an answer for that as well.
Original
As I intend to prosper and repent,
So thrive I in my dangerous affairs
Of hostile arms! Myself myself confound!
Heaven and fortune bar me happy hours!
(King Richard, Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Just as I plan to prosper and repent,
So may I thrive by winning dangerous battles
Against the enemy! May I destroy me;
May God and luck prevent me being happy...
So Richard swears by the future, and the form his oath takes is a curse on himself: may he confound himself, may heaven and fortune bar him happy hours, may day deny him light and night deny him rest, if he does not love her daughter. Every clause is granted. He does not love her daughter; he loses the battle, his last night is sleepless, and the sun refuses to rise on the morning of Bosworth. The audience that has watched every curse in the play come true watches Richard write his own. Elizabeth’s last questions – shall I be tempted of the devil thus? shall I forget myself to be myself? – are answered with the old brilliance, and she goes, promising to write. He calls her a relenting fool and a shallow, changing woman. Act 4, Scene 5 will report which of them was the fool; for now the play leaves the question open, and the seeming yield is the first performance in the play whose audience cannot tell whether it worked.
Songs of Death
The last hundred lines are a change of tempo. Richard, who has run the play by giving orders, gives orders that cancel one another – Catesby is sent without a message, Ratcliffe is sent and then not sent – and the messengers arrive faster than he can answer them.
Original
Is the chair empty? Is the sword unswayed?
Is the King dead? The empire unpossessed?
What heir of York is there alive but we?
And who is England’s king but great York’s heir?
(King Richard, Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Is the throne empty? Is the sword kept sheathed?
Is the King dead? And is the country unclaimed?
What royal heir of York lives on but me?
And who’s the King of England but York’s heir?
The four questions to Stanley are the old rhetoric working at full stretch – who is England’s king but York’s heir? – and they are answered by a man who has just been told that Richmond is on the seas. Stanley is not deceived and not intimidated; he is sent to raise troops and leaves his son behind as a hostage, which is the beginning of the Bosworth plot. Then the messengers. Devonshire, Kent, and the third one struck before he can finish a sentence that turns out to be good news – Buckingham’s army scattered by floods – so that Richard has to pay him a purse for the blow. The fourth brings the play’s one piece of luck for Richard, Richmond’s fleet dispersed by storm, and Catesby cancels it: Richmond has landed at Milford. “While we reason here, / A royal battle might be won and lost” is the exit line, and it is a man who has spent five hundred lines reasoning, cursing, wooing and swearing discovering that the war has started without him. The scene that opened with Margaret watching the waning of her enemies ends with the enemy on the march.
Language and Technique
- Stichomythia: Line-for-line exchange, each speaker capping the other – the wooing is built from it, and Elizabeth’s caps are sharper than Richard’s, which is how the scene shows him losing.
- The catalogue: Margaret’s for-clauses (for happy wife, a most distressed widow…), the Duchess’s stages of Richard’s life, the list of the dead: the scene piles up lists so that grief and history sound like accounts.
- Curse as recipe: Margaret’s lesson turns cursing into a method – deprivation, comparison, exaggeration – so the audience sees the play’s supernatural machinery as a craft anyone can learn.
- The broken oath: Richard swears by four things and Elizabeth answers each with a single line: the oath-sequence is a formal duel in which every weapon is taken away in turn.
- Self-curse: Richard’s final oath is a conditional curse on himself – and every clause is later fulfilled – so his own words join the women’s in the play’s pattern of prophecy.
- Accelerating messengers: Four reports in fifty lines, one interrupted by a blow: the rhythm of the ending is news arriving faster than the king can absorb it.
Key Quotes from Act 4, Scene 4
Quote 1
So now prosperity begins to mellow
And drop into the rotten mouth of death.
(Queen Margaret, Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
The Yorks’ prosperity has started fading,
Like ripened fruit that rots upon the ground.
Quote Analysis: Margaret’s opening couplet. Ripeness and rot in one image: the house of York has mellowed like fruit and will drop into a mouth. She has watched, she says, from the confines – the edges of the stage, the edges of the play – and this scene is the harvest she came for.
Where is thy husband now? Where be thy brothers?
Where be thy two sons? Wherein dost thou joy?
(Queen Margaret, Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Where is your husband now? Where are your brothers?
Where are your two sons? Where do you find pleasure?
Quote Analysis: The questions Margaret puts to Elizabeth are the play’s inventory of what Richard has taken, and each one has the same answer. The form is an old one – where are they now? – and Margaret uses it to demote a queen to a widow in two lines.
A grievous burden was thy birth to me,
Tetchy and wayward was thy infancy;
Thy school-days frightful, desp’rate, wild, and furious,
Thy prime of manhood daring, bold, and venturous;
Thy age confirmed, proud, subtle, sly, and bloody,
More mild, but yet more harmful – kind in hatred.
(Duchess of York, Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Just giving birth to you was agony,
And you were naughty in your infancy;
At school you were ferocious and uncaring,
And as a young man, you were bold and daring;
And when mature, sly, cunning and barbaric,
Appearing mild, yet causing harm with flattery.
Quote Analysis: The Duchess’s four-line life of her son is unique in the play: a description of Richard by someone who knew him before he could speak. The list moves through the ages of man – birth, infancy, school, manhood, age – and ends on a paradox, kind in hatred, that is as exact an account of his charm as the play offers.
Bloody thou art, bloody will be thy end...
(Duchess of York, Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
You’re bloody vile; you’ll die a bloody death...
Quote Analysis: The mother’s curse in a couplet. Bloody at both ends, shame in between; the rhyme end and attend closes it like a door. The Duchess exits on it and keeps her word never to speak to him again, and Bosworth honours the prophecy to the letter.
QUEEN ELIZABETH: But how long shall that title "ever" last?
RICHARD: Sweetly in force unto her fair live’s end.
QUEEN ELIZABETH: But how long fairly shall her sweet life last?
(Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
QUEEN ELIZABETH: But how long does that ‘ever’ really mean?
RICHARD: I’ll love her sweetly till her dying day.
QUEEN ELIZABETH: But how long is her sweet life going to last?
Quote Analysis: Elizabeth’s two questions are the scene’s best example of her method: take the other speaker’s word – ever, sweet, fair – and ask how much it weighs. Richard’s everlasting love and her daughter’s sweet life are measured against what he did to Anne, and neither survives the measurement.
Relenting fool, and shallow, changing woman!
(King Richard, Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
You weak-willed fool and shallow, fickle woman!
Quote Analysis: Richard’s verdict on Elizabeth as she leaves, and possibly the play’s worst piece of judgement. The line is the old Richard – contempt as an aside, the audience invited to share it – and Act 4, Scene 5 will report that the relenting fool has given her daughter to Richmond. It is the last time he sounds sure of himself.
Key Takeaways
- The curses come home: Margaret’s prophecies of Act 1 are checked off as fulfilled, and she leaves the play satisfied.
- The women learn Richard’s weapon: Elizabeth asks to be taught to curse, and then out-argues Richard line for line – language changes sides.
- A mother’s curse and a life story: The Duchess gives the play’s only account of Richard’s childhood, and the only curse he does not answer.
- The second wooing fails: The mirror of the Anne scene, with every move reversed: this time the widow wins and the wooer swears a curse on himself.
- Control slips: Cancelled orders, a struck messenger, a hostage taken: the scene ends with Richard reacting to news for the first time.
Study Questions and Analysis
What happens in Act 4, Scene 4, and why is it so long?
It is the longest scene in the play, and it does three things in sequence. First, the women’s lament: Margaret, Elizabeth and the Duchess of York count their dead, Margaret taunts Elizabeth with everything she has lost, Elizabeth asks to be taught to curse, and Margaret leaves for France. Second, Richard’s entrance and two confrontations: his mother’s curse, and his attempt to persuade Elizabeth to give him her daughter, which ends with her apparent consent and his contempt. Third, the news: Richmond at sea, risings in the west and Kent, Buckingham scattered and then captured, Richmond landed at Milford Haven.
The length is structural. The scene is the hinge of the play, and everything that was set going in Acts 1 to 3 arrives here at once – the curses, the second wooing that mirrors the first, the rebellion. Productions cut it heavily, usually at the expense of the women’s laments, and the cuts change the play’s balance: on the page the scene gives its first two hundred lines to three women and its last hundred to messengers, so that Richard, the play’s engine, is for once its object. A student can argue that the scene’s size is the point – the play slows to let the audience watch the consequences catch up.
Why does Queen Margaret return, and what does she want?
To watch, and to say she told them so. Historically Margaret of Anjou was dead by 1483, and her presence in the play is Shakespeare’s invention; he keeps her as a chorus who cursed the whole court in Act 1, Scene 3 and returns here to check the results. She has been lurking, she says, to watch her enemies wane, and she lists them – Edward, the princes, Clarence, Hastings, Rivers, Vaughan, Grey – before turning to the one who is left.
Bear with me; I am hungry for revenge,
And now I cloy me with beholding it.
(Queen Margaret, Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Bear with me; I am hungry for revenge,
And now I’ve seen so much, I’m overwhelmed.
Her hunger is the honest word, and the scene lets her feed. What she wants from the women is acknowledgement: that Elizabeth, who scorned her, now stands where she stood, and that the Duchess, who bore Richard, is the source of the hell-hound. She gets it in the form of a request for tuition, and leaves satisfied. Samuel Johnson, in his 1765 edition, found parts of the play improbable, and Margaret’s survival is the improbability most often named; the theatre has kept her because the play’s design of curse and fulfilment needs a voice to keep the score.
What does Elizabeth mean when she asks Margaret to teach her to curse?
She means it literally, and the request measures how far she has fallen. In Act 1 Elizabeth was a queen who stood by while Margaret cursed; by this scene her husband is dead, her brother and one son executed, her two younger sons murdered, and she has nothing left but words. Margaret is the play’s expert in words used as weapons, and Elizabeth asks for the craft. The lesson she gets is practical: sleeplessness, fasting, comparison, exaggeration – make the loss bigger and the curse sharper.
The exchange is followed by a short debate on whether words do any good at all. The Duchess asks why calamity should be full of words; Elizabeth answers that they are windy attorneys and breathing orators of misery, that they help nothing and ease the heart. It is as close as the play comes to explaining its own long laments. And the lesson takes: within a hundred lines Elizabeth is turning Richard’s own words against him, oath by oath. A student can present the scene as the moment language changes sides in the play – the villain’s instrument learned by his victims.
What is the Duchess of York’s curse, and why is it different from the others?
It is a mother’s curse, which Elizabethan audiences held to be the heaviest kind, and it is the only curse in the play spoken by someone who once loved its target. The Duchess first gives Richard the history of his life as she experienced it – a grievous birth, a tetchy infancy, wild schooldays, a manhood daring and bloody – and asks what comfortable hour he ever gave her. He answers with a joke. She tells him she will never speak to him again, and curses him: he will die by God’s justice in this war or she will die without seeing him again; her prayers will fight on the other side; the souls of Edward’s children will whisper victory to his enemies.
Either thou wilt die by God’s just ordinance
Ere from this war thou turn a conqueror,
Or I with grief and extreme age shall perish
And never more behold thy face again.
(Duchess of York, Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
You’ll either die by God’s fair justice
Before returning from this war victorious,
Or through my grief and old age, I will perish
And never will I see your face again.
Every clause is honoured. The ghosts of Act 5 are the princes whispering to his enemies; the Duchess’s prayers fight for Richmond; the end is bloody. What distinguishes the curse is that Richard does not answer it. He has a reply for everyone else in the play – Anne, Margaret, Hastings, Buckingham, Elizabeth – and to his mother he says nothing, and moves on to business. E. M. W. Tillyard, in Shakespeare’s History Plays (1944), read the play as the working out of God’s plan against a scourge; the Duchess’s curse is the point where the plan is spoken by the person who made the scourge.
Does Richard succeed in wooing Elizabeth for her daughter?
He thinks so, and he is wrong. Elizabeth ends the scene by agreeing to go to her daughter and to write to him, and Richard, watching her leave, calls her a relenting fool and a shallow, changing woman. In the very next scene Stanley reports that the queen has heartily consented to her daughter marrying Richmond – the man Richard is marching to fight. So either Elizabeth was lying to him here, or she changed her mind at once; the play does not say which, and the ambiguity is the scene’s last trick.
Plead what I will be, not what I have been;
Not my deserts, but what I will deserve.
(King Richard, Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Describe what I will be, not what I have been;
Not punishment I’m due, but praise I’ll earn.
What is not ambiguous is who won the argument. Richard’s case for the marriage is a series of grotesque bargains – the dead sons buried in the daughter’s womb, tears returned as pearls with interest – and Elizabeth answers every one of them with a question he cannot meet. William Hazlitt, in Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817), thought Richard should woo Anne less as a lover than as an actor; here the performance is the same and the audience has changed, because this woman has seen the show before. A strong essay treats the scene as Richard’s first defeat in his own medium.
How does this wooing compare with the wooing of Lady Anne in Act 1?
Shakespeare builds the second scene as a deliberate mirror of the first. Both are conducted over the dead – Henry VI’s corpse in Act 1, the murdered princes here – both are line-for-line duels, both involve Richard offering to be killed or cursed if he is insincere, and in both the woman appears to yield. The differences are the point. Anne was alone, young and without protection; Elizabeth has just been taught to curse and has her daughter’s life to bargain with. Anne’s arguments were answered; Elizabeth’s are not.
The most telling difference is in Richard’s own commentary. After Anne he had a soliloquy of triumph – was ever woman in this humour wooed? After Elizabeth he has one line of contempt, and the next scene proves it misplaced. The play uses the pair of scenes to show a technique working and then failing, and the failure is not that Richard has lost his skill but that his victims have learned it. For an essay on manipulation and deceit, the two wooings are the clearest evidence the play offers.
Why does Elizabeth reject each of Richard’s oaths?
Because he has already broken faith with everything he could swear by. He swears by his George (the jewel of the Order of the Garter), his Garter and his crown, and she answers that the first is profaned, the second dishonoured and the third usurped. He tries himself, the world, his father’s death and God, and she answers each in turn: himself is self-misused, the world is full of his wrongs, his life has dishonoured his father, and God is the party most wronged of all – because the oath of friendship he swore before God in Act 2, Scene 1 is the one whose breaking killed her brothers and her sons.
If something thou wouldst swear to be believed,
Swear then by something that thou hast not wronged.
(Queen Elizabeth, Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
But if you want your oath to be believed,
Then swear on something that you haven’t harmed.
The sequence is a formal demonstration that a man who has broken every bond has nothing left to bind himself with. When Richard finally swears by the time to come, Elizabeth points out that he has already wronged the future by what he did in the past – the fatherless children and childless parents who will live to lament him – and he is reduced to cursing himself. Every clause of that self-curse is fulfilled at Bosworth, which makes the oath-scene part of the play’s machinery of prophecy: Richard, who mocked the women’s curses, ends by writing one for himself.
What do the messengers report, and why are there so many?
Ratcliffe reports a navy off the western coast with Richmond as its admiral, waiting for Buckingham to welcome it. Stanley confirms that Richmond is on the seas and coming for the crown. Then four messengers in succession: Sir Edward Courtney and the Bishop of Exeter in arms in Devonshire; the Guildfords in Kent; Buckingham’s army dispersed by floods and the duke vanished; Lovel and Dorset in arms in Yorkshire, but Richmond’s fleet scattered by a storm and returned to Brittany. Catesby closes the scene with Buckingham captured and Richmond landed with a mighty power at Milford.
Away towards Salisbury! While we reason here,
A royal battle might be won and lost.
(King Richard, Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Let’s leave for Salisbury! While we’re talking here,
A royal battle might be won and lost.
The number is the technique. Shakespeare compresses the autumn of 1483 and the summer of 1485 into fifty lines so that the audience experiences the rebellion as a flood, and he uses the sequence to show Richard’s grip loosening: he strikes the third messenger before hearing that the news is good, pays him for the blow, and cancels his own orders to Ratcliffe. The historical events are real – Buckingham’s rising failed in the floods of October 1483, and Richmond did land at Milford Haven in August 1485 – but the play runs them together so that the king who managed every event in the first three acts is now managing none.
How does Richard change in this scene?
He starts to lose control of the play’s language, which has been his instrument since the first line. The women silence him with drums rather than with wit; his mother’s curse gets no answer; the wooing is a long argument he does not win; and the ending is a series of orders given, contradicted and forgotten. “My mind is changed” – said to Ratcliffe when he cannot remember why he sent him – is a small line and a large admission. The Richard of Act 1 never changed his mind, because he had already planned the scene.
There is no soliloquy here, and that is the change. Richard has not spoken to the audience alone since his coronation, and the scene gives him one line of aside – the sneer at Elizabeth – which the next scene proves wrong. Stephen Greenblatt, in Tyrant (2018), read the play as a study of how a tyrant’s power depends on enablers and collapses when they withdraw; this scene stages the withdrawal, in the person of Stanley, who lies to Richard’s face about where his friends are and leaves with a hostage in the king’s hands. Charles Lamb, writing in 1802, thought unstrained mirth a prime feature of Richard’s character; by the end of this scene the mirth has gone, and what replaces it is haste.
