Appearance vs Reality
Theme Profile – At a Glance
- Focus: The gap between what people in the play see and what is true, and who is allowed on which side of it. Richard lives in the gap; the audience is invited in; everyone else is kept out until it is too late.
- Key Characters: Richard III, The Duke of Buckingham, Hastings, Lady Anne, George, Duke of Clarence, the Lord Mayor, the Scrivener.
- The Core Tension: Richard tells the audience that he will seem a saint when most he plays the devil, and then does it in front of people who have every reason to know better. The play asks why they believe him, and whether we would.
- Key Manifestations: The plain-brother act and the honest-soldier act (A1S1, A1S3); the wooing of Anne and the looking-glass (A1S2); the peacemaker at Edward’s bedside (A2S1); the Duchess on deceit’s gentle shape (A2S2); the kind uncle and the warning against false friends (A3S1); Hastings reading Richard’s face (A3S4); the Scrivener (A3S6); the prayer book and two bishops (A3S7); Elizabeth on the golden crown (A4S4).
- Famous Quote:
"Nor more can you distinguish of a man
Than of his outward show, which, God he knows,
Seldom or never jumpeth with the heart."
(Act 3, Scene 1) - The Outcome: The appearances hold until Richard is king and then fail one by one. By Act 4 everyone can see him; by Act 5 the only performance left is the one he gives himself on the morning of Bosworth, and it does not last the day.
Seem a Saint, When Most I Play the Devil
The theme is announced by the man who embodies it. At the end of A1S3 Richard has just picked a public quarrel with the Queen’s family, in the character of a plain honest soldier, and has wept over Clarence to the very people he needs to blame for Clarence’s arrest. Alone, he explains the costume.
Original
But then I sigh, and, with a piece of scripture,
Tell them that God bids us do good for evil:
And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stol’n forth of holy writ,
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.
(Richard, Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
But then I sigh, and, quoting from the Bible,
Say God bids us return good deeds for evil:
And so I hide my truly wicked nature
By quoting random phrases from the Bible;
It makes me look a saint, but I’m the devil.
Scripture, sighs and forgiveness are the surface; underneath is a man who has arranged his brother’s death that week. The line is a boast, and the boast is addressed to us. Richard’s power depends on the gap between what people see and what is true, and the audience is the only party in the theatre allowed on both sides of it.
What is unusual is how little the disguise costs him. He does not change his face or his voice; he changes the story, and the people listening supply the rest. The play’s treatment of manipulation and deceit explains the mechanics. This theme is about something simpler and stranger: a court in which everyone knows what Richard is, and everyone treats what he seems as if it were what he is.
A Marvellous Proper Man
The wooing of Lady Anne ends with a piece of comedy about mirrors. Richard has won a woman who has every reason to hate him, and he draws the obvious conclusion: he must be better-looking than he thought.
Original
I’ll be at charges for a looking-glass,
And entertain a score or two of tailors
To study fashions to adorn my body:
Since I am crept in favour with myself...
(Richard, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I’ll have to go and buy myself a mirror,
And hire twenty or forty personal tailors
To choose the latest fashions I can wear:
Since I’ve begun to like myself again...
The joke is at his own expense and it is also precise. Richard has just proved that appearance is something you can talk people into; now he proposes to buy the appearance itself, with tailors and a glass. The speech ends with him calling on the sun to shine so that he can see his shadow – the same shadow he described, in the first scene, as the only thing he had to look at in peacetime.
The mirror runs through the play. Richard descants on his own deformity; Anne calls him a lump of foul deformity; Margaret calls him a rooting hog; and Richard, at Bosworth, wakes to find that the one reflection he cannot manage is his own. Appearance in this play is not only what others see. It is what a man can bear to see of himself, and the theme of conscience and guilt is where that question is finally put.
By His Face Straight Shall You Know His Heart
Hastings is the play’s test case for reading appearances, and he fails it in the most public way possible. At the council in A3S4, Richard has just gone out in an excellent mood, having asked the Bishop of Ely for strawberries, and Hastings tells the table what he has seen.
Original
His Grace looks cheerfully and smooth this morning;
There’s some conceit or other likes him well,
When that he bids good morrow with such spirit.
I think there’s never a man in Christendom
Can lesser hide his love or hate than he,
For by his face straight shall you know his heart.
(Hastings, Act 3, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
His Grace was looking cheerful this morning;
He has some plans or projects that he’s pleased with
When he declares ‘good morning’ with such passion.
I don’t think there is any man alive
Who shows his feelings any more than him,
For you can know his heart by looking at him.
No man in Christendom hides his feelings less than Richard; his face is his heart. Within forty lines Richard is back, showing the same council a withered arm and calling Hastings a traitor, and Hastings is on his way to the block. The speech is the most confident statement in the play of the belief that surfaces are honest, and it is spoken by the man about to die of it.
What makes it painful is that Hastings had every warning. Stanley’s dream, the stumbling horse, the priest, the pursuivant: the signs were there, and Hastings preferred the face. The play does not treat him as a fool. It treats him as the ordinary case, the man who reads people the way people are usually read, in a world where one man has stopped playing by that rule. The theme of fate vs free will asks whether Hastings could have chosen differently. He could. He looked at Richard’s smile instead.
Two Props of Virtue for a Christian Prince
A3S7 is the theme staged as a public event. Buckingham has told Richard to get a prayer book in his hand and stand between two churchmen, and to be hard to persuade; the Lord Mayor and citizens arrive; Richard appears above; and Buckingham narrates what everyone is supposed to see.
Original
Two props of virtue for a Christian prince,
To stay him from the fall of vanity;
And see, a book of prayer in his hand...
(Buckingham, Act 3, Scene 7)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Two props of goodness for a Christian prince,
To stop his downfall into vanity;
And look, he has a prayerbook in his hand…
The bishops are props in both senses – supports for a Christian prince and pieces of stage furniture – and Buckingham says the word aloud, to the Mayor, who does not hear the joke. What follows is a courtship in which the bride has arranged her own proposal: Richard refuses the crown, refuses again, and accepts it under protest, and the Mayor goes back to London having seen a holy man forced to be king.
The scene works because the audience has watched the rehearsal. We know the prayer book is a prop, and so does everyone on stage except the people the show is for. It is the high point of Richard’s career and of the theme, and it is also the last time the trick works: from the coronation onwards, the play’s treatment of power and ambition is about a man who has run out of appearances to hide behind.
"It is, however, a subtle economy of art in the poet that he does not permit his hero to give open and complete expression to all his secret motives."
— Sigmund Freud, Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work, 1916
Key Quotes on Appearance vs Reality
Quote 1
Ah! That deceit should steal such gentle shape,
And with a virtuous visor hide deep vice!
(Duchess of York, Act 2, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
It’s awful that a liar may seem kind,
Disguising evil with an honest face!
Quote Analysis: The Duchess of York, having just heard her grandson repeat that his uncle Richard wept, kissed him and promised to be a father to him. She knows better, and says so: deceit has stolen a gentle shape, and a virtuous visor hides deep vice. A visor is a mask, and the Duchess is the first person in the play to name Richard’s face as one. She is also his mother, which gives the line its weight. The person who has looked at Richard longest is the one who sees him clearest.
Sweet Prince, the untainted virtue of your years
Hath not yet dived into the world’s deceit;
Nor more can you distinguish of a man
Than of his outward show, which, God he knows,
Seldom or never jumpeth with the heart.
(Richard, Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Because you’re young, you lack experience
And haven’t been exposed to folk who cheat you;
The only way that you can judge a man
Is by the way that man behaves, which God knows
Is almost never how he really is.
Quote Analysis: Richard to the young Prince of Wales, who wants to know why his uncles have been arrested. Richard’s answer is a lesson in the theme: the boy is too young to tell a man’s outward show from his heart, and the two seldom or never agree. Every word is true and the speaker is the proof. The Prince’s reply is a prayer to be kept from false friends, and the audience, which knows who is standing next to him, is left to enjoy the irony and to wish it could not.
Here is the indictment of the good Lord Hastings,
Which in a set hand fairly is engrossed
That it may be today read o’er in Paul’s.
And mark how well the sequel hangs together...
(Scrivener, Act 3, Scene 6)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Here is the note accusing good Lord Hastings,
Which has been written down intelligibly,
To read today outside St Paul’s Cathedral.
And notice how this hangs together well...
Quote Analysis: The Scrivener, alone on stage with a document. He has spent eleven hours copying out the indictment of Hastings for treason, which was given to him before Hastings was accused, and he has done the arithmetic. The speech that follows asks who is so gross as not to see the device, and who is so bold as to say so. He is the play’s plainest witness that the appearances deceive no one who thinks, and that no one who thinks will speak. The scene is fourteen lines long and it is the theme in miniature.
Hid’st thou that forehead with a golden crown
Where should be branded, if that right were right,
The slaughter of the prince that owed that crown,
And the dire death of my poor sons and brothers?
(Queen Elizabeth, Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Do you disguise your forehead with a crown
Which should be marked, Were justice to be served,
The murder of the prince that owned that crown,
And with the death of my poor sons and brothers?
Quote Analysis: Queen Elizabeth to the crowned Richard, in the road, with the Duchess beside her. The golden crown is an appearance covering a forehead that should be branded with the murders it cost, and Elizabeth says so to the King’s face. By Act 4 the theme has reversed: the disguise is still on, but nobody is fooled by it, and the women say aloud what the court has known for three acts. Richard’s answer is to call for trumpets and drums to drown them out, which is what a man does when the show has stopped working.
Key Takeaways
- Richard Names the Trick: He tells the audience he will seem a saint when most he plays the devil, and we watch every performance from backstage.
- The Court Chooses the Surface: Hastings says Richard’s face is his heart. The Duchess says the face is a visor. The court believes Hastings until he is dead.
- Props and Stage Management: Strawberries, a withered arm, a prayer book and two bishops. Appearance in this play is built out of objects as much as words.
- The Mask Stops Working: Elizabeth names the crown a disguise; the Scrivener sees the device; the citizens fall silent. By Act 5 the only person Richard can still fool is himself, and only until dawn.
Study Questions and Analysis
How does Richard control what other people see?
By deciding, for each audience, what the surface will be, and by never letting the surface and the truth appear in the same room. To Clarence he is the loyal brother; to the court he is the blunt soldier who cannot flatter; to the Prince he is the kind uncle; to the Mayor he is the reluctant saint. The performances are matched to the audience, and the audience always supplies the belief. The plainest statement of the method is his speech to the Queen’s relatives in A1S3:
Because I cannot flatter and look fair,
Smile in men’s faces, smooth, deceive, and cog,
Duck with French nods and apish courtesy,
I must be held a rancorous enemy.
(Richard, Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Because I’m neither fawning nor attractive;
Don’t smile; not suave, deceitful nor conniving;
Can’t bow like Frenchmen with a faux politeness;
I’m seen as a contentious enemy.
Every clause is false, and the persona is one of the most durable in politics: the honest man too plain for a court of flatterers. It works because it turns every accusation into evidence. If Richard is attacked, that is what happens to honest men. William Hazlitt, in Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817), called him "a princely hypocrite" among other things, and the phrase is exact: the hypocrisy is princely because it is performed with complete command. Wolfgang Clemen’s A Commentary on Shakespeare’s Richard III (1968) shows how each early scene is built to display one such performance, so that by Act 3 the audience has the whole repertoire and can watch the great set pieces knowing every move.
Why does the audience see through Richard when the characters cannot?
Because he tells us, and tells no one else. From the opening soliloquy onwards Richard announces each performance before he gives it, so that the audience is always behind the mask while the court is in front of it. The technique has a history, and Richard names it himself:
Thus, like the formal Vice, Iniquity,
I moralise two meanings in one word.
(Richard, Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Like in old plays, Iniquity was evil,
And like him, I twist meanings of a word.
The Vice of the morality plays was a comic devil who confided in the audience, winked at them as he worked, and made them laugh at what he was doing to the hero. Bernard Spivack’s Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (1958) traced Richard’s asides and confidences to that tradition, and Robert Weimann’s Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater (1978) placed the Vice physically at the front of the stage, close to the crowd, where Richard’s soliloquies put him.
The effect is that the theme has two audiences. The characters see appearances; we see the reality behind them; and the play makes our knowledge a pleasure. Phyllis Rackin’s "Engendering the Tragic Audience" (1993) argues that the pleasure is then withdrawn: as the victims’ curses come true and the women say aloud what we have known all along, the spectator is moved from Richard’s side to theirs. The gap between appearance and reality closes in Act 4, and it closes for us as well as for the court.
What is the significance of Hastings's misreading of Richard?
It is the play’s demonstration that reading faces is a fatal habit in a world with one liar in it. Hastings tells the council that Richard’s face is his heart; Richard returns and shows the council his arm:
Look how I am bewitched; behold, mine arm
Is like a blasted sapling, withered up;
And this is Edward’s wife, that monstrous witch,
Consorted with that harlot, strumpet Shore,
That by their witchcraft thus have marked me.
(Richard, Act 3, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
See how I’m cursed, and how this arm of mine
Is withered like a blighted, sickly sapling
And this was caused by Edward’s wife, the witch,
Who partnered with that hooker Mistress Shore.
And thus I’m twisted by the spells they cast.
The arm was withered at birth and every man at the table knows it. Richard is not asking them to believe the witchcraft; he is announcing that from this moment the appearance is whatever he says it is, and Hastings, who begins his answer with "if", is a traitor before the sentence ends. The withered arm is the theme turned inside out: a real deformity offered as false evidence, and accepted because refusing it is death.
Marjorie Garber’s "Descanting on Deformity" (1987) reads Richard’s body as the play’s central figure for the relation between appearance and history: the crooked shape that Tudor writers gave him after the fact becomes, in the play, a shape he uses. Katherine Schaap Williams’s "Enabling Richard" (2009) makes the point sharper: Richard takes the story others tell about his body and turns it into a weapon, here literally, by holding the arm up as proof of someone else’s crime. Hastings dies because he trusted a surface, and the surface he trusted was a smile from a man whose whole body was already a lie in other people’s mouths.
How does the play use props and staging to explore the theme?
More than any other Shakespeare play of its date, and the props are worth listing. The strawberries in A3S4 send the Bishop of Ely out of the room and make Richard look domestic minutes before he calls for a head. The withered arm is a prop that happens to be attached to the actor. The prayer book and the two bishops at Baynard’s Castle dress Richard as a saint. And before the Mayor even arrives, Buckingham rehearses the faces he will wear:
Come, cousin, canst thou quake and change thy colour,
Murder thy breath in middle of a word,
And then again begin, and stop again,
As if thou were distraught and mad with terror?
(Richard, Act 3, Scene 5)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Come, cousin, can’t you shake with fear, turn ashen,
And cease from speaking halfway through a word,
And then begin again, then stop again,
As though you were distraught and mad from fear?
Buckingham’s answer is that he can counterfeit the deep tragedian – tremble, start at a straw, look ghastly – and the two of them then perform their terror for the Lord Mayor over Hastings’ severed head. The scene is the play’s most explicit reminder that appearance is a craft with a repertoire, and that the repertoire was learned in the theatre.
A. P. Rossiter’s "Angel with Horns" (1961) is the classic account of these scenes as comedy and history at once, with the audience required to laugh at a performance while watching a country being stolen by it. William Hazlitt (1817) said the play "belongs to the theatre, rather than to the closet", and the props are why: they do not read as well as they play. The theme of language and rhetoric covers what Richard says; this theme is as much about what he holds, wears and stands between.
What does the Scrivener's scene contribute?
A witness who is not a nobleman and not a fool. The Scrivener appears once, alone, with the indictment of Hastings in his hand, and works out aloud that the paper was ordered before the crime it describes. Then he asks the question the whole play has been avoiding:
Here’s a good world the while! Who is so gross
That cannot see this palpable device?
Yet who’s so bold but says he sees it not?
(Scrivener, Act 3, Scene 6)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Oh, what a world we live in! Who’s so stupid
That they can’t see this obvious deception?
But who can see this, yet denies he sees it?
Who is so gross as not to see the device? Who is so bold as to say so? Both questions have the same answer: nobody, and nobody. The Scrivener is not deceived for a moment, and he will not speak, and he tells us why in a couplet – the world is bad when such dealing must be seen "in thought" and nowhere else.
Robert Weimann (1978) places him with the citizens of A2S3 in the tradition of the plain speaker at the front of the stage, and Phyllis Rackin’s Stages of History (1990) reads such figures as the play’s record of what the official version leaves out. For the theme he does one essential thing: he proves that the appearances do not deceive anyone who thinks. Richard’s power does not rest on being believed. It rests on everyone who sees through him deciding, like the Scrivener, that seeing is enough.
How do the women expose the gap between appearance and reality?
By saying it aloud when no one else will. The men of the play read Richard’s face and are wrong; the women read his history and are right, from the first scene they share with him. Lady Anne calls him a devil and a lump of foul deformity over Henry’s corpse; Queen Margaret calls him a bottled spider and a bunch-backed toad in A1S3; the Duchess names his face a visor in A2S2; and in A4S4 Queen Elizabeth tells the crowned King what his crown is hiding. Margaret’s catalogue of what Elizabeth has lost is a list of appearances stripped away one by one:
Decline all this, and see what now thou art:
For happy wife, a most distressed widow...
(Queen Margaret, Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
You’ve none of this, and see what you’ve become:
From happy wife to melancholic widow...
"For happy wife, a most distressed widow": the pattern continues for seven lines, each pairing a former show with the present fact. Margaret is describing Elizabeth, but the method is the play’s. Every appearance in it is eventually set beside its reality, and the women are the ones who do the setting.
Madonne M. Miner’s essay in The Woman’s Part (1980) argues that the play defines its women by the men they belong to and then strips those men away, so that the women end up seeing the world without the appearances that protected them. Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin’s Engendering a Nation (1997) read their laments and curses as the play’s counter-history, a record of the bodies that Richard’s version of events leaves out. Either way, the women are the theme’s truth-tellers. They see through Richard from the start, and the play’s tragedy is that seeing is all they are allowed.
Does Richard ever see himself clearly?
Once, and briefly. In A1S2 he jokes that he must be a "marv’lous proper man" since Lady Anne has accepted him, and resolves to buy a mirror; the joke depends on his knowing exactly what he looks like. In A5S3 the joke stops. He wakes from the ghosts and looks at himself without a glass:
What do I fear? Myself? There’s none else by.
Richard loves Richard, that is, I am I.
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am.
(King Richard, Act 5, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
What am I scared of? Me? There’s no one else here.
Richard loves Richard, that is, I’m just me.
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am.
"Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am." It is the only moment in the play when Richard’s appearance and his reality are held in the same sentence by the same man, and the sentence breaks in the middle. He goes on to find that he hates himself for his hateful deeds, that he is a villain, that he lies. Then dawn comes, and he decides that conscience is a word for cowards.
Sigmund Freud, in 1916, admired the play for never letting Richard "give open and complete expression to all his secret motives" – the audience is kept doing the work, and identifies with him because of it. On the last night the work is done for us: Richard says what he is, and cannot bear it. Nicholas Brooke’s Shakespeare’s Early Tragedies (1968) reads the speech as the play’s entry into tragedy, the moment the performer runs out of audience and has to face the one spectator he cannot fool. The theme of conscience and guilt takes the story from there. What this theme records is that Richard saw himself, for a few lines, and looked away.
