Conscience and Guilt
Theme Profile – At a Glance
- Focus: What conscience is in this play, who has one, and what it costs. Almost everyone who does wrong in Richard III is made to feel it eventually. Richard is made to feel it last, for one night, and decides not to.
- Key Characters: Richard III, George, Duke of Clarence, King Edward IV, The Duke of Buckingham, Lady Anne, the Two Murderers, Tyrrel.
- The Core Tension: Conscience in the play always arrives after the deed and too late to stop it. The question is whether that makes it useless, or whether the play’s whole moral weight rests on the fact that it arrives at all.
- Key Manifestations: The murderers’ debate before they kill Clarence (A1S4); Clarence’s dream and prayer (A1S4); Edward’s guilt over his brother (A2S1); the Scrivener who sees and says nothing (A3S6); Anne’s sleepless bed (A4S1); Tyrrel’s report of the weeping murderers (A4S3); Buckingham on All Souls’ Day (A5S1); the ghosts and Richard’s soliloquy (A5S3).
- Famous Quote:
"O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!"
(Act 5, Scene 3) - The Outcome: Every guilty person except Richard repents before dying. Richard has his one night of conscience, calls it cowardice by morning, and dies unrepentant. The play lets us decide whether that is strength or the last and worst of his defeats.
Where’s Thy Conscience Now?
The play’s first discussion of conscience is between two hired killers, in prose, outside the room where Clarence is sleeping. The Second Murderer has been stopped by a single word in the warrant, and the First wants to know what is wrong with him.
Original
Not to kill him, having a warrant, but to be damned for killing him, from the which no warrant can defend me.
(Second Murderer, Act 1, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Not to kill him, because we have a warrant, but to be damned for killing him, for which no warrant can defend me.
It is a precise distinction and a comic one. The warrant covers the killing; nothing covers the damnation. The Second Murderer then delivers a thirty-line description of conscience as a nuisance that stops a man stealing, swearing and sleeping with his neighbour’s wife, and resolves to turn it out of doors. The First asks where it is now, and is told: in the Duke of Gloucester’s purse.
Shakespeare gives the play’s central moral term to its lowest characters first, and lets them treat it as a joke. But the joke is serious. The Second Murderer does hesitate, and does refuse his fee, and does wish he had saved the Duke; and Richard, in Act 5, will use the murderer’s own argument – that conscience makes cowards – word for word. The play’s treatment of manipulation and deceit runs on Richard’s wit; its treatment of conscience begins with two men who have none, and finds it in one of them anyway.
Who Sued to Me for Him?
The first conscience that costs anything belongs to a king. King Edward has just been told that Clarence is dead by his order – an order he reversed too late – and has just granted a pardon to Stanley’s servant for killing a man in a brawl. The two facts meet, and Edward turns on his court.
Original
But for my brother not a man would speak,
Nor I (ungracious) speak unto myself
For him, poor soul. The proudest of you all
Have been beholding to him in his life;
Yet none of you would once beg for his life.
(King Edward, Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
But for my brother, nobody would speak up,
Nor did I, to my shame, convince myself
On his behalf, poor soul. The proudest of you
All owed him something whilst he was alive,
Yet none of you would plead to save his life.
The speech is a catalogue of everything Clarence did for him, and a demand to know why nobody reminded him; but it is also an admission. "Nor I (ungracious) speak unto myself" is Edward taking his share, and his last words are a fear that God’s justice will fall on his house for this. He is carried out to die within the scene.
What the play does with Edward’s guilt is instructive. It is real, it is spoken, and it changes nothing: Clarence is dead and Richard, who arranged it, stands in the room offering condolences. Conscience in this play is never preventive. It is the price paid afterwards, and the play is careful to show that the innocent-seeming pay it too. The theme of fate vs free will is often read as providence punishing the guilty; Edward’s speech shows the punishment arriving as self-knowledge, before the illness does.
Wept Like Two Children
The murder of the princes is not shown. It is reported by Tyrrel, the man who arranged it, in a speech that gives the play’s most terrible act its most tender language, and the tenderness is placed in the mouths of the killers.
Original
Dighton and Forrest, who I did suborn
To do this piece of ruthless butchery,
Albeit they were fleshed villains, bloody dogs,
Melted with tenderness and kind compassion,
Wept like two children in their deaths’ sad story.
(Tyrrel, Act 4, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Dighton and Forrest, whom I had persuaded
To do this ruthless act of butchery,
Although they’re bloody ruthless murderers,
They melted out of tenderness and pity,
And wept like children at this tragedy.
Two "fleshed villains, bloody dogs" smothering two boys, and weeping as they do it: the report is designed so that no one in the theatre can hear it without the men who did it feeling more than the man who ordered it. Tyrrel adds that both went away "with conscience and remorse" and could not speak, and then the King enters and asks whether he is happy.
The scene completes a pattern begun in the Tower with Clarence. Every murder in the play is done by someone who feels it, on behalf of someone who does not. Richard’s power depends on other men’s hands, and the hands keep flinching. It is the play’s quiet answer to the question of whether conscience matters when it changes nothing: it matters because it is the one thing in the play Richard cannot delegate, and cannot buy.
A Thousand Several Tongues
On the night before Bosworth the ghosts come, and Richard wakes calling for a horse and for mercy. What follows is the only time in the play that conscience speaks in his voice.
Original
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.
Perjury, perjury, in the highest degree;
Murder, stern murder, in the direst degree...
(King Richard, Act 5, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I hear my conscience speak a thousand voices,
And every voice recounts a different story,
But every story damns me as a villain.
I have been lying under oath; it’s perjury!
I have committed grim, atrocious murder...
The image is a courtroom: a thousand tongues, each with a tale, every tale a conviction, and the charges read out in order – perjury, murder, and then all the rest thronging to the bar to cry "Guilty!" It is the same courtroom Clarence saw in his dream, and it is Richard’s turn in the dock.
And then he leaves it. Ratcliffe arrives, dawn comes, and within a hundred lines Richard has told his army that conscience is a word cowards use to keep the strong in awe. The night’s verdict is set aside by daylight, and the play does not pretend otherwise. What it does insist on is that the verdict was delivered. Richard heard the thousand tongues; he knew what they said; he chose the battle instead. The theme of power and ambition ends in a fight, and the theme of conscience ends here, in a man who felt guilt for one night and decided it was beneath him.
"Conscience avaunt, Richard’s himself again"
— Colley Cibber, The Tragical History of King Richard III, 1700
Key Quotes on Conscience and Guilt
Quote 1
The urging of that word "judgement" hath bred a kind of remorse in me.
(Second Murderer, Act 1, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Your use of the word ‘judgement’ has brought on a kind of remorsefulness in me.
Quote Analysis: The Second Murderer, on his way in to kill Clarence. He has been fine until the First Murderer mentioned the day of judgement, and the word has done something to him. What follows is the play’s first debate about conscience, and it is conducted in prose by a man who has been paid. Shakespeare could have given the theme to a bishop. He gave it to a hired killer, and made him honest about the difficulty, which is more than any nobleman in the play manages before Act 5.
How fain, like Pilate, would I wash my hands
Of this most grievous murder!
(Second Murderer, Act 1, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I’d like to wash my hands, like Pontius Pilate,
To wash away this awful murder!
Quote Analysis: The Second Murderer after the stabbing, having warned Clarence to look behind him and then done nothing to stop the blow. Pilate washed his hands and remained guilty, and the murderer knows it: the wish to be clean is not the same as being clean. He refuses his fee and tells the First Murderer to report that he repents. It is the first act of conscience in the play that costs anyone money, and it is performed by the man with the least to spare.
O God! I fear thy justice will take hold
On me and you, and mine and yours, for this.
(King Edward, Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Oh God! I fear you will inflict your justice
On me and you, and all our loved ones, for this.
Quote Analysis: King Edward’s last words in the play. He has just understood that he ordered his brother’s death and that no one at court stopped him, and he expects God’s justice to fall on everyone in the room. "Me and you, and mine and yours" is the whole cast list of Acts 2 to 5: Edward’s sons, Queen Elizabeth’s brothers, Hastings, Buckingham. The dying King is the first character to see the shape of the coming punishment, and unlike Margaret he includes himself in it.
By the apostle Paul, shadows tonight
Have struck more terror to the soul of Richard
Than can the substance of ten thousand soldiers
Armed in proof and led by shallow Richmond.
(King Richard, Act 5, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
The ghosts I’ve seen tonight – I swear by Saint Paul –
Have struck more terror in the heart of me
Than can an army of ten thousand soldiers
All dressed in armour, led by shallow Richmond.
Quote Analysis: Richard to Ratcliffe, in the grey light after the dream. The ghosts have frightened him more than ten thousand soldiers could, and he says so, to a subordinate, which is the most naked admission of fear in the play. The image is exact: shadows have more substance than armour. Within a few lines he is calling for a bowl of wine and telling Ratcliffe to eavesdrop on the tents. Conscience has reached him; he has felt it; and he is already working out how to be rid of it before the sun comes up.
Key Takeaways
- Conscience Comes After the Deed: The murderers, Edward, Anne and Buckingham all feel guilt once it is too late to act on it. The play never lets conscience prevent anything.
- The Hands Flinch; the Head Does Not: Every killing is done by men who feel it, for a man who feels nothing. Richard cannot delegate conscience and cannot buy it.
- Everyone Repents but Richard: Clarence prays, Edward confesses, Buckingham recognises, Anne admits. Richard has one night of it and calls it cowardice by dawn.
- The Verdict Is Still Delivered: Richard sets the ghosts aside and fights. But a thousand tongues have condemned him, and the play makes sure we heard them.
Study Questions and Analysis
Does Richard have a conscience?
He has one and refuses it, and the play stages the refusal in two movements. In the first, after the ghosts, Richard wakes and interrogates himself: is there a murderer here, does he love or hate himself, is he a villain or not. The soliloquy ends in despair:
I shall despair; there is no creature loves me,
And if I die no soul will pity me.
And wherefore should they, since that I myself
Find in myself no pity to myself?
(King Richard, Act 5, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Now I despair, for there’s no one that loves me,
And if I die, no one will pity me.
Why should they pity me, when even I
Cannot find any reason for self-pity?
In the second, at dawn, he addresses his army, and conscience has become a word that cowards use. Nothing has been resolved between the two speeches. Richard has decided not to have the crisis, and the decision is itself the play’s answer: he has a conscience in the sense that it can wake him, and no conscience in the sense that he will not let it change what he does.
Wolfgang Clemen’s A Commentary on Shakespeare’s Richard III (1968) treats the dream soliloquy as the place where the play’s rhetorical machinery breaks into real speech, with its broken half-lines and unanswered questions. Harold C. Goddard’s The Meaning of Shakespeare (1951) argued that the whole play builds towards it: the conscience Richard denies has been kept for him all along by other people – by Margaret’s curses, by the murderers’ hesitation, by Clarence’s dream – and on the last night it is handed back. Stephen Greenblatt’s Tyrant (2018) reads the recovery as characteristic of the type: a man who has never doubted his entitlement cannot sustain doubt for more than a night. The useful position for an essay is that Richard has a conscience and no repentance, and that the play treats the difference as the whole of his tragedy.
Why do the murderers argue about conscience before killing Clarence?
Because the scene needs the audience to feel the killing as a choice, and because Shakespeare wanted the word in play long before Richard has to face it. The Second Murderer’s speech is the play’s fullest definition of conscience, and it is a comic one:
I’ll not meddle with it, it makes a man a coward. A man cannot steal, but it accuseth him; a man cannot swear, but it checks him; a man cannot lie with his neighbour’s wife, but it detects him.
(Second Murderer, Act 1, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I’ll ignore it, for one’s conscience makes you cowardly. A man can’t steal without a guilty conscience; a man can’t swear without his conscience intervening; a man can’t sleep with his neighbour’s wife without it revealing his guilt.
Conscience, he goes on, is a blushing, shame-faced spirit that mutinies in a man’s bosom. The description is exact and the speaker means it as a complaint. Conscience gets in the way. It stops a man stealing and swearing; it made him once restore a purse he had found; every man who means to live well tries to do without it. The First Murderer tells him to think of the reward, and he recovers.
Robert Weimann’s Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater (1978) places the murderers in the line of the clowns and Vices of the popular stage, who stood at the front and told the audience in prose what the verse-speaking nobles would not. Nicholas Brooke’s Shakespeare’s Early Tragedies (1968) notices that the debate is the first of the play’s many delays before a death, and that the delay is where the moral weight sits: we are made to wait and listen to the arguments against the murder before it happens. The Second Murderer refuses his fee afterwards. He is the first person in the play whose conscience costs him something, and he is the least important person in it.
What does Clarence's dream reveal about guilt?
That the guilty know. Clarence believes himself innocent of the crime he is imprisoned for, and he is; but his dream takes him past the drowning to the underworld, where the two men he really wronged are waiting:
The first that there did greet my stranger soul
Was my great father-in-law, renowned Warwick,
Who spake aloud, "What scourge for perjury
Can this dark monarchy afford false Clarence?"
(Clarence, Act 1, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
The first man there to greet this stranger was
My father-in-law, the great Earl of Warwick,
Who spoke aloud, ‘What punishment for lying
Can this vile king devise for cheating Clarence?’
Warwick, whom he deserted after swearing to him, and Prince Edward, whom he helped to stab at Tewkesbury. The dreaming mind has kept an accurate account. When he wakes, Clarence does not dispute it. He tells the keeper he has "done these things" and prays that God will punish him alone and spare his wife and children.
It is the first full act of repentance in the play, and it is spoken by a man about to be murdered for something else. The murderers, when they come, throw his real crimes at him, and his defence is not that he is innocent but that he did it for his brother, who is as guilty. E. M. W. Tillyard’s Shakespeare’s History Plays (1944) read every death in the play as the payment of a debt from the earlier plays, and Clarence’s perjury is paid in full. Harold C. Goddard (1951) took the harder view that a man murdered without trial for a crime the King shared is not justice restored. Either way, the dream establishes the play’s rule: conscience arrives in sleep, at night, and too late. The theme of prophecy and curses makes the pattern public; Clarence’s dream is its private form.
How does Buckingham's guilt differ from Richard's?
Buckingham recognises his; Richard refuses. Buckingham has no scene of remorse over the princes, whose murder he declined to arrange, and no visible guilt over Hastings, Rivers or Grey, whose deaths he helped to bring about. What he feels, on the way to the block, is the guilt of a broken oath:
This is the day which, in King Edward’s time,
I wished might fall on me when I was found
False to his children and his wive’s allies;
This is the day wherein I wished to fall
By the false faith of him whom most I trusted...
(Buckingham, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Today’s the day, when Edward was alive,
I wished would fall on me if I was found
To cheat his children or friends of his wife;
Today’s the day I wished would happen to me
If he whom I had trusted most deceived me...
He remembers swearing at Edward’s bedside that if he ever turned against the Queen’s family, God should punish him with betrayal by the friend he trusted most; he sees that it has happened; and he accepts it as just. "Wrong hath but wrong, and blame the due of blame" is his last line, and it is a man agreeing with his sentence.
Wolfgang Clemen (1968) counts Buckingham’s speech as the last of the play’s recognition scenes, in which each victim is given a moment to see the pattern before dying, and notes that Richard is the only major character who is given the moment and rejects it. The difference is the difference between guilt as knowledge and guilt as feeling. Buckingham knows and consents; Richard feels for a night and overrules. The play gives Buckingham the more dignified death for exactly that reason.
Why is the murder of the princes reported rather than shown?
Because a report can carry conscience in a way that a staged killing cannot. If the audience watched two boys smothered, the scene would be about horror. Told by Tyrrel, it becomes a scene about the men who did it and what it did to them:
Hence both are gone with conscience and remorse
They could not speak; and so I left them both,
To bear this tidings to the bloody King.
(Tyrrel, Act 4, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Then both men left, confounded with remorse
So much they couldn’t speak; and then I left them
To share the news with this bloodthirsty King.
The murderers cannot speak. The man who hired them can, and does, and then greets "the bloody King" with a cheerful "All health". The report is placed so that the play’s most terrible deed is described by the person least affected by it, in the language of the people most affected, and Richard’s first question is whether Tyrrel saw the bodies.
Peter Saccio’s Shakespeare’s English Kings (1977) notes that the account comes from Thomas More, whose history supplied Dighton and Forrest by name and the detail of their weeping, and that Shakespeare kept it almost exactly. Phyllis Rackin’s Stages of History (1990) observes that the play consistently gives the moral cost of Richard’s crimes to the people who carry them out or mourn them, never to Richard himself, so that conscience is distributed across the cast and withheld from its centre. Tyrrel’s report is the clearest example. The theme of appearance vs reality turns on Richard’s performances; the theme of conscience turns on the faces of the men he never sees.
What does Anne's sleeplessness tell us about guilt?
That Richard’s conscience was awake long before he was. In A4S1 Lady Anne, on the way to be crowned, tells the other women what marriage to Richard has been:
For never yet one hour in his bed
Did I enjoy the golden dew of sleep,
But with his timorous dreams was still awaked.
(Lady Anne, Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
For in his bed, I haven’t had an hour
Where I’ve enjoyed recuperating sleep;
Instead, I lie awake, hearing his nightmares.
"His timorous dreams": Richard has been having nightmares since the wedding, and his wife has been lying beside them. The information is offered almost in passing, and it is the only evidence before Act 5 that Richard has an interior at all. Anne is also confessing her own guilt in the same speech – she has become the subject of her own curse – and the two guilts share a bed.
Madonne M. Miner’s essay in The Woman’s Part (1980) reads the women of the play as the keepers of its moral record, and Anne’s speech is a small instance: she knows what Richard is afraid of before he admits it, and her knowledge does her no good at all. Her ghost, when it comes, makes the same point in the second person – she never slept a quiet hour with him, and now she fills his sleep with perturbations. Richard’s conscience is not something that appears in Act 5. It is something the play has been reporting from the side of the bed since Act 4, and he is the last to hear it.
Is the play's treatment of conscience Christian or theatrical?
Both, and the two are hard to separate. The Christian frame is everywhere: Margaret prays to a "true-disposing God"; Clarence appeals to the King of kings and the commandment against murder; Edward fears God’s justice; Richmond calls his army God’s ministers of chastisement; and the ghosts speak like a judgement. The theatrical frame is Richard, who plays the Vice of the old morality plays and tells us so, and whose one night of conscience is written as a duel between two actors sharing a part:
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.
Bernard Spivack’s Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (1958) traced Richard to the morality tradition, in which the Vice is carried off to hell at the end and the audience is meant to feel the justice of it; on that reading the play’s conscience is inherited furniture. E. M. W. Tillyard (1944) made it doctrine: the play displays God’s plan, and conscience is how the plan is felt from inside. Jan Kott, in Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964), stripped the theology out and left a machine in which each king falls in turn, with the ghosts as stage devices for showing which way the wheel is turning.
The play accommodates all three readings because it keeps its own counsel. It shows conscience working in murderers, kings, a duchess and a duke, and failing to work in the one man who needed it most; it lets the Christian language stand and never confirms it. What is not in doubt is the effect. By the time Richmond announces that the bloody dog is dead, the audience has heard eleven ghosts, one confession too many, and a thousand tongues. The verdict was theatrical. It was also, the play lets us feel, correct.
