The Deformed Hero

       Society has always placed a high premium on physical beauty.  The plight of the ‘ugly’, ‘deformed’ and ‘unusual’ therefore has a poignancy which as fascinated writers and audiences alike.  It is not the objective ugliness which has concerned them, however, so much as the individual’s agonizing awareness of his own deformity.
     What elevates the misfortunes of the few to a universal symbol is the all-too-common equation of ‘ugly’ with ‘unlovable’.  The hero who feels himself to be hideous strikes a chord in people who never have to suffer as manifest a symbol of their isolation as a hunch back, a scarred face or a ridiculously large nose.
     The idea that deformity places the victim beyond the reach of human affection is often strongest in the victim himself.  It makes for powerful metaphor.  There are few more striking images of alienation than the transformation of Gregor Samsa into a hideous insect in Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis; few more vivid expressions of Man’s rage at his own imperfections than the brutal murder of Baron Frankenstein by his own misbegotten Monster.
     Many of the most resonant uses of the ugly/unlovable theme relate specifically to the love of women—both its absence and its redeeming power.  Shakespeare’s Richard III shares with Rostand’s Cyrano (and the real life ‘elephant man’, John Merrick) the truly disabling sense of rejection from birth, with even his mother being repulsed by his ugliness.  Meanwhile, the old tales of Beauty and the Beast and the Frog Prince are clear testaments to the power of one woman’s love to lift the ‘curse’ of ugliness. But in Cyrano’s unrequited (or seemingly unrequited) passion for Roxane, which parallels that of another ‘deformed hero’ of French literature—the Hunchback of Notre Dame—yet another manifestation of the power of love is apparent.  This time it is the love given, not the love received, which offers redemption.  The ugliness is not ‘cured’ but endured, and that with a nobility and courageous self-sacrifice which makes the outward imperfection essentially an irrelevance when compared with the ‘elegance within’.

Evidence for Richard III’s Deformity  By Clifford Williams      

  A few people who saw Richard in his lifetime, or knew others who had seen him, and who wrote their impressions, offer some evidence concerning his physical appearance.  John Rous, a contemporary Warwickshire antiquarian, described him as short of stature, his right shoulder higher than his left.  The Italian Polydore Vergil agreed about the stature but thought the left shoulder was the higher.  Archibald Whitelaw, Scottish Ambassador in 1384, also mentioned shortness but added that the King was great in mind.  Dr. Ralph Shaw, a notorious supporter, preached a sermon in which he sought to substantiate Richard’s lawful claim to the crown by reason of his resemblance in height and countenance to his father, Richard, Duke of York.  Richard’s brother, King Edward, was tall and burly!  Clearly a bastard, and his children equally illegitimate!
      An undoubted eyewitness, Nicholas von Popplelau, guest of the King of Middleham Castle, Yorkshire, in 1384, stressed that Richard was delicately boned and “three fingers” taller than himself, but we do not know von Poppleham’s height.  John Rous also claimed that Richard spend two years in his mother’ womb and was born with teeth—and hair down to his shoulders.  In the records for the City of York in 1491, a citizen said that he was “crouch-backed.”
      Sir Thomas More’s History of Richard III (the account ended with the unsuccessful Buckingham rebellion of 1843) presented a Richard hard-favored of image, ill-featured of limb, and crook-backed.  “Close and secret, a deep dissimuler, lowly of countenance, arrogant of heart, outwardly companionable where he inwardly hated, dispitious and evil.”  Other Tudor historians followed suit, and the peak of vilification was reached in Edward Hall’s Union of the Two Illustre Families of Lancaster and York (1548) where England is freed from the tyrant-monster Richard by the grace and resolution of Henry Tudor, and his son Henry VIII.
      In probability, Richard was shortish and unevenly shouldered.  Shakespeare, using More as source material, allows no doubt as to his Richard’s deformities.  In Henry VI, Part III, Richard himself supplies the details:      

      Why, love foreswore me in my mother’s womb;
      And, for I should not deal in her soft laws,
      She did not corrupt frail nature with some bribe
      To shrink mine arm up like a withered shrub;
      To make an envious mountain on my back,
     Where sits deformity to mock my body;
      To shape my legs of unequal size;
      To disproportion me in every part . . .  

      Philip Rhodes suggested in The Physical Deformity of Richard III (British medial Journal 2, 1977) that the real Richard suffered from Sprengel’s Deformity, the under-development of non-descent of the scapula, resulting in inflexible shoulder muscles.
      But the trouble with Shakespeare’s Richard probably derived from his shortened leg leads to scoliosis (lateral curvature of the spine) which in the thoracic region forces the vertebrae and ribcage to rotate, thus producing a one-sided hyperkyphosis.  Kyphosis (taken from Greek) = hunched back.  Queen Margaret is right on the orthopaedic mark when she curses Richard as a “poisonous hunch-backed toad.”

Artistry  by Stanley Wells
  Shakespeare’s ambition in writing Richard III parallels that of its hero, though with happier consequences.  It is the longest play he had so far written, to be exceeded in his career only by Hamlet.  In it he deploys all the verbal and rhetorical power at his command along with an astonishing mastery of both theatrical effect and dramatic structure.  He subordinates a complex mass of historical as well as invented material to a clearly defined artistic purpose, and he does so partly by making of Richard a more dominating central figure than is to be found in any of his earlier plays.
      This is a tragedy as well as a history play, but it is an ironical rather than a romantic tragedy.  In some ways Richard may be compared with Macbeth.  Both come to the throne by murder.  Both are motivated by ambition.  Both find that their ambition has a self-destructive force, that achievement of their aims costs them both humanity and life.  Both are finally overcome by a representative of a newer, better order.
      But Richard is far less introspective than Macbeth.  Rather than communing with himself he addresses the audience, like a chorus to his own play, and does so with ironic objectivity.  We can appreciate his cleverness even while deploring the use to which he puts it.  Shakespeare gives him a vigorous, colloquial style distinct from the rhetorical formality of many of those around him.  This engages our attention and makes us laugh, but his physical deformity serves as an ever-visible symbol of his moral corruption, and Shakespeare characterizes his evil through a continuing sequence of repellent animal images—wolves, spiders, toads, hogs, hell-hounds, and, most significantly, boars, for this was Richard’s personal emblem.
     We come closest to Richard in the despairing soliloquy in which he wakes from his dream of retribution, but even here the style is coldly, intellectually self-analytical:
      There is no creature loves me,
      And if I die no soul will pity me.
      Nay, wherefore should they?—Since that I myself
      Find in myself no pity to myself.      
        Richard III may deserve no better epitaph than Richmond’s ‘The bloody dog is dead,’ but at least he retains to the end both his intelligence and (like Macbeth) his physical courage.

THE PLAY IN PERSPECTIVE    The History

      In the last of Shakespeare’s three plays about Henry VI the hunchback Richard of Gloucester, son of Richard Duke of York, kills Henry; Richard’s brother, Edward, becomes King.  But Richard is already plotting his own way to the throne, as he tells us in the opening soliloquy of Richard III.  Major obstacles are his elder brothers, George Duke of Clarence and the new king, Edward IV.  Richard hires assassins to murder Clarence, whose body they deposit in a butt of malmsey. Edward, already sick, dies believing himself responsible for Clarence’s death.  He is succeeded by his son, the boy Prince of Wales, who with his brother is housed in the Tower to await his coronation.  Richard and his ally the Duke of Buckingham plot for Richard to be declared king in the boy’s place; Lord Hastings, who opposes them, is eliminated. Richard casts doubt on the legitimacy of the princes and even of their father, and becomes king.  Feeling insecure so long as the princes are alive he has them, too, assassinated.
      Edward’s widow, Queen Elizabeth, and mother, the Duchess of York, are joined by Henry VI’s widow, the old Queen Margaret, in lamentations for members of their family who have fallen victims to the power struggle.  Richard seeks to strengthen his position by persuading Queen Elizabeth to let him marry her daughter, and appears to succeed.  But the Earl of Richmond, heir to the Lancastrian claim to the throne, is gathering support against Richard, and the two leaders confront each other at Bosworth. On the night before the battle, in a scene of high formality which forms a climax to the whole sequence of history plays, the ghosts of Richard’s victims alternately curse him and bless Richmond.  Richmond, having overcome and killed Richard, declares  that he himself will marry Elizabeth of York, thus uniting the white rose and the read.

Topicality
      Richard III, composed around 1592 to 1593, had great topical appeal for its early audiences.  Under the strong reign of Queen Elizabeth I England had overcome many obstacles to national unity, most recently, and climactically, the Spanish Armada of 1588.  Shakespeare’s history plays reflect the nation’s fierce pride in its achievements, but national confidence was hard-won, and underneath it lay a constant anxiety that what had been gained might be quickly lost. Great power rested with the sovereign; her sudden death, especially if she had not appointed a suitable heir, could be as disastrous as that of Henry V.

      These fears are reflected by Richard III.  When the play opens, the nation—and the family of York—is divided against itself.  Individual representatives of the house of York—Clarence, Edward IV, Richard himself—are seen as symbols of national guilt; a climactic, almost sacrificial act in the self destruction of the family is the death of the princes in the Tower, described by Tirell as:

      The most arch deed of piteous massacre
      That ever yet this land was guilty of. 

      The play’s strong religious imagery contributes to the sense that its events represent a working out of God’s purpose to a particular end: the establishment of national unity and prosperity by the founder of the Tudor dynasty.  God’s active instrument is Richmond, father of Henry VIII; in his victory the play celebrates Queen Elizabeth’s grandfather and the founding of the dynasty to which she belonged.  Richmond’s final, pious speech bridges the gap between events of the past and the present of the play’s first audiences when Richmond declares that his heirs will ‘Enrich the time to come with smooth-faced peace.’  Elizabeth and all her subjects would echo his final prayer:  

      Now civil wounds are stopped; peace lives again.
      That she may long live here, God say ‘Amen.’