Presenting an "Unfinish'd" Richard III (Whitney)

This image has been on my mind since I was first introduced to it during a recent Renaissance Department lecture on early anatomy books. In doing initial research for our assigned dramaturgical work on Richard III, I kept returning to Richard’s deformity and the way the deformity has been staged and could be staged. Kelly’s post moves through each of the words and phrases Richard’s uses to articulate his deformity during his opening soliloquy, helpfully tracking the various opening references and proving a great springboard for my concepts.  Some of this opening language, specifically the lines “deform’d, unfinish’d, sent before my time/ into this breathing world, scarce half made up,” compelled me to return to this image (1.1.20-1). After initially trying to ignore the insistence of this image in my mind – simply because, like probably many of you, I find it chilling and difficult to analyze – I found myself starting to shape a concept of Richard built around the this image and the idea of a child and a man “unfinish’d.”

Richard III is most often portrayed as evil incarnate. Similar to Iago’s “motiveless malignity,” Richard is often staged as unnecessarily cruel and inherently evil, a tyrant who commits acts of terror and cruelty for, it seems, no reason at all. But, after watching the end of Henry VI, Part 3 (which, I’m ashamed to say I haven’t read) and hearing Richard’s lines after he kills Henry VI, I started wondering about his motives. Richard III is, in fact, not at all without motives (as Ellen pointed out in our recent class discussion). He has witnessed immense trauma in the deaths of his family members and has consistently been categorized as inferior because of his physical deformity. If every person’s gaze directed at Richard has been laden with disgust, pity, or horror, isn’t there room here for a certain amount of self-loathing and its potential results? Self-loathing and shame, as we see in other Shakespeare plays (Othello, for instance), can turn into rage directed outward. I would like to offer this reading as a possibility for a portrayal of Richard III that is not purely evil.

As a way into this reading, I offer this image. This image manages to be repulsive and beautiful. It displays a fetus at almost full term, but also suggests the possibility for further development. In other words, this child could be “unfinish’d” or “scarce half made up.” The possibility is what interests me. The tension between an “unfinish’d” body and it’s alternative – presumably “finish’d” or in some way more completely whole. I would like to suggest the possibility that this same tension can exist within Richard’s character. The tension between repulsion and beauty, between incompleteness and wholeness, between de-formation and formation. There is, obviously, much evidence in the play Richard III to support the common staging of Richard as evil incarnate. But even a play that depicts a character in such a way is limited by the constraints of itself. In other words, there is always the possibility that Richard was not always evil incarnate, and a Richard III that took into consideration a different set of motives for Richard – motives that are, perhaps, outside the constraints of this single play – could potentially stage a much more complicated and compelling figure.

*Image taken from The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus, William Hunter, 1774.