A Necessary Evil: The Inverted Hagiography of Shakespeare’s Richard III

Summary

The popularity of William Shakespeare's The Tragedy of King Richard III owes as much to Richard's morally repugnant character as hagiographies of saints do to the saints’ moral perfection. To mold the character of Richard, Shakespeare synthesizes medieval saints’ lives and romances, creating a moral, instead of a purely biographical, truth. Almost never written within the saint's lifetime, hagiographies were offered as moral and spiritual exempla, and, later in the tradition, as an explanation for their sanctification. Saint veneration, while widespread throughout Catholic Europe and England, was almost always at heart a local affair, as communities often tied saints to their own histories and landscapes, like St. George and England or Thomas Becket and Canterbury. King Richard's malignant characterization actively engages English medieval hagiography, rich with saintly figures and their violent persecutors. Richard III is hagiographic in nature and operates as an adaptation of, not a break with, medieval hagiographic traditions established in works like William Caxton's Golden Legend, particularly his “Life of S. Thomas of Canterbury [Thomas Becket],” and the extreme conversion narrative of the romance Sir Gowther.

Saints’ stories were part of medieval and early Tudor England's cultural fabric and were re-told and reenacted through religious services, drama, manuscripts, and early print. Saints’ legends, ubiquitous and easily adaptable, adjusted to changing literary tastes as earlier martyr stories were reimagined through the lens of medieval romance. Even so, hagiography's conventions remained fairly stable: a miraculous or unusual birth and childhood, absolute devotion to the calling, sacrifice, martyrdom or physical suffering at the hands of evil or demonic forces, and the performance of miracles. Almost every saint also had a nemesis whose vicious ignorance complemented the saint's moral perfection. The victory of the saint's good over their enemy's evil was considered proof of holiness, and as medieval religious drama developed, tyrannical figures like Herod or Thomas Becket's King Henry II became, quite literally, “necessary evils.”

Shakespeare's Richard III would, at first glance, appear another such tyrant, and his charmingly villainous character a foil to the redemptive figure of Richmond, later Henry VII, founder of the Tudor dynasty. Richard, whose body count includes two kings (Henry VI and Edward V) and two rightful heirs to the English throne (Edward, the Prince of Wales and son of Henry VI, and the other prince in the tower, also named Richard), seems at first another Herod waiting to be “out-Heroded.”