5 - Tyranny added to usurpation: Richardus Tertius, The True Tragedy, and Richard III

Summary

As conquest may be called a foreign usurpation, so usurpation is a kind of domestic conquest, with this difference—that an usurper can never have right on his side, it being no usurpation but where one is got into the possession of what another has right to. This, so far as it is usurpation, is a change only of persons, but not of the forms and rules of the government; for if the usurper extend his power beyond what, of right, belonged to the lawful princes or governors of the commonwealth, it is tyranny added to usurpation.—John Locke, Second Treatise on Civil Government, Chapter 17

The political drama of the second half of the sixteenth century is characterized by the sudden emergence of the figure of the usurper, who was hitherto absent from the English stage. In the manner of a true (political and theatrical) arriviste, the usurper of Elizabethan drama rapidly rose to a position of theatrical prominence, which he retained tenaciously through decades of tumultuous political and dramatic change. Not content with the crown and the sceptre, the usurper also staked a claim to the theatrical dominance of the tyrant—the protagonist of the political drama of the preceding decades—by internalizing his characteristics. The crime of usurpation was thus superimposed on the sin of tyranny. The ‘new prince’ who came to dominate the Elizabethan stage embodied a double political trangression: the illegitimate acquisition of authority and its misuse. In other words, he embodied the formula that ‘bad rule follows inevitably from lack of legitimacy’.

The title page of the 1597 quarto of William Shakespeare's Richard III promises the reader a play depicting, among other things, Richard's ‘tyrannicall usurpation’, thus designating the illegitimate acquisition of power as a misuse of power in itself. The conflation of the tyrant with the usurper is symptomatic of the formal and ideological changes that transformed sixteenth-century political and theatrical cultures. Despite the distinction between the illegitimate ruler and the incompetent/evil ruler that existed in the political theory of early modern Europe, in the theatrical imagination of the late sixteenth century the tyrant was almost without exception a usurper and, conversely, the over-reaching ‘new prince’ was almost always tainted with the crime of tyranny.