Watching Richard watching Buckingham: 3.7 of Richard III and performance criticism.

Shurgot, Michael W.

As an experienced reviewer of Shakespearean productions, I have seen numerous productions of his most popular plays in the United States, Canada, and Britain. (1) In this era of the "director's theater," I have become increasingly fascinated--and occasionally frustrated--by the reasons why directors make the decisions they do and how, as an academic reviewer, I am supposed to react to them. Every time I ponder this question I find myself confronting squarely the knotty problem, much discussed in academic journals, of "authority" in both Shakespearean performances and performance criticism. Directors obviously have their own legitimate spheres of authority--their theater--but just as obviously reviewers have their own sphere of authority--their knowledge of Shakespeare's plays which justifies an editor's asking them to review productions and to write (presumably) intelligent reviews for the journal's readers. Most reviewers of Shakespearean productions that I read usually try to address both spheres of authority; possessing a superb knowledge of the text and its performance history, they generally praise a production while occasionally they fault some elements, perhaps involving casting, costumes, cuts, blocking, or the director's "concept" that haunts contemporary Shakespearean productions.

As they attempt to balance their reviews between the directors' choices and their own knowledge of the text, most critics also attempt to be as "objective" as possible, heeding Alan Dessen's advice about being "conscious of their implicit and explicit standards about what constitutes an ideal production of a Shakespearean play." (2)

While ideally always aware of the standards they evoke and apply in their essays, reviewers must also recognize directors' appropriation of Shakespeare as the authority for their production choices. W. B. Worthen explains this interpretive process:

 To conceive the performance ensemble as interpreting the Author
 means that the ensemble is interpreting an Author it in fact
 creates. Shakespeare is a necessary fiction that organizes and
 stabilizes this interpretive community, working not to provide
 access to privileged meaning, but to legitimate a series of
 interpretive relationships--between actor and text, between
 spectator and stage, between critic and performance. (3)

All Shakespearean productions create numerous "interpretive relationships," including that with Shakespeare the author who is created to "stabilize" (by which I assume Worthen means justify) directors' choices. Directors make these choices well before reviewers see them, and, as Sidney Homan explains, from completely different perspectives: whereas scholarship and criticism are "retrospective," actors and directors approach a play "moment by moment, line by line, beat by beat--inductively." (4) Conscientious reviewing thus involves a juggling act among the choices that directors and actors make and a reviewer's sense that without one's critical standards one has no justification for writing a review.

While recognizing, and attempting to balance, these twin spheres of authority--the director's/actor's and the reviewer's/critic's--this retrospective essay contrasts two recent productions of Richard III to address two issues that I believe are important to performance reviews. The productions are the 2005 Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) staging of Richard III in the Angus Bowmer Theatre, directed by LibbyAppel, with James Newcomb as Richard and Michael Elich as Buckingham; (5) and the 2006 Intiman Theatre version in Seattle, directed by Bartlett Sher, with Stephen Pelinski as Richard and Michael Winters as Buckingham. (6) I will address first how Appel's staging of 3.7 convinced me of the essential place of that scene in all productions of Richard III and my sense of what that claim means for a reviewer's authority. While the Intiman production omitted 3.7 altogether, the OSF staging, which I examine below, made the scene central to its entire production and is the basis for my argument that 3.7 is essential to performances of Richard IlI. "Essential" is here an admittedly dangerous word, for it claims that a particular scene must be present in all productions of a play (as, for example, one might argue is true of the "Mousetrap" in Hamlet or 4.7 of King Lear), and its use might seem to compromise the authority of a director to shape his or her vision of a play within his or her authorial space: the theater. However, I wish to argue that the OSF staging justifies this word because without 3.7 spectators can understand neither the deadly game that Richard and Buckingham are playing, especially why Richard asks Buckingham to kill the princes in the Tower, nor the relationship between 3.7 and Richard's sudden dismissal of Buckingham in 4.2. My second issue involves what I shall call an "interpretive relationship" that my initial argument about 3.7 could perhaps foster between directors and academic reviewers.

Buckingham's dedication to Richard's cause, as well as Richard's ruthless egotism, are established early in the play. In 1.3 Buckingham tells Richard that he respects "nothing" that Queen Margaret says, and then tells Richard that he rejects Margaret's warnings about his devotion to him: "My hair doth stand on end to hear her curses." (7) Despite this pledge of loyalty, Richard numbers Buckingham among the "simple gulls" that he will manipulate in his "secret mischiefs" (1.3.325). In 2.2 Buckingham argues for a "little train" to accompany Prince Edward from Ludlow to London, ostensibly to prevent new eruptions of the "new-healed wound of malice" (2.2.125). Moments later, Buckingham urges that he and Richard journey towards the Prince while he "sort[s] occasion" regarding their discussions about parting "the Queen's proud kindred from the Prince" (2.2.150). Richard acts the role of child to his supposed mentor and counselor:

 My other self, my counsel's consistory,
 My oracle, my prophet! My dear cousin,
 I, as a child, will go by thy direction.
 Toward Ludlow then, for we'll not stay behind. (2.2.151-54)

Then in 3.1, after Buckingham sends Catesby to sound Lord Hastings' loyalty to their cause, Richard promises Buckingham his reward:

 BUCKINGHAM. NOW my lord, what shall we do if we perceive
 Lord Hastings will not yield to our complots?

 RICHARD. Chop Off his head. Something we will determine.
 And look when I am king, claim thou of me
 The earldom of Hereford and all the movables
 Whereof the King my brother was possessed.

 BUCKINGHAM. I'll claim that promise at Your Grace's hand.

 RICHARD. And look to have it yielded with all kindness.
 Come, let us sup betimes, that afterwards
 We may digest our complots in some form. (3.1.191-200)

For agreeing to murder, Buckingham's reward supposedly will be generous.

Richard's questioning of Buckingham in 3.5 is the necessary prelude to his asking Buckingham to kill the princes in the Tower:

 RICHARD. Come, cousin, canst thou quake and change thy color,
 Murder thy breath in middle of a word,
 And then again begin, and stop again,
 As if thou wert distraught and mad with terror?

 BUCKINGHAM. Tut, I can counterfeit the deep tragedian,
 Speak and look back, and pry on every side,
 Tremble and start at wagging of a straw;
 Intending deep suspicion, ghastly looks
 Are at my service, like enforced smiles;
 And both are ready at their offices,
 At any time, to grace my stratagems. (3.5.1-11)

Richard asks Buckingham about his ability to "play," to be the hypocrite, the Greek word for actor. As the lead actor in his own hypocritical rise to power, Richard here tests Buckingham's loyalty as well as his ability to "counterfeit." With his mind on Edward's sons in the Tower, Richard knows that he now needs an uncompromising ally who, like himself, will "upon [his] cue" (3.4.26) perform vicious deeds instantly and indisputably. Buckingham asserts his ability and willingness to fulfill Richard's requests with the "enforced smiles" that dictators require.

Buckingham's hypocritical skills excel in 3.7, where he stages Richard's supposed unwillingness to assume the crown:

 The Mayor is here at hand. Intend some fear;
 Be not you spoke with but by mighty suit.
 And look you get a prayer-book in your hand,
 And stand between two churchmen, good my lord,
 For on that ground I'll make a holy descant;
 And be not easily won to our requests.
 Play the maid's part: still answer nay and take it. (3.7.45-51)

Buckingham skillfully manages this scene, maneuvering Catesby, the Mayor, and the citizens, and arguing that Richard's initial refusal of their request "argues conscience in Your Grace" (174). Buckingham's litany of Edward's supposed infidelity and the resulting bastardy of his sons in the Tower finally convinces the Mayor and citizens to "entreat" Richard to assume the throne. Richard finally accepts his citizens' pleading, despite the "world of cares" that he insists they are thrusting upon him. Richard leaves, having agreed to be crowned "tomorrow," and retires with the two bishops to their "holy work" (245).

This scene is among Shakespeare's most preposterous, and it requires a skilled actor playing Richard to stage it convincingly. The actor must make Richard appear saintly and devout, while being fully aware of the sheer hypocrisy of the entire spectacle. Whereas at the end of 1.2 the actor playing Richard has a soliloquy in which he can relish his astonishing success with LadyAnne, the actor in 3.7 does not have a soliloquy in which he can release to spectators the tension required in playing the hypocritical buffoon with the Mayor and citizens. In 3.7, Richard, aloft, speaks of his "holy work" with the churchmen, bids farewell, and then exits above, presumably to explode offstage with self-congratulatory laughter. As convincing as the actor playing Richard must be, a crucial point about this scene in performance is that the actor playing Buckingham must be equally skilled, for his task is equally demanding: he must coordinate the entrances and exits of this charade with a similar grasp of the hypocrisy he is conducting. His "ghastly looks" and "enforced smiles" must convince the Mayor and citizens that Richard's ludicrous game, played symbolically "aloft" among clergymen, is sincere, and that Richard is both penitent and unwilling to seize the crown.

In her OSF staging of 3.7, Libby Appel emphasized that this scene tests the theatrical hypocrisy of both Richard and Buckingham; they laughed giddily as Buckingham outlined his plans for Richard, and both obviously relished the charade they were about to stage. When the Mayor and citizens entered, James Newcomb as Richard hobbled upstage right and crouched more than stood between two clergymen. Downstage left, Michael Elich as Buckingham urgently exhorted the Mayor and grabbed his coat repeatedly, as if heralding doom if the Mayor and his aldermen did not urge the pious Richard to assume the throne. Buckingham was ferocious, turning the initially reluctant Mayor upstage and pointing towards Richard holding his prayer book. Buckingham thus superbly played his "role" in this scene, and throughout, his most attentive spectator was Richard. Crouched between the taller clergymen, Richard turned his head over his disfigured right shoulder to watch Buckingham's performance. As Richard marveled at his partner's wooing of the Mayor, one suddenly realized exactly why this scene is crucial to the entire play: Watching Richard watching Buckingham, one senses that Richard now grasps how "talented" Buckingham is at "counterfeiting," as he says in 3.5, and thus how dangerous he could be. Richard numbers Buckingham among the "simple gulls" in 1.3, but if Buckingham can convince the Mayor and aldermen of the sincerity of Richard's blatant hypocrisy, what else might he be able to do? Might he be able to play Richard for a fool? "Counterfeit" even as he plotted with others against Richard? The longer and more deeply Newcomb's Richard gazed at Buckingham, and the more that Richard marveled at Buckingham's wicked tongue, the more clearly one sensed the necessity of this scene, and how sharply the OSF staging had communicated its central importance to understanding the relationship between these two thoroughly hypocritical and now equally dangerous men.

Equally clear in the OSF production was the relationship between Richard's sudden grasp of Buckingham's "talents" and his immediate test of Buckingham's loyalty. In 4.2, barely five minutes after Buckingham salutes Richard as "England's worthy king" (3.7.240) and the Duchess of York bids Dorset flee to Richmond, Richard brutally taunts Buckingham.

 Ah, Buckingham, now do I play the touch,
 To try if thou be current gold indeed:
 Young Edward lives. Think now what I would speak.

 Cousin, thou wast not wont to be so dull.
 Shall I be plain? I wish the bastards dead,
 And I would have it suddenly performed.
 What sayst thou now? Speak suddenly; be brief. (4.2.8-10; 17-20)

Having used Buckingham in his boldest and most audacious scheme, Richard must immediately ascertain Buckingham's loyalty by testing his capacity for cruelty. Can Buckingham murder the innocent? Buckingham's error, like Remirro de Orco's in Book VII of Machiavelli's The Prince, is not to have seen where his loyalty to a ruthless dictator would inevitably lead him. (8) The OSF production superbly clarified this point; Elich stumbled off stage towards his death, aware that the audacious success of his hypocritical performance in 3.7--his ability to feign in the midst of a scene as repulsive as it was ridiculous-will now cost him his head.

Bartlett Sher at Intiman omitted 3.7 completely (and both productions cut 3.6), and thus significantly altered the rhythm of the play? Given the cuts, spectators heard Richard refuse all access to the princes in the Tower at the end of 3.5 and then saw Queen Elizabeth, Duchess of York, and Lady Anne (the other women were cut) trying to visit them. Brackenbury's refusal to admit them, on Richard's order, came just a moment after Richard's saying he will prohibit all visitors, so the transition from the end of 3.5 to 4.1 seemed fluid and certainly hastened the action. Achieving this fluidity of action was probably one of Sher's main motives in cutting both 3.6 and 3.7, but I would argue that cutting 3.7 seriously weakened this production. The Intiman spectators were denied what the OSF production showed is a crucial scene for the entire play; for in 3.7 we witness not only the height of both Richard's and Buckingham's hypocrisy but also Richard's reason for testing Buckingham's loyalty in 4.2 so soon thereafter. While one might argue that cutting 3.6 and 3.7 creates a smooth transition from Richard's order forbidding visits to the princes and its implementation by Brackenbury, what is lost seems of far greater importance to the theatrical contest between Richard and Buckingham. In a play replete with theatrical metaphors, spectators ought to see Richard's devious mind at work in 3.7 as he listens to Buckingham and realizes that yet one more test, more sinister than the rest, must be applied to Buckingham. After all, has not Buckingham said:

 Intending deep suspicion, ghastly looks
 Are at my service, like enforced smiles;
 And both are ready at their offices,
 At any time, to grace my stratagems. (3.5.8-11 ; emphasis added)

Surely Richard attended these words, especially Buckingham's repeated "my," not "your," presumably what Richard would have preferred to hear.

To return to my first issue, I would argue that Appel's OSF staging of 3.7, and the prominence that her production gave to both Richard's and Buckingham's theatrical, i.e., hypocritical, skills, warrants this scene's inclusion in all productions of Richard III. While no other production will exactly copy Appel's staging, nor would I wish it to, what matters is how this production clarified Richard's understanding of Buckingham's skills, his potential danger to Richard's plotting, and the relationship between what Richard grasps about Buckingham in 3.7 and Richard's dismissing Buckingham so quickly in 4.2. Richard calls Buckingham "The deep-revolving, witty Buckingham" (4.2.42), and Appel's staging of 3.7, as well as James Newcomb's and Michael Elich's superb acting, clarified exactly why Richard must dismiss Buckingham. Further, this assertion invokes a reviewer's authority to judge radically different stagings of the same play by respected directors in well-established theaters. An obvious, initial point is that a short article on just two productions of a single play cannot possibly engage the many theoretical debates surrounding the contentious issue of authority in Shakespearean productions and criticism. My focus is both far more narrow and more practical. However, even within this narrow range I am nonetheless engaging, and in the case of Bartlett Sher challenging, the established authority of two well-respected directors whose approaches to Richard III were widely different, and who elected to tell different "stories" from that single script. As Cary Mazer explains, this is what directors do:

[D]irectors and their collaborators create performances out of the theatrical raw materials at their disposal, materials which include (but are not limited to) the playscript; they seek to "tell" the "story" that they perceive is in the script, and to find theatrical means of telling this story, according to the particular material conditions in which they are working. If, and only if, what they read of contemporary scholarship matches their sense of the story they wish to tell, will scholarship be of any use to them at all. (10)

Within the material confines of Angus Bowmer Theatre in Ashland or Intiman Theatre in Seattle I have no legitimate authority at all. Appel's and Sher's staged versions of Richard III are uniquely theirs, the result of their own interpretive choices that, as W. B. Worthen asserts, invoke Shakespeare to legitimate those choices. Worthen adds: "As a genre of literary criticism, it is perhaps not surprising that performance criticism finally denies the authority of the stage, reserving it for an Author whose 'presence' can be generated from a reading of the text." (11) Reviewers return to an authorial text, assuming it to be far more stable than a script acted upon a stage, whenever they encounter performance choices that they deem somehow unworthy of this presumably stable text and its "Author." However, despite the major differences between what Homan terms the inductive immediacy of performance and the deductive reflection of the critic, both must, as H. R. Coursen remarks, make choices "recognizing that a 'total understanding' of the 'text' will never be realized" and that each response is "inevitably individual." (12) Given these individual theatrical and critical choices, and the obvious fact that Sher, Appel and I are operating within totally different contexts and spheres of influence (they in theatrical spaces, I in an academic journal), what justification exists for criticizing Sher's cutting of an entire scene from his production of Richard III? Can one deduce from a critical comparison of just two productions of one play that one production has omitted a scene so essential to that play that it simply must be included if spectators are to experience that play fully? Or is this critical exercise only too obviously an encroachment on a director's authority and simultaneously a blatant example of performance criticism's evoking a spectral author(ity) to justify bashing a particular production? Where now are those two spheres of authority that I promised to balance?

In his fine essay, "Shakespeare's Scripts and the Modern Director," Alan Dessen addresses the justifications that directors have used for their "cutting or reshaping" of Shakespeare's scripts in production. Dessen finds "insidious" a conceptual basis for cutting the script in which "passages or stage directions or even entire scenes are omitted because their presence would contradict or jar with the director's interpretation." (13) Does Sher's cutting of 3.7, presumably to emphasize the swift execution of Richard's order regarding visitors in the Tower, constitute such a conceptual basis for cutting? If so, can a reviewer justifiably describe this cut as "insidious" because it is presumably inimical to a complete understanding of Richard's and Buckingham's characters and their relationship? Dessen laments those reviewers who reveal more about their own tastes than about the actual production itself. (14) However, my argument here is not about my own tastes in production styles, but rather about my critical sense of the necessary place of 3.7 within Richard III that Appel's production convinced me is too vital to be cut in any production of the play. I argue that Sher's production was flawed because what Dessen would term Sher's "concept" about the swift execution of Richard's order led to his omitting an entire scene that is essential to understanding Richard III and the deadly "counterfeit" between its two main characters.

Thus, in a reversal of Worthen's claim that performance critics ultimately deny the authority of the stage, (15) I would assert the authority of Appel's staging of 3.7 within her production of Richard III. The OSF production infused life into this scene so convincingly that 3.7 became vital to understanding not only the relationship between Richard and Buckingham but also later segments of the play, especially Richard's tantalizing words to Buckingham in 4.2: "Ah, Buckingham, now do I play the touch, / To try if thou be current gold indeed" (8-9). While Sher's Intiman production aimed for its own internal logic and audience appeal, I argue that Appel's OSF production clarified brilliantly the essential place of 3.7 within Richard III and why this scene demands performance.

I proposed also that my argument about the OSF staging of 3.7 might create yet another kind of "interpretive relationship" involving directors and reviewers of Shakespeare's plays. Directors and actors certainly create their own interpretive relationships with Shakespeare's plays, and teachers create theirs as well in the classroom. Reviewers going into a production may be influenced by their own strongly held critical approach to a play, which may affect how they receive and review a production, although one hopes, as Dessen asserts, that most reviewers remain open to all the possibilities that a production offers. (And here I certainly must include my own reactions to both of the productions I describe above.) While Homan is right that directors and reviewers approach a Shakespearean play from totally different perspectives and that the reviewer's critique always postdates the director's choices, nonetheless a more collaborative relationship between directors and reviewers could benefit both and perhaps yield an evolving consensus on production values for Shakespeare's plays that could confront and integrate the "spheres of authority" that both claim. By proposing an increased dialogue between directors and reviewers, perhaps at conferences and in scholarly journals, I do not pretend to know how such discussions might evolve or what form they might assume. I desire only more dialogue about this "knotty problem" of distinctive authorities and challenging productions of Shakespeare's plays that engage their audiences--and their reviewers--fully. (16)

Michael W. Shurgot, Seattle, Washington

Notes

(1.) I review Shakespeare productions in the Pacific Northwest for Shakespeare Bulletin, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and London Globe seasons for The Upstart Crow. None of this experience, however, renders me immune from errors in judgment or taste.

(2.) Alan Dessen, "Reviewing Shakespeare for the Record," Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (1985): 602-608, 603.

(3.) W. B. Worthen, "Staging 'Shakespeare': Acting, Authority, and the Rhetoric of Performance," in Shakespeare, Theory and Performance, ed James C. Bulman (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 19.

(4.) Sidney Homan, Directing Shakespeare (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004), ix-x.

(5.) For my review of the OSF Richard III, see The Upstart Crow 25 (2005): 92-104, esp. 101-04.

(6.) Both OSF and Intiman have excellent artistic reputations and the majority of their productions are highly praised and well supported. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is among the best known festivals in North America, selling annually over 350,000 tickets. Intiman Theatre in Seattle and its Artistic Director Bartlett Sher won a TONY award for regional theatre in 2006.

(7.) 1.3.296. All citations to Richard III are from The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 4th ed., ed. David Bevington (New York: Harper Collins, 1992).

(8.) See Chapter VII of The Prince, where Machiavelli recounts Cesare Borgia's efforts to pacify Romagna and his manipulation of Remirro de Orco, a "cruel and able man." The Italian Renaissance Reader, ed. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Mark Musa (New York: New American Library, 1987), 266-67. For a different view of Richard's dismissal of Buckingham, see Robert G. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Mystery of God's Judgment (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976), 89-91.

(9.) On the OSF cutting of 3.6, see Alan Armstrong's excellent review in Shakespeare Bulletin 24 (Spring 2006): 73-77.

(10.) Cary M. Mazer, "Historicizing Alan Dessen: Scholarship, Stagecraft, and the 'Shakespeare Revolution,'" in Bulman, 150.

(11.) Worthen, 19.

(12.) H.R. Coursen, Shakespearean Performance as Interpretation (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), 25.

(13.) Alan Dessen, "Shakespeare's Scripts and the Modern Director," Shakespeare Survey 36 (1983): 57-64, 60.

(14.) Dessen, "Reviewing," 603-04.

(15.) Worthen, 19.

(16.) A shorter version of this essay was part of the seminar "Performance Criticism: The State of the Art," directed by Jeremy Lopez, at the annual Shakespeare Association of America Meeting on April 6, 2007 in San Diego. I wish to thank the participants, especially Alan Armstrong, for their comments during the seminar.