The Artistic Links Between William Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More by Charles A. Hallett & Elaine S. Hallett

Author:Charles A. Hallett & Elaine S. Hallett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2010-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Phase Two: “Your Beauty Was the Cause” (1.2.114–44)

“Buts” are rebutting words and can be counted on to signal a change of direction. The “but” in Richard’s “But, gentle Lady Anne” does just that; it introduces a new phase of the intensification. Only here—and not before—here in this second phase of the intensification—does Richard begin the wooing. Only now does he start to propose. And how fitting that the proposal units will continue the trial motif. But despite Richard’s former reticence, he has made progress. In this unit Richard intends to transfer his guilt to Anne.

What is striking about Richard’s rebutting “but” is that with it Richard reveals that in his view all that has come before, all the grief and rage that Anne has invested in her encounter with him, all the truths that she has paraded before him, are reduced to a mere “keen encounter of our wits.” If Anne had sought to fix blame in the preceding segment, he will do the same here. As Anne would have a trial, Richard will undertake his own defense—or rather he will seize the role of prosecutor and convict Anne for the very murders she has accused him of committing. In the units that follow, we are observing Richard’s notion of how a proposal should be made.

Now, Anne’s opposition to Richard is founded on two things—his murder of her husband and his murder of her father-in-law. “I hate you because you have done these two things.” These two things Richard will now seize upon and twist around. The very things that she founds her opposition on, he will ingeniously turn against her. As Richard begins to prepare the ground for his proposal, the question Richard will pose to Anne is, “Why were these two men killed?”

On the most obvious level, Richard’s motive for the next fifty-six lines will be to make Lady Anne acknowledge her complicity in the crime: “Is not the causer of the timeless deaths / Of these Plantagenets, Henry and Edward, / As blameful as the executioner?” (1.2.117–19). Rossiter speaks of “the deliberateness of this highly controlled workmanship” (9). We see that control working in the contrast being plotted out between the initial phase of the action, in which Anne demonstrates that beneath the righteous indignation that enf lames her resides a well-ordered judgment, firmly grounded in the divine order of things. Her very images are drawn from that sphere. Richard’s persuasion, initiated with his “but,” is intended to detach Anne from her moral bearings. Everything she has said will become ammunition to be used against her. If she has proclaimed that she hates him because of the murders he committed, he will persuade her that he committed those murders because he loves her, turning Anne’s world upside down and, therefore, distorting her perception of it. Subtly he shifts the ground of judgment from the center of rational order and divine wisdom, where she has located it, to the center of passion, where there are no (or at least far less adequate) defenses against deception.

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