'The Lack of Self-deception'

“There is a difference between a villain and one who simply commits a crime. The villain is an extremely conscious person and commits a crime consciously, for its own sake.” 

A fine distinction, one often lost on us. Auden is describing Shakespeare’s Richard III and refers us to the great monologue that opens the play that bears his name. It always hooks me: “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York . . .” It’s not just the metaphor. It’s the stately roll of the words, a cadence almost military. Next, Auden likens Richard’s unapologetic villainy to a more recent historical figure:

 

“Richard III’s monologue is not unlike Adolf Hitler’s speech to his General Staff on 23 August 1939, in it’s utter lack of self-deception. The lack of self-deception is striking because most of us invent plausible reasons for doing something we know is wrong.”

 

Speaking at the New School for Social Research in New York City on October 16, 1946, Auden is referring to Hitler’s Obersalzberg speech made to his Wehrmacht commanders one week before he invaded Poland and started World War II. It was only seven years later -- recent history. In his speech Hitler announces his intentions:

 

“Our strength consists in our speed and in our brutality. Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter – with premeditation and a happy heart. History sees in him solely the founder of a state. It’s a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me. I have issued the command – and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad – that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy.”

 

Richard’s aim was not genocide or world conquest but raw power. The historical Richard reigned as king of England for two years. In his opening monologue, Shakespeare has him say:

 

“I am determined to prove a villain,

And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,

By drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams,

To set my brother Clarence and the King

In deadly hate the one against the other . . .”

 

No pussyfooting, no sweet veneer of euphemism. He tells us what he intends to do, and soon he will do it, as did Hitler. The Battle of Bosworth, during which Richard was killed, was fought on this date, August 22, in 1485. It was the last major  battle of the Wars of the Roses, the civil war between the houses of Lancaster and York that lasted more than twenty years. The war’s casualties include some 105,000 men dead in the fighting, when England’s population totaled roughly three-million. Richard’s death at Bosworth ended the Plantagenet dynasty, the rulers of England since 1154.

 

[Auden’s remarks are collected in Lectures on Shakespeare (ed. Arthur Kirsch, Princeton University Press, 2000). I grew up watching Olivier’s Richard III (1955), which seemed like a Western with peculiar costumes and too much talking.]