The Wish to be Hated

In The Tragedy of Richard III, Shakespeare presents a central figure whose severe physical deformity accompanies complexly combined characterological elements of evil and charisma, of icily calculated murderousness and near-maddening, if nondeterrant guilt, and of lacerating self-loathing alongside towering narcissistic entitlement and ambition. The sheer reprehensibility of Richard’s behavior warrants his inclusion in the pantheon of unforgettable Shakespearean characters that includes Hamlet, Lady Macbeth, Shylock, Lear, and Iago. Richard has also come to occupy a singular place in the psychoanalytic canon, that of “an exception” (Freud 1916) who asserts that his severe physical defect justifies his self-awarded exemption from the moral and ethical constraints incumbent on the rest of humanity.

Thus, between the anguished, envy-filled “Now is the winter of our discontent” soliloquy with which he opens the play and his arguably self-initiated battlefield death five acts later, Richard kills four family members (his wife, his brother, and two nephews), seduces and marries the widow of one of his earlier victims, impugns his mother’s marital fidelity in order to strengthen his allegation of his older brother’s illegitimacy, ¹ and cajoles his widowed sister-in-law into considering, for a time, his proposed incestuous marriage to her daughter, his niece. In short, Richard is portrayed as the monodimensional embodiment of evil, an evil that has made him, with no close rival, the most infamous villain in the Shakespearean canon.

It is my thesis here that in addition to serving his “craving” (Shevrin and Toussieng 1962) for kingship, Richard’s incorrigible villainy reveals a deep-seated wish to be hated, thereby perpetuating a lifelong object-tie to a traumatized, rejecting, and demonizing mother. The syndrome of being a “hate-collector” resembles Bergler’s characterization of the “injustice collector” (1949) and may also be thought of as a form of relational masochism, with its unceasing search for a “bad-enough” object (Rosen 1993).

Before proceeding further with this exploration of Richard’s fateful relationship with his mother, it is important to specify that I am writing here of the Shakespearean figure, not the “historical” monarch who, I discovered in researching this study, ² was neither as incorrigibly villainous nor as sadistically brutal as he is depicted in the two plays in which he plays a major role—Richard III and Henry VI, Part Three.

Alan Palmer (1976) describes Richard as “an able and diligent administrator with a sense of justice for the common people if not for the baronage” (p. 69). According to Anthony Cheetham (1975), Richard’s “image has been blackened in the caricature compiled in the reign of his successful rival, Henry VII, and later adapted by Shakespeare to give birth to the monster portrayed in his play Richard III ” (p. 152).

It is Richard’s misfortune to have had his story told by humanity’s greatest playwright-poet, for rather than dramatizing history, Shakespeare created it and succeeded in endowing Richard’s biography with a near-mythic, diabolical status, a tendentious, Tudor-promoting tale that, while historically false, is nonetheless psychologically coherent, empathically engaging, and, as Freud (1916) pointed out, universally applicable.

Freud’s essay on Richard’s “exceptionalism” has served as a fountainhead of generative reflection within psychoanalysis. Blum (2001) traces its crucial role in the emergence of an analytic theory of character-formation, and Jacobson (1959), uncovering the unconscious masochistic elements within the syndrome, describes, as does Blum, the inevitably self-destructive nature of the exception’s narcissistically driven overreaching.

Kris (1976) explores the insatiability of the exception’s need for gratification, an observation I will discuss further in this essay. Anderson (2006) demonstrates the insidious impairment of reality testing and other areas of ego functioning that often accompanies the exception’s sense of entitlement—an assault on rationality that she terms “the death of the mind” (p. 706). Noshpitz (2010) views Richard’s obliterative disdain of others as an externalization of his lifelong self-hatred, a pattern expressed in his unrestrained and irreversible villainy throughout the drama.

What I am proposing is an approach complementary to previous explications of Richard’s lifelong defiance of moral and ethical norms, one that applies the object-relational perspectives of Ronald Fairbairn (1943) to the understanding of Richard’s unyielding malevolence. I suggest that in his outrageous behavior Richard is in fact living out his mother’s early and lasting demonization of him and that in consequence he strives throughout his life to re-create and thus preserve, protect, and perpetuate, through his villainy, an inseparable tie to this “bad-enough” maternal object.

I use the term “bad-enough object” rather than “bad object” to indicate the “window” of deep antipathy between Richard and the women with whom he becomes emotionally entwined. Were such connections too hate-drenched, the women, Richard feared, would abandon him, as had his mother. On the other hand, were the relationships insufficiently suffused with malevolence, they would no longer replicate the sought-after hostile maternal object-tie, which, throughout the play, Richard proves diabolically skillful at creating and manipulating.

For her part, Richard’s mother is equally compelled to maintain this ill-fated dynamic, joining her son (as a vengeful victim) as he compulsively reenacts the monstrous role into which he has been cast. In short, to retain the tie with her as an object, Richard “becomes” the monster that his traumatized mother has contoured him into being—her child of hate.

That this relationship, crucial from a psychoanalytic perspective, has at times been dramaturgically underappreciated is evidenced by the New York Public Theater’s “abbreviated” summer production of the play in 2012, from which the role of Richard’s mother was entirely deleted (New York Times, August 13, 2012).

An apt point at which to begin our reexamination of Richard’s narrative would be the pregnancy of his mother, Cecily Neville, the thirty-seven-year-old wife of the Duke of York, scion of the Plantagenet family, which had ruled England for the preceding three hundred years. The family line, though, was reaching its dynastic end, with the child the Duchess was bearing destined to become England’s last Plantagenet king. The pregnancy was a grim and woeful time for the mother-to-be, for her family, and for her nation. Once unchallengeably successful in occupying and ruling France, the English under the Plantagenets, having lost the Hundred Years’ War, were, except for the small French city of Calais, driven off the European mainland, and London was filled with “returning . . . unemployed, starving armies from overseas . . . accustomed to war, license, and plunder, and fit for any mischief” (Trevelyan 1962, p. 257). Writing of that period, Palmer (1976)) records that “public feeling was turning against the whole Lancastrian establishment, which had embarked on a French war that it was unable to win, and an agrarian uprising threatened London and Westminster” (p. 61).

In parallel to these external misfortunes, the Duchess’s pregnancy and labor were prolonged and arduous, as she later recalls to Richard:

I have stayed for thee,

God knows, in torment and in agony [4.4.168–169].

Richard’s predecessor, Henry VI, shortly before the latter’s death, tells him:

Thy mother felt more than a mother’s pain,

And yet brought forth less than a mother’s hope:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Teeth hadst thou in thy head when thou was born

[King Henry VI, Part 3, 5.6.50–51,54].

Rhodes (1977) reports that “he was born feet first and his hair came down to his shoulders”; quoting Sir Thomas More, Rhodes continues: “There was so much ado in his mother’s travail that she could not be delivered uncut” (p. 1651) and so underwent her era’s version of an episiotomy. Rhodes also speculates that Richard’s birth, at a late gestational age, may have involved forcible traction.

But however painful the time-limited physical agony of the disfigured Richard’s birth was for his mother, she experienced a far greater and more durable emotional pain and sense of self-recrimination over his undeviatingly villainous life course. Relatively late in the play, she comments to a confidante:

O ill-dispersing wind of misery!

O my accursed womb, the bed of death!

A cockatrice hast thou hatched to the world,

Whose unavoided eye is murderous [4.1.56–59].

A cockatrice is defined in the Random House Unabridged Dictionary as “a legendary monster with a deadly glance and with the head, legs, and wings of a cock and the tail of a serpent.” The demonizing “cockatrice” ascription is also, of course, an anguished expression of the Duchess’s perception of her deformed son as an inhumanly monstrous creature, whose appearance could only have been a calamitous narcissistic blow to her womanly sense of generativity, with her allusion to the infant’s “murderous looks” being a projection of her own filicidal wishes toward her newborn son.

Such then was the parturient Duchess of York—a distraught, narcissistically wounded mother whose pregnancy (her eleventh) she had singled out as a “grievous burden” (4.4.173). It was at this point, I believe, that Richard discernibly became her child of hate, a symbol and a condensation of his mother’s sense of failure and subsequent self-reproach, now projectively identified with her newborn infant.

Thus the disfigured Richard became for his mother what, four centuries later, the white whale became, in symbolic condensation, for Melville’s Captain Ahab (1851), “The monomanic incarnation of all the agencies which some men feel eating at them . . . identifying with him not only all their bodily woes, but also all their intellectual and spiritual exasperations” (p. 226).

Dire and portentous as it was, the Duchess’s rejection of her disfigured child is by no means a singular occurrence. A sizable literature on the bonding difficulties of mothers to their “appearance-impaired” children (Weis 1998) has been steadily emerging—addressing such conditions as cleft palate (Tisza and Gumpertz 1962), cerebral palsy and myodysplasia (Breslau, Staruch, and Mortimer 1982), spina bifida (Barakat and Linney 1992), craniofacial disfigurement (Campis, DeMaso, and Twente 1995), epilepsy (Pianta and Lothman 1994), congenital anomalies of the limbs (Gingras et al. 1964), and Down syndrome and hydrocephalus (Bentovim 1972).

Bentovim identifies maternal feelings of “numbness, grief, disgust, waves of helplessness, rage and disbelief” toward such disabled children, along with filicidal wishes to “get rid of the child, followed by feelings of guilt, self-blame, shame, and intense anxiety” (p. 580). Earlier, Rascovsky and Rascovsky (1968) referred to “the universal resistance to acknowledging mother’s filicidal drives, undoubtedly the most dreaded and uncanny truth for us to face” (p. 390). ³

Of particular relevance to, and in great empathy with, the Duchess’s inability to establish a nurturant maternal bond with her deformed son is Barbosa, Chaud, and Gomes’s moving paper, “Experiences of Mothers of Disabled Children: A Phenomenological Study” (2008). They conceptualize the disabled infant as representing the death of the hoped-for, idealized child—as well as an assault on the mother’s sense of “maternal altruism” (p. 46). In such cases, the feelings of loss are, as in Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), converted into hostility over the lost idealized object and are now directed toward its defective surrogate.

Superb dramaturge that he was, Shakespeare reveals the Duchess’s filicidal wishes toward Richard incrementally—introducing the first such incident almost offhandedly, scripted as an aside, an omission whose motive could be taken, ambiguously, as deliberate or parapraxic. In act 2 Richard kneels before his mother, beseeching her blessing, which gives rise to the following exchange:

Duchess:

God bless thee and put meekness in thy breast,

Love, charity, obedience and true duty.

Richard:

[standing] Amen. [Aside] And make me die a good old man!

That is the butt end of a mother’s blessing;

I marvel that her Grace did leave it out! [2.2.110–114].

Then, as the play progresses, such filicidal wishes find increasingly undisguised expression, reaching their climax in act 4 when the Duchess identifies herself to her son as “she that might have intercepted thee, / By strangling thee in her accursèd womb” (4.4.141–142). Later in that scene, shortly before Richard’s final, fatal battle), she announces her hopes for its outcome: “My prayers promote . . . thine enemies[’] . . . success and victory” (4.4.200–203).

The outpouring of the Duchess’s hatred of Richard continues unabated throughout act 4, scene 4, revealing a lifelong maternal loathing that long precedes his adult villainous acts, extending back into Richard’s earliest years:

. . . by the Holy Rood, thou know’st it well.

Thou cam’st on earth to make the earth my hell.

A grievous burden was thy birth to me;

Tetchy and wayward was thy infancy;

Thy school days frightful, desp’rate, wild, and furious;

Thy prime of manhood daring, bold, and venturous;

Thy age confirmed, proud, subtle, sly, and bloody; . . .

What comfortable hour canst thou name

That ever graced me with thy company? [4.4.171–181].

The Duchess then utters the last words that Richard is to hear from his mother—the two are never again to see each other:

Hear me a word,

For I shall never speak to thee again [4.4.190–191].

Bloody thou art, bloody will be thy end.

Shame was thy life and doth thy death attend [4.4.204–205].

This tirade from Richard’s mother signals her final disowning of her son and provides an appropriate point at which to pause to consider the relevance and heuristic power of a Fairbairnian perspective in understanding the relational dynamics of this ill-fated pair. For Fairbairn (1943), the crucial relational struggle lies in dealing with one’s repressed, unconscious, usually infantile internalized objects, which are conflictedly experienced as both “indispensible and intolerable” (p. 74). The ascription of indispensability to such objects requires that the child “remain attached to them . . . and confer them with power over him” (p. 68).

Unlike Freud, Fairbairn (1944) considers the first internalization to be “bad,” since it involves separation and loss, with Fairbairn reasoning that “it would be pointless to internalize the breast of a mother . . . whose milk is sufficient to satisfy his incorporative needs. It is only later that good objects are internalized to defend the child against bad objects which have been internalized already” (p. 93; emphasis added).

Thus, since the Fairbairnian child is constantly playing a sort of “emotional catch-up” in cathecting good objects, his mother’s role in providing libidinal nurturance is emphasized to a greater degree than it is with his Freudian counterpart, and the absence of such nurturant provision can be catastrophic. Fairbairn (1944) might well have had King Richard’s childhood in mind when he described the ominous plight of the rejected child:

What he experiences at the hands of his mother is a sense of lack of love and, indeed, emotional rejection on her part. This being so, the expression of hate towards her becomes in his eyes a very dangerous procedure. On the one hand, it is calculated to make her reject him all the more, and thus to increase her ‘badness’ and make her seem more real in her capacity of bad object. On the other hand it is calculated to make her love him less, and thus to decrease her ‘goodness’ and make her seem less real (i.e., destroy her) in her capacity of good object. At the same time, it also becomes a dangerous procedure for the child to express his libidinal need, i.e., his nascent love, of his mother in the face of rejection at her hands; for to do so is equivalent to discharging his libido into an emotional vacuum.

. . . It is thus an experience of disintegration and of imminent psychical death [p. 113]. ⁴

This formulation neatly encompasses Richard’s “frozen” position vis-à-vis his internalized rejecting mother—whom it is safe neither to love nor to hate. Richard’s “solution” to this dilemma is to seek out a series of mother-surrogates with whom to repetitively reenact their fateful relationship. Thus, immediately after his mother severs contact with him, Richard turns to his widowed sister-in-law, Queen Elizabeth, whom he urges to induce her daughter to enter into a strategically advantageous incestuous marriage to him. Since under canon law the Church would have forcibly banned such a union and Richard was in no position to antecede Henry VIII’s later break with the Pope, the outrageous proposal appears doomed from the outset, and initially Elizabeth’s vilification echoes his mother’s earlier invective as in act 4, scene 4, she calls him murderous, bloodthirsty, a butcher, and a usurper, into whose eyes she longs to anchor her nails.

But just as Richard’s mother had nurtured the vain hope of her son’s reformation in her prayer that God grant him “meekness . . . / love, charity, obedience and true duty” (2.2.110–111), so too does Richard cynically convince Elizabeth that, by encouraging her daughter’s marriage to him, she will become the instrument of his repentance and redemption, an invitation the old queen finds irresistible as he cajoles her: “As I intend to prosper and repent, / . . . . Plead what I will be, not what I have been” (4.4.420,437). In this same entreaty, even while he is skillfully playing on Elizabeth’s gullibility, he is simultaneously confirming his object-identification of her with the maternal Duchess of York:

Therefore, dear mother—I must call you so—

Be the attorney of my love to her [4.4.435–436].

The tipping point in overcoming the Queen’s resistance to Richard’s incestuous proposal, however, comes in this exchange between them:

Queen Elizabeth:

Yet thou didst kill my children.

Richard:

But in your daughter’s womb I bury them,

Where, in that nest of spicery, they will breed

Selves of themselves, to your recomforture [4.4.445–448].

Richard’s outré insinuation conveys that by inseminating her daughter, he will be providing the older woman a continuing line of royal offspring; he drops the broad oedipal hint that in fantasy it is the mother, rather than the daughter, to whom he will be making love. Her rage now completely soothed and accepting her role as Richard’s intercessor, Elizabeth says:

I go. Write to me very shortly,

And you shall understand from me her mind [4.4.451–452].

She offers no further objection to the incestuous arrangement when Richard instructs her to “bear her my true love’s kiss; and so, farewell” (4.4.453).

After Elizabeth leaves the stage, Richard’s goal of debasing her having been accomplished, he offers this scornful parting aside: “Relenting fool and shallow, changing woman!” (4.4.454).

A similar maternally displaced coercion into disgraced submission is seen in Richard’s earlier courtship of his future wife and murder victim, Anne, in act 1). Their encounter, like the one with Queen Elizabeth, reveals the deeply etched, maternally forged template of Richard’s lifelong relationship to women—controlling, loveless, exploitative, aimed at perpetuating the hatred of those who already despise him, and far more revenge-driven than romantic.

There can be little doubt of Anne’s surrogacy for Richard’s mother, as earlier she has anticipated the latter’s language: “thou hast made the happy earth thy hell” (1.2.52) foreshadows the Duchess’s “Thou cam’st on earth to make the earth my hell” (4.4.172). Throughout Richard’s pursuit of her, Anne replicates his mother’s demonizing imagery of him, calling him a “fiend” (1.2.35), a “foul devil” (1.2.52), and a “lump of foul deformity” (1.2.59) “unfit for any place but hell” (1.2.116).

The incestuous oedipal equation of Anne with the Duchess becomes obvious in Richard’s comment as he schemes to make the former his wife:

What though I killed her husband and her father?

The readiest way to make the wench amends

Is to become her husband and her father [1.1.158–160].

Cursed, spat upon, and echoingly reviled by Anne’s repetitive use of his mother’s epithets, Richard goes so far as to test Anne’s hatred of him by handing her his sword and daring her to kill him. With her piety exceeding her hatred of him, Anne is unable to go this far, telling Richard that “though I wish thy death, / I will not be thy executioner” (1.2.202–203), thus furthering his identification of his wife-to-be with his death-wishing mother. Cynical throughout the encounter, and knowing that once he has availed himself of Anne’s strategic benefit to him he will kill her, even Richard is somewhat bemused at her eventual acceptance of his ring, wondering aloud, “Was ever woman in this humor wooed? / Was ever woman in this humor won?” (1.2.247–248).

Throughout the play, however, the most bitter, vengeful, and despising voice to assail Richard is that of the eldest of his mother-surrogates, Margaret, widow of the slain King Henry VI, and mother of the murdered Prince Edward, both killed by Richard’s hand. The old queen, now destitute and defenseless, finds herself inescapably at the mercy of Richard, whom she views as the very essence of evil, and, steadfastly refusing to seek either his pity or his charity, remains a one-woman Greek chorus of calumny in scene after scene as she unleashes an unrelenting torrent of maledictions and contemptuous curses—repeating the invective of the Duchess, of Anne, and of Elizabeth, and sensing with vengeful glee the early signs of Richard’s approaching doom:

So now prosperity begins to mellow

And drop into the rotten mouth of death [4.4.1–2].

Although Richard responds in kind to Margaret’s unceasing vilification, calling her a “hateful, withered hag,” (1.3.225), he also expresses a grudging admiration and even a degree of empathy for her embittered indefatigability, saying, in this same scene,

I cannot blame her. By God’s holy mother,

She hath had too much wrong, and I repent

My part thereof that I have done to her [1.3.325–327].

These are Richard’s kindest words in the entire play. That they speak tenderly of the woman who has heaped the most virulent outpouring of hate upon him evidences yet again his greater affinity for a familiar hatred than for, to him, an unknown and incomprehensible love. Richard’s tragedy is that these conciliatory words could not be addressed to their rightful but forbidden target—his internalized mother.

While Richard’s relationship with every woman in the play is suffused with a hate-filled rancor, his emotional ties to men are no less malignant. Bitterly envious of one brother and plotting to kill the other, Richard, it becomes apparent as the play progresses, has but one friend: the Duke of Buckingham, a committed, cunning, and crafty consigliere who engineers Richard’s ascent to the throne by successfully spreading the rumor of his mother’s sexual profligacy and his royal brother’s consequent illegitimacy.

In his naive underestimation of the depths of Richard’s murderous malice, Buckingham crafts an intricate plan that would allow Richard to gain the throne without killing his two young nephews, who stand ahead of him in the line of succession. But this compassion infuriates Richard and exposes his sadism in a way that alienates and draws the hatred of the sole character in the play who has shown even a trace of affection for him. Despite this, he will be executed later, on Richard’s order. Buckingham’s “crime” in Richard’s eyes is his asking, in response to Richard’s order that he kill his nephews, for “some little breath, some pause, dear lord, / Before I positively speak in this” (4.1.26–27). This request for “some pause” enrages Richard and reveals what Kris (1976) describes as the exception’s imperious predilection toward “wanting too much”—a demand for quick, unambivalent, and copious gratification that assuages their inability to tolerate disappointment or rejection.

Preceding Kris’s intriguing formulations about the exception’s heightened demand for gratification, Shevrin and Toussieng (1962) described the effects on drive-intensity of tactile over- and understimulation during early infancy, with such disturbances giving rise to “cravings” rather than to more adaptively regulated wishes and desires.

In the other Shakespearean play in which Richard plays a significant role, King Henry VI, Part Three, he likens himself to “an unlicked bear-whelp, / That carries no impression like the dam” (3.2.163–164), a clear metaphoric expression of his having been denied soothing infantile body contact with his mother, a withholding that has become a major source of his arrogant and urgent sense of entitlement, as well as of his tenuous and fragmentary sense of a core identity or selfhood.

In his famous introductory soliloquy to Richard III, the king-to-be loses no time in proclaiming that for him “the winter of discontent” is no seasonal event, but a year-round, ever present, unrelentingly bleak time of loneliness, unlovability, envy, and hate, exacerbated by the unshared joy of those surrounding him in their brief surcease from war—a peace achieved by his “glorious” and heralded brother, Edward, while he, Richard, has been

Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,

Deformed, unfinished . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . so lamely . . . and unfashionable . . .

That dogs bark at me as I halt by them [1.1.19–23].

Richard then asserts his right to be “an exception,” one licensed for miscreance—“therefore, since I cannot prove a lover / . . ., / I am determined to prove a villain” (1.1.28–30)—and launches his fratricidal plot to trick one of his brothers into killing the other.

Two striking absences from this riveting soliloquy—later corrected by Shakespeare—are noteworthy. First, throughout the eloquent grievance, Richard makes no reference, in thought or feeling, to his mother. Second, blame for his deformity is ascribed to an unidentifiable, impersonal, “dissembling nature.” The verbs are blame-avoidantly passive; there is cheating without a cheater, desprivation without a depriver.

Such is not the case in King Henry VI, Part Three, a “prequel” to Richard III in that, while written later, its events had occurred a decade and a half earlier. Here we find a younger Richard reflecting on his physical deformity in a far more poignant way as he soliloquizes:

Why, Love forswore me in my mother’s womb,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

She did corrupt frail Nature with some bribe

To shrink mine arm up like a withered shrub;

To make an envious mountain on my back,

Where sits Deformity to mock my body;

To shape my legs of an unequal size;

To disproportion me in every part,

Like to a Chaos, or an unlicked bear-whelp,

That carries no impression like the dam.

And am I then a man to be beloved?

O monstrous fault to harbor such a thought! [3.2.155–166].

Later in the Henry play, Richard, again with “no impression like [his] dam,” says of himself:

I have no brother, I am like no brother;

And this word “love,” which graybeards call divine,

Be resident in men like one another

And not in me. I am myself alone [5.6.81–84].

These two soliloquies, I suggest, offer a view of Richard’s sense of himself and his deformity widely different from the one portrayed in the soliloquy for which he is best remembered. For one thing, Richard is now far clearer and specific in assigning blame for his disfigurement—ascribing it to a “corrupt” mother who “bribed nature” to render him deformed.

Additionally, it is not the deformity per se that is so searingly distressful to Richard; rather, his pain lies in his mother’s reaction to it. Indeed, by having declared him “a monster,” Richard’s mother antedates Freud (1916) by four centuries in declaring him “an exception”—in her case, an exception to the nourishing and humanity-affirming love that she bestowed upon his brothers.

In consequence of his mother’s perceived dehumanization of him, Richard then spells out a chilling “instruction manual” for the creation of a false and hollow simulacrum of a self, one that is isolated from any feeling of positive connection to others:

Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile,

And cry “Content” to that which grieves my heart,

And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,

And frame my face to all occasions.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I can add colors to the chameleon,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

And set the murderous Machiavel to school [3.2.184–195].

The final scenes of Richard III present the last hours of Richard’s life. They describe his “external” battle to subdue a rebellious army assembled and led by the Duke of Richmond, as well as his “internal” struggle to quell a destabilizing torrent of remorse over his years of murderous betrayal. He loses both battles—decisively, self-collusively, and fatally.

The salient details of Richard’s combat death at Bosworth field—he was the last English king to die in battle—are recounted by the historian Desmond Seward (1984) in Richard III: England’s Black Legend. There Seward points out that Richard entered the fray with a significant numerical advantage over his foe, “perhaps 12,000 to 5,000” (p. 189), superior armor and weaponry (p. 192), and a decidedly better military position, having earlier occupied the high ground near the battlefield (p. 188). Seward describes Richmond’s position as “so inferior that he had only the sketchiest of centres” (p. 193).

The battle itself was brief, lasting but two hours, and is ironically described by Seward as “not exactly another St. Crispin’s day” (p. 186), with the foredoomed king “looking severely pale and haggard” and “on the verge of hysteria” (p. 192). When his horse was killed under him and he was urged to pursue a retreat to safety, Richard is said to have replied, “I will not budge a foot! I will die king of England” (p. 193). In the ensuing charge, Richard was killed—his body stripped and mutilated, and his remains “covered with blood . . . were strapped to a horse and taken to nearby Leicester for a pauper’s burial” (p. 193). ⁵

Parallel to this historical account of Richard’s death, the Shakespearean narrative of that event provides a psychologically congruent view of the last day of his life and, more significantly, of his dreams on the night preceding it. In the short penultimate scenes of Richard III (5.3 and 5.4), Shakespeare captures the vastly different life orientations of the two adversaries, Richard and Richmond, as they prepare for battle, outlooks strikingly comparable to the depressive and the paranoid-schizoid positions described by Melanie Klein (Segal 1964). Richmond has received the blessings of his mother, who “prays continually for [his] good” (5.3.90), and seeks to protect the safety of his stepfather, Lord Stanley, whom Richard suspects of disloyalty and whose son he is holding hostage. Richmond also expresses genuine affection for his soldiers, calling them “fellows in arms, and my most loving friends” (5.2.1) and offering hope, comfort, and encouragement; he optimistically notes “a golden [sun]set / . . . / [that] gives token of a goodly day tomorrow” (5.3.20–22).

Meanwhile, the mother-cursed Richard, alone and frightened in his tent, rejects his evening meal, instead consuming “a bowl of wine” (5.3.77). When he finally drifts off to sleep, he is, in his terrifying dreams, no longer alone. Throughout the night he is haunted by the ghosts of eleven of his victims, including his wife Anne, his brother Clarence, his two nephews, the once-loyal Buckingham, and several others he has betrayed in his relentless quest for power. This vengeful group form a chorus of hate, accusation, and recrimination—as, echoing his mother’s words as her surrogates, they condemn Richard to “Despair and die!” (5.3.134).

Nor were such nightmares confined to Richard’s troubled, pre-apocalyptic sleep on the last night of his life. In her segment of the dream, his murdered wife, Anne, recalls having “never slept a quiet hour with thee” (5.3.170), echoing her earlier memory that “never yet one hour in his bed / Did I enjoy the golden dew of sleep, / But with his timorous dreams was still awaked” (4.1.87–89). These repetitive nightmares bespeak Richard’s constant, if nondeterrant, sense of condemnation and reaffirm the link between his predations and the enduring recriminatory tie to his mother. Indeed, they, like the entire pre-battle nightmare, suggest the heuristic value of a complementary version of Freud’s “criminals from a sense of guilt” theme (1916)—one encompassing an object-relational viewpoint as well as a structural perspective.

A short time later, showing the same “frightful, desperate, wild, and furious” rage that his mother had observed in him (4.4.175), and having ignored his officers’ admonition not to wear the crown-shaped helmet that readily identified him to his enemies, Richard is killed in hand-to-hand combat, bringing to Richmond the crown and to Richard the culmination of his having lived his life in mutual projective identification with his mother as her child of hate.

As I write the foregoing sentence, I am prompted to ask, rhetorically, “But isn’t such mutual projective identification unavoidably present in all parent-child intertwinings?” I believe that it is, but I also think that the Duchess’s reaction to Richard’s deformity and his counterresponse to her rejection lent a fateful intensity and malignancy to their enmeshment.

Richard III is chronicled as Shakespeare’s second play, and even at this early stage in his career the theme of a conflictual mother-son relationship was starkly apparent. It was to reappear in his work throughout his creative life, in Hamlet, Coriolanus, The Tempest, and Macbeth.

Hamlet’s object-tie to his mother, Gertrude, is one of bitter, retributive, and ultimately fatal vengeance for her marriage to his father’s murderous brother, a situation that provided Freud a dramatic early example of oedipality. Writes Norman Holland (1964): “It is not so much that Freud brought the Oedipus complex to Hamlet as that Hamlet brought the Oedipus complex to Freud.” Quoting the letter to Fliess on October 15, 1897, Holland reports Freud as saying, “I have found love of the mother and jealousy of the father in my own case too”; Freud “immediately went on to apply the concept to ‘Oedipus Rex’ and to Hamlet” (p. 59).

Of Volumnia, imperious mother of the warrior-ruler Coriolanus, the Shakespearean scholar Harold Goddard (1951) writes, “She had been little other than an Amazon . . . who so rejoiced in battle and military glory that for her vicarious satisfaction she pushed her son into bloodshed almost before he ceased to be a child. A wolf is said to have suckled Romulus and Remus. Coriolanus did not need any such nourishment. He had its human equivalent” (p. 598).

Less well known, perhaps, is Sycorax, deceased mother of the savage Caliban in The Tempest, described as a “damn’d witch” (1.2.316) who has committed “mischiefs manifold and sorceries terrible / To enter human hearing” (1.2.317–318). Impregnated “by the devil himself,” she brings forth a son, Caliban, “a freckled whelp hag-born—not honored with / A human shape” (1.2.419–420) and possessed of an untamable wildness, “a born devil, on whom nature / Nurture cannot stick” (4.1.211–212).

Additionally, Macbeth, while correctly not considered a play concerned primarily with mothering, contains one reference to the topic which, though brief, is for many the most chilling utterance in the entire gory drama. In berating her husband for his squeamish hesitancy to kill King Duncan, Lady Macbeth says,

I have given suck, and know

How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me.

I would, while it was smiling in my face,

Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums

And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you

Have done to this [1.7.62–67].

These unvaryingly unsympathetic and often tragic portrayals, along with those of Richard and his mother, are representative of the way in which Shakespeare typically depicted the relationship of mothers with their sons; loving and beneficent maternal care is not to be found. Referencing a paper on flawed Shakespearean mothers presented by Dorothy Grunes at the 2006 annual meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, a Psychiatric News reporter raised the question, “Why did [Shakespeare] give them such unfavorable treatment? Did he have something against his own mother?” (Arehart-Treichel 2006).

A cogent reply to that query is provided by Donald Silver (1983) in “The Dark Lady: Loss and Mourning in the Shakespearean Sonnets.” There, with meticulous scholarship, intrepid historical sleuthing (including travel to the locations involved (personal communication, October 2012), and sophisticated, psychoanalytically based reconstructive reasoning, Silver fashioned a vivid portrait of Mary Arden, both as a child and as the adult mother of William Shakespeare. According to Silver, Mary’s own mother died sometime before her daughter’s ninth year; when the girl was eighteen, she married John Shakespeare, about eight years her senior.

Approximately two years later, she gave birth to a daughter, Joan, who apparently died in her second year. Mary’s second child, Margaret, was born about two years after Joan’s death, and died only five months later. The third daughter born to the couple . . . was renamed Joan, after her deceased sibling, suggesting that the mother’s thoughts were still on that early loss. Anne, the youngest and fourth daughter, died when she was eight years old. Thus, with the exception of the second Joan, all of Mary’s daughters died. One year after the death of Margaret, William was born [p. 516].

Silver suggests that the childhood death of three of Mary Arden’s four daughters revived the earlier traumatic loss of her own mother and that her “resulting depression significantly interfered with her ability to mother the poet and left him with a residue of sadness and bitterness that are revealed in his sonnets” (p. 513).

To this credible assumption I would add only that feelings about impaired mothering pervade Shakespeare’s plays as much as they do the sonnets, appearing as early as his second play, Richard III, and continuing throughout his creative years. In his plays he portrayed a series of sons who, fixated on their flawed internalized mothers, can neither give nor receive mature love. Richard’s words near his death speak to his tragic aloneness: he grieves that “there is no creature loves me, / And if I die no soul will pity me” (Richard III, 5.3.212–213). He has achieved his wish to be universally hated and has recognized its irreversibility and the immensity of its cost.

In the bleak, loveless mother-son ambience that pervades Shakespeare’s plays, there is, however, one instance of a genuinely affectionate tie between a mother and her male offspring. In King John, Constance proves to be a caring, devoted mother to her son Arthur, who dies during the unfolding of the play’s narrative. Her eloquent words of mourning leave little doubt of the extent of her grief over her son’s death:

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,

Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,

Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,

Remembers me of all his gracious parts,

Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;

Then, have I reason to be fond of grief? [3.4.95–100].

While the precise date of King John remains inexact, it appears likely that the play was written close to the time (August 1596) that Shakespeare’s own son Hamnet had died at age eleven, and, like Constance, the playwright may well have been in a state of deep grief and mourning for a lost son. Holland (1964) cites the Shakespearean scholar Harold McCurdy in hinting at a link between the two situations: “Perhaps Shakespeare was compensating for the lost Hamnet” (p. 120).

In writing this essay I recalled, as one might imagine, several of my clinical encounters that had ended unsatisfactorily, usually involving a transference-countertransference impasse or a negative therapeutic reaction. In reviewing those cases, I now believe that I erred on the side of overinterpreting the hostility involved, at the expense of underappreciating the power of the patient’s implacable wish to convert me into “a hater”—the “bad-enough object” whose persecutory existence in their lives was felt to be vital to their continuing survival. I now no longer engage in clinical work, but I have found, through colleagues I supervise, a vicarious “second chance,” and we are together experiencing the usefulness of interpreting the wish of some patients to create, as Richard did, a world of bad-enough objects and that they then lament that they are unloved.

This has been a difficult paper for me to write, largely because of its vexingly counterintuitive recognition of the tenacity with which we cling to our bad objects. Fairbairn (1943) referred to the arrangement as analogous to “a Satanic pact” (p. 70). There is, however, a culture in which such “prizing of the despised” is accepted as a given. People who live and work in the gritty, bruising world of semiprofessional boxing also recognize the necessity of retaining their bad objects—capturing the situation thus: “You never throw the punching bag out of the gym,” a fitting summation of my thesis.

This has not been an optimistic paper, for it has directed much of its focus toward a grievous source of human distress—the pain of lifelong antipathy between a mother and her child. There is, however, another, more hopeful side of the picture, equally true as what I have written. These are the words of Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoyevsky 1880):

My dear children . . . you must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If one carries many such memories into life, one is safe to the end of one’s days, and if one has only one good memory left in one’s heart, even that may be the means of saving us [p. 820].