Performing Conscience in Richard III

Abstract

In Early Modern England, conscience presents a point where discourses of subjectivity, religion, law and the theatre converge. Conscience was not only a concept most popular in religious writings, but it was the term most prominent for the analysis of interior experience. Conscience prohibits and produces theatricality, and creates dramatic situations in which external credibility authorizes internal truthfulness. Apart from being anatomized in religious works, conscience, both as a character on stage and as a theme, was an integral part of dramatic literature, above all in Shakespeare. In this paper I investigate into the performativity involved into the notion of conscience itself, in relation to the subject and in recourse to conscience on the stage. I will consider how the performance of conscience relates to contemporary ideas about conscience, and in looking at the structure and dramaturgy of conscience in Shakespeare’s Richard III, I want to suggest that conscience is not so much a moral or thematic concern of the play that reflects on the ethical status of man, but rather a performative mode which relies on the notion of unity and uniformity through difference.