‘UNFELT IMAGINATION’

Mirroring is a dominant idea in the play, from Richard's sequence of soliloquies in the first act onwards. There they chart a growing self-confidence. At the start he is, by his own account, ‘nor made to court an amorous looking-glass’ (I.i.15). In the idea that the looking-glass is itself ‘amorous’, there is a narcissistic conflation of the imaginary lady and his own reflection; the lady is there to reflect him, but it is himself whom he courts, to woo his likeness into a liking of himself. Anne fulfils this function to the extent that purchasing an actual full-length glass – a large financial outlay in Shakespeare's time, let alone in the middle ages – becomes a plausible fantasy:

For Cibber this isn't quite extravagant enough; his ‘I'll have my Chambers lin'd with Looking-Glass’ takes one back to the ‘fops’ and dandies of eighteenth-century comedy, the roles in which he made his name.

‘Mirroring’ structures the play dramatically. After its midpoint, which is also its most self-referentially histrionic – Richard's performance to the mayor and citizens – events repeat and earlier scenes are echoed. The difference is that while the first half of the play showed Richard on an upward trajectory, the emphasis in the second is on his loss of control; this is the downward part of the arc of his career. The princes’ murderers are appalled by what they have done; Clarence's had not been; Margaret's second appearance is gloatingly triumphant, where her first was pathetic, and Buckingham is no longer a reliable ally. And Elizabeth, as we shall see, seems to escape where Anne succumbed.

Richard's end is a mirror to that of Clarence, his first victim in the play. Even if Richard has found literal mirrors to be unexpectedly benign, the mirror structure, in its implications of fatality, is intrinsically threatening. Both the brothers are visited, on the eve of their death, by dreams and by the ghosts of their past crimes.