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Summary
Act 3, Scenes 5–10
Act 3, Scene 5
Oliver meets James near the beach where the service will be held. James feels that the lake has turned on them. He urges Oliver not to sleep with Meredith, noting police could take it as motive for Richard’s demise. When Oliver worriedly replies that Richard fell, James agrees and apologizes for making him anxious.
Act 3, Scene 6
The acting students spare Wren sit together for the service on one side, with Richard’s family and the school staff on the other. Dean Holinshed reads a speech about Henry V from Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part 1, lamenting that Richard never got to play this role. Wren speaks, explaining that Richard was like her brother and points to the deaths in Twelfth Night, a comedy, to try to make sense of his loss. Looking at her friends, she cites Hamlet to suggest that they must go on but will be sad for a while. When she returns to her seat, she and Richard’s father sob.
Act 3, Scene 7
The group, minus Wren, gather at the Bore’s Head for a wake. They discuss their dismal holiday plans, and Meredith extends an invitation to New York. They realize that Wren’s break will be the worst of all and wonder if she will return. James insists she must.
Act 3, Scene 8
Thanksgiving is tense at Oliver’s family home. His father snipes at Oliver’s overly thin sister Caroline to eat her food, while his mother bemoans how revealing his other sister’s, Leah’s, shirt is. Leah is interested in Oliver’s performances, asking if he will be in Hamlet in the spring, and the family bickers about acting. After dinner, Oliver’s parents tell him that Caroline must go to a treatment facility for eating disorders and they will not be able to afford his final semester at Dellecher. The conversation is tense and angry.
Act 3, Scene 9
The next day Oliver calls Dellecher and arranges financial aid to fund his final semester. In his childhood bedroom, he recalls Shakespeare has been his companion since he was eleven. Avoiding his father, Oliver refuses to join the family for dinner. Leah brings him a sandwich. He tells her that he will be returning to Dellecher because his friends are like family to him. Except for her, he explains to Leah he doesn’t like his family. After she leaves, he reads Réné Girard’s The Theatre of Envy, which leads him to wonder if Richard was their enemy and why they agreed with Alexander so quickly when he suggested they do nothing. During the night, James arrives at Oliver’s house explaining that he couldn’t bear being at his house in California but that returning to Dellecher wasn’t an option. They share Oliver’s bed and discuss Hamlet before falling asleep.
Act 3, Scene 10
Oliver wakes up to Caroline and Leah looking in at him and James, and making boyfriend jokes about them. While James is getting dressed, Oliver calls Meredith to tell her that he won’t be able to come to New York because James arrived unexpectedly. Her reply is terse.
Analysis
A coming-of-age novel is usually oriented toward the future as the characters pass from youth to adulthood. In If We Were Villains, the decision that the group makes on the dock shifts their relationship to time. Instead of thinking forward, as they had done earlier in the novel when they anticipated their future or the success of the year, now they are stuck, returning in their thoughts to that one moment on the dock. Learning to live with the ramifications of this choice is one of the key elements of the second half of the novel. The school’s decision to temporarily house them in a different building enhances the sense that they are imprisoned by their choice, undermining both their cohesion and their confidence that they did the right thing. Filippa’s use of a passage from Macbeth to convince the group that they must not argue aptly captures their complicated position. Lady Macbeth urges Macbeth not to dwell on the fact that they murdered the king for it cannot be changed, and she attempts to curb his feelings of remorse and insecurity. The use of this passage, then, not only characterizes Filippa as a woman of steely resolve, but it also presents the group’s choice as an action rather than the failure to act, one they cannot undo.
Richard’s memorial service builds further on how the novel represents time in the wake of Richard’s death. As the group arrives, the decorative candles recall for Oliver a line from early in Julius Caesar, the play that inspired the tragedy in their lives. There are ghosts to be reckoned with and the most imposing of them is Richard, whom both speakers at the service admit will not disappear easily. His presence will continue to be felt, they argue. The eulogies simultaneously stress that Richard is not actually gone while lamenting the future that could have been. The dean imagines Richard playing Henry V, a figure from Shakespeare’s history plays, and reads a speech from the opening of Henry VI. A passage from Henry V’s funeral is an apt choice for the dean to read but it resonates differently for his friends. Like the “bad revolting stars” Shakespeare describes, they “consented” to Richard’s death and are responsible for Richard’s lost future and the grief it causes.
Wren’s use of comedy in her eulogy offers a different option, however. In her grief, she has turned to Twelfth Night, one of Shakespeare’s most celebrated comedies, and she reminds the audience that there are deaths in this play as well. It is not the case, she argues, that death necessarily prevents a happy ending for all. What is required is a full recognition that life and death are combined. One should welcome grief for a time, as a way to release both it and Richard himself. The present moment is mired in tragedy, as her citation from Hamlet makes clear, but that does not mean the future must be blighted entirely. Hers is the happier option, but one that her subsequent collapse suggests might not be possible in real life. This is the consensus of her peers, who, in a brief scene at the Bore’s Head, imagine Wren’s life and their immediate future. Both are bleak.
