Richard III
Richard is in every way the dominant
character of the play that bears his name, to the extent that he is both the
protagonist of the story and its major villain. Richard III is an
intense exploration of the psychology of evil, and that exploration is centered
on Richard’s mind. Critics sometimes compare Richard to the medieval character,
Vice, who was a flat and one-sided embodiment of evil. However, especially in
the later scenes of the play, Richard proves to be highly self-reflective and
complicated—making his heinous acts all the more chilling.
Perhaps more than in any other play
by Shakespeare, the audience of Richard III experiences a complex,
ambiguous, and highly changeable relationship with the main character. Richard
is clearly a villain—he declares outright in his very first speech that he
intends to stop at nothing to achieve his nefarious designs. But despite his
open allegiance to evil, he is such a charismatic and fascinating figure that,
for much of the play, we are likely to sympathize with him, or at least to be
impressed with him. In this way, our relationship with Richard mimics the other
characters’ relationships with him, conveying a powerful sense of the force of
his personality. Even characters such as Lady Anne, who have an explicit
knowledge of his wickedness, allow themselves to be seduced by his brilliant
wordplay, his skillful argumentation, and his relentless pursuit of his selfish
desires.
Richard’s long, fascinating
monologues, in which he outlines his plans and gleefully confesses all his evil
thoughts, are central to the audience’s experience of Richard. Shakespeare uses
these monologues brilliantly to control the audience’s impression of Richard,
enabling this manipulative protagonist to work his charms on the audience. In
Act I, scene i, for example, Richard dolefully claims that his malice toward
others stems from the fact that he is unloved, and that he is unloved because
of his physical deformity. This claim, which casts the other characters of the
play as villains for punishing Richard for his appearance, makes it easy to
sympathize with Richard during the first scenes of the play.
It quickly becomes apparent,
however, that Richard simply uses his deformity as a tool to gain the sympathy
of others—including us. Richard’s evil is a much more innate part of his
character than simple bitterness about his ugly body. But he uses this speech
to win our trust, and he repeats this ploy throughout his struggle to be
crowned king. After he is crowned king and Richmond begins his uprising,
Richard’s monologues end. Once Richard stops exerting his charisma on the
audience, his real nature becomes much more apparent, and by the end of the
play he can be seen for the monster that he is.
The most famous crime of the
historical Richard III, and the deed for which he was most demonized in the
century following his death, is his murder of the two young princes in the
Tower of London. For centuries after the death of Edward IV, the fate of the
princes was a mystery—all that was known was that they had disappeared. It was
speculated that Richard had them killed, it was speculated that they had spent
their entire lives as prisoners in the tower, and it was speculated that they
had escaped and lived abroad. The English author Sir Thomas More wrote that
they were killed and buried at the foot of a staircase in the White Tower. Many
years later, in 1674, workers in the Tower of London discovered two tiny skeletons
hidden in a chest buried beneath a staircase of the tower. The skeletons date
from approximately the late fifteenth century, and serve as the best evidence
that the young sons of Edward IV were in fact murdered in the tower. There is
still no conclusive proof that it was Richard who had them murdered—some
scholars even think it could have been Richmond. Still, thanks to popular
legend, Shakespeare’s play, and the biography of Richard that More wrote a few
years before the play, Richard has gone down in history as the most likely
culprit.
Because the story of the princes in
the tower was so well known, it was crucial to Richard III that
Shakespeare make the princes memorable and engaging figures despite their youth
and their relatively small roles in the story. As a result, Shakespeare creates
princes who are highly intelligent—they are among the only characters in the
play to see through Richard’s scheme entirely. They are courageous, standing up
fearlessly to the powerful Richard. They are charismatic, outdoing Richard in
games of wordplay. However, they are utterly, pitifully helpless because they
are so young. Though Elizabeth remarks that her younger son is a “parlous boy,”
meaning sharp or mischievous, the princes are never a threat to Richard, and they
are unable to defend themselves against him (II.iv.35). Yet Shakespeare creates
the sense that, had the princes lived, they would have grown up to become more
than a match for their wicked uncle.
Though she plays a very minor role
in the play’s plot, mostly prowling around the castle cursing to herself,
Margaret is nevertheless one of the most important and memorable characters in Richard
III. The impotent, overpowering rage that she directs at Richard and his
family stands for the helpless, righteous anger of all Richard’s victims. The
curses she levels at the royals in Act I, which are among the most startling
and memorable in all of Shakespeare, foreshadow and essentially determine
future events of the play. Her lesson to Elizabeth and the duchess about how to
curse paints a striking picture of the psychology of victimization and the use
of language as a means of alleviating anguish.
As the wife of the dead and
vanquished King Henry VI, Margaret also represents the plight of women under
the patriarchal power structure of Renaissance England. Without a husband to
grant her status and security, she is reduced to depending on the charity of
her family’s murderers to survive—a dire situation that she later wishes on
Elizabeth. Margaret is a one-dimensional character, representing rage and pain,
but she is vital to the play for the sheer focus of torment she brings to the
world surrounding Richard’s irresistible evil.
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