RICHARD III

1595-96
 S H A K E S P E A R E ’ S H I S T O R I C A L P L AY S
The historical play is a genre that did not exist in ancient Greece (only comedy and
tragedy did), but it became so popular in Shakespeare’s time that the genre imposed itself
as a self-standing one;
Though similar to the tragedy in the sense that it depicts the ‘fall of great men’, a
historical play helps shape the notion of nationhood and further legitimizes the
king/queen/ruling dynasty. https://
www.britannica.com/biography/William-Shakespeare/The-early-histories
In Richard III, Richmond, the man who defeats Richard at Bosworth field and thus
restores the peace, is the future king Henry VII, Elizabeth I’s grandfather. The flattering
way in which Shakespeare depicts Richmond (as a ‘saviour’ that restores peace and
eliminates the usurper) indirectly flatters Queen Elizabeth and emphasizes the legitimacy
of the Tudor dynasty, which unites the belligerent forces of the Houses of York and
Lancaster.
The history plays reassess England’s past and are divided into two tetralogies, as each
series of four plays is in chronological order. Richard III belongs to The War of the Roses
Tetralogy.
Characters:
King Edward IV
Queen Elizabeth, his wife; mother to three THEMES
children: the young prices (killed by Richard as
they pose a threat to his reign) and a daughter,
POWER
Elizabeth, that Richard plans to marry
Richard, Duke of Gloucester (future Richard GOOD VS. EVIL
III) APPEARANCE VS. ESSENCE
George, Duke of Clarence
WOMEN
Duchess of York – mother to King Edward
IV, Richard and Clarence
Lady Margaret- former queen, wife of former
king Henry VI
Queen Anne, widow of prince Edward, Henry
VI’s son
T H E WA R S O F T H E R O S E S ( 1 4 5 5 - 1 4 8 7 )

Called thus as the emblem of each house is a

rose: a red one, for the House of Lancaster, and a
white one, for the House of York.
The play opens on a relaxed, feel-good
atmosphere (jazz music is playing) as a time of
peace has arrived with the coronation of King
Edward IV, Richard’s brother. The 1995 film
starring Ian McKellen as Richard is set in the
1930s, equating Richard’s rise to power to that of
Hitler, but the film captures Richard’s out-of-place-
ness in the overall gleeful proceedings (he’s
attending a party still in his uniform), as well as his
dissembling (ability to pretend), which is the crux
of his character. Play the video for the opening
scene.
Shakespeare’s play begins directly with Richard’s famous soliloquy ‘This is the winter of
our discontent’- a statement referring to the recent political reality of peace, the end
(‘winter’) of war (‘discontent’). While the first part seems to sing the praises of the new-
found joys of
peace (soldiers have hung of their suits of armour, war-mongering has been replaced with
love-making), the second part lets Richard’s real intentions shine through. A sample of the
character’s defining duplicity, the soliloquy ends with Richard imparting his plans of
turning one brother against another (he will later benefit from this by being the sole royal
adult able to reign, as his nephews are too young to be crowned).
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures. How has ‘grim-
viaged
Grim-visaged war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front; war changed’ in
peace time?
And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries, Which implications does the
word
He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber ‘caper’ have? Is it a
‘masculine’
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute. way to walk?
But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time He was born
prematurely
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up, He has a physical
disability
And that so lamely and unfashionable He is so ugly dogs don’t
recognize
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them; him for a human
and
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace, bark when they see
him
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the king
In deadly hate the one against the other:
And if King Edward be as true and just
As I am subtle, false and treacherous,
This day should Clarence closely be mew'd up,
About a prophecy, which says that 'G'
Of Edward's heirs the murderer shall be.
Dive, thoughts, down to my soul: here
Clarence comes.
Questions:

1. Which expression which refer to peacetime as ‘unmanly’ does

Richard use?
2. What’s the reason behind Richard’s preference for wartime?
3. What is he suggesting about the current king’s behaviour?
4. Which prophecy is he referring to and how does he plan to use it?
5. How would Richard benefit from his brothers, King Edward and
Clarence, fighting?
6. In the second line, the phrase ‘sun of York’ is a pun, as ‘sun’ is a
homophone of ‘son’. The ‘son of York’ is, of course, king Edward
(the ‘son’ , or representative, of the winning house of York), who has
brought ‘summer’ (peace), ending ‘the winter of our discontent’ (the
War of the Roses). Which new dynasty will be formed by uniting the
two warring houses (York and Lancaster) by the marriage of
Elizabeth and Richmond, after Richard’s defeat at the end of the
play?
 RICHARD’S RISE TO POWER
 He tells Edward about the prophecy that a person whose name starts
with ‘G’ will murder the king’s heirs, hinting that it could be their
brother, George. The prophecy is, of course, referring to Richard, as his
title also begins with a ‘G’ (Gloucester). The king has George
imprisoned in the Tower.
 In order for him to strengthen his connections to royalty, he woos and
marries Lady Anne, the former king’s daughter-in-law, whose husband
he had killed on the battlefield, at Tewksbury (what a sick pervert,
right!?).
 King Edward issues an order to kill George, but then changes his mind
and withdraws it. Richard, however, hires two assassins to kill George
anyway, telling the king that the order was never reversed. The blow is
fatal to the already ill King – the guilt of having killed his own brother
sends him to an early grave.
 The question of who is going to inherit the throne arises, as Edward’s two sons are
too young to be crowned. Furthermore, Richard had also spread rumors about the
legitimacy of the children. With the support of his allies, Richard is asked to be
Lord Protector, i.e. to rule until his nephews come of age. He rejects the offer at
first, claiming that the responsibility would be too much, but then accepts.
 Lady Anne, Richard’s wife, dies.
 After becoming Lord Protector, Richard removes the two young princes to the
Tower, allegedly for their own safety. He will later have them killed.
 The former queen Elizabeth, who has lost her sons and is trying to protect her
daughter, is approached by Richard. He would like to marry young Elizabeth
(who is his niece!) so that he is further connected to the throne. She pretends to
agree.
 As Richard’s abuse of power has become obvious (he has also lost some of his
allies, whom he has failed to reward for their help), the opposing faction gathers
an army.
 The Battle of Bosworth. The night before, Richard’s defeat is prophesied, as the
ghosts of all the people he has unjustly killed visit him. They curse him (‘Despair and
die!). The battle is won by Richmond, who will marry young Elizabeth , unite the
houses of York and Lancaster and thus form the Tudor dynasty. He is the future
Henry VII, Elizabeth I’s grandfather.
 RICHARD’S ‘DISSEMBLING’: THE
C O U RT S H I P O F A N N E

In Shakespeare’s play, Richard approaches

Lady Anne with a love pledge in the most
inappropriate of circumstances, as she is
walking behind her father-in-law’s coffin in
the funeral procession. The film adaptation
takes things one step further, placing the
encounter between the two at the morgue,
over the husband’s dead body (the phrase
‘over my dead body’ takes on another
meaning here, am I right?), to underscore
Richard’s lack of scruples in climbing the
social ladder and reaching his goal.
Watch the clip and answer the questions in
the next slide.
Questions:

1. Richard’s duplicity is so masterful that, in the space of just one

scene that begins very unpromising (Anne verbally attacks him, as
he is her husband’s murderer, insults him– ‘Toad, thou dost infect
mine eyes!’, spits on him), he manages to completely turn the
situation around. Which arguments does he use to persuade her?
2. Why do you think Lady Anne accepts to marry him?
3. How much power do the female character in Richard III have?
(Queen Elizabeth, her daughter, Lady Anne, Queen Margaret, the
Duchess of York)
 RICHARD’S DISSEMBLING: HE IS ASKED
TO REIGN

Watch the clip and answer the

questions:
 In the beginning of the
previous clip, what prophetic
curse had Lady Anne made
before agreeing to marry
Richard??
 How does Richard wish to
appear before the council?
What does he pretend to do
right before?
 THE KILLING OF CLARENCE

The imprisoned Clarence has a

premonitory dream, in which Richard
and him are on a ship and his brother
pushes him into the water by accident.
He remembers the sensation of drowning
quite vividly. The actual murder scene
involves the paid assassins drowning
Clarence into a keg of wine. This is just
one of the instances in which dreams and
prophecies occur in the play: Richard
will also have a prophetic dream before
the decisive battle of Bosworth.
 WOMEN AND LANGUAGE IN RICHARD III
The adjoining lines, belonging to Henry VI’s
widow, the former Queen Margaret, are just a sample
of the vituperative language used by the women in
the play. Widowed and grieving for their husbands
and children or fearing for their lives, the female
characters are doubly punished: they see their loved
ones die and are powerless in preventing or avenging
it. Moreover, they are simply treated as a means to an
end: though they have no power themselves, their as
used as political pawns to secure it through marriage,
with complete disregard for any wishes or desires of
their own. Consequently, their rage and bitterness can
only be expressed in their scathing language, in
obliterating curses and imprecations.
No sleep close up that deadly eye of
thine,
Unless it be while some tormenting
dream
Affrights thee with a hell of ugly
devils.
Thou elvish-marked, abortive,
rooting hog,
Thou that wast sealed in thy nativity
The slave of nature and the son of
hell.
Thou slander of thy heavy mother’s
womb.
Thou loathèd issue of thy father’s
loins.
Thou rag of honour, thou detested—
 Lady Anne:
O, gentlemen, see, see! dead Henry's wounds According to popular superstition,
Open their congeal'd mouths and bleed afresh! the corpse’s wounds bleed in the
Blush, Blush, thou lump of foul deformity; presence of the murderer.

In the case of Lady Anne, the flattery she receives from Richard (who tells her it was
her beauty that prompted him to kill her husband) is not the only reason to marry him.
Widows who no longer have a connection to the throne (like Queen Margaret, who lost king
Henry and her son, Edward) are essentially dispensable. By marrying someone with a chance
of becoming king, Anne thinks she is putting herself in a position of safety and prestige.
Ironically, she begins by cursing Richard and his future wife , which she herself will later
become. (‘Cursed the blood that let this blood from hence. Cursed the heart that had the heart
to do... If ever he have child, abortive be it...If ever he have wife, let her be made more
miserable by the death of him that I am by my young lord and thee.’)
After Anne accepts him despite most unlikely odds, Richard has a jubilatory moment of
his own in which the imagery of the ‘sun’ and ‘mirror’ from his ‘winter of our discontent’
soliloquy is reprised. If, in the beginning, Richard had stated his determination ‘to be a
villain and hate the idle pleasures of these days’, it was because ‘I cannot prove a lover’- his
physical impairments prevent him from being desirable to the fair sex.
 Peacetime is boring (‘I […] have no delight to pass away the time’) for Richard, who
compensates from his failures in love by being a man of arms in times of war and
plotting (‘plots have I laid, inductions dangerous) when the war halts. The terms he uses
to refer to courtship are disparaging; the men are depicted as weak (‘this weak piping
time of peace’) and the women are ‘wanton’ (‘a wanton ambling nymph’). In the
following excerpt, however, Richard’s pretending has proven so effective that he has
convinced himself he can indeed be a lover. Staring into the looking glass, the very
thing he hated in times of peace time as it only served to remind him of his
ugliness(‘have no delight to pass away the time /Unless to spy my shadow in the
sun/and descant on my own deformity’), his frustration with being in his brother’s
shadow (the sun/son refers to King Edward) has now become desirable. Richard no
longer has a problem with the ‘sun’, as he his days on the throne are numbered with him
inching closer to his goal:
I'll be at charges for a looking-glass,
And entertain some score or two of tailors,
To study fashions to adorn my body:
[…]
Shine out, fair sun, till I have bought a glass,
That I may see my shadow as I pass.
 RICHARD ’S CONSCIENCE
Richard:The lights burn blue. It is now dead
midnight.
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.
What do I fear? Myself? There’s none else by.
Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am.
Then fly! What, from myself? Great reason. Why:
Lest I revenge. Myself upon myself?
Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O no, alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself.
I am a villain.  (V.v.134–145)
Although he seems not to have
one at all, Richard’s conscience is
shaken after the visitation of the
ghosts. In what seem split-
personality gibberish, the adjoining
lines show his incapacity to process
this new-found, fear-triggering,
conscience, as he acknowledges that
he is a murderser, therefore he
cannot love himself. By saying that
he ‘cannot fly’ (run) from himself,
he admits that he needs to face the
consequences of his own actions,
which are imminent.
 THE BOAR, THE TOAD, THE HEDGEHOG

Richard’s physical deformity is the butt of the women’s insults: Queen

Margaret calls him an ‘abortive hog’, Anne calls him ‘a hedgehog’ and a
poisonous toad. There are references not only to their feelings of repulsion
about Richard’s physical and moral impairments, but to his military
emblem, as well: Gloucester’s coat of arms is a wild boar.

If you watch the 1995 film, more precisely Richard’d coronation scene at
1:48,
you will see the emblem all over his flags. A gruesome image of him as a
boar also appears in Clarence’s dream – it is an allusion to the character’s
baseness, his primitive instincts, his cruelty and lack of scruples.
 F U RT H E R R E A D I N G A N D B I B L I O G R A P H Y

 https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/richard-iii-and-the-will-to-power

 https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/richard-iii-and-machiavelli

 https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/richard-iii-and-the-staging-of-di

sability