My favorite author of all time is William Shakespeare. As an English teacher, I always try to toss some Shakespeare into my literature lessons, and while my students don’t always share my enthusiasm for the Bard of Avon, I usually get somewhere with at ,least some of them.
Anyway, this year I managed to give my students an option of two different plays, where each of my students would choose one play to read. The first of those was Richard III, and that one, well, that one is a fairly good portrait of evil.
That said, I do recall what a college professor I had in my undergraduate days had to say about Shakespeare and Richard III. He, a big Shakespeare fan himself teaching a Shakespeare seminar, said that Shakespeare wrote some plays, particularly the early ones, that aren’t very good. I’ve since had the opportunity in my own graduate work to read all of Shakespeare’s plays, and I have to concur with my former professor: some of Shakespeare’s early plays aren’t very good. Now, the professor has said that Richard III was not a great play, but it may be Shakespeare’s first good play. Again, I find myself in agreement there.
So, what kind of play is Richard III? Officially, it’s often referred to as the final play in Shakespeare’s first tetralogy following three lackluster plays about King Henry VI and the Wars of the Roses. Unofficially, it’s the play that teaches most people all they may know, if anything, about the historic Richard III. And, while Richard is most likely the one responsible for the deaths of his nephews and was an actual hunchback, he also was not the cartoon villain Shakespeare portrayed him to be.
Now, there is good reason for that. Shakespeare wrote this play during the reign of Elizabeth I. Her grandfather, Henry VII, overthrew Richard at the Battle of Bosworth Hill, Richard’s body only recently discovered during a parking lot excavation. Likewise, Henry VII’s queen, another Elizabeth, was the daughter of Richard’s brother Edward IV. Making either Henry or Edward look bad was out of the question for any playwright looking to keep his head. But Richard had no descendants, and in order to fully justify the Queen’s grandfather taking the throne under the flimsiest of claims by force from an anointed king, generally one of the biggest no-nos for any play of this period. The answer, then, is to depict Richard as evil as possible.
And, dramatically speaking, we’re all the better for it. Richard may not be a historically accurate representation of the real king, but he is a great representation of evil. From his opening monologue, starting with “Now is the winter of our discontent,” he outlines that, as a man twisted physically who even dogs don’t like, he is going to just be a villain, a plan he’s already set in motion by pitting his two older brothers, Edward IV and the Duke of Clarence, against each other. From there he goes on to woo Lady Anne, a young widow. Anna had been married to the son of Henry VI, and the play’s version of Richard was responsible for the deaths of both father and son. Richard not only woos the young woman, he does so while they are standing next to Henry VI’s corpse.
I gotta say, I love how after Anne finally warms to the man who made her a widow, even Richard seems surprised that what he did worked: “Was ever woman in this humor wooed?/Was ever woman in this humor won?” (1.2.247-8).
But that’s more or less Shakespeare’s Richard. He has a third of all the lines in the play, and he is easily the only character that shows anything like a personality with the possible exception of deposed queen Margaret of Anjou. And let’s face it: people love a good literary villain. Villains like Richard, with their completely irredeemable personalities, are often far more memorable than more benevolent figures like Henry VI is often portrayed to be. We, as the audience, like to watch a character like Shakespeare’s Richard, strut and plot across the stage until their inevitable (sometimes) downfall. There’s shades of Richard III in many works of fiction, like Kevin Spacey’s Frank Underwood.
That said, Richard III is far from a perfect play. It still has some of the hallmarks of early Shakespeare. Sections of it, mostly ones without Richard, are highly melodramatic. Scenes of characters mourning dead loved ones, murdered by Richard’s various schemes, could come across as a contest to see who can mourn the loudest, each exclaiming how none have suffered as much as they due to the loss of their loved ones. And while I actually enjoy Queen Margaret’s role in the play, she seems more like a supernatural figure dispensing divine retribution than a human being. Really, while this play shows how a young author improved with practise, it’s far from a perfect work.
But as a portrait in evil, it is very much worth a read.
Grade: B
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