DHSHX

Richard III: "Looking for Richard," Redux

What is Richard III about?
For a plot synopsis, see the Folger edition's opening page. For a real understanding of the play, you'll need to read Shakespeare's Richard III using the assigned edition for your course, a specific edition required by your professor (strongly recommended). If your professor has not required a hard-copy edition, you may choose your own from your favorite library or read the text of the play in a Digital Edition produced by the Folger Shakespeare Library. Avoid relying on internet summaries or modern-language re-tellings. 

Richard III remains one of Shakespeare's most frequently performed history plays, and its titular character remains one of Shakespeare's greatest villains. Recent discoveries have shed light on the historical King Richard, which you can learn more about from the University of Leicester's facial and vocal reconstruction.

Shakespeare's Richard is probably best known for his first and last speeches, which establish a kind of frame for the play. Most of Shakespeare's plays begin with a conversation between two characters on stage, but Richard III opens with Richard alone on stage delivering a monologue to the audience:

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York,
And all the clouds that loured 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.
Grim-visaged war has smoothed his wrinkled front;
And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute...

Richard's final speech is delivered in the heat of battle:[[Ideally, will embed R3 database here, with framing for exploration and links to YouTube clips showing interpretive angles over time. With that said, the site Jonathan's included may be a better intro!]] 

     As Al Pacino's 1996 Looking for Richard suggests, these moments are ones through which the play has entered popular consciousness. Appreciating Shakespeare's presentation of the king as a portrayal, however, involves engaging the work as a whole and delving into its textual and contextual history. Below are resources to aid your work to this end.

The play's thematic interests include:

Villainy
The play begins with Richard's monologue in which he announces his determination "to prove a villain" (1.1.30). Much of the play revolves around his malevolent plans, and he associates himself with a certain kind of villain, the Vice figure from late medieval drama (3.1.82). The Vice was known for playing tricks on other characters and appealing to audiences through monologues and asides that tried to make members of the audience feel complicit in his villainies. Note how Richard carries out his plans and how his methods change throughout the play. What do other characters think about Richard, and how do they express those thoughts?

Prophesies, Curses & Dreams
Margaret's curses seem to do more than simply foreshadow what happens later in the play. Richard's initial monologue mentions "Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous, / By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams" (1.1.32-3). Yet in a play with many prophecies and dreams, how much control does Richard appear to have over them? How do dreams work in this play? Consider Clarence's lengthy account of his dream (1.4.9-63); Lord Stanley's dream, as described by the messenger in Act 3, Scene 2; and Richard's dream before the battle at Bosworth (starting at 5.3.177). Also, pay attention to curses, especially from Margaret and other women in the play. How accurate do the curses seem, and what kind of power might they have? Why do most of the curses come from women?

[[Include potential visualization here bringing forward clusters that surround the word "dream": Voyant, perhaps AntConc, and potentially VEP work to place these patterns in context.]]

Persuasion
Shakespeare's presentation of Richard's tale casts its central figure as anything but conventionally attractive. (quote lines here) Yet repeatedly, characters initially opposed to Richard find themselves converted to his views. (Anne, Margaret, etc.). Look briefly at the first of these speeches, then the second. How would you describe the rhetorical technique Richard repeatedly uses?

The ancient Greek term for Richard's approach is stichomythia. To see this rhetorical technique in action, click here. [[VEP visualization here with "rules" designed to highlight repeated and related words in these passages.]]

Throughout the play, what, if any, other approaches to persuasion does Richard take? One further scene: the paralleled "Hollow Crown" rallying the troops:Why might Richard's varied approaches prove more or less successful at particular points?

Conscience
Richard III is arguably a play about conscience. Note the dialogue between the two murderers in the Tower of London (starting at 1.4.100). One says that his conscience is within Richard's purse with their reward for the murder. Richard mentions his "coward conscience" before the battle at Bosworth (5.3.179); later in the same scene, he claims that "Conscience is but a word that cowards use" (5.3.309). Where else can you find "conscience" in the play? What tool could you use for this kind of search? What do these lines suggest about how conscience was understood in the period? What if we consider Richard's statements regarding conscience next to Hamlet's similar statement in his "To be or not to be" speech: "Thus conscience does make cowards of us all"?

Activity. [PERHAPS SOMETHING WITH ANTCONC: one approach would be to use KWIC clusters in either AntConc or Voyant.]

Disability
In his famous opening monologue, Richard draws attention to some of the physical deformities that he has had since birth:

Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time
Into this breathing world scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them

Modern playgoers and play-readers often interpret this part of the speech as an attempt to gain the audience's sympathy, but in Shakespeare's time, this was one of several lines in the play that identify Richard as a "monstrous birth." This British Library resource might also be a useful reference for students' further reading.

Ghosts
Ghosts play an important role in some of Shakespeare's plays, most notably Old Hamlet in Hamlet and Banquo in Macbeth. For Richard, the significance of the ghosts has less to do with them as individuals and more to do with them as a group, a kind of procession or pageant of Richard's victims. They come on stage one- or two-at-a-time to curse Richard and praise Richmond.
[[This might be beyond our reach for now, but I'd love to use the language of the near-final accusatory scene as a lens for looking back on ways each character involved has spoken throughout the play. With the right rules, VEP might be useful.]]

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(part 2)

Sources, Influences, Resonances

* Approaching Shakespeare's Angle 

     As brought forward through Richard's ongoing memorial in the English East Midlands town of Leicester, the images we know of Richard were themselves refracted through a particular political lens--here, one concerned to legitimize and glorify the Lancastrian line of Henry Tudor (Henry VII) and his successors. (links to Leicester resources raising questions about R3's complexity) 

    (Jonathan: there might be an argument for using a statement like this as part of the framing...)

* Book History 
    
    Connect here to resources showing as well as stating alternate accounts. 

* Corpus Approaches

--In what ways might patterns in the extant textual record place what we see as Richard's characteristic features in context? (Note: searches of this kind could go several ways: am working out which seem most useful/interesting/productive of further questions.)

(discovery exercise using CQPWeb and Early Print to explore rhetorical patterns we associate with Shx's Richard, but which have wider-ranging foundations in the preserved textual record)

 

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