Richard III
Character Profile – At a Glance
- Role: Richard, Duke of Gloucester, youngest brother of King Edward. He murders his way to the throne and reigns as King Richard III. He is the play’s protagonist, its villain and, for most of its length, its narrator.
- Key Traits: Brilliant, funny and quick. A superb actor who tells the audience the truth and everyone else lies. He is physically deformed, and he makes that deformity the excuse for everything he does.
- The Core Conflict: Richard against everyone, and finally Richard against himself. For four acts he needs the audience on his side. The moment he wins the crown, he loses both the audience and his own nerve.
- Key Actions: Has Clarence imprisoned and murdered (Act 1). Woos Lady Anne over the corpse of Henry VI (A1S2). Has Rivers, Grey and Vaughan executed and Hastings beheaded (Act 3). Stages the show at Baynard’s Castle so that he can be begged to take the crown (A3S7). Orders the murder of the princes in the Tower (A4S2). Turns on Buckingham. Tries to buy Queen Elizabeth’s daughter (A4S4). Is visited by eleven ghosts (A5S3). Dies fighting at Bosworth (A5S4).
- Famous Quote:
"Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York..."
(Act 1, Scene 1) - The Outcome: Killed in battle by Richmond, who becomes Henry VII and ends the Wars of the Roses. Richard’s last words are for a horse.
Determined to Prove a Villain
No other Shakespeare play opens with its villain alone on stage, and no other villain begins by explaining himself. Richard walks on, describes a country at peace, and then describes himself: a man built wrong, who cannot join the peace and therefore intends to wreck it.
Original
I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion,
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 –
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to see my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity.
(Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Me, robbed of beauty in my face and body,
Me, cheated out of features and proportions,
Deformed because I was born prematurely,
Arriving incomplete in this cruel world,
Appearing crippled, ugly and infirm
So dogs bark at me when I limp on by.
As there’s no war, we hear the pipes of peace
And I’ve no other way to pass the time
Except observing my distorted shadow,
Articulating how I am deformed.
The logic is stated as if it were obvious. Because he is deformed he cannot be a lover; because he cannot be a lover he will be a villain. The argument does not hold – plenty of people are unlovely without turning to murder – and we accept it anyway, because Richard has spoken to us first and spoken well. The speech is a bargain with the audience, and the audience takes it.
Notice, too, how much pleasure is in the lines. To "descant on mine own deformity" means to compose variations on the theme, and that is exactly what he is doing: turning his body into a set of witty phrases. The self-pity is real and it is also a performance. That double quality – the wound and the joke about the wound – is the key to the whole part, and to the play’s treatment of appearance and reality.
Was Ever Woman in This Humour Wooed?
A1S2 is the most audacious scene in the play. Lady Anne is following the corpse of Henry VI, whom Richard killed. She is the widow of Henry’s son, whom Richard also killed. Richard stops the funeral, takes her curses, offers her his sword and his bare chest, and by the end of the scene she has accepted his ring. Then he turns to us.
Original
Was ever woman in this humour wooed?
Was ever woman in this humour won?
I’ll have her, but I will not keep her long.
What? I, that killed her husband and his father,
To take her in her heart’s extremest hate,
With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes,
The bleeding witness of my hatred by,
Having God, her conscience, and these bars against me,
And I no friends to back my suit at all
But the plain devil and dissembling looks?
And yet to win her! All the world to nothing!
(Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Has any woman in this mood been courted?
Has any woman like this been seduced?
I’ll win her over but won’t keep her long.
What, me? Who killed her husband and his father,
To win her over whilst her heart detests me,
As she spits vulgar curses, teary eyed,
The bleeding corpse she wails for right beside me,
With God, her conscience, and her claims against me,
Whilst I’ve no friends willing to back me up
Except the devil and my feigning looks?
And yet, against the odds, I’ve won her over!
He is as astonished as we are, and that is the point. He does not tell us how he did it; he lists the odds against him and then simply gloats. The scene was meant to be impossible, and its impossibility is what he wants us to admire.
How he did it is worth setting out, because the technique recurs throughout the play. He never denies the killings for long. He redirects them: her beauty made him do it, so the deaths are her fault; a man who will kneel and beg to be stabbed must be sincere; the only way she can be revenged on him is to take him. Each step is absurd, and each is delivered with such speed and confidence that Anne never finds the gap between them. It is manipulation and deceit as a performance art, and Richard is honest about the performance the moment she leaves.
Seem a Saint, When Most I Play the Devil
Richard is an actor before he is a murderer, and the play keeps showing us the wings. In A1S3 he has just brawled with the Queen’s family, in front of witnesses, in the character of a plain blunt man too honest for the court. Left alone, he explains the trick.
Original
But then I sigh, and, with a piece of scripture,
Tell them that God bids us do good for evil:
And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stol’n forth of holy writ,
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
But then I sigh, and, quoting from the Bible,
Say God bids us return good deeds for evil:
And so I hide my truly wicked nature
By quoting random phrases from the Bible;
It makes me look a saint, but I’m the devil.
The scripture, the sighing and the talk of forgiveness are costume. Underneath is a man who has arranged Clarence’s imprisonment and is now weeping over it to the very people he needs to blame the Queen for it. He tells us this with pride. He is not confessing; he is showing off.
The theatrical metaphor runs through the play. In A3S1 he compares himself to the Vice of the old morality plays, the comic devil who winked at the crowd while he did his damage. In A3S5 he coaches Buckingham to "counterfeit the deep tragedian" for the Lord Mayor. In A3S7 he appears between two bishops, prayer book in hand, and has to be begged three times to accept a crown he has spent two acts arranging. Richard’s power rests on the gap between what people see and what is true, and the audience is the only party allowed on both sides of it. That is why the play’s treatment of appearance and reality feels like a shared secret rather than a lesson.
So Far in Blood
Something changes when he is crowned. A4S2 opens with Richard on the throne and immediately asking Buckingham to kill the two boys in the Tower. Buckingham, who has never hesitated before, asks for a moment to think. Richard notices, and the noticing is the beginning of the end.
Original
But I am in
So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin.
Tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye.
(Act 4, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
But I am now so committed
In blood, each sin requires another sin.
There’ll be no tears of pity in these eyes.
The soliloquies shrink. The jokes go. The man who confided in us at leisure now speaks in short, harried bursts, sending for Tyrrel, checking on rumours, refusing Buckingham the earldom he promised him. The famous line about not being in the giving vein is the sound of a partnership ending in real time. Within a scene Buckingham has fled to raise an army.
What Richard has lost is the position from which he was strong. As Duke of Gloucester he stood outside the system and played it; as king he is the system, and every threat now comes towards him rather than from him. The play’s study of power and ambition turns on this reversal: the crown he wanted so badly is the one thing that makes him ordinary.
Richard Loves Richard
On the night before Bosworth the ghosts of everyone he has killed file through his tent, each one ending with the same command: despair and die. He wakes, and for the first time in the play he speaks to himself rather than to us.
Original
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. What, 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.
(Act 5, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
What am I scared of? Me? There’s no one else here.
Richard loves Richard, that is, I’m just me.
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am.
Then run! Run from myself? Why should I do that…
In case I seek revenge? What, from myself?
Alas, I love myself. But why? For good deeds
Committed in self-interest by myself?
Oh no! Alas, I really hate myself
For all the awful deeds that I have done.
The speech is written as a quarrel between two Richards, and neither wins. He is a villain; no, he is not. He loves himself; no, he hates himself. The wit that once served him against others is now turned inward and it produces only contradiction. The audience has been his accomplice for four acts, and he no longer seems to know we are there.
It does not last. Within a hundred lines he has decided that conscience is a word invented by cowards, and he goes into battle roaring. Whether the dream changes anything is one of the play’s open questions, and it is where the theme of conscience and guilt is decided one way or the other. What is certain is that the play has shown us, for a moment, what it costs him to be what he is.
"The Richard of Shakespear is towering and lofty; equally impetuous and commanding; haughty, violent, and subtle; bold and treacherous; confident in his strength as well as in his cunning; raised high by his birth, and higher by his talents and his crimes; a royal usurper, a princely hypocrite, a tyrant and a murderer of the house of Plantagenet."
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, 1817
Key Quotes
Quote 1
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York;
And all the clouds that lowered upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
(Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Like winter ends the year, our sorrow ends,
For Edward, son of Duke of York, rules brightly;
And all those sullen clouds that brought us anguish
Have turned to water, buried in the ocean.
Quote Analysis: The most famous opening in Shakespeare, and it is a trick. "Now is the winter" sounds like a complaint until the second line reveals it is a boast: the winter is over, York has won, the sun is out. The pun on son and sun points at King Edward, the son of York who is now king. Richard delivers eleven more lines of this sunny public verse before the word "But" turns the speech inward, and everything after it is about him. The structure of the speech is the structure of the man: the smooth surface first, then the truth underneath.
Thus, like the formal Vice, Iniquity,
I moralise two meanings in one word.
(Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Like in old plays, Iniquity was evil,
And like him, I twist meanings of a word.
Quote Analysis: An aside, spoken to us while the young Prince of Wales stands beside him. Richard has just said that the wise die young, and the boy has not understood; Richard explains to the audience that he is doing what the Vice did in the old morality plays – saying one thing and meaning another, and enjoying the difference. It is the play’s most explicit statement of what kind of villain he is. The Vice was a comedian who made the audience laugh while he damned the hero. Richard knows the tradition, names it, and expects us to be pleased.
I am not in the giving vein today.
(Act 4, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I am not in a giving mood today.
Quote Analysis: Buckingham has just asked, for the second time, for the earldom Richard promised him. Richard has been talking over him about Richmond and a prophecy, and this is his answer. The line is small and the moment is enormous: the alliance that took Richard to the throne ends here, in a refusal so casual that Buckingham cannot at first believe it. Kings who are secure can afford to keep their promises. Richard, three scenes into his reign, already cannot.
Slave, I have set my life upon a cast,
And I will stand the hazard of the die.
I think there be six Richmonds in the field;
Five have I slain today in stead of him.
A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!
(Act 5, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I’ve risked my life on one throw of the dice,
And I will stand by what the dice reveal;
It seems this battle has six Earls of Richmond;
I’ve slaughtered five, but not the one I want.
A horse! I’d give my kingdom for a horse!
Quote Analysis: The last words Richard speaks, and the play’s most quoted line after the first one. Catesby has just offered to help him to a horse so that he can escape; Richard calls him a slave and refuses. He has been fighting like a man looking for Richmond and nothing else, cutting down five men in Richmond’s colours. "My kingdom for a horse" is not despair. It is a gambler naming his stake. He has staked everything on one throw, the dice have fallen, and he goes back into the battle on foot to find out how they landed.
Key Takeaways
- The Villain Who Tells Us First: Richard opens the play by explaining his plans to the audience, and for four acts we know more than any character on stage.
- The Actor: He plays the loyal brother, the plain soldier, the reluctant king and the grieving lover. The only honest Richard is the one who talks to us.
- The Crown Changes Everything: As Duke of Gloucester he is unbeatable. As king he is anxious, short-tempered and alone, and the soliloquies stop.
- Conscience Arrives Too Late: The ghosts and the night-time soliloquy show what his crimes have cost him. He shrugs it off by morning and dies fighting.
Study Questions and Analysis
Why does Richard say he is "determined to prove a villain"?
Because he has just told us he cannot be anything else, and the play wants us to notice that the reasoning is faulty. Richard opens by describing a peace he cannot share – he is not shaped for lovers’ games, dogs bark at him in the street – and concludes:
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.
(Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
And therefore, since I cannot be a lover
To keep me occupied within our peacetime,
I am determined that I’ll be a villain,
Destroying this frivolity of peace.
"Determined" carries two meanings: he has resolved to be a villain, and he has been made one by nature. The line leaves both open, which is the whole question of the play’s treatment of fate and free will. Is Richard’s deformity the cause of his wickedness, or the excuse he has chosen for it?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his 1811–12 lectures, took the first view: "The inferiority of his person made the hero seek consolation and compensation in the superiority of his intellect." Sigmund Freud, in "Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work" (1916), found the soliloquy so persuasive precisely because it appeals to a grievance everyone shares: "Richard is an enormous magnification of something we find in ourselves as well. We all think we have reason to reproach Nature and our destiny for congenital and infantile disadvantages; we all demand reparation for early wounds to our narcissism, our self-love."
Marjorie Garber’s "Descanting on Deformity" (in Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers, 1987) turns the question round: the deformity is not the cause of Richard’s history but the shape the Tudor historians gave him after the fact, a crooked body for a crooked reign. More recent disability studies, notably Katherine Schaap Williams’s "Enabling Richard" (2009), read the soliloquy as Richard seizing the story others tell about his body and using it as a weapon. On any of these readings the line "I am determined" is where a man announces that he will be what he has been called.
How does Richard manage to win Lady Anne?
By refusing to argue on her terms and never stopping. Lady Anne arrives with every advantage: the corpse, the facts, the moral high ground and a set of curses. Richard concedes almost nothing and redirects everything. He did not kill her husband; then he did, but her beauty drove him to it; her beauty is his day and his life; the man who took her husband did it to give her a better one. When words run out he kneels and hands her his sword.
Nay, do not pause: for I did kill King Henry –
But ’twas thy beauty that provoked me.
Nay, now dispatch: ’twas I that stabbed young Edward
But ’twas thy heavenly face that set me on.
(Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
No, do not wait: for I have killed King Henry…
Although it was your beauty that provoked me.
Now, go ahead: I killed your husband Edward,
Despite the fact your beauty made me do it.
The confession is the masterstroke. He has been denying the killings for a hundred lines; now he admits both, in the same breath as he blames her for them, with his chest bared. Anne cannot strike, and the failure to strike is what he needs. From that moment she is negotiating, and he closes the deal with a ring.
William Hazlitt, in Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817), thought the scene belonged to the actor rather than the lover: Richard "should woo less as a lover than as an actor — to shew his mental superiority, and power of making others the play-things of his purposes." That is the standard view and it is probably right; Richard tells us afterwards that he will not keep her long. Jan Kott, in Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964), read the scene more darkly, as a demonstration of what the play’s political world does to everyone in it: Anne’s surrender is not a lapse of character but a recognition that Richard is the only power left standing. Both readings agree that Shakespeare has deliberately made the scene impossible. Richard says so himself as soon as she has gone.
Is Richard a Vice, a Machiavel or a tragic hero?
He is all three at different moments, and the play’s energy comes from the switching. The Vice was the comic devil of the medieval morality plays, a figure who confided in the audience, delighted in his own tricks and was carried off to hell at the end. Richard names the tradition himself in A3S1, and his soliloquies follow its pattern exactly:
I do the wrong, and first begin to brawl.
The secret mischiefs that I set abroach
I lay unto the grievous charge of others.
(Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I do the wrong and instigate the fights.
The secret tricks and traps I set in motion
I surreptitiously pin blame on others.
Bernard Spivack’s Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (1958) traced this inheritance in detail, arguing that Richard’s intimacy with the audience, his glee and his habit of announcing each trick before he plays it all come from the Vice. Robert Weimann, in Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater (1978), placed the same figure in the physical theatre: the Vice worked at the front of the stage, close to the crowd, and Richard’s asides put him there.
The Machiavel is a different inheritance: the Elizabethan stage version of Machiavelli’s prince, who treats politics as pure technique and religion as a useful mask. Richard’s use of scripture, his staged reluctance at Baynard’s Castle and his treatment of Buckingham are Machiavellian in this sense, and Emrys Jones, in The Origins of Shakespeare (1977), added a third strand, the Senecan tyrant, whose bombast surfaces whenever Richard is threatened.
A. P. Rossiter’s lecture "Angel with Horns" (published 1961) argued that these inherited types are held together by something none of them possessed: a sense of humour, and with it a capacity to make the audience complicit. The tragic-hero reading rests almost entirely on A5S3, where Richard for the first time turns his wit on himself and finds nothing to stand on. Nicholas Brooke’s Shakespeare’s Early Tragedies (1968) treats the play as tragedy on exactly this ground. Whether one scene of self-division makes a tragic hero of a man who has enjoyed himself for four acts is a fair question for an essay, and the play does not settle it.
Why does Richard’s power collapse once he is king?
Because everything that made him effective depended on not being king. As Duke of Gloucester he could stand outside the court, blame the Queen’s family for his own plots, play the honest soldier and let others carry the risk. As king there is no one left to blame and nowhere to stand. The first thing he does on the throne is ask for two more murders, and his ablest ally hesitates.
Cousin, thou wast not wont to be so dull.
Shall I be plain? I wish the bastards dead,
And I would have it suddenly performed.
(Act 4, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Cousin, you haven’t always been so stupid.
Shall I be clear? I want those bastards dead,
And I would like it done immediately.
Buckingham has just carried Richard to the crown through the show at Baynard’s Castle. He has never before needed a plan explained to him twice. The hesitation is not conscience so much as calculation – Buckingham can see that the murder of two children is a different kind of crime – and Richard’s contempt for the hesitation is what drives him away. From this scene on Richard trusts no one, promises nothing he keeps, and reads every message as bad news.
Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964) described the histories as a "Grand Mechanism", a staircase of kings on which each usurper climbs over the last and is thrown down by the next; on this reading Richard’s fall is not a personal failure but the machine turning. Stephen Greenblatt’s Tyrant (2018) looks instead at the people around him: Richard reaches the throne through what Greenblatt calls enablers, and a tyrant whose enablers desert him has nothing of his own to fall back on. Greenblatt’s Richard "is pathologically narcissistic and supremely arrogant", and narcissists do not manage decline well.
There is also a plainer theatrical explanation. Shakespeare gives Richard fewer and shorter soliloquies after the coronation, and the ones he has are anxious rather than confiding. The audience’s pleasure in Richard was built on those speeches. Take them away and what remains is a frightened man giving orders.
Does Richard have a conscience?
The play gives two answers within a hundred lines, and asks us to hold both. After the ghosts, Richard wakes in a sweat and interrogates himself: is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am. His conscience, he says, has a thousand tongues and every one of them condemns him. Then dawn comes, Ratcliffe arrives, and Richard addresses his army.
Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe:
Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law!
(Act 5, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
‘Conscience’ is just a word that cowards use
At first to keep those stronger men in awe:
Our strength will show we’re right, swords prove our law!
The speed of the recovery is the point. Richard has not resolved the crisis; he has decided not to have it. The couplet is defiant, quotable and entirely in character, and it is followed by his last real soliloquy: a short, bleak note that the sun will not shine on him today.
Wolfgang Clemen’s A Commentary on Shakespeare’s Richard III (1968) treats the dream soliloquy as the one place where the play’s rhetorical machinery breaks down into something like real speech, with its broken half-lines and questions with no one to answer them. Harold C. Goddard, in The Meaning of Shakespeare (1951), saw the whole play as building towards it: the conscience Richard denies is the conscience the play has been keeping for him, in the curses of Queen Margaret and the guilt of the men he has used. The murderers in A1S4 spend a whole scene arguing about conscience before they kill Clarence; the Second Murderer decides it is a dangerous thing that "makes a man a coward". Richard’s battle speech says the same thing, and the echo is deliberate.
The most useful way to put it is that Richard has a conscience and refuses it. The play shows the refusal costing him a night’s sleep and, arguably, the battle. What it does not show is repentance. He dies, as E. M. W. Tillyard observed in Shakespeare’s History Plays (1944), in a play whose "main business" is to complete God’s plan for England, and that plan has no more use for him.
Why do audiences enjoy Richard so much?
Because he lets them in. From the first line Richard treats the audience as his only confidant, and for four acts we know every plan before it is played. That knowledge is flattering. We are cleverer than Clarence, than Hastings, than Anne, because Richard has made us so, and each time a trick works we share the credit. He even ends his first scene by telling us he is getting ahead of himself:
But yet I run before my horse to market:
Clarence still breathes, Edward still lives and reigns;
When they are gone, then must I count my gains.
(Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
But I am getting far too far ahead:
Clarence still lives, and Edward holds his innings;
But when they’re dead, I’m free to count my winnings.
Charles Lamb, writing anonymously in the Morning Post in 1802, put his finger on the mechanism: "This quality of unstrained mirth accompanies Richard, and is a prime feature in his character", and it is what enables Shakespeare "to make us contemplate a bloody and vicious character with delight." Lamb was reviewing George Frederick Cooke, and complaining that actors made Richard too grim; the argument that Richard must be funny to work has been made by every serious critic since.
Phyllis Rackin’s "Engendering the Tragic Audience" (1993) asks who exactly is being flattered. Richard’s confidences are addressed to a spectator who enjoys the humiliation of women – Anne, Elizabeth, his own mother – and the play’s later scenes, in which the women’s curses come true, quietly withdraw that pleasure. Linda Charnes, in Notorious Identity (1993), points out that Richard was already notorious before the play began, and that Shakespeare’s trick is to let the audience feel it is meeting the real man behind the reputation.
The enjoyment stops when the soliloquies stop. After the coronation Richard no longer confides, and the audience is moved, without quite noticing, from his side to the side of his victims. By the time the ghosts appear we are watching him rather than watching with him. The play has used our pleasure and then withdrawn it, which is one reason the ending feels like a judgement rather than a simple defeat.
Is Shakespeare’s Richard the real Richard III?
No, and the play is not trying to be. Shakespeare’s Richard comes from a chain of Tudor writers who had every reason to blacken the last Yorkist king. The chain begins with Thomas More’s History of King Richard III (written around 1513–18), a brilliant, unfinished piece of political writing that supplied the hunchback, the withered arm, the sardonic wit and the murder of the princes. More’s account was absorbed by Edward Hall’s chronicle (1548) and then by Holinshed (1577 and 1587), which is where Shakespeare found it.
The historical Richard reigned for just over two years, passed some sensible laws, and died at Bosworth fighting rather than fleeing, which even his enemies conceded. The murder of the princes has never been proved either way. Peter Saccio’s Shakespeare’s English Kings (1977) sets out the record carefully and concludes that the real man lies somewhere between the monster of the play and the wronged king of his modern defenders. The discovery of Richard’s skeleton beneath a Leicester car park in 2012 showed a severe curvature of the spine, but no withered arm and no limp: enough for a real man to have been mocked, nowhere near the shape Shakespeare gives him.
The more interesting question is what Shakespeare needed him to be. E. M. W. Tillyard’s Shakespeare’s History Plays (1944) argued that the play exists to complete the pattern of the four Henry VI and Richard III plays, in which England is punished for deposing Richard II and finally healed by the Tudors: "In spite of the eminence of Richard’s character the main business of the play is to complete the national tetralogy and to display the working out of God’s plan to restore England to prosperity." On that reading Richard is a scourge, and Richmond an instrument, and neither needs to be a person.
Later critics have found this too tidy. Marjorie Garber (1987) argued that Shakespeare makes the Tudor version of Richard so obviously a construction – a man who announces he will play the villain and then does – that the play ends up questioning the history it dramatises. That may give Shakespeare more scepticism than he had. What is not in doubt is that the Richard of the play has replaced the Richard of history in almost everyone’s mind, which is perhaps the strongest evidence of what the play achieves.
