Fate vs Free Will
Theme Profile – At a Glance
- Focus: Whether the people in this play choose what happens to them or are made to do it. Richard says he is "determined" to be a villain, and the word means both things at once. The play never lets the two meanings settle.
- Key Characters: Richard III, Queen Margaret, The Duke of Buckingham, Richmond, George, Duke of Clarence, Hastings.
- The Core Tension: Everything Margaret curses comes true, which looks like fate. Every victim was warned and chose not to listen, which looks like free will. Richmond wins because God chooses him, or because Stanley does. The play gives evidence for both and settles for neither.
- Key Manifestations: "I am determined to prove a villain" (A1S1); Margaret’s curses and Richard’s claim that God punishes her (A1S3); Clarence’s dream and prayer (A1S4); Hastings ignoring Stanley’s dream (A3S2); Elizabeth’s "avoided grace makes destiny" (A4S4); the ghosts, the two orations and the sun that will not shine (A5S3).
- Famous Quote:
"I am determined to prove a villain..."
(Act 1, Scene 1) - The Outcome: Richard dies exactly as Margaret said he would, and Richmond is crowned as Henry VI foretold. Whether that proves a providential design or only a very well-built play is the question the ending hands to the audience.
Determined to Prove a Villain
The theme is stated in the play’s first speech, in one word. Richard has described his deformity and the peace he cannot enjoy, and draws his conclusion.
Original
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.
(Richard, 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" means resolved: Richard has made a decision. It also means fixed in advance: Richard has been made this way by nature. The line holds both senses and does not choose, and the whole play can be read as an argument about which one is true. If nature made him, he is not to blame and the play is a study of fate. If he chose, he is the freest man in it and the play is a study of will.
What the speech does is offer the audience the deformity as an explanation and then make the explanation slightly too neat. Plenty of people are unlovely and do not murder their brothers; the reasoning is a bargain rather than a proof, and Richard knows it. The play’s treatment of conscience and guilt will later ask whether a man who chose can un-choose, and the answer is no.
Can Curses Pierce the Clouds?
Queen Margaret enters in A1S3 as the voice of a different theory. She has lost everything to the house of York, and she believes that heaven keeps accounts. Her question is whether curses reach it.
Original
Can curses pierce the clouds and enter heaven?
Why then give way, dull clouds, to my quick curses!
(Queen Margaret, Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Can curses get to heaven just like that?
In which case, clouds divide and hear my curses!
She then curses the King, the Queen, the Prince, Rivers, Dorset, Hastings and Richard, and the rest of the play pays every curse in order. On the face of it this is the strongest evidence in the play for fate: what is spoken comes to pass, and the speaker is a woman with no power except her words.
But Richard has already answered her. Before she curses anyone, he reminds her of the paper crown she put on his father’s head and the cloth dipped in Rutland’s blood, and says that his father’s curses on her have all fallen; "God, not we, hath plagued thy bloody deed." The two sides of a civil war both claim that heaven is punishing the other, and both have been proved right. The play’s treatment of prophecy and curses is not a proof of providence but a picture of what providence looks like to people who have chosen to see it.
To Fly the Boar Before the Boar Pursues
If the play has a test case for free will, it is Hastings. In A3S2 a messenger wakes him before dawn: Stanley has dreamt that the boar struck off his helmet, and wants them both to ride north. Hastings has every reason to go. He laughs.
Original
To fly the boar before the boar pursues
Were to incense the boar to follow us,
And make pursuit where he did mean no chase.
(Hastings, Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
To run away before Gloucester has chased us
Would anger him and make him follow us
In hot pursuit, although he didn’t plan to.
The reasoning is not stupid; it is confident. Hastings believes he is safe because he has always been safe, and because Catesby is his friend, and because Richard smiled at him that morning. He spends the rest of the scene gloating over the deaths of his enemies and giving a priest money for a sermon. By dinner-time he is dead.
On the way to the block he remembers the dream, and the horse that stumbled three times, and the priest, and Queen Margaret’s curse, and he calls himself "too fond". The play has given him every warning a man could ask for and shown him choosing, freely and cheerfully, to ignore them. Fate did not kill Hastings. A decision did, and the decision was his, and the play lets him see it before the axe.
The Sun Will Not Be Seen Today
The night before Bosworth is where the play stages the argument as theatre. The ghosts of Richard’s victims pass between two tents, cursing him and blessing Richmond; Richmond sleeps and wakes refreshed; Richard wakes in a sweat. In the morning Richard looks for the sun.
Original
The sun will not be seen today,
The sky doth frown and low’r upon our army.
I would these dewy tears were from the ground.
Not shine today? Why, what is that to me
More than to Richmond? For the self-same heaven
That frowns on me looks sadly upon him.
(King Richard, Act 5, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
The sun will not appear today,
The darkened sky is frowning on my army.
I wish the earth was not sodden with dew.
The sun won’t shine today? Will that affect me
More than it does to Richmond? That same heaven
That frowns at me does also scowl at him.
"What is that to me more than to Richmond?" is the last thing Richard says that sounds like free will, and it is a good point: the same sky covers both armies. But Richmond has already read the sunset as a promise of a goodly day and been right, and the play has arranged the weather so that the same clouds mean defeat to one man and victory to the other.
What settles the battle on stage is not the sky. It is Stanley withholding his troops, and Stanley does that because Richard has given him a reason: a son held hostage, a wife who is Richmond’s mother, and four acts of watching what happens to the people Richard trusts. The theme of power and ambition ends with a choice that looks like destiny. The ghosts told Richmond he would win. Stanley made sure of it.
"In the tremendous evolution of God’s plans the accidents of character must not be obtruded."
— E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays, 1944
Key Quotes on Fate vs Free Will
Quote 1
Did York’s dread curse prevail so much with heaven
That Henry’s death, my lovely Edward’s death,
Their kingdom’s loss, my woeful banishment...
(Queen Margaret, Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
So did the Duke of York’s curse hoodwink heaven
To thinking that my husband’s and my son’s death,
Losing their kingdom, and my banishment...
Quote Analysis: Queen Margaret, asking whether the Duke of York’s curse on her can really have bought so much: the death of her husband and son, the loss of the kingdom, her own exile. The question is bitter and it is also a theory of history. If York’s curse worked, curses work, and her own will work too. Richard has just told her that God, not the Yorkists, punished her; Margaret takes the argument and turns it round. Everyone in this play believes in fate when it is punishing someone else.
O God! If my deep pray’rs cannot appease thee,
But thou wilt be avenged on my misdeeds,
Yet execute thy wrath in me alone!
O, spare my guiltless wife and my poor children!
(Clarence, Act 1, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
God, if my prayers are not enough to quell you,
And you require revenge for what I’ve done,
Then cast your rage on me, and me alone!
Oh, spare my guiltless wife and my poor children!
Quote Analysis: Clarence, waking from the dream in which Warwick and Prince Edward accused him of perjury. He does not argue that he is innocent; he asks that the punishment fall on him alone. It is the first prayer in the play, and it is answered exactly: Clarence dies, his wife and children live. Whether that is providence or coincidence the play does not say, but it is worth noticing that the one man who accepts his guilt gets the one thing he asks for.
True – when avoided grace makes destiny:
My babes were destined to a fairer death,
If grace had blest thee with a fairer life.
(Queen Elizabeth, Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
True – when a graceless man makes destiny:
My children would have had a fairer death
If you’d been blessed with graciousness in life.
Quote Analysis: Queen Elizabeth’s answer when Richard says that the princes were killed by destiny rather than by him. Her reply is the sharpest statement of the theme in the play: a man who avoids grace makes his own destiny, and calls it fate afterwards. "Avoided grace" means grace refused – the mercy Richard could have shown and did not. Elizabeth is not denying that the boys were destined to die. She is saying that Richard wrote the destiny.
Thus doth he force the swords of wicked men
To turn their own points in their masters’ bosoms;
Thus Margaret’s curse falls heavy on my neck...
(Buckingham, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
It’s how he turns the swords of wicked men
Upon themselves to stab them through the heart.
And so that curse from Margaret has come true...
Quote Analysis: Buckingham on the way to execution, on All Souls’ Day, working out what has happened to him. God turns the swords of wicked men against their own masters; Margaret’s curse has fallen on his neck. It is the play’s clearest speech of recognition, and it is spoken by the man who told Margaret in Act 1 that curses were only breath. Buckingham has moved from free will to fate in four acts, and the play lets him explain the journey before it kills him.
Key Takeaways
- One Word, Two Meanings: Richard is "determined" to be a villain: resolved to it, and made for it. The play never says which.
- Everyone Was Warned: Stanley’s dream, Margaret’s curses, Clarence’s nightmare, the citizens in the street. The victims choose not to listen, and the choice is free.
- Both Sides Claim Heaven: Richard says God punished Margaret; Margaret says God will punish Richard. Both are proved right, which proves nothing.
- Stanley Decides Bosworth: The ghosts promise Richmond victory; Stanley’s withheld troops deliver it. Fate and free will arrive at the same result on the same morning.
Study Questions and Analysis
Is Richard a free agent or a victim of fate?
Both readings have textual support and the best essays hold them together. The case for free will is Richard himself: he announces his plans, executes them, adjusts them when they go wrong, and takes pleasure in every step. Nobody makes him do anything. The case for fate is everything said about him by other people, starting with his own mother, and it is summed up by Queen Margaret:
Thou elvish-marked, abortive, rooting hog!
Thou that wast sealed in thy nativity
The slave of nature and the son of hell!
(Queen Margaret, Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
You scarred, revolting pig, digging the dirt!
You who became, the day that you were born,
A freak of nature and the son of hell!
Marked at birth, born too soon, sealed by nature and hell: on this account Richard was made, not chosen. The play gives the account to his enemies and lets Richard adopt it himself when it suits him, as in the opening soliloquy, where the deformity is offered as the reason for everything.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his 1811–12 lectures, took the soliloquy as psychology: a man compensating for his body with his intellect, which is a story about choice. E. M. W. Tillyard’s Shakespeare’s History Plays (1944) read Richard as a scourge in God’s plan, which is a story about fate; his phrase for Richmond, that "the accidents of character must not be obtruded", applies to Richard too. Marjorie Garber’s "Descanting on Deformity" (1987) added a third view: the deformity is not the cause of Richard’s history but the shape Tudor history gave him afterwards, so that "fate" in this play is what the winners call the past. The play supports all three, which is why the question is worth asking.
Do Margaret's curses prove that fate governs the play?
They prove that the play is built so that they come true, which is not quite the same thing. Queen Margaret curses seven people in A1S3, and each dies in turn, and each remembers her as they die. Rivers, on his way to the block at Pomfret, lists them:
Then cursed she Richard, then cursed she Buckingham,
Then cursed she Hastings. O, remember, God,
To hear her prayer for them, as now for us!
(Rivers, Act 3, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
She first cursed Richard, then cursed Buckingham,
And then cursed Hastings. Dear God, please remember
Her prayers for them, then hear the prayers for us now!
The pattern is unmistakable and the play wants us to see it. But two things complicate the reading. The first is that Margaret’s curses are not prophecies from outside the action; they are accurate predictions by the one person on stage who has already watched a court destroy itself. She knows what Richard is because she has seen him kill her son. The second is that the play gives the victims every chance to act on the warning, and they decline.
Wolfgang Clemen’s A Commentary on Shakespeare’s Richard III (1968) treats the curse-and-fulfilment structure as the play’s principal dramatic device, a way of announcing the shape of the action so that the audience watches it fill in. A. P. Rossiter’s "Angel with Horns" (1961) argued that the pattern is so tidy that it becomes ironic: a providence that works this neatly looks less like God than like a playwright. The safest position for an essay is that the curses show the play’s structure to be fated, while leaving its characters free. The theme of prophecy and curses sets out the evidence in full.
What does Hastings's death show about choice?
That the play’s victims are given warnings and choose to ignore them. Hastings is the fullest case. He is told Stanley’s dream, and laughs; his horse stumbles three times on the way to the Tower; a priest crosses his path; a pursuivant reminds him of the last time he was in trouble. He notices none of it until the axe is ordered, and then he notices all of it at once:
Stanley did dream the boar did rase our helms,
And I did scorn it and disdain to fly.
Three times today my foot-cloth horse did stumble,
And started when he looked upon the Tower,
As loath to bear me to the slaughter-house.
(Hastings, Act 3, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Stanley had dreamt the boar cut off our heads
But yet I laughed and didn’t run away.
Three times today my riding horse slipped up,
And it seemed startled when it saw the Tower,
As though averse to take me to my death.
"I did scorn it and disdain to fly": the confession is of a choice, not a fate. Hastings could have ridden north with Stanley; he preferred to stay and enjoy his enemies’ executions. The play then gives him the play’s bleakest lines on how a courtier lives – like a drunken sailor on a mast, ready to fall at every nod – and sends him to the block.
Harold C. Goddard’s The Meaning of Shakespeare (1951) saw in Hastings the type of the man who is destroyed not by Richard’s wickedness but by his own complacency, and read the play as a chain of such choices, each victim supplying the consent that makes the next murder possible. Fate, on this reading, is the name the victims give afterwards to the decisions they made. Hastings, at least, has the honesty not to use the word. He says he was fond, and that the fault was his.
Is Richmond's victory providence or politics?
On stage it is both, and the play arranges for them to coincide. The providential evidence is thick: Henry VI prophesied that Richmond would be king; the ghosts of Richard’s victims bless him and curse Richard; Richmond prays before sleeping and his prayer is answered with the sweetest sleep of his life; the sun refuses to shine on Richard. Richmond’s own account of the coming battle assumes that heaven has already decided it:
God and our good cause fight upon our side;
The prayers of holy saints and wronged souls,
Like high-reared bulwarks, stand before our faces.
(Richmond, Act 5, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
We all have God and virtue on our side;
The prayers of holy saints and murdered people,
Like rampart walls, are all here to protect us.
The political evidence is equally thick and much less discussed. Stanley, whose son is Richard’s hostage, withholds his troops and joins Richmond at the decisive moment; Richard’s own men, Richmond says, would rather the other side won; and Queen Elizabeth has given her daughter to Richmond rather than Richard, which supplies the marriage that makes the new dynasty legitimate. Every one of these is a human decision, and the play shows each being made.
E. M. W. Tillyard (1944) is the classic providential reading: Richmond is God’s instrument, and his passivity is the sign of it. Phyllis Rackin’s Stages of History (1990) argues that the histories keep providential and political accounts of events in play at once and let the audience choose. Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964) went further and read the ending as one more turn of the "Grand Mechanism", a new coronation with the same machinery underneath it. The play gives Richmond the last word and gives the audience no instruction about how much to believe it.
What does Clarence's dream contribute to the theme?
It is the play’s first vision of the future, and unlike the curses it comes from inside the victim. Clarence dreams that Richard knocks him overboard and that he drowns; then that he crosses to the underworld and is accused of perjury by Warwick and Prince Edward. Both halves come true – the murder and the guilt – and Clarence, on waking, ignores the first and accepts the second:
Ah, Keeper, Keeper, I have done these things
(That now give evidence against my soul)
For Edward’s sake, and see how he requites me!
(Clarence, Act 1, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Ah, jailer, jailer, I have done those things
The spirits in my dreams accuse me of,
For Edward’s sake, and look how he repays me!
"Edward" is a mistake: the brother who requites him is Richard, and the dream told him so. But the acceptance of guilt is not a mistake, and it is the one act of will the play allows Clarence. He chooses to pray for his family and to take the punishment himself, and the play honours the choice by sparing them.
Nicholas Brooke’s Shakespeare’s Early Tragedies (1968) reads the dream as the first place where the play’s language turns inward, from public curse to private conscience, and sees it as the model for Richard’s own nightmare in Act 5. The comparison is instructive for the theme. Clarence dreams, repents and dies; Richard dreams, refuses to repent, and dies. The dreams are the same fate arriving at two men. What each does with it is free, and the play shows the difference. The theme of conscience and guilt is where that difference is worked out.
How does the play use dramatic irony to explore fate?
By making the audience the only people who know the whole design. From the opening soliloquy we know what Richard intends; from A1S3 we know what Queen Margaret has cursed; and for four acts we watch characters walk into outcomes we can see and they cannot. The effect is that every scene feels fated to us and free to them. The clearest example is the Prince of Wales in A3S1, who has just been told by his uncle to beware of false friends:
God keep me from false friends! – but they were none.
(Prince Edward, Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
God keep me from false friends! But they weren’t false.
The audience knows that the false friend is speaking to him. The Prince does not, and cannot; he acts freely on the information he has, and the information has been arranged by the man who will kill him. This is what fate looks like from outside: a set of choices made in ignorance by people who were never told the rules.
Bernard Spivack’s Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (1958) traced Richard’s confiding asides to the Vice of the morality plays, whose whole art was to let the audience in on the plot; the inheritance is what makes the play’s irony so relentless. Wolfgang Clemen (1968) counts the recognition speeches – Clarence, Hastings, Rivers, Buckingham, Anne – as the play’s answering device: each victim gets a moment of seeing what we saw all along. Fate in this play is largely a matter of who is allowed to know. The audience knows everything. The characters find out at the block.
Does Richard have any choice left by the end?
One, and he makes it. After the ghosts, Richard wakes and for the first time in the play argues with himself: is there a murderer here, does he love himself, is he a villain. The soliloquy is a quarrel between two Richards and neither wins. Then dawn comes and he chooses:
Let not our babbling dreams affright our souls;
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!
(King Richard, Act 5, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Let’s not be terrified by rambling nightmares;
‘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!
He could have done what Clarence did and repented. He could have done what Hastings did and recognised. Instead he decides that conscience is an invention of cowards, and goes into battle roaring. The choice is free in the plainest sense: nobody is forcing him, the alternative has just been shown to him by eleven ghosts, and he declines it.
Stephen Greenblatt’s Tyrant (2018) describes Richard as a man with "a grotesque sense of entitlement, never doubting that he can do whatever he chooses", and the last morning bears this out: even offered a horse to escape, he chooses to stand the hazard of the die. Harold C. Goddard (1951) saw the refusal as the play’s final verdict on the theme – that a man who has chosen evil often enough loses the capacity to choose anything else, and calls the loss strength. Richard dies as he lived, a free man who used his freedom to become something he could not stop being. That is the play’s answer, and it is neither fate nor free will but the point where they meet.
