Language and Rhetoric
Theme Profile – At a Glance
- Focus: A play in which almost nothing is done by force and almost everything by speech. Richard talks his way to the throne, the women curse their way to justice, and the battle at the end is preceded by two orations that the audience is asked to compare.
- Key Characters: Richard III, Queen Margaret, Lady Anne, Queen Elizabeth, The Duke of Buckingham, Richmond, George, Duke of Clarence.
- The Core Tension: Richard’s language is quick, colloquial and changeable; the women’s is formal, patterned and fixed. His wins for four acts. Theirs wins the fifth. The play is a contest between two ways of using words, and it is not neutral about which one lasts.
- Key Manifestations: The opening soliloquy and its asides (A1S1); the stichomythia of the wooing scene (A1S2); Margaret’s curses and Richard’s interruption (A1S3); Clarence’s plea to the murderers (A1S4); the laments and their refrains (A2S2, A4S4); Buckingham’s oratory and the silent citizens (A3S7); the oath exchange (A4S4); the two orations before Bosworth (A5S3).
- Famous Quote:
"An honest tale speeds best being plainly told."
(Act 4, Scene 4) - The Outcome: Richard, the play’s great talker, ends it stammering about prophecies, arguing with himself in broken half-lines, and shouting for a horse. Richmond, who speaks plainly and never wittily, speaks last. The play gives the last word to the plainer style.
I Moralise Two Meanings in One Word
Richard is the play’s master of the double meaning, and he tells us so. In A3S1 he has just told the young Prince that the wise die young, and the boy has not understood; Richard turns to the audience.
Original
Thus, like the formal Vice, Iniquity,
I moralise two meanings in one word.
(Richard, Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Like in old plays, Iniquity was evil,
And like him, I twist meanings of a word.
The Vice of the old morality plays lived on puns: he said one thing to the hero and another to the crowd, and the difference was the joke. Richard’s whole way of speaking descends from that. "Son of York" is also sun; "determined" is both resolved and fated; when he tells Clarence he will "lie for you", he means it in both senses; and his promise to send his brother’s soul to heaven is a threat that sounds like love.
The technique is a way of speaking to two audiences at once, and the play makes the second audience – us – complicit in every pun. That is why Richard’s language is such a pleasure for four acts and why the pleasure feels guilty afterwards. The theme of manipulation and deceit explains what the double meanings do to his victims. This theme is about what they do to the listener who is in on them.
A Keen Encounter of Our Wits
The wooing of Lady Anne is a duel of single lines. Anne curses; Richard caps the curse; Anne answers; Richard turns the answer round. The technique is called stichomythia – line for line, blow for blow – and the play uses it to show one speaker gaining ground on another without either ever making a speech.
Original
ANNE: Villain, thou know’st nor law of God nor man:
No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity.
RICHARD: But I know none, and therefore am no beast.
ANNE: O wonderful, when devils tell the troth!
(Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
ANNE: You know no law of God nor law of man, thug:
There’s no such beast that’s so devoid of pity.
RICHARD: I have no pity, thus I am no beast.
ANNE: How wonderful when devils tell the truth!
"But I know none, and therefore am no beast": Anne has said that no beast is without pity, and Richard, taking the sentence literally, uses it to prove himself something other than a beast. He does not deny the charge; he moves the word. Anne’s reply, that it is wonderful when devils tell the truth, is the best line in the exchange and it does her no good, because Richard has already changed the subject to her eyes.
What the scene demonstrates is that in a contest of wit the person who is willing to say anything has the advantage over the person who means what she says. Anne is bound by her grief and her honesty; Richard is bound by nothing. The theme of appearance vs reality treats the wooing as a performance. Here it is worth reading as a fencing match, and noticing that the loser lands the better hits.
Windy Attorneys to Their Client’s Woes
The women of the play speak a different language from Richard’s, and the play sets the two against each other. Their style is formal, built on repetition, balanced clauses and shared refrains: the laments of A2S2, in which three generations mourn in the same shape; Queen Margaret’s catalogues of what Queen Elizabeth has lost; the roll-call of the dead, "I had an Edward, till a Richard killed him". Queen Elizabeth herself, after Margaret has taught her to curse, delivers the play’s verdict on that style.
Original
Windy attorneys to their client’s woes,
Aery succeeders of intestate joys,
Poor breathing orators of miseries,
Let them have scope! Though what they will impart
Help nothing else, yet do they ease the heart.
(Queen Elizabeth, Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
They’re just like lawyers, waffling for their clients
That seek a payment from a will-less death,
They’re merely waffle, focussing on sadness,
So let the words ring out! Though what they say
Won’t help, but it may take the pain away.
Words as lawyers pleading for a client already lost; words as heirs to a joy that has died intestate; words that help nothing and ease the heart. The image is bleakly exact, and it is a defence as well as a dismissal. The women’s language does not change anything on stage, and the play does not pretend it does. What it does is keep the count.
And the count is what survives. Richard’s puns win the scenes; the women’s refrains win the play, because every curse they utter is paid and every name they chant is a death Richard has to answer for on the last night. The theme of prophecy and curses shows the machinery. This theme notices that the machinery is made of a particular kind of sentence, and that Richard, when he finally wakes to his conscience, starts speaking in that kind of sentence himself.
An Honest Tale Speeds Best
By A4S4 Richard’s way of speaking has stopped working, and the play shows it failing in the one form he used to own: the line-for-line duel. He wants Queen Elizabeth’s daughter; Elizabeth answers every proposal with a question; and when he tells her to speak plainly to the girl, she gives him the play’s rule about language.
Original
RICHARD: Then plainly to her tell my loving tale.
QUEEN ELIZABETH: Plain and not honest is too harsh a style.
RICHARD: Your reasons are too shallow and too quick.
QUEEN ELIZABETH: O no, my reasons are too deep and dead...
(Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
RICHARD: Then simply tell her of my loving tale.
QUEEN ELIZABETH: A simple tale won’t work if it’s deceitful.
RICHARD: Your answers are too simple and not thought through.
QUEEN ELIZABETH: Oh no, my answers are all deep and dead...
"Plain and not honest is too harsh a style": Elizabeth has separated the two things Richard always kept together, plainness and honesty, and told him that plain speech without honesty is not persuasion but assault. Richard’s answer is that her reasons are shallow and quick. Hers is that they are deep and dead, like her sons. The exchange he used to win is being used on him, and he loses it.
The oath exchange that follows finishes the job: every word Richard offers to swear by, she shows he has already broken. Then Bosworth, and the two orations. Richmond gives his soldiers reasons; Richard gives them contempt for the enemy and a couplet about going to hell together. The play’s treatment of power and ambition ends in a battle, and its treatment of language ends a scene earlier, with the great talker reduced to a man whose words no one on stage will credit.
"No where, in any of his plays, is to be found so much of sprightly colloquial dialogue, and soliloquies of genuine humour, as in Richard."
— Charles Lamb, G. F. Cooke in Richard the Third, 1802
Key Quotes on Language and Rhetoric
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.
(Richard, 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 a lesson in how Richard uses a sentence. "Now is the winter of our discontent" sounds like a lament until the next line turns it into a boast: the winter is over, made summer by the son of York, who is also the sun. The pun is the first of hundreds, and the structure – a grand public statement with a private joke inside it – is the structure of everything Richard says for four acts. He is speaking to the nation and winking at us.
Lady, you know no rules of charity,
Which renders good for bad, blessings for curses.
(Richard, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
My dear, you do not know charity’s rules,
Which swaps bad deeds for good, curses for blessings.
Quote Analysis: Richard to Lady Anne, who has just cursed him over her father-in-law’s coffin. His answer is to lecture her on charity – the Christian duty to return good for evil – while standing beside a man he murdered. The rhetorical trick is to occupy the moral high ground before your opponent can, and to use her own values as the weapon. Anne has been made, in one couplet, the uncharitable party in a conversation with a killer. The rest of the scene is spent trying to get the ground back, and she never does.
But how long shall that title "ever" last?
(Queen Elizabeth, Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
But how long does that ‘ever’ really mean?
Quote Analysis: Queen Elizabeth, answering Richard’s promise to love her daughter everlastingly. One word, weighed. Richard has used "ever" the way he uses all words, as a sound that does a job; Elizabeth picks it up, holds it to the light, and asks what it is worth from a man who has just killed her sons. It is the moment the play’s language changes hands. For four acts Richard has been the one who noticed what words could mean. Now someone is doing it to him.
What shall I say more than I have inferred?
(King Richard, Act 5, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
What more is there to say that I’ve not said yet?
Quote Analysis: The first line of Richard’s oration at Bosworth, and it is an admission. He has nothing more to say than he has already implied; the great talker is out of material. What follows is a rant about Breton beggars and a milksop who never felt the cold, and it is vivid and hopeless in equal measure. Set beside Richmond’s oration, with its five if-then reasons and its promise to share the spoils, the line tells us where the play has arrived: the man of words has run out of them, and the plain man has just enough.
Key Takeaways
- Richard Speaks to Two Audiences: Every pun and aside has one meaning for the person on stage and another for us. The Vice tradition gave him the technique; the play makes us enjoy it.
- Wit Beats Honesty in Single Combat: The stichomythia of the wooing scene shows a man who will say anything defeating a woman who means what she says.
- The Women Keep the Count: Their formal, repeated, refrain-built language changes nothing on stage and everything in the reckoning. Richard ends up speaking it.
- The Plain Style Has the Last Word: Elizabeth weighs Richard’s words and finds them empty; Richmond gives his soldiers reasons; Richard runs out of things to say.
Study Questions and Analysis
What makes Richard's language so effective?
Speed, doubleness, and the sense that he is always talking to someone other than the person in front of him. Richard never argues on his opponent’s ground; he moves the word, changes the subject, or agrees so completely that the agreement becomes an attack. His answer to Lady Anne’s charge that he killed her husband is a model of the method:
RICHARD: Say that I slew them not?
ANNE: Then say they were not slain.
But dead they are, and, devilish slave, by thee.
RICHARD: I did not kill your husband.
ANNE: Why then he is alive.
RICHARD: Nay, he is dead, and slain by Edward’s hands.
(Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
RICHARD: What if I didn’t kill them?
ANNE: Then tell me they’re alive.
But dead they are, and – evil fiend – you killed them.
RICHARD: I did not kill your husband.
ANNE: Then he’s alive then?
RICHARD: No, he is dead, but he was killed by Edward.
Deny; then, when the denial fails, admit half and hand the other half to someone else. The moves come faster than they can be answered, and Anne, who is grieving and honest, cannot keep up with a man who is neither. Wolfgang Clemen’s A Commentary on Shakespeare’s Richard III (1968) is the fullest account of the play’s rhetoric, scene by scene, and shows how Richard’s style is built from the devices the grammar schools taught – antithesis, pun, rhetorical question – used at a pace that turns them into weapons.
Charles Lamb, in 1802, thought the key was humour: nowhere else in Shakespeare, he wrote, is there so much sprightly colloquial dialogue, and it is the humour that carries the audience with a murderer. Bernard Spivack’s Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (1958) traced the colloquial ease to the Vice of the morality plays, who talked to the crowd in their own idiom while the virtuous characters spoke in verse. Richard’s language works because it sounds like ours, and the play uses that likeness to make us his accomplices.
What is stichomythia and how does the play use it?
Stichomythia is dialogue in alternating single lines, each answering or capping the last. Shakespeare took it from Seneca, and Richard III uses it more than any other play he wrote. The wooing of Lady Anne is the famous case; the second wooing, of Queen Elizabeth, repeats the form with the roles reversed. In A4S4 Elizabeth asks how Richard can possibly woo her daughter, and the exchange that follows is her turn to cap every line:
RICHARD: Say that I did all this for love of her.
QUEEN ELIZABETH: Nay then indeed she cannot choose but hate thee,
Having bought love with such a bloody spoil.
(Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
RICHARD: Tell her I did all this for love of her.
QUEEN ELIZABETH: Well, no, because she’d have no choice but hate you
Because you bought her love by murdering.
Richard offers a formula; Elizabeth turns it inside out. He wants the daughter told that he did it all for love; she replies that a girl bought with such a bloody spoil cannot choose but hate him. The lines are the same length, the rhythm is the same, and the advantage has changed sides.
Emrys Jones, in The Origins of Shakespeare (1977), traces the form to Seneca and observes that "whenever tyrants are in question in Shakespeare, there is likely to be a Senecan feel somewhere in the diction". Nicholas Brooke’s Shakespeare’s Early Tragedies (1968) makes the structural point: the play stages the same rhetorical duel twice, once won by Richard and once lost, so that the audience can measure his decline in the form he was best at. Stichomythia in this play is a scoreboard. Whoever caps the last line is winning, and by Act 4 it is not Richard.
How does the women's language differ from Richard's?
It is formal where his is colloquial, repetitive where his is quick, and it means what it says. The clearest sample is Queen Margaret’s catalogue of what Queen Elizabeth has lost, a list built on a single grammatical shape:
Decline all this, and see what now thou art:
For happy wife, a most distressed widow;
For joyful mother, one that wails the name;
For one being sued to, one that humbly sues;
For queen, a very caitiff crowned with care;
For she that scorned at me, now scorned of me;
For she being feared of all, now fearing one;
For she commanding all, obeyed of none.
(Queen Margaret, Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
You’ve none of this, and see what you’ve become:
From happy wife to melancholic widow;
From happy mum to howling for your kids’ names;
From granting wishes, swapped to one who begs;
From queen to being only crowned with worry;
From mocking me to now me mocking you;
From being feared by all, now fearing one man;
From ruling everything to being ignored.
Seven lines, each pairing a former glory with a present loss, each beginning "For". It is rhetoric as ritual, and it has a purpose: the pattern makes the losses countable, and the count is the play’s moral ledger. Richard’s language changes minds. The women’s language records what the changed minds cost.
Wolfgang Clemen (1968) connects the laments to the formal set pieces of classical tragedy and to the school exercises in which boys learned to write them. Madonne M. Miner’s essay in The Woman’s Part (1980) reads the women’s speech as what is left to people who have been stripped of every other form of action. Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin’s Engendering a Nation (1997) go further and call it the play’s counter-history. The most useful observation for an essay is the simplest: Richard’s style wins every scene in which the two meet, until A5S3, when he wakes from the ghosts speaking in broken, repeated, self-answering lines – the women’s style, in his mouth, at last.
Why does the play compare Richmond's and Richard's orations?
Because the comparison is the play’s final statement about language, and Shakespeare places the two speeches within a hundred lines of each other so that no audience can miss it. Richmond speaks first, and the shape of his speech is an argument:
If you do sweat to put a tyrant down,
You sleep in peace, the tyrant being slain;
If you do fight against your country’s foes,
Your country’s fat shall pay your pains the hire;
If you do fight in safeguard of your wives,
Your wives shall welcome home the conquerors;
If you do free your children from the sword,
Your children’s children quits it in your age.
(Richmond, Act 5, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
If you exert yourself to kill a tyrant,
Then you will sleep in peace when he is dead;
And if you fight against your country’s foes,
Your country’s wealth will pay you for your efforts;
If you are fighting to protect your wives,
Your wives will welcome you when you’re victorious;
If you prevent your children doing battle,
Your grandchildren will help you when you’re old.
If you fight against a tyrant, you will sleep in peace; if for your country, your country will pay you; if for your wives, they will welcome you; if for your children, your grandchildren will repay you. Four conditions and four rewards, in the plainest verse Richmond speaks. Richard’s oration, which follows, has no conditions at all: the enemy are scum and beggars, their leader is a milksop, and if the English do not fight they will lose their lands and their wives. It is more vivid, more energetic and better written, and it offers nothing except fear.
E. M. W. Tillyard’s Shakespeare’s History Plays (1944) read Richmond’s plainness as the deliberate voice of order, the style of a king who does not need to perform. A. P. Rossiter’s "Angel with Horns" (1961) is less comfortable with it and notices that the audience’s pleasure has been with the other kind of language all evening. Both are right about the effect. The play gives the crown to the plain style and gives the poetry to the man it kills, and it does not apologise for either.
How does Clarence use language to fight for his life?
With every register the play has. Clarence, woken by two murderers, tries law (there has been no trial), scripture (thou shalt do no murder), logic (God needs no hired help), loyalty (his brother loves him), and finally pity. The scriptural argument is the most formally constructed:
Erroneous vassals, the great King of kings
Hath in the table of his law commanded
That thou shalt do no murder. Will you then
Spurn at his edict, and fulfil a man’s?
(Clarence, Act 1, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
You’ve got that wrong, for God, the King of kings
Has ordered in the ten commandments that
You shan’t commit a murder. So will you then
Ignore his ruling, yet obey a man’s?
The murderers have said the King sent them; Clarence answers that a higher King has forbidden murder, and asks which command they will obey. It is a good argument and they cannot answer it, so they change the subject to his own record at Tewkesbury. The exchange is a small trial of the whole play’s rhetoric: the divine law is quoted, the human order prevails, and eloquence delays the knife without stopping it.
Wolfgang Clemen (1968) treats the murder scene as a self-contained tragedy inside the play, with its own rise and fall, and notes that Clarence’s pleading is the longest sustained argument for life anywhere in Shakespeare. What is striking is how nearly it works. The Second Murderer is moved, warns Clarence to look behind him, and refuses his fee afterwards. Language in this play can change a man’s mind. It cannot, on its own, stop a blow, and the play is exact about the difference.
What role does silence play in the theme?
A large one, and it is easy to miss because silence leaves no lines. The citizens of London, asked by Buckingham at the Guildhall to acclaim Richard as king, say nothing. Buckingham reports the failure himself:
No, so God help me, they spake not a word,
But like dumb statues, or breathing stones,
Stared each on other, and looked deadly pale;
Which when I saw, I reprehended them,
And asked the Mayor what meant this wilful silence.
(Buckingham, Act 3, Scene 7)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
God help me, no, they didn’t speak a word,
But stood like silent statues made of stone,
And stared at one another, deathly pale;
And when I saw that, I berated them,
And asked the Mayor what all their silence meant.
Ten of Buckingham’s own men shout from the back of the hall, and he calls it general applause. The Scrivener in A3S6 sees the indictment of Hastings for what it is and asks who is bold enough to say so; the answer is no one, including him. Richard’s language conquers everyone who speaks. It cannot conquer people who refuse to.
Robert Weimann’s Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater (1978) reads the citizens and the Scrivener as the play’s plain-speaking chorus, the tradition of the common man at the front of the stage; Phyllis Rackin’s Stages of History (1990) sees in their silence the gap between the official history being made at court and the people who will live under it. The theme of appearance vs reality is usually read through Richard’s performances. Its quietest instance is a hall full of Londoners who have seen the performance and decline to clap.
How should a student analyse the play's language in an essay?
Start from the contest rather than from the catalogue. The play has two languages – Richard’s quick, punning, colloquial style and the women’s formal, repetitive, cursing style – and its structure is the story of which one wins. Trace Richard’s style from the opening soliloquy through the wooing scene and the asides of Act 3, and then watch it fail: the second wooing, the oath exchange, the broken soliloquy after the ghosts, the oration that begins by admitting he has nothing more to say. Trace the women’s style from Anne’s curse through Margaret’s catalogues to the roll-call of the dead:
I had an Edward, till a Richard killed him;
I had a Harry, till a Richard killed him:
Thou hadst an Edward, till a Richard killed him;
Thou hadst a Richard, till a Richard killed him.
(Queen Margaret, Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
My son was Edward, then a Richard killed him;
I married Henry, then a Richard killed him.
Your son was Edward, then a Richard killed him;
Your son was Richard, then a Richard killed him.
Four losses, one shape, one name. Then notice that Richard’s last real soliloquy – "Richard loves Richard, that is, I am I" – is built in exactly this way, with the same word repeated until it turns on itself. The great talker ends by speaking the language of the people he silenced.
Two critical positions frame the argument. Charles Lamb (1802) and William Hazlitt (1817) belong to the tradition that finds the play’s life in Richard’s wit and its interest in the theatre; Hazlitt thought the play "belongs to the theatre, rather than to the closet". Wolfgang Clemen (1968) and Nicholas Brooke (1968) belong to the tradition that reads the play’s formal rhetoric as its real subject, and Richard’s wit as the thing that formal rhetoric finally absorbs. An essay that uses both, and shows the two styles meeting in the oath exchange of A4S4 and the dream soliloquy of A5S3, will have described what the play does with words. The theme of conscience and guilt is where the absorption is completed.
