Manipulation and Deceit
Theme Profile – At a Glance
- Focus: How Richard gets people to do what he wants: not by force but by telling each of them the story they are most ready to believe. The play is a catalogue of techniques, and it lets the audience watch every one of them being set up.
- Key Characters: Richard III, The Duke of Buckingham, George, Duke of Clarence, Lady Anne, Queen Elizabeth, Hastings.
- The Core Tension: Richard tells the audience the truth and everyone else lies. His victims are not fools; they are people who want to believe something, and he supplies it. The play asks how much of the deception is his and how much is theirs.
- Key Manifestations: The planted prophecy and the plain-brother act with Clarence (A1S1); the wooing of Anne (A1S2); the blunt honest soldier at court (A1S3); the peacemaker at Edward’s deathbed (A2S1); the kind uncle (A3S1); the strawberries and the withered arm (A3S4); the reluctant king at Baynard’s Castle (A3S7); the second wooing, which fails (A4S4).
- Famous Quote:
"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) - The Outcome: The deceptions succeed until Richard is king and then stop working. Elizabeth sees through the second wooing; Buckingham and Stanley desert; and on the last night the only person Richard has left to deceive is himself.
Simple Plain Clarence
The first deception in the play is the first thing that happens. Clarence is being taken to the Tower because of a prophecy about the letter G; Richard planted the prophecy; and Richard now meets his brother on the street and asks, with every sign of concern, what is going on. Clarence explains. Richard blames the Queen. Then Clarence is led away, and Richard tells us what he thinks of him.
Original
Go tread the path that thou shalt ne’er return:
Simple plain Clarence, I do love thee so
That I will shortly send thy soul to heaven,
If heaven will take the present at our hands.
(Richard, Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Walk down that path that you’ll never return to:
Foolish and boring Clarence, I do love you
So much that I will send your soul to heaven,
Assuming heaven takes what I will offer.
"Simple plain Clarence": the victim is named for the quality that makes him a victim. Clarence has no guile, so he cannot imagine guile in his brother, and Richard has just spent forty lines supplying him with a story about the Queen that he was already inclined to believe. The lie works because it agrees with the listener.
The method is worth stating, because the whole play runs on it. Richard never invents a resentment; he finds one and feeds it. Clarence resents the Woodvilles, Hastings resents the Woodvilles, the old nobility resent the Woodvilles, and Richard is the plain-spoken man who resents them loudest. Every victim helps to build the trap by supplying the material. The play’s treatment of appearance vs reality begins with a man who is believed because he says what people already think.
Cannot a Plain Man Live and Think No Harm?
In A1S3 Richard walks into a room full of the Queen’s relatives and picks a fight. He accuses them of turning the King against him and against Clarence, and when Queen Elizabeth answers back he plays the injured party, the honest soldier who is too blunt for a court of flatterers.
Original
Because I cannot flatter and look fair,
Smile in men’s faces, smooth, deceive, and cog,
Duck with French nods and apish courtesy,
I must be held a rancorous enemy.
(Richard, Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Because I’m neither fawning nor attractive;
Don’t smile; not suave, deceitful nor conniving;
Can’t bow like Frenchmen with a faux politeness;
I’m seen as a contentious enemy.
Every clause is a lie and the performance is superb. The man who cannot flatter has just talked his way past Brakenbury and will shortly flatter Anne into marriage; the man who cannot smile in men’s faces has done nothing else for two scenes. But the persona of the plain dealer is one of the most useful in politics, because it turns every accusation into proof: if Richard is attacked, that is what happens to honest men.
The scene ends with Richard alone, explaining the trick to us: he weeps for Clarence to the very men he needs to blame the Queen for, quotes scripture, and seems a saint when most he plays the devil. The audience is let backstage. Richard’s deceptions are only half the theme; the other half is the pleasure of being the one person who is not deceived, and the play makes the audience complicit in that pleasure for four acts.
The Strawberries
A3S4 is the most efficient deception in the play, and it is done almost entirely with props. The council has met to fix the date of the coronation; Richard arrives late, in a good mood, and asks the Bishop of Ely to send for the strawberries from his garden. Hastings tells the room that no man in Christendom can hide his feelings less than Richard. Richard goes out with Buckingham, comes back changed, and shows the council his arm.
Original
Look how I am bewitched; behold, mine arm
Is like a blasted sapling, withered up;
And this is Edward’s wife, that monstrous witch,
Consorted with that harlot, strumpet Shore,
That by their witchcraft thus have marked me.
(Richard, Act 3, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
See how I’m cursed, and how this arm of mine
Is withered like a blighted, sickly sapling
And this was caused by Edward’s wife, the witch,
Who partnered with that hooker Mistress Shore.
And thus I’m twisted by the spells they cast.
The arm has been withered since birth and everyone in the room knows it. That is the point. Richard is not trying to convince anyone; he is announcing that the rules have changed and that the truth no longer matters. Hastings, who begins "If they have done this deed", is a traitor by the end of the sentence for saying "if", and is beheaded before Richard’s dinner.
The strawberries are a small masterpiece of stage management. They send Ely out of the room so that he cannot object; they create a pause in which Buckingham can be briefed; and they make Richard look relaxed and domestic minutes before he calls for a head. Manipulation in this play is not only speech. It is timing, exits, and knowing which people to remove from a room before the room is asked to agree to something. The theme of power and ambition is decided in scenes like this one, and the scene is over in a hundred lines.
The Deception That Fails
By A4S4 the audience has learned Richard’s methods, and so has Queen Elizabeth. He needs her daughter, and he tries on her exactly what he tried on Lady Anne: the redirected blame, the promise of a better husband, the appeal to the future. Elizabeth agrees to everything and gives him nothing, and when he tries to swear his good faith she takes each oath apart in turn. He is reduced, at last, to threatening the country.
Original
QUEEN ELIZABETH: Shall I be tempted of the devil thus?
RICHARD: Ay, if the devil tempt you to do good.
QUEEN ELIZABETH: Shall I forget myself to be myself?
(Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
QUEEN ELIZABETH: Is this how I should let the devil tempt me?
RICHARD: Yes, if the devil tempts you to do good.
QUEEN ELIZABETH: Shall I forget the person that I am?
"Shall I forget myself to be myself?" is not a surrender; it is a riddle, and Richard mistakes it for consent. She leaves; he calls her a relenting fool and a shallow, changing woman; and in the next scene we learn that she has promised her daughter to Richmond. The manipulator has been manipulated, by a woman using his own technique of the answer that is not an answer.
This is the play’s turning point in the theme. Richard’s deceptions worked while nobody had seen them before; by Act 4 everyone has. Stanley sends messages to the enemy while promising loyalty; Buckingham learns to run; and the citizens have long since stopped cheering. The theme of language and rhetoric ends with Richard’s words being weighed and found worthless by the people he needs most, and there is no new trick left to try.
"The inferiority of his person made the hero seek consolation and compensation in the superiority of his intellect."
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, 1811–12
Key Quotes on Manipulation and Deceit
Quote 1
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.
(Richard, 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.
Quote Analysis: The masterstroke of the wooing scene. For a hundred lines Richard has been denying the killings; now, kneeling with his chest bared and his sword in Lady Anne’s hand, he admits both and blames her beauty for them in the same breath. The confession is the trap. Anne cannot strike a kneeling man who has just told her the truth, and the truth has been arranged so that it flatters her. Richard’s greatest deceptions are the ones that contain an admission.
I do not know that Englishman alive
With whom my soul is any jot at odds
More than the infant that is born tonight.
I thank my God for my humility.
(Richard, Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I don’t know any Englishman alive
With whom I am at odds with, any more than
An infant who has just been born tonight.
And thank you, God, for making me so humble.
Quote Analysis: Richard at King Edward’s deathbed, where the King has just made his court swear friendship. Richard outdoes them all: he is at odds with no Englishman alive, no more than a newborn baby, and he thanks God for his humility. The audience has heard him plan Clarence’s murder, and knows Clarence is already dead. The line is the play’s most brazen, and it is spoken to a room that applauds it. Deceit in this play needs no cleverness when the audience for it wants to be reassured.
Sweet Prince, the untainted virtue of your years
Hath not yet dived into the world’s deceit;
Nor more can you distinguish of a man
Than of his outward show, which, God he knows...
(Richard, Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Because you’re young, you lack experience
And haven’t been exposed to folk who cheat you;
The only way that you can judge a man
Is by the way that man behaves, which God knows...
Quote Analysis: Richard to the young Prince of Wales, who has noticed that his uncles have been arrested and is not comforted. Richard’s answer is that the boy is too young to tell a man’s heart from his outward show – which is true, and is being said by the man whose outward show is about to kill him. The Prince’s reply is a prayer to be kept from false friends. It is the play’s bleakest use of dramatic irony: the victim is warned, in general terms, by the man he should be warned against.
Tut, I can counterfeit the deep tragedian,
Speak and look back, and pry on every side,
Tremble and start at wagging of a straw;
Intending deep suspicion, ghastly looks
Are at my service, like enforced smiles;
And both are ready in their offices
At any time to grace my stratagems.
(Buckingham, Act 3, Scene 5)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Pah! I can fake fear like a tragic actor,
And speak and look around as though I’m frightened,
And tremble when a blade of grass is nodding;
Pretending I’m suspicious, looking scared,
Are all skills at my service, like a fake smile;
And both those skills are ready to deploy
At any time to liven up my plans.
Quote Analysis: Buckingham’s professional statement, made to Richard before the Lord Mayor arrives to be lied to. Every technique of feigned fear is listed and declared ready for use, "like enforced smiles". The speech tells us that deceit in this play is a craft with two practitioners, and it lets the audience compare them. Richard performs because he enjoys it; Buckingham performs because he has studied it. The difference does not show until A4S2, when Richard asks for something no technique can supply and Buckingham discovers he has a limit.
Key Takeaways
- Richard Feeds Resentments He Did Not Invent: Clarence, Hastings and the old nobles already hate the Queen’s family. Richard’s lies work because they agree with what his victims think.
- The Audience Is Let Backstage: Every trick is announced to us before it is played. The theme is as much about our pleasure in knowing as about the victims’ ignorance.
- Props, Timing and Exits: The strawberries send Ely out of the room; the prayer book and two bishops dress Baynard’s Castle. Manipulation is stagecraft, not only speech.
- The Tricks Stop Working: Elizabeth answers Richard with his own methods, Stanley deceives him back, and the last person Richard has to fool is himself.
Study Questions and Analysis
How does Richard manipulate the people around him?
By becoming, for each of them, the person they need him to be. To Clarence he is the loyal brother who blames the Queen; to Hastings he is the fellow enemy of the Woodvilles; to Lady Anne he is the lover driven mad by her beauty; to the Prince he is the kind uncle; to the Lord Mayor he is a holy man dragged unwillingly to the throne. The persona changes and the method does not: find what the listener already believes, and confirm it.
My Lady Grey his wife, Clarence, ’tis she
That tempers him to this extremity.
(Richard, Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
It is his wife, Lady Elizabeth Grey,
Who’s wound him up to take such drastic action.
That is the Clarence version. It works because Clarence already suspects the Queen and because a brother is the last person he would suspect. Richard adds nothing new; he arranges the existing facts into a story with a villain in it, and the villain is never him. Wolfgang Clemen’s A Commentary on Shakespeare’s Richard III (1968) shows how each of Richard’s early scenes is built as a demonstration of one such technique, so that the audience is taught his repertoire piece by piece before the great set pieces of Act 3.
Stephen Greenblatt’s Tyrant (2018) adds the uncomfortable half of the answer. Richard’s victims are not simply deceived; they collude, because each of them expects to profit from believing him. Hastings wants the Woodvilles gone; Buckingham wants an earldom; the Mayor wants to be consulted by great men. Manipulation in this play is a transaction, and the manipulated party always brings something to it.
Why does the wooing of Lady Anne succeed?
Because Richard never argues on her ground. Lady Anne has the corpse, the facts and the moral case; Richard concedes nothing and redirects everything, and the redirections come faster than she can answer them. Her beauty caused the killings; a man who kneels to be stabbed must be sincere; the only revenge she can take on him is to accept him. Each step is absurd, and each arrives before the last has been dealt with. Then he tells us how it felt:
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.
(Richard, 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.
"I will not keep her long" is the tell. The deception was never about Anne; it was about the audience, and the boast is addressed to us. William Hazlitt, in Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817), thought Richard "should woo less as a lover than as an actor" – the scene is a display of technique, and Anne is the material. Jan Kott, in Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964), read her surrender more darkly, as a recognition that in this world Richard is the only power left and that the eloquent are always finally at the mercy of the armed.
Whichever reading one takes, the scene establishes the theme’s rule: Richard’s lies succeed when the person lied to has a reason to stop resisting. Anne is exhausted, unprotected and flattered. Elizabeth, in Act 4, is none of those things, and the same speech fails.
What is the significance of the Baynard's Castle scene?
It is the play’s fullest staging of a deception as a public performance. Buckingham has failed to get the citizens to acclaim Richard at the Guildhall, so he changes the venue and the script: the Lord Mayor is brought to Baynard’s Castle, Richard appears above between two clergymen with a prayer book, and Buckingham begs him to take the crown. Richard refuses. Buckingham begs again. Richard refuses again:
Alas, why would you heap this care on me?
I am unfit for state and majesty.
I do beseech you take it not amiss,
I cannot nor I will not yield to you.
(Richard, Act 3, Scene 7)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Oh dear, why do you force this role on me?
I am unfit to be a regal monarch.
I ask that you don’t take it personally,
But I cannot, nor will not, take your offer.
Buckingham threatens to crown someone else and storms out; Richard calls him back and accepts under protest. The Mayor has seen a pious man forced to take a throne, and that is what he will tell London.
A. P. Rossiter’s "Angel with Horns" (1961) is the classic account of the scene’s double effect: it is a serious political event and a broad comedy at once, and the audience is required to enjoy the comedy while watching the country being stolen. Robert Weimann’s Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater (1978) connects Richard’s asides and knowing performances to the Vice of the old morality plays, who winked at the crowd as he worked. The scene is the theme’s high point because it is manipulation performed for two audiences at once: the Mayor, who believes it, and us, who know better and laugh. That complicity is the play’s subject as much as Richard’s lies are.
Is Buckingham as good a deceiver as Richard?
He is a better public speaker and a worse actor, and the play draws the line carefully. Buckingham’s deceptions are formal and prepared: the sanctuary argument that talks the Cardinal round, the Guildhall oration, the scripted pleading at Baynard’s Castle. He describes his own method with a professional’s pride:
Doubt not, my lord, I’ll play the orator
As if the golden fee for which I plead
Were for myself – and so, my lord, adieu.
(Buckingham, Act 3, Scene 5)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Don’t doubt it, sir, I’ll speak like I’m performing
To win the golden crown as King I ask for
Like it was for myself. So, sir, goodbye.
Richard’s deceptions are different in kind. He does not play the orator; he plays whoever the person in front of him needs, and he improvises. The difference shows at the two moments when each man is tested. Buckingham, asked to agree to the murder of two children, pauses – a real man’s hesitation breaking through the performance. Richard, asked by the ghosts whether he is a murderer, says "No. Yes, I am", and is back in character by dawn.
Charles Lamb, writing in 1802, saw that Richard’s "unstrained mirth" was the quality that carried the audience with him; Buckingham has competence without mirth, and the audience never warms to him. The play’s verdict is that deceit as a skill can be learned, hired and dismissed, and that deceit as a nature cannot. Buckingham is the first; he is discarded in A4S2 and dead by A5S1.
Why do Richard's deceptions stop working in Act 4?
Because they have all been seen. A trick that depends on the victim not recognising it cannot survive being played twice, and by Act 4 the whole court has watched Hastings, Rivers, Clarence and the princes go. The clearest sign is the second wooing. Richard performs the Anne speech again, for Queen Elizabeth, and she has seen the first performance:
By nothing, for this is no oath:
Thy George, profaned, hath lost his lordly honour;
Thy Garter, blemished, pawned his knightly virtue;
Thy crown, usurped, disgraced his kingly glory.
(Queen Elizabeth, Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
By nothing; this oath isn’t real.
The pendant of St George you’ve desecrated;
You’ve stained the knighthood Order of the Garter;
You stole the crown and brought disgrace upon it.
Every oath he offers is something he has already broken, and she says so. The exchange ends with Richard swearing by the future, and Elizabeth pointing out that he has already misused it. He has no words left that anyone will credit, and the play makes this the practical cause of his fall: Stanley deceives him, Buckingham deserts him, the citizens stay silent, and his own soldiers, Richmond says, would rather the other side won.
Nicholas Brooke’s Shakespeare’s Early Tragedies (1968) observes that the play’s formal rhetoric turns against Richard in its final movement: the rapid exchanges he used to beat Anne are used to beat him. Harold C. Goddard, in The Meaning of Shakespeare (1951), read the reversal as the play’s moral centre, the point at which a man who has treated every word as a tool discovers that tools wear out. The theme of conscience and guilt then takes over, because the last person left to deceive is Richard himself, and on the night before Bosworth he cannot manage it.
How does the play make the audience complicit in Richard's deceit?
By telling us everything first. From the opening soliloquy onwards, Richard confides each plan to the audience before he plays it, and for four acts we know more than any character on stage. That knowledge is a pleasure, and the play exploits it. When Richard tells the Prince to beware of false friends, we enjoy the irony; when he thanks God for his humility at Edward’s deathbed, we are the only people in the theatre who are not taken in.
The nearest thing to a confession of the technique is Richard’s aside in A3S1, when the boy has failed to understand a joke about wise children dying young:
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 was the comic devil of the morality plays, whose whole art was to make the audience laugh at what he was doing to the hero. Richard names the tradition and expects us to enjoy it. Bernard Spivack’s Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (1958) traced the inheritance in detail; Phyllis Rackin’s "Engendering the Tragic Audience" (1993) asked who exactly is being flattered, and argued that the play first invites the spectator to share Richard’s pleasure in humiliating his victims, then withdraws the invitation as the victims’ curses come true. By Act 5 we are watching Richard rather than watching with him. The deceit was ours as well as his, and the play is exact about when it takes it back.
What is the difference between manipulation and persuasion in the play?
Persuasion, in this play, is what happens when the listener is allowed to weigh the argument; manipulation is what happens when the listener is not told what is being weighed. Richmond persuades: his oration to his soldiers offers reasons – God, cause, wives, children – and a promise to share the spoils. Richard manipulates: he offers each person a story that suits them and withholds the fact that the story is his.
The play is unusually explicit about the second method, because Richard describes it to us. In A1S3, after picking a quarrel with the Queen’s family in front of witnesses, he explains what the quarrel was for:
I do the wrong, and first begin to brawl.
The secret mischiefs that I set abroach
I lay unto the grievous charge of others.
(Richard, 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.
Provoke the fight, then lay the blame elsewhere, and weep over the victim to the people you have blamed. It is a technique, and it has a name in the study of rhetoric: the speaker who conceals his own interest while appearing to serve his listener’s. Emrys Jones, in The Origins of Shakespeare (1977), traces Richard’s manner to the Senecan tyrant and the Machiavel of the Elizabethan stage, figures for whom speech is purely instrumental. The play’s answer to the question is in its ending. Richmond, who persuades, is crowned; Richard, who manipulates, dies calling for a horse, having run out of people who will listen. The theme of language and rhetoric is where the distinction is worked out line by line.
