Power and Ambition
Theme Profile – At a Glance
- Focus: How a crown is won in this play, what it does to the man who wins it, and why the skills that take Richard to the throne are useless for keeping him there.
- Key Characters: Richard III, The Duke of Buckingham, King Edward IV, Queen Margaret, Richmond.
- The Core Tension: Nobody in the play admits to wanting power. Richard has to be begged to take the crown; Richmond never mentions his claim; Buckingham asks only for what he was promised. Ambition works by pretending it is not there.
- Key Manifestations: Richard’s opening soliloquy and the plot against Clarence (A1S1); the quarrel over the Queen’s upstart family (A1S3); the arrests on the road from Ludlow (A2S4); the show at Baynard’s Castle (A3S7); the giving vein (A4S2); Richard’s last throw at Bosworth (A5S4).
- Famous Quote:
"Which done, God take King Edward to his mercy,
And leave the world for me to bustle in!"
(Act 1, Scene 1) - The Outcome: Richard gets the crown in Act 3 and is dead by the end of Act 5. Richmond, who never says he wants it, is crowned on the field. The play’s last image of power is a man being handed a crown he did not visibly reach for.
Leave the World for Me to Bustle In
The play’s first speech is a plan. Richard tells the audience that peace bores him, that he cannot be a lover, and that he has therefore decided to be a villain; and then, once Hastings has left the stage, he explains what the villainy is for.
Original
I’ll in, to urge his hatred more to Clarence
With lies well steeled with weighty arguments,
And if I fail not in my deep intent,
Clarence hath not another day to live:
Which done, God take King Edward to his mercy,
And leave the world for me to bustle in!
(Richard, Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I’ll meet the King and urge him to hate Clarence
Through sturdy lies and weighty arguments,
And if I do not fail in my deep scheming,
Then Clarence will not live another day:
And when that’s done, King Edward’s free to die,
And I’ll take over as I rule the world!
The word is "bustle". Richard does not speak of ruling, or of reigning, or of England; he speaks of a world cleared of two brothers so that he can move about in it. Ambition here is not a vision of kingship but an appetite for room, and the two deaths that will make the room are mentioned in passing, as tasks.
What the speech also establishes is the method. Clarence is to die by rumour, King Edward by his own illness, and Richard will supply "lies well steeled with weighty arguments" to hurry the first along. Nothing is to be done by force. The play’s study of power begins with a man who understands that in a court the cheapest weapon is a story, and its treatment of manipulation and deceit and of power are, from this scene on, the same subject.
Since You Will Buckle Fortune on My Back
By A3S7 the road is clear, and Richard has to be seen not to walk down it. Buckingham has slandered the princes at the Guildhall, the Lord Mayor and citizens have been brought to Baynard’s Castle, and Richard appears above them between two bishops with a prayer book in his hand. He is asked to take the crown. He refuses. He is asked again. He refuses again. Buckingham walks out. Richard calls him back.
Original
Cousin of Buckingham, and sage grave men,
Since you will buckle Fortune on my back,
To bear her burden whe’er I will or no,
I must have patience to endure the load...
(Richard, Act 3, Scene 7)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
My cousin Buckingham, and all you wise men,
Since you intend to force me to accept,
To take it if I want the role or not,
I have to find the patience to endure it...
The crown is described as a burden that other men have strapped to his back against his will, and the sentence is built so that any blame for what follows belongs to the people who insisted. Richard has spent two acts arranging to be forced. It is the play’s central demonstration of how power is taken in a world where it cannot be seen to be wanted.
The scene works because everyone on stage except the Mayor knows it is a performance, and the audience has watched the rehearsal. It is also the last time Richard is this good. The theme of appearance vs reality peaks here, and so does his career: he has reached the throne by being the only man in the play who never appears to be reaching for anything.
So Far in Blood
A4S2 opens with Richard on the throne, and the first words he speaks as king are a request for two more murders. The change in him is immediate and the play makes no attempt to hide it. He asks Buckingham, in a whisper, to kill the princes; Buckingham hesitates; and Richard is left to say plainly what he wants.
Original
Shall I be plain? I wish the bastards dead,
And I would have it suddenly performed.
What say’st thou now? Speak suddenly, be brief.
(King Richard, Act 4, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Shall I be clear? I want those bastards dead,
And I would like it done immediately.
What do you say now? Speak up and be brief.
"Shall I be plain?" is a question Richard has never needed to ask before. For three acts he has worked by indirection, and the indirection was the pleasure. Now he is king, there is no one above him to deceive, and the only tool left is the order. The order is given to a man who does not want to take it, and within the scene Buckingham has been refused his earldom and gone.
What has happened is that power has changed sides on him. As Duke of Gloucester Richard stood outside the system and manipulated it; as king he is the system, and every threat now comes towards him. The soliloquies shrink, the jokes go, and the man who confided in the audience at leisure is reduced to muttering "so far in blood that sin will pluck on sin". The crown he wanted is the one thing that makes him ordinary.
A Kingdom for a Horse
Bosworth is where the play cashes the theme. Richard has an army, the crown, and a night of ghosts behind him; Richmond has fewer men, a doubtful claim and a clean conscience. Richard’s own oration to his troops shows what he has left to offer them.
Original
March on, join bravely, let us to it pell-mell;
If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell.
(King Richard, Act 5, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
March on together, bravely, let’s be swift;
We’ll go to heaven, else to hell we’ll shift.
It is a good couplet and a hopeless one. Richard’s promise to his soldiers is that they will all go to hell together, which is a remarkable thing for a king to say on the morning of a battle, and it tells us where power has ended up in his mind: as a gambler’s stake rather than a possession.
His last words make the same point. Offered a horse to escape, he refuses it and goes back into the fight on foot, having "set my life upon a cast" and determined to "stand the hazard of the die". The kingdom that took him five acts to win is offered for a horse and not taken. Power, in this play, is something you can only hold while you are reaching for it. Richmond gets the crown from Stanley’s hands, and his first act is to pardon the men who fought against him; the play’s treatment of fate vs free will suggests that this is the difference between a king who was made and one who was allowed.
"In Richard III., ambition is, as it were, the channel in which this impulse directs itself; the character is drawn with the greatest fulness and perfection."
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, 1811–12
Key Quotes on Power and Ambition
Quote 1
They that stand high have many blasts to shake them,
And if they fall, they dash themselves to pieces.
(Queen Margaret, Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
The higher up one stands, the more the winds blow,
But when they fall, they shatter into pieces.
Quote Analysis: Queen Margaret to Dorset, who has just been made a marquess and does not yet know what the title will cost. The image is of a tree in a high place, shaken by every wind and shattered when it falls, and it is spoken by the one person on stage who has already fallen from the top. Dorset will lose his brother and his uncle to the block and flee the country; Hastings, who stands by, will be dead within two acts. The line is the play’s general law of power, stated in Act 1 by the woman who has least of it.
O momentary grace of mortal men,
Which we more hunt for than the grace of God!
Who builds his hope in air of your good looks
Lives like a drunken sailor on a mast,
Ready with every nod to tumble down
Into the fatal bowels of the deep.
(Hastings, Act 3, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Why do we seek the blessing of mere mortals,
When we should really seek the grace of God!
Those men whose hopes are built on others’ views
Live like a drunken sailor on a mast
Who, with each rock from waves, risks falling in
To drown within the ocean’s fatal grasp.
Quote Analysis: Hastings, on the way to the block, having discovered in the space of a single council meeting that a king’s favour is worth nothing. He had told a passing pursuivant that morning that he was in better state than ever; he had laughed at StanleyHe had told Catesby that morning that he was in better state than ever; he had joked with Stanley about the boar.#8217;s dream of the boar. Now the image is of a sailor drunk on the mast, ready to fall at every nod. "Air of your good looks" is exact: Hastings built his security on Richard’s smile, and Richard’s smile was the trap. Power in this play is never held; it is only ever borrowed from someone who can take it back.
And is it thus? Repays he my deep service
With such contempt? Made I him king for this?
(Buckingham, Act 4, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
And this is how it is? He pays me back
With deep contempt? I made him king for this?
Quote Analysis: Buckingham alone, after Richard has refused him the earldom of Hereford. The question is the question of every enabler in history, and the play has arranged for it to be asked a scene too late. Buckingham made a king in order to be rewarded by one; he has discovered that kings, once made, do not need their makers. His next line is to remember Hastings, and to run. The theme’s bleakest lesson is here: the power you help create is not yours, and the moment you ask for a share of it you have become a threat.
True hope is swift and flies with swallow’s wings,
Kings it makes gods, and meaner creatures kings.
(Richmond, Act 5, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
True hope flies fast upon a swallow’s wings;
Kings rise to God-like status, folk to kings.
Quote Analysis: Richmond’s couplet at the end of his first scene, and the only aphorism he speaks. Hope makes kings into gods and lesser men into kings, which is precisely what is about to happen to him: an earl with a thin claim will be a king within two scenes. The line is worth setting against Richard’s. Richard talked about power as bustle, blood and a cast of the dice. Richmond talks about it as hope, and never once as something he wants. The play gives the crown to the second kind of language.
Key Takeaways
- Ambition Never Admits Itself: Richard must be begged to take the crown, Richmond never mentions his claim, and Buckingham asks only for what he is owed. Power in this play is taken by seeming not to want it.
- Winning and Keeping Are Different Skills: Richard’s wit, timing and performances carry him to the throne. None of them helps him hold it; as king he has only orders, and the orders drive his friends away.
- Power Is Borrowed, Not Owned: Hastings, Buckingham, Rivers and Anne each discover that what they held was on loan from Richard. Margaret said so in Act 1: they that stand high have many blasts to shake them.
- The Crown Goes to the Man Who Did Not Reach: Richmond is handed the crown by Stanley and pardons his enemies. The play’s last picture of power is of a king who was allowed rather than made.
Study Questions and Analysis
How does Richard gain the throne?
By removing everyone between himself and it, one at a time, and by arranging for each removal to look like someone else’s doing. Clarence dies because a prophecy that Richard planted has persuaded the King; the Queen’s brother and son die because Buckingham and Richard "part the Queen’s proud kindred from the Prince" on the road from Ludlow; Hastings dies because he will not agree to setting aside Edward’s children. Then the children themselves are declared illegitimate, and Richard gives Buckingham the brief:
Go after, after, cousin Buckingham.
The Mayor towards Guildhall hies him in all post.
There, at your meet’st advantage of the time,
Infer the bastardy of Edward’s children.
(Richard, Act 3, Scene 5)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Go follow him, my cousin Buckingham.
The Mayor’s hotfooting it towards the Guildhall.
Once there, and when you think the time is right,
Frame Edward’s kids as illegitimate.
The Guildhall does not cheer, so Buckingham supplies ten voices of his own and calls it applause; the Lord Mayor is brought to Baynard’s Castle; Richard appears between two bishops and is begged three times. The whole sequence takes five scenes of Act 3, and at no point does Richard raise his voice or draw a sword. He is offered the crown, and accepts it under protest.
Jan Kott, in Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964), called the process the "Grand Mechanism": a staircase on which each king climbs over the body of the last, and Richard’s ascent is the clearest picture of it in Shakespeare because he narrates each step to the audience as he takes it. Stephen Greenblatt’s Tyrant (2018) shifts the emphasis from the climber to the people who hold the ladder – Buckingham, Catesby, the Mayor, the silent citizens – and argues that the play’s real subject is how a manifestly unfit man is allowed to reach the top. Both are right, and both leave the same question open, which is why nobody stops him. The answer the play gives is that everyone expects to profit, and that by the time they discover otherwise it is too late.
Why does Richard want the crown?
The play offers a reason and then makes it hard to believe. In the opening soliloquy Richard says that he is deformed, cannot be a lover, and has therefore chosen to be a villain; the crown is never mentioned as a goal in itself.
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.
(Richard, Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
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.
Peace, in other words, leaves him nothing to do. The argument is that ambition is a substitute for pleasure, and that a man shut out of one kind of satisfaction will take another. It explains the energy and it does not explain the crown, and critics have been divided ever since about how far to trust it.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his 1811–12 lectures, took the soliloquy at its word and made "pride of intellect" the motive: "The inferiority of his person made the hero seek consolation and compensation in the superiority of his intellect." William Hazlitt, in Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817), thought Richard "is not a man striving to be great, but to be greater than he is" – ambition as restlessness rather than as a plan. Sigmund Freud, in 1916, found the speech persuasive precisely because its logic is faulty: we all feel that nature has short-changed us and that life owes us reparation, and Richard simply says so aloud. On any of these readings the crown is not the point. The point is the reaching, and the play bears this out: Richard is never happier than in Act 1, when he has nothing, and never more miserable than in Act 4, when he has everything.
Is Buckingham ambitious too?
Yes, and the play is careful to make his ambition look reasonable. Buckingham wants what a great nobleman in his position would expect: influence, the earldom of Hereford, the King’s goods that go with it, and the standing of the man who made the King. He does not want the crown, and he never lies to the audience about what he does want. When he comes to collect, he asks in the proper form:
My lord, I claim the gift, my due by promise,
For which your honour and your faith is pawned,
Th’ earldom of Herford, and the moveables,
Which you have promised I shall possess.
(Buckingham, Act 4, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
My lord, I’d like to claim my promised gift
That, in good faith, you’d offered for my service,
To be the Earl of Hereford, and assets,
Which you have promised that you’ll give to me.
Richard talks over him about Richmond and a prophecy, and then says he is not in the giving vein. The refusal is the play’s clearest statement about the relationship between two ambitions: the larger one uses the smaller and then declines to pay. Buckingham has assumed that power is a partnership. Richard has never assumed anything of the kind.
Peter Saccio’s Shakespeare’s English Kings (1977) notes that the historical Buckingham’s rebellion in 1483 has never been fully explained, and that Shakespeare supplies the motive the chronicles lack: the earldom withheld and the princes murdered. Stephen Greenblatt (2018) treats him as the type of the enabler, the able man who lends a tyrant his competence in the belief that he will share the proceeds. His ambition is smaller than Richard’s, more conventional, and just as fatal.
What does the play say about the legitimacy of power?
That everyone claims it and no one quite has it. King Edward took the crown in battle from Henry VI; Richard takes it from Edward’s sons by declaring them bastards; Richmond takes it from Richard with a Lancastrian claim so thin that the play never states it. Richard’s own defence of his title, when Stanley reports that Richmond is at sea, is a set of rhetorical questions:
Is the chair empty? Is the sword unswayed?
Is the King dead? The empire unpossessed?
What heir of York is there alive but we?
And who is England’s king but great York’s heir?
(King Richard, Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Is the throne empty? Is the sword kept sheathed?
Is the King dead? And is the country unclaimed?
What royal heir of York lives on but me?
And who’s the King of England but York’s heir?
Each question assumes its answer, and each answer is a lie or a half-truth: the chair was not empty, the heir of York was a boy in the Tower, and the man asking had put him there. Yet the form of the argument is the form every king in the play uses. Possession is legitimacy, and the only proof is that no one has taken it from you yet.
E. M. W. Tillyard’s Shakespeare’s History Plays (1944) read the tetralogy as a demonstration that legitimate power is finally restored by providence in the person of Richmond, whose thin claim is made good by God’s choice. Phyllis Rackin’s Stages of History (1990) argued that the histories keep several ideas of legitimacy in play at once – descent, conquest, consent, providence – and never settle on one. The play’s own evidence supports Rackin: Richmond wins because Stanley changes sides and the ghosts choose him, and his closing speech grounds the new dynasty in a marriage rather than a claim. The theme of fate vs free will does the work that legitimacy cannot.
How does power isolate Richard?
Completely, and the play measures the isolation in soliloquies. In Act 1 Richard confides in the audience at length and with pleasure; by Act 4 his private speeches are short and anxious; and on the night before Bosworth he speaks to himself rather than to us, and finds no one there.
I shall despair; there is no creature loves me,
And if I die no soul will pity me.
And wherefore should they, since that I myself
Find in myself no pity to myself?
(King Richard, Act 5, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Now I despair, for there’s no one that loves me,
And if I die, no one will pity me.
Why should they pity me, when even I
Cannot find any reason for self-pity?
The lines are the arithmetic of a man who has spent every relationship he had. His brothers are dead by his arrangement; his wife is dead by his order; his mother has cursed him to his face; Buckingham has been executed; Stanley is sending messages to the enemy. The crown has been won by removing everyone who might have loved him, and he notices, for one night, what that leaves.
Wolfgang Clemen’s A Commentary on Shakespeare’s Richard III (1968) traces the shrinking of Richard’s soliloquies across the play as the formal sign of his isolation: the more power he holds, the less he has to say to us. Nicholas Brooke’s Shakespeare’s Early Tragedies (1968) reads the dream soliloquy as the moment the play becomes tragedy, because the man who has used everyone discovers that the one person he cannot use is himself. By morning he has decided that conscience is a word for cowards, and goes out to die among strangers. The play’s treatment of conscience and guilt is where its study of power ends.
What role do the citizens of London play in Richard's rise?
A small one on stage and a large one in the play’s argument. The three citizens who meet in the street in A2S3 have no power at all, and they are the only people who predict the whole play correctly. The Third Citizen reads the signs like a farmer reading the sky:
When clouds are seen, wise men put on their cloaks;
When great leaves fall, then winter is at hand;
When the sun sets, who doth not look for night?
Untimely storms makes men expect a dearth.
(Third Citizen, Act 2, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Wise men put on their raincoats when it’s cloudy;
When leaves fall from the trees, it’s nearly winter;
At dusk, who doesn’t know the night is coming?
With early storms, we fear a ravaged harvest.
A child on the throne, a court divided, a protector who is feared: the citizens see it and go home. Later, when Buckingham asks the Guildhall to acclaim Richard, the citizens say nothing, and he has to manufacture the applause. Silence is the only resistance the common people offer, and the play treats it with respect: it is the one thing Richard cannot talk his way round.
Robert Weimann’s Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater (1978) places the citizens and the Scrivener in a long tradition of plain-speaking figures who stand at the front of the stage and tell the audience what the great men will not. Phyllis Rackin (1990) reads them as the play’s reminder that the official history is being made over the heads of the people who will live under it. Richard’s power is taken at court and ratified, if at all, by ten hired voices in a hall. The citizens know it, and their knowing is the play’s quiet verdict.
How does Richard III compare with Macbeth as a study of ambition?
The two plays are often set together, and the comparison is worth making carefully. Both concern a man who murders his way to a crown and is destroyed by it; both give him a night of visions before the final battle; both end with the killer’s head brought on and a new order proclaimed. The differences are where the interest is. Macbeth has to be persuaded and is horrified by what he does; Richard needs no persuading and enjoys it. Macbeth loses his wife and his sleep before he loses the crown; Richard loses nothing he notices until the ghosts arrive. The nearest Richard comes to Macbeth’s language is a single moment in A4S2:
But I am in
So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin.
Tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye.
(King Richard, 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.
Macbeth says something very like this – that he is stepped so far in blood that going back would be as tedious as going on – but he says it as a man exhausted by guilt, and Richard says it as a man stating a policy. That is the whole difference. Ambition in Macbeth is a temptation the play watches a good man fail to resist; ambition in Richard III is a talent the play watches a bad man exercise.
William Hazlitt, in Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817), set the two characters against each other at length and found Richard the more theatrical and Macbeth the more inward. Harold C. Goddard’s The Meaning of Shakespeare (1951) treats Richard III as the early sketch and Macbeth as the finished study of the same subject, with conscience moved from the last act to the first. For an essay, the useful point is that both plays agree about the end of ambition – a man alone, at night, with the dead – and disagree entirely about how much the man understood on the way there.
