Themes in Richard III

"Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York." Richard opens the play alone on stage, speaking directly to the audience. He is not confessing. He is performing. He is inviting you to watch the plot with him.

His situation: the House of York has won the civil war. His brother Edward is king. England is at peace. Richard is physically deformed — he describes himself as "rudely stamp'd," "curtail'd of fair proportion," unable to be a lover — and he has decided that since he cannot play the expected peacetime role, he will instead "prove a villain." "I am determined to prove a villain" is his declaration. It is not a slip. It is a program.

What separates him from most fictional villains is the directness of the self-disclosure. He tells you exactly what he is going to do, and then does it. He has his brother Clarence arrested in Act 1 Scene 1, based on a prophecy he has planted himself, and expresses sympathy for him afterward to his face. "I cannot weep; for all my body's moisture / Scarce serves to quench my furnace-full of grief" — he says this to Clarence, who is being led away. It is completely false. He knows it. The audience knows it. It is also very funny.

The ambition is not presented as simple greed for a crown. Richard's opening speech makes clear that his primary complaint is exclusion — from the normal social world of peace, romance, and courtly life. His deformity is his stated reason for choosing villainy. Whether to believe this is the play's central psychological question. He might be using his appearance as a convenient narrative for something more straightforward: he wants to be king, and he will do whatever is necessary.

His route to the throne is methodical. Clarence is murdered in Act 1 Scene 4. Edward IV dies in Act 4. The young princes — Edward's heirs — are sent to the Tower in Act 3 and presumably killed there in Act 4 Scene 3, though the play does not show it directly. Hastings is executed in Act 3 Scene 4. Buckingham eventually refuses one step too many and is executed in Act 5 Scene 1. Richard dismantles anyone who stands between him and the crown with the efficiency of someone who has been thinking about it for a long time.

By Act 4, he is king. This is where the play changes register. Richard without obstacles is Richard without an audience to perform for. The wit that made Acts 1 through 3 so theatrically alive drains away as the practical business of maintaining a throne through terror takes over. He says in Act 4 Scene 2: "I am not in the giving vein to-day." He has got what he wanted. He is not enjoying it.

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Richard is not troubled by conscience for most of the play. He has done too many things that require not being troubled by it, and he has managed that well. What is interesting is that Shakespeare gives him a perfectly lucid account of this in Act 5 Scene 3, the night before the Battle of Bosworth, when everything comes due at once.

The ghosts visit him in his sleep — everyone he has killed, in order: Prince Edward, Henry VI, Clarence, Rivers, Grey, Vaughan, Hastings, the young princes, Lady Anne, Buckingham. Each one speaks to him: "Despair and die." Each one speaks to Richmond — his opponent in tomorrow's battle — and says "Live and flourish." Richard wakes alone.

"O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!" He goes through a sequence of self-argument that is one of the most complex passages of psychological writing in Shakespeare. "I am a villain: yet I lie. I am not." He tries both positions. "Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I." He attempts to use self-love as a foundation and finds there is nothing there. "I shall despair. There is no creature loves me."

This is a man who announced in Act 1 that he was "determined to prove a villain" and who has now, in Act 5, discovered what that determination has produced. He has no one. He has a throne that he is about to lose, a battle he is going to fight in the morning, and no way to think about tomorrow that does not lead to despair.

Claurence's dream in Act 1 Scene 4 anticipates all of this. He is waiting in the Tower, and he describes a nightmare in which he drowned and went to hell, where he met the people he had betrayed in the wars. "'Clarence is come; false, fleeting, perjured Clarence" — the accusation comes from the dead, exactly as Richard's accusers will come in Act 5. The conscience that destroys Richard was already active, in someone else, in the play's first act.

Margaret's curse in Act 1 Scene 3 identifies conscience as Richard's eventual vulnerability: "The worm of conscience still begnaw thy soul!" She is right. He has armoured himself against external consequences for four acts. What he cannot armour against is himself. "Conscience is but a word that cowards use" he says before the battle, rallying his troops — and the bravado does not quite convince, coming from a man who has just spent the night arguing with his own mind.

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Richard woos Lady Anne in Act 1 Scene 2 over the open coffin of Henry VI. Anne was married to Henry's son Edward of Westminster, who Richard killed. Henry VI, in the coffin in front of them, was also killed by Richard. She knows all of this. She spits at him. He offers his own throat to her sword.

By the end of the scene, she has agreed to see him again. "Was ever woman in this humour woo'd? / Was ever woman in this humour won?" — Richard says to himself after she leaves. He is genuinely astonished. The scene is not romantic. It is a demonstration of what determined manipulation can achieve against a person in an extreme state of grief who has nothing else to hold onto.

Buckingham is Richard's primary political instrument through Acts 2 to 4. He manages the public relations of Richard's seizure of power — persuading the citizens, managing the council, organising the formal offer of the crown. Richard calls him "my other self, my oracle, my prophet, / My dear Coz." He is using Buckingham's abilities fully and intends to discard him once they are no longer needed.

The moment of discard comes when Richard asks Buckingham to arrange the murder of the young princes in the Tower. Buckingham hesitates — asks for time to think. Richard immediately registers this as a defection. Within a few scenes, Buckingham is arrested. He is executed in Act 5 Scene 1. "Thus Margaret's curse falls heavy on my neck" he says before he dies, recognising what has happened.

The princes themselves are handled off-stage. Richard has them moved to the Tower in Act 3 and their murder is reported, not shown, in Act 4 Scene 3. Tyrrell, the hired murderer, delivers a brief description of their deaths that sounds genuinely remorseful. Richard listens and moves immediately to the next political calculation — he needs a new wife, his next alliance.

Every relationship in the play is a resource. Richard uses Anne to legitimate his claim to the House of Lancaster, then has her killed when he needs to remarry. He uses Buckingham as a political operator, then executes him. He uses Clarence's execution to remove an obstacle, then mourns him publicly. The manipulation is total and consistent. His one mistake is Buckingham's hesitation — he misreads it as resolvable and loses time. Richmond's army lands before he has secured his position.

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Margaret's appearance in Act 1 Scene 3 is unusual. She is the widow of Henry VI, the deposed and murdered king whose family lost the Wars of the Roses to the Yorkists. She has no political function in the play. She is there to curse.

She curses each of the principal characters in turn. She curses Rivers, Dorset, and Hastings. She curses Queen Elizabeth. She curses Richard. Each curse names something specific — she tells Elizabeth her sons will die, that her husband Edward will die before her. She tells Richard she hopes he outlives all the things he loves and ends in nothing. "The worm of conscience still begnaw thy soul!"

By Act 3, the curses are coming true. Hastings is executed. Rivers and Grey are taken in Act 3 Scene 3. In Act 4 Scene 4, the women gather — Margaret, Elizabeth, and the Duchess of York — and Margaret itemises what has happened, matching each curse to its fulfilment. She was not making things up. She was reading the logic of how this court operates and describing where that logic leads.

Richard's plot against Clarence in Act 1 Scene 1 also uses prophecy as a mechanism. He has spread a rumour that a "G" will destroy King Edward's heirs. Clarence's name is George — he begins with "G." Richard makes sure the king hears this prophecy. Clarence is arrested. The prophecy that destroys Clarence is one Richard invented. This is the same play that presents Margaret's curses as genuine. Both prophecies come true. One was manipulated into existence, one was not. The play does not quite resolve whether this distinction matters.

The ghosts before Bosworth are prophecy in reverse: the dead speak the future in the same night that they enumerate the past. Each one tells Richard to despair and Richmond to be confident. Their arrival is both supernatural and logical — Richard's actions have produced consequences that are now arriving at once. Whether the ghosts are real or his own guilty imagination producing predictions he already knows are true is, as in Macbeth's dagger, something the play leaves open.

Richmond's victory at Bosworth in Act 5 is framed throughout as the restoration of providential order — the idea that history is moving toward a righteous outcome and that Margaret's curses were part of that movement. Shakespeare was writing for a Tudor audience whose dynasty began with Richmond. The play's final image is Richmond declaring peace, not Richard dying. Fate, here, has a very specific destination.

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Richard is the most theatrically self-aware character Shakespeare ever wrote. He opens the play in direct address to the audience, explaining his intentions. He does this multiple times. He is not confused about the difference between what he is and what he performs. He manages both simultaneously and with visible enjoyment.

"And seem a saint, when most I play the devil" — he says this in Act 1 Scene 3, describing his strategy for the day ahead. The verb "play" is precise. He is not deceiving himself. He is a man who has decided to use theatre as his primary weapon and is articulate about the decision.

His staging of the crown offer in Act 3 Scenes 5 and 7 is the most elaborate of his productions. He instructs Buckingham to request the crown on behalf of the citizens, so that he can appear reluctant, pious, and properly invited to take power rather than having seized it. The staging requires an audience of citizens, a balcony appearance between two bishops, a prayer book, and Buckingham's polished rhetoric. Richard directs all of it. When Buckingham says he is "not made of stone" and the citizens cheer, Richard "descends" — the stage direction itself is theatrical. He has performed reluctance so convincingly that accepting the crown appears virtuous.

His wooing of Lady Anne in Act 1 Scene 2 is another production. He controls the pace of the scene, the emotional temperature, and the script he offers her to respond to. She says her lines — insults, refusals, grief — and he absorbs them all and redirects them. He gives her a role, then gradually makes that role impossible to maintain. By the time she accepts his ring, she has been cast in a story she did not write.

What happens in Acts 4 and 5 is the disintegration of his directorial control. Once he is king, the audience he has been playing to — the court, the citizens, the gallery — has less reason to be entertained by him. He becomes a tyrant rather than a plotter, and tyranny does not offer the same theatrical opportunities. His line before Bosworth — "A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!" — is his last moment of theatrical vitality. It is extravagant, it is absurd, it is quotable. It is also a man about to lose everything reduced to one desperate request.

The night before Bosworth, the ghosts come, and he wakes to a speech he cannot perform his way out of. "I shall despair" is not a line he can deliver with irony. He has run out of audience to play to, and without an audience, the performance cannot hold.

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Characters and This Theme