Richard IIIStudy Guide

Richard, Duke of Gloucester, steps forward the moment England has peace and tells you he will not keep it. Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York, and he will not live in it. He calls himself deformed, unfinished, unfit for sport, and chooses villainy out loud: since he cannot prove a lover, he is determined to prove a villain. Shakespeare staged the play around 1592. The man who tells you exactly what he is will still get a crown, because a court, a family, and a city keep saying yes.

Richard is the youngest brother of King Edward IV: sharp, theatrical, and so sure that grievance licenses anything that he recruits the audience as witness before he recruits a single ally. Lady Anne walks beside Henry VI's coffin, the widow of a man Richard killed, and still takes his ring. George, Duke of Clarence, believes the wounded brotherhood and walks into the Tower. Buckingham builds the theater that makes a crown look like a duty, then asks for a pause and is discarded. Queen Elizabeth sees the pattern and still has to speak it in public before anyone will hear. Lord Hastings says if at a council table and is beheaded before dinner. Around them Shakespeare places the two princes in the Tower, Tyrrell who can do the work Buckingham will not, Margaret who names the curse early, and Richmond, who arrives only when the hunt has already eaten the court.

Richard turns Edward against Clarence with a drunken prophecy that G will murder the king's heirs. He stops Anne at the coffin, lends her the sword, and calls the conquest an experiment he will not keep. Hired murderers drown Clarence in a malmsey-butt. Edward dies. The princes arrive. Elizabeth flees into sanctuary. At a Tower council Richard shows a withered arm, accuses witchcraft, and has Hastings killed for the word if. With Buckingham he parades the head to the Mayor, sends a script to Guildhall that Edward's children are bastards, then takes a prayer book, stands between two bishops, and plays the reluctant maid until they force the crown on him. Once king, he tests Buckingham: the princes must die. Buckingham hesitates. Tyrrell does not. The boys are smothered. Richard then courts Elizabeth for her daughter's hand and offers to bury the murdered princes in the girl's womb. The night before Bosworth the ghosts tell him to despair and die. He wakes asking whether Richard loves Richard, then will not withdraw. He cries a horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse, and dies fighting. Derby plucks the crown from the dead temples.

Shakespeare wrote the play from Tudor sources that needed Richard to be a monster. He never treats the hunchback as a cartoon, or the wooing as a cute test, or Bosworth as simple justice arriving on schedule. Charm without empathy is not a personality. It is a method. Brotherhood, piety, and grief all become tools the moment someone needs them to be. What remains is not a sermon against ambition. It is a picture of how a predator narrates his own hunt, and of how a court keeps applauding until there is nobody left in the room but the man who wrote the script.

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