Shakespeare‘s Richard III is a brilliant portrait of villainy, a mesmerizing study in how unchecked ambition and Machiavellian manipulation can lead to the downfall of individuals and entire kingdoms. The play‘s titular character, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, has become the quintessential image of an evil king in popular culture. With his hunchback, withered arm, and a mind "subtle, false, and treacherous," Richard murders and schemes his way to the English throne, only to be haunted by his own conscience and destroyed by his misdeeds.
But why did Shakespeare choose to portray this controversial king, the last of the Plantagenet dynasty, in such a relentlessly villainous light? Was it merely to please the Tudor monarchs who succeeded Richard, or to conform to the contemporary chronicles that depicted him as a tyrant? Or did Shakespeare have deeper reasons for shaping Richard into a villain-protagonist of almost Satanic charisma and malice?
Historical Context: The Wars of the Roses and Richard III‘s Reign
To understand Shakespeare‘s portrayal, we first need to look at the historical Richard III and the tumultuous period he lived in. Richard was born in 1452, in the midst of the Wars of the Roses – a series of bloody civil wars between two rival branches of the Plantagenet dynasty, the Houses of Lancaster and York. Richard‘s elder brother, Edward IV, deposed the Lancastrian king Henry VI and claimed the throne in 1461, with Richard serving as his loyal lieutenant.
However, when Edward IV died unexpectedly in 1483, the succession was thrown into chaos. Edward‘s sons, the 12-year-old Edward V and his younger brother Richard, were declared illegitimate by Richard and his supporters. Richard took the throne as Richard III, but his reign was short and troubled. Just two years later, in 1485, he was defeated and killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field by Henry Tudor, who became Henry VII, the first king of the Tudor dynasty.
A facial reconstruction of Richard III based on his discovered skeleton. © University of Leicester
Shakespeare‘s Sources and Tudor Propaganda
It was during the reign of Henry VII‘s granddaughter, Elizabeth I, that Shakespeare wrote his play Richard III around 1592. Shakespeare‘s main source was the chronicle The History of King Richard III by Sir Thomas More, written around 1513. More‘s account, based on testimony from those hostile to Richard, painted the king as a deformed, ruthless tyrant who murdered his way to the throne.
As the Oxford historian John Guy notes in his biography of More, this work was "a piece of brilliant propaganda" that "established the enduring myth of the monstrous usurper" (Guy, 2012, p. 164). The Tudors had a vested interest in legitimizing their own claim to the throne and discrediting the Plantagenet king they had ousted. Shakespeare, writing under a Tudor queen, would have been influenced by this official narrative.
Other Tudor-era chronicles Shakespeare likely consulted, such as Edward Hall‘s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustrate Families of Lancaster and York (1548) and Raphael Holinshed‘s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1577), likewise depicted Richard III in a negative light. As Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro points out, these histories were "more propaganda than fact," but they "provided Shakespeare with the essential ingredients from which he crafted his portrait" of Richard (Shapiro, 2011, p. 85).
Shakespeare‘s Master Strokes: Exaggerating Richard‘s Villainy
However, Shakespeare did more than simply rehash Tudor propaganda. He took the legends surrounding Richard and embellished them to create a villain of mesmeric power and blackness. Shakespeare exaggerated Richard‘s physical deformity into a overt symbol of his twisted soul: a hunchback, a limp, a withered arm. The real Richard, as confirmed by the 2012 discovery of his skeleton, did have scoliosis, a sideways curvature of the spine. But he was not a "poisonous bunch-back‘d toad" as Shakespeare describes him.
Laurence Olivier as Richard III in the 1955 film, sporting the character‘s traditional hump and limp. Public domain image.
Shakespeare also invented or altered key events to heighten Richard‘s wickedness. Most notably, he depicts Richard as masterminding the murder of his young nephews, Edward V and Richard, Duke of York (the infamous "Princes in the Tower"), in order to secure his claim to the throne. While the princes did indeed disappear after Richard took power, there is no conclusive proof he ordered their deaths. Many historians now believe Henry VII may have been responsible.
But the most compelling evidence of Richard‘s guilt in Shakespeare comes from his own mouth. In his soliloquies, Richard gleefully confesses his plots to the audience, making them complicit in his schemes. After wooing and winning Lady Anne, he marvels at his own manipulative powers:
"I‘ll have her; but I will not keep her long.
What! I, that kill‘d her husband and his father,
To take her in her heart‘s extremest hate,
With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes,
The bleeding witness of her hatred by,
Having God, her conscience, and these bars against me,
And I no friends to back my suit at all,
But the plain devil and dissembling looks,
And yet to win her, all the world to nothing!"
(Richard III, Act 1, Scene 2)
Richard‘s charisma as a villain-hero, a role Shakespeare pioneered, largely comes from his dazzling wordplay and dark wit in such speeches. He brings the audience into his confidence, even as we recoil at his crimes. Shakespeare critic Harold Bloom calls Richard "an entertaining monster" who "charms us even while we dread his villainy" (Bloom, 1998, p. 65).
A Villain for All Ages: The Enduring Fascination of Richard III
Shakespeare‘s distortion of history had a huge impact on Richard III‘s reputation. For centuries after the play was written, the hunchbacked, murderous villain became the dominant image of the king in the popular imagination, from David Garrick‘s crazed performance in the 18th century to Laurence Olivier‘s suave Machiavel in his 1955 film. As the historian Desmond Seward wrote in his biography of Richard, "Richard‘s name was blackened for all time by the greatest poet and dramatist in the English language" (Seward, 1997, p. 15).
It was only in the 20th century that historians and Richard‘s defenders began to seriously challenge this Shakespearean caricature. Revisionist works like Josephine Tey‘s The Daughter of Time (1951) and Paul Murray Kendall‘s biography Richard III (1955) argued for a more balanced, objective view of Richard‘s life and reign. The discovery of Richard‘s skeleton under a Leicester car park in 2012, which revealed his scoliosis but not the withered arm or limp of Shakespeare‘s portrayal, further humanized the historical king.
Yet Shakespeare‘s Richard III endures as a character, even as the real Richard is reclaimed from the myth. In recent years, productions have cast Richard with disabled actors and explored the play‘s complex attitudes towards deformity and villainy. The Royal Shakespeare Company‘s 2022 production featured Arthur Hughes, who has radial dysplasia, as Richard. Director Gregory Doran said the production sought to "challenge the trope of the disabled villain" while still honoring Shakespeare‘s powerful creation (RSC, 2022).
Ultimately, Shakespeare‘s Richard III resonates not because of its historical accuracy, but because of its timeless insights into power, morality, and the human capacity for both evil and self-reflection. Richard is a villain who reveals villainy in ourselves – our secret desire for domination, our voyeuristic pleasure in transgression. In making us complicit with his antihero, Shakespeare implicates us in the play‘s Grand Mechanism of crime and retribution.
Perhaps that is why, even today, we are still enthralled by Shakespeare‘s "black legend" of Richard III. We see in Richard‘s rise and fall something of our own flawed humanity, our own potential for darkness. And in grappling with that darkness, through the alchemy of theater, we come to a deeper understanding of history and ourselves.
References
- Bloom, H. (1998). Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Riverhead Books.
- Guy, J. (2012). Thomas More: A Very Brief History. SPCK.
- Royal Shakespeare Company. (2022). Richard III Production Information Pack.
- Seward, D. (1997). Richard III: England‘s Black Legend. Pegasus Books.
- Shapiro, J. (2011). A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599. Harper Perennial.
