Richard III is not useful because it is historically incorre essays

Richard III is not useful because it is historically incorre essays Richard is difficult to understand psychologically because, while he is clearly pwer-hungry and sadistic, the deep-rooted motivations for his malevolent hatred are hard to pinpoint. Some critics feel that Richard is not really a fully developed character in the way that Shakespeare's later characters, such as Macbeth or Hamlet, are. Such critics argue that Richard does not possess a complex human psychology but instead recalls a stock character from early medieval drama. Like the "Vice" character of medieval morality pageants, who simply represented the evil in man, Richard does not justify his villainy-he is simply bad. Indeed, Richard, with self-conscious theatricality, compares himself to this standard character when he says, "Thus like the formal Vice, Iniquity, I moralize two meanings in one word" (III.i.8283). We should note that the mere fact that he reflects upon his similarity to the Vice figure suggests that there is more to him than this mere resemblance. Watching Richard' s character, Shakespeare's audiences also would have thought of the "Machiavel," the archetype of the scandalously amoral, power-hungry ruler that had been made famous by the Renaissance Italian writer Niccol Machiavelli in The Prince ( first published in 1532). Bloody though he was, nevertheless, the historical King Richard III was not necessarily more murderous than the kings who preceded or succeeded him. Nor is it likely that he was deformed, as Shakespeare portrays him. Winners, not losers, write history. When Shakespeare wrote this play, Queen Elizabeth I ruled England; Elizabeth was a descendant of King Henry VII, the ruler who overthrew Richard. Thus, the official party line of the Elizabethan era was that Richard was a monster who was not a legitimate ruler of England. It would have been thoroughly dangerous for Shakespeare to suggest otherwise. For a number of decades in the late fifteenth century, England's royal family was l...