What every diehard Richard III fan should know…
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Richard, the Duke of Gloucester, was the third son of a duke who is killed in a civil war against Henry
VI, the King of England. In revenge, he joins with his brothers to overthrow the King and kill his son,
leaving his wife, Lady Anne, a widow.
Richard’s oldest brother, Edward, has become the new King of England. However, Edward is dying,
and Richard wants to become the King when he is gone.
 There are some barriers to Richard’s ambition, though. King Edward has a wife, Queen
Elizabeth, who has two brothers and two grown sons from a previous marriage. The King and
Queen have two young sons, Edward and Richard, who are in line before Richard, and a
pretty, young daughter, Elizabeth. And also, there is Richard’s popular older brother George,
Duke of Clarence, who stands in his way.
Richard is difficult to understand psychologically because, while he is clearly power-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.
THEMES:
The Allure of Evil
Appearance vs. Reality
The Connection Between Ruler and State
MOTIFS:
The Supernatural
Dreams
SYMBOL:
The Boar
 The boar is Richard’s heraldic symbol, and is used several times throughout the play to represent
him, most notably in Stanley’s dream about Hastings’s death. The idea of the boar is also played on
in describing Richard’s deformity, and Richard is cursed by the duchess as an “abortive, rooting hog”
(I.iii.225). The boar was one of the most dangerous animals that people hunted in the Middle Ages
and Renaissance, and Shakespeare’s audience would have associated it with untamed aggression
and uncontrollable violence.
Shakespeare’s Richard III, Fact or Fiction?
Even though Richard III is considered a “history” play by some, it does not mean that Shakespeare
was required to show the era in an entirely accurate light. The history plays show the political
struggles that ravaged the English monarchy for centuries. In order to show these political
struggles [while also staying in favor with the current (Tudor) monarch (Elizabeth I), Shakespeare
does take advantage of his poetic license.
A few errors on Shakespeare’s part:
1. He uses Holinshed’s Chronicles (not know for it’s historical accuracy).
2. Richard III is shown as a deformed hunchback, but was he really??
3. He was definitely responsible for the death of Henry VI, but was he responsible for all of the
others? (princes in the Tower of London; his brother, Clarence; his wife, Anne…etc.)
4. In the play, he has his brother killed and then he marries Lady Anne, but history shows that
Clarence died in 1478, and he married Anne in 1471.
You decide, but there is an entire society in England (and an American chapter) dedicated to
having Richard III’s reign reassessed.
http://www.richardiii.net/