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The Tragedy of Richard III: Shakespeare's First Great Villain

The Tragedy of Richard III, often referred to as simply Richard III, is a history play by William Shakespeare (1564-1616), probably written around 1592-94. It is the fourth and final installment of the 'first tetralogy' of Shakespeare's history plays which, along with the three parts of Henry VI, chronicle the Wars of the Roses (1455-1487), a series of bloody dynastic conflicts in England that pitted the houses of York and Lancaster against one another. Richard III picks up toward the end of the conflict and follows the Machiavellian rise of the hunchbacked Richard, Duke of Gloucester, as he schemes and murders his way to the English throne, eventually becoming King Richard III of England (r. 1483-1485).

Background & Context

At the time that Richard III was written, history plays were quite popular in London – Shakespeare, still in the early part of his career, would have been encouraged by the success of his Henry VI plays to continue the story where he left off, with the death of the Lancastrian King Henry VI of England (r. 1422-1461; 1470-1471) and the reacsension of the Yorkist claimant King Edward IV of England (r. 1461-1470; 1471-1483). Richard, Duke of Gloucester, is the youngest brother of King Edward and suffers from several physical deformities, including a twisted spine and a withered arm. According to Richard himself, these deformities have caused him a life of mockery and unlovability, and have made him decide to "prove a villain"; from his very first appearance in Act I, he stops at nothing to claw his way to the throne, ordering the deaths of his brother Clarence, the Princes in the Tower, and his wife.

Richard takes the audience along for the ride – early in the play, he addresses them and takes them into his confidence, winning them over with his wit and good humor. Indeed, Richard plays the part of 'Vice', a character that expresses sinister intentions through comic charm, common to the morality plays of medieval literature – in the words of scholar Peter Holland, Richard's charm makes it "almost impossible for spectators to maintain their moral ambiguity" (906). Only after he takes the throne does Richard lose the audience's sympathy; as he becomes more paranoid and isolated, so, too, does he stop addressing the audience, thereby removing them from the spell of his charm.

The depiction of Richard III as a deformed villain – albeit a charming one – was not original to Shakespeare. In the decades after the defeat and death of the historical Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field (1485), it was in the best interest of the Tudor dynasty that had supplanted him to paint him as a bloodthirsty tyrant. The Tudors, whose rise to power marked the end of the Wars of the Roses, propagandized their victory over Richard as a battle of good versus evil, their victory at Bosworth a "divinely sanctioned deliverance of the English nation" (Bevington, 263). It was in the best interest of contemporary chroniclers to align their own depictions of Richard with this Tudor propaganda.

The villainization of Richard began with Sir Thomas More and his work The History of Richard III, and it was propagated in Edward Hall's The Union of the Two Noble and Austere Families of Lancaster and York (1547) as well as in Richard Holinshed's The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1577). Shakespeare, who drew on all three of these works, would have been unable to resist the delightfully devilish image of Richard that they had created. Many of the myths about Richard III that persist in the modern imagination were immortalized by Shakespeare, such as the idea that he had his nephews, the Princes in the Tower, killed, or that he was as deformed as he is depicted. Shakespeare's play aligns with the Tudor version of history by depicting the Earl of Richmond – the future Henry VII of England, founder of the Tudor dynasty – as a heroic force of good, who defeats Richard, the "demonized epitome of evil" (Holland, 904). But whatever liberties the chroniclers and Shakespeare may have taken with Richard's character, the villain they have created – a violent, paranoid, authoritarian – comes to life with uncomfortable realism, mirroring several real-life dictators and autocrats.

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