Richard III AO5

2011 Propeller Theatre Company production

Had soldiers onstage turn their guns at the audience after Richmond's final speech reflecting the cyclical structure of political violence and the inevitability of continued violence under the guise of a new regime.

Rene Girard

Myths are often used to mask the scapegoating mechanism (single individual being blamed to restore societal order) - Richard acts as the manipulator of this at first but ultimately becomes the victim of the Tudor myth and collective blame - the real Richard is made into a villain whose 'right to reply' is taken from him,

Human desire is mimetic - we learnt what to want by copying other people - both Richard and Richmond desire power and the throne (although this is left out for Richmond to fit the Tudor myth) and this leads to destructive ambition and rivalry (intensifying the desire)

Societies caught in mimetic rivalry often descend into violence, perpetuated by reciprocal acts of vengeance - evident in the Wars of the Roses - actions from all characters in the play perpetuate and exacerbate the cycle of violence and it continues into Henry VII' reign. 

1985 Anthony Sher National Theatre

Richard's physical disability and outsider status are emphasised through a costume resembling a grotesque spider.

2016 The Hollow Crown

A chess game is repeated throughout, emphasising Richard's game strategies behind his rise to power.

The final scene is an aerial shot focusing on all the  bodies from the battle - reflecting a more modern perspective of the wider implications of conflict, rather than the Tudor one of Richmond's victory

Richard's disability is emphasised by Benedict - we see him strugdle to get dressed at the beginning.

2022 RSC Production

Arthur Hughes is the first disabled actor to play Richard - suffers from radial dysplasia.

Margaret first appears doubled over and shrouded by long grey hair and as the performance continues, her  body articulates as if she is being reanimated from the grave.

A3S7 - the two bishops either side of Richard are the same actors as Clarence's murderers in Act 1 - amplifies his falsehood, villainy and performance.

Richard's horse during the battle is made up of the ghostly bodies of those he killed and has just been haunted by.

A4S4 - Elizabeth kisses Richard at the end, highlighting her silent refusal to comply with him and reversing the power structure.

2019 Headlong Production

His last 'desperate rejection by his mother' is made 'a moving and even harrowing encounter'

The setting uses many mirrors to highlight Richard's preoccupation with his physical difference as well the significance attached to his appearance by others. 

A crown is suspended above the stage for the entire play - highlighting the precarious nature of power and kingship.

Lemon

'Richard, allegedly inspired by his own body, embraces deformity in all its lawless possibilities'

Dowden

'(his dominant characteristic is) rather a daemonic energy of will'

'He inverts the moral order of things, and tries to live in this inverted system'

Freud

‘(Richard is) an enormously magnified representation of something we can all discover in ourselves'

Tillyard

‘the simultaneous change in Richard from accomplished villain to the despairing embodiment of evil'

'Shakespeare drops hints of a divine purpose in the mass vengeance that forms the substance of the play'

'Every sentence of Richmond's last speech.....would have raised the Elizabethans to an ecstasy of feeling'

Levine

'Elizabeth functions as a positive symbol of maternal heroism and aggression, battling for her children rather than herself'

'Women in the play turn their grief into vengeance in an attempt to right the monstrosity they have endangered'

'Richard is 'warring with women''

Siemon

‘As far as I know, the limp begins with Shakespeare.’

Spacey

‘It is a play about man who doesn’t have a conscience and grows a conscience’

Rossiter

'(Richard) takes the audience on a holiday from morality'

'(Richard is) God's agent in a plan of divine retribution'

Czach

‘Richard is only one in a chain of comparable rulers’

Galloway

‘The women of this play function as voices of protest and morality’

Blades

'Elizabeth was merely weak and changeable'

'Richmond the healer is immediately linked with imagery of brightness and warmth'

'Richard attributes his attitudes and policy to distortions in his own body, which have become projected into his moral and social psyche'

Shapiro

'the powerlessness allows her (Margaret) not to be blinded as everyone else in the play is blinded by the hope of some advantage through Richard'

Greenblatt

Anne is 'shallow, corruptible, naively ambitious, and, above all, frightened'

'there is something eerie and disturbing about curses as if they magically touch the hidden order of things'

Bloom

'Richard makes us all into the Lady Anne'

'(Shakespeare's greatest originality) is the hero-villain's startlingly intimate relationship with the audience'

Emma Smith

'There is so much to dislike about Richard, and yet he is beguiling, seductive and ravishing.....it's almost as if the play's popularity itself testifies to a kind of audience masochism.....there is little resistance to Richard's will'

‘A mind as rogue, roving and recalcitrant as his will never learn from Machaivelli or anyone else'

Unknown

Donkor

'Richard's damaged psyche is just too cruel to learn restraint, leading to his ultimate downfall'

'Richard's actions disfigure Machiavellian ideas as the play progresses'

'modern audiences in particular might reasonably wonder if it isn't this barrage of unseemly insults about Richard's shape that are partly responsible for the ugliness of his ensuing actions'

'his physical damage is matched by complex psychological impairment. His inner world is a wild and inhospitable terrain where ambition, misanthropy, hubris and self loathing are knotted weeds growing apace'