Shakespeare and the Present: History and Mediality in <i>Richard III</i>

Wiegandt, Kai

doi:10.1080/17450918.2020.1760340

Shakespeare

2020

DOI: 10.1080/17450918.2020.1760340

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Shakespeare and the Present: History and Mediality in Richard III

Kai Wiegandt

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2024

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Cited by 2 publications

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Addressing the Audience and Making History: Soliloquies in Richard III

Hopkins

2024

Humanities

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Few plays make such varied or such bravura use of soliloquies as Shakespeare’s Richard III. The opening forty-one-line monologue by Richard himself allows an actor to show what he can do and to capture his audience and offers a view on processes of historical causation: having started with six uses of the word ‘our’, Richard not only moves on to say ‘I’ nine times (supplemented by ‘my’ and ‘me’), but also explains that his plans are going to affect the future of others, too. His plot to set his brothers against each other is going to change the course of history; moreover, it will do so by using the stalking-horse of a prophecy, a form of speech which presumes that the future is already unalterably fixed. Other soliloquies in the play also offer insights into historical process. This paper examines the differing tonality of the play’s soliloquies and the kind of information offered in them to argue that while Richard III officially subscribes to Tudor myths of the past, it not only implicitly urges the audience to a more sceptical take, but in fact raises questions about whether we can ever be sure about how history was made.

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Addressing the Audience and Making History: Soliloquies in Richard III

Hopkins

2024

Humanities

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Temporal Compression in Shakespeare’s Richard III

Innes

James

2022

Literature

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Shakespeare’s treatment of Richard III has long been the cause of debates about Tudor defamations of the last Yorkist king. Within this context, some attention has been paid to the play’s extreme compression of events that in fact took place over a period of seven years, from the death of George, Duke of Clarence in 1478 to the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. This study investigates the momentum of events to gauge the extent to which the representation of Richard does paint him in an entirely negative light. Detailed analysis of the timeline demonstrates that the way the play re-structures historical moments is designed to foreground not only the figure of Richard himself, with all its attendant associations, but also the very methods used to concentrate attention upon him. The self-referential nature of the play’s relationship to history points to its own constructions, foregrounding the techniques used to show not only the legend of Richard, but how it is elaborated. The play therefore draws attention to its own manipulation of events, which in turn makes any assumptions about its representation of Richard as villain open to question.

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Shakespeare and the Present: History and Mediality in Richard III

Cited by 2 publications

References 9 publications

Addressing the Audience and Making History: Soliloquies in Richard III

Addressing the Audience and Making History: Soliloquies in Richard III

Temporal Compression in Shakespeare’s Richard III

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