The unbiased evidence of various chroniclers and legal documents, both before and after Richard’s reign, and both English and international, demonstrate that he was a just ruler, a caring uncle, and a loyal brother. He took what he was given and asked no questions. Now, who can possibly doubt the evidence of someone who Richard had imprisoned for treason? But it wasn’t in Shakespeare’s plans to be subversive. The saintly More himself of course, had his facts directly from the source – John Morton, the treacherous strawberry-cultivating bishop of Shakespeare’s play. The facts conveyed to Shakespeare, mostly through the medium of the irreproachable Thomas More, ended up every bit as mangled and deformed as the body of his fictional Richard. Naturally the Tudors, who destroyed the House of York at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, did not want the last Yorkist king to have a sympathetic image, hence the desire to bend the truth. Living as he did in the reign of Elizabeth I, granddaughter to Henry VII, he had access to a very limited range of facts. It is hard to blame Shakespeare for his harsh portrayal of Richard. The plain truth is that he didn’t really care. One cannot help but wonder how Shakespeare came by this vivid characterization, and how much he really knew about the people he wrote about. Early on in the play Richard demonstrates to us, using his brother Clarence, and his future wife, Lady Anne, as examples of his ability to control people’s perceptions and decisions, and his readiness to go as far as necessary to get what he wants. He then proceeds throughout the play to act on this assertion committing various acts of escalating treachery and cruelty. He bluntly claims from the outset that he is “determined to prove a villain”. It seems the Wars of the Roses are finally over (for now), and unadapted as Richard is to “idle pleasures”, he has no alternative left but to divert himself by other means.

As he beautifully explains at the beginning of Act I, “all the clouds that loured upon” the house of York are now “in the deep bosom of the ocean buried”. The inevitable feelings of inadequacy, envy, and frustration that this engenders are heightened when his military talents are no longer needed. He also happens to be severely physically deformed. Shakespeare’s Richard is a brilliant schemer and manipulator, completely devoid of scruples of any kind.

Shakespeare was a brilliant playwright, but nevertheless, he was not a historian Unfortunately for history, and for Richard, the power and appeal of his plays make this small fact easy to forget. It is Shakespeare’s command of the English language, and his keen sense of drama and psychological depth, that make his plays so affecting and deeply memorable. William Shakespeare’s Richard III is no doubt a fascinating character and an entertaining villain.

King richard william shakespeare