Richard III

Provided that we are dealing with Histories, it is apparent that Richard the Third is the first true villain in the Shakespearean world of characters. Richard so conceives the scope of unscrupulousness that he makes it absolutely his own.

His character, with the self-blinding belief, lives beyond the pages of the text. As it seems, he's going to stay with you. How many characters have done that so far, I wonder. Surely, Sir John Falstaff, Henry the Fifth and his father, Henry the Fourth, to an extent.

To the playwright's credit, force and stance are welded to Richard's soliloquies; a hint of which we get in the previous play in the so called tetralogy. The play opens up with the memorable line which manifests Richard's own perturbation at not being at the centre of the royal attention:


Now is the winter of our discontent
. . .
But I,–that am not shap'd for sportive tricks,
. . .
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
. . .
And therefore,–since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,–
I am determined to prove a villain,


His ‘discontent' bred out of maliciousness for others, ambition of power and bitterness about his physical deformity results in the intent to deceive through political manipulation and instinct to kill whoever comes in his way between him and the throne;

And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stol'n out of holy writ,
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.

In the end, it is by manipulation through words that Richard presents a series of misdeeds which internalizes his crimes. His evil-ness is more of an inward belief in his deformed self rather than his physical deformity; that he ‘believes' to be the only one the way he is,

No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity.
But I know none, and therefore am no beast.

Surely, the play works on the basis of heightened dramatization of a character's villainy led by extreme, selfish actions rather than the torments of mind one would encounter elsewhere in Shakespeare; and even though the play ends in somewhat of a whimper, the realizations of Richard's wrongdoings seemingly sudden (once we look back), it is hard not to get charmed by the import of its character portrayal.