Richard III and Macbeth
In the plays of William Shakespeare, certain themes seem to appear over and over again. In both the stories of Richard III and Macbeth, very ambitious men use nefarious means in order to achieve leadership of their countries. Each man is in line for the throne, but has to deal with other people who are closer to the crown than he is. So, the title character takes it upon him to eliminate all the people who stand between him and ultimate power. It doesn't matter if they are family members or friends. Anyone who stands in the way is done away with either through murder or by framing the person for murder. What often happens when a man or woman uses bloodshed to get ahead in the world is that the deaths come back to haunt them, often in a physical form. This haunting, whether real or imaginary always precedes the character's eventual fall and death.
In Richard III, the title character wakes from a dream before he goes to do battle with his enemy Richmond. In the dream, he sees all the ghosts of the people he has either directly murdered or who he helped destroy through his actions. Upon waking, the king delivers a soliloquy in which he tries to justify his actions to himself and the viewing audience. Through-out the story, Richard has been able to manipulate everyone around him. Those that he could not manipulate, he had taken care of. However, as the people take up arms against him, Richard becomes aware that he is losing control even though he is the king. He cannot manipulate the people as he was able to do earlier on. Instead he has to rely more and more on violence to achieve his ends. In the passage, he vacillates between regretting his actions and calling himself a villain to declaring himself the rightful...
Richard III was one of Shakespeare's earliest plays, and possibly aside from Titus Andronicus, one of his most brutal. This violence is contrasted with Shakespeare's use of supernatural elements such as dreams and curses, because these supernatural elements grant certain characters power who would otherwise be powerless in the face of the physical violence upon which Richard and his rise to power depend (even though Richard himself shies away from
They want to be king so badly that they can justify any action that helps them achieve their goal. These actions include murder. Both men become villains in different ways - Richard seems to have been born villainous and Macbeth seems to prove that villains are not born but made from outside influences. Shakespeare proves both assertions valid when we see Macbeth reach the same level of conniving and
This reinvention has continued in every era since, including in the modern film adaptation of Richard the Third starring Ian McKellan. Set just prior to World War II and with Richard as a fascist dictator who often appears quasi-Naziish, this film version gives much darker political overtones to Richard's climb and eventual reign than appear in Shakespeare's text. Though this makes the depth of Richard's evil far more profound
SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III AND TEY'S RICHARD III This paper explores the differences between Shakespeare's account of Richard III and Josephine Tey's Account of the same. The paper reasons out the causes of differences. COMPARISON OF SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III AND TEY'S RICHARD III Shakespeare's descriptions of Richard III have been the most popular historical account. He describes Richard to be a physically deformed individual with his deformities eating away at his mind and soul
Duke of Gloucester Shakespeare's Richard III, The Duke of Gloucester, may not bear much resemblance to the real king in character and appearance but in this play, he is certainly the most dominant and a fully developed figure that serves as both the protagonist and villain of the play. For critics, it is hard to decide whether Richard III can actually be called a tragedy because here the protagonist appears less
Romantic Era The years in which the Romantic Era had its great impact -- roughly 1789 through 1832 -- were years in which there were "intense political, social, and cultural upheavals," according to Professor Shannon Heath at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville (Heath, 2009). The beginning of the Romantic Era actually is traced to the French Revolution, and though that tumultuous event was not in England, William Wordsworth and
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