Words I Love and Terms You Should Know in "Richard III"

Abortive rooting Hogge: an aborted or stillborn fetus, failing to produce a viable child, an unsuccessful result; the act of implanting, later, slang for the male’s part of sexual intercourse; specifically, a castrated male swine raised for slaughter, also refers to Richard’s symbol, the boar.

Arme: spelling could mean both arm or army, conjuring images of flesh and war at once.

Burgundy: the most wealthy, powerful state during the 15^th century in Europe reaching from the English Channel to western Germany with power concentrated in the Duchy of Burgundy, it had a large influence on English trade and culture. For example, under Edward IV, England adopted the elaborate Burgundian court ceremonies. Burgundy’s Phillip the Good allowed the English to take much of northern France and thus this remained a supporter of York while his cousin, Charles VII, and later Louis XI supported Lancaster. The even more fervently anti-French successor, Charles the Bold, married Edward IV’s sister, Margaret of York, who was hostile towards Henry VII and continued to support various Yorkists even after the Duchy was reabsorbed into France. Also, a sweet red wine from this region in France.

Cloy: satiate, gorge, satisfy.

Cockatrice: a serpent identified with a Basilisk that was hatched from a cock’s egg and could kill with its glance; rarely, another term for crocodile.

Crosbie House: one of Richard’s houses in London, which became where Elizabeth I received ambassadors.

Crosse-row: the alphabet, used in prophesizing; Shakespeare’s audience would have known that Queen Elizabeth was herself a fan of astrology and employed “philosophers,” such as John Dee, who scheduled her coronation with his horoscope.

Diet: way of living, i.e. Edward’s corrupt lifestyle is his “evil diet."

Dighton and Forrest: The two servants hired by Tyrell to carry out the murder of the two princes.

Eagles should be mew’d up: specifically the Golden Eagle, a native species of England, symbolic of nobility, power, and royalty.

Haire about her ears: Elizabeth enters with her hair undone, a way Shakespeare liked to depict his distressed damsels, such as Constance who tears her hair in King John.

Hedge-hogge: hedgehogs represented evil because they “robbed” grapes from vines the way the devil was thought to rob people of their souls. They were also believed to be another form of goblin and were associated with neglecting to pray.

Humour: mood, disposition, frame of mind as determined by the balance of the four humours, or bodily fluids, blood (passion), phlegm (idleness), choler (anger) and melancholy (sadness).

Kites and Buzzards: birds of prey, thieving birds and bad omens; inferior breed of hawks used as an insult to mean a stupid person. Hastings means that it is a pity that he and Clarence (“eagles”) should be locked up by their enemies, whom he likens to inferior species of bird.

Livery: the special uniform provided for an official by his employer, such as a collar, hood or gown in a special color or design.

Lord Chamberlaine: a peer and member of the Privy Council who was one of the King’s closest, most important officers. This is Lord Hastings.

Margaret’s “bloody deed”: In Henry IV, Part III, Margaret stabs Richard of York, Richard III’s father, at Wakefield, after first offering him a handkerchief drenched in his son Edmund, Earl of Rutland’s blood and placing upon then knocking off a paper crown from his head.

Minority: the state of being a minor, not of age (14 years old), so that a Lord Protector would rule instead until he was of age (typically one of the King’s brothers according to age).

Mistress Shore: Elizabeth or Jane Shore was allegedly Edward’s favorite mistress, with whom he became involved about 1470. Her later affair with Thomas Grey, marquis of Dorset and later his rival Lord Hastings is what landed her in prison for practicing “sorcery,” though she was probably just their political go-between.

Nest of Spicery: figuratively, the womb.

Pomfret: from Latin “ponte fracto,” meaning broken bridge; Pontefract Castle, in Pontefract, West Yorkshire; belonged to John of Gaunt and the site of Richard II’s murder in 1399.

Pursuiuant at Armes: a junior officer attending a herald.

Queenes Kindred: Elizabeth’s eldest son Thomas Grey, marquis of Dorset, her son Richard Grey, her brother Anthony, Earl Rivers.

Scaffold: hanging was considered a common form of punishment while beheading was typically saved for the upper classes. Traitors could be hung, drawn and quartered, murderers or criminals might be mutilated or dissected and displayed after death, and drowning or boiling pits were not unheard of.

Son of York: Edward IV assumed a sun as his emblem after the vision of the three suns appear to him and his brothers before the battle of Mortimer’s Cross (Henry VI, Part III).

Sowre Ferry-man: Charon, who carries souls across the rivers Styx and Acheron in hell.

Surfet: illness brought on by excess, gluttony. Margaret’s curse reflects on Edward’s indulgent lifestyle.

“The Curse my Noble Father layd on thee”: at Wakefield, Richard of York curses Queen Margaret in Henry VI, Part III before she slays him.

“What would betide on me”: While some Queen Mothers became guardians or coregents of their young kings, others were completely stripped of their political power and left court, some evening entering a convent, unable to remarry. Historically, Elizabeth did not receive much from Edward IV’s will and it was not until Henry VII was crowned that she received the wealth and property due to her position as Queen Dowager.

White-livered runnagate: cowardly fugitive or rebel.

Wolves, Spiders, Toades: wolves are both a symbol of appetite and Catholicism; spiders could traditionally symbolize both evil creatures who sucked the blood of their prey and signs of good luck; toads were symbols of witchcraft and decay.

Wonton ambling Nymph: Literally, a malicious and lusty wandering earth-spirit in the form of a maiden; nymph can mean anything from a maiden to a prostitute to a slangy old-Latin term for the labia minora.

Ten Facts About Life in Shakespeare’s England

Shakespeare’s England, Life in Elizabethan and Jacobean Times is an excellent book edited by R. E. Pritchard that compiles and discusses primary documents from Shakespeare’s contemporaries in order to describe his world. This book offers us a unique insight into what exactly Shakespeare’s audience would have been thinking about while watching his plays, making connections between the turmoil on stage and that in London’s streets and England’s countryside.

1. The population was on the rise, going from 3 to 4.5 million during Shakespeare’s lifetime. To make matters worse, there was disease, rising prices without rising wages and increased social mobility that made life unstable. It was also the moment that England began to industrialize, expanding industries like cloth manufacture and mining.

2. Although marriages could be consummated at a very young age (12 for girls and 14 for boys), the average Elizabethan did not marry until his mid-twenties. Although women were “entirely under the power of their husbands,” companionship was sought in marriage before family or monetary gains (29). Courtship generally involved the exchange of rings, gloves or other tokens. Women tended to have six to seven children, and since contraception was primitive, premarital sex was not as common as we might think.

3. Under Elizabeth, England experienced an education boom due to the church reforms. By 1600, a third of the population was literate, although the rate was much higher in London, and reading had begun to become a part of daily life, explaining how pamphlets became useful political tools.

4. The Great Chain of Being dominated Elizabethan beliefs in the cosmos. Superstition was also widespread, despite its negative associations with Catholicism under Elizabeth, and astrology was a legitimate science. Witches were put on trial by being restrained and then thrown into water to see if they swam.

5. Elizabeth’s court was described by Sir Walter Raleigh as “[shining] like rotten wood” (129). There were around 1500 attendants overall, and sixty people who had access to the most private chambers. The Queen was never in one place for long, and inhabited different castles at different times of year, saving Whitehall for Parliament.

6. London had a population of 200,000 by 1600, since enclosure laws drove people into the city. Guilds held great power, but the city was run by the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and a Common Council.

7. The first theatres were established in “the Liberties,” or the southern suburbs, where brothels, bars, poorhouses, and asylums were found.

8. The poor were classified as “the impotent,” “the laboring” and “the idle” poor. Vagrants were everywhere as poverty increased, and riots frequently broke out, spreading fear among Elizabethans of crime and disorder.

9. Bastardry and infanticide peaked during Elizabeth’s time, which suggests that audiences of Richard III would have been sensitive to these issues in his plays.

10. There were over a thousand hangings in England and Wales every year, and beheading was reserved for those of higher rank.

Read more about Religion and Punishment in Elizabethan England.

Production History of Richard III

While Richard III was one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays during his lifetime, Richard played by the famous Richard Burbage, its success has by no means stopped there. The play was performed once more in 1633 before the closing of the theatres in 1642, and then revived in 1700 with Colley Cibber’s shortened adaptation that embedded text from the Henry VI plays into the script. Throughout the 18^th and 19^th centuries, these condensed versions of the play remained popular and Richard III propelled many great English actors through their successful careers. David Garrick played Richard III almost continually from 1747 till 1776, and later Edmund Kean, the great, drunk, womanizing celebrity actor in London during the mid-19^th century. In America, it was Edwin Forrest who used Richard III to achieve unprecedented fame on the American stage, playing into the typical portrayal of Richard as an “irredeemable monster, a dire warning against political tyranny” (Cliff 16-17). Although William Macready tried to popularize the full text once again in 1821, it was not until the 1870s that audiences were interested in a full-length Richard III.

David Garrick as Richard III.

The twentieth-century took the play from its popular shortened, highly theatrical and melodramatic form into more dynamic, diverse interpretations and ambitious stagings. In 1920, Leopold Jessner directed a version of the play in Berlin that reflected the “time of social and political upheaval in Europe” that inspired later productions to follow this more contemporary, political interpretation of the play (Besnault 123). Donald Wolfit, for example, directed a 1942 version of the play in which a Hitler-like Richard III reminded audiences all too well of the recent horrors of Nazi Germany. It is said that the audience even had to run for shelter because of a bomb alert that sounded during a production. Laurence Olivier played a “supremely cunning and devilish” Richard who also reflected the “cold-blooded ruthlessness” that viewers would have identified with the current war times (Besnault 123).

The 1950s saw a return to staging Shakespeare’s history plays with their “original practices” and it wasn’t until Terry Hands’ production in 1970 that the text was more fully experimented with. In 1984, Bill Alexander directed Richard III with the Royal Shakespeare Company in which Anthony Sherr played a spider-like Richard with a “crippling disease” who used a pair of crutches to move across the space while hopping and crawling (Besnault 123). In addition to Olivier’s own expressionist-inspired film version, the 1995 Richard Loncraine Richard III starring Ian McKellan offers yet another uncannily modern production that calls on images of 30s fascism and American gangsters to present a totalitarian Richard.

More recently in 2009, the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre staged its own “timeless” version of the play that looked at the play through more of a psychoanalytical lens then a political one. Although director Barbara Gaines saw the women as the “soul” of the play, she still placed them as powerless, fragile creatures in a violent world, while Richard was a man “attempting to deny his own humanity” and repress his instincts and feelings (Interview). The Garage Theatre in Long Beach, California invited audiences to “trip out on Richard as he slimes his way to the top” in its 2009 production (Garage Theatre Website). This performance, directed by Amy-Louise Sebelious, envisioned Richard as the DJ of a hot club called “The Tower,” updating the script with texting, drugs, and cross-dressing. At BAM, Kuwait’s Sabab/Sulayman Al-Bassam Theatre performed Richard III: An Arab Tragedy in which Richard’s rise to power was adapted for our own tumultuous, oil-obsessed times. The religious conflicts, nationalism, ritual, propaganda, and foreign affairs of the original text took on new meaning in this Arabic-language, contemporary version of the play commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The Royal Shakespeare Company's recent production of Richard III was set in “an alternative 19^th century” England in which the Victorian prim-and-proper society becomes a glossy cover for the sordid, violent politics beneath. This production, in which director Sean Holmes strived to emphasize the theatricality of Richard’s character and his world, explored the movement in the plot from realism to expressionism while finding subtle connections to England’s current political structure and climate. These contemporary productions reveal how Richard III has lost no relevance or popular appeal since Richard Burbage was on the Elizabethan stage and continues to provide dramatists and audiences alike with haunting reflections of our own times.

Check out the YouTube video of Richard’s opening monologue on the BAM website, or read more about the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company productions.

Read more about the original production here.

References:

Besnault, Marie-Hélène and Michel Bitot. “Historical legacy and fiction: the poetical reinvention of King Richard III.” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Histories. Ed. Michael Hattaway. Cambridge University Press. 2002. Print.

Cliff, Nigel. The Shakespeare Riots: Revenge, Drama and Death in Nineteenth-Century America. NY: Random House. 2007. Print.

Halperin, Marylin. “The Undertow of Richard III, Backstage, Director Interview.” Chicago Shakespeare Theatre. 2008. Web. Accessed 9-15-10. <http://www.chicagoshakes.com/main.taf?p=2,19,3,19,4,12>.

“Richard III.” Royal Shakespeare Company, n.d. Web. Accessed 9-15-10. <http://www.rsc.org.uk/richard/current/home.html>.

“Richard III: An Arab Tragedy.” BAM. n.d. Web. Accessed 9-15-10. <http://www.bam.org/view.aspx?pid=866>.

Scarborough, James. “Richard III, The Garage Theatre, by James Scarborough.” What the Butler Saw. Sept. 26, 2009. Web. Accessed 9-15-10. <http://perhapsperhapsperhaps.typepad.com/what_the_butler_saw/2009/09/richard-iii-the-garage-theatre-by-james-scarborough.html>.

About the Playwright: William Shakespeare

Personal Life and the Lost Years

William Shakespeare was born around St. George’s Day, April 23, 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, England, which is about one-hundred miles northwest of London. His father was John Shakespeare, a glover, illegal wool dealer and local official, and his mother was Mary Arden. He was the third of eight siblings and the first son. He attended a local grammar school, The King’s New School, where he learned English and Latin, studying Aesop’s fables, Ovid and Virgil. In his early years he would have also been exposed to the Geneva Bible, The Book of Common Prayer, Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, and other Protestant works. He married Anne Hathaway, eight years his elder, in 1482 and became a father in 1583. Their children included the eldest daughter Susana, Hamnet and Judith.

An early drawing of Shakespeare's home.

After 1585, Shakespeare does not appear in any records until 1592, known as the “lost years.” Some believe that he fled Stratford after a poaching incident while others believe that he was studying abroad, practicing law, or teaching school. While equally mysterious is how exactly Shakespeare ended up in London, it is possibly that he joined a theatre troupe that traveled through Stratford and the rest is history.

While Shakespeare was in London, his family remained in Stratford. He probably traveled home on occasion, about four days walking or two days ride. It was in 1596 that his son Hamnet died, and Shakespeare also composed the melancholy lines in King John, “Grief fills the room up of my absent child…” (Gray).

Shakespeare and the Theatre

In London, the “upstart crow” Shakespeare became a very successful, versatile playwright. In March 1592, for example, his Henry VI plays are recorded to have played five times in rotation with thirteen other plays, making Shakespeare’s plays the most performed compared to Kyd, Marlowe or anyone else. At first, Shakespeare was a kind of “freelance dramatist” and worked for The Queen’s Men, Lord Strange’s Men, and Pembroke’s Men, who performed frequently at court (Gray). Despite being hit hard by the closure of the theatres during an outbreak of the Plague in 1593 that killed roughly 11,000 of London’s 200,000 inhabitants, Shakespeare stayed afloat writing verse for patrons like Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, who became a long-term supporter. Shakespeare’s sonnets were most likely composed sometime during this “Southampton period,” between 1592 and 1595, earning him enough money to survive until the theatres reopened and become a sharer in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, organized by the Queen’s Chamberlain, Lord Hudson (Gray). It was with this troupe that Shakespeare worked with Richard Burbage, the great actor, his father James Burbage, and actor William Kempe. They performed publicly at the Theatre, the Swan and the Curtain.

Between 1594 and 1599, Lord Chamberlain’s Men became the most popular theatre troupe in London and Shakespeare’s writing was profuse. In 1597, when the lease ran out on Burbage’s Theatre, the family eventually decided to tear it down and use the timber to build the Globe on the Bankside across the Thames and could accommodate as many as 3,000 audience members beneath its open-air, thatched roof and among its three balconies. Shakespeare was one of the new theatre’s co-owners and made somewhere between £200 and £250 every year. Shakespeare was now able to help his father receive a coat of arms, and he even bought a mansion by Elizabethan standards in Stratford. The next years of explosive creativity and writing were probably connected to the rapid changes going on in society around him. Not only had the Essex Rebellion crumbled in 1601, ending in the execution of Southampton, but in 1603 England suddenly had a new monarch, James VI of Scotland, and Shakespeare was now a member of the King’s Men, the most popular company to perform at court. Shakespeare’s tragedies become increasingly popular, and it is speculated that Shakespeare himself was in a dark place while composing these “higher art forms.” In 1608, the King’s Men began performing at the more expensive, indoor theatre, Blackfriars, and Shakespeare focused on his romances that were in the spirit of the masques that became very popular at court. The Globe burnt down in 1613, but a second Globe was built on top of it, only this time with a tile roof.

In his final years, Shakespeare returned to Stratford to work on three more collaborative plays after The Tempest. It seems he spent his time with his two, now married, daughters, until his death at April 23, 1616.

Folios and Quartos

Shakespeare’s plays first appear in print in 1594 with Titus Andronicus in the form of quartos. These were very small, very inexpensive pamphlets that could be readily made and sold. The quartos remain the only source for Shakespeare’s writings, since he left no manuscripts, and they are often contradictory, reflecting drafts of plays or versions written by the actors from memory (British Library).

In 1623, the First Folio appeared thanks to two of Shakespeare’s colleagues, Heminges and Condell, entitled Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories & Tragedies. The folio included 36 plays, 18 of which had never been published. The collection was probably inspired by the recent folio of Ben Jonson, Workes, who even included a commemorative poem to the Bard.

Catholic Shakespeare

One of the most highly debated aspects of Shakespeare’s biography is his religion. While historians do not have concrete proof that Shakespeare was a Catholic, many pieces of evidence suggest that he was despite the era of Catholic persecution in which he lived and wrote:

1. The Arden Family was a wealthy, powerful, and staunchly Catholic family located in Warwickshire. Mary Arden, Shakespeare’s mother, was a not-so-distant relative of Edward Arden, the head of the family, who actively supported Jesuit rebels, such as Edmund Campion and Robert Southwell. Arden was hung, drawn and quartered for his religion and alleged involvement in treasonous plots in 1583 after his son-in-law, John Somerville, was arrested for claiming the Queen to be a heretic and calling for her death. Shakespeare and his mother would have certainly been affected by this incident, if they were not present at the executions.

2. Coventry, known for its medieval Catholic Mystery plays, was just a day’s ride from Stratford, where Shakespeare would have surely first have been exposed to the theatre.

3. John Shakespeare, William’s father, was certainly raised Catholic, although as a Bailiff and later Chief Alderman of Stratford, he publicly identified as a Protestant during his career. However, it is suggested by historians that John Shakespeare’s financial troubles and retreat from public affaires later in life was due to his difficulty functioning in an increasingly Protestant political climate. Most incriminating of all, in 1757, a testament of faith was found in Shakespeare’s birth home signed by John Shakespeare, and his name is later found on a list of Catholic sympathizers who refused Protestant communion by claiming to be in too much debt.

4. Shakespeare was possibly educated by known Catholics both at grammar school and in his “lost years” it has been speculated that Shakespeare studied abroad in Rome, attended a Catholic college or became a schoolmaster for a prominent Catholic family in Lancashire.

5. As a dramatist and poet, two of Shakespeare’s patrons, Lord Strange and Earl of Southampton, were from very Catholic families.

6. There is also documentation to suggest that Shakespeare purchased the gatehouse at Blackfriars, London where Catholics secretly met, making a very personal contribution to the survival of Catholicism.

Click here for an additional Shakespeare timeline including his life, plays and historical context.

References:

The British Library. “Basic facts about William Shakespeare, his, life, his plays and the quartos.” William Shakespeare in quarto. Web. Accessed 2-22-10. <http://www.bl.uk/treasures/shakespeare/basics.html>.

“Edward Arden,” “John Shakespeare,” “John Somerville.” In Search of Shakespeare. PBS. 2003 Web. Accessed 2-22-10. <http://www.pbs.org/shakespeare/>.

Gray, Terry. “A Shakespeare Timeline.” 1998. Web. Accessed 2-22-10. <http://shakespeare.palomar.edu/timeline/timeline.htm>.

Hammerschmidt-Hummel, Hildegard. "The most important subject that can possibly be": A Reply to E. A. J. Honigmann." Connotations. 12.2-3, 2003. Web. Accessed 2-22-10. <http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/connotations/ham-hu1223>.

Character Circles for "Richard III"

This image comes from the "Shakespeare's Words" website, where you can find a complete hypertexted script and character list as well.

What were Shakespeare's sources?

Shakespeare’s primary source appears to be Edward Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustrate Families of Lancastre and Yorke published in 1548 that included Sir Thomas More’s “The Tragical Doynges of Kyng Richard the Thirde.” Other sources include The Third Volume of Chronicles by Raphael Holinshed for details on the action and The Mirour for Magistrates, both dating from 1587.
In Shadowplay, Clare Asquith also argues that Richard III was most likely a parody of Elizabeth’s closest councilor and Secretary of State, Robert Cecil. Not only did Richard’s hunchback mock Cecil’s own physical appearance and mannerisms, but Richard’s opening speech also describes Cecil’s political career. Many descriptions of Richard throughout the text appear to be specific references to Cecil, such as his nickname “Elf” or his association with the secret service, a “black intelligencer” (RIII 4.4.71). However, Shakespeare’s cunning layering of symbolism of Richard as a Vice figure as well helps him to subtly escape criticism, just as he does in Richard II, about which Elizabeth famously remarked “I am Richard II, know ye not that?” Despite the “ruthless and efficient propaganda machine in place” that the transmission of “politically correct versions of national history,” Shakespeare circumvented Elizabeth’s disapproval with his talent and clever use of coded meaning.

References:

Asquith, Clare. Shadowplay. NY: Public Affairs. 2005.

Hattaway, Michael. Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s History Plays. Cambridge University Press. 2002. p.103

What was the first production like?

It is believed that "Richard III" was first written and performed in 1591 following his Henry VI trilogy. The first performance was most likely performed by a mix of the Admiral’s Men and Lord Strange’s Men, possibly for “Essex, Southampton and the growing opposition, Catholic and radical Protestant, that gathered in Essex House to nurse grievances and plot enemies’ downfall” The play became very popular and was performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men at the Globe in the 1600s, and even as late as 1633 at court. Richard Burbage, Shakespeare’s leading actor, was performing the role of Richard after the Globe opened in 1599. Like the other early history plays, Richard III was designed to be performed for large audiences in open-air theatres, packing hundreds of Elizabethans hungry for entertainment in to see the show. The first quarto appeared in 1597, printed from a manuscript that was believed to have been written from memory by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and Shakespeare.

References:

Asquith, Clare. Shadowplay: Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare. NY: Public Affairs. 2005.

Hattaway, Michael. Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s History Plays. Cambridge University Press. 2002. p.103

Shakespeare in Quarto. The British Library. 10/25/09. <http://www.bl.uk/treasures/shakespeare/homepage.html>.

Shakespeare and Prophesy

Astrology, which came to medieval Europe by way of Arabian scholars, was divided into “natural” and “judicial” theories. Natural astrology had to do with the influence of the stars and planets on the physical world, like weather and the development of living things while judicial astrology related to “the influence of heavenly bodies on human destiny” (245). While this second theory of astrology complicated Christian teachings of free will and the possibility of redemption, the church allowed that the stars incline based on the will of God, even if they do not compel. It is unclear whether most people believed in the powers of the stars, sort of like people might believe in the power of hormones without really knowing how they work, or if the population was generally more skeptical. Either way, horoscopes and almanacs were an important part of medieval culture and used to tell everything from how a child’s personality might develop to when the Queen herself should be crowned. Like many elite who employed court-astrologers, Elizabeth I employed John Dee as her “philosopher.” Astrological events, such as “solar and lunar eclipses, comets and meteors were regarded as portents for rulers and nations,” explaining why the appearance of the three suns before Edward IV and his brothers was more than just a “wondrous-strange” phenomenon, but a miraculous and meaningful sign of glory (Henry VI, Part III 2.1.33).

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An astrolabe.

Although other Shakespearean plays and sonnets, like sonnet XV, imply that he shared the contemporary belief in natural astrology and was familiar with its common rules and forms, there is no indication that Shakespeare ever studied astrology or believed in judicial astrology. In Richard III, one might attribute the mistaken astrology that allows Edward to condemn his brother Clarence instead of Richard as an example of Shakespeare’s skeptical cynicism about the value of astrological knowledge. Clarence appears to be no less gullible than Edward, who condemns his own brother to the Tower based on a prophesy. If both Richard and the audience know that the letter G really points to Richard himself, who ultimately does destroy Edward IV, does this suggest that our belief in fate and astrology is futile or that we should simply pay better attention? What does it mean that Richard’s villainy is emerging at the same moment that we see his omniscient rationality and ability to manipulate superstition? This might “modernize” Richard and separate him from his gullible contemporaries, but it also makes him even more frighteningly sly and familiar, since as modern audience such as ourselves can better identify with a skeptic and cynic when it comes to superstition and stars, even if he is a “divell.”

An astrological treatise.

References:

Sondheim, Moriz. “Shakespeare and the Astrology of His Time.” Journal of the Warburg Institute. Vol. 2, No. 3. Jan., 1939. Pp243-259. JSTOR. Accessed 2-13-10.