Abstract

A Villain of Language: Manipulation and Verbal Power in Shakespeare’s Richard III

Pankaj Sharma

Volume: 3 Issue: 4 2013

Abstract:

This essay reads Shakespeare's Richard III as a study in rhetorical rather than martial conquest. Scholarship has long tracked how Shakespeare's heroes command language; his villains, despite frequently sharper verbal gifts, have drawn comparatively little sustained attention on this front. Richard offers the clearest test case. Working from three set pieces — the wooing of Anne beside her father-in-law's coffin, the stage-managed ruin of Clarence, and the mayoral pantomime that delivers him the crown — the essay traces a consistent pattern: each victory is won by speech alone, with blame for every act systematically displaced onto others even as Richard privately owns his design. Building on Wolfgang Clemen's account of the play's rhetorical architecture and setting Richard against the Vice-figure lineage identified by Bernard Spivack and A. P. Rossiter, the essay argues that reducing him to a stock morality-play villain undersells what unites his set pieces: language deployed as an instrument of psychological mastery, sharper than any sword the play puts on stage. Richard's fluency, on this reading, is less an ornament to his villain than its actual mechanism.

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References

• Clemen, Wolfgang. A Commentary on Shakespeare’s Richard III. Methuen, 1968.
• Keats, John. “To Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818.” The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, edited by Hyder Edward Rollins, vol. 1, Harvard UP, 1958.
• Rossiter, A. P. “Angel with Horns: The Unity of Richard III.” Angel with Horns and Other Shakespeare Lectures, edited by Graham Storey, Longmans, 1961, pp. 1–21.
• Shakespeare, William. Richard III. Edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, Folger Shakespeare Library, www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/richard-iii/read/.
• Spivack, Bernard. Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil: The History of a Metaphor in Relation to His Major Villains. Columbia UP, 1958.