Richard III
Shakespeare’s Richard III is a crucial exemplification of how disability is staged in various ways in modern theatrical performances. In the Renaissance, Richard’s body is foregrounded appealingly, with the impotence he claims enabling him to advance his political power through complicated and shrewd maneuvers. This paper examines the representation of disability in Riсhard III and explains its significance within the play. Indeed, understanding the powerful ends to which Richard uses his identity is important in interpreting the complexity of deformities, the various discourses to understanding physical differences regarding the human body instabilities, and their correct staging in modern theatrical performances.
Richard’s physical difference drives him to become both a pervasive narcissist pleasured by his disability and a physiognomic revisionist who makes attempts to change the meaning of his physical self. He argues that “I am determined to prove a villain” (1.1.1). In dissembling the meaning of his deformity, he finds delight descanting upon his deformity. Richard shifts his attention from his disability to his clothes and face, rejecting the physiognomy of accidental appearance. In turn, this favors the physiognomy of essential and naturalistic attributes. As the theory of physiognomy would have it, his appearance at birth is factually an accurate indexical representation of his villainy and the tragedy that befalls him (Connolly 87).
Moreover, Richard suffering an attack of ‘conscience’ in Act 5 Scene 5 (135-157) can be interpreted as the drama’s psychological climax (Shakespeare 517). In examining Richard’s vision of himself, he is appalled to be at the breaking point of his identity, ultimately relying on the very ideas he used advantageously in judging himself. The king, who seemingly was above the affliction of cowardice conscience, becomes overwhelmed by the varying conceptions of his nature (5.5.133).
The king’s self ‘love’ (5.5. 141), his identity’s kernel, becomes threatened by the “fear” his conscience instills in him (5.5 136) (Shakespeare 535). “Richard loves Richard” (5.5 137), a phrase systematically repeated in the play, serves to motivate this character. His contradictory approaches are more reverent when he states that he seemingly becomes more of a saint on instances where he plays the devil (561). The malleable nature of his self-identity becomes most apparent in Anne’s interview. After the continued woos, he pictures himself through her eyes and states that Richard had “been mistaking his person all along” (1.2.239). This made Richard become more determined to ‘maintain’ how highly he held himself with ‘some little cost’ (1.2.245-6). Nonetheless, he was viewed as an “elvish-marked, abortive, rooting hog” (I.iii. 225) who murdered his way to the crown (Connolly, 93). He viewed the world as incoherently fragmented, failing to comprehend that actions had consequences on other least expected areas (111). Therefore, the other characters cannot help but feel a mixture of sympathy and relief for the king.
In the modernistic interpretation of the play, Richard’s monstrosity bears the shape of an aggressive masculinity challenging the boundaries of succession and other patriarchal structures in its setting. His unfinished status and lack of proportions from the perspectives of theatrical disfigurement are exemplifications of double-ness in the plays’ period hybrid staging practices. His “difference” from one point of view is characterological, motivating his isolation and his compensatory ambitions. Secondly, the view is also theatrical as registered in the ‘dramaturgy of his theatrical transaction’ (Connolly 87). Like the medieval Vice, the play unfolds an ambidextrous design with the representation of self as Gloucester’s self-presentational displays turn disfigurement into the agency (87).
Relevantly then, Richard III is a gesture exemplification of how frequently physical difference is interpreted. In Renaissance, it is dependent mainly on the moral significance of bodies. Richard’s character in the play has been associated with two important modern terms – “monstrous” and “deformed”. Both terms form the interpretive model patterns where deeper moral truths are evidenced by physical anomalies (Garber 37). Therefore, through this model, Richard’s contemporaries then interpret his hunchback as evil – a body difference which later proves to hold the truth of his naked character later (Connolly, 87). The characters (Elizabeth, Richmond, Stanley, the Duchess, and Anne at first) who stigmatize his deformity through their physiognomic eyes accurately represent his naked and naturalistic villainy, thus, end up getting rewarded with life. The other characters who forget their physiognomy (Hastings, Edward V, Clarence, and Anne) in the end “shift their attention to his clothes and face,” befriend him, and get deceived by his dissembling looks with death befalling them (Garber 37).
In the modern world of disability staging, the continued theatrical reliance on an actor’s body to produce a deformity has been the basis for the current interpretation of how Richard’s body is characterized. With every show, the shape of Richard takes a different form, serving as a perpetual reminder that “deformity” is one of the earliest coined words connoting the ability of an actor to shift shapes (Connolly 137). As the character assumes the spotlight to start the show, the audience eagerly awaits to see what distinctive shape the deformed leaders’ body will assume (Lins 3). Richard’s deformity then becomes an occasion for virtuosic acting, almost always by non-disabled identifying actors.
The deliberate cultural appropriation performances of non-disabled persons assuming and later discarding the characterization of disability in plays – termed ‘crippling up’ or ‘cripdrag’ – has continually come under heavy criticism by researchers in work disabilities (Garber 31). The staging of Richard’s character has been associated with the use of complicated prostheses, the adoption of contoured postures, and use of exaggerated limping all of which tax an actor’s body (38). Anecdotes of injury then bind the actors who insist on foregrounding Richard’s body in such a mannernecdotes of injury.
Indeed, whereas questions continue to arise as to whether the deformity of Richard was just a sign or the root of his evil, preferably, his body is one of the crucial elements that desire to be watched in play. The dynamics of how deformities are staged continues to form the basis for unsettling the equation between Richard’s display of deformity and how easily disability is interpreted. Play participants have historically characterized and negatively interpreted Richard’s body differences. However, proper theatrical performances involving actors who identify as disabled ensure that performances portray Richard’s character in its correct form, never reducing it to a singular meaning. The staging of disability, however, calls to attention what is to be seen in Richard, and what disability is thought to mean.
Works Cited
Charles T. Wood. Joan of Arc and Richard III: Sex, Saints, and Government in the Middle Ages. Oxford University Press, 2003.
Connolly, Annaliese F. Richard III: A Critical Reader. Bloomsbury Arden, 2013.
Garber, Marjorie. “Descanting on Deformity: Richard III and the Shape of History.” Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality. Routledge, 1987, pp. 28-51.
Lins, Tanja. Shakespeare – the Disturbing World of Richard Iii and Edmund. GRIN Verlag GmbH, 2007.
Shakespeare, William. Richard III. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Suzanne Gossett, Jean E. Howard, Katherine E. Maus, and Gordon McMullan. W.W. Norton & Company. 2016. pp. 515-600.
