Richard Iii

Richard III

To an extent, surly there are other characters in the play that show poor characters, perhaps even worse than Richard himself. However, it’s not the same characteristics the share that make them so “bad”. For example, Anne’s lack of restraint and weakness towards losing her position makes her weaker than Richard which on some sense is “worse. But overall,
Richard the third is by far the worst character throughout the play.

Richard is in every way the dominant character of the play, to the extent that he is both the protagonist of the story and its major villain. Richard III Intensely displays the psychological aspect of evil, and those factors are focused on Richard’s mind. Critics sometimes compare
Richard to the medieval character, Vice, who was a flat and one-sided embodiment of evil.
However, especially in the later scenes of the play, Richard proves to be highly self-reflective and complicated, making his heinous even more devious.

Perhaps more than in any other play by Shakespeare, the audience of Richard III experiences complex, ambiguous, and constant relationship with the main character. Richard is clearly the villain, he declares his intensions in his very first speech that he intends to stop at nothing to achieve his nefarious designs. But despite his open allegiance to evil, he is such a resilient and complicated figure that, for much of the play, we are likely to facinated by him, or at least to be impressed with him. In this way, the relationship with Richard mimics the other characters’ relationships with him, conveying a powerful sense of the force of his personality. Even characters such as Lady Anne, who have an explicit knowledge of his wickedness, allow themselves to be charmed by his brilliant wordplay, his skilful argumentation, and his relentless pursuit of his selfish desires. But Anne is weaker than the others, and in a fragile state.

Richard’s long, fascinating monologues, in which he outlines his plans and gleefully confesses all his evil thoughts, are central to the audience’s experience of Richard.
Shakespeare uses these monologues brilliantly to control the audience’s impression of
Richard, In Act I, scene i, for example, Richard dolefully claims that his malice toward others stems from the fact that he is unloved, and that he is unloved because of his physical deformity. This claim, which casts the other characters of the play as villains for punishing
Richard for his appearance, makes it easy to sympathize with Richard during the first scenes of the play, even though throughout the play all a reader could think is why he has not be assassinated yet.

It quickly becomes apparent, however, that Richard simply uses his deformity as a tool to gain the sympathy of others—including us. Richard’s evil is a much more innate part of his character than simple bitterness about his ugly body. But he uses this speech to win our trust, and he repeats this ploy throughout his struggle to be crowned king. After he is crowned king and Richmond begins his uprising, Richard’s monologues end. Once Richard stops exerting his charisma on the audience, his real nature becomes much more apparent, and by the end of the play he can be seen for the monster that he is. No other person in the play shows characteristics as horrid as Richard. The lengths he went thought to get what he wanted outweighs any others hints of wickedness.