Research and Analysis Assignment of Richard III Play (Essay Sample)

Client’s Name
Instructor’s Name
En 141
Date
Richard III Response
At any Shakespeare play, we can observe innuendo and ambiguity in the actions and motivations of his characters. There never can be one definitive answer to any questions even after observation of these plays numerous times. For example, in Richard III, one person can unambiguously conclude that the acts committed by the protagonist entirely disappointing. His ambition to be king were undeniable, but Richard III could compete with the devil in the wicked and deceitful means to achieve his goal. What was the real driving force of his ambition? Can they be regarded as an attempt to find the place in the world, even if this place was an evil?
In the opening monologue it becomes clear that Richard wants to be king but even at the end of the play we can not understand why:
Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York; and all the clouds that loured upon our house in the deep bosom of the ocean buried. Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths, our stern alarums changed to merry meetings, our dreadful marches to delightful measures. Grim-visaged war hath smoothed his wrinkled front, and now, instead of mounting barbed steeds to fright the souls of fearful adversaries, he capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber to the lascivious pleasing of a lute. But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks nor made to court an amorous looking-glass; I, that am rudely stamped, and want love’s majesty to stru before a wanton ambling nymph; I that am curtailed of this fair proportion, cheated of feature by dissembling nature, deformed, unfinished, sent before my time into this breathing world scarce half made up, and that so lamely and unfashionable that dogs bark at me as I halt by them; why, I in this weak piping time of peace have no delight to pass away the time, unless to spy my shadow in the sun and descant on mine own deformity. And therefore since I cannot prove a lover to entertain these fair well-spoken days, I am determined to prove a villain and hate the idle pleasures of these days.  (I.i.1–30).
In this passage, we learn a lot of information not only about Richard, but also about the state of affairs in England. England is prosperous, but Richard does not want to be part of this. He believes that his physical deformity made him superfluous in this world. He boldly suggests that this may be an excuse for his transformation into a villain, and for all the evil deeds that he performed throughout the play. But we can not really accept that Richard was evil just because he was a cripple. I do not believe that it would be so; it's too easy an answer. Even this monologue in the BBC was not so convincing. Yes, the actor reveals a cunning, ruthless and charismatic image of the character, but I'm still not sure why?
Richard III was a fascinating character for researchers, but without any doubt I can say the ways of research in literature and psychoanalysis are different. It can be argued that Richard's evil methods were the result of an event or events during the time of his birth, infancy and / or early childhood. Many psychoanalytic theory may have been applied to the case of Richard III. For the beginning of this investigation, I'll start with the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. According to Aisling Hearns in “I am I’: A Lacanian Analysis of Richard III,” she states that Freud’s basics premise regarding Richard goes as follows:
Richard has remained in the realm of the pleasure principle and has failed to move forward into the realm of the reality principle. Freud claims Richard’s villainous ambition is a consequence of his childhood deformity. Freud says that even though Richard claims to have become a villain due to boredom, we, as an audience, believe it spans from something deeper and it is this belief that gains access to our sympathies for him.
In Freudian terms, the pleasure is the primary innate need to seek pleasure by any price. It is a first and foremost need that we experience at birth and during infancy. Nevertheless human development implies that person must be able to ultimately follow the principle of reality. This principle allows us all to act according to the rules of the outside world, rather than just take and get as we please. According to Freud's model, it would seem that Richard was stuck in the pleasure principle, which can say a lot of questions about his behavior. He wanted to be king, and used all the means necessary to meet this inherent need for power.
Some researchers say the definition of evil is the total absence of love, and maybe the question we should be asking, is not why does Richard’s deformity make him think he needs to be a villain, but rather why does Richard come to believe that his deformity makes him unlovable. According to theory of attachment that was proposed by Donald Winnicott, Richard’s case can be explained in this manner. In “’Myself Alone’: Richard III and the Dissolution of the Masculine Identity,” Coppela Kahn puts together a compelling case with regards to Winnicott’s conjectures. It begins with a passage from” King Henry VI ‘Why love forswore me in my mother’s womb,’ and goes on to describe the hideous deformity that makes him ‘Like to a chaos, or an unlick’d bear whelp that carries no impression like the dam.’” According to Kahn’s essay with regards to Winnicott’s theory, the following passage states that:
Richard ‘cannot know himself because he cannot love himself, and he cannot love himself because he has never been loved. Confronted with the lumpish whelp her womb had formed, Richard’s mother failed to lick it into shape, to imprint on it the ‘impression’ of being loved and accepted. The circumstances of Richards’s entrance into the world are mentioned frequently enough to demand our consideration; a difficult labor, a breech birth, his limbs deformed, but his teeth already in his head, as even the young Duke of York has heard somewhere. His mother’s remembrance tends to confirm his contention that he was never loved. Lacking that crucial two-way exchange with the mother as the primary representative of the human community, he never feels he is part of it. (229)
Richard ascended...