Richard III

Richard III

June 24, 2014

      
                                                                               

       English playwright William Shakespeare took a perceived bad man from English monarch history and really played up the alleged evil uprising. Shakespeare’s Richard III is about Richard Plantagenet who had members of his family and anyone standing in his way killed off, so he could inherit the thrown of England.  Shakespeare’s play treads a thin line between a history and tragedy. Richard III is a history play because it tells the story right before Henry VII came to power and ended the War of the Roses, but it is also a tragedy because the audience gets to see the titled character go from a high place of prestige and power to a fall of corruption and innocence, in essence the tragic ending and circumstances of King Richard III. Richard Loncraine directed a film version in 1995 that stars Ian McKellen as the power hungry Richard III. What Loncraine does in this film is make Richard, still power hungry, but power hungry.

            Loncraine makes Richard III a man whose own deformity and family dysfunction a cause for the way Richard is. Richard’s pathology was caused by nurture not nature in these circumstances. The scene that makes the viewer want to root for Richard is when his mother, Cicely Duchess of York, tells Richard that he has been a curse for her and the family and that she wishes he was never born. With a mother like that who wouldn’t want to see harm done to th family. Mother’s are supposed to love and not hate their children. Loncraine makes Richard’s lust for power a result of his masculinity being stripped thanks to his withered arm, and his mother’s own hatred of her son. Richard is compensating for the one thing in his life that he knows he can obtain, if only with a little bloodshed. Shakespeare portrayed Richard as a man who Machiavellian ways was only used for one purpose, power. Shakespeare’s version of Richard III has a lot more bite and psychological depth to it, while Loncraine version simply shows a royal man who let women and his mommy issues cause his high rise into power and fast ride into death. Ian McKellen gives a good performance but was more than likely better viewed and developed on stage.  The movie updates the setting from the late 1400s to the early 1930s. Loncraine makes Richard out to be a character in the vein of Hitler, another man with mommy and a women issue, who was also power hungry. The updated setting worked somewhat but the dialogue was still taken from the original play of Shakespeare. Both Loncraine’s and Shakespeare’s versions shows the unnatural and natural ways in which power can corrupt.