Before Evil Deeds

Guilt is tied up with repentance and remorse with expiation and retribution. Even in the around callous criminal, the pangs of conscience may suddenly break through, and with them, remorse and eventual expiation.

The fifteenth century was a deeply strike period in English history, a time of political disorder stemming largely "from feminine misrule" (Moulton 254). In Richard III, the pendulum swings to the other(a) extreme and "masculine aggression runs rampant" (Moulton 255). Richard, refusing to subordinate himself to the peacetime hierarchy, announces that he is determined "to prove a villain" (1.1.30). In this initiative soliloquy, Richard introduces "the theme of wrong-doing and expiation that is to pervade the play" (Clemen 6). He char subprogramerizes himself as supremely "subtle, false and treacherous" (1.1.37) and reveals his part in the arrest of his brother, the Duke of Clarence.

Richard the King dominates the play, having almost one-third of the lines. Through his asides and soliloquies he also captures the audience: "[Richard] reveals himself so intimately that we become his accomplices: in sharing his keen delight in villainy, we share his guilt" (Hamilton 192). On the surface, Richard is the model of the righteous prince, expressing sorrow and regret for malign movements more(prenominal) than anyone else in the play, begging forgiveness and invoke those who offend against him. This is the persona he has crafted to gain the confidence and nourishment of th

Levin, Harry. "Two Tents on Bosworth Field." Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 18 Jun.- Sept. (1991): 199216.

This comes out more fully when Clarence argues with the two murderers, calling on them non to spite God's law against murder. But the First Murderer counters that Clarence has no stand to plead God's law when he has already broken it. And Clarence responds that Edward is no less guilty than he is and therefore he could not want to kill him. But the First Murderer, unmoved by moral arguments and determined to do as he has been ordered, kills him with a dagger thrust.

Clarence, dying, cries out a warning to them and to all others who would jockstrap Richard to power: "Ah, sirs, consider, he that set you on/To do this deed will hate your for the deed" (1.4.261262).

Richard is a strong masculine figure, full of the element of fire which the Elizabethans held to be the essential division of action and of masculinity. The three parts of Henry VI present weak and unmasculine kings. Richard is their opposite. He is all aggression, all action. Moral niceties know no place in his aggressive male populace: "[Richard] at no point reflects a concern for the consequences of an act before he commits it, and his momentary remorse is relatively superficial, the allow for more of fear than of contrition or spiritual perceptiveness" (Champion 68). In fact, his only suggestion of moral anguish comes in affect V, on the eve of the climactic battle.

In Act IV, Richard orders the murder of the princes, sons of Edward IV, who are imprisoned in the Tower of London. Sir throng Tyrrel, an impoverished nobleman, agrees to lead the undertaking. To do the actual deed, however, he enlists the sanction of the most ruthless and depraved men he stub find, John Dighton and Miles Forrest. Tyrrel returns to the palace to inform Richard, but first he speaks to the audience: "[Dighton and Forrest]/Although they were fresh'd villains, bloody dogs,/Melting with tenderness and kind pardon/Wept
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