Richard III

Richard opens the play alone on stage, confiding his plan to be a villain directly to the audience before he's done anything villainous at all, and that soliloquy sets the pattern for everything that follows: every murder, every seduction, every betrayal is narrated to us in advance by Richard himself, gleefully, as if the play's real relationship isn't between Richard and his victims but between Richard and whoever's watching. Shakespeare uses that intimacy to implicate the audience in a way few of his other tragedies attempt, since laughing along with Richard's asides means actively enjoying the same cruelty the rest of the court is too slow, too trusting, or too compromised to stop.

The play closes out the first history tetralogy's long account of England tearing itself apart in the Wars of the Roses, and Richard functions as that cycle's grim summation: a state that has already normalized deposition, betrayal, and casual violence among its ruling family produces, almost inevitably, a figure skilled enough to exploit every one of those normalized habits for his own advancement. Richard's physical deformity, which he names constantly as his motive and his excuse, is less a cause of his cruelty than a story he tells about himself and lets the audience half believe, a self-justifying myth performed with the same theatrical relish he brings to everything else.

Richard's seduction of Lady Anne over her father-in-law's coffin, a man Richard himself killed, is often staged as the play's most audacious set piece precisely because it's aimed less at persuading Anne than at proving to the audience what Richard is capable of talking anyone into. He tells us beforehand he expects to win her and predicts he won't keep her long, treating the entire courtship as a demonstration of technique rather than genuine desire, and her eventual consent functions less as a comment on her weakness than as Shakespeare's proof that rhetoric untethered from any real feeling can overpower grief itself.