'Distortum vultum sequitur distortio morum.'Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay [Character distortion follows a distorted expression.] --Thomas More Shakespeare's Richard III, from the titled play, shares the disturbing characteristic of being expressly "determined to prove himself a villain" (Ii30) with other Shakespeare creations, notably Othello's Iago and Titus Andronicus' Aaron the Moor, who, like Richard, is obviously a physical outsider. Richard's statement, which Shakespeare includes in the first scene, has an ambiguous and double-edged meaning. First, Richard is saying by this that he is determined to "prove" himself "a bad guy." This interpretation requires the reader to imbue Richard with free will. The Oxford English Dictionary's definition of "solve" as the act of "making a decision" shows why. If life is preordained then a man will never be able to make a decision, only destiny can do it. Being resolved is the demonstration of the subject's free will. The second possible interpretation directly contradicts the first. That is, Richard might say that he is "determined" by fate (or perhaps by his author, Shakespeare) to "prove himself a villain." In this case, he has no choice, no freedom. When we look at the most obvious question raised by Richard III: “What motivates Richard to be evil?” - we must remember that the question, as revealed in Richard's opening soliloquy, may not apply. In a world of destiny, personal motivation does not exist. That said, Richard's dense line only half suggests that the tragedy takes place in a universe controlled by fate. And there are some interesting ways to try to understand Richard without immediately resorting to description, as Granville Barker reductively described Richard's descendant Iago as "only a poisoned and poisonous ganglion of longings for evil" (Spivack 3). First, very handily, Richard himself provides a reason to act that way right from the start. He characterizes himself as “deformed,” “unfinished,” “out of fashion,” and this ugliness, he claims, prevents him from being a “lover,” prevents him from “will[ing] love majesty.” So, he justifies, “to entertain these fair and well-spoken days,” he is “determined to prove himself a villain” (Ii20-30). On the surface this makes sense until, in the next scene, he successfully seduces the single woman, Lady Anne, who is (or, at least, should be) the absolute hardest one for him to win. If her last encounter counts for anything, she's presumably very pretty, but more importantly, she's the widow and daughter-in-law of two men Richard himself killed. If this still doesn't prove that while his physique leaves a little to be desired, his charisma is overwhelming and makes it potentially easy for him to be a "lover," we see him sexually attracting the only other woman who should be as difficult as Anne for him to enter in a later scene. This is the "Queen", the widow of the dead brother, whose children, brothers and brother-in-law Richard himself killed. After a witty banter between the two, Richard and the Queen, in which he persuades her to marry his daughter to him, he grants her a "kiss of true love" (IV.iv.349). She too succumbs to him as a lover, despite her known wickedness and physical deformity. Furthermore, when Lady Anne has the opportunity to complain about her marital condition, she complains that "never for an hour in her bed did I enjoy the golden dew of sleep... Besides, she hates me" (IV.ii.78- 81 ). She specifically doesn't complain about her waking prowess in bed, and she doesn't even say she's fallen out of love withhe, rather, only notes that he is not in love with her. It seems, if anything, that Richard is a fantastic lover (insofar as being one classically requires no real emotion). Through these two examples of nearly impossible, yet successful, seductions, Shakespeare's audience sees that the tragic evil star of Richard III is unreliable in the motives he attributes to himself. He can, if he wants, be a lover. Having discounted the possibility that Richard himself will provide us with an answer, let's get back to where we started. Either Richard has no motivations as such, or they are not so obvious that they can be defined directly by him or anyone else. The latter of these two options leaves us open to a more intriguing answer than Richard's to the question of Richard's motivation. It is a paradox - plausible in a piece of literature that employs paradoxical lines such as "Cursed be the heart that had the heart to do it" (I.ii.15). Richard, being ugly, is classically equated with being evil. Thomas More, in his History of King Richard III, the text on which Shakespeare primarily based his play, makes clear the connection between appearance and reality, when More describes Richard as having "evil-featured limbs, a crooked back, a very higher right." As Jowett points out, "More's vocabulary is itself significant: the limbs are, as it were, evil in features rather than merely ugly; crooked or crooked can mean 'deviation from straightness', and the left side of the body, dominant here, was associated with evil. (Jowett 32)" Shakespeare's secondary characters make similar equations. Margaret, the old queen, curses Richard by dreaming of "a hell of foul devils" and goes on to cry, "thou marked by elves...thou who was sealed in thy birth the slave of nature and the son of hell" (I.iii.224-7). Not only does he paint his devils as ugly, thus implying the connection between ugliness and treachery, but he makes the most direct connection in the phrase "marked by elves,” which, as Jowett cites in his footnote to the phrase, “Refers to a belief that physical defects were left by evil elves to mark a child for evil deeds. Margaret adamantly sees Richard's physical body as a testimony to the sinfulness of his soul, and tells him so. Likewise, Richard's mother draws a connection, saying, "He [Richard] was the most miserable thing when he was young" (II.iv.18). Rather than use a less powerful word than "wretch" that might refer solely to her physical being, the Duchess employs this strong word with many negative connotations. Finally, in Richmond's last speech, he closes the work by calling England a "fair land" (V.vii.39, emphasis mine). Like More, Richmond uses a word that means both something moral and something superficial. In this case, the single adjective combines justice and attractiveness. Knowing, as Richard does, that the nature of someone's true persona commonly comes from their outward appearance, and knowing, as Richard does, that they are ugly, it makes sense that he would want to weaken the equation. This conjecture would explain his desire for deception. If he manages to deceive people, he will effectively demonstrate that appearance does not reveal reality, in fact, he will demonstrate just the opposite. Logically, this would prove that his ugliness does not make him evil. One of Richard's shining moments comes when he gives advice to his nephew: "Your Grace heeded their [your uncle's] sugary words," he says, "But he looked not upon the poison of their hearts" (III.i.13- 14 ). In expressing this feeling, he is at the same time able to deceive beautifully by taking the high level, 1964.