Richard III: Tragic Hero

            As a result of Shakespeare’s eponymous play, Richard III is considered conniving, murderous, and cruel. The full title of the play is The Tragedy of Richard III (R3), which seems incongruous since Richard appears to be a consummate villain; yet the play is a tragedy. It contains the necessary elements of an Aristotelian tragedy: a high born hero who falls from greatness through his own tragic mistake.

The structure of Richard III fits what Aristotle describes in his Poetics. The plot of Shakespeare’s Richard III is intimate: it involves the royal classes, their relatives and close friends. As the younger brother of King Edward IV, Richard, Duke of Gloucester is at the top of the social order in England. His hamartia sets in motion murders and executions, with Richard killing off friends and family members in a tyrannical reign. In final scene of the play, Richmond kills Richard and declares “the bloody dog is dead” (R3 5.5.3); Richard has lost everything and has been killed in a civil war of his own making. This is the classic Aristotelian plot structure of tragedy.

It would be easy to argue that this play is not a tragedy because Richard is not a hero, claiming as proof that in the opening scene of Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Richard III, Richard himself says “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” (R3 1.1.28). However, it’s important to note that Richard doesn’t say that he is a villain. He may be plotting, but he hasn’t actually done anything evil at this point. He isn’t very well liked, but Aristotle’s Poetics does not list likeability as a requirement for a tragic hero.

When Aristotle considers tragedy in his Poetics, he says, “most important of all is the structure of the incidents…character comes in as subsidiary to the action” (Aristotle 25). Richard is different than most tragic heroes, but in the opening scenes of the play, Shakespeare paints a portrait of someone who is clever, witty, and intelligent; someone who is royal but has been dealt a cruel hand by fate giving him physical deformities.

In Act I, scene 3, Queen Elizabeth tells Lord Grey that Richard has been chosen to be protector when the King dies, which will make Richard the de facto ruler until Edward’s son is old enough to take the throne. Richard obviously starts the play as a great man, a hero. Audiences are intended to feel at least some pity for this deformed man, who is disliked and ridiculed by almost every other character in the play, even if Shakespeare couldn’t make Richard too sympathetic since he was overthrown by an ancestor of the sitting queen.

Richard’s hamartia is that he engineers the death of his brother Clarence in Act I. Richard didn’t need to have his brother Clarence killed to gain power. Richard had already been chosen as protector, and was going to rule England until the prince was old enough. However, having successfully engineered one death, Richard’s ruthless ambition to be king consumes him and he begins coldly removing anyone in his way. By Act IV, scene 3, he has had the princes, Lord Grey, Earl Rivers, Sir Vaughn, Lord Hastings, and his own wife murdered.

In Act V, when Buckingham says “Thus doth he force the swords of wicked men to turn their own points on their masters’ bosoms” (R3 5.1.23), he is speaking as much about Richard as he is about himself. Buckingham recognizes that Richard has brought about his own downfall. Richard also has this recognition and his “recognition is coincident with a reversal of fortune” (Aristotle 39), appropriate for the tragic hero, happens in Act V, scene 3, when he proclaims that no one loves him, and why should they, since he does not pity himself (R3 4.3.200).

At the end of the play, the audience is not left with a sense of poetic justice, but with feelings aligned to the tragedy they have witnessed, feelings appropriate for having witnessed a tragedy. While Richard III is not the perfect tragic hero, he is, nonetheless, a tragic hero and the eponymous play, The Tragedy of Richard III, is indeed a tragedy.

Works Cited

Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. S. H. Butcher. London: MacMillan & Sons, 1895 Internet Archive. University of Toronto Libraries. Web. 5 April 2014.  

Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Richard III. Ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. New York: Simon & Schuster. Paperback, 2012. Print.