My research looks at Shakespeare’s unsympathetic representation of King Richard III in The Tragedy of Richard III. Shakespeare was not the first to present Richard negatively: sixteenth-century chroniclers such as Robert Fabyan, Polydore Vergil, and especially Thomas More played a significant role in scripting the Tudor Myth that portrayed Richard as a corrupt, disfigured monarch. In my research I have located a chronicle written during Richard’s reign, Dominic Mancini’s 1484 chronicle The Usurpation of King Richard III, which reports favourably of the king. I will show that Shakespeare incorporates events from Mancini’s chronicle, though reshapes that material to support and advance the Tudor bias against the last Yorkist King. In Mancini’s chronicle, for instance, Elizabeth Woodville persuades her husband Edward IV to have his brother Clarence murdered in the Tower; in Act One of Shakespeare’s Richard III, Richard schemes his way to the crown by creating a false prophesy that Edward uses as grounds to murder Clarence. In Shakespeare’s Richard III, Richard uses his physical deformity and his inability to “prove a lover” (I.i.28) to justify his desire to “prove a villain” (I.i.30); Mancini records no evidence or testimony concerning Richard’s body, and the recent 2012 exhumation of Richard’s remains shows no sign of physical deformity other than a slight spinal curvature. Overall this presentation aims to reconstruct the way modern readers and audiences view Richard III, and to question the role that significant literary texts play in reshaping historical narratives.
Prudentia in More’s Utopia: The Ethics of Foresight