SOURCE: “‘Determined to prove a villain’: Theatricality in Richard III,” in Critical Survey 3, No. 2, 1991, pp. 149-56.

In the essay below, Day examines Richard III's chosen and not always reliable professions as prologue, stage manager, and actor in the “morality-Vice manner” of the play.

Richard III has a long association with theatricality. Colley Cibber's melodramatic attentions to the text in 1700 ensured its reputation as a piece of showmanship even into the 1950s when, some would say, Laurence Olivier's film confirmed the histrionic image. Both men, however, built on what already existed in the play. Richard III is self-consciously theatrical, inviting an audience both to perceive and to question its central metaphor of acting and illusion.¹

Richard's opening soliloquy is a self-presentation in the morality-Vice manner. At the same time its structural formality is a mirror of deliberative discourse wherein the character rejects the more virtuous futures which offer themselves...