SOURCE: “Richard III,” in Shakespeare and the Mystery of God's Judgments, University of Georgia Press, 1976, pp. 67-100.

In the following essay, Hunter reviews the plot and characters of Richard III, and also discusses Shakespeare's adaptation of his sources.

We regard the hellish fall of Dr. Faustus and wonder at the forces that explain it, particularly at the mysteries of grace and free will, of election and reprobation. The hellish fall of Richard the Third directs our minds toward the same unlawful things, but Shakespeare's first great tragic protagonist is the protagonist of something more (or other) than tragedy. The Richard III plays (I shall be considering Henry VI, Part Three as well as Richard III) are doubly generic—tragic history within comic history—and the tragic destruction of Richard is simultaneously the comedy of England's salvation. Evil is done but good comes of it. Divine providence is necessarily...