SOURCE: Trotter, Jack E. “‘Was Ever Woman in This Humour Won?’: Love and Loathing in Shakespeare's Richard III.” Upstart Crow 13 (1993): 33-46.

In the following essay, Trotter contends that an important theme of Richard III is the protagonist's disgust with the world of flesh and his attempt to conquer the inadequacies of nature, particularly as they are revealed by his own body. Trotter sees strong evidence of this theme in Act I during Richard's courtship of Lady Anne.

Typical of nineteenth-century assessments of what is perhaps the most debated scene in Shakespeare's Richard III, the wooing of Lady Anne in Act I, is Henry Hudson's remark that Richard's remarkable triumph is due “not so much to any special vice or defect in [Anne] as to his witchcraft of tongue and wit, so put into play as to disconcert all her powers of resistance.”¹ Like S. T. Coleridge before him...