SOURCE: Plasse, Marie A. “Corporeality and the Opening of Richard III.” In Entering the Maze: Shakespeare's Art of Beginning, edited by Robert F. Willson Jr., pp. 11-25. New York: Peter Lang, 1995.

In the following essay, Plasse argues that Richard uses his malformed body as an excuse to behave wickedly.

The opening scene of Richard III, unique among Shakespeare's plays in its call for the leading character to appear onstage alone and deliver a lengthy monologue, represents a marked departure from the crowded scenes that open the other three plays in the first tetralogy. Next to the heavily populated and eventful scenes with which those plays begin,¹ the opening of Richard III seems remarkably stark. The expansive representation of historical events offered in the first scenes of the Henry VI plays is replaced in Richard III by a more narrowly focused representation of a single figure into which the...