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Critical essay on richard iii deception
Richard III character analysis
Characterization of Richard III in the play Richard III
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The Last Act of Richard III
In Shakespeare's play Richard III, the main character Richard is developed as an actor - to the degree of morbidity. Richard is forever putting on an act, and playing the part that he thinks will most please whomever he shares the stage with at a given moment. Not that to please is his ultimate goal, it is just a means to get what he wants--which is the tempting role of the king. His acts are from the start plentiful, and for some time almost surprisingly effective. To Clarence he plays the Loving and Concerned Brother. His counterfeit fools Clarence into a state of trust that is stunning to the spectator, who knows that the events which make Richard exclaim "We are not safe, Clarence, we are not safe!" (I.i.70) are in fact Richard's own doing.
Alone with his audience, Richard plays the part of the Self-confident Villain. The audience serves a function not unlike that of a mirror, only it mirrors character traits rather than looks. He introduces himself as the actor who cannot play the role of lover (i.e. be good) satisfactorily, so he chooses to play the villain (i.e. be bad) instead. The notion that this is a choice, as well as his use of the word play rather than be, underline the fact that to him this is all acting. In front of the audience--his mirror and thus a second self--Richard toys around with the conviction that he can do anything he sets his mind to through the means of his acting abilities. He leaves his audience speechless by going through with the overly ambitious task he sets up. He tells us that he will marry Warwick's youngest daughter, and the next thing you know, he has pulled it off. Whether Anne falls for Richard's sex appeal or his rhetoric is moot, yet she does fall. Richard himself seems credulous at her giving in so easily; "Was ever woman in this humour woo'd? / Was ever woman in this humour won?" (I.ii.232-233) He talks as if it were a sign that his repulsiveness must in some way appear attractive to her, although the way he expresses this makes me doubt his seriousness. Perhaps this is an attempt at sharing a joke with his audience, his feeling being that as it cannot possibly be his looks she has fallen for, it must be his words.
In order to better understand the premises of the story a short summary is needed to get to know the narrator better. The protagonist, although not named tries to enjoy his summer with two of his friends Jeff and Digby by being rebels. Initially looking for trouble, they ride around from place to place using the protagonist’s parents’ borrowed car. They go looking for trouble at a place called Greasy Lake where they mistake a car for their friend’s car and try interrupt him while getting busy with a lady. When they interrupt the couple in the car, they find out that their friend Tony wasn’t in there, but a stranger, a real “badass”, their foil, was interrupted who proceeds to beat down the protagonist and his two friends. Out of rash thinking he hits the “badass” in the head with a tire iron just enough to knock him out. Once he is down the protagonist and his friends try to ravage the “foxy” lady the re...
At the start of Adolf Hitler’s reign of terror, no one would have been able to foresee what eventually led to the genocide of approximately six million Jews. However, steps can be traced to see how the Holocaust occurred. One of those steps would be the implementation of the ghetto system in Poland. This system allowed for Jews to be placed in overcrowded areas while Nazi officials figured out what to do with them permanently. The ghettos started out as a temporary solution that eventually became a dehumanizing method that allowed mass relocation into overcrowded areas where starvation and privation thrived. Also, Nazi officials allowed for corrupt Jewish governments that created an atmosphere of mistrust within its walls. Together, this allowed
... order to gain resources there that could aid them in their war against China. Further, invading and conquering Korea would have cut China off from what was a vital tributary/vassal state of the Chinese, and would have weakened them considerably. These were his main motives in attack.
Al Capone was a boy born on January 17, 1899 (Chicago Historical Society). He was born in the city of Brooklyn, New York. His given name was Alphonsus Capone from his Italian background, but everyone called him Al. Capone grew up in a truly poor neighborhood in Brooklyn. He was a very smart kid; however, he dropped out of school at the young age of fourteen. He was a member of two different child gangs. The names were the Brooklyn Rippers and the Forty- thieves Juniors. The Forty- thieves Juniors were a young branch of the original Forty- thieves. Not only was he already part of child gangs, Capone also had many odd jobs in his life. Some examples of these jobs are a clerk in a candy store, pin boy in a bowling alley, cutter in a book bindery, Harvard Inn bouncer and bartender. As he grew up he was still tied into many bad things, but then he met Mary Coughlin. He met her at a dance in 1918. On December 4, 1918, she gave birth to their son Albert “Sonny” Francis. Capone and Coughlin were married on December 30, 1918 (Chicago Historical Society). His sid...
His name was Alphonse Capone. His background, along with thousands of other Italians, the Capone family moved to Brooklyn. It was a new beginning in a New World. The Capone’s were a quiet and peaceful family. Nothing about the Capone family was disturbed, violent, or dishonest. The children and the parents were close. They really enjoyed baseball and were often at games. There was no mental disabilities, no traumatic event that sent the boys into the dangerous life of crime. They did not display sociopath or psychotic personalities; they were not crazy. They were a law-abiding, unremarkable Italian-American family with conventional patterns of behavior and frustrations. They displayed no special genius for crime. Family Parents-Gabriele and Teresina Capone Brothers-Vincenzo (James), Raffaele (Ralph), Salvatore (Frank), Alphonse (Al). Home-The Capone’s lived in a cold-water tenement flat that had no indoor toilet or furnishings. The neighborhood was virtually a slum. The family moved to better lodgings in an apartment over their father’s barbershop at 69 Park Avenue in Brooklyn. This move exposed Al to cultural influences well beyond what was supplied by the Italian immigrant community. Most of the people living around Park Avenue were Irish, although Germans, Swedes and Chinese were also in the neighborhood. Moving into a broader ethnic part of town allowed Al to escape from the all-Italian neighborhood. In their spare time, the ragged children gave the streets an explosive vitality as they played stickball, dodged traffic, brawled and bawled. To be a kid growing up in immigrant Brooklyn, you had to be in a gang (Italian, Jewish or Irish gang). They were not the vicious urban street gangs of today, but rather groups of territorial neighborhood boys who hung out together. Capone was a tough, scrappy kid and
Gifted with the darkest attributes intertwined in his imperfect characteristics, Shakespeare’s Richard III displays his anti-hero traits afflicted with thorns of villains: “Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous / By drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams” (I.i.32-33). Richard possesses the idealism and ambition of a heroic figure that is destined to great achievements and power; however, as one who believes that “the end justifies the means”, Richard rejects moral value and tradition as he is willing to do anything to accomplish his goal to the crown. The society, even his family and closest friends, repudiate him as a deformed outcast. Nevertheless, he cheers for himself as the champion and irredeemable villain by turning entirely to revenge of taking self-served power. By distinguishing virtue ethics to take revenge on the human society that alienates him and centering his life on self-advancement towards kingship, Richard is the literary archetype of an anti-hero.
The term “ghetto” came from the Jewish Quarter in Venice that was made in 1516, when the Venetian experts required the entire city’s Jewish people to live in this area. The Ghettos separated the Jews from the Non-Jews and from other Jewish communities. There were three types of ghettos, closed, open, and destruction ghettos. My thoughts are that the destruction ghettos are concentration or death camps. The ghetto was not a Nazi invention.
The content and construction of texts are inexorably influenced by the plethora of social, cultural, and historical factors relative to a composer’s context. Context thus becomes the principle medium for deciphering the complex and often didactic meanings within texts. Through the comparative study of Shakespeare’s historical tragedy King Richard III and Al Pacino’s postmodern docudrama Looking For Richard, both texts explore the various connections explored through the protagonist Richard with respective societal influence affecting their portrayal. Shakespeare’s text strongly conveys a sense of providentialism which was influential by the Tudor monarchy whilst Al Pacino thorough the implement of modern day media portrays these influences to a secular, postmodern audience.
The ghetto is a very often commonly misused word. Jews are the only ones who can utilize the word properly. People of Jewish religion are the alone ones who truly recognize what it is like to be in an actual ghetto. This word holds so many stories behind it are nil compared to what its actual significance. At least one thousand ghettos were established by Germans during the Holocaust. Jews were discovered as a minority; hence they were inhabited in small regions which the Nazi SS named ghettos. Jewish quarters were somewhat in similar comparison to concentration camps, although they were very much smaller. Jews were not always subjected to this type of treatment. Treatment in such a way all started with Adolf Hitler. He charged the Jews for
At the very outset of the play, readers are presented with the power-hungry, self-loathing Duke of Gloucester, defined by his thirst for vengeance and power and by his uncanny ability to manipulate the minds of the people around him. Richard appeals to the audience’s sympathies in his self-deprecating description, when he declares that he is deformed, unfinished, and so hideous and unfashionable that dogs bark at him as he passes by. The imagery he utilizes throughout the opening soliloquy also evokes a feeling of opposition and juxtaposition which speaks to the duality of his nature.The juxtapositions he employs are more than rhetorical devices, as ...
Composers throughout various zeitgeists are linked by different representations of universal human concerns, and their texts simultaneously embody certain values and agendas individual to themselves. An exploration of Shakespeare’s King Richard III (1592) and Al Pacino’s Looking for Richard (1996) allows for a greater understanding of the composer’s respective contexts, along with their intended agendas, through the lens of their own societal values and concerns. The manipulation of Richard III’s persona, whether by authorial adaptation of historical sources related to his character, or through the differing views of Richards motives, are universal concepts, that when studied in relation to the differing time periods, accentuates the context and our understanding of recurrent aspects of the human experience.
Instead of a powerful physical image, like Queen Elizabeth I, Richard implements elegant soliloquies, engages in witty banter, and attunes the audience to his motives with frequent asides. This flexibility demonstrates Richard's thespian superiority and power over the rest of the play's cast, making him a unique character in the play, but why does he do it? This constant battle between characters to claim mastery over a scene leaves the audience with a seemingly overlooked source of power for an actor [clarify/expand].
and sent before his time" and "since he cannot prove to be a lover; he is
Throughout the historical literary periods, many writers underrepresented and undervalued the role of women in society, even more, they did not choose to yield the benefits of the numerous uses of the female character concerning the roles which women could accomplish as plot devices and literary tools. William Shakespeare was one playwright who found several uses for female characters in his works. Despite the fact that in Shakespeare's history play, Richard II, he did not use women in order to implement the facts regarding the historical events. Instead, he focused the use of women roles by making it clear that female characters significantly enriched the literary and theatrical facets of his work. Furthermore in Shakespeare’s history play, King Richard II, many critics have debated the role that women play, especially the queen. One of the arguments is that Shakespeare uses the queen’s role as every women’s role to show domestic life and emotion. Jo McMurtry explains the role of all women in his book, Understanding Shakespeare’s England A Companion for the American Reader, he states, “Women were seen, legally and socially, as wives. Marriage was a permanent state” (5). McMurtry argues that every woman’s role in the Elizabethan society is understood to be a legal permanent state that is socially correct as wives and mothers. Other critics believe that the role of the queen was to soften King Richard II’s personality for the nobles and commoners opinion of him. Shakespeare gives the queen only a few speaking scenes with limited lines in Acts two, four, and five through-out the play. Also, she is mentioned only a few times by several other of the characters of the play and is in multiple scenes wit...
...eem to be blinded by his manipulations. From this there could possibly be some more admiration to Richard for pulling this all off. How he fools the others on their toes. He has had to rely on his intellect and he is more of an outcast and more of an outsider in all aspects of life. "I fear, I fear, `twill prove a giddy world," (Act 2, Scene 3, Line 6) The people of England fear the worst both literally and figuratively. The two scenes surrounding the scene involving the common folk are comprised of the predominant women in the novel. This could possibly be to help display the fact that the women can foretell the events and the future of England.