Richard III And Othello Essay

Shakespeare has a way with villainous characters. But not only in making them bad but also to make the audience or even the other characters in the play to feel for these characters that are only showing signs of evil and a want to ruin everything. We even goes as far as to say the very apparent villain in Richard III is also the hero of the play even though most characters despise him in the end. But in the same breath we are given a character like Iago from Othello who does quite the same things as Richard and yet is seen as a good and honest person to most of the characters. Both Richard and Iago use their way with rhetoric and action that make them even more complex characters than other Shakespeare characters. There is also going to be discussion

He is deformed and this is his reason behind why he gets nothing, no love and no power. Like in many cases this is hard to picture he is the third son and thus had very little chance of ever getting the throne unless something severe happened, which in this play we would see happen. But he is not left without he is the Duke of the Gloucester but even with this he laments and complains about not getting the power that he thinks he so rightfully deserves. In his monologues we hear of his great triumphs in battle as well as how he is deformed, all in the same breath. In this monologue he starts with ‘Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths, Our bruisèd arms hung up for monuments, Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,’ and then it slowly devolves into ‘I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion, Cheated of feature by dissembling nature, Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time Into this breathing world, scarce half made up, And that so lamely and unfashionable (Richard III 1:1).’ It seems from the get go Richard is wanting people to feel sorry for him because he is deformed and to think that this is why he is not given any power or