Richard III Use Of Blood Essay

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Use of Blood in Richard III In Richard III, by William Shakespeare, there are many references and depictions of blood. Anne, Richard, and Richmond all make numerous speeches that involve this sanguine image. By using the various speeches and related fates of the characters in this work as a vehicle, Shakespeare calls upon the motif of blood throughout Richard III in order to demonstrate the futility of revenge. Following the blade-assisted demise of the once (but not future!) king, Henry, Lady Anne attends his funeral service and laments over his body as he is lowered into his final resting place. She refers to him as a “bloodless remnant of that royal blood,” (1.2.7), implying that she thinks of him only in terms of his blood, rather than …show more content…

For example, the band Bastille have published a song on the topic of “bad blood”, which is among one of the multifarious motifs upon which Richard has a tendency to soliloquise. In the lyrics of the aforementioned song, it is mandated that “all this bad blood here… be let dry,”. Bastille, in this work, use the image of blood to represent past events whose courses have run and that are no longer susceptible to human intervention. Similarly, Richard has a lot of ‘bad blood’ in this sense, but he refuses to ‘let it dry’, and instead chooses to pick at these past events, as though they were oozing, festering scabs that he refuses to let heal over. In the song, the line mentioning the titular ‘bad blood’ is followed by a few seconds of a high-pitched, banshee-like screaming, which is rather reminiscent of the (implied) dreadful wails emitted by Richard in the course of his eventual climactic demise, where his attempts at revenge prove to be a mortal exercise in folly. Following the surprisingly-in-tune howls of a sad, solitary singer, this musician goes on to philosophically muse that because “[the blood]’s been cold for years, won’t you let it lie?”, to which Richard answers with a resounding ‘no’, shortly before he loses the ability to reply at all, when he is ‘let lie’ in his grave. Though both Shakespeare and Bastille use blood in similar ways, Shakespeare expands upon what would happen if the blood were not allowed to

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