Temporal Compression in Shakespeare’s Richard III

Abstract

Shakespeare’s treatment of Richard III has long been the cause of debates about Tudor defamations of the last Yorkist king. Within this context, some attention has been paid to the play’s extreme compression of events that in fact took place over a period of seven years, from the death of George, Duke of Clarence in 1478 to the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. This study investigates the momentum of events to gauge the extent to which the representation of Richard does paint him in an entirely negative light. Detailed analysis of the timeline demonstrates that the way the play re-structures historical moments is designed to foreground not only the figure of Richard himself, with all its attendant associations, but also the very methods used to concentrate attention upon him. The self-referential nature of the play’s relationship to history points to its own constructions, foregrounding the techniques used to show not only the legend of Richard, but how it is elaborated. The play therefore draws attention to its own manipulation of events, which in turn makes any assumptions about its representation of Richard as villain open to question.