Detailed Note on Richard III and Looking For Richard

Resource Description

Richard III and Looking For Richard Comparative Assessment Based on Similar Themes and Scenes. 

Conscience

Richard embodies our sick but an irrepressible obsession with darkness often discouraged in today’s world through rigorous morals and social conventions. Both Shakespeare and Pacino ultimately explore the tragedy that underlies this fascination, that a suppression of one’s humanity will inevitably lead to one’s downfall. Shakespeare’s Richard the Third’s first four acts focus on Richard and his evil energy with a restless tempo, however, the audience is aware of the approaching catastrophe and we witness the protagonist’s decline in Act 5. Richard’s dream is essentially a metaphor for his suppressed sense of humanity being released. After Richard wakes, Shakespeare employs dialogue between two voices- one accusatory and one defensive- to convey the twists and turns of Richard’s mind which reveal the impact of rejecting one’s humanity. The syntactically disjointed speech similarly exposes his inner turmoil, “Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am”, “What?”. Here, Shakespeare’s psychological analysis of human nature seems to suggest that humans cannot function properly when ignoring their conscience.  The dream echoes Elizabethan values of divine justice, revenge and providence since it reflects Margaret’s curse placed on Richard earlier in the play, “The worm of conscience be gnaw thy soul”. Pacino differs here, as he believes that Richard’s just karma is a result of his own mind as opposed to providentialism. All spiritual links are omitted, the dream sequence only including compressed, shifting images of Richard in a montage, demonstrating the psychological stress and disorder from fragmenting one’s conscience. In this scene, Richard also lays on his bed as a physicalisation of the sickness of his mind. A similar idea is used with the hand-held camera and riding-crop prop when Richard lashes out on his followers, conveying the shaky, psychological “suspicion he has for all those around him”. Ultimately, however, the consequences of this emotional and spiritual exploration are the same. Richard’s evilness leads to his defeat and death where “no one shall pity him” and “he does not have his own humanity” because “he’s lost it”. Both composers ultimately convey that no one can love their evilness, no one can suppress their own humanity, and no one can truly be a villain; “I am a villain. Yet I lie, I am not.”

Additionally, Shakespeare portrays a conscience which is attached to the dealings of God, not only in his divine authority, but through the societal structure of the Great Chain of Being he has created—which progresses from God to angelic beings to humans to animals to plants. Ultimately, he exacerbates this in the amount of poor or disadvantaged characters who are used to “kill the kids” because of their extreme absence of conscience. The murderers of Clarence are the only two characters to use prose in the play, to emphasise their common-place position in society, and their actions are expressed comedically—displaying deliberate ignorance—Murderer 1: “Have you forgotten thy reward?” Murderer 2: “Come, the bastards die.” In contrast, Pacino’s murderers display no such comedic nature. The levelled authority is portrayed in the low-angle shots of Clarence and their deliberate hidden movement secluded in shadows. They use explicitly serious demeanours in their discussion of conscience and also motion to their minds as proof of their individual agency. Again, ultimately however, the functions of both portrayals distance the audience from Richard despite Pacino’s context which values the “self-made man” and a society in which one can climb the corporate ladder to gain access to affluence. Social status and class is heavily emphasised in Clarence’s dream, and as such, later he is attached to the dealings of God-given conscience. Wealth in his dream is symbolised through pearls, gold, stones and jewels, “Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl, inestimable stones, unvalued jewels, All scattered in the bottom of the sea”, however, the bottom of the sea signifies his death. Wealth and fortune is the last thing he sees in this dream