Mod A Comparative Essay – Shakespeare’s (King Richard III) & Al Pacino’s (Looking for Richard)

Resource Description

Comparative essay on Shakespeare’s King Richard III’ & Al Pacino’s ‘Looking for Richard’ Focus on the ‘Wooing’ Scene and women in the texts Separate paragraphs for each text as part of conversation instead of being interwoven.

Module A: Textual Languages

Over centuries society and culture changes. As a result, we lose touch with past contexts and so texts, such as William Shakespeare’s historical tragedy King Richard III, seem irrelevant and inaccessible to contemporary audiences. Al Pacino’s reframing of this text in his 1996 docudrama, Looking for Richard, creates a cultural conversation that exposes the common and disparate values, assumptions and perspectives between the two contexts. As LFR reimagines KRIII for a new generation no longer dominated by theocentric ideology, it brings KRIII to life by exploring motivations, the nature of evil, power of language, and gender. The contrasting textual forms reveal resonances and dissonances, and one of the ways in which they align and collide is in their representation of women, particularly in the characters of Lady Anne, Queen Elizabeth and Margaret. It is this ‘conversation’ that reveals the ongoing value of Shakespeare not only for Pacino’s audience but for our own generation as the #MeToo Movement has made this too clear. Textual conversations reinvigorate texts, breathing new life into them for new generations.