And experienced while looking at his images;Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay But now two mirrors of his princely appearance Are shattered to pieces by malignant death, And to comfort me I have but one false glass That grieves me when I see my shame in him. This is how the Duchess of York laments the birth of her own son, Richard III, perhaps Shakespeare's most evil creation. Machiavellian who likes to govern with fear and force, his evil is only compensated by his lively and cunning mind. As his talents drive others to self-destruction, the audience too succumbs to Richard's wit and selfishness until finally his cruelty appears repugnant and destructive. Yet Shakespeare provides a counterpoint, a striking contrast, to Richard's wickedness. The women of Richard III function as voices of protest and morality. They often see through Richard's intrigues and predict the dire consequences of his actions. Shakespeare uses women to emphasize moral truths and emphasize the general principles of the Elizabethan worldview of “moral and political order” (Tillyard 108). While Shakespeare's Richard III pursues his malevolent intentions by brandishing a disarming wit and a bloody, conscienceless sword, the women in the play derive their power from heartfelt verbal poison and raw, unbridled feeling. Lady Anne, the Duchess of York, Margaret and Elizabeth, subverted in their roles as queens, mothers and wives, each contribute to the advancement of Shakespeare's moral themes in several ways---through their roles as victims expressed in their intense lamentations, in their cries for vengeance through divine punishment, and in “alluding to a higher moral order that transcends the actions of men” (Tillyard 107). In each of these ways, the wives of Richard III help to illustrate how destruction occurs when order, both political and moral, is violated, either by the weakness of a reigning king or by the machinations of those who provoke the civil war by wanting to take the place of the king. Such instability and chaos devastate the individual, the family and the nation, leading to moral decadence, betrayal, anarchy and a profound level of human suffering. “The world that Shakespeare depicts in Richard III is a man’s world” (Asimov 313). Women are presented as secondary characters who only function to cry, complain, or bury the dead. Richard himself views women as tools, as shown in his various asides to the audience when announcing his plots, in which the marriage of Anne or Elizabeth are only moves in his elaborate games of intrigue and of power. Shakespeare further emphasizes the inferior role of women as Richard “invariably attributes his own guilt along sexual lines, so that women are the root of his evil” (Tillyard 111). He tells his doomed brother Clarence that "this is how men are ruled by women", implying that it was Queen Elizabeth who "tempted" her husband into the "hard extremity" of carrying out his own brother, thus deflecting the blame from himself. the real author of the conspiracy. “Quite simply, Clarence,” Richard laughed. I love you so much that I will soon send your soul to heaven. about people whose agony of body and mind can be intensely real, but also shows that the state of civil unrest, disorder and betrayal that has prevailed since the start of the Wars of the Roses leaves no one spared by thesuffering. Anne, the first woman we are introduced to, is struck by grief over the deaths of her husband Edward and her father, King Henry VI, both killed by the hand of Richard "Poor cold face of a holy king, / Pale ashes of Lancaster’s house,” she cries. "May I invoke thy ghost / To hear the lamentations of poor Anne." In describing this true sorrow, Shakespeare gives the audience a first glimpse of the despair provoked by the work of his hero-villain. In the At the same time, the "attribution of guilt" is even more obvious When Anne accuses him of the bloody murders of her relatives, Richard first rushes to find a surrogate mother, blaming Edward IV and Margaret) before falling. on a much more effective line, accusing Anne of being the main “cause” of the deaths (Tillyard 111 . / Your beauty that haunted me in my sleep! / To undertake the death of the whole world, / So that I may live an hour in your sweet bosom. Shakespeare expands the scope of grief in the second scene of Act II, in which Elizabeth and the Duchess lament and list similar losses of loved ones. The Duchess cries in agony: “Never has a mother suffered such a dear loss. / Alas! I am the mother of these sorrows! / ... Alas! You three upon me, triple afflicted, / Shed all your tears! I am your nurse of sorrow, / and I will pamper him with lamentations. The Duchess here laments that Richard, her “false glass” of comfort, “has torn my two crutches from my weak hands,” the crutches being her sons Clarence and Edward. She calls upon the former Queen Margaret, who lost her husband and son, Queen Elizabeth who lost her husband and Clarence's orphaned children, to pour out their collective grief on her, for she is the mother of the demon. which caused this avalanche of distress. Act IV contains some of the play's most poignant lines as Elizabeth looks at the Tower, suspecting that she may never see her imprisoned sons again. "Ah my God, poor princes! / If yet your sweet souls fly in the air, hover around me with your aerial wings / And hear your mother's lamentations. " It is at this moment, while Richard condemns to death the young and innocent princes, that the public finally finds Richard's cruelty repugnant and thus turns its sympathy towards the victims of his wickedness. In the same scene, the Duchess sums up the state of despair in which all women find themselves when she says: "I go to my grave, where peace and rest lie with me! / I have seen eighty years of sorrow, and every hour joy ravaged by a week of adolescence Although the Duchess and the former Queen Margaret can be characterized as monotonous complaints, it is emphasized that this individual devastation is the result of the disaster that unfolded. is brought down on the nation as a whole Everyone is corrupt – even the women are not entirely innocent in the struggle between the warring houses By passively accepting, as in Anne's acceptance of Richard's proposal, the. Margaret's very active role as a soldier on the battlefield, the blood and barbarity of the Civil War reduced everyone, but especially women, to helpless creatures who can only recite psalms of sorrow, guilt and sorrow Finally, in the fourth scene of Act IV, “the wailing queens” Margaret, the Duchess and Elizabeth unite in their mourning. Once again, Shakespeare uses women to emphasize the sorry state of the nation. Elizabeth asks Margaret to teach her to swear, the curse being the only outlet for these women, powerful in title but powerless in reality, unable to stem the tide of sorrow and suffering fromdisorder of the times generated. "Do not sleep the nights and fast the days / Compare dead happiness with living unhappiness... / Bet that your loss aggravates the bad cause; / Spinning this will teach you to curse", Margaret responds to the call of Elizabeth. As the women lament their loss, the audience once again realizes how destructive Richard's vengeful crimes against the world have been. Shakespeare uses their grief to ultimately present Richard as the villain he is. When it comes to how women are used as scapegoats and bargaining chips, young women have received the most attention (Succio 51). However, when we consider how Richard uses women as figures, three older women --- Queen Elizabeth, Margaret and the Duchess of York --- reluctantly come to the fore. All of these women suffer, on some level, from a loss of definition on Richard's part. “Not only does Richard subvert the role of queen, but he also undermines the roles of mother and wife” (Tillyard 117). For example, while Edward's death deprived Elizabeth of a husband, it deprived the Duchess of York of a son. Her "stock" now two-thirds depleted, the Duchess turns to Elizabeth commenting that unlike her, "You are a widow, yet you are a mother / And you have left the comfort of your children. Addressing the still current claim of 'Elizabeth to motherhood, the duchess seems to abjure hers, it is as if she no longer wants to assume the title of mother if Richard is the son who grants her this right, it is accepting responsibility for "all these sorrows"; , of the losses suffered by Elizabeth and by Clarence's children It is not enough for a mother to abandon her claim to the title of mother; this process is underway. the “Protector” refuses to grant Elizabeth her status as a mother, refusing to admit her to the Tower to see her children Elizabeth cries out in protest: “Has he put any. limits between their love and me / I am their mother; who will stop me? » Yet after the deaths of young Edward and Richard, Elizabeth is forced to turn around in order to protect her remaining child. Because of Richard's manipulations, "a mother's name bodes ill for children"; therefore, she must deny her title as mother in order to express her true identity as a mother who cares about the well-being of her children. She sends her son Dorset to France --- "O Dorset, do not speak to me, go away!" -and expresses his desire to deny the legitimacy of young Elizabeth's birth to save her marriage to Richard "I will corrupt her ways, stain her beauty, / Slander me as false to Edward's bed.../ J 'I'll admit she wasn't Edward's daughter.' It is a mother's love for her daughter that prompts Elizabeth's offer; she willingly renounces her titles as legitimate wife and mother (Tillyard 118). In these examples, Richard's general line is such that it encourages women to abandon traditional titles, to disidentify. The women's resistance and passivity in the face of this desire exposes them to the audience as undeserving victims of Richard's seemingly endless wickedness. When women are not grieving, they often express their hatred. Expressions of Margaret's thirst for vengeance are her curses, and she inflicts them liberally on all those who have contributed to her personal losses: while also evoking the mechanical aspect of justice when she prophesies their destruction. “Can curses pierce the clouds and enter heaven? she cries. “Well, yield, you annoying clouds, to my quick curses.” After predicting thefate of all the “lords, ladies, queens, princes and kings” who, according to her, perpetrated her downfall, she turns her anger on Richard (Succio42). "On you, the disturber of the peace of the poor world! / The worm of conscience still gnaws at your soul! / Your friends suspect traitors as long as you live, / And take deep traitors for your dearest friends! / Not of sleep close this mortal eye of you, / Unless it is during a tormenting dream Here the audience glimpses for the first time the extent of the destruction that the vengeful hatred will bring The already damned former queen will watch with. only tempered satisfaction as all his curses come true with surprising clarity Each of the women joins Margaret in cursing Richard, the most concentrated representation of the evil and disease that permeates the land, but it is interesting to note at. how often the curse turns on the cursed one. Anne recognizes this, thus admitting her own duplicity in the disorder that everyone finds. In front of the corpse of her murdered father-in-law, she condemns herself without knowing it. “If he ever have a wife, let her be made / More unhappy by his death / Than I am by my young lord and you!” Of course, as she succumbs to Richard's softening words and accepts his marriage proposal, the curse she cast falls upon her. "In such a short time my wife's ear / Became grossly captive to her honeyed words / And proved to be the subject of my own soul's curse." Richard loses all sympathy or support when his own mother curses herself for hatching a "cockatrice" whose "unaverted eye is murderous." Thus, Shakespeare demonstrates once again that even for the perpetrator of the crime, revenge is ultimately destructive by its very nature. This theme is constantly apparent, as at the end of the play the description "living --- but neither mother, nor wife, nor queen of England" applies to Margaret, Elizabeth, and the Duchess. All scenes of female lamentation are peppered with curses, “calling for justice when all are guilty” (Succio 45). Shakespeare uses women to illustrate how England itself is under the curse of “civil dissensions and moral evils” (Tillyard 113). The resounding curses and cries for justice directly reflect the magnitude of the quagmire of blood, betrayal and disorder, and the urgency with which lawful order must be restored. But does vengeance belong to man or to God? Shakespeare uses the tension created by Margaret's curses and cries for personal vengeance to answer this question in the person of Richmond. Throughout the play, a “moral order which transcends the actions of men” is eluded but is not fully expressed until the last act. It is to this moral order, to this “immutable form of divine justice”, that all women appeal when they cry to heaven for their wrongs to be repaired, particularly poignant in the scene of the “crying queens” (Tillyard , 113). In this scene, Margaret remarks to Elizabeth how temporal life is: “To a happy wife, a very afflicted widow; / For a joyful mother, one who cries his name; .../ Thus the course of justice has twisted / And left you only a prey of time. " However, although Margaret uses this allusion to temporality to emphasize the maxim "what goes around comes around", she confuses the fulfillment of one's wishes with divine justice. “Her curses come true because they should have, not because she wants them to” (Succio 45). Like other women, she tends to be morally myopic in her calls for justice, unable or unwilling to recognize her own guilt. Shakespeare makes Margaret, 1971.