Deception in Shakespeare's Plays | Russ McDonald (essay date 1989)
Russ McDonald (essay date 1989)
SOURCE: "Richard III and the Tropes of Treachery," in Philological Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 4, Fall, 1989, pp. 465-80.
[In the essay that follows, McDonald demonstrates that the discourse in Richard III is laden with deceptive elements, particularly puns or other rhetorical structures, which drastically change the meaning of the language used.]
One of the requirements of the modern critical essay being an appeal to Continental authority, I begin by citing the Princess of France's response to her royal suitor in the last act of Henry V: "O bon Dieu, les langues des hommes sont pleines de tromperies. " Shakespeare's artistic development is accompanied and fostered by an enlarging sense of the dangers of language, and Richard III registers more clearly than any other early play—even more than Love's Labor's Lost, the nearest rival—its author's awakening to the duplicity of...
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