Richard III (Vol. 39) | Maurice Hunt (essay date 1997)
Maurice Hunt (essay date 1997)
SOURCE: "Shakespeare's King Richard III and the Problematics of Tudor Bastardy," in Papers on Language & Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature, Vol. 33, No. 2, Spring, 1997, pp. 115-41.
[In the following essay, Hunt suggests that Shakespeare used Richard HI to support the Tudor monarchy by showing that a physical bastard like Richmond chosen by God makes a better king than a moral bastard like Richard III]
Granted Queen Elizabeth's touchiness concerning the subject of royal bastardy, Shakespeare ran a risk in King Richard III by focusing questions of bastardy in such a way that they invite comparison with problematical details of bastardy in the Tudor succession. The queen's life-long association with bastardy makes Shakespeare's emphasis surprising.1 Analysis of Tudor bastardy reveals the emergence of a paradigm of illegitimate...
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