Richard III (Vol. 39) | Richard P. Wheeler (essay date 1971-72)
Richard P. Wheeler (essay date 1971-72)
SOURCE: "History, Character and Conscience in Richard III" in Comparative Drama, Vol. V, No. 4, Winter 1971-72, pp. 301-21.
[In the following essay, Wheeler discusses how this play dramatizes, through the life of King Richard III, two divergent views of history: that events are determined by divine will, and that events are determined by human will but are repeated in cyclical patterns.]
Criticism of Shakespeare's second tetralogy of English history plays has moved away from the attempt to correlate precisely the history dramatized in these plays with that presented by official Tudor apologists. C. L. Barber's essay on the Henry IV plays,1 for instance, finds in them a much more profound understanding of historical rhythms and of human involvement in the dynamics of power than E. M. W. Tillyard could establish by interpreting Shakespeare through concepts expressed in the...
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