The murderous little man with the hunchback? Oh, he’s just the title character, King Richard III of England. The one to keep your eye on is the young nobleman called Richmond. Though he only shows up for the first time in act five, he’s pretty much the point of Richard III—or so he was for Shakespeare and his audience—because he’s going to become King Henry VII by killing Richard at Bosworth Field. Then he’s going to marry Elizabeth of York, uniting the houses of York and Lancaster, which will effectively end the Wars of the Roses and establish the Tudor dynasty. And you know who was a Tudor, don’t you? Henry VII’s granddaughter, the reigning monarch at the time Richard III was written, Elizabeth I.
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No surprise, then, that the queen’s grandpa is depicted as a pious, brave, loving, and intelligent young man, while Richard is the bad seed whose own mother calls him a toad and tells him, “Thou cam’st on earth to make the earth my hell.” What is surprising under the circumstances is how utterly mesmerizing the toad can be, even in this Chicago Shakespeare Theater production, which is compromised by a significant miscalculation.
But the punch line comes in the next pentameter: “I’ll have her,” Richard confides, “but I will not keep her long.” Sure enough, Lady Anne eventually joins Richard’s impressive pile of royal victims on the bier. This is no namby-pamby Macbeth, who only really gives himself over to evil when it dawns on him that he’s “stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.” Richard jumps in and splashes around from the start.
