One major purpose of works of fiction, whether they be prose, poetry, or plays, is to transport their audience to another time, to another place, somewhere beyond where they sit or stand or lie. That, after all, is why there is a distinction between fiction and nonfiction. This purpose holds true even in the case of a historical play like Richard III, which is based on actual happenings. However, in seeming contrast to this purpose is the principle of Aristotle’s three unities, which is to “make a plot more plausible, more true-to-life, and thus to follow Aristotle’s concept of mimesis, i.e., the attempt to imitate or reflect life as authentically as possible” by making sure there is a sense of cohesiveness – thus, the three unities (Lethbridge). While strict adherence to these three guidelines may have worked for the Ancient Greeks, they are not necessarily what is best for modern works – or as modern as Shakespeare is given the context. This is seen in Richard III, in which Shakespeare disregards the Aristotelian unities of time and place while adhering thoroughly to the unity of action, and this particular application of the unities, rather than detracting from the play as a unified whole, only serves to strengthen the play’s themes and plotline.
While the three unities of time, place, and action are conventionally solely attributed to Aristotle, in actuality, Aristotle largely emphasized only the unity of action, providing mere suggestions as to time and place. The other two unities, in turn, were built upon by three Italian critics in the mid- to late-sixteenth century: Giraldi Cinthio, Vincenzo Maggi, and Lodovico Castelvetro (Frye 329). Between 1540 and 1545, Cinthio proposed limiting a drama to a single day, and in 1550,...
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Shakespeare's first tragedy has been a topic of discussion since the day it was written. Titus Andronicus "was staged on 24 January 1594 by the Earl of Sussex's Men at the Rose Theatre" (Welsh 1). Though this tidbit of information seems somewhat irrelevant to Titus, we must note that there are certain standards and practices established by a play from its first performance. It is also important to establish the general attributes that audiences attribute to Shakespearean performance.
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Richard, the main character of the Shakespeare’s play, Richard III is portrayed as socially destructive and politically over-ambitious. His destructive potential is depicted by the way he relates with the other protagonists in the play and also by what he confesses as his intentions.
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Shakespeare constructs King Richard III to perform his contextual agenda, or to perpetrate political propaganda in the light of a historical power struggle, mirroring the political concerns of his era through his adaptation and selection of source material. Shakespeare’s influences include Thomas More’s The History of King Richard the Third, both constructing a certain historical perspective of the play. The negative perspective of Richard III’s character is a perpetuation of established Tudor history, where Vergil constructed a history intermixed with Tudor history, and More’s connection to John Morton affected the villainous image of the tyrannous king. This negative image is accentuated through the antithesis of Richards treachery in juxtaposition of Richmond’s devotion, exemplified in the parallelism of ‘God and Saint George! Richmond and victory.’ The need to legitimize Elizabeth’s reign influenced Shakespeare’s portra...
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Martin Esslin, an established drama director, scholar, and critic, approaches his analysis of drama by drawing on his practical experience as a director of plays. Esslin implicitly assumes that drama is the most elite of the artistic genres when he directly declares the purpose of his book, which is to answer the question "why should those concerned with art resort to drama rather than any other form of communication?" Esslin then immediately poses another question that he seems to take as a prerequisite for the first question: "What is the underlying, basic nature of dramatic form and what is it that drama can express better than any other form of communication?"