Richard the Iii

The values and concerns central to both composers are embedded within each text and are portrayed both directly and indirectly through the conventions of each textual form. Both composers adopt forms popular within their contemporary context in order to explore contextual theme of an outcast but a gifted individual’s power to persuade, whether that is through language or film.   Textual form and context affects any interpretation that we have of the text despite what we are directly presented with. Although both texts utilise different techniques, both Shakespeare’s Richard the III (henceforth R3) and Pacino’s Looking for Richard (henceforth LFR), allow the responder to recognise that the audience is complicit in a collaborative process of making meaning.
Both composers had to appeal to the mass audience of the time to portray both an appealing story and their concerns. Plays were the main form of entertainment for Shakespeare’s context; however Shakespeare’s concerns were bound by the rigidity of the Elizabethan world view inherited from the Middle Ages in the hitherto unquestioned paradigm of the Great chain of being. Shakespeare challenges this paradigm by setting it against the emerging paradigm of humanism through the personified figure of Richard. This notion is highlighted in act I during the opening soliloquy as Richard begins to build and self-determine his character, so that the audience learns that he is an actor in both senses of the word: he feigns the social forms necessary for his acceptance, of contrary to the feudalist model, he act independently of the will of God, “determining” himself “to be a villain”. He also acts as a concerned brother for Clarence in Act 1, scene 1 “Well your imprisonment shall not be long, I will deliver you.”However his punning use of the term “deliver” signalling that he will deliver Clarence to God- i.e. kill him and his overt aside to the audience, confiding with us that “Clarence hath not long to live” creates a...