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Role Of Power In Looking For Richard III

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“These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air… and, like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a wisp behind.”
– Looking for Richard

How has your study of Looking for Richard enhanced your understanding of the role of power in Richard III?

The role of power and its nature is essentially futile. We rise and we fall, we are melted into thin air, without leaving a wisp behind. Now that I have your attention, hello, and welcome to all you power hungry listeners. In today’s episode, were going to delve a little deeper into the role of power and what better way to do so than to explore how Al Pacino’s documentary drama Looking for Richard enhances a modern audience’s understanding of William Shakespeare’s historical tragedy Richard III. Through its …show more content…

Thus, the appropriation conveys the transcendent idea of the role and construction of power, and through the manipulation of form, enhances our understanding of the historical drama.

Shakespeare’s construction of King Richard III as manipulative and vice like acts as the agency fulfilling his desire and lust for power. He portrays Richard, the historically maligned figure, as the usurper, meddling with the role of power. The motivations behind Richard’s lust for power are revealed initially, in “And thus I clothe my naked villainy…And seem a saint when I most play the devil.” The metaphor conveys the extent of his duplicitous nature through the contrasting religious imagery and depicts the extreme lengths to achieve his goal of usurping the throne. Shakespeare manipulates his use of form, making it an “insubstantial direful pageant”. Metatheatre, allows for Richard to put on many facades to create an inauthentic image of himself that appeals to the values of the Elizabethan context. This is made evident as Richard is instructed by Buckingham to appeal to societies sense of religiosity, in “Intend some

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