Directing Richard III

Shakespeares King Richard the Third deals with the mind of corruption by ambition. The head for the hills is designed to depict the tragic and rapid downf any of an evil hustler who murders, lies, and deceives in order to raise his lust for power. Due to the fact that Elizabethan drama moves at a decidedly slower place than or so modern stories, any modern director of King Richard the Third, who wanted to rule the interest of contemporary audiences might choose to trim or thus far eliminate some of the eagle-eyed monologues that are a part of the maestro play.A good example of where a monologue might be thin out is the opening monologue of the play, which is both rhetorically sublime and deservedly famous. In the opening monologue, Richard, who is still the Duke of Gloster, and not yet King, delivers a reparationing, expository monologue to the audience where he reveals the deep-seated motives for the terrible crimes he will currently commit. After lamenting peace and pro claiming that he is not a lover, Richard says And therefore, since I cannot conjure a lover/ To entertain these fair well-spoken old age/ I am determined to prove a villain/ And scorn the idle pleasures of these days. (Richard III, 1-1)However, for a modern audience, this exposition is completely unnecessary and, in fact, the suspense of the play would wait to build in an even more than starling fashion if Richard did not so overtly express his motives and the audience was do to determine the motives as best they could for themselves as the play develops. The following facet between Richard and Anne, whiz of the most intense and moving scenes in all of literature, in my opinion, forwards complete of Richards essentially sociopathic personality and delivers enough information concerning his motives to power as the opening scene.Due to the erotic element of the Richard and Anne scene, the extirpation of the opening monologue would foster a very powerful understanding of acce leration and suspense. Another scene which might be beneficial to compress would be the scene between Richard and Queen Elizabeth here Richard admits to having killed her sons. This scene mirrors the currently scene between Richard and Anne and is meant to reveal Richard as being as manipulative and persuasive as the devil himself.However, I feel that the scene is sanely redundant and, again, the information about Richard and aspects of his character development which are underlying to this scene are expressed elsewhere, most clearly in those scenes which seem to intimate that Richard is if not the devil literally in league with the devil. To further accelerate the plot and to further heighten suspense, these subtle references to swarthy-magic, devils, and the black humanistic discipline could be magnified.These elements are part of Shakespeares original play, but they were originally created with a feeling for the sensibilities of an Elizabethan audience. For a modern audi ence the elements of deviltry and black magic would have to be exaggerated. One way to do this would be to literally include obvious elements of the supernatural ghosts, demons, and perhaps even succubi and phantoms who haunt Richard and who inhabit his macabre England.Such a portrayal would also forward the plays theme of raging, damning ambition by demonstrating how a single persons dark-vision could unleash terrible, in fact, supernatural power over an entire nation. In cases of the cult-of-personality, such a dynamic is present even if it is not literally based in the supernatural. The supernatural, however, offers a great way to symbolize the power of demagogues and ambitious leading that make stark and dramatic statements possible. All in all, if I were directing King Richard the Third I would change very little from Shakespeares original play.The reason that I would choose to keep the play as shoemakers last to the original as possible is because I feel the play is already a single, harmonious whole which can be rightly considered one of the greatest tragedies in the English language. I am willing to knuckle under that modern audiences may need a swifter-moving plot and a fewer embellishments like obvious black magic and devils, but in the long run, Shakespeares original vision and his original language would still probably prove to be very compelling, memorable, and cathartic for any audience.