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... content at wherever he is heading. Richards most incredible victory is a battle fought against the sorrow, anger and hatred of the beautiful widow Lady Anne. A victory, after which he celebrates by dancing through the morgue, singing Was there ever a woman in this humour won. Was there ever a woman in this humour wooed. He shouts in defiance, All the world to nothing!
Nothing can stand in his way any more he has achieved the unattainable. Richard goes to her while she is grieving in the morgue, cursing him for the death of her husband. With the dead body of Prince Edward beside them they have a battle of wits. Every time Richard says something to win her over, she replies by cursing or spiting at him. But little by little she begins to soften and finally when he offered to kill himself she agrees to take his ring. Here we get the impression that Anne doesnt really fall in love initially.
She might have just taken him up for the security it offers. Also the metallic and cold colours of the morgue do not seem to compliment what the actors were trying to portray and there is no music to drive the emotions, thus leaving everything soulless and businesslike. This adds the much-wanted credibility to a scene that is quite drastic. We get the feeling that what just happened was not a real love scene, instead a play put on by both of them to get what they wanted, except Lady Anne lost out. The one of only two characters who seems to have some influence over Richard is his right hand man James Tyrell. He takes on a much bigger role here than in the play.
When he is with Richard we know someone is about to meet with her or his fate. His ruthless efficiency attracts Richards fondness. But then in battle Richard himself kills him as his final act of cruelty. James death was the signal to Richards own downfall. He was the last of Richards cronies and now with no Buckingham or Tyrell he had lost much of his power. The Duchess of York, Richards mother has a stronger influence over her son.
He seems to always halt when conversing with her. He does not fight back; instead we see his face twist with hurt whenever the Duchess curses him. Our sympathy for him created when we see him being abused by his own mother, makes us oversee her role as a strong, practical, god hearted woman. Instead we are tempted to blame her for how her son turned out (there has to be a reason for his wickedness). Seeds of suspicion are planted into our minds about the treatment of Richard in his childhood. The other self-assertive female character is Queen Elizabeth.
She is an American, a foreigner, and an outsider to the family. Her alienation from the Yorks allows Richard to manipulate those differences into suspicions and shift the light away form himself. He incriminates Elizabeth as the cause of Clarence's ghastly end. Add this to the fact that Richard murders her brother and sons and her husband also dies of illness, she is probably the most unfortunate person in the film. But she surprises us by being strong for the sake of her surviving daughter and facing up to Richard with more than just blind hatred alone. She mocks him as he asks for the hand of her daughter and leaves him out manoeuvred and fooled.
All of this though leaves us wondering if her attachment to her husband and children were genuine. Earl Rivers, Elizabeth's brother, is a brash, handsome young American, portrayed with a great vigour for life. His friendliness and his naivety in the area of politics makes us feel attached to him. We cannot expect him to die because he is full of life and when he is killed we can sense the destruction of something innocent, overcome by the ugliness of death. Rivers is not the only one so innocent and harmless to be killed. Simple plain Clarence, the young princes and Lady Anne are all murdered or used for the advancement of evil.
But of all these characters it is Shakespeare's white knight, Richmond who comes across as being less than the sum of parts. His early appearance and his almost cowardly abandoning of his relatives when he flees to France add shadows of grey to his one-dimensional character presented in the original play. His obvious attempt to be a hero and that sinister smile at the end of the play all point to an ulterior motive. It was the final battle for the throne, symbolic of the conflict between good and evil, which caused certain critics to argue that this film was nothing more than a parody of Hollywood films.
If they had passed the judgement by viewing the war scene alone their comments would have been justified. First it was the villain trying to blast his way out of some trap and then the hero pursuing the villain up some flight of stairs to reach some great height before killing him. The battle scene does however reflect on Shakespeare's use of entertainment in combination with elegance and sophistication so that it would appeal to a diverse audience, made up of different classes with different traditions. It also highlights the aim of the film producers to bring Shakespeare into the popular culture. But of all these the most obvious link back to Shakespeare is the use of Elizabethan language. It utilised as a device to keep us reminded that the values of Elizabethans must be taken into account when we make judgment on the actions of characters.
We must identify the differences in our present social values to ones of our predecessors to accurately perceive the significance of the changes made to the original script. The films context is stretched across a time frame of four centuries, incorporating the values of western societies through that time. The consistencies become apparent as we make connections to the issues discussed in Shakespeare's Richard III, written four hundred years ago. I think we can confidently say that the film was quite successful in achieving its purpose of trying to relate the themes of Shakespeare into modern society.
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Research essay sample on Woman In This Humour Lady Anne Richard
