Richard III: Intertextual Conversations

• Intertextual conversations reveal resonant and dissonant perspectives by reframing and reimagining canonical texts.
• William Shakespeare's 1597 history play Richard III explores the morality of political power and the potential of language and performance to achieve goals, drawing from Holinshed's Chronicles.
• Richard is constructed as a self-conscious villain and Machiavellian performer in Shakespeare's Richard III.
• Al Pacino's postmodern docudrama employs pastiche and hybridity to reimagine Richard as an emotionally complex anti-hero.
• Pacino's portrayal of Richard reflects both his context as an actor and 20th Century American values like individualism.
• Postmodern textual conversation with Shakespeare's historical drama reveals the dialogic nature of Pacino's work.

Richard's Character

• Pacino's reimagining of Richard III reframes him as a psychologically complex anti-hero with ambition shaped by individualistic desire, not historical determinism.
• Shakespeare's Richard establishes himself as a self-aware performer who takes control of the narrative in the opening soliloquy.
• Richard declares “Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time...Therefore... I am determined to prove a villain”, showing his active choice of a villainous role.
• Shakespeare makes the audience complicit in Richard's machinations through direct address.
• Shakespeare superimposes Richard's deformity, tapping into Elizabethan superstitions where physical deformities were seen as divine manifestations with his behaviour.
• Pacino dresses in everyday clothing and films the opening soliloquy with a handheld camera.
• Pacino reimagines the scene through American Method Acting, focusing on Richard's emotional depth and hinting at psychological wounds and societal alienation.
• The ghost scene's repeated "Despair and die!" reveals self-determinism as an illusion.
• Shakespeare presents Richard's ambition as self-driven, and the ghosts embody divine judgment, reinforcing the play's deterministic values making his ambition futile.
• Pacino reimagines Richard as undone by his own unchecked ambition as a tragic anti-hero.
• Pacino shifts from divine retribution to paranoia by replacing ghostly dreams with fragmented flashbacks conveyed through rapid jump cuts.
• Dim lighting, shadow-heavy cinematography, and Method Acting reinforce Richard's psychological descent.
• Close-ups of Richard's distressed expressions and erratic body language highlight his torment.

Rhetorical Language

• Shakespeare exposes rhetorical language as a manipulative tool, whereas Pacino emphasises the power of performance.
• Shakespeare highlights the power of language through Richard's ability to manipulate Lady Anne, transforming her initial hatred into submission.
• Shakespeare crafts Richard's speech with rhetorical devices such as antithesis, oxymorons, wit, irony, and flattery to disarm and confuse.
• Pacino reimagines Richard's manipulative power through visual performance, using cinematic techniques to emphasise how performance alone can shape audience perception.
• Intimate close-up shots capture every nuance of Richard's facial expressions and body language.
• Richard openly reveals how his rhetorical manipulation allows him to control perception and shape his own narrative.
• These metatheatrical moments highlight Shakespeare's exploration of language as a performative tool to deceive characters within the play.
• Pacino relies on cinematic performance tools such as voice-over narration to shape audience perception, in contrast to Shakespeare's emphasis on rhetorical language.
• Pacino's commentary imposes a particular interpretation on Richard's motivations, not through manipulative language, but through Pacino's external voice as director and performer.

Conclusion

• Shakespeare promotes Tudor propaganda and deterministic moral order using performance of a Machiavellian Richard.
• Pacino's reinterpretation introduces modern values of individualism and psychological complexity, challenging traditional academic hegemony over Shakespearean literature.
• The reinterpretation emphasises the transformative power of performance in reimagining cultural narratives.
• All performance is haunted - never constant, but a continual re-enactment shaped by the lingering traces of history and cultural memory, according to Derrida's theory of hauntology.