Quotes About Richard III

brain activity in a heartbeat. All of that says Richard. But the DNA in consort with the paper trail of a genealogy available only for royalty says this was him. Richard III is now the oldest person to be unequivocally identified in death.

A very bad murderer," I said. "Like Shakespeare's Second Murderer in that scene in King Richard III. The fellow that had certain dregs of conscience, but still wanted the money, and in the end didn't do the job at all because he couldn't make up his mind. Such murderers are very dangerous. They have to be removed.

When I read 'Paradise Lost,' or 'Richard III,' it is clear that Milton and Shakespeare took real pleasure and satisfaction from creating these epitomes of evil.

I've played almost every lead character from Henry VI to Othello. I'm dying to tackle Richard III sometime.

The 16th-century theatre witnessed the particularly English manifestation of 'the history play.' There can be no doubt that Shakespeare's presentations of 'Henry V' and 'Richard III' have been incalculably more influential than any more sober historical study.

I once came upon a definition of history as 'the process by which complex truths are transformed into simplified falsehoods'. That is particularly true in the case of Richard III, where the normal medieval proclivity for moralizing and partisanship was further complicated by deliberate distortion to serve Tudor political needs.

There seems to me to be something admirable, indeed noble, about the people arguing over Richard III. They're doers rather than naysayers, romantics rather than realists, people looking for meaning rather than numbness.

You can't get any more evil than Iago or Richard III. Those guys are bad.

The trap in Hamlet is he's the most passive of Shakespeare's characters. He's not a Richard III, not out there taking a lot of action. It's a lot of asides and soliloquies where he's wrapped in angst, and that's not a very interesting character.

'Richard III' is a really difficult play to film - it's involved, often obscure. I felt it absolutely necessary to do more simplification than I've ever done before.

Every schoolboy turned over the final page of Richard III with relief, because now at last the Wars of the Roses were over and they could get on to the Tudors, who were dull but easy to follow.

It occurred to me some years ago, that the picture of Richard the Third, as drawn by historians, was a character formed by prejudice and invention. I did not take Shakespeare's tragedy for a genuine representation, but I did take the story of that reign for a tragedy of imagination.

Life repeats Shakespearian themes more often than we think. Did Lady Macbeth, Richard III, and King Claudius exist only in the Middle Ages? Shylock wanted to cut a pound of flesh from the body of the merchant of Venice. Is that a fairy tale?

Richard III is not a monster. He is the natural outgrowth of monstrous and horrible times. He is the fitting termination of the rule of the House of York the exemplification of an old, divinely attested saying that they who take the sword shall perish by it.

Theater will cast in a more open way; Denzel Washington might play Richard III. Television and film don't really cast openly like that. The theater world has always been a leader in diversity.

Richard III was one of those plays that could repeal the law of diminishing returns; it could be enjoyed over and over again.

An interesting footnote to the centuries of accusations that have swirled around Richard III and the disappearance of his nephews took place in the United States in 1997. In an extraordinary mock trial, Richard III was brought up on charges of murdering his nephews. Presiding was a panel of three US Supreme Court judges. Cases for both prosecution and defence were duly presented. The judges returned a unanimous verdict of 'not guilty on all counts'.

There's an honourable tradition of British actors who've gone to Hollywood playing baddies. Part of that is because we grow up with Richard III and Macbeth - we're not afraid of our villains.

What a tribute this is to art; what a misfortune this is for history. (In reference to Shakespeare's 'Richard III')