Intertextual Contexts In Al Pacino's Play King Richard III

Great Essays
By looking at the way composers represent the intertextual connections between texts, audiences are provided with heightened understanding of humanity’s changing contexts in shaping the values and societal paradigms that transcend in time. Within William Shakespeare’s tragedy “King Richard III” (1591), Shakespeare’s depiction of the Machiavellian political endeavour regarding Richard’s personal ambition in the pursuit of authority as a product of his deformed vessel of his corporeality, reflects upon the prevalent deterministic worldview during Elizabethan era. Simultaneously, in the docudrama “Looking For Richard”, Al Pacino enhances the detriments of the human frailty and intersection deception evinced through the mastery of language and …show more content…
Pacino’s ambition to “communicate a Shakespeare that is how we think and how we feel today” leads him to orchestrate his interpretation of Richard’s identity and, in process, manipulate his own identity to present this adaptation to his audience. Pacino revaluates Richard’s exaggerated deformity as not a consequence of opposing the divine order but rather a ‘metaphorical representation of the inner corruption of his mind’. Through the cinema verite of Richard in black attire, shadows and limping, the dramatic characterisation reveals the pernicious state of his mind. Pacino uses enigmatic tone of repetitive voice, “an amorous looking glass cheated of feature by deformed…deformed…deformed” to reveal Richard’ internally fragmented self accompanied with eclectic editing style. As the Elizabethan tyrant is made more relevant to the modern audience, it reveals the audience’s freedom to conclude the guilty conscience, rather than presuming punishments lead to a devaluation of Richard’s authentic power. Pacino highlights this by exaggerating Richard’s “deformity in order to bring forth dramatically the corruption of his mind”. While both texts elucidate the dynamic yet universal significance of power in different eras, Pacino’s …show more content…
Lady Margaret aptly compares Richard to “bottled spider” with a “deadly web” as Richard begins transition from deformed royalty in the shadows to man of considerable cunning and beguilement in greed towards political gain. Superficially, Richard assures to Clarence from jail, “Well, your imprisonment shall not be long;/I will deliver or else lie for you”, where the ambiguity of the deceptive language acts as a mechanism to emphasise Richard’s duplicitous nature. He masters the concept of double entendre as Richard essentially means he will lie and manipulate in order to eliminate his obstacle. Shakespeare’s use of anaphora in Richard’s boastful charade, “was ever in this humour wooed? Was ever in this humor won?” reveals the aptitude at which Richard exercised language and concealed truth for triumph against the odds of “all the world to nothing”. Richard feigns gentleness and artfully praises her beauty, evident in anaphora when he soulfully confesses, “your beauty was the cause of that effect, your beauty did haunt me in my sleep”, where language hyperbolically projects Anne’s beauty as a consequence of Richard’s rhetorical prowess. Furthermore the use of pun in “thine eyes, sweet lady, have infected mine”, demonstrates the tone of mockery used in Richard attempts to woo Anne. The juxtaposition between Anne’s

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