Richard III - Act 1 Quotes Flashcards
Yorkist fortunes have been transformed from a…
‘winter of discontent’ to ‘summer’
Richard is unhappy
‘This weak piping time of peace’
Break of iambic metre emphasises Richard’s self-obsession
‘But I…I…I…’
Richard feels bitter and excluded
‘But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks.’
Richard has established his intention
‘I am determined to prove a villain’
Richard is the solicitous brother to Clarence
‘This deep disgrace in brotherhood touches me deeper than you can imagine’
Richard blames Clarence’s imprisonment on Queen Elizabeth
‘Why, this is it, when men are ruled by women’
Richard’s misogyny
‘mighty gossips’
Bitterness towards Elizabeth’s position of power
‘We are the Queen’s abjects and must obey’
Richard sympathises with Hastings over the power that the Woodeville family in court
‘More pity that eagles should be mewed, when kites and buzzards play at liberty
Richard dismisses his brother as….
‘Simple, plain Clarence’
Richard tells the audience that this is…
‘Not so much love as for another secret close intent’
Richard emphasises that he has set himself a huge challenge through the rhetorical question
‘What though I killed her husband and her father?’
Earthy style of language
‘Leave the world for me to bustle in’
Anne grieving for her father-in-law
‘poor key-cold figure of a holy king’
Anne grieving for the demise of the House of Lancaster
‘pale ashes of the house of Lancaster’
Anne blaming Richard for the death of Henry VI and Prince Edward
‘O cursed be the hand that made these holes; Cursed the heart that had the heart to do it; Cursed the blood that let this blood from hence’
Richard threatening Anne
‘stay … set down … I command’
Anne’s long speech of insults towards Richard
‘foul lump … lump of foul deformity … inhuman and unnatural’
Richard’s use of tropes of Petrarchan courtly lover
‘it is my day, my life’
Richard leaving the audience under no allusion that he is courting Anne for her own selfish ends
‘i’ll have her but i’ll not keep her long’
Elizabeth is shown to be fully aware of how precarious her position will be after Edward’s death
‘the loss of a lord includes all harms’
Reflection of Richard as protector
‘Richard Gloucester, a man that loves not me, nor none of you’
Elizabeth is presented as more astute than her sons and brother
‘i fear our happiness is at the height’
Buckingham and Stanley give news of King Edward’s desire to make peace between the rival factions before his death
‘he desires to make atonement between the Duke of Gloucester and your brothers and between them and my Lord Chamberlain’
Richard sees Elizabeth and her family as having undeserved power and influence
‘I was a packhorse in his great affairs … to royalise his blood, i spent mine own. In all which time, you and your husband Greg were factious in the house of Lancaster’
Richard congratulated himself in a soliloquy
‘the mischiefs that i set abroach’
Richard has an irreverent attitude towards religion
‘and thus i clothe my naked villainy with odd old ends, stol’n forth of Holy Writ’
Clarence’s dream foreshadowing his own death at the hands of Richard
‘methought that Gloucester stumbled, and in falling struck me overboard’
Clarence feels remorse for his involvement in the deaths of the wars of the roses
‘i have done these things that now give evidence against my soul’
Clarence understands Richard is behind his murder
‘it cannot be, for he bewent my fortune and hugged me in his arms, and swore with sobs that he would labour my delivery’
