The Scrivener and History in Richard III Essay -- Literary Analysis, S

Richard III challenges notions of how floor is bring to passd and presented. Shakespeares play depicts the ill-famed Richard not only at odds with the other qualitys, but too fighting for a different interpretation of history. Richard and Margaret function as deuce characters opposed to each other with regard to history Richard attempts to cover up the past as Margaret attempts to expose it. However, the creation and acceptance of history is largely predicated on more common figures. In particular the scrivener, a evidently small side character, becomes an integral figure who creates the documentation of history, cementing the pen indication as a rectitude. The scrivener, tasked with the duty to write the documents falsely indicting Hastings at Richards request, approaches the audience in Act III, scene 6 and laments his location of falsely creating a legal document construed as truth, and manifests the complicated truth of history. The scriveners position as a figure entrusted with written truth is observantly figured against both Richards approach to history through his language and the play as a wholea text figured with propagandistic interests with the Tudor line. The scriveners scene, with its focus of documented history, exposes Richards verbal tricks and the plays reliability as a historical document. While critics including Paige Martin Reynolds and Linda Charnes have identified both Richard and Margaret of Anjou as figures who engage with and distort history, lesser characters serve similar vital functions. Overall, Charnes and Reynolds nominate much to the conversation of history within the text and are essential to this particular reading, yet the level that the scrivener as a character works on contributes to... ...g to their favor, and in the creation of Hastings indictment, must create another device to place public opinion in the detention of the court (3. 6. 11). The public, nonetheless, knows that the bias is in place, illu strated by the scriveners head teachers to the audience. In the depiction of this figure, the scrivener calls out to the audience to recognize authorial retard of historical narratives. The question remains as to what the audience should make of this screw up of historical narratives. Should they assign a Derridan lack of truth to the entire trial by ordeal? Should they posit a historical meaning outside of the context of Richard III, relying altogether on finite historical texts the scrivener brings into question? What remains to be addressed here is the question of meaning with characters that both create and question the very nature of truth in history and drama.