Richard himself lays claim to occupy the central dramatic role, if not the moral pole position, conventionally offered to the titular character in tragedy. As with King Lear, or Coriolanus, or Macbeth, or Romeo and Juliet, it is Richard’s death that brings the play to a close. Shakespeare has cut his historical material into this particular shape: obviously, there’s lots more of the story still to come, since, unlike tragedy, history does not come to an end. As we saw when thinking about Richmond in Richard III, in the final scene of a tragedy there tends to be little investment in what is
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