This indicative encounter between Richard and Margaret therefore takes on something of a meta-theatrical quality about the play itself as a version of history, and a contested one. Tudor historians since Sir Thomas More, writing in the reign of Richmond’s son, Henry VIII, had worked to demonize Richard III – and Shakespeare’s Richard embraces this vision enthusiastically: ‘I am determinèd to prove a villain,’ he declares in his opening soliloquy (1.1.30). The line is double-edged: ‘determinèd’ has the dual meaning both of human agency, and of some sort of cosmic direction.
