Richard of Gloucester, Richard III, is in fact a new kind of character for Shakespeare, a character with a complex, fully developed, and internally contradictory “personality”—in short, a character conceived in terms recognizable from the standpoint of modern psychology. This, of course, is one reason Freud found him fascinating. Richard is also “modern,” or at least appealingly “early modern,” in his interest in, and use of, the language of economics, profit and loss, and wager.
