Indeed, Richard III has been read productively by early modern literary scholars through the lens of his body, who see in his distinctive shape a relation to fractured and turbulent English history, a monstrous political figure who usurps the throne, and a demonstration of Renaissance beliefs about the continuity between inner morality and outward physical forms. This history of using Richard's body as a framing device for production - and the question of how to dramatize this body - makes the play particularly interesting for both work in the Renaissance and disability studies. This ambiguity extends throughout the history of the play's production, so that Richard's form 'divides four hundred years of productions into two opposed camps: those who exaggerate his deformities in order to supply the play with an otherwise absent motivation and those who downplay Richard's disabilities as an archaic characterization device and focus instead on the rhetoric of intrigue' (Mitchell and Snyder 103).

While this language draws attention to Richard's bodily difference, the play ultimately remains ambiguous about his physical form, staging instead a frenzy of interpretive fervor about what Richard's body really means. Throughout the play, characters discuss and describe Richard's body in a number of ways: Richard describes himself as 'cheated of feature,' 'deformed,' and 'unfinished ' Anne and Elizabeth deride him as 'diffused infection of a man,' 'hedgehog,' 'bottled spider,' and 'foul bunch-backed toad,' terms which all link insult to anomalous and inhuman body. The play, which features a protagonist with a famously distinctive body, charts Richard's rise to power and his brief tenure as king. In William Shakespeare's play Richard III, the body of the king has always been at stake.

Richard iii full play