Richard III - Elizabeth Quotes

Question 1

Grief

Answer 1

• emphasises R’s cruelty by losses
• ‘Why grow the branches when the root is gone?’
• ‘Ah, my pure princes! Ah, my tender babes!’
• ‘such gentle lambs / and throw them into the entrails of the wolf’, R as predator

Question 2

Perspicacious

Answer 2

• ‘Why, this it is when men are ruled by women’, R’s anxiety about women’s power
• ‘A man that loves not me nor none of you’, not fooled, vulnerable/precarious position but strength in perspicacity
• ‘She may, Lord Rivers, why, who knows not so?… She may… She may’, anaphora emphasises R’s contempt
• ‘thou whet’st a knife to kill thyself’, foreshadowing schemes, DI
• ‘the tiger hath seized the gentle hind’, violence and threat R poses, recognises true nature, savage animal metaphors (characterise R as villain)

Question 3

Curses - language

Answer 3

• power of grief, vengeance
• ‘teach me how to curse mine enemies’
• ‘thy woes will make them sharp, and pierce like mine’
• ‘help nothing else, but do they ease the heart’

Question 4

Powerful or powerless (women)?

Answer 4

• ‘relenting fool and shallow, changing woman’
• in this scene, very similar strategies to Anne, but works harder - E has more power or R’s power diminished as he is forced into his honest reason
• structurally similar but soliloquy is cut short, power diminished
• E apparently given in, though some power as she is only character who managed to get an honest reason out of him

Question 5

Turning wheel of fortune

Answer 5

• ‘Poor painted queen, vain flourish of my fortune’