Performing historical and political skills. The narrator and characters in More’s History of King Richard III

Maria Grazia Dongu

2020-01-01

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Abstract

More’s History of Richard III constructed the malicious persona of the Yorkist King and passed it on to later generations. In this article, the narrator’s techniques will be examined. In particular, the focus will be on the self-fashioning of a humanist historian, who accumulates testimonies, some discarded as unreliable, but still interwoven in his tale. In so doing, he gives a collective, sometimes contradictory interpretation of events. Moreover, mixing different modes of speech presentation, he ventriloquises the characters’ voices, using similar dilemmatic constructs to investigate a making decision process, and historical hypotheses. The villain in the History, Richard, is characterised by a peculiar despotic use of this strategy.