SOURCE: Howlett, Kathy M. “Vivid Negativity: Richard Loncraine's Richard III.” In Framing Shakespeare on Film, pp. 128-48. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Howlett appraises director Richard Loncraine's film adaptation of Richard III and the problems of historical representation that it addresses.

Richard Loncraine's Richard III (1995) sets Shakespeare's play about a medieval tyrant's rise to power within the material trappings of a 1930s fascist England, a transformation that troubles some film critics, who call the film “a time-travel experiment gone wrong,” with “Fascist regalia” that “seems oddly beside the point.”¹ Even those critics who are impressed with the film's fascist spectacle remain skeptical that it is still Shakespeare. Richard Bowman, film critic for The American Spectator, praises the film's “consistent cleverness of its setting,” finding that “in some ways [it is] the best film adaptation of Shakespeare there has ever been.” Yet, paradoxically, he concludes that...