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of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."

Shakespeare- "Now is the winter of our discontent /Made glorious summer by this sun of York; /And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house/ In the deep bosom of the ocean buried. /Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;/ Our bruised arms hung up for monuments; /Our stern alarums chang'd to merry meetings,/ Our dreadful marches to delightful measures. /Grim visag'd war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front, /And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds /To fright the souls of fearful adversaries, /He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber/ To the lascivious pleasing of a lute."

It was Dickens' 'Tale of Two Cities' that lead me toward a deeper reflection on the role dualism plays in the plot of Richard the III. I believe Shakespeare tells a tale of split nature inside the larger dualism of a split monarchy. At the start we see Richard the dissembler with one face for the crowd, and another countenance presented to his deceived. If we have followed Shakespeare's histories, we also see that there is a split in the royal lineage, and while the house of Lancanster and the house of York both claim rightful heirs to the throne and demonize the other house, their nature and their methods of securing influence are so similar that they seem to mirror each other. This impression is greatly reinforced by the similarity of names. In the English tradition, you see a great many Annes, Elizabeths, Richards and Henries popping up. There are so many Edwards in Shakespeare's fictional telling of King Richard, that it is hard to tell, from a simple reading of the play, which one is which. I notice that though the device of noble titles and surnames might have diminished the confusion in his plays, Shakespeare makes no overt effort in his writing to distinguish them from eachother. Now, in the presentation of the play this confusion would be greatly diminished by the appearance of actors, but you get the sense in reading through that Shakespeare's Edward after Edward after Edward betrays, in the author's mind at least, a lack of discrimination between the ruthless, warring nobility of 'both their houses'. I can only wonder if this was true of Shakespeare's outlook.

The audience enjoys a first hand observation of the split in Richard's psyche. This dualism is all the more fascinating and horrific because its twists and turns are seen so clearly by the people

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