Mr. Henry Irving as King Richard III (1878) | Alfred Bryan / Public Domain
When I bought my ticket for this summer’s production of Shakespeare’s Richard III at the Globe Theater in London, I chose a seat under cover of the rafters rather than a place standing directly in front of the stage—a distinction designed to echo the several ways that Elizabethans could experience live performance. It was a warmish June day, and I wanted to be out of the heat. Little did I know that, despite not being down on the floor among the plebes, I’d end up being swept into the overexcited crowd’s embrace of the tyrant—a veritable plebiscite for the king.
Richard III was written in the 1590s, some one hundred years after the death of the English monarch of the same name. Shakespeare’s play is a damning story of a charismatic, villainous Duke of Gloucester who murders everyone in sight in order to seize the throne, including his two young nephews—princes whom he imprisoned in the Tower of London shortly after assassinating their father and their uncle, his brothers. Among Shakespeare’s villains, Richard III stands out for his wit, ruthlessness, and crippled body: “I, that am rudely stamped … Deformed, unfinished,” he declares in his opening monologue.
This latest Globe production was directed by Michelle Terry, who also took the lead role alongside a largely female cast. Terry is not herself physically disabled (nor is Richard, as she performs him). Her decision to take the part inspired Britain’s Disabled Artists Alliance to issue an open letter to the Globe, protesting the choice and arguing that “the production cannot be successfully performed with a non-physically disabled character at the helm.”
Shakespeare’s script is the ultimate “crip” text, the letter argues, in that Richard “is one of the first characters who experiences and documents the socialised effect of an attitudinally disabling society. How those attitudes embitter us, break us; ruin our integrity and character.” In the statement’s interpretation, the play transforms the negative associations of “cripple” into a social good by exposing ableism and the right-wing movements associated with it. Just as disability activists reclaimed the word crip (from “cripple”) as both a state of being and a worldview, so Richard might be reclaimed as a representative of crip experience.
In claiming that Richard’s disability is “integral to all corners of the script,” the alliance proposes that the link between the monarch’s tyrannical behavior and his disabled body is so tight that the absence of attention to his so-called deformity would wreak havoc on the structure of the play. Yet this production survives without it. In fact, Richard’s narcissism, his poisonous self-love, and his Machiavellian lust for power are unbridled. He is, in short, an autocrat extraordinaire whose tyranny does not depend upon his embodiment.
But, like ableism, tyranny often operates through sleights of hand.
In 2024, that sleight involves an analogy between Richard III’s quest for power and Donald Trump’s political ambitions. References to Trump are mischievously sprinkled throughout. “When you’re famous,” says Richard, “they let you do anything,” echoing Trump’s notorious Access Hollywood comment. And at least one line from the 1590s manuscript is stunning for the way it resonates in the current antechamber of fascism: “Alack, I love myself.”
Richard, of course, is extremely charismatic. He is both irreverent and linguistically agile. His wordcraft is part of his statecraft: the toolkit of populism, the mechanism of his seduction, what invites us to see—and to love—him as he loves himself.
Notably, it is Richard’s physicality that most evokes contemporary autocrats in this production. He wears a blond wig à la Boris Johnson and a body suit reminiscent of the bare-chested posturing of Vladimir Putin. And in one of the most infectious scenes, when Richard’s ascent looks assured, he and courtiers and citizens dance triumphantly, and menacingly, clad in red caps that read “R III” but shout “MAGA.”
Critics are divided on whether this is brilliant satire or high-jinks worthy of a bad high school production. Meanwhile, Richard’s antics bring to mind another politically charged stage show, Hamilton—specifically the lyrics from the song “You’ll Be Back.” There, mad King George III promises that “I will fight and win the war/For your love, for your praise/When you’re gone, I’ll go mad/So don’t throw away this thing we had/’Cause when push comes to shove/I will kill your friends and family to remind you of my love.”
Similarly, Richard’s love for us is dependent on our love for him. The love of the people. Mob love. The critics’ focus on the person playing the king distracts us from the work of his henchmen (here, the Duke of Buckingham, played to the hilt in London by Helen Schlesinger), who whip up Richard’s courtiers into an adoring crowd.
At the Globe, that roaring, madding crowd included us, the audience—regardless of where our tickets placed us. In a matter of minutes, all of us were clapping and stamping our feet, drawn into what became enthusiastic mob support for Richard and his ambitions. I’ve never been to a presidential rally, but I became uncannily aware of what it might feel like to be in the midst of such physically intense and contagious fandom.
When we frolic alongside the MAGA–hatted subjects of Richard III, we succumb to Buckingham’s plea: “Refuse not, mighty lord, this proffered love.” For whatever else they say and do, tyrants need to be reassured of our love. And at the Globe we gave it freely, helpless in the face of a gleeful sociopath. We should not be fooled. The debility that is in fact at the heart of the play is not only the king’s. It’s ours as well.
Scholars and pundits have had a lot to say about the urgency of making Shakespeare “radically accessible.” Kaite O’Reilly, in particular, anticipated the Disabled Artists Alliance, in 2018, with her call to reclaim Richard III by “cripping the crip.” Houman Barekat, by contrast, has argued that Shakespeare’s script doesn’t depict someone living with disability but instead partakes in a long history of using “deformed” physique to portray a deformed personality. “When disability activists object to any reimagining of Richard III that reduces or effaces the disability aspect,” Barekat writes, “they are effectively arguing to preserve a caricature.”
It’s crucial we see more disabled actors on stage generally—especially in the role of Richard III. This representation has been long overdue: the Royal Shakespeare Company only cast its first disabled Richard (Arthur Hughes, who has radial dysplasia and identifies as “limb different”) in 2022. But what the Globe’s production of Richard III shows is that the play’s politics of tyranny does not hinge on the identity of the tyrant alone.
To understand Richard III as a radically crip project, we must return to Robert McRuer’s original claim about disability as a cultural sign—that is, as a phenomenon not found in nature but produced in the theater of tyranny, in part by enablers like Buckingham, in part by spectators like us. Wherever and whenever it rises up, such tyranny, like the figure of Richard III himself, is undoubtedly “subtle, false and treacherous.” But we the people egg it on, helping to give it form on its way to becoming truly monstrous.
