"Why, love forswore me in my mother's womb: And, for I should not deal in her soft laws, She did corrupt frail nature with some bribe, To shrink mine arm up like a wither'd shrub; To make an envious mountain on my back. . . . . . . . . To disproportion me in every part; Like to a chaos, or an unlick'd bear-whelp, That carries no impression like the dam. And am I then a man to be belov'd? O monstrous fault, to harbour such a thought! Then, since this earth affords no joy to me But to command, to check, to o'erbear such As are of better person than myself, I'll make my heaven to dream upon the crown." The lust of power is an inward agony to him. He compares himself to a man "lost in a thorny wood, That rends the thorns and is rent by the thorns;" and he sees no way of deliverance except to "hew his way out with a bloody axe." Thus is he tormented by his desire for the crown of England; and to achieve it he will "drown more sailors than the mermaid shall;... Deceive more slyly than Ulysses could;... add colours to the chameleon;... And send the murd'rous Machiavel to school." (The last touch is an anachronism, for Richard died fifty years before _The Prince_ was published.) If this is to be a villain, then a villain he is. And for the sake of the artistic effect, Shakespeare has piled upon Richard's head far more crimes than the real Richard can be historically proved to have committed. This he did, because he had no doubt of the existence of such characters as rose before his imagination while he read in Holinshed of Richard's misdeeds. He believed in the existence of villains--a belief largely undermined in our days by a scepticism which greatly facilitates the villains' operations. He has drawn more villains than one: Edmund in _Lear_, who is influenced by his illegitimacy as Richard is by his deformity, and the grand master of all evil, Iago in _Othello_. But let us get rid of the empty by-word villain, which Richard applies to himself. Shakespeare no doubt believed theoretically in the free-will which can choose any course it pleases, and villainy among the rest; but none the less does he in practice assign a cause to every effect. On three scenes in this play Shakespeare evidently expended particular care--the three which imprint themselves on the memory after even a single attentive reading.