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ABSTRACT
Critics of Shakespeare's Richard III have had difficulty explaining and validating the perennial engagement of theater audiences with Richard, a figure who violates the norms of morality and aesthetics by triumphantly asserting his own malevolence and taking narcissistic pride in his ugliness. This article analyzes Richard's problematic appeal by focusing on the play's use of "sinister aesthetics": in other words, a set of cultural conventions governing the representation of evil, which valorize the dark and hideous as admirable poetic subjects and, by association, risk encouraging the very values they label as evil. The play thereby affirms a poetics in which Richard is attractive and powerful because he is evil-and even because he is ugly. This analytical approach enables us to appreciate the full range of moral and aesthetic appeals available to Shakespeare and his audiences. It also elucidates the complex play of conflicting moral and aesthetic ideas that gives Richard III its poetic energy. Richard combines two sets of sinister conventions, a poetics of malevolent theatricality and a poetics of deformity, which the play uses to explore the tension between aesthetics and ethics that plagued Renaissance moralists. As a critical concept, sinister aesthetics can be applied more broadly to facilitate the analysis of artistic representations whose appeal runs counter to normative aesthetic standards.
1. INTRODUCTION: THE PROBLEM OF RICHARD
The fascination with evil is central to the construction of Shakespeare's Richard III. According to Antony Hammond, editor of the Arden Richard III, no other example of what he calls the "criminal hero. . . . has had the theatrical longevity, nor the audience appeal of Richard; never have the elements described above been combined into so persuasive and attractive a consequence as Richard III" (104). Although audiences from Shakespeare's time to the present have taken pleasure in Richard's compelling malevolence, the implications of Richard's appeal continue to trouble critics. A. P. Rossiter, while acknowledging that Richard's asides make it impossible for him to deceive the audience, suggests that audiences cooperate in deceiving themselves when they do not take Richard seriously, with potentially dangerous moral consequences. Hugh Richmond, in his introduction to the 1999 collection Critical Essays on Shakespeare's Richard III, sees the "compulsive interest" of modern audiences in "the megalomaniac delights of...