Ricardo III (Gloucester): The man determined to prove a villain

Almost every villain in this archive arrives with an explanation behind him: a brain, a social class, a childhood, a label. Richard of Gloucester arrives with the opposite — a decision. In the opening soliloquy of Richard III, before a single drop of blood is spilled, Shakespeare has him announce his plan: since nature made him deformed and no one will love him, he has resolved to "prove a villain." He does not beg for pity or hide behind his hunchback: he mentions it in order to discard it as an alibi and to proclaim that the evil to come will be his own doing. Richard is the villain who chooses, and he makes us witnesses to the choice.

// The theoryThe criminal who chooses

The underlying idea is the oldest and most influential in criminology: free will. The classical school of Cesare Beccaria (On Crimes and Punishments, 1764) holds that the human being is a rational, free agent: he offends not because of a defect or his blood, but because he chooses to, after calculating the pleasure he expects and the punishment he risks. From this springs an entire penal philosophy — the one that still governs us: if crime is a choice, punishment must be certain, swift and proportionate in order to tip the scales of that decision. Kant carried it to the moral plane: it only makes sense to reproach someone for what they did if they could have done otherwise. Without freedom there is no guilt; without guilt, there is no justice, only mechanics.

Richard is that premise made flesh. He is lucid, calculating, master of himself; he weaves his crimes — seducing, slandering, murdering brothers, nephews, allies — with the coolness of a chess player who sees several moves ahead. No compulsion drags him along, no voice of "Mother" possesses him: there is a project, executed step by step toward the crown. When, on the eve of his fall, the ghosts of his victims visit him and he falters for an instant, he immediately gathers himself with a line that is a whole manifesto: conscience is "a word that cowards use." Richard is not sick with crime: he is a professional who has decided that the rules of morality do not apply to him.

// The subjectThe hunchback as a rejected alibi

Here Richard unknowingly converses with another case in this archive. His "deformed" body is, point for point, the stigma of the born criminal that Lombroso would take to be the biological cause of crime: the man twisted without and within. Tudor England, in fact, read him that way, and Shakespeare inherits that propaganda. But the playwright does something subtler than Lombroso: he does not let the body determine the crime. Richard cites his deformity and at once turns it into a decision — "since I cannot prove a lover, I am determined to prove a villain." It is not his hunchback that kills: it is he, who chooses evil partly in answer to contempt, but chooses. (The historical irony is exquisite: when his actual skeleton was found in 2012, the scoliosis was confirmed and much of the monster legend had painted was dismantled — the body was real; the wickedness, a story.) Richard is the exact point where biology proposes and the will disposes.

// The crackAre we really that free?

The classical school has a crack that two centuries of science have widened: it presupposes a fully rational and free agent who almost never exists in a pure state. Against Beccaria, the positivism of Lombroso, Ferri and Garofalo replied that much of crime arises from causes — biological, psychological, social — that the subject did not choose; and modern criminology grants them, in part, the point: poverty, trauma, addiction, neurological deficits, peer pressure, all incline behavior. The debate over free will versus determinism is still alive, and today neuroscience rekindles it with experiments suggesting that the brain "decides" before we are conscious of deciding. Richard, so sovereignly free, is almost a philosophical fantasy: the criminal who chooses without constraints is as unreal as the criminal who is entirely programmed.

The sensible way out is not to pick a side, but the compatibilism that the law itself practices: to accept that behavior has causes and that, save in extreme cases (psychosis, coercion, minority), we retain enough margin of choice to be responsible. As the jurist H. L. A. Hart argued, the point of punishing does not depend on some absolute metaphysical freedom, but on whether the person had the capacity and the opportunity to adjust their conduct to the norm. Richard had it in abundance: intelligent, informed, with no disorder ruling him. That is why he is guilty with no mitigation. The hunchback explains his resentment; it does not press the dagger home.

That is why Richard III remains, five centuries later, the most seductive villain in the theater: he does not ask for our pity, he asks for our complicity. He speaks to us in confidence, makes us laugh with his cynicism, invites us to admire his wit as he climbs over corpses — and in doing so he implicates us, reminds us that we understand all too well the temptation of ambition without brakes. Shakespeare did not write a sick man or a victim: he wrote a man who decided, and who had the terrible courage to say so out loud. Criminology spent centuries arguing over whether the criminal is born or made. Richard answers, with a crooked smile, that sometimes the criminal, quite simply, chooses himself.