Fate and Free Will in Richard III

Queen Margaret curses everyone. She names them by name and predicts their deaths. “When he shall split thy heart with sorrow, / Remember Margaret was a prophetess.” She speaks in the cadence of Old Testament prophecy, and everything she says comes true. Hastings dies. Rivers, Grey, and Vaughan die. The young princes die. Anne dies. Each death happens exactly as Margaret predicted it would. By the time we reach the end of the play, Margaret’s curse has proven to be the truest thing anyone has spoken. Yet Richard believes in his own will. He believes he can outrun prophecy through cunning and force. This collision between two kinds of time—the medieval time of fate and prophecy, and the Renaissance time of individual agency—is the play’s deepest tension.

Richard’s entire philosophy is built on the assumption that he is the author of his own destiny. He seduces Anne. He murders Clarence. He orchestrates Hastings’ death. He claims the throne. In each case, he does it through his own will, his own cunning, his own sheer force of personality. He is convinced that he controls events. But the play shows us something else: that Richard’s actions, while seemingly free, are moving him along a path that was already spoken by Margaret decades before. When Richard kills Hastings, he is fulfilling Margaret’s curse. When he murders the princes, he is fulfilling her prophecy. He believes he is free, but he is actually being moved by a will older and deeper than his own.

The play does not resolve this tension by showing that prophecy was right and free will was wrong. Instead, it shows us that they are the same thing. Richard chooses to murder Hastings. His choice is free. And yet his choice is also the fulfillment of a prophecy made years before. Both things are true at once. Richard’s free will and Margaret’s prophecy are not opposites. They are two ways of describing the same event. The play suggests that our choices are real, and they matter, and they are also part of a larger pattern that we cannot see or escape. We act freely, and our actions are somehow also written.

By Bosworth, Richard understands this too late. He has tried to outrun fate through force of will, and instead he has run directly into it. The sun refuses to shine. His allies abandon him. His body falls at the hands of Richmond. Standing on the field before battle, Richard tries to rally his soldiers by saying the sun’s absence is meaningless—it frowns on both armies equally. But he is wrong. The sun’s refusal to shine is part of a story that began long before Richard was born, a story that Margaret knew, a story that Richard has been enacting all along without knowing it. The play’s final word is that free will and fate are not enemies. They are two aspects of the same human experience. We are most free when we think we are escaping destiny, and most bound when we think we are choosing.