Richard III

Richard III, from Shakespeare's history play "King Richard the Third", is the perfect embodiment of a political monster. He represents evil in the state--he is the incarnation of the inauspicious power and the symbol of a devilish nihilism. The monster also plays the role of a social magnifying glass. It represents the physical exaggeration of moral defects. Richard III is a monster because he is immoral and ridicules honour and virtue so as to reach …

…have in fact permitted him to achieve his end. And this is the really disturbing fact- that in the 'civilized' society what is considered as morally bad could be socially good. Moreover, the real monstrous beings in Shakespeare's plays are physically sane and 'normal' (Goneril and Regan, Iago, Claudius…) and is therefore harder to recognize them as such than it is to imagine that ugly beings, like Richard or Caliban, could be morally sane.