In Richard’s opening soliloquy, he characterizes himself as "rudely stamped . . . Cheated of feature by dissembling nature, / Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time / Into this breathing world scarce half made up" (I.19-21). "[S]ince I cannot prove a lover," he asserts, "I am determined to prove a villain" (I.28,30). From the very first act, then, Shakespeare establishes Richard’s villainy as inextricably bound to his embodiment.

The wit and irony of Richard’s words are apparent in the next act, in which he proves himself a capable lover, at least in language, by successfully wooing Anne Neville as she walks in mourning behind her father-in-law’s casket. The play is thus engaged not only with the body and "deformity," but also with deformity’s social and rhetorical aspects. Richard knows, uses, and even performs the cultural meanings of his body, as emphasized by his dramatic display of his arm in Act III.4 as evidence that his brother’s widow has used witchcraft against him, making political use of what Erving Goffman would call his "spoiled identity."

Other characters connect his immoral actions and his disabled body more directly, calling him a "foul bunchbacked toad," for example. Act III.1, in which the young Duke of York makes jokes about Richard’s body, and Act IV.4, in which Richard’s mother blatantly rejects him, suggest but do not reveal the emotional damage discrimination can cause, but we never really know how Richard feels about his disabilities. Further, because we only meet him as a villain, the play reiterates that Richard’s body and his morality are one.

Francis Bacon’s essay, "Of Deformity" (1625), which presents the deformed as "void of natural affection," crafty, and ambitious, reads well as a companion text that locates the play in historical relation to beliefs about the social body, disability, and morality. Taught with Bacon, Montaigne’s quite differently oriented essay, "Of a Monstrous Child" (1580), and Ambroise Paré’s "Des monstres et prodiges" (1573), the play works as a gateway to a discussion of historical and present-day views of the causes and social effects of congenital disabilities.

A point of recurrent interest has been the fact that Shakespeare’s rendering of the historical Richard, which makes him a pure villain, was written under Tudor rule. Other sources present him as a capable ruler, loyal brother, and good husband. In addition, there is no clear historical evidence about the nature and extent of Richard’s disabilities, which are not apparent in existing portraits. Richard III Societies in Britain and the U.S. seek to reclaim him from Shakespeare’s portrait as the quintessential villain.