Becoming King: Richard III and the Body without Organs

Becoming King: Richard III and the Body without Organs

This article reads Richard III through Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the Body without Organs (BwO) to reconsider how kingship is composed, mediated, and ultimately undone through non-normative embodiment. The article critiques Renaissance physiognomic discourse for its deterministic codification of bodily difference and moves beyond conventional disability studies that focus on the moral stigma imposed on non-normative bodies. It traces how Richard’s body functions as a machinic assemblage, channeling intensity, mobility, and political violence across the play’s acts. Rather than treating Richard’s bodily difference as a stable sign of moral depravity or political failure, the essay argues that Richard assembles a provisional royal body by appropriating external supports, language, weapons, rituals, and regalia as prosthetic extensions of himself. These prostheses do not normalize Richard’s embodiment; instead, they amplify its volatility, generating a form of kingship that is powerful yet unstable. As the play progresses, the same assemblage that enables Richard’s ascent becomes saturated with guilt, spectral return, and moral reckoning, leading to the collapse of his royal body. Richard’s collapse, the article contends, is not a return to an able-bodied norm but an excess of the BwO that exposes kingship itself as a contingent, prosthetic, and fundamentally unstable formation.