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For as long as there have been stories, there have been heroes whose adventure the story follows. For every hero there is also a villain, the diametric opposite to the hero who must defeat him. This is evident throughout the history of stories. In the earliest piece of surviving English literature, the epic poem Beowulf, the eponymous hero has the monster Grendel to grapple with. Or in Virgil’s classic, The Aeneid, Aeneas must confront the warlike Turnus. As literature has grown with western society, so too have these villains. Instead of embodying pure evil and hatred, the villains of more modern texts have become more engaging through the humour they inject and the insight we as an audience gain into their psyche. We can see this more engaging villain in Shakespeare’s Richard III, and in modern texts such as Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings Trilogy (based on the books by J.R.R Tolkien) or Christopher Nolan’s Batman film, The Dark Knight. The villains Richard, Gollum and The Joker all exhibit humour and psychological insight, which makes them engaging characters to their audience.

Shakespeare’s Richard III opens with a soliloquy by Richard himself, addressing the audience and talking about how, in a time of peace, he intends to cause unrest and climb the ladder to the throne through murder. Richard is “determined to play the villain” and his obvious delight in is evil deeds is, to some extent, contagious. Richard directly engages with the audience in several soliloquies, all the while inviting us to revel with him in his murderous escapades. In his opening lines Richard informs us that he is “not shaped for such sportive tricks” as those that his libidinous brother (King Edward) gets up to, but in the next scene he woos Lady Anne, whose husband he has just killed, into marrying him. Richard then asks the audience “was ever woman in this humour wooed? Was ever woman in this humour won?” Richard can see the humour in his far-fetched seduction of...