Written on the Forehead

Roberts examines William Shakespeare's Richard III. In the context of the lines from Richard III, the use of imagery implies that the king is a felon--appropriately enough in a play which represents Richard as complicit in multiple murders. This is part of a pattern of imagery repeated in Shakespeare, shared by his contemporaries and, presumably, comprehensible to his audience. Whether or not these statutes were actually enforced, the possibility of a humiliation of this nature--the permanent marking of a crime on the forehead of the criminal--is branded into the literature of the period.