Richard III

Introduction

The Cycle of History

Richard the Player

Beyond Marlowe

About the Text

Key Facts

The Tragedy of Richard the Third

List of Parts

Act 1

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Act 2

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Act 3

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Scene 6

Scene 7

Act 4

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Act 5

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Textual Notes

Quarto Passages That Do Not Appear in the Folio

Scene-by-Scene Analysis

Richard III
in Performance:
   
The RSC and Beyond

Four Centuries of
Richard III:
An Overview

At the RSC

Actor, Director, and Designer: Interviews with
      Simon Russell Beale, Bill Alexander, and Tom Piper

Richard and Tyranny: Reflections by Richard Eyre

Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater

Beginnings

Playhouses

The Ensemble at Work

The King’s Man

Shakespeare’s Works: A Chronology

Kings and Queens of England: From the History
Plays to Shakespeare’s Lifetime

The History Behind the Histories: A Chronology

Further Reading and Viewing

References

Acknowledgments and Picture Credits

Shakespeare’s first group of historical plays comes to a harmonious conclusion with the defeat of wicked King Richard at the battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. The victorious Henry, Earl of Richmond, belongs to the House of Lancaster. He marries the Princess Elizabeth, of the House of York, thus unifying the nobility and bringing to an end the Wars of the Roses. In the final scene of
Richard the Third
, the Lord Stanley, Earl of Derby, places the crown on Richmond’s head and he becomes King Henry VII, inaugurator of the Tudor dynasty. The play closes with a speech in which Henry looks back on the civil strife that has been the subject not just of this play but also of the
Henry the Sixth
sequence. It also looks forward to the golden age over which his wife’s namesake, Queen Elizabeth, liked to believe that she reigned:

On hearing these lines, Shakespeare’s audience would themselves have looked both forward and back: back to a bloody period in the nation’s history, with relief at how it was providentially ended by the Tudor dispensation; forward to an uncertain future, in the knowledge that the queen was now too old to sustain the line.

Historians still debate the question of how villainous Richard III really was, and in particular whether he personally ordered the slaying of the princes in the Tower. What is not in doubt is that it was convenient for the Tudors to paint him as a villain, in order to make his opponent, the future Henry VII, into a hero and a saint. Sir Thomas More played a major part in the process with his
History of King Richard III
, written at the court of Richmond’s son, Henry VIII. Shakespeare finished the work in the public theater of Henry VIII’s younger daughter, immortalizing Richard as the scheming Crookback. The English are notorious for getting their theology from Milton and their history from Shakespeare, rather than from more orthodox sources. The endurance of the image of a Richard who is “determinèd to prove a villain” is proof of the power of drama to be more memorable than written history.
Richard the Third
is one of those core Shakespearean plays that everybody has heard of, even if they have never read it. The success of two film versions—first Sir Laurence Olivier’s and subsequently Sir Ian McKellen’s dazzling update to the fascist 1930s—has assured its continuing life.

As in the
Henry the Sixth
plays, the language is frequently elevated and highly rhetorical. The combination of formal language and a sense of symmetry in the events—action leading to reaction, bloody violence to revenge, a slippery rise followed by a crashing fall as the wheel of fortune turns—places the play in the tradition of the Roman tragedian Seneca. The influence on Shakespeare was probably both direct—Seneca had been published in English translation in the 1580s—and indirect, via the multiauthored
Mirror for Magistrates
, a highly Senecan collection of “complaint” poems, telling of misfortunes and wickedness, written in the voices of the victims of history, including both King Richard’s brother George, Duke of Clarence, and King Edward IV’s mistress, Jane Shore.

The Senecan symmetry is taken to an extreme in the role of Queen Margaret, the widow of King Henry VI, who had been such a powerful force throughout the Wars of the Roses plays. In Act 1 Scene 3, she formally curses Rivers, Dorset, Hastings, Buckingham, and Richard himself. All her curses are fulfilled and as each character dies, Richard realizes that this is the case. Senecan tragedy traditionally began with a ghost returning from the underworld and demanding revenge for his or her murder. In an elegant variation, Shakespeare withholds the ghosts for the climax of the play, bringing them on to taunt King Richard in his tent on the eve of the battle that will be his downfall. The scene in which Richard confronts those ghosts would duly become one of the great set pieces of the English stage: this was the play, and the moment within the play, chosen in the eighteenth century by the actor David Garrick and the painter William Hogarth for the portrait that immortalized Garrick and showed that Shakespeare was a fit subject for art of high moral and historical seriousness.

1.
Engraving after William Hogarth’s 1745 portrait of the actor David Garrick as Richard facing the ghosts on the night before the battle of Bosworth Field. Executed in the artist’s studio, but influenced by the elaborate stage design of the period, this painting inaugurated the tradition of representing great moments in Shakespeare in the style of “history painting” that had hitherto been reserved for elevated biblical and classical stories. The original portrait is in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

Whereas nearly everybody in the
Henry the Sixth
plays appears to be caught up in a maelstrom of historical events that they are not able to control, Richard attempts to take command of his own and his country’s destiny. There is little doubt that the part was written for Richard Burbage, just as he was becoming Shakespeare’s closest friend in the theater world.
Richard the Third
is the first of the small group of Shakespearean plays that are not ensemble pieces—as the
Henry the Sixth
plays so clearly were—but star vehicles, in which the leading player has three times as many lines as anybody else. This play was the making of both the writer and the star. It accounts for their nicknames in a well-attested theatrical anecdote that has them as rivals in the bed of a theater-crazed citizen’s wife: Burbage is “Richard the Third” and Shakespeare “William the Conqueror.”

The trick that they seem to have worked out together was to make the leading character into the apparent author of his own script. From the very opening soliloquy, Richard takes the audience into his confidence and shares with them the role he will adopt and the plot of the drama that he intends to act out, which might be entitled “an unlovely but clever man plans his ascent to the throne, not letting anybody—even an innocent child—get in his way.” He is master of the wink and the aside; he rejoices in playing the role of Iniquity, the Vice in the old tradition of morality plays. The audience enjoys his performance exactly because they know it is a performance.