Short answers, pulled from the story.
Richard III is believed to have been written around 1592-1594. The earliest confirmed performance took place on the 16th or the 17th of November 1633, when Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria watched it on the queen's birthday.
Six quartos were published between 1597 and 1622, with the first entered into the Stationers' Register on the 20th of October 1597 by Andrew Wise. The Folio text is longer by more than two hundred lines, while the Quarto is now thought to have been produced by memorial reconstruction, with actors collectively remembering their lines, possibly to replace a missing prompt book.
Scholar Janis Lull argues that Richard's opening boast that he is "determined to prove a villain" carries two meanings: that he controls his own destiny, and that his villainy was predestined. Irving Ribner read Richard's evil as a God-ordained purge of English society, while Victor Kiernan presented the opposing view that Richard acts as a pure Machiavellian exercising free will.
Shakespeare followed Tudor sources that portrayed Richard as a villain. Queen Margaret was not at court during the period shown; she returned to France in 1475. Richard's wife Anne Neville is thought to have died of tuberculosis, not poison. At Bosworth Field there was no single combat between Richard and Richmond, and Richard's horse lost its footing in marshy ground rather than being struck down in battle.
Laurence Olivier's 1955 film became the standard reference, incorporating scenes from Henry VI, Part 3 and Colley Cibber's rewrite while cutting Queen Margaret entirely. Richard Loncraine's 1995 film, starring Ian McKellen, set the story in a fictional fascist England of the 1930s and used roughly half the original text. A 1912 silent film starring Frederick Warde, discovered in 1996 and donated to the American Film Institute, is considered the earliest surviving American feature film.
John Steinbeck used the play's opening line for the title of his novel The Winter of Our Discontent. The phrase "Winter of Discontent" entered British political language as a description of the widespread trade union strikes in the winter of 1978-79. Richard's battlefield cry, "A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse," appears in works ranging from E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1816 story "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King" to the 1993 Mel Brooks film Robin Hood: Men in Tights.