Richard III (play)

• 1. Introduction

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  Richard III opens with a man addressing you directly, telling you exactly who he is and what he plans to do. "I am determined to prove a villain," says the Duke of Gloucester in his opening monologue. He means it literally. Over the next several hours, audiences watch him murder brothers, imprison children, poison a wife, and seize a throne he was never meant to have. Shakespeare wrote the play around 1592-1594, making it one of his earliest works. It concludes the first tetralogy, a cycle of four plays begun with the three parts of Henry VI. By word count it ranks as the second longest play in the Shakespearean canon, and it is the longest text in the First Folio. The questions the play keeps posing are deceptively simple. Is Richard a free agent who chose evil, or a man fulfilling a divine punishment? Is he a villain or, for much of the play, something more troubling: a charming anti-hero whose logic you find yourself following? And how does a man of such transparent monstrousness actually win?

• 2. The Charmer and His Audience

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  Act I belongs entirely to Richard. Every scene ends with him addressing the audience directly, pulling them into his confidence. Scholar Michael E. Mooney describes this as a "figural position": Richard moves in and out of the dramatic action, talking with the audience on one level while deceiving every other character on another. He wins Lady Anne over her murdered husband's corpse, confessing to the murder and offering her his own sword to kill him with. She drops it. He walks away exulting that he has seduced a woman who has every reason to hate him. He tells his imprisoned brother Clarence, "I will deliver you, or else lie for you" (1.1.115), knowing that the audience has just heard his plan to have Clarence killed. The humour is dark but genuine. When Buckingham reports that the London crowds refused to shout "God save Richard, England's royal king," Richard's reply is simple: "And did they so?" Buckingham's answer tells the story: "No, so God help me, they spake not a word." Richard also resembles the character of Vice from medieval morality plays, which Elizabethan audiences knew well. Vice was the wicked, witty figure who could render ugly intentions charming. Richard even names himself "the formal Vice, Iniquity" at 3.1.82, signalling to the audience that he knows his own dramatic function.

• 3. Free Will Against Fate

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  Scholar Janis Lull reads Richard's opening boast as a deliberate pun. His "primary meaning is that he controls his own destiny," Lull writes, but his words carry a second, contradictory meaning: that his villainy was predestined all along. Shakespeare drew heavily on Sir Thomas More's portrait of Richard as criminal and tyrant, and the play's moral architecture is shaped by what Lull calls the growing Calvinism of the Elizabethan era, the belief that individual historical events are determined by God. Irving Ribner argued that Richard's evil path functions as "a cleansing operation which roots evil out of society and restores the world at last to the God-ordained goodness embodied in the new rule of Henry VII." Scholar Victor Kiernan describes the parallel conviction about England as a whole, the Elizabethan idea of Englishmen as a new chosen people with God on their side. Yet Kiernan also presents the opposing view: Richard as "a personification of the Machiavellian view of history as power politics," a man acting entirely out of his own free will. Kiernan suggests that Richard uses the appearance of divine determinism as a manipulation, cloaking what he calls his "naked villainy" with scripture, as noted at I.iii.334-348. The tension never fully resolves, and scholar Paul Haeffner traces it into Shakespeare's individual word choices, pointing to "kind" as a term that means both "gentle and loving" and, more darkly, a person's true nature, so that Richard will indeed treat Hastings "kindly" in the sense of treating him exactly as his nature demands.

• 4. The Decline and the Women

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  After Act I, Richard's asides to the audience grow sparser and shorter. Scenes appear that do not feature him at all: ordinary citizens discussing the succession, the Duchess of York mourning with Clarence's children. Without Richard filtering events for the audience, viewers are left to judge for themselves. By Act IV, the women of the play have become a moral chorus. Queen Elizabeth, the Duchess of York, and even the banished Queen Margaret gather to curse Richard after the murders of the two young princes. Lull observes that the mourning women favour rhetorical figures of repetition, such as anaphora, beginning each clause with the same word, and epistrophe, repeating the same word at a clause's end. This formal language aligns them with Richmond, whose speeches scholar Paul Haeffner describes as "dignified," in contrast to Richard's "slangy and impetuous" address to his own troops. The Duchess of York curses her only surviving son before leaving. Richard attempts the same seduction of Queen Elizabeth that had worked on Lady Anne in Act I, using the same quick rhythmic dialogue. This time it fails. She stalls him, saying she will let him know her daughter's answer in due course. His vivacity and playfulness are gone. As Richard draws closer to the crown, he stops inhabiting his fluid position between the audience and the stage, and becomes fixed inside the world of the play.

• 5. Texts, Quartos, and Memory

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  Richard III was entered into the Register of the Stationers' Company on the 20th of October 1597 by bookseller Andrew Wise, who published the first Quarto that same year, with printing by Valentine Simmes. A second Quarto followed in 1598, printed by Thomas Creede for Wise, and this edition carried an attribution to Shakespeare on its title page. Further quartos appeared in 1602, 1605, 1612, and 1622, a frequency that speaks to the play's popularity. The First Folio version followed in 1623. The Folio is longer than the Quarto by more than two hundred lines spread across some fifty additional passages. The Quarto, however, contains roughly thirty-seven lines in about twenty-seven passages that the Folio lacks. Scholars once believed the Quarto represented a separate revision by Shakespeare, but it is now widely accepted that it was produced by memorial reconstruction, probably by a company of actors collectively remembering their lines, perhaps to replace a missing prompt book. Because the Folio was collated against a Quarto (probably the third), some of the Quarto's errors found their way in, and portions of the Folio beginning in Act III and continuing through much of Act V are copied with little change directly from the Quarto. Neither text is fully reliable on its own. Christopher Marlowe's Edward II, which must have been written before Marlowe's death in 1593, is thought to have been influenced by Richard III, placing at least part of the play's composition before that year.

• 6. Performance and Adaptation

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  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. The most consequential early adaptation came from Colley Cibber, who produced his rewritten version at Drury Lane starting in 1700, played the lead himself until 1739, and kept his version on stage for roughly a century and a half. Cibber's text supplied what may be the most quoted Shakespearean line that Shakespeare never wrote: "Off with his head; so much for Buckingham." The original Shakespearean text returned to the stage at Sadler's Wells Theatre in 1845. On film, Laurence Olivier's 1955 version became the reference point for decades. It incorporated scenes from Henry VI, Part 3 and from Cibber's rewrite, cut Queen Margaret and the Duchess of York entirely, and relocated Lady Anne's seduction scene to her husband's corpse rather than her father-in-law's. Peter Sellers, who had wanted to play the role himself, appeared in a 1965 television special reciting the lyrics to "A Hard Day's Night" in Olivier's style. Richard Loncraine's 1995 film, starring Ian McKellen, transplanted the story to a fictional fascist England of the 1930s and used roughly half the text. In it, Richard's famous cry for a horse is delivered when his jeep becomes stuck in rubble. A print of a 1912 silent film starring Frederick Warde, running fifty-five minutes, was discovered by a private collector in 1996 and donated to the American Film Institute; it is considered the earliest surviving American feature film.

• 7. Lines That Outlived the Play

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  John Steinbeck borrowed the play's opening line for the title of his novel The Winter of Our Discontent. The phrase "Winter of Discontent" became a fixed expression in British political language after journalists used it to describe the winter of 1978-79, when widespread strikes by local authority trade unions paralysed the country. In the 2010 film The King's Speech, speech therapist Lionel Logue, played by Geoffrey Rush, auditions with the lines "Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York." Shakespeare critic Keith Jones read the film as constructing its main character as an antithesis to Richard III. Richard's battlefield cry, "A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse," travelled even further. E. T. A. Hoffmann gave the Nutcracker the line in his 1816 story. Noel Coward worked it into his 1941 song "Could You Please Oblige Us with a Bren Gun?" The 1993 Mel Brooks film Robin Hood: Men in Tights has Cary Elwes deliver it on arrival in England. US President Abraham Lincoln was known for his particular love of Richard III, which Confederate propagandists exploited during the Civil War. Residents of Richmond, Virginia, identified their city's name with the play's hero. Within a fortnight of Lincoln's visit to the defeated Confederate capital, he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, a Shakespearean actor who had performed both Richard and Richmond on stage. Booth's last words from the stage were "Sic semper tyrannis."

• 8. History Against the Play

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  Shakespeare relied on sources with an interest in making Richard a monster. Holinshed's Chronicles, the writings of John Rous, Polydore Vergil, and Thomas More all served Tudor power by painting the last Plantagenet king as irredeemably evil. The historical record sits awkwardly against the drama on several points. The only contemporary description of Richard's body noted that his right shoulder sat slightly higher than his left, a condition now understood as scoliosis. After the discovery of his remains in 2012, it became clear he may have been somewhat hunched, though not to the degree that would constitute what is now classified as spinal kyphosis. Queen Margaret was not present at Edward IV's court at all during the period the play covers; she had become Edward's prisoner and returned to France in 1475. Richard's wife, Anne Neville, had grown up in the same household as Richard; their marriage was not the abrupt seduction the play presents. Contemporary rumours that Richard poisoned Anne appear to have no foundation, as she is thought to have died of tuberculosis. At the Battle of Bosworth Field, there was no single combat between Richard and Richmond. Richard identified Richmond in his rearguard, surrounded by French pikemen, and led a cavalry charge toward him. He was steered away by Sir Rhys ap Thomas. His horse lost its footing in marshy ground, and when a new horse was offered, Richard declined. The Stanleys entered the battle in support of Richmond when they saw Richard was exposed, and Richard cried "Treason" as he fell. The real Richard negotiated a potential marriage for his niece Elizabeth of York not with himself but with Manuel, Duke of Beja, who later became Manuel I of Portugal.