Study guide
The Tragedy of King Richard the Third
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Overview
- Author
- William Shakespeare (1564–1616), actor and playwright, then early in his London career
- Genre
- History play, called a tragedy on its title page; in blank verse with some prose
- Written
- About 1592–93, as the conclusion of a sequence that begins with the three parts of Henry VI
- Early texts
- Six quartos (the first in 1597) and the First Folio (1623), which differs from the quartos in many hundreds of readings
- Setting
- London, Westminster, Pomfret, Salisbury and Bosworth Field, from 1471 to 22 August 1485, with history compressed into a few weeks
- Sources
- The chronicles of Edward Hall (1548) and Raphael Holinshed (1587), which drew on Thomas More's History of King Richard III and Polydore Vergil's Anglica Historia
- Length
- Shakespeare's second-longest play after Hamlet; Richard's part is the second-longest in the canon
- Main characters
- Richard, Duke of Gloucester; his brothers Edward IV and Clarence; Queen Elizabeth; Queen Margaret; the Duchess of York; Lady Anne; Buckingham; Hastings; Stanley; Richmond
- Key scenes
- The opening soliloquy (1.1), the wooing of Anne (1.2), Margaret's curses (1.3), Clarence's dream (1.4), the false refusal of the crown (3.7), the murder of the princes (4.2–4.3), the lamenting queens (4.4), the ghosts (5.3)
- Quote text
- The modernised text of Project Gutenberg's Complete Works, which combines quarto and Folio readings
Context
Richard III was probably written in 1592 or 1593, when Shakespeare was not yet thirty, and it completes the sequence of plays on the Wars of the Roses that begins with the three parts of Henry VI. Richard, Duke of Gloucester, already a sardonic killer in 3 Henry VI, here takes centre stage. The play was an early and lasting success. Richard Burbage made his name in the title role, and the first quarto of 1597 was reprinted five times before the First Folio of 1623, a sign of its popularity with readers. The quarto and Folio texts differ widely, and modern editions such as those of John Jowett and James Siemon have argued about which better represents the play as performed (Jowett 2000) (Siemon 2009).
The historical Richard (1452–1485) was the youngest surviving son of Richard, Duke of York. A loyal and able servant of his brother Edward IV, he governed the north of England for a decade. When Edward died in April 1483 Richard became Protector for the twelve-year-old Edward V, but within weeks he had arrested the boy's maternal kin, executed Lord Hastings, had his nephews declared illegitimate, and taken the throne. The princes disappeared in the Tower that summer. Richard put down Buckingham's rising in October 1483, lost his only son and his wife, and was killed at Bosworth on 22 August 1485 by the forces of Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, who became Henry VII (Ross 1981) (Horrox 1989).
Shakespeare's Richard is the Richard of the Tudor historians. Thomas More wrote his unfinished History of King Richard III, in English and Latin versions, in the 1510s; it was printed in the chronicles of Hardyng and Hall and later in Holinshed, and it supplied the strawberries, the withered arm, the stage-managed refusal of the crown and the murder of the princes by Tyrrel's men. More's Richard is little in stature, crook-backed and born with teeth; he is also a superb ironist's portrait of a tyrant, written by a humanist who may have meant it as much as a study of political theatre as a record of fact. More had grown up in the household of John Morton, Richard's enemy, who appears in the play as the Bishop of Ely (More 1963) (Pollard 1991).
The chronicles also shaped the play's larger pattern. Edward Hall's Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York (1548) told the story from the deposition of Richard II to the marriage of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York as a long sequence of crime and punishment, ended by the providential union of the roses. In the twentieth century E. M. W. Tillyard called this view the 'Tudor myth' and argued that Shakespeare's histories endorsed it; later critics, notably Henry Ansgar Kelly, showed that the chroniclers' providential judgements were many and partisan, not a single official doctrine (Tillyard 1944) (Kelly 1970) (Campbell 1947).
On stage Richard has been one of the most coveted parts in the repertory. Colley Cibber's adaptation of 1700, which added lines from other plays, held the stage for nearly two centuries; David Garrick, Edmund Kean and Henry Irving played the role, and Laurence Olivier's film of 1955 fixed the image of the limping, seductive villain for a generation. Since the 1980s productions have explored Richard's disability, his politics and his likeness to modern dictators, as in Richard Loncraine's 1995 film with Ian McKellen. The discovery of Richard's skeleton in Leicester in 2012 renewed public interest in the real king (King 2014).
Plot overview
With the civil wars ended and his brother Edward IV on the throne, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, tells the audience that he will make his way to the crown by villainy. He has his brother Clarence imprisoned and murdered, woos Lady Anne over the coffin of the king he killed, and plays the injured honest man at a court divided between the Queen's kinsmen and the old nobility. Queen Margaret, the widow of Henry VI, curses them all.
When Edward dies, Richard and his ally Buckingham seize the young Edward V, have the Queen's brother and son executed at Pomfret, and lodge the boy and his brother in the Tower. Lord Hastings, who will not support Richard's claim, is beheaded on a trumped-up charge. Buckingham spreads the claim that Edward's children are illegitimate, and in a staged show of reluctance Richard accepts the crown.
As King, Richard has the princes murdered by Tyrrel, breaks with Buckingham, lets it be known that his wife Anne is dying, and seeks to marry his niece Elizabeth. The women of the play, Queen Elizabeth, the Duchess of York and Margaret, unite in lament and curse him. Buckingham rebels and is executed, and Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, lands with an army.
On the eve of the battle of Bosworth, the ghosts of all Richard's victims appear to him and to Richmond in their sleep, damning one and blessing the other. Richard wakes to face his conscience. He fights bravely and is killed, and Richmond, about to marry Elizabeth of York, proclaims the union of the white rose and the red and the end of the civil wars.
Scene by scene
Scene 1: Act I, Scene 1: Richard's opening soliloquy
Act I, Scene 1 (the whole scene)
Summary
Richard, Duke of Gloucester, walks on alone. The wars between York and Lancaster are over, his brother Edward IV is on the throne, and the court has turned from fighting to dancing and love. Richard, who describes himself as misshapen and unfit for such pleasures, announces that he will be a villain instead. He has already set his brother George, Duke of Clarence, at odds with the King through a prophecy that someone whose name begins with 'G' will murder Edward's heirs.
Clarence enters under guard on his way to the Tower. Richard blames the Queen and her family, promises to work for his release, and mocks him the moment he is gone. Lord Hastings, just freed from the Tower himself, reports that the King is sick. Alone again, Richard plans Clarence's death, the King's, and his own marriage to Lady Anne, widow of the Lancastrian Prince Edward whom he helped to kill.
Analysis
No other Shakespeare play opens with its protagonist alone on stage, taking the audience into his confidence. The soliloquy turns from a public celebration ('our discontent', 'our house') to a private grievance ('But I'), and the pun on 'son' and 'sun', the Yorkist badge of the sun in splendour, places Richard outside the bright world he describes. From this point the audience knows what every character on stage does not, and Richard's intimacy with us is the engine of the play's comedy and of its moral discomfort (Rossiter 1961) (Hammond 1981).
Richard explains his villainy by his body, yet the logic is slippery: 'since I cannot prove a lover' does not compel 'I am determined to prove a villain', and 'determined' means both resolved and predestined. Critics have long debated whether deformity here is a cause, an excuse or an outward sign of an inner evil, a question that the play's Tudor sources answered with confidence and that modern disability studies has reopened (Garber 1987) (Mitchell 2000).
Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this son of York;
The famous opening. 'Son' puns on the sun, Edward IV's badge; the 'winter' of civil war has given way to a Yorkist summer.
Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time Into this breathing world scarce half made up,
Richard presents himself as nature's unfinished work, drawing on the chronicle story of his unnatural birth.
I am determined to prove a villain,
'Determined' is both a choice and a fate: the line holds free will and predestination in one word.
Clarence still breathes; Edward still lives and reigns.
Richard counts the obstacles between himself and the crown with brisk, comic impatience.
Scene 2: Act I, Scene 2: The wooing of Lady Anne
Act I, Scene 2 (the whole scene)
Summary
Lady Anne follows the coffin of King Henry VI, her father-in-law, mourning him and cursing his murderer. Richard stops the procession. In the presence of the corpse, whose wounds are said to bleed afresh at his approach, he trades insults with her in quick, matched lines. He admits the killings of Henry and of her husband Edward but claims that her beauty drove him to them, offers her his sword and bares his breast. She cannot strike, and by the end of the scene she accepts his ring.
Left alone, Richard marvels at his own success, mocks Anne for taking a man so far below her husband, and decides that he must after all be handsome: he will buy a mirror and hire tailors.
Analysis
The scene is a set piece of persuasion. Anne's curses and Richard's replies take the form of stichomythia, line answering line, a technique Shakespeare borrowed from Senecan drama; Richard wins by turning each of her words to his own purpose. The bleeding corpse, a sign of guilt in popular belief, makes the scene a trial in which the evidence is ignored. Many readers find Anne's capitulation hard to credit, and productions have played it as grief, fear, exhaustion or fascination (Hammond 1981) (Siemon 2009).
Feminist critics have read the wooing as the first of the play's contests between Richard and the women whose sons and husbands he kills: Anne loses this one, but the women's curses eventually come true (Howard 1997). The closing soliloquy also turns Richard's opening complaint upside down. In 1.1 he could only 'descant' on his shadow; now he calls on the sun so that he may watch it, a comic image of his growing confidence.
No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity.
Anne's reproach. Richard's reply, that he knows none and is therefore no beast, shows the wit with which he defeats her.
Nay, do not pause, for I did kill King Henry— But ’twas thy beauty that provoked me.
Richard dares Anne to kill him while confessing the murder, a gamble on her inability to act.
Was ever woman in this humour wooed? Was ever woman in this humour won?
His triumph, shared with the audience. 'Humour' means mood: she was won in the very moment of hatred.
I’ll have her, but I will not keep her long.
A chilling line that anticipates Anne's death in Act 4.
Scene 3: Act I, Scene 3: Queen Margaret's curses
Act I, Scene 3 (the whole scene)
Summary
At court, Queen Elizabeth and her kinsmen, Lord Rivers, Lord Grey and the Marquess of Dorset, fear what will become of them if the sick King dies. Richard bursts in complaining that he is slandered by upstarts and quarrels with them. Queen Margaret, widow of Henry VI, has been listening unseen. She comes forward and curses them all: Elizabeth will outlive her glory and her children, Rivers, Dorset and Hastings will die early, and Richard will suffer sleeplessness, false friends and the worm of conscience. Only Buckingham is spared, and he is warned to beware of Richard.
When the others leave, Richard explains to the audience how he sets the Queen's party against Clarence while he poses as a Christian. He then gives two hired murderers a warrant to kill Clarence in the Tower.
Analysis
Margaret's presence is unhistorical: the real Margaret of Anjou had returned to France and died in 1482. Shakespeare brings her back as a figure of memory and retribution, a link to the earlier plays of the Henry VI cycle. Her curses lay out the plot of the rest of the play, and each victim later recalls them before he dies. This pattern of prophecy and fulfilment is the chief evidence for readings of the play as a providential drama in which God punishes the house of York (Tillyard 1944) (Kelly 1970).
Margaret's speech also gives Richard his animal names: hog, toad, spider, dog. These images, which run through the play, turn the body that Richard has described for himself into a sign of monstrosity. His last soliloquy in the scene names his method precisely: he wears religion as a disguise, like the Vice of the morality plays (Spivack 1958).
The worm of conscience still begnaw thy soul;
Margaret's curse. Richard will claim to have no conscience, but it returns to him on the eve of Bosworth.
Thou elvish-marked, abortive, rooting hog,
The hog recalls Richard's badge, the white boar; 'elvish-marked' means marked at birth by malign spirits.
Why strew’st thou sugar on that bottled spider,
A swollen, venomous spider: Margaret mocks Elizabeth for flattering Richard.
And thus I clothe my naked villany With odd old ends stol’n forth of Holy Writ, And seem a saint when most I play the devil.
Richard describes his own hypocrisy, the key to his public manner.
Scene 4: Act I, Scene 4: The murder of Clarence
Act I, Scene 4 (the whole scene)
Summary
In the Tower, Clarence tells his keeper of a terrible dream: Richard knocked him overboard into the sea, and after drowning he crossed into the underworld, where the ghosts of Warwick, whom he betrayed, and of Prince Edward, whom he helped to kill at Tewkesbury, accused him. The two murderers arrive with their warrant. They hesitate, and the Second Murderer debates comically with his own conscience before they wake their victim.
Clarence pleads for his life, appeals to the law of God and tells them that Richard will reward them. They reply that Richard sent them. The First Murderer stabs him and drowns him in a butt of malmsey wine; the Second repents.
Analysis
Clarence's dream is one of the great descriptive speeches in early Shakespeare, full of the drowned treasure of the sea floor and of classical images of the underworld. It is also a confession: Clarence knows he has broken his oath to the Lancastrians, and the play treats his death as both a crime of Richard's and a just punishment for his own perjury. This double causation, human plotting and divine judgement working together, is characteristic of the play (Kelly 1970) (Jowett 2000).
The murderers' exchange about conscience, in prose, parodies the moral debates of the morality plays and anticipates Richard's own crisis in 5.3. Clarence's plea that they fear God is turned against him: he too killed in the name of a cause. The scene's mixture of horror and grim comedy is typical of Richard's world.
Methoughts that I had broken from the Tower, And was embarked to cross to Burgundy;
The opening of the dream: an escape that becomes a drowning, with Richard as the cause.
Clarence is come—false, fleeting, perjured Clarence, That stabbed me in the field by Tewksbury!
The ghost of Prince Edward accuses him. 'Fleeting' means fickle: Clarence changed sides twice.
Faith, some certain dregs of conscience are yet within me.
The Second Murderer's comic debate with conscience, a parody of the grave struggle to come.
What we will do, we do upon command.
The murderers' defence, which Clarence answers by appealing to a higher king.
Scene 5: Act II, Scene 1: A false reconciliation
Act II, Scene 1 (the whole scene)
Summary
The dying King Edward makes the rival factions swear friendship: Rivers and Hastings, Dorset and Hastings, the Queen and Buckingham. Buckingham vows loyalty in strong terms. Richard arrives, joins the peace with exaggerated humility, and then, when the Queen asks the King to pardon Clarence, announces that Clarence is dead. The King's countermand, he says, arrived too late.
Stanley, Earl of Derby, kneels to beg the life of a servant who has killed a man, and the King bursts out in bitter remorse that no one pleaded for his brother. He is led away, and Richard lays the blame on the Queen's kinsmen.
Analysis
The scene shows Richard's skill as a manager of the stage. The reconciliation, built on oaths that the audience knows to be hollow, is broken by a single piece of news timed for the greatest effect. Buckingham's oath, in which he calls on God to punish him if he breaks it, will be remembered in 5.1 on the day of his execution.
Edward's lament gives the King his one moment of moral clarity and shows how the guilt for Clarence spreads beyond Richard: the King signed the warrant, and the court stood by. Shakespeare compresses history here, as the real Clarence was executed in 1478, five years before Edward's death (Saccio 1977).
Why, so. Now have I done a good day’s work.
Edward's satisfaction with the peace he has made, ironic given what Richard is about to reveal.
Who knows not that the gentle Duke is dead?
Richard announces Clarence's death with feigned surprise that anyone could be ignorant of it.
My brother killed no man; his fault was thought, And yet his punishment was bitter death.
Edward's remorse: Clarence was condemned for a prophecy, not a deed.
Scene 6: Act II, Scene 2: Mourning for King Edward
Act II, Scene 2 (the whole scene)
Summary
The Duchess of York, mother of Edward, Clarence and Richard, comforts Clarence's children, who have been told by Richard that the King is to blame for their father's death. Queen Elizabeth enters, distracted with grief: King Edward is dead. The Queen, the Duchess and the children lament together in a formal chorus of loss.
Richard and Buckingham arrive. It is agreed to fetch the young Prince Edward from Ludlow for his coronation with only a small escort. Buckingham privately proposes to separate the Prince from his mother's kin on the way, and Richard praises him extravagantly.
Analysis
The scene introduces the play's ritual laments, in which women answer one another in balanced lines. These choruses, which grow longer and fiercer as the play goes on, give a voice to those whom political history usually silences. The Duchess's line 'I am the mother of these griefs' takes the guilt of her son upon her body, a theme that culminates in her curse in 4.4 (Howard 1997).
Buckingham now becomes Richard's partner in the plot. Richard's praise of him, as 'my other self' and 'my oracle', is excessive in a way that the audience can read as flattery, and his promise to obey 'as a child' carries a dark irony, since the children are the targets.
Alas, I am the mother of these griefs.
The Duchess sees her own family as the source of its ruin.
That is the butt end of a mother’s blessing;
Richard's aside after his mother blesses him and prays for his humility: a joke at her expense.
My other self, my counsel’s consistory, My oracle, my prophet, my dear cousin, I, as a child, will go by thy direction.
Richard's flattery of Buckingham. 'Consistory' is a church court: Buckingham is his council and his conscience.
Scene 7: Act II, Scene 3: Citizens in the street
Act II, Scene 3 (the whole scene)
Summary
Three citizens of London meet and discuss the King's death. One is hopeful that the young Prince will reign well under a council. Another fears the worst: a child king, a dangerous uncle, and proud kinsmen on the Queen's side. They compare the moment to the minority of Henry VI, which led to civil war.
Analysis
This short scene, which has no source in the chronicles, shows how ordinary people read political weather. The anxious citizen's proverbs, of clouds and cloaks and of land governed by a child, echo a biblical warning (Ecclesiastes 10:16) and express the commonplace Tudor fear of a minority and a divided council. The scene widens the play's view from the court to the city whose support Richard will soon try to manufacture (Campbell 1947).
Woe to that land that’s governed by a child.
A proverb derived from Ecclesiastes, widely quoted in the period.
O, full of danger is the Duke of Gloucester,
The citizens already see through Richard, though they cannot act on their knowledge.
Scene 8: Act II, Scene 4: The Queen takes sanctuary
Act II, Scene 4 (the whole scene)
Summary
The Archbishop of York, Queen Elizabeth, the Duchess and the Queen's younger son, Richard, Duke of York, wait for the Prince. The boy repeats a sharp story about his uncle Gloucester, who is said to have grown so fast that he could gnaw a crust at two hours old. A messenger brings news that Rivers, Grey and Sir Thomas Vaughan have been arrested by Richard and Buckingham and sent to Pomfret. The Queen takes her younger son into sanctuary at Westminster.
Analysis
The young Duke of York is a precocious, witty child, and his jokes about his uncle's teeth repeat the chronicle legends of Richard's birth. The scene marks the moment when the Queen's party realise what is happening. The Duchess's speech on the endless cycle of civil strife looks back over the whole history of the Wars of the Roses (Saccio 1977).
Small herbs have grace; great weeds do grow apace.
Richard's proverb, as repeated by the young Duke of York: a veiled insult to the growing boy.
That he could gnaw a crust at two hours old.
York's joke about Richard's legendary birth with teeth, a detail from Thomas More's history.
Scene 9: Act III, Scene 1: The Princes arrive in London
Act III, Scene 1 (the whole scene)
Summary
Prince Edward arrives in London and asks why his uncles on his mother's side are not there to greet him. Buckingham persuades the Cardinal to fetch the Duke of York out of sanctuary, overriding the Cardinal's scruples with a legal argument that a child cannot claim sanctuary. Richard proposes that the Prince stay in the Tower before his coronation. The boy dislikes the idea and questions whether Julius Caesar built it.
The young Duke of York arrives and teases his uncle, asking for his dagger and joking about riding on his back. The princes go to the Tower. Richard, Buckingham and Catesby then plan to test Hastings, and Richard promises Buckingham the earldom of Hereford when he is King.
Analysis
Richard's asides in this scene make his likeness to the Vice explicit. The Vice of the morality plays was a witty tempter who worked through double meanings and shared jokes with the audience, and Richard, overhearing the Prince's remark about fame, glosses his own pun with a reference to the figure (Spivack 1958) (Rossiter 1961).
The Princes are not simply victims. Edward reflects intelligently on history and reputation, and York's wit is a match for his uncle's. Their cleverness makes them dangerous to Richard and their deaths more painful. The Tower, which they enter here, is the play's chief place of imprisonment and murder.
I do not like the Tower, of any place.
The Prince's instinctive fear of the place where he will die.
Thus, like the formal Vice, Iniquity, I moralize two meanings in one word.
Richard names his theatrical ancestor, the Vice of the morality plays.
Bold, quick, ingenious, forward, capable.
Richard on the young Duke of York, after calling him a 'parlous boy': in this play such praise is a death sentence.
Chop off his head, man; somewhat we will do.
Richard's answer to the question of what to do if Hastings will not join them.
Scene 10: Act III, Scene 2: Hastings's confidence
Act III, Scene 2 (the whole scene)
Summary
At four in the morning a messenger comes to Hastings from Lord Stanley, who has dreamt that the boar razed off his helmet and urges flight. Hastings dismisses the warning. Catesby arrives to sound him on Richard's taking the crown, and Hastings refuses to support it, while rejoicing that his enemies, the Queen's kinsmen, are to die at Pomfret that day. He meets Stanley, a pursuivant and a priest, and goes to the council at the Tower in high spirits.
Analysis
The scene is built on dramatic irony. Hastings's confidence in Richard's friendship, and his delight in the downfall of his rivals, mark him as blind in the way Margaret predicted. The boar of Stanley's dream is Richard's heraldic badge, and the dream is one of several in the play that tell the truth to those who will not listen. His chance meeting with a pursuivant on the very spot where he was once led to the Tower as a prisoner, a detail from More, adds to the sense that fate is offering him signs (More 1963).
He dreamt the boar had razed off his helm.
Stanley's warning dream. The boar is Richard, whose badge was a white boar.
Think you, but that I know our state secure, I would be so triumphant as I am?
Hastings's fatal confidence, spoken on the day of his death.
Scene 11: Act III, Scene 3: Execution at Pomfret
Act III, Scene 3 (the whole scene)
Summary
Sir Richard Ratcliffe leads Rivers, Grey and Vaughan to their execution at Pomfret Castle. Rivers recalls that Richard II was murdered there. Grey remembers that Margaret cursed them for standing by when Richard stabbed her son. Rivers asks God to remember that she cursed Hastings, Buckingham and Richard too, and the three embrace before they die.
Analysis
This brief scene is the first of a series in which Richard's victims remember Margaret's curses at the moment of death. The reference to Richard II links the present to the origin of the dynastic conflict, the deposition of 1399, which E. M. W. Tillyard took as the beginning of a cycle of crime and punishment that ends only at Bosworth (Tillyard 1944).
O Pomfret, Pomfret! O thou bloody prison, Fatal and ominous to noble peers!
Rivers recalls the murder of Richard II, which began the dynastic wars.
Now Margaret’s curse is fall’n upon our heads,
The first explicit fulfilment of Margaret's curses.
Scene 12: Act III, Scene 4: Strawberries and the fall of Hastings
Act III, Scene 4 (the whole scene)
Summary
At a council in the Tower to set the date of the coronation, Hastings offers to speak for Richard, who is absent. Richard enters in good humour and asks the Bishop of Ely to send for strawberries from his garden. He leaves with Buckingham and returns in fury, showing his withered arm and claiming that the Queen and Mistress Shore, the late King's mistress, have bewitched him. When Hastings begins a sentence with 'If', Richard accuses him of treason and orders his immediate execution. Hastings recalls the omens he ignored and Margaret's curse.
Analysis
The strawberries and the withered arm both come from Thomas More, who presents the scene as a masterpiece of theatrical tyranny: Richard's arm, More says, had been so from birth, and everyone at the table knew the charge was false (More 1963). Shakespeare keeps this sense of a staged event in which the audience on stage must pretend to believe what it sees.
Hastings's final speech on the 'momentary grace of mortal men' turns the scene into a moral lesson about trusting in princes, in the manner of A Mirror for Magistrates. The Bishop of Ely is John Morton, who later fled to Richmond, became Henry VII's Archbishop of Canterbury, and is widely thought to have been one of More's informants.
I saw good strawberries in your garden there;
Richard's genial request to the Bishop of Ely, a moment of calm before the storm.
Off with his head! Now by Saint Paul I swear I will not dine until I see the same.
Richard condemns Hastings without trial; the oath by St Paul is one of his favourites.
O momentary grace of mortal men, Which we more hunt for than the grace of God!
Hastings's lament: the favour of the powerful is less secure than God's grace.
Scene 13: Act III, Scene 5: The Lord Mayor is persuaded
Act III, Scene 5 (the whole scene)
Summary
Richard and Buckingham, dressed in old, ill-looking armour, perform alarm for the Lord Mayor of London, pretending that they are in danger. Lovell and Ratcliffe bring in Hastings's head. Richard and Buckingham explain that Hastings plotted to murder them and that they were forced to act at once. The Mayor accepts the story. Richard then sends Buckingham to the Guildhall to suggest that Edward IV's children are illegitimate, and even that Edward himself was not his father's son.
Analysis
The scene shows political theatre at its most cynical. Buckingham boasts that he can play the tragedian, trembling and starting like an actor, and Richard's argument from necessity, that the peril required action without law, is the classic defence of tyranny. The slander that Edward was illegitimate, which touches Richard's own mother, shows how little he regards family (More 1963) (Jowett 2000).
What, think you we are Turks or Infidels?
Richard claims that only a desperate emergency could make Christians act against the form of law.
Infer the bastardy of Edward’s children;
Richard's instructions for the Guildhall speech, the basis of his claim to the throne.
Scene 14: Act III, Scene 6: The Scrivener
Act III, Scene 6 (the whole scene)
Summary
A scrivener, a professional copyist, enters alone with the indictment of Hastings. It took him eleven hours to copy, and the draft took as long to prepare, yet Hastings was alive and unaccused only five hours ago. Everyone can see the trick, he says, but no one dares to say so.
Analysis
This tiny scene of fourteen lines comes straight from More, who reports that a schoolboy could have seen the proclamation was prepared in advance (More 1963). It gives a voice to ordinary knowledge under tyranny: the truth is plain, and silence is the price of safety. It is the play's clearest statement that Richard's lies are not believed, only tolerated.
Here’s a good world the while! Who is so gross That cannot see this palpable device?
'Gross' means stupid: the forgery is obvious to anyone.
Bad is the world, and all will come to naught When such ill dealing must be seen in thought.
The truth can only be 'seen in thought', never spoken aloud.
Scene 15: Act III, Scene 7: Richard accepts the crown
Act III, Scene 7 (the whole scene)
Summary
Buckingham reports that the citizens at the Guildhall received his speech in silence; only a few of his own men cried 'God save King Richard'. Richard arranges a further performance. When the Mayor and citizens arrive at Baynard's Castle, Richard appears above them between two bishops, with a prayer book in his hand. Buckingham begs him to take the crown, and he refuses, protesting his unworthiness and his love for the young Prince.
Buckingham pretends to give up in anger and leaves. Catesby urges Richard to call him back, and Richard reluctantly agrees to accept the 'burden' of kingship. The coronation is fixed for the next day.
Analysis
The scene is a play within the play, carefully stage-managed: Buckingham plays the spokesman, Catesby the go-between, and Richard the unwilling saint. Its comedy depends on our knowledge of the script. The silence of the citizens is the city's only means of resistance, and Richard's acceptance on behalf of a people who never chose him anticipates later analyses of manufactured consent (More 1963).
Richard's show of piety echoes his account of clothing villainy in 'Holy Writ'. The prayer book returns, terribly, in 4.3, where the murdered princes are found with a book of prayers on their pillow.
But, like dumb statues or breathing stones, Stared each on other, and looked deadly pale.
Buckingham describes the citizens' silence at the Guildhall.
Two props of virtue for a Christian prince, To stay him from the fall of vanity;
Buckingham points to the bishops beside Richard as stage properties of holiness.
Call them again. I am not made of stones, But penetrable to your kind entreaties, Albeit against my conscience and my soul.
Richard's mock reluctance as he accepts the crown.
Scene 16: Act IV, Scene 1: The women at the Tower
Act IV, Scene 1 (the whole scene)
Summary
Queen Elizabeth, the Duchess of York and Dorset meet Anne, now Duchess of Gloucester, with Clarence's young daughter, at the Tower. They have come to visit the princes but Brakenbury refuses them entry on the orders of 'the King', meaning Richard. Stanley arrives to take Anne to Westminster to be crowned Queen. Anne recalls her curse over Henry's coffin, which has fallen on herself: she has had no sleep in Richard's bed. Elizabeth sends Dorset to join Richmond in Brittany, and the women part, Elizabeth looking back at the walls that hold her sons.
Analysis
The scene is the women's version of the coronation: instead of a procession, a parting. Anne's speech confirms that her curse on any future wife of the murderer has come home to her, a neat example of the play's pattern of returning curses. Elizabeth's address to the stones of the Tower, as a 'rough cradle' and 'rude ragged nurse', makes the building a grotesque substitute for a mother (Howard 1997).
A cockatrice hast thou hatched to the world,
The Duchess on Richard. The cockatrice, a mythical serpent, killed with a look.
Pity, you ancient stones, those tender babes Whom envy hath immured within your walls—
Elizabeth's farewell to the Tower, addressed to the walls themselves.
Eighty odd years of sorrow have I seen,
The Duchess's age is exaggerated for effect; she was in her late sixties.
Scene 17: Act IV, Scene 2: Richard turns on Buckingham
Act IV, Scene 2 (the whole scene)
Summary
Richard is crowned. He tells Buckingham that young Edward still lives and hints that he wants the princes dead. Buckingham hesitates and asks for time to consider. Richard turns from him in contempt and asks a page for a man who will kill for gold; the page names Sir James Tyrrel. Richard orders a rumour that Anne is sick and near death, and plans to marry his niece Elizabeth of York. Tyrrel agrees to kill the princes.
Buckingham returns to claim the earldom of Hereford he was promised. Richard ignores him, talks of a prophecy about Richmond, and finally dismisses him. Buckingham resolves to flee to his estates at Brecknock.
Analysis
This is the turning point of Richard's career. Once he has the crown, the comic partnership with the audience fades, and the man who thrived on secrecy must find new instruments. The break with Buckingham comes from the same impatience that made Richard dangerous: 'I am not in the giving vein today.' The exchange about the clock, in which Richard compares Buckingham to a jack striking the hour, appears in the quarto text but not in the Folio, one of the many differences between the early printings (Jowett 2000) (Siemon 2009).
Richard's own words now admit fatigue. His line about being 'so far in blood' recalls Macbeth, and critics have often compared the two plays as studies of a usurper who discovers that each crime requires another.
Shall I be plain? I wish the bastards dead,
Richard drops his indirection; Buckingham's hesitation ends their friendship.
I must be married to my brother’s daughter, Or else my kingdom stands on brittle glass.
Richard sees that his title is fragile without a marriage to Elizabeth of York.
But I am in So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin.
A line often compared with Macbeth's 'I am in blood / Stepped in so far'.
I am not in the giving vein today.
Richard's dismissal of Buckingham's claim to reward. This line belongs to a passage found only in the quartos.
Scene 18: Act IV, Scene 3: The murder of the princes
Act IV, Scene 3 (the whole scene)
Summary
Tyrrel enters alone and reports the murder of the princes by his agents Dighton and Forrest, who wept as they described the sleeping children with their arms around each other and a prayer book on their pillow. Richard receives the news and asks to hear more after supper. He reports that he has shut up Clarence's son, married Clarence's daughter to a commoner, and that Anne is dead. Ratcliffe brings news that Bishop Morton has fled to Richmond and Buckingham is raising an army.
Analysis
The murder, the climax of Richard's crimes, takes place offstage, and Shakespeare tells it through a man who did not see it, quoting two men who did. The effect is to wrap the crime in layers of report and remorse, so that the children appear as a tender picture rather than as victims of violence. Tyrrel's account follows More closely, including the prayer book and the murderers' repentance, though More himself reports the story as hearsay from a later confession (More 1963) (Pollard 1991).
Albeit they were fleshed villains, bloody dogs, Melted with tenderness and mild compassion,
Even the hardened murderers were moved by what they did.
Their lips were four red roses on a stalk, And in their summer beauty kissed each other.
An image of innocence; the red roses may recall the dynastic badges of York and Lancaster.
A book of prayers on their pillow lay,
The prayer book, which Richard used as a prop in 3.7, returns as a sign of real piety.
Scene 19: Act IV, Scene 4: The lamenting queens
Act IV, Scene 4 (the whole scene)
Summary
Queen Margaret, about to leave for France, watches Elizabeth and the Duchess of York mourn the princes, then joins them. The three women sit on the ground and recite their losses in a formal liturgy of grief. Margaret, triumphant, shows how Richard's crimes repay the crimes of the house of York, and teaches Elizabeth how to curse. Richard enters on the march, and his mother curses him before she leaves: he will die in despair and his enemies will be blessed.
Richard then asks Elizabeth to woo her daughter for him. In a long exchange, parallel to the wooing of Anne, she counters each of his arguments, but seems at last to consent. Richard calls her a 'relenting fool'. News arrives of Richmond's fleet, Buckingham's rising and the defection of nobles; Buckingham is captured. Stanley is ordered to leave his son George as a hostage.
Analysis
This is the longest scene in the play and its moral centre. The laments form a pattern of exact repetition, Edward for Edward, Richard for Richard, which suggests that history is a balance sheet of revenge. Margaret's satisfaction makes the logic of retribution uncomfortable, and critics have debated whether the play endorses or questions it (Kelly 1970) (Howard 1997).
The second wooing is a test of Richard's verbal power, and it is not clear who wins. Elizabeth's apparent consent may be a ruse, and in 4.5 we learn that she has promised her daughter to Richmond. Many editors take Richard's sneer as a sign that his judgement of people has begun to fail (Siemon 2009) (Lull 1999).
I had an Edward, till a Richard killed him; I had a husband, till a Richard killed him.
Margaret's lament, with its mechanical repetition, turns grief into accounting.
Forbear to sleep the night, and fast the days;
Margaret's lesson in cursing: exaggerate the loss and the enemy's guilt.
Thou cam’st on earth to make the earth my hell.
The Duchess's judgement of her son, before she curses him.
Relenting fool, and shallow, changing woman!
Richard's contempt for Elizabeth, perhaps misplaced.
Scene 20: Act IV, Scene 5: Stanley's message to Richmond
Act IV, Scene 5 (the whole scene)
Summary
Stanley sends a priest, Sir Christopher Urswick, to tell Richmond that he cannot give open support while his son George is Richard's hostage. He also reports that Queen Elizabeth has consented to Richmond's marriage to her daughter. Urswick names the great men who have joined Richmond in Wales.
Analysis
This short scene reveals that Elizabeth outwitted Richard in 4.4 and sets up Stanley's divided position at Bosworth, where his delay keeps the outcome in doubt. The marriage of Richmond to Elizabeth of York, which joined the two houses, was the foundation of Tudor claims to legitimacy (Saccio 1977).
That in the sty of the most deadly boar My son George Stanley is franked up in hold;
Richard as a boar again: 'franked' means penned in a sty for fattening.
Scene 21: Act V, Scene 1: Buckingham's All Souls' Day
Act V, Scene 1 (the whole scene)
Summary
Buckingham is led to execution at Salisbury. He calls on the souls of Richard's victims to see his fall. It is All Souls' Day, the very day on which he swore before King Edward that he might be punished if he betrayed the Queen's family. God has taken his false oath at its word, and Margaret's warning has come true.
Analysis
Buckingham's speech is a perfect example of the providential pattern: oath, betrayal and fulfilment line up exactly, and the victim himself recognises the justice of his fate. The historical Buckingham was in fact executed on 2 November 1483, All Souls' Day, which gave the chroniclers and Shakespeare a ready-made moral (Ross 1981).
Why, then All-Souls’ day is my body’s doomsday.
Buckingham recognises the day of his death as the day of judgement he called on himself.
And given in earnest what I begged in jest.
God has answered his false prayer seriously.
Scene 22: Act V, Scene 2: Richmond's march
Act V, Scene 2 (the whole scene)
Summary
Richmond, having landed in Wales, marches with his allies into the heart of England. He has news from Stanley and tells his followers that Richard, the usurping boar, is near Leicester. His captains expect Richard's own men to desert him. Richmond answers with confidence in the justice of his cause.
Analysis
Richmond speaks a different language from Richard: public, plain and pious, with no asides. Critics often find him flat beside Richard, but the contrast is the point. He represents the lawful order of the Tudor settlement rather than a personality, and his brief scenes give the end of the play the form of a deliverance (Tillyard 1944) (Campbell 1947).
The wretched, bloody, and usurping boar,
Richmond turns Richard's badge into a beast that devours England's fields.
True hope is swift, and flies with swallow’s wings;
Richmond's confident close: hope, not ambition, is his motive.
Scene 23: Act V, Scene 3: The ghosts before Bosworth
Act V, Scene 3 (the whole scene)
Summary
The two armies camp on Bosworth Field. Richard pitches his tent and gives orders, sharp but uneasy. Richmond plans the battle and receives a secret visit from Stanley, who promises what help he can. Both leaders sleep. The ghosts of Richard's victims, Prince Edward, Henry VI, Clarence, Rivers, Grey and Vaughan, Hastings, the two princes, Anne and Buckingham, appear in turn, telling Richard to despair and die and blessing Richmond.
Richard wakes in terror and, in a fractured soliloquy, confronts his conscience for the first time. At dawn he recovers his nerve. Both leaders address their troops: Richmond calls on God and the cause of right, Richard mocks the enemy as Breton vagabonds. News comes that Stanley refuses to bring his forces.
Analysis
The ghost scene is a ritual of judgement that fulfils every curse of the play, and its symmetry, with each ghost addressing both men, makes the stage a picture of the moral universe. Richard's waking soliloquy is the most debated speech in the play. Some read it as a crude expression of guilt in short, broken lines; others see in it the beginning of the divided, self-questioning voice of Shakespeare's later tragic heroes (Rossiter 1961) (Hammond 1981).
The two orations show the contrast between legitimate and illegitimate power. Richmond's is built on prayer and the defence of wives and children; Richard's on contempt and force. His line 'Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law' sums up his politics.
Despair and die!
The ghosts' refrain to Richard, repeated by almost every visitor.
Richard loves Richard, that is, I am I.
The self-enclosed logic of the soliloquy, which turns in on itself and breaks.
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, And every tongue brings in a several tale, And every tale condemns me for a villain.
Margaret's 'worm of conscience' arrives at last, now as a courtroom of accusers.
Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law.
Richard's answer to his night of terror, spoken to his officers.
Scene 24: Act V, Scene 4: My kingdom for a horse
Act V, Scene 4 (the whole scene)
Summary
During the battle Catesby reports that Richard is fighting like a man possessed, on foot, his horse killed under him. Richard enters calling for a horse. He refuses to withdraw: he has staked his life on the throw of a die and has already killed five men dressed as Richmond.
Analysis
The scene is very short, and its famous line is one of the most quoted in English. Richard's courage at the end is historical: Polydore Vergil, no friend to him, says that he died fighting manfully in the press of his enemies. The image of the gambler, staking everything on a cast, gives his end a reckless grandeur (Ross 1981).
A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!
Richard offers the kingdom for which he killed so many for the means to stay in the fight.
Slave, I have set my life upon a cast, And I will stand the hazard of the die.
Richard sees the battle as a game of chance.
Scene 25: Act V, Scene 5: The union of the roses
Act V, Scene 5 (the whole scene)
Summary
Richard and Richmond fight, and Richard is killed. Stanley brings Richmond the crown taken from the dead King. Richmond asks after Stanley's son, who is safe, orders the burial of the noble dead and pardons the soldiers who fled. He announces that he will marry Elizabeth of York and unite the white rose and the red, and prays for peace and prosperity for their heirs.
Analysis
The play ends with a prayer rather than a reflection on Richard. Richmond's last speech looks back over the civil wars as a time when England 'hath long been mad' and forward to the Tudor peace of Shakespeare's own day. The ending is the dramatic form of what is now called the Tudor myth, and its confidence may be read as a sincere celebration, as necessary flattery under Elizabeth I, or as an official close that the play's energies have already called into question (Tillyard 1944) (Kelly 1970) (Howard 1997).
The day is ours, the bloody dog is dead.
Richmond's verdict on Richard, recalling Margaret's curses.
We will unite the white rose and the red.
The marriage of Lancaster and York, the founding image of the Tudor dynasty.
England hath long been mad, and scarred herself:
Richmond's summary of the Wars of the Roses as national madness.
Characters
House of York
- Richard, Duke of Gloucester, later King Richard III
- Youngest brother of Edward IV, physically deformed by his own account, and the play's dominant voice. Witty, theatrical and utterly without scruple, he confides his plans to the audience, woos the widow of a man he killed, and murders his brother, his nephews and his allies on the way to the crown. Once king, he loses his comic energy, and on the eve of Bosworth his conscience returns in a nightmare of ghosts. He dies fighting.
- George, Duke of Clarence
- Richard's brother, who once deserted York for Lancaster and then returned. Imprisoned on Richard's plotting, he dreams of drowning and judgement, pleads for his life with the murderers, and is stabbed and drowned in a butt of wine.
- King Edward IV
- Richard's eldest brother, sick and near death. He tries to reconcile the court factions and is broken by the news that Clarence has been executed on his own warrant.
- Queen Elizabeth
- Edward IV's wife, of the Woodville family, whose rise made enemies among the old nobility. She loses her brother Rivers, her son Grey and her two young sons by Edward, and in 4.4 matches Richard in argument over the marriage of her daughter.
- Duchess of York
- Mother of Edward, Clarence and Richard. She grieves for her sons and grandsons and finally curses Richard, wishing him defeat and death.
- Edward, Prince of Wales, and Richard, Duke of York
- The sons of Edward IV, clever and lively children. The elder is briefly Edward V. Lodged in the Tower by their uncle, they are murdered on his orders and appear among the ghosts at Bosworth.
House of Lancaster
- Queen Margaret
- Widow of Henry VI and mother of the Prince Edward whom the Yorkists killed. Unhistorically present at the Yorkist court, she curses her enemies in 1.3 and returns in 4.4 to see her curses fulfilled. She speaks for memory and retribution.
- Lady Anne
- Widow of Prince Edward and daughter-in-law of Henry VI. Wooed by Richard over Henry's coffin, she marries him, lives in fear and sleeplessness, and dies offstage. Her ghost appears at Bosworth.
- Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond
- Lancastrian claimant in exile in Brittany, who lands in Wales and defeats Richard at Bosworth. He speaks with formal piety and ends the play as Henry VII, promising to marry Elizabeth of York.
Richard's allies
- Duke of Buckingham
- Richard's chief accomplice, an accomplished speaker who stages the public scenes of his rise. He balks at the murder of the princes, is denied his reward, rebels, and is executed on All Souls' Day.
- Catesby, Ratcliffe and Lovell
- Richard's agents, who carry messages, sound out opponents and carry out executions. A contemporary rhyme named them, with Richard, as 'the Cat, the Rat and Lovell our dog'.
- Sir James Tyrrel
- An ambitious gentleman who arranges the murder of the princes and reports it with something like remorse.
Court
- Lord Hastings
- Lord Chamberlain and loyal servant of Edward IV, enemy of the Queen's kin. He refuses to support Richard's claim, ignores repeated warnings, and is beheaded at the council table.
- Lord Stanley, Earl of Derby
- Stepfather of Richmond and husband of Margaret Beaufort. Cautious and secretly hostile to Richard, he warns Hastings, communicates with Richmond, and withholds his forces at Bosworth while his son George is a hostage.
- Bishop of Ely (John Morton)
- The bishop who sends for strawberries in 3.4 and later flees to Richmond. The historical Morton was the patron in whose household Thomas More grew up.
Queen's kin
- Lord Rivers, Lord Grey and the Marquess of Dorset
- The Queen's brother and her two sons by her first marriage. Rivers and Grey are executed at Pomfret with Sir Thomas Vaughan; Dorset escapes to join Richmond.
Others
- The two Murderers
- Hired killers of Clarence, whose comic debate about conscience prepares for the play's more serious treatments of guilt. The second repents.
Themes
Providence and retribution
The play is built on curses, prophecies and dreams that come true. Margaret's curses in 1.3 are recalled by each victim at the moment of death, and Buckingham dies on the day he named in his own oath. Seen in this light, Richard is a scourge of God who punishes the sins of the house of York and is then destroyed, and Richmond's victory is a divine deliverance (Tillyard 1944).
Yet the providential pattern is voiced most loudly by characters with an interest in it, especially Margaret, whose satisfaction in others' suffering is hard to share. Richard's wit and the audience's pleasure in his schemes pull against the moral design, and critics have asked whether the play believes in its own providence or displays it as one way of telling history (Kelly 1970) (Rossiter 1961).
Theatre, role-playing and power
Richard is an actor who stages his own career. He plays the plain blunt man, the lover, the grieving brother and the reluctant saint, and Buckingham boasts that he can 'counterfeit the deep tragedian'. Politics appears as a performance in which the audience on stage knows it is watching a show but dares not say so, as the Scrivener and the silent citizens make clear (More 1963).
The real audience is drawn into complicity. Richard's soliloquies and asides make us his confidants, and much of the play's discomfort comes from the pleasure we take in his performances while knowing their cost (Hammond 1981).
Conscience
Conscience is mocked at the start, debated comically by the murderers of Clarence, and finally triumphant on the eve of Bosworth, when it speaks with a 'thousand several tongues'. Richard's discovery that he cannot escape himself is the play's turn from comedy to tragedy.
The same word is used cynically throughout: Richard accepts the crown 'against my conscience', and before the battle he declares that swords are conscience enough. The play tests whether conscience is a real inner voice or another word for fear (Siemon 2009).
Women, grief and cursing
The women of the play cannot fight, but they speak. Anne, Elizabeth, the Duchess and Margaret mourn, accuse and curse, and their words outlast the men who dismiss them. In 4.4 they form a chorus of mothers and widows whose grief becomes an accusation of the whole political order (Howard 1997).
Feminist critics have noted that the women's power is mostly verbal and retrospective, and that the play ends with a marriage arranged between men. The princess whose marriage unites the roses never appears on stage.
The body and deformity
Richard's body is the first thing he mentions and the last thing his enemies insult. The chronicles treated his deformity as a sign of evil, and the play's animal imagery follows them. But Richard also uses his body as a theatrical asset, and he blames nature for making him a villain, an argument the play neither fully accepts nor dismisses (Garber 1987).
Disability scholars have argued that Richard is a key case of 'narrative prosthesis', in which a disabled body supplies a story with its explanation and its spectacle; others have read his deformity as a figure for the distorted state of England itself (Mitchell 2000) (Moulton 1996).
History, legitimacy and the Tudor settlement
The play's long view of history begins with the deposition of Richard II and ends with Henry VII's marriage, and it repeatedly asks what makes a ruler legitimate: blood, law, popular consent, divine favour or force. Richard claims the throne by slander and staged acclamation; Richmond by victory and a dynastic marriage (Saccio 1977).
For Shakespeare's first audiences, the union of the roses was the origin of their own peace under Elizabeth I, the granddaughter of Henry VII. The ending can therefore be read both as a celebration and as a reminder of how much depended on an ageing queen without an heir (Campbell 1947).
Motifs
Curses and prophecies
From the 'G' prophecy that dooms Clarence to Margaret's curses and the Duchess's last words to her son, spoken predictions organise the plot. Almost every one comes true, often in ways the speaker did not intend.
Dreams
Clarence's drowning, Stanley's boar, Anne's sleeplessness and the ghosts of Bosworth make dreams the play's channel of hidden truth. Richard, who scorns dreams in others, is undone by his own.
Animal imagery
Richard is called hog, toad, spider, dog, boar and cockatrice. The insults dehumanise him, and the boar ties the abuse to his heraldic badge.
Laments and ritual repetition
Formal, symmetrical speeches of mourning, especially in 2.2 and 4.4, and the ghosts' refrain 'Despair and die!' give the play the patterns of liturgy.
Oaths and perjury
Clarence, Buckingham, Hastings and the reconciled courtiers of 2.1 all swear oaths that are later broken or turned against them, and Richard's soliloquy at Bosworth names perjury as the first of his sins.
Symbols
The boar
Richard's badge was a white boar. In Stanley's dream, Richmond's speeches and the play's insults the boar stands for Richard as a beast that destroys England's harvest.
The Tower
The Tower of London, prison and palace, is where Clarence and the princes die and Hastings is condemned. It stands for the hidden violence on which Richard's power rests.
The sun and the mirror
The 'son of York' of the first line recalls Edward IV's badge of the sun. Richard first watches his shadow in the sun and then wants a mirror to admire himself, images of a self-regard that the play finally turns into self-horror.
The prayer book
Richard uses a prayer book as a prop when he accepts the crown, and the murdered princes are found with one on their pillow: false and true piety side by side.
The white rose and the red
The roses of York and Lancaster, which give the civil wars their later name, are united in Richmond's last speech in the symbol of the Tudor rose.
Critical debates
The Tudor myth: does the play endorse it?
E. M. W. Tillyard argued in 1944 that Shakespeare's two tetralogies dramatise a providential view of English history inherited from Hall: the deposition of Richard II brings a curse on England that is expiated only when Henry Tudor defeats Richard III and unites the houses. Lily B. Campbell read the histories as 'mirrors' of Elizabethan policy, warning against rebellion and disputed succession (Tillyard 1944) (Campbell 1947).
Henry Ansgar Kelly showed that the chroniclers did not share a single myth: Yorkist and Lancastrian writers each found God on their own side, and Shakespeare gives providential judgements to particular characters rather than to the play itself. Later critics have treated the providential frame as one of several voices, set against Richard's sceptical, theatrical energy (Kelly 1970) (Rossiter 1961).
Thomas More's History: chronicle or satire?
More's History, written about 1513–18 and left unfinished, is the most influential single source for the play's Richard. Its editor, Richard Sylvester, showed how far it is shaped by classical models, especially Tacitus and Sallust, and by the humanist art of dramatic speech. More invents speeches, reports rumours with careful qualifiers, and stages scenes such as the council in the Tower with an ironist's eye (More 1963).
Historians have weighed whether More's account rests on good information, much of it perhaps from Morton and other survivors of 1483, or on Tudor hostility. Some read it less as history than as a study of tyranny in general, and its interest in performance and complicity anticipates Shakespeare's play. Dominic Mancini's report, written in 1483 by an Italian visitor and rediscovered only in 1934, confirms some of More's outline without his moral portrait (Mancini 1969) (Pollard 1991).
The historical Richard: villain or victim of Tudor propaganda?
Since Sir George Buck's history (written in the 1610s) and Horace Walpole's Historic Doubts (1768), defenders of Richard have argued that the Tudor portrait is a slander invented to justify Henry VII's usurpation. Paul Murray Kendall's sympathetic biography and Josephine Tey's detective novel The Daughter of Time brought this view to a wide audience, and the Richard III Society has promoted it since the 1920s (Walpole 1768) (Kendall 1955) (Tey 1951).
Most academic historians, including Charles Ross, Rosemary Horrox and A. J. Pollard, accept that Richard seized the throne by force and that the princes were very probably killed on his orders, while rejecting the cartoon villain of Tudor tradition. They stress his loyal service in the north, the violent politics of the age, and the deep uncertainty of the evidence. The question who killed the princes cannot be settled with certainty (Ross 1981) (Horrox 1989) (Pollard 1991).
Richard and the Vice: tragedy or black comedy?
Bernard Spivack traced Richard's ancestry to the Vice of the morality plays, the jesting tempter who shares his schemes with the audience, and Richard himself invokes the figure in 3.1. A. P. Rossiter called Richard an 'angel with horns' and argued that the play's comic energy and its moral pattern work against each other, producing a deliberate ambivalence (Spivack 1958) (Rossiter 1961).
Other critics see a tragic development: the confident Vice of the first acts becomes a lonely, divided man in 5.3. Whether the late soliloquy achieves real inwardness or remains a set piece is still debated, and productions decide much of the answer in performance (Hammond 1981) (Siemon 2009).
Deformity and disability
Richard's body has been read as a moral emblem, a psychological cause, and a theatrical device. Marjorie Garber argued that Shakespeare's Richard is shaped by the Tudor histories that deformed him, so that his body is itself a product of historical writing. Ian Frederick Moulton linked his deformity to an unruly, excessive masculinity that threatened Elizabethan order (Garber 1987) (Moulton 1996).
Disability studies, following David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, has asked how the play uses disability to explain villainy and how it might be performed without repeating that equation. The skeleton found in Leicester in 2012 showed severe scoliosis but no withered arm or limp of the kind the chronicles describe (Mitchell 2000) (Appleby 2015).
The women's voices
Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin argued that Richard III gives women a larger role than the earlier histories, but mainly as mourners and mothers whose authority lies in lament and curse. The ritual laments of 4.4 can be read as a powerful counter-history told by the victims, or as a containment of women within grief (Howard 1997).
The second wooing scene is a crux for this debate. If Elizabeth deceives Richard, she is the only character to defeat him with words; if she yields, the play repeats the pattern of Anne. The text leaves the question open until 4.5 (Lull 1999) (Siemon 2009).
Quarto or Folio?
The first quarto (1597) is shorter than the Folio by about two hundred lines and differs from it in many hundreds of readings. Older editors thought the quarto a memorial reconstruction by actors; others have argued that it reflects a revised, theatrical version of Shakespeare's text, while the Folio was printed from a quarto corrected against a manuscript (Hammond 1981) (Jowett 2000).
John Jowett's Oxford edition chose the quarto as its basis, and James Siemon's Arden edition the Folio. Some well-known passages, such as the exchange about the clock in 4.2, are found only in the quarto, and most reading texts, including the one quoted here, combine both (Jowett 2000) (Siemon 2009).
The king in the car park
In 2012 archaeologists from the University of Leicester, prompted by the Looking for Richard project of the Richard III Society, excavated the site of the Grey Friars church and found a skeleton with a curved spine and battle wounds. Radiocarbon dating, genealogy and mitochondrial DNA matched to living descendants of Richard's sister identified it as Richard's (Buckley 2013) (King 2014).
The analysis of the skull wounds confirmed a violent death in battle, consistent with the accounts of his last charge. The find did not settle the question of his guilt, but it showed how far the stage Richard, with his hump and limp, had departed from the man. He was reburied in Leicester Cathedral in March 2015 (Appleby 2015).
Key passages
Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this son of York;
The opening lines describe the Yorkist peace as summer after winter, with a pun on Edward IV's badge of the sun; the soliloquy then turns to Richard's exclusion from that summer.
I am determined to prove a villain,
Richard's announcement of his career, in which 'determined' means both resolved and fated.
Was ever woman in this humour wooed? Was ever woman in this humour won?
His delighted reflection on winning Anne over her father-in-law's coffin, shared with the audience.
And thus I clothe my naked villany With odd old ends stol’n forth of Holy Writ, And seem a saint when most I play the devil.
Richard explains his use of religion as a disguise, the method of the Vice.
Thus, like the formal Vice, Iniquity, I moralize two meanings in one word.
An aside in which Richard compares himself to the Vice of the morality plays, who deceived by double meanings.
Bad is the world, and all will come to naught When such ill dealing must be seen in thought.
An ordinary man sees through the forged indictment of Hastings but knows he cannot say so.
But I am in So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin.
Richard, now King, sees that each crime demands another, as he plans his niece's marriage and her brothers' murder.
I had an Edward, till a Richard killed him; I had a husband, till a Richard killed him.
Margaret's lament reduces history to a ledger of revenge in which names and losses repeat.
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, And every tongue brings in a several tale, And every tale condemns me for a villain.
Waking from the ghosts, Richard faces the conscience he had dismissed, imagined as a crowd of witnesses at a trial.
A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!
His last cry in battle: the kingdom he killed for is offered for the means to keep fighting.
Questions for study
How does the opening soliloquy shape the audience's relationship with Richard, and how does that relationship change by Act 5?
Compare the confidences of 1.1 and 1.2 with the soliloquy after the ghosts in 5.3.
Why does Anne yield to Richard in 1.2? Is the scene psychologically convincing?
Consider grief, fear, Richard's rhetoric, the stichomythia and the presence of the corpse.
What is the dramatic function of Queen Margaret, given that she was not historically present?
Look at her curses in 1.3 and at who remembers them in 3.3, 3.4, 5.1 and 4.4.
How does the play present politics as theatre? Choose two scenes in which characters stage a performance for an audience on stage.
3.5 and 3.7 are the obvious examples; consider the citizens' silence and the Scrivener.
Is Richard III a providential drama, as Tillyard argued?
Weigh the fulfilled curses and Richmond's prayers against Richard's wit and Margaret's appetite for revenge.
What role does Richard's body play in the play? Is his deformity a cause, an excuse or a symbol?
Compare Richard's own account in 1.1 with others' insults, and think about how it might be staged today.
Compare the wooing of Anne (1.2) with Richard's attempt to win Elizabeth's daughter through her mother (4.4). What has changed?
Look at who controls the exchange, and at what 4.5 reveals.
How do the women of the play respond to the violence of the men?
Think about the laments in 2.2 and 4.4, the Duchess's curse, and the absent Elizabeth of York.
How far does Shakespeare follow Thomas More, and what does he add?
The strawberries, the Scrivener and the refusal of the crown come from More; Margaret, the wooing of Anne and the ghosts do not.
Does the historical evidence about Richard matter to how we read the play?
Think about the Tudor sources, the arguments of Richard's defenders, and the Leicester discovery.
Further reading
- Appleby, Jo, et al. "Perimortem Trauma in King Richard III: A Skeletal Analysis." The Lancet 385 (2015): 253–259.
- Buckley, Richard, et al. "'The King in the Car Park': New Light on the Death and Burial of Richard III in the Grey Friars Church, Leicester, in 1485." Antiquity 87 (2013): 519–538.
- Campbell, Lily B. Shakespeare's "Histories": Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1947.
- Garber, Marjorie. Shakespeare's Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality. New York and London: Methuen, 1987.
- Hammond, Antony, ed. King Richard III. By William Shakespeare. The Arden Shakespeare, Second Series. London: Methuen, 1981.
- Horrox, Rosemary. Richard III: A Study of Service. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
- Howard, Jean E., and Phyllis Rackin. Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.
- Jowett, John, ed. The Tragedy of King Richard III. By William Shakespeare. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
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Written by the Poetry Codex editors. Updated 2026-10-21.