Twenty-nine facts about Richard III

"we all demand reparation for early wounds to our narcissism"

As usual, this is all taken from the Cambridge and Arden editions. If you want to join the book club meeting about Richard III, this Sunday at 19.00 UK time, become a paid subscriber.

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1. The Arden editor writes: “Uniquely for Shakespeare, Richard III begins with the protagonist’s soliloquy about his discontent.”

2. Richard III is an early play. It can’t have been written before 1587, as it relies on the edition of Holinshed from that year. Sir James Blunt may be a compliment to a man who was knighted in 1598. There are echoes of Marlowe (“despair and die”), which suggests a date of 1592.

3. Richard III has always been popular. There were six quartos before 1623 (the year of the Folio) and two after.

4. There is no sub-plot. It is a classic Freytag’s pyramid.

5. Richard’s speech at V.iii—Give me another horse/ Bind up my wounds—has been seen as the beginning of modern tragedy. It is personality, not fate, that kills Richard.

6. The Cambridge editor writes: “By electing to remain himself, Richard insists on free will in the face of determinism… Richard assumes he predestined identity as his own choice.” (The whole play can be compared to Coriolanus, which I will be doing later on.)

7. Like Richard, Macbeth is a villain in the role of king and hero. Richard says, “I am in / So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin.”¹ Macbeth says, “I am in blood / Stepped so far, that I should wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”² Some people see similarities between the witches of Macbeth and the women of Richard III.

8. Stories of Richard’s villainy originated in his own time. An Italian priest wrote about him as a usurper in 1483. This isn’t Tudor propaganda (it comes two years before the Battle of Bosworth). We don’t really know enough to say what was propaganda and what was not.

9. Shakespeare relied on the chronicles of Edward Hall and Raphael Holinshed for his story. Hall incorporated Thomas More’s History of Richard III. Holinshed adopted More from Hall. More covers the rise to the throne, Hall and Holinshed the rest.

10. In Henry VI, part II, Richard is a devoted son and full of “warlike anger”. In part III he becomes a villain. Lines from part III are often performed at the start of productions of Richard III.

11. The real Queen Margaret left England in 1476 and died in 1482. Her role is to issue curses and prophecies and to underscore the prophecy’s fulfilment. She is Fate, the ultimate antagonist.

12. The play is full of mirroring. Wooing of Ann and Elizabeth (I.ii, IV. iv). Clarence’s dream and Richard’s dream (I.iv, V.iii). Richard’s soliloquy and Margaret’s speech (I.i and IV.iv).

13. Richard is one of the plum parts. It used to be how a young actor made their name.

14. In 1700, Colly Cibber, that perpetual pest, cut 3,000 of Shakespeare’s lines, added 1,000 of his own, along with a few scraps from other plays. He got rid of Edward, Margaret, Clarence, and Hastings. And he removed all ambiguity.

15. In Shakespeare, Richard tells us he woos Ann

    not all so much for love
    As for another secret close intent
    By marrying her which I must reach unto

    Cibber gives us,

    But see, my love appears!—Look where she shines.
    Darting pale lustre, like the silver moon,
    Through her dark veil of rainy sorrow!

    No wonder Pope condemned him in the Dunciad.

16. However, and alas, Cibber’s adaptation of Richard III was the longest running of all the adaptations.

17. In Shakespeare, Richard has 30% of the lines. In Cibber, he has 40%. Cibber turned it into a basic villain play, all action no nuance.

18. By 1740, Cibber’s version had been played 84 times, sometimes simultaneously in two or three theatres. It was with this script that Garrick made his London debut in 1741.

19. In 1793, the editor George Steevens wrote,

    What modern audience would patiently listen to that narrative of Clarence’s dream, his subsequent expostulation with the murderers, the prattle of his children, the soliloquy of the Scrivener, the tedious dialogue of the citizens, the ravings of Margaret, the gross terms thrown out by the Duchess of York or Richard, the repeated progress to execution, the superfluous train of spectres, and other undramatick incumbrances…?

20. In 1845, Samuel Phelps performed a version of Shakespeare’s text, but in 1854, Cibber’s version was restored. Phelps played that one in 1861.

21. In 1920, John Barrymore produced a version that had five scenes from Henry VI, part III at the start. Richard’s “opening” soliloquy came half-way through. It lasted four and a half hours, finishing after one a.m.

22. In 1929, Baliol Holloway’s performance was described as “Parallel to Mr. John Gielgud’s Hamlet… one of the most remarkable Shakespeare creations of latter years.” (My full profile of Holloway here.) No-one remembers poor old Holloway now.

23. In 1942, Donald Wolfit made impressions of Hitler part of his performance. That was how Ian McKellen played Richard in 1995.

24. Olivier’s 1944 performance toured Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, and was revived in London in 1949. He cut the women’s roles dramatically, especially for the film.

25. All later actors—including Alec Guinness and Christopher Plummer—were compared unfavourably to Olivier.

26. Starting in 1886, Frank Benson staged Richard III thirteen times in thirty years at the Memorial Theatre in Stratford. After Olivier in 1944, Richard III didn’t play at Stratford again until 1953.

27. The Hall/Burton production of 1963, which combined Henry VI into two plays, was set in a police state. Ian Holm played Richard (in the final part of the trilogy) as a “gifted and powerful politician and yet, obviously, quite mad.” This was the shift away from melodrama and towards motives and politics. (The Winter’s Tale was psychologised at a similar time.)

28. Holm, inevitably, was called a “pocket Olivier”.

29. Freud: Richard is

    an enormously magnified representation of something we can all discover in ourselves. We all think we have reasons to reproach nature and our destiny for congenital and infantile disadvantages; we all demand reparation for early wounds to our narcissism, our self-love.

1. IV.ii 64-5

2. III.iv 135-7