Richard III Read online

  That I myself have done unto myself?

  O no! Alas, I rather hate myself

  For hateful deeds committed by myself!

  Since he has forged his identity through acting, Richard denies the possibility of an essential being that is anterior to performance. He cannot sustain a language of being—“I am,” “I am not”—because he keeps coming back to particular roles (“villain”) and actions (murdering). The moment when an authentic self ought to be asserted, as in a deathbed repentance, becomes that when the self collapses. This is an actor-dramatist’s way of looking at the nature of human being.

  The Ghosts who appear to him in his dream the night before the last battle force him into the realization that actions have consequences: murder will bring him “to the bar” and a verdict of “guilty” will be pronounced. This final emphasis upon guilt is the pragmatic Shakespeare’s correction of the blasphemous Marlowe toward religious and moral orthodoxy. Having been granted his earthly crown, Richard is defeated by Henry of Richmond, who has spent the night before the battle of Bosworth Field in pious prayer to the Christian God: “O thou, whose captain I account myself, / Look on my forces with a gracious eye.” The fall of the overreacher is thus yoked to the Tudor myth of that providential scheme of history which combined the Houses of York and Lancaster and established the dynasty that brought unity, then Reformation and ambition for imperial glory to the nation.

  Further selections from critical commentaries on the play, with linking narrative, are available on the edition website, www.therscshakespeare.com.

  ABOUT THE TEXT

  Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare’s classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can’t).

  But because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, editors also have to make decisions about the relative authority of the early printed editions. Half of the sum of his plays only appeared posthumously, in the elaborately produced First Folio text of 1623, the original “Complete Works” prepared for the press by Shakespeare’s fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else. The other half had appeared in print in his lifetime, in the more compact and cheaper form of “Quarto” editions, some of which reproduced good quality texts, others of which were to a greater or lesser degree garbled and error-strewn. In the case of Richard III, there are hundreds of differences between the two early editions, the Quarto of 1597 and the Folio.

  Generations of editors have adopted a “pick and mix” approach, moving between Quarto and Folio readings, making choices on either aesthetic or bibliographic grounds, and creating a composite text that Shakespeare never actually wrote. Not until the 1980s did editors follow the logic of what ought to have been obvious to anyone who works in the theater: that the Quarto and the Folio texts represent two discrete moments in the life of Richard III; that plays change in the course of rehearsal, production, and revival, and that the major variants between the early printed versions almost certainly reflect this process.

  If you look at printers’ handbooks from the age of Shakespeare, you quickly discover that one of the first rules was that, whenever possible, compositors were recommended to set their type from existing printed books rather than manuscripts. This was the age before mechanical typesetting, when each individual letter had to be picked out by hand from the compositor’s case and placed on a stick (upside down and back to front) before being laid on the press. It was an age of murky rushlight and of manuscripts written in a secretary hand that had dozens of different, hard-to-decipher forms. Printers’ lives were a lot easier when they were reprinting existing books rather than struggling with handwritten copy. Easily the quickest way to have created the First Folio would have been simply to reprint those eighteen plays that had already appeared in Quarto and only work from manuscript on the other eighteen.

  But that is not what happened. Whenever Quartos were used, playhouse “promptbooks” were also consulted and stage directions copied in from them. And in the case of several major plays where a reasonably well-printed Quarto was available, Richard III notable among them, the Folio printers were instructed to work from an alternative, playhouse-derived manuscript. This meant that the whole process of producing the first complete Shakespeare took months, even years, longer than it might have done. But for the men overseeing the project, John Hemings and Henry Condell, friends and fellow actors who had been remembered in Shakespeare’s will, the additional labor and cost were worth the effort for the sake of producing an edition that was close to the practice of the theater. They wanted all the plays in print so that people could, as they wrote in their prefatory address to the reader, “read him and again and again,” but they also wanted “the great variety of readers” to work from texts that were close to the theater life for which Shakespeare originally intended them. For this reason, the RSC Shakespeare, in both Complete Works and individual volumes, uses the Folio as base text wherever possible. Significant Quarto variants are, however, noted in the Textual Notes, and Quarto-only passages are appended after the text of Richard III.

  The following notes highlight various aspects of the editorial process and indicate conventions used in the text of this edition:

  Lists of Parts are supplied in the First Folio for only six plays, not including Richard III, so the list at the beginning of the play is provided by the editors, arranged by groups of characters. Capitals indicate that part of the name which is used for speech headings in the script. Thus “Lord Stanley, Earl of DERBY” indicates that lines spoken by this character are always headed “DERBY,” even though he is sometimes addressed as “Stanley.”

  Locations are provided by the Folio for only two plays. Eighteenth-century editors, working in an age of elaborately realistic stage sets, were the first to provide detailed locations. Given that Shakespeare wrote for a bare stage and often an imprecise sense of place, we have relegated locations to the explanatory notes, where they are given at the beginning of each scene where the imaginary location is different from the one before. We have emphasized broad geographical settings rather than specifics of the kind that suggest anachronistically realistic staging. We have therefore avoided such niceties as “another room in the palace.”

  Act and Scene Divisions were provided in the Folio in a much more thoroughgoing way than in the Quartos. Sometimes, however, they were erroneous or omitted; corrections and additions supplied by editorial tradition are indicated by square brackets. Five-act division is based on a classical model, and act breaks provided the opportunity to replace the candles in the indoor Blackfriars playhouse which the King’s Men used after 1608, but Shakespeare did not necessarily think in terms of a five-part structure of dramatic composition. The Folio convention is that a scene ends when the stage is empty. Nowadays, partly under the influence of film, we tend to consider a scene to be a dramatic unit that ends with either a change of imaginary location or a significant passage of time within the narrative. Shakespeare’s fluidity of composition accords well with this convention, so in addition to act and scene numbers we provide a running scene count in the right margin at the beginning of each new scene, in the typeface used for editorial directions. Where there is a scene break caused by a momentary bare stage, but the location does not change and extra time does not pass, we use the convention running scene continues. There is inevitably a degree of editorial judgment in making such calls, but the system is very valuabl
e in suggesting the pace of the plays.

  Speakers’ Names are often inconsistent in Folio. We have regularized speech headings, but retained an element of deliberate inconsistency in entry directions, in order to give the flavor of Folio. For the sake of clarity, RICHARD is always so-called in his speech headings, though in the first half of the play he is sometimes addressed as “Gloucester” and in the Folio text of the second half some of his speeches are headed “King.”

  Verse is indicated by lines that do not run to the right margin and by capitalization of each line. The Folio printers sometimes set verse as prose, and vice versa (either out of misunderstanding or for reasons of space). We have silently corrected in such cases, although in some instances there is ambiguity, in which case we have leaned toward the preservation of Folio layout. Folio sometimes uses contraction (“turnd” rather than “turnèd”) to indicate whether or not the final “-ed” of a past participle is sounded, an area where there is variation for the sake of the five-beat iambic pentameter rhythm. We use the convention of a grave accent to indicate sounding (thus “turnèd” would be two syllables), but would urge actors not to overstress. In cases where one speaker ends with a verse half line and the next begins with the other half of the pentameter, editors since the late eighteenth century have indented the second line. We have abandoned this convention, since the Folio does not use it, and nor did actors’ cues in the Shakespearean theater. An exception is made when the second speaker actively interrupts or completes the first speaker’s sentence.

  Spelling is modernized, but older forms are occasionally maintained where necessary for rhythm or aural effect.

  Punctuation in Shakespeare’s time was as much rhetorical as grammatical. “Colon” was originally a term for a unit of thought in an argument. The semicolon was a new unit of punctuation (some of the Quartos lack them altogether). We have modernized punctuation throughout, but have given more weight to Folio punctuation than many editors, since, though not Shakespearean, it reflects the usage of his period. In particular, we have used the colon far more than many editors: it is exceptionally useful as a way of indicating how many Shakespearean speeches unfold clause by clause in a developing argument that gives the illusion of enacting the process of thinking in the moment. We have also kept in mind the origin of punctuation in classical times as a way of assisting the actor and orator: the comma suggests the briefest of pauses for breath, the colon a middling one, and a full stop or period a longer pause. Semicolons, by contrast, belong to an era of punctuation that was only just coming in during Shakespeare’s time and that is coming to an end now: we have accordingly only used them where they occur in our copy texts (and not always then). Dashes are sometimes used for parenthetical interjections where the Folio has brackets. They are also used for interruptions and changes in train of thought. Where a change of addressee occurs within a speech, we have used a dash preceded by a full stop (or occasionally another form of punctuation). Often the identity of the respective addressees is obvious from the context. When it is not, this has been indicated in a marginal stage direction.

  Entrances and Exits are fairly thorough in Folio, which has accordingly been followed as faithfully as possible. Where characters are omitted or corrections are necessary, this is indicated by square brackets (e.g. “[and Attendants]”). Exit is sometimes silently normalized to Exeunt and Manet anglicized to “remains.” We trust Folio positioning of entrances and exits to a greater degree than most editors.

  Editorial Stage Directions such as stage business, asides, indications of addressee and of characters’ position on the gallery stage are only used sparingly in Folio. Other editions mingle directions of this kind with original Folio and Quarto directions, sometimes marking them by means of square brackets. We have sought to distinguish what could be described as directorial interventions of this kind from Folio-style directions (either original or supplied) by placing them in the right margin in a smaller typeface. There is a degree of subjectivity about which directions are of which kind, but the procedure is intended as a reminder to the reader and the actor that Shakespearean stage directions are often dependent upon editorial inference alone and are not set in stone. We also depart from editorial tradition in sometimes admitting uncertainty and thus printing permissive stage directions, such as an Aside? (often a line may be equally effective as an aside or a direct address—it is for each production or reading to make its own decision) or a may exit or a piece of business placed between arrows to indicate that it may occur at various different moments within a scene.

  Line Numbers are editorial, for reference and to key the explanatory and textual notes.

  Explanatory Notes explain allusions and gloss obsolete and difficult words, confusing phraseology, occasional major textual cruces, and so on. Particular attention is given to nonstandard usage, bawdy innuendo, and technical terms (e.g. legal and military language). Where more than one sense is given, commas indicate shades of related meaning, slashes alternative or double meanings.

  Textual Notes at the end of the play indicate major departures from the Folio. They take the following form: the reading of our text is given in bold and its source given after an equals sign, with “Q” indicating that it derives from the First Quarto and “Ed” that it derives from the editorial tradition. The rejected Folio (“F”) reading is then given. Thus, for example, at 2.1.108 “at = Q. F = and” means that the Folio compositor erroneously printed “and,” which does not make sense in context, so we have adopted Quarto “at.”

  KEY FACTS

  MAJOR PARTS: (with percentage of lines/number of speeches/scenes on stage) Richard III/Duke of Gloucester (32%/301/14), Duke of Buckingham (10%/91/11), Queen Elizabeth (7%/98/6), Queen Margaret (6%/33/2), George, Duke of Clarence (5%/33/3), Lady Anne (5%/51/3), Lord Hastings (4%/47/8), Duchess of York (4%/43/4), Henry, Earl of Richmond (4%/14/3), Lord Stanley, Earl of Derby (3%/32/9), King Edward IV (2%/ll/l), Sir William Catesby (2%/31/9), Earl Rivers (2%/24/5), Edward, Prince of Wales (l%/19/2), Richard, Duke of York (l%/21/2).

  LINGUISTIC MEDIUM: 98% verse, 2% prose.

  DATE: 1592? 1594? Must follow the Henry VI plays, so perhaps written shortly before the theaters were closed due to plague in June 1592. Alteration of the chronicle sources to flatter Lord Stanley, Earl of Derby, has led some scholars to suppose that the play was written for the acting company of Lord Strange’s Men, active at this time, whose patron was Stanley’s descendant. Alternatively, Shakespeare might have been writing for Pembroke’s Men in 1592: the text also includes brief praise of the Pembroke family name. Some scholars, by contrast, suppose the play to be Shakespeare’s first work for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the company formed after the post-plague reopening of the theaters in summer 1594. Support for this view might come from the way in which the play was clearly written as a showcase for Richard Burbage, the Chamberlain’s leading man.

  SOURCES: The main source for the representation of Richard as a hunchbacked villain is Sir Thomas More’s History of King Richard III (c.1513). Since More was writing at the court of King Henry VIII, son of Henry VII, who defeated Richard at Bosworth Field, he had a vested interest in portraying Richard as unfavorably as possible. He got much of his information from Bishop Morton of Ely, a bitter enemy of Richard. More’s account was incorporated in the major Tudor chronicles; Shakespeare probably read it via Edward Hall’s Union of the Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and York (1548). He may also have consulted Holinshed and one or more other chronicles. The historical poem sequence known as The Mirror for Magistrates (1559, expanded 1563) seems to have shaped Shakespeare’s treatment of the Clarence plot. The relationship to an anonymous drama The True Tragedie of Richard the Third (registered for publication June 1594, poorly printed) is unclear: it seems to have been an older play, belonging to the Queen’s Men, that was perhaps published to cash in on the success of Shakespeare’s version.

  TEXT: Quarto edition, 1597, with title advertising the content of the play: The Tragedy
of King Richard the third. Containing, His treacherous Plots against his brother Clarence: the pittiefull murther of his innocent nephewes: his tyrannicall vsurpation: with the whole course of his detested life, and most deserued death. As it hath beene lately Acted by the Right honorable the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants. Reprinted 1598, with Shakespeare’s name on the title page (one of the first printed plays to be so attributed), and again in 1602, 1605, 1612, 1622, 1629, 1634, indicating the play’s popularity. Each Quarto was reprinted from the last, with some errors and occasional editorial correction. The 1623 Folio text derives from an independent manuscript that differed substantially from the Quarto tradition, though the Sixth Quarto and to a lesser extent the Third Quarto were consulted in its preparation. There has been much scholarly debate over the sources and relationship of the two texts: their relationship and relative authority has been justifiably described as the most difficult textual problem in all Shakespeare. It appears that the Folio, though printed much later, reflects an earlier version of the play. The Folio text is about 200 lines longer than the Quarto, a difference more probably due to Quarto cutting and streamlining than Folio expansion. The Quarto has just under 40 lines that are not in Folio. There are hundreds of variants of wording. The Folio text is generally more coherent; some of the difficulties of the Quarto have been attributed to “memorial reconstruction” by actors, but current scholarship questions this view. Though Folio has many deficiencies, some imported from the Quarto tradition and others introduced by the compositors, it requires less editorial intervention to render it comprehensible and theatrically workable. It has been the copy text for most, though not all, scholarly editions, as it is for ours, in accordance with our Folio-based policy.

  THE TRAGEDY OF