Richard III (Vol. 39) | E. Pearlman (essay date 1992)
E. Pearlman (essay date 1992)
SOURCE: "The Invention of Richard of Gloucester," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 4, Winter, 1992, pp. 410-29.
[In the following essay, Pearlman describes Shakespeare 's development of Richard III from a lifeless character in 2 Henry VI to a fascinating entity in Richard III as the result of the influence of the ideas of jealousy and of the competition between brothers. ]
The chronology of Shakespeare's earliest plays is so uncertain that it is impossible to describe with any confidence the process by which the playwright learned to transmute the raw theatrical materials available to him in 1590 into the refined works he was able to produce less than a decade later. When Shakespeare first began to put to good use what he would modestly call his "rough, and all-vnable Pen," he had already absorbed a variety of deeply rooted theatrical genres. As a youth in Stratford, he had almost...
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