[In the following excerpt, Fergusson describes Richard III as an early masterpiece combining contemporary political attitudes about the monarchy with skilled stagecraft.]

Richard III was written about 1592 and was one of Shakespeare's first big successes. Though it has a great deal of political and psychological wisdom, it is essentially a melodrama, full of sardonic humor and of the youthful Shakespeare's delight in thunderous language. It has fascinated audiences since its first appearance on Shakespeare's own stage.

It is the story and the character of Richard himself that give the play its extraordinary theatrical vitality. The Tudor historians had created the popular image of Richard as a heartless villain, and at least two plays had been written about him, before Shakespeare wrote his play. Modern historians criticize the Tudor interpretation of King Richard, but Shakespeare accepted it with gusto, making him a horrible example of mischief in high places. His Richard, when played with the right smiling and demoniac energy, enthralls us still, whether we know anything about English history or not.

Shakespeare's patriotic audience, however, would have found Richard's story absorbing not only because of Richard but because it marks the turning point in the bloody narrative of the English crown. Richard appears at the end of Henry VI's "disastrous reign" as the visible epitome of that savage moment, as his own House of York returns to power. But it is Edward, not Richard, who becomes king:

Now is the winter of my discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York,

as he sardonically remarks at the beginning of this play. While he lives he will dominate the scene, but everyone in Shakespeare's audience knew that he would be defeated, at last, by Henry Tudor, who would become king as Henry VII, and the grandfather of the great Elizabeth herself.

It is Richard's own relatives that stand in his way, and he proceeds with the greatest enthusiasm and dexterity to get rid of them one by one. The King obligingly dies, but Richard has to arrange the murders of his brother Clarence, of the Queen's kinsmen, of his lukewarm follower Hastings, and finally of the little Princes. He marries Anne to settle the Lancastrian claim to the throne, and he fools and bullies the Londoners into accepting him as king. All of this he accomplishes in the first three acts.

Shakespeare makes Richard understandable as the deformed child who becomes a spiritually distorted man, and takes savage and ironically smiling vengeance upon the world for his misfortune. But he was more interested in the theatrical effectiveness of such a character than in trying to account for him psychologically. His Richard is the heartless villain of Senecan melodrama, who at the same time has the humor and intelligence to see himself as the "Vice" of the old morality plays, a figure traditionally played for laughs. Richard onstage can satisfy our savage instincts, and also our appetite for huge Aristophanic farce.

The princes and nobles around Richard lack his fascination, and they have none of the human depth of Shakespeare's later characters. But there is a great political wisdom in Shakespeare's picture of their dangerous struggle for power. They are always trying to guide their policies according to the party they believe to be the strongest. They make friends solely in order to get ahead, and instantly betray them when it serves their purpose. They are in fact the typical "palace guard" as it appears in every generation around the center of power; but in this case their struggles acquire the cruel color of Richard's personality. They are just what old Margaret calls them: "wrangling pirates."

The central story of the play is of course that of Richard, but Shakespeare does not forget the wider theme which unites Richard III with the other histories, that of England and her longed-for peace. The widowed Margaret, the old Duchess of York, Edward's widow, Elizabeth, and Richard's unwilling wife, Anne, are on hand to bewail the bloody treacheries and to pray for England's deliverance. And we are given glimpses of the common people, who know very well that their rulers, as they tear each other to pieces, are also destroying the England of the humble folk. These motifs make a dark background for Richard's impudent successes, and prepare us for the more solemn ending of the play.

We hear the "wailing Queens" for the first time in Act I, scene 3. They return in force at the end of Act IV (scene 4). Old Margaret notes with gusto that her dire predictions are being fulfilled:

So now prosperity begins to mellow,
  And drop into the rotten mouth of death.

Her longest speech runs to thirty-four lines, and the other wailing Queens are not far behind her. The scenes of women's lamentation strike the modern reader as much too long, and they are always cut in production. They have, like so much of the play, the formality of the "classical" plays which were written in imitation of Seneca. Even the violent disputes are often formal, like Richard's with Anne in Act I, scene 2, or with Elizabeth in Act IV, scene 4. The antagonists have a sharp exchange of single lines, the so-called stichomythia:

RICHARD

Infer fair England's peace by this alliance.

ELIZABETH

Which she shall purchase with still-lasting war.

RICHARD

Tell her, the King that may command, entreats.

ELIZABETH

That at her hands which the King's King forbids.

Such fights are like operatic duets, and the Queens' prolonged curses are like operatic arias, or Senecan choruses. The Elizabethans apparently relished the form itself, as one may relish the "form" of a good boxer; but to us they are likely to seem merely artificial. That, however, should not obscure the underlying theatrical power of the "wailing" scenes. There is more anger than self-pity in the women's tirades, and the joy of anger is infectious:

ELIZABETH

O thou well skilled in curses, stay awhile,
And teach me how to curse mine enemies.

MARGARET

Forbear to sleep the night, and fast the day;
Compare dead happiness with living woe;
Think that thy babes were sweeter than they were.

There is humor here, as well as pathos; part of the fun of the play is in its resounding curses.

The scenes of the common people, contrasting with the Queens' high style, are deflated and realistic. The thug whom Richard has hired to murder brother George of Clarence is bothered by his conscience:

I'll not meddle with it, it makes a man a coward. A man cannot steal, but it accuseth him. A man cannot swear, but it checks him. A man cannot lie with his neighbour's wife, but it detects him. . . . every man that means to live well endeavours to trust to himself, and to live without it.

The murderer slyly speaks for the audience, who can recognize in what he says their own dealings with their consciences. He also describes the action of the play, in which everyone (reflecting Richard's style) gets rid of his conscience and trusts to himself alone in the struggle for power. The citizens know just what is going on throughout. In Act II, scene 3, after Edward's death, they see clearly what will happen with a child on the throne. In Act III, scene 6, the Scrivener, on his way to post a notice of Hastings' execution, understands that Richard has liquidated another man who stood in his way: "Who is so gross / That cannot see this palpable device?" Even when the Londoners give Richard the crown they are not really fooled. The common people are close to the meaning of the play as Shakespeare saw it; they express both its sardonic and its serious aspects.

The turning point comes at the end of Act III, when Richard gets the crown. He must now take the consequences of his crimes. His follower, Stanley, looks for a way to leave him; Buckingham, his chief ally, runs away and starts a rebellion; Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, approaches from France with an army.

At this point Richard himself changes, as though his inspiration had left him. He does not rejoice in his old devilish way when the Londoners make him king. When he bullies Elizabeth into granting him her daughter's hand he lacks the comic verve he displayed in the similar scene (Act I, scene 2) when he wooed and won the Lady Anne. These scenes are psychologically convincing; Richard's pleasure, we see, was in the savage game of power, and once he has the prize he realizes that, if he is to keep it, he has nothing to look forward to but more crimes. But this change is hard to put over in performance. The audience misses its evil clown, and Shakespeare is not prepared to show us the depths of Richard's failure. Richard says (Act IV, scene 2):

  But I am in
So far in blood, that sin will pluck on sin.

We are reminded of Macbeth's terrible line (Act III, scene 4 of that play):

I am in blood
Stepped in so far, that should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.

Macbeth's words convey the very essence of weariness and stale horror, while what Richard says merely gives us the facts of his situation. When Shakespeare wrote this play he had not yet attained his full poetic power, or his full vision of evil and its effects on the human psyche. Richard, in his fall, does not hold us with the tragic pity and terror of Macbeth,

Shakespeare, however, does not expect him to. To carry the end of the play he counts less on Richard than upon the patriotic theme of the whole sequence of histories, and it is, of course, Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, who announces the stirring finale. Listen to the military music of his speech (Act V, scene 2):

Fellows in arms, and my most loving friends,
Bruised underneath the yoke of tyranny,
Thus far into the bowels of the land
Have we marched on without impediment. . . .

The wretched, bloody, and usurping boar,
That spoiled your summer fields and fruitful vines,

Swills your warm blood like wash, and makes his trough
  In your embowelled bosoms, this foul swine
Lies now even in the centre of this isle . . .

In God's name cheerly on, courageous friends,
  To reap the harvest of perpetual peace
By this one bloody trial of sharp war.

The fifth act is all based on the famous battle of Bosworth Field, which to Shakespeare's audience meant the beginning of England's health and "perpetual peace." It is a formal set-piece, which concludes both this play and the sequence which began with Henry VI, Part 1. The feeling is almost religious, and the style is allegorical. The battle—like so many battles in Shakespeare—has some of the meaning of the medieval "ordeal" in which the rival champions, submitting their causes to the "arbitrement of war," fought in order to discover the will of God. Richard sets up his tent on one side of the stage, Richmond sets up his on the other side. On the night before the battle, the ghosts of the Princes whom Richard has murdered come to curse him and foretell his doom, while they give Richmond

The sweetest sleep, and fairest-boding dreams,
  That ever entered in a drowsy head.

In the morning each champion addresses his soldiers. Richmond invokes God and England's patron saint, Saint George, while Richard appeals to fear, hatred, and the joys of fighting. The old Richard flashes forth here at the end, and when he yells the famous line, "My kingdom for a horse!" we sympathize even as we rejoice in his death. So Shakespeare ends his story, absorbing it into the wider theme of England triumphant.

Richard III is a masterpiece of Shakespeare's youth. It does not have the depth or the haunting poetry of Macbeth, but we feel in it the great tragedies to come. Some of it is too elaborately rhetorical for our taste; yet the theatrical power of its fierce humor is irresistible, and its political wisdom applies to our own or any time.