SOURCE: “Plots and Prophecies—The Tragedy of King Richard the Third,” in Unconformities in Shakespeare's History Plays, The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1982, pp. 53-71.

[In the following essay, Smidt studies the role of dreams, prophesies, and curses in Richard III, demonstrating the way in which these devices structure the play.]

In dramatic method Richard III is the most non-realistic of Shakespeare's history plays, not excepting Richard II. It has even been called ‘the most stridently theatrical’ of all his plays.¹ In a sense it is a metadrama in which a self-styled villain conspires with the spectators to produce a black comedy and himself plays a variety of roles in order to deceive and discomfit the other members of the cast. This actor-villain speaks a total of 166 lines (i.e. about 4.5 per cent of the play's dialogue) in soliloquy or in direct address to the audience. He is seconded in his histrionics by one (Buckingham) who ‘can counterfeit the deep tragedian’; and he does, in fact, deceive everyone else, including his coadjutor when it comes to the point. Everyone, that is to say, except two old women. One is his mother.

Ah, that deceit should steal such gentle shape
And with a virtuous visor hide deep vice!

(II.ii.27-8)

exclaims the Duchess of York in answer to her grandson's innocent description of Richard. The other woman, who is not quite so elderly (though Richard calls her a ‘withered hag’) is the spirit of Revenge, Queen Margaret. For Margaret, like Richard, is an unrealistic character. She appears from nowhere, or France, to darken the dialogue with her mutterings and curses but has no physical business with the happenings of the play. In addition to her there are supernatural omens and apparitions, a bleeding corpse, a stumbling horse, a sun which apparently shines on one army and not on the other, and a procession of ghosts. There is a chorus of lamenting women and children, a repeated matching of griefs and grievances, a conspicuous use of stichomythia. There are two parallel wooing scenes and a number of parallel execution scenes. There are also attempts to render simultaneous action in two places, twice by interrupting almost continuous events at Westminster with scenes of death elsewhere (Clarence and the lords at Pomfret) and once, more remarkably, by pitching the tents of the opposing army leaders on the stage both at once and watching them alternately.

Much has been written about the formal patterning of Richard III. Irving Ribner has emphasised its indebtedness to Seneca and to the morality tradition, as well as to Shakespeare's more immediate forerunner, Christopher Marlowe. After enumerating the Senecan elements of the play—‘the villain-hero with his self-revealing soliloquies, the revenge motif, the ghosts, the stichomythic dialogue, and not least, the abundant echoes of Seneca's own plays’—Ribner declares: ‘The dominating figure of the Senecan villain-hero gives to Richard III a unity which the Henry VI plays lacked.’ The morality tradition, he says, ‘is carried on in the ritual technique with which Richard III abounds’. And he instances the wooing of Anne and the murder of Clarence as acts which are ‘handled in ritual fashion’. With Schelling he sees ‘the great choral scene of lamentation’ in IV.iv as ‘reproducing … the nature and function of the Greek choric ode’, while ‘the parallel orations of Richmond and Richard before the final battle’ also ‘serve a ritualistic function’.²

Ribner does not exaggerate. Ritual formalism pervades the play from beginning to end. It is apparent, too, as M. M. Reese has pointed out, in ‘its controlling pattern of Nemesis and revenge’, in the way in which ‘each successive blow of fate is the fulfilment of a curse, until at last the bleeding country is rescued by its foreordained deliverer’.³ In fact the most significant departure from realistic convention, with its frequent stress on the role of accident, is the extent to which everything that happens is exactly foretold before it happens. Shakespeare made liberal use of prediction in all his history plays, but never as much as in Richard III. This play is a web of stated intentions, curses, prophecies, and dreams, and practically all expectations are punctually fulfilled. A. P. Rossiter and Wolfgang Clemen have both admirably explored this aspect of the play,⁴ but it will still bear further scrutiny.

Only two minutes after Richard, Duke of Gloucester, has entered solus he informs us that he is ‘determined to prove a villain’, and, he goes on,

Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the King
In deadly hate the one against the other;

(I.i.32-5)

Richard's ‘plots’, ‘prophecies’, and ‘dreams’ in themselves foreshadow the mode of the remainder of the play. His pretended prophecy that a certain ‘G’ will be the murderer of King Edward's heirs proves more true than the victims of the deceit, Clarence and Edward, suspect, but Richard knows already, and we know, that the G stands for Gloucester and not for George. He speaks the truth though with forked tongue. And he never keeps his audience in the dark.⁵

Richard is himself no prophet. But he is a man of iron will and unscrupulous performance coupled with exceptional gifts of persuasion and dissimulation. What he resolves to do he does, and his confidence in telling us of his intentions leaves no room for doubt that they will be carried out successfully. We know before the event that Clarence will be imprisoned and murdered (I.i.32-40, 119-20), that Richard will marry Anne (I.i.153), that he will have his revenge on Rivers, Vaughan, and Grey (I.iii.332),⁶ that something will be done ‘To draw the brats of Clarence out of sight’ and to get rid of the princes in the Tower (III.v.106-8, IV.ii.61), that he will do away with Anne and woo Elizabeth (IV.ii.57-61). All this is revealed in soliloquies, and Richard further confides in us about the success of his undertakings (IV.iii.36-43). In addition, of course, he conspires with Buckingham and his more inferior associates and gives instructions to his hired assassins on two occasions. We know what will happen to Hastings if he does not fall in with Richard's plans, and we know exactly what lies and pretences Richard will use to gain the support of the citizens of London for his coronation. Practically all the plot of the play until near the end of the fourth act is contained in Richard's stated intentions.

These intentions are for the most part reinforced by Margaret's curses and prophecies, since Richard turns on those of his own side and consequently his enemies are hers. In the great cursing scene of Act I, Margaret predicts no fewer than thirteen misfortunes relating to King Edward, his son, Queen Elizabeth, her children, Rivers, Hastings, Richard, and Buckingham. There is even a certain amount of detail in her curses: King Edward is to die ‘by surfeit’ and the Prince of Wales by ‘untimely violence’, the queen is to outlive her glory and her children and see another ‘decked in [her] rights’. ‘The day will come’, Margaret warns Elizabeth,

                              that thou shalt wish for me
To help thee curse this poisonous bunch-backed toad.

(I.iii.244-5)

As for Richard, she is unsparing in her depiction of punishments for him, especially, as Tillyard points out, the curse of insomnia:

If heaven have any grievous plague in store
Exceeding those that I can wish upon thee,
O let them keep it till thy sins be ripe,
And then hurl down their indignation
On thee, the troubler of the poor world's peace!
The worm of conscience still begnaw thy soul!
Thy friends suspect for traitors while thou liv'st,
And take deep traitors for thy dearest friends!
No sleep close up that deadly eye of thine,
Unless it be while some tormenting dream
Affrights thee with a hell of ugly devils!

(I.iii.216-26)

Margaret's curses are no mere displays of clairvoyance but obviously potent agents in bringing about the events which she prophesies, and as they come to pass this is recognised in turn by the victims—all but Richard. As Grey goes to his execution at Pomfret he remarks to Rivers,

Now Margaret's curse is fallen upon our heads,
When she exclaimed on Hastings, you, and I,
For standing by when Richard stabbed her son.

(III.iii.14-16)

Similarly Hastings, Queen Elizabeth, and Buckingham⁷ all remember her words in their hour of distress, and Margaret herself tots up the score of her victories in the great lamenting scene of Act IV.

Margaret is the chief and most vociferous but by no means the only prophet and author of curses in the play. She herself is first prompted by Richard's reminder of his father's curse denounced against Margaret at the time of his death (I.iii.173-95). If ‘York's dread curse prevail[ed] so much with heaven’, then she must try the same means of revenge. The Duchess of York and Elizabeth take a lesson from Margaret, and the duchess utters violent imprecations against Richard to which Elizabeth says amen (IV.iv.188-98). Anne in the second scene of the tragedy curses the murderer of her husband and father-in-law and prays to God to revenge King Henry's death. Unwittingly she involves herself in her baneful wishes by hypothetically including the wife of the murderer. She remembers this when her misery is complete, just as Buckingham in the reconciliation scene swears an oath which recoils on himself and remembers it on the day of his execution.⁸ Even Richard, in the second wooing scene, swears against himself and is probably too sceptical to realise that his maledictions will be most precisely honoured:

                                        Myself myself confound!
Heaven and fortune bar me happy hours!
Day, yield me not thy light, nor, night, thy rest!

(IV.iv.399-401)

After his night of agony and confused awakening, the sun ‘disdains to shine’ on him on the day of battle. Vaughan and Hastings before being beheaded foretell the downfall of their judges. The ghosts, of course, add their full share of cursing. And Richmond, on Bosworth field, prays that he and his forces may be God's ‘ministers of chastisement’.

Prayers are mostly for chastisement and revenge, and blessings are as rare in Richard III as imprecations are plentiful. Clarence prays for his wife and children, the hoodwinked mayor invokes God's blessing on Richard when the latter agrees to accept the crown, Dorset exits to Brittany with the Duchess of York's benediction (she also rather futilely sends her good wishes with Anne and Elizabeth), Stanley blesses Richmond ‘by attorney’ from his mother, and of course the ghosts whisper encouragements to Richmond in his sleep. But the only time Richard talks of blessings is when he hypocritically craves one of his mother and makes fun of her admonishments (II.ii.106-11).

Dreams are almost as important as curses and prayers and equally prophetic. Richard uses invented dreams to set Edward against Clarence, Clarence appropriately dreams of drowning and of being tormented in hell, Stanley dreams symbolically of being executed by Richard along with Hastings, and Richard and Richmond dream on the eve of battle of defeat and victory. Hastings sceptically laughs at Stanley's being so simple as ‘to trust the mockery of unquiet slumbers’ (III.ii.27) but learns to his cost that Stanley was right. And Richard, who is outwardly the least superstitious of all the characters in the play, is plagued nightly after Margaret's curse by the phantom horrors it promises. As Clemen remarks, ‘There is the feeling of fear and uncertainty running like a keynote through almost all the scenes of the play and finding expression in various characters and ways.’⁹ So general is the mood of fearsome divination that even the anonymous citizens in II.iii, commenting on the death of King Edward, are inspired with prophetic forebodings.

Two prophecies originating in a time prior to the action of the play have to do with its decisive events. One is Henry's intuition, referred to by Richard in IV.ii.94-5, ‘that Richmond should be king’, the other the vision of ‘a bard of Ireland’ mentioned by Richard almost in the same breath that he (Richard) ‘should not live long after [he] saw Richmond’. Like these last two, all the prophecies in the play come true with only a few, mostly questionable, exceptions.¹⁰ Dorset, if he was ever meant to be included in Richard's revenge and in Margaret's curse, completely escapes them both, and Queen Elizabeth saves at least two of her children and will be the mother of a new queen.¹¹ Stanley, too, escapes in spite of his ominous dream, though he is long kept on tenterhooks both for his own safety and his son's. But the most interesting case of non-fulfilment relates to the despair invoked on their destroyer by the ghosts of Richard's victims. The word ‘despair’ (and ‘despairing’) is uttered no fewer than twelve times in their maledictions, and we cannot forget that it had a very definite implication. To die in despair was to die without hope of salvation, especially by one's own hand.¹² In his anguished soliloquy after the spectral visitation, Richard cries out, ‘I shall despair. There is no creature loves me;’ but there is no hint of despair in the last words he speaks in the tragedy, just before his death is reported; in fact his courage is unabated as long as we see him:

Slave, I have set my life upon a cast,
And I will stand the hazard of the die.
I think there be six Richmonds in the field;
Five have I slain today instead of him.
A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!

(V.iv.9-13)

Perhaps he should be understood to be desperately minded though he does not betray the fact or perhaps even realise it himself. But the ghosts are quite specific in referring their curses to the moment of his defeat and summoning fear and guilt to unman him:

Tomorrow in the battle think on me,
And fall thy edgeless sword; despair and die!

(V.iii.135-6)

Think upon Vaughan and with guilty fear
Let fall thy lance; despair, and die!

(V.iii.143-4)

O, in the battle think on Buckingham,
And die in terror of thy guiltiness!
Dream on, dream on, of bloody deeds and death.
Fainting, despair; despairing, yield thy breath!

(V.iii.170-3)

It would be in keeping with the pattern of anagnorisis which pervades the play if Richard, too, had his moment of recognition. In The True Tragedie of Richard the third we see considerably more of Richard's despair, and though he is courageous to the end as in Shakespeare's play, he recognises in his very last words that he will be ‘among the damned soules’. Since so many prophecies are so exactly fulfilled in Richard III one must necessarily wonder why this one is not. Could it be that the ghosts were not in the author's first draft, or else that that draft had a scene in which Richard's despair was actually shown? Strong arguments can be advanced for at least the former explanation.

In Shakespeare's main source, Hall's chronicle, the ghosts are only anonymous ‘ymages lyke terrible develles’ and Hall puts no words in their mouths. In The True Tragedie Richard's dreams are troubled by the ghosts of Clarence, the young princes, and ‘the headlesse Peeres’ which come ‘gaping for revenge’, but they make no visible appearance in the play, except for Clarence's ghost in the Prologue. It would be only natural if Shakespeare's initial impulse was to follow his sources. And there are indications in the texts of Richard III pointing to an early state in which the apparitions were not actually staged. Thus both Richard and Richmond adequately (from a dramatic point of view) describe their dreams after awaking, in passages which were obviously meant to be parallel and contrasting. The parallelism becomes particularly evident if Richard's lines, instead of awkwardly concluding his terrified soliloquy, as they do in the extant texts (V.iii.205-7), are transferred a few lines down to his dialogue with Ratcliffe, thus:¹³

O Ratcliffe, I have dreamed a fearful dream!
Methought the souls of all that I had murdered
Came to my tent, and every one did threat
Tomorrow's vengeance on the head of Richard.

Similarly Richmond tells his friends:

The sweetest sleep, and fairest-boding dreams
That ever entered in a drowsy head
Have I since your departure had, my lords.
Methought their souls whose bodies Richard murdered
Came to my tent and cried on victory.

(V.iii.228-32)

Whether or not the ghosts were in fact added at a later stage of composition, it at least seems reasonably certain that they were not all included at once. A number of peculiarities point to this conclusion: 1. The ghosts of Anne and Buckingham tell the sleepers to dream on after they have been called on by the ghosts of the ‘headless peers’ to awake. 2. Prior to the dream scene there are preparatory invocations of all the ghosts except those of Clarence, Anne, and Buckingham.¹⁴ 3. The order in which the ghosts of the princes appear in the first quarto differs from that of the third quarto and subsequent editions, including the Folio. 4. Clarence speaks not only for himself but for ‘the wronged heirs of York’, which would include the princes. 5. Anne is made to repeat the exact wording of Clarence's curse: ‘Tomorrow in the battle think on me, / And fall thy edgeless sword; despair and die! (V.iii.163-4). There are no other comparable repetitions in the string of curses.¹⁵

What would seem to have happened is that Shakespeare first introduced the ghosts of Prince Edward, King Henry VI, Clarence, the Pomfret peers, and Hastings, in the order in which their deaths occurred in his own plays. Then he, or someone else, added the remainder—the two princes, Anne, and Buckingham—for good measure. And I am inclined to think ‘someone else’, since the placing of the princes was somehow bungled, since the contradiction between the injunctions to awake and to sleep on went unnoticed, and since Anne's curse is a mere repetition of Clarence's. In any case, and this of course is what I have been leading up to, if some or even all of the ghosts were not part of the original plan for this scene, the forecast of Richard's despair in the battle scene would not be nearly as marked as it eventually became.

The alternative explanation of the non-fulfilment of the ghosts' curses, viz. that the original version contained a scene in which Richard was actually shown to die in despair, is perhaps less likely, but it is strange in any case that the extant texts do not contain a single verbal exchange between the two antagonists Richard and Richmond. As in The True Tragedie, if we can trust the surviving version of that play, the defeat and death of Richard is given merely in dumb show. Shakespeare's tragedy has the brief stage direction: ‘Alarum, Enter Richard and Richmond, they fight, Richard is slaine.’ Obviously there is opportunity here for a variety of theatrical interpretations consonant with the curses. Nothing is actually said about Richard being supernaturally overtaken by impotence at the end, and it rather looks as if Richmond was meant to show his prowess by overcoming the tyrant in physical combat. But it seems just possible that a different solution was once intended.

We are still free to reject both these explanations, and in any other play there would be nothing very unusual in finding anticipations created only to be ignored. In the majority of such cases most readers and spectators will hardly notice that there has been a deception. And this may be the one instance in Richard III where Shakespeare allowed an important prophecy to lapse in order to have it both ways: we are made to think of Richard as desperate, but we actually see him fighting courageously to his last gasp.

The plot of Richard's rise and fall is extremely simple. Step by step and according to plan he climbs towards his goal, securing the supports he needs and removing the obstacles in his path ruthlessly and systematically. Anne is a mere object to mount on, Clarence, Clarence's children, and Edward's sons are swept from the line of succession, the queen's kinsmen and friends and Edward's loyal Lord Chamberlain are likewise eliminated. Only once is he dependent on fortune rather than on his own will: in the death of Edward. But even this event is made to seem part of his scheming, as it is part of Margaret's witchcraft. Richard is on the Wheel of Fortune and while it rises on his side he turns it, directing all events. It reaches the top and slows down at his coronation and the murder of the princes. The downward movement is signalised by the first mention of Richmond, which puts Richard in mind of the prophecies of Henry VI and the Irish bard, and by the defection of Buckingham. For a while he is able to stave off disaster. He even shows some of his old spirit in the wooing of Elizabeth. He captures Buckingham and has him executed. But as the descending wheel gathers momentum he loses control, and his fall is rapid: there is not a word spoken between him and Richmond as they fight and ‘the bloody dog’ is slain.

Seen in this way, the plot has a figurative and emblematic dimension. And Richard's great antagonist in this dimension is Margaret, who long plays his game for him in the external conflict but secretly torments him and finally drives him to destruction. She is mainly activated by personal revenge, but in her own way she prolongs the Wars of the Roses, which are temporarily over after the death of Henry VI but of which there are frequent reminders and which still have a symbolical importance, as both the beginning and the ending of the play testify. Two Lancastrian widows are the only remnants of opposition to York, until Richmond steps in. Poor Anne is quickly overcome, but Margaret fights on till she gets her revenge, constantly reminding us of past battles and crimes and claiming to be the rightful queen. Richmond wins the last battle of the Roses, but not till the conclusion of the play is he called ‘the true succeeder’ of his house, and it is never made clear how he is the succeeder except that he was designated by Henry VI. In any case he is more a concept than a character and comes to deliver England from a tyrant rather than to claim his own right. ‘In its context,’ says Reese, ‘the lifelessness of the character shows how seriously Shakespeare took him.’¹⁶

It is interesting to notice that the hired murderers of Clarence would have been taken for Lancastrians in a realistic context. Clarence is the object of God's vengeance, they tell him,

[Sec. Mur.] For false forswearing and for murder too:
Thou didst receive the sacrament to fight
In quarrel of the house of Lancaster.
[First Mur.] And like a traitor to the name of God
Didst break that vow, and with thy treacherous blade
Unrip'st the bowels of thy sovereign's son.

(I.iv.205-10)

The murderers, however, are obviously to be understood not just as Richard's hirelings but as ministers of the heavenly vengeance they invoke. We must allow for a certain amount of artificiality in their attitudes. Similarly with the wooing of Anne. The artificial convention established by Richard's soliloquy in the opening scene makes it unnecessary, even absurd, to look for psychological probability in her submission.¹⁷ This scene, too, has a strong element of symbolical conflict and resolution.

To what extent the figurative dimension of Richard III is also a religious dimension has been a matter of disagreement and extreme opinions. In 1944—and it is perhaps not irrelevant to observe that this was the year of the Normandy landings—E. M. W. Tillyard asserted that ‘Richard III is a very religious play’. ‘For the purposes of the tetralogy and most obviously for this play,’ he said, ‘Shakespeare accepted the prevalent belief that God had guided England into her haven of Tudor prosperity.’ This view was endorsed by Irving Ribner in the following decade, quoting Tillyard to the effect that ‘the primary purpose of the play … is to “display the working of God's plan to restore England to prosperity”’. And towards the end of the sixties it was amplified by E. A. J. Honigmann in his Penguin redaction of Richard III.¹⁸ Discussing what he calls ‘the play's two-phase movement’, Honigmann remarked:

We thus see that the gradual unfolding of a providential design against the individualist who set himself up against God's order necessitated emphasis upon character in the first part of the play, … and then upon plot in the second, where the author's design mirrors that of God. We see, further, that Richard's fake piety is not simply a delightful comic touch but prepares us for the central conflict of the play, in which Richard's mighty opposite is not the puppet Richmond but the King of kings.

On the other side of the debate M. M. Reese has maintained that ‘Richard III is an unremittingly earthy play’ and that ‘True recognition of a higher power is found only in Richmond, who is a visitant from another world’. And in a very anti-Tillyardian piece, ‘The World of Richard III’, A. L. French has not only rejected ‘the notion that the play is the climactic lesson taught by the Tudor Myth’ but has argued in some detail to prove that ‘The world of Richard III … is by and large the reverse of religious’.¹⁹

Faced with such contrary opinions it is tempting to take refuge in the usual compromise and declare with the immortal Sir Roger that much might be said on both sides. But in fact I find French's arguments most convincing. There can be no doubt that the idea of heavenly vengeance is central to both the main conflict and to the fates of individual characters like Clarence, Hastings, and Buckingham, but it does not touch anyone deeply and is in fact chiefly a means of energising prayers and curses. The chief minister of heavenly vengeance does not appear till near the end, and in the meantime Margaret represents heaven in a completely pagan spirit. The central conflict involves not so much Richard and God, as Honigmann has it, as Richard and Margaret.

This is on the symbolical level. But of course the play is enacted on a realistic level as well. And Richard is not just ‘the formal Vice, Iniquity’ of the morality tradition, there is a great deal of realistic detail in his portraiture. In the first place we are given a sound psychological explanation of his villainy, and though Elizabethans may not have known about inferiority complexes they would certainly understand the mechanisms of compensation:

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

(I.i.28-31)

In the second place there are hints that Richard does not, after all, tell us everything that goes on in his mind. He does not, for instance, reveal the ‘secret close intent’ which he must ‘reach unto’ by marrying Lady Anne (I.i.158-9) or the ‘divers unknown reasons’ why Anne should grant the ‘boon’ he asks of her (I.ii.217). Perhaps we are expected to realise that marrying Henry VI's daughter-in-law would put him in a stronger position to reach for the crown, perhaps we are meant to be mystified, or perhaps Shakespeare simply forgot to clear up the mystery.²⁰ Whatever the explanation, this bit of secretiveness on Richard's part adds a touch of humanity. He does not immediately tell us, either, later on, why his ‘kingdom stands on brittle glass’ unless he is married to his brother's daughter (IV.ii.59-60), and once more we sense an opaqueness which makes him all the more lifelike. But in this case an explanation is given shortly afterwards: he has learnt that ‘the Britain Richmond aims / At young Elizabeth’ and has to forestall him. One thing he really suppresses for a long time: his nightly torments. Only his wife Anne is able to bring them to our knowledge:

For never yet one hour in his bed
Did I enjoy the golden dew of sleep,
But with his timorous dreams was still awaked.

(IV.i.82-4; see also V.iii.161)

It is as if a mask of levity is whipped away and we suddenly see an agonised face behind it. There is another brief glimpse of that face as Richard commissions Tyrrel to dispose of his ‘Two deep enemies, / Foes to my rest and my sweet sleep's disturbers’ (IV.ii.71-2). And when we see Richard after the visitation of the spirits struggling to shake off the impression of his nightmare which has now fully invaded his consciousness we realise that he is not as entirely devoid of moral feeling as he is about to pretend at the commencement of the battle:

Let not our babbling dreams affright our souls;
Conscience is but a word that cowards use.

(V.iii.309-10)

Richard has reached a point where he is not even sure of his villain's role. He confounds himself according to the conditional oath he swore to Queen Elizabeth: ‘I am a villain. Yet I lie, I am not.’ This is psychological realism at Shakespeare's best. And it is supported by general behavioral attributes. Richard is always in a hurry, for instance. ‘Clarence hath not another day to live’, ‘go we to determine / Who … straight shall post to Ludlow’, ‘Then fiery expedition be my wing’, ‘And brief, good mother, for I am in haste’, ‘Come, bustle, bustle! Caparison my horse!’ The examples could be multiplied, and Shakespeare must have consciously endowed Richard with this urge for haste. He may even have associated it with the saying quoted after Gloucester by the young Duke of York: ‘Small herbs have grace; great weeds do grow apace’ (II.iv.13).²¹

On the realistic plot level Richard's chief antagonist is neither God nor Margaret but Queen Elizabeth and her ‘allies’, at least until Richmond takes over. Richard and Clarence in the first scene of the play speak of Elizabeth as the person who really rules the land: ‘We are the Queen's abjects, and must obey.’ Actually her role is fairly passive, as all but Richard's are. Since the initiative for action always comes from him until he is deserted by Buckingham, there is little conflict in the usual sense. We often see Elizabeth plaintive and in tears, and well she may complain, but she does stand up to Richard both at first and at the end, and is the last person to succumb to his force or persuasion. That she does genuinely succumb I see no reason to doubt, especially since both she and her daughter give their consent to Richard in The True Tragedie.²² But the capitulation is undeniably sudden after her long resistance. And the whole wooing scene is inordinately long, coming as it does just before the concluding phase of the action and having no influence on the plot as such. It includes the longest speech in the entire play, spoken by Richard and ending with a resounding climax which when it was first written may well have been meant to reduce Queen Elizabeth to submission:

Bound with triumphant garlands will I come
And lead thy daughter to a conqueror's bed;
To whom I will retail my conquest won,
And she shall be sole victoress, Cæsar's Cæsar.

(IV.iv.333-6)

The queen's ironical answer and the ensuing return to stichomythia are hardly what we expect after Richard's great display of eloquence. His long speech is omitted without trace in the quartos, probably as the result of abridgment, though it is tempting to think that the wooing scene as we have it in the Folio contains a conflation of alternative passages. I will not venture to suggest which parts of the scene were the author's first thoughts and which second, or which were meant for excision and which for retention, or whether indeed Shakespeare ever decided what to keep and reject, but the signs of complex composition are sufficiently clear. In a play as long as Richard III (it is almost as long as Hamlet, and the quarto version is not much shorter than the Folio) there may have been considerable indecision on the author's part as to what and how much to include. Some matter may have been discarded and some added in his efforts to arrive at a satisfactory structure and a suitable length; and the surviving texts may reflect a complicated process of drafting and revision, both substantive texts incorporating more than was eventually intended for stage performance.²³ But, not to digress too much, we may in any case be reasonably certain that Queen Elizabeth disappoints our expectations in the end and proves momentarily to be what Richard calls her, a ‘relenting fool, and shallow, changing woman’.

Richard's dealings with the Grey faction are internecine in that the Yorkists now fight among themselves. The chaos of civil war during the last phase of Henry VI's reign has degenerated further into a brutal struggle between brothers and relations in which all idealism has disappeared. The ‘glorious summer’ of York has been short, and York's widow grieves for her sons:

And being seated, and domestic broils
Clean overblown, themselves the conquerors
Make war upon themselves, brother to brother,
Blood to blood, self against self. O preposterous
And frantic outrage, end thy damned spleen.

(II.iv.60-4)

There is now no question of title to the crown, in fact Richard deliberately defies legitimacy and denies the rightful succession. Having ostensibly got Edward to do away with Clarence and then been favoured by the death of Edward, he fabricates stories of bastardy concerning both Edward and his children to prove himself next in line.

The plot is equally simple whether seen from a realistic or an emblematic point of view. But one tends to look more at the details, and there are more questions to be asked, in a realistic analysis. Why, for instance, do we never see Jane Shore? Or the Duchess of Clarence? Or Princess Elizabeth? Obviously there were limits to the number of women who could be put on the stage and there is a large number in Richard III as it is—four important characters, in addition to four children. But was Margaret strictly necessary?²⁴ Or the Duchess of York? Or (one could go on) even Lady Anne? Shakespeare must at least have faced a difficult choice in selecting his women.

In the case of Mistress Shore it does look as if he may have contemplated using her. At the very outset of the play she is spoken of as a person of great influence. Clarence remarks:

By heaven, I think there is no man secure
But the Queen's kindred, and night-walking heralds
That trudge betwixt the King and Mistress Shore.
Heard you not what an humble suppliant
Lord Hastings was to her for his delivery?

(I.i.71-5)²⁵

And Richard replies:

Humbly complaining to her deity
Got my Lord Chamberlain his liberty.
I'll tell you what, I think it is our way,
If we will keep in favour with the King,
To be her men and wear her livery.
The jealous o'erworn widow and herself,
Since that our brother dubbed them gentlewomen,
Are mighty gossips in this monarchy.

There is further bantering about Mistress Shore between Richard and Brakenbury. After the death of the king she is referred to as Hastings's mistress (III.i.185). And in the crucial council scene at the Tower (III.iv), Richard accuses the queen, ‘consorted with that harlot, strumpet Shore,’ of having withered up his arm by witchcraft. Clearly one who was both so influential and so crafty might have defended a place beside Richard's other enemies. In The True Tragedie of Richard the third, which, pace Honigmann,²⁶ was probably written before Shakespeare's play, Jane Shore has a not insignificant part and is even mentioned by way of advertisement on the title page, in a moralistic appendage (‘With a lamentable ende of Shores wife, an example for all wicked women’), which does not do justice to the sympathetic treatment of Jane in the actual tragedy. Geoffrey Bullough has suggested that Shakespeare wished to avoid dramatising incidents which had already been on the boards in the earlier play, but he offers no objective support for this view.²⁷ It seems more likely that Shakespeare jettisoned Jane when he thought of introducing Margaret. The latter would be a much more imposing and colourful figure for a tragedy than Edward's bourgeois concubine. Similarly the inclusion of the Duchess of York, the mother of Edward, Clarence, and Richard, must have been a more tempting choice than the Duchess of Clarence, although the latter is mentioned in her husband's prayer for her safety and we might have expected to see her with the children when they appear shortly afterwards. Princess Elizabeth we may have a momentary expectation of meeting when Richard tells us in IV.iii. ‘To her go I, a jolly thriving wooer.’ She, too, is in The True Tragedie. But the dramatically effective wooing of Anne at the beginning of Richard III would probably have made a dialogue with the young Elizabeth too repetitious, and it was appropriate that Richard should have a final combat of wills and words with her mother the queen, who is so prominent in the early part of the play.

An expectation which is perhaps even more likely to be aroused than that of seeing Jane Shore is the actual sight of the murder of the princes. Here again The True Tragedie might have provided a model if any were needed. It is explicit on the title page about ‘the smothering of the two yoong Princes in the Tower’. Tyrrel's account of the murder in Shakespeare's play is second-rate narrative at best and stands no comparison with the earthy dialogue of Clarence's murderers. One may surmise that one murder performed in view of the audience was felt to be enough, but the argument would not hold for a great many other plays, and anyway why show Clarence being killed rather than the princes? One may further surmise that the play was beginning to be rather long by the time Shakespeare got to Act IV, Scene ii, but then why the extremely long wooing scene soon afterwards? In this case Bullough may be right, that the staging of the murder in an earlier play was still too fresh in people's memory. But perhaps the best answer is that Shakespeare sometimes ignored the most obvious dramatic attraction in order to exploit the less expected solution.

Honigmann has wondered about the absence of the trusted friend who betrays Buckingham to his captors:

Whether or not Shakespeare slipped in supplying no more than hints about the treachery that led to Buckingham's capture is less easy to decide. Abjuring all enmity to the Queen, Buckingham hopes that if he forgets his oath he will be punished in his greatest need by a friend's treachery (II.i.32ff), and later recalls that his wish has come true (V.i.13). Buckingham's son states the facts in Henry VIII (II.i.107-11): his father, ‘Flying for succour to his servant Banister’ was ‘by that wretch betrayed’. While writing Act II of Richard III Shakespeare perhaps planned a later scene depicting the treachery of Banister whom, according to Holinshed, Buckingham ‘above all men loved, favoured, and trusted’—a grand climax after the play's other acts of treachery. If so, he changed his mind.²⁸

I would add two things to support this conjecture. First, that in Henry VIII Buckingham puts some emphasis on his having been betrayed by a friend. And, secondly, that Banister has a small part to play in The True Tragedie. But Shakespeare may not have changed his mind at all. It is quite conceivable that he actually wrote a scene like the one Honigmann hypothesises and that it was later removed either by the author or by some other abridger. It is less probable, perhaps, that he wrote a scene, which may likewise be hypothesised, featuring Doctor Shaw and Friar Penker, who are summoned to Richard's presence at the end of III.v but never turn up. Shakespeare was content, one may assume, to merge them with the two clergymen (bishops in Hall and in the stage direction in III.vii) who at Buckingham's suggestion appear on either side of the would-be king during his meeting with the mayor and citizens.

Two other very minor cases of persons remaining absent or appearing contrary to expectations may be briefly mentioned. The fairly conspicuous part of Dorset, and his flight to Richmond, seem to point forward to his reappearance with Richmond's army from Brittany.²⁹ Instead we are told by a messenger when the rising is under way that he is in arms in Yorkshire. This would be a case of historical truth being in conflict with dramatic propriety, and it would be presumptuous to censure Shakespeare's decision in favour of the former. But that he did at need prefer fiction to fact is demonstrated clearly enough by the presence of Margaret. The second case concerns Stanley, who surprisingly turns up in Richmond's tent on the eve of battle after Richmond has despatched Captain Blunt with a written message for him. Stanley's visit is extremely short and apparently serves mainly to repeat the excuse for his passivity which he already conveyed to Richmond by Sir Christopher Urswick on the former's landing in Wales (IV.v). He does, however, promise to help the Earl as best he may, and Shakespeare may have felt the incident to be necessary in order to motivate the reappearance of Stanley in the final scene. In both Hall and The True Tragedie there is a similar interview between Richmond and Stanley, though the meeting occurs somewhere between the armies.

Richard III is the most conclusive of Shakespeare's English history plays. It leaves no loose ends and prepares for no continued action. It naturally has backward perspectives to the plays which precede it, and it is no doubt a help to the understanding of the relations between the main characters to be familiar with the two Contention plays. The butchering of Rutland and the Duke of York at Wakefield, of Prince Edward at Tewkesbury by York's three sons, and of King Henry in the Tower, are especially recalled, as well as King Edward's marriage to Lady Elizabeth Grey and Clarence's betrayal of his father-in-law Warwick before the battle of Barnet where Warwick is killed. But Richard III is self-contained in that it briefly recapitulates past events at all important points and has an entirely independent plot. It even approximately repeats passages from 3 Henry VI so as to assimilate them, especially Richard's long soliloquy in III.ii of the earlier play, which is echoed in the opening soliloquy of Richard III. I emphatically disagree with Tillyard, who declares:

In its function of summing up and completing what has gone before, Richard III inevitably suffers as a detached unit. Indeed it is a confused affair without the memory of Clarence's perjury to Warwick before Coventry, of Queen Margaret's crowning York with a paper crown before stabbing him at Wakefield, and of the triple murder of Prince Edward at Tewkesbury. The play can never come into its own till acted as a sequel to the other three plays.³⁰

The best answer to this is provided by Honigmann:

Shakespeare, so far as we can tell, did nothing to make his tetralogies available as such, either in print or in the theatre. Like the other dramatists of his time he had to plan even two-part plays largely, if not entirely, as two self-contained units: for Richard III … he devised a firm internal structure, totally different from the loosely episodic sequences of Henry VI. Themes and characters may survive from earlier histories, but do so only when relevant to more immediate purposes. Richard III, the first English play that has consistently held the stage, stands triumphantly on its own.³¹

Among the characters who survive from earlier histories, one seems to be specially introduced into 3 Henry VI to prepare for his part in Richard III: young Henry Richmond, whom King Henry sees as ‘England's hope’ and ‘Likely in time to bless a regal throne’ (IV.vi.67-76). He is Richard's opposite and counterpart, but we catch only a glimpse of him in the earlier play, and the lacking development of his character is in keeping with his mainly symbolical role. Hastings is already King Edward's particular friend and supporter in 3 Henry VI. There is also a Sir William Stanley, who helps to rescue King Edward from captivity and whom Edward promises to requite for his ‘forwardness’ (IV.v.23). This must be the Lord Stanley of Richard III who comes blundering in just as the news of Clarence's death has been broken to Edward and demands ‘A boon, my sovereign, for my service done!’ (II.i.97). Shakespeare obviously conflated the two brothers William and Thomas and especially the parts they played during the battle of Bosworth. In the third scene of the play, where this composite person makes his first appearance, Lord Stanley's later title of Earl of Derby is anticipated, but his part in that scene shows several signs of being an afterthought, and he may simply have served as an excuse for bringing in the name of Richmond at an early stage.³² On the other hand, some fairly central characters of Richard III are not in 3 Henry VI, above all Buckingham and the Duchess of York. Anne, Grey, and Dorset do not appear in the earlier play either, though the marriage between Anne and Prince Edward is arranged there. There is thus a certain amount of discontinuity between the two plays. There are many minor discrepancies, too,³³ but no major ones, and Richard III commences smoothly from the situation arrived at the end of 3 Henry VI. The really significant break in continuity occurs about the middle of the earlier play, to be precise in Richard's soliloquy in III.ii, when the loyal brother becomes a murderous egomaniac.³⁴ His part in the remainder of Henry VI truly belongs to Richard III and needs the latter play to be completed. But Richard III does not need it. Nor, as pure drama and a very different kind of drama from its predecessors, does it strictly need any support from the Henry VI plays.

Within a wider epic framework where the fates of peoples and heroes are recorded it is a different matter. There Richard III takes its place, not necessarily as the last play of a tetralogy, but as the description of the last phase in a power struggle beginning with England against France, continuing in civil war, and compacting itself into butchery of kith and kin before it finally narrows into a conflict within the evil mind:

Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why—
Lest I revenge. Myself upon myself?

(V.iii.186-7)

A central theme in this longdrawn struggle as dramatised by Shakespeare is the rise and fall of the house of York. And the increasing savagery of the conflict is in part a reflection of the way in which the Yorkist claim to the throne of England gradually changes from being based on legitimacy to expressing a naked power-lust.

Within this wider extra-theatrical framework we may wish to see Margaret, the bearer of memories, of ancient desires and hates, the keeper of accounts, the Norn, as the central character—paradoxically perhaps, since she is a Frenchwoman and the plays are about England. Those who had the good fortune to see Dame Peggy Ashcroft sustaining the part of Margaret from youth to age in the 1963 and 1964 Stratford-upon-Avon productions of ‘The Wars of the Roses’ are not likely to forget the dominance of that personality. Margaret paves the way for the Yorkist rebellion by depriving a weak king of his strongest support, then carries the burden of the struggle against the rival faction until its last forlorn and monstrous hope is on the brink of destruction. Only then does she fade into the shadows and give place to the symbolic deliverer. And it is in the wider framework of all the plays in which Margaret appears that Richmond's concluding speech in the last of those plays has its full force:

England hath long been mad and scarred herself,
The brother blindly shed the brother's blood,
The father rashly slaughtered his own son,
The son, compelled, been butcher to the sire:
All this divided York and Lancaster,
Divided in their dire division;
O, now let Richmond and Elizabeth,
The true succeeders of each royal house,
By God's fair ordinance conjoin together!
And let their heirs, God, if thy will be so,
Enrich the time to come with smooth-faced peace,
With smiling plenty, and fair prosperous days!

Notes

1. M. Neill, ‘Shakespeare's Halle of Mirrors: Play, Politics, and Psychology in Richard III’, SSt., VIII (1975) p. 99.

2. Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (1957) pp. 117-20. See also A. P. Rossiter, ‘The Structure of Richard the Third’, Durham University Journal, XXXI (1938) 44-75; and ‘Angel with Horns: The Unity of Richard III’ in Angel with Horns (1961) 1-21. In the former essay Rossiter analyses R3 in terms of a ‘ritualistic method’, which is first introduced, he thinks, in II.v of 3H6 and there marks a new departure. In ‘Angel with Horns’ he sees R3 as ‘a symphonic structure … with first and second subjects and some Wagnerian Leitmotifs’ (p. 7).

3. [M. M.] Reese, The Cease of Majesty, (1961) p. 208.

4. Rossiter, ‘The Structure of Richard the Third’ (see n. 2); Clemen, ‘Anticipation and Foreboding in Shakespeare's Early Histories’, SS, 6 (1953) 25-35.

5. This statement perhaps needs a slight qualification. Richard is at least made to appear secretive about his intentions in marrying Lady Anne and for a long time he successfully conceals his nightmares. …

6. Richard threatens revenge on Rivers, Dorset, and Grey in the F text, but Dorset is replaced by Vaughan when it comes to the execution of this revenge. Q has ‘Ryuers, Vaughan, Gray’ in the first place, too.

7. Buckingham is the only person present in the cursing scene besides Richard who remains seemingly unaffected at first, to Margaret's annoyance. After his sceptical remarks it is surely wrong to attribute the speech ‘My hair doth stand an end to hear her curses’ to Buckingham, as the New Penguin edition does, following F. Q gives it correctly to Hastings.

8. He does not say that he foretold his death on All Souls' Day, however, as Honigmann thinks—see New Penguin R3, p. 18.

9. SS, [Shakespeare Survey], 6, p. 27.

10. A. L. French thinks the curses in R3 do not all ‘come entirely true’ and that the point of this is to show that there is no absolute reign of Justice in the world of the history plays. See ‘The Mills of God and Shakespeare's Early History Plays’, ES, [English Studies], 55, 4 (Aug. 1974) 313-24, esp. pp. 321-3.

11. Margaret in both the Q and F texts curses Rivers, Dorset, and Hastings for being ‘standers-by’ when her son ‘was stabbed with bloody daggers’ (I.iii.209-11), but in the execution scene at Pomfret Grey makes it clear that he, and not Dorset, was meant; and in IV.iv.68-9, Hastings, Rivers, Vaughan, and Grey are called ‘the beholders of this frantic play’ (i.e. of the stabbing of Edward). In Shakespeare's 3H6 none of them are standers-by, though Hall says that Dorset and Hastings took part in the murder of Edward. Shakespeare evidently wanted Dorset to be quite a young man in R3 and replaced the older Dorset by Grey. He must have failed to do so at I.iii.209, and there would seem to be a good case here for emendation.

    It should be clear from I.iii.254-9 that Margaret only scolds Dorset and does not specifically curse him. He is included, however, in the general curse on Elizabeth's children (‘Long mayst thou live to wail thy children's death’, l.203), as Elizabeth remembers in IV.i.43-6. It is from this curse that he escapes.

12. Compare the two other places where the word ‘despair’ occurs in R3:

    Anne. Fouler than heart can think thee, thou canst make
    No excuse current but to hang thyself.
    Richard. By such despair I should accuse myself.
    Anne. And by despairing shalt thou stand excused
    For doing worthy vengeance on thyself
    That didst unworthy slaughter upon others.

    (I.ii.83-8)

    Queen Elizabeth. I'll join with black despair against my soul
    And to myself become an enemy.

    (II.ii.36-7)

    Compare also the three occurrences in Lear: IV.vi.33; V.iii.192; V.iii.255.

13. There are a number of good reasons for transferring these lines. They occur in a passage in V.iii, ll.205-16 as numbered in the New Penguin edition, but here quoted from the first quarto:

    Me thought the soules of all that I had murtherd,
    Came to my tent, and euery one did threat,
    To morrows vengeance on the head of Richard.
                                                                                              Enter Ratcliffe.
    Rat. My Lord.
    King. Zoundes, who is there?
    Rat. Ratcliffe, my Lord, tis I, the earlie village cocke,
    Hath twise done salutation to the morne,
    Your friendes are vp, and buckle on their armor.
    King. O Ratcliffe, I haue dreamd a fearefull dreame,
    What thinkst thou, will our friendes proue all true?
    Rat. No doubt my Lord.
    King. O Ratcliffe, I fear, I feare.
    Rat. Nay good my Lord, be not afraid of shadowes.

    The following peculiarities may be noted: 1. The first three lines of this passage come abruptly and oddly at the end of Richard's soliloquy on starting out of his dream. One would expect Richard to identify his dream at the beginning (i.e. after ‘Soft! I did but dream.’) rather than at the end of the soliloquy. And if the lines are meant for information this can hardly be intended for the audience, supposing they have already seen and heard the ghosts. 2. The questionable lines as printed in F correspond in substantial details with the first quarto version, whereas they disagree with the third quarto from which, for the most part, the scene in the F text was pretty mechanically set. This certainly indicates a disturbance of some kind. 3. Lines 213-15 are omitted in F, in spite of its care in reproducing Q3 elsewhere. Most likely the compositor's eye jumped from the ‘O Ratcliffe’ of line 213 to the identical phrase three lines down, but the omission could be deliberate. At any rate it leaves Ratcliffe's exhortation ‘be not afraid of shadowes’ in line 216 without a point of reference. 4. Richmond describes his dream to his friends in the morning. He uses words which parallel those at the end of Richard's soliloquy:

    The sweetest sleep, and fairest-boding dreams
    That ever entered in a drowsy head
    Have I since your departure had, my lords.
    Methought their souls whose bodies Richard murdered
    Came to my tent and cried on victory.
    I promise you my heart is very jocund
    In the remembrance of so fair a dream.

    This suggests that Richard's words, too, should be addressed to an interlocutor. Hall tells how the king ‘recyted and declared to hys famylyer frendes in the morenynge hys wonderfull visyon and terrible dreame’. Both Richard and Richmond would then describe their dreams sufficiently to their friends to make the spectacle of the ghosts unnecessary, and the play is long enough without it. Even so, Shakespeare may have felt that he wanted this scene of combined Senecan eeriness and groundling entertainment, and it undeniably goes unobtrusively enough with the formalism of the play as a whole. (Clarence's dream, of course, is only described, but this is a different case, since Clarence is not a main character.)

    The reason for the anomalies in the transmitted texts could be untidiness in the manuscript which was used by the Q compositor. Concerning the relationship of this manuscript to the copy for F see my Memorial Transmission and Quarto Copy in ‘Richard III’ (Oslo, 1970).

14. The Duchess of York in her last words to Richard calls on ‘the little souls of Edward's children’ to

    Whisper the spirits of thine enemies
    And promise them success and victory!

    (IV.iv.192-4)

    And Buckingham, on his way to execution, invokes the souls of

    Hastings, and Edward's children, Grey and Rivers,
    Holy King Henry and thy fair son Edward,
    Vaughan, and all that have miscarried
    By underhand corrupted foul injustice,

    to mock his own destruction (V.i.3-9). He makes no specific mention of Clarence, Anne or, naturally, of himself.

15. The repetition looks like a memorial error in Q copied by F, which was here set from Q3. The lines perhaps more naturally belong to Anne than to Clarence, since she once, in the first wooing scene, herself pointed a sword at Richard and let it fall. This would make Clarence's lines a case of anticipation. But the repetition could also be a sign that Anne's appearance was an afterthought.

16. Reese, op. cit., p. 212. Cf. Ribner, p. 122: ‘His [Richmond's] personality is deliberately underdeveloped … ; he is instrument rather than actor.’ And A. L. French: ‘artistically speaking, Shakespeare was intent upon making Richmond as much of a cipher as possible’ (‘The World of Richard III’, SSt., [Shakespeare Studies] IV (1968) p. 31).

17. An extreme example of attempts to prove the wooing scene psychologically probable is Donald R. Shupe's ‘The Wooing of Lady Anne: A Psychological Inquiry’, SQ, [Shakespeare Quarterly] 29, 1 (Winter 1978) 28-36.

18. [E. M. W.] Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays, [(1944; Peregrine Books, 1961)]; p. 204; Ribner, p. 118; New Penguin R3, p. 30.

19. Reese, p. 223; French, SSt. IV, pp. 25, 33-6.

20. There is no foundation in the play or the H6 plays for the assertion that ‘Richard woos Anne because Clarence has expropriated Anne's wealth, which Richard hopes to gain by doing away with Clarence and marrying her’. (Shakespeare Newsletter, Sep. 1971, review of Denzell S. Smith, ‘The Credibility of the Wooing of Anne in Richard III’, PLL, 7.2 (Spring 1971) 199-202.)

21. Cf. 3H6, V.vi.71-3:

    I came into the world with my legs forward.
    Had I not reason, think ye, to make haste
    And seek their ruin that usurp'd our right?

    Honigmann (p. 24) speaks of Richard's ‘suddenness’, which is another aspect of the same quality.

22. This apparently is the view taken by Louis E. Dollarhide in an article entitled ‘Two Unassimilated Movements of Richard III: An Interpretation’ (Mississippi Quarterly, XIV (1960) 40-6). Taking a cue from A. P. Rossiter, Dollarhide thinks that ‘In writing Richard III, Shakespeare was evidently trying to do two things—first, construct a fable on a structure of curses and related emotive figures; and, second, present the portrait of “a witty king” …’. Dollarhide thinks that Shakespeare awkwardly and inconsistently brought the ‘witty king’ motif to a climax in Richard's successful wooing of Elizabeth when he had already set Richard on a declining course in the curses plot. Stephen L. Tanner reports this view (I am indebted to his report) and attacks it in his own interpretation of the second wooing scene, ‘Richard III versus Elizabeth’ (SQ, XXIV.4 (1973) 468-72). Tanner contends that in giving Elizabeth the upper hand in the wit combat Shakespeare obviously meant to show that Richard was continuing his fatal descent. There is thus an unbroken downward movement from the third scene of Act IV on. I personally see no difficulty in combining a sense of Richard's declining power—both politically and mentally—with a recognition of his hard-won victory over Elizabeth in argument. He has not yet been finally defeated. And if Elizabeth's submission seems sudden this kind of quick yielding after long persuasion is far from unique in Shakespeare. It is more worrying that we hear nothing of Elizabeth's subsequent change of mind before Stanley sends word to Richmond ‘that the Queen hath heartily consented / He [Richmond] should espouse Elizabeth her daughter’ (IV.v.7-8—these lines, incidentally, are misinterpreted by Tanner).

23. It cannot be ruled out that the reason why the F editors (or compositors) used Q3 as copy for two extended passages in R3 was that the Q version for some reason contained speeches which were not in the manuscript to which they had access. We know that in one place it contained twenty lines of dialogue (the ‘clock passage’) which at any rate did not get into F, whether or not they were in the manuscript copy.

24. Margaret was left out by Cibber and in our own time by Olivier, though this, of course does not prove her superfluous.

25. ‘Lord Hastings was to her for his delivery’ is the Q reading. F reads ‘Lord Hastings was, for her delivery’ and the New Penguin ‘Lord Hastings was for his delivery’.

26. See New Penguin R3, p. 15. Geoffrey Bullough, following G. B. Churchill and Dover Wilson, gives reasons for thinking The True Tragedie preceded R3—see Sources, III, pp. 238-9. In any case, ‘Shores wife, King Edward the fourths Concubine’ has her own complaint in the Mirror for Magistrates. Contemporary interest in Jane Shore is also attested by her appearance in the two parts of Heywood's Edward IV (1594?).

    Honigmann recognises the importance attributed to Jane Shore in the early scenes of R3 but thinks she becomes mainly ‘a moral touchstone’ and concludes rather oddly that ‘her function … is the same as that of the invisible Falstaff in Henry V’ (New Penguin R3, pp. 41-2).

27. Sources, III, p. 239.

28. New Penguin R3, p. 18.

29. In The True Tragedie (Sc. xxi) Dorset is at least enquired after by Queen Elizabeth after the battle of Bosworth, and Richmond informs her that he had to remain in France as a pledge for the men provided by the French king.

30. Tillyard, pp. 199-200. See Reese, p. 224: ‘a play which … is only a complement to Henry VI.’ And French, SSt. IV, p. 25: ‘if it is acted by itself, a great many references which are only meaningful in the light of Henry VI are baffling and have to be excised.’

31. New Penguin R3, pp. 43-4.

32. The queen's reference to the Countess of Richmond in I.iii. 20-4, since that person does not appear in the play, can only serve to point out that she is Stanley's wife and to remind us of the existence of her son. Richmond himself is not mentioned till IV.i.42, when Dorset is advised to fly to him, but in the following scene Richard becomes concerned with Richmond and his name is mentioned seven times in quick succession and again three times in IV.iii.

    As for Stanley being an afterthought in I.iii as I suggest, the best indications are (a) that he is not brought off the stage again although he has no speeches and can have no part in the quarrelling and cursing that follow, and (b) that he is an unlikely person to bring news of the king's health to the queen. So, for that matter, is Buckingham, who takes over as spokesman for the two lords and also tells the queen that the king has called a meeting of the opposing factions at court to ‘make atonement’ between them. It turns out only a moment later (I.iii.62-8) that the queen knows more about this meeting than Buckingham. On top of these indications it is interesting to notice that the entry of Buckingham and Stanley is announced with the words (spoken by Grey), ‘Here comes the Lord of Buckingham & Derby.’ This is the F version. Q1 has both the verb and the noun in the plural (‘Here come the Lords’) whereas Q3-6 have ‘Here comes the Lords’.

    It seems likely that the muddle of Stanley and Derby in speech headings and stage directions later in the play is due to his first, erroneous, appearance as Derby. In The True Tragedie, Stanley remains Stanley throughout.

33. The change from Sir William Stanley to Lord Stanley may be counted as a discrepancy. Another has been pointed out in note 11: there are no ‘standers-by’ other than King Edward and his brothers and Queen Margaret during the killing of Prince Edward in 3H6. In 3H6 it is King Edward who first stabs the prince. Richard recalls this once in the later play, when he tells Lady Anne, ‘I did not kill your husband’ and claims that he was ‘slain by Edward's hands’ (I.ii.91-2). At IV.iv.63 Margaret reminds the Duchess of York, ‘Thy Edward he is dead, that killed my Edward’. But elsewhere in R3 the blame for the murder of the prince is laid entirely on Richard. He himself admits to it in his soliloquy in I.ii. King Edward is made to appear relatively blameless in R3.

    At I.iii.186 we are told, after the murder of Rutland has been brought up, that ‘Northumberland, then present, wept to see it’. But in 3H6 Northumberland is not present at the slaying of Rutland but weeps to see the suffering of York (I.iv.169-71). In R3 Richard claims that Elizabeth and her husband Grey ‘were factious for the house of Lancaster’ and that Grey was slain ‘in Margaret's battle at Saint Albans’ (I.iii.126-9), whereas in 3H6 Edward tells his brother that ‘in quarrel of the house of York / The worthy gentleman did lose his life’ (III.ii.6-7).

    In addition to the small internal inconsistencies in R3 pointed out in note 11 above, it may be mentioned that Ratcliffe in the F version and Catesby in the Q version are present in two places simultaneously (see my Iniurious Impostors and ‘Richard III’ (Oslo, 1964, p. 22). And Margaret in recapitulating her mockery of Queen Elizabeth in IV.iv.82-91 remembers more than she ever said in the cursing scene in I.iii.196-208. Finally, Richmond's order to the Earl of Pembroke to see him in his tent ‘by the second hour in the morning’ (V.iii.31-2) is not followed up.

34. John Palmer sees the change in Richard taking place at an earlier time and fails to notice that Richard remains loyal not only to his father but to his brother Edward until the latter's marriage to Lady Elizabeth Grey. See his Political Characters of Shakespeare (1945) pp. 68-9. Rossiter, concentrating on the dramatic method of the early history plays, finds the most remarkable ‘fault’ in 3H6, II.v—see note 2 above.

(The New Penguin Richard III, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann (1968) has been used for quotations and references.)