SOURCE: “Richard III: Bonding the Audience,” in Mirror Up to Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of G. R. Hibbard, edited by J. C. Gray, University of Toronto Press, 1984, pp. 114-27.

[In the following essay, Berry explores the relationship Richard develops with the play's audience and argues that the bond that grows from this relationship contributes to the success of Richard III.]

The first thing that we know of Richard III is that it was a success, and remained so. From the days of its mentions in Henslowe's diary and the five quartos by 1612, through two centuries of Cibber's version to the triumphs of Olivier's film and the opening night of the Festival Theatre at Stratford, Ontario, Richard III has commanded popular success. It is not only a hit but a play intended and designed as a hit (as some of Shakespeare, in the second half of his career especially, is not). In Richard III Shakespeare seems to have expressed all that he knew of the means of controlling an audience: of creating, for the first time in his career, a star part and of welding the audience into a fascinated and delighted unity. The relations between Richard and his audience are my subject.

I

The ground-plan of Richard III is that the audience supports the villain-hero, then abandons him. The formal action can be called the working of ‘retributive justice’¹; the audience experiences it as the waning of an affair and a demonstration that actions will have consequences that include our emotional reactions to those consequences. Gloucester is in the first place a channel for the energies of the drama, impulses transmitted from stage to audience and back. Those energies are dark and primitive, emerging from a stratum of folklore and desire in the collective mind. Richard, clearly, permits the acting-out of desires in the audience. He makes himself king; he takes his sexual rewards; he plans (but is unable to commit) incest. Against all the structures of morality, kinship, the needs of the tribe itself, the individual asserts himself. The process is made profoundly attractive and, in the end, as profoundly repellent. The atavistic forces tapped by Richard are never far below the surface of the action. The folklore element suggests, for instance, that Richard's status is that of imposter. He is the Man Who Would Be King, behind whom stretches a long line of tricksters. Then, in the wooing of Lady Anne, we become conscious of another myth: Beauty and the Beast. (It is a myth Middleton also exploits, in The Changeling.) Nicholas Brooke finds echoes of de Sade in Richard's treatment of Lady Anne. As Brooke remarks, the play's ‘sexual current, prominent in this scene and equally so later in the wooing of Queen Elizabeth for her daughter, is elsewhere frequently felt, but very much as an undercurrent.’² This is true, but it is interesting that the sexual current is strong and explicit in Richard's apotheosis, his address to the troops:

You having lands, and blest with beauteous wives,
They would restrain the one, distain the other …
Shall these enjoy our lands? Lie with our wives?
Ravish our daughters?

(V.iii.321-2, 336-7)

The appeal to the sexual and racial instincts of the soldiery and the proposition that the end of war is to get at the enemy's womenfolk can be looked at as a tactic of rhetoric: they can also be taken as a straightforward exposition of Richard's psychology and values. The soldiery / audience is appealed to at a certain level of its psyche. The appeal is rejected, as it happens; but the intensity of the current is fully registered.

From these hints of a dark prehistory to Richard, a shadowy impression of his identity begins to emerge. That identity is, however, based on an immediately available tradition. The great container for Richard is the Vice figure. The explicit reference does not occur until III.i, but the Vice governs the frame of reference within which Richard engages the audience. Richard alludes to a network of devices, stratagems, traditions with which his audience is well familiar. He can, for instance, be looked at as a mutation of Herod in the mystery plays, a role ‘rooted in the tension and interaction of the horrible and the comic.’³ The comic is the means by which the audience both approaches the tyrant and revenges itself upon him. Richard, for his part, seeks to seduce the audience. Audience rapport is the key to the early structuring of this play, and we need to touch lightly on the obvious features of Richard's wooing of his public.

SOLILOQUIES AND ASIDES

It is generally accepted that the soliloquies in Richard III, prior to the last one (V.iii), should be played as direct address to the audience.⁴ The tone is ingratiating, and the audience flattered by being taken into Richard's confidence. We become accomplices. But these soliloquies cluster most densely around the early scenes, and they later fade. Thus the audience's regard for Richard is insidiously weakened. In the opening phase Richard confides in us; in the second, in Buckingham; in the third, in no one.

The aside in Richard III is not really a miniature soliloquy, merely a joke that maintains good relations with the audience.

Amen! And make me die a good old man!
That is the butt-end of a mother's blessing;
I marvel that her Grace did leave it out.

(II.ii.109-11)

This aside presents Richard as Peck's bad boy, an endearing-enough figure.

So wise so young, they say, do never live long.

(III.i.79)

The aside is transmitted to Catesby and Buckingham, who illustrate a tactic of their master's:

Catesby The princes both make high account of you—
For they account his head upon the bridge.

(III.ii.69-70)

Hastings Nay, like enough, for I stay dinner there.
Buckingham And supper too, although thou know'st it not.

(III.ii.121-2)

All instances of the aside occur in the first half of the play. Its lapse marks a weakening of the bond between Richard and audience.

DOUBLE MEANINGS

The double meaning is a joke shared between Richard and the audience. While the remark is addressed to another character on stage, its import is clear and will be pointed up by the actor. Thus:

We are not safe, Clarence, we are not safe.

(I.i.70)

Meantime, this deep disgrace in brotherhood
Touches me deeper than you can imagine.

(I.i.111-12)

I will deliver you, or else lie for you.

(I.i.115)

For they that were your enemies are his.

(I.i.130)

Some tardy cripple bare the countermand.

(II.i.90)

Buckingham is presumably the audience for whose benefit the last remark is passed; the others are all for the playhouse audience. Again, the pattern holds of an opening blaze of instances, soon extinguished. But while the immediate tactic lapses, the idea of double meaning broadens out into the superlative continuous jest of III.vii.

WORD-PLAY

Richard enjoys word-play, usually of a rather obvious and mechanical type. The most advanced instance I can find is the reference to the ‘new-delivered Hastings’ (I.i.121), a neat hit at the innocent-babe aspect of Hastings. Otherwise Richard's word-plays do not test the powers of the audience:

Since every Jack became a gentleman,
There's many a gentle person made a Jack.

(I.iii.71-2)

                              while great promotions
Are daily given to ennoble those
That scarce some two days since were worth a noble.

(I.iii.79-81)

What, marry, may she? Marry with a king …

(I.iii.99)

These (with which one can include the oath-substitute of ‘Margaret’) are broad and easy games with words, much in the Vice tradition and sure to win the approval of the audience. Shakespeare extends their use into the second half of the play, presumably because he finds them psychologically interesting. Richard, in the bad-news scene, has three in rapid succession:

Stanley Richmond is on the seas.
Richard There let him sink, and be the seas on him!

(IV.iv.462-3)

Stanley Unless for that, my liege, I cannot guess.
Richard Unless for that he comes to be your liege,
You cannot guess wherefore the Welshman comes.

(IV.iv.474-6)

(The word ‘liege’ evidently touches a nerve: Richard had played on ‘true noble Prince’ with Buckingham, IV.ii.20.)

Stanley No, my good lord, my friends are in the north.
Richard Cold friends to me! What do they in the north,
When they should serve their sovereign in the west?

(IV.iv.483-5)

These attempts to wrest words from their meaning show a mind trying to impose order on a dissolving reality.

Word-play is the critical term for locating the traditions energized by Richard. It is focused to the clear exposition of

Gloucester So wise so young, they say, do never live long.
Prince What say you, uncle?
Gloucester I say, without characters fame lives long.
Thus, like the formal Vice, Iniquity,
I moralize two meanings in one word.

(III.i.79-83)

‘Gloucester's reference to the “formal vice, Iniquity” is—like Speed's—itself in the form of a pun, and it is a vicious and highly sophisticated kind of “contrarie sence” in which Gloucester uses the verb “moralize.”’⁵ Weimann marks the first and fourth lines in the passage cited as ‘aside.’ That is precisely the point, left open for performance, which characterizes the openness of the text to the traditional allusion. Richard may deliver the lines broadly, to the audience; or he may speak them covertly, to Buckingham. The one mode is the non-representational use of the platea (platform), a direct address to the audience. The other way assents to the realistic locus-centred style. It is impossible and unnecessary to determine the matter; no doubt the actors' way of playing this passage (and others raising parallel problems) varied over the years in Shakespeare's lifetime. These options raise the question of the degree of obsolescence associated with the tradition. Weimann emphasizes the word ‘old’ used of the Vice in Twelfth Night and The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

These qualifications are, in Shakespeare, perhaps the most illuminating: The Vice was the old Vice, but still he could be used or referred to; and the words ‘old’ and ‘still’ indicate the dialectic of innovation and tradition by which Shakespeare's wordplay actually thrived upon the diminishing tensions of mimesis and ritual, matter and impertinency.⁶

The psychology of the role adapts easily to the dualism of the tradition. There is nothing improbable in the notion of a person modelling himself upon a stereotype of conduct or using this stereotype as a point of departure. ‘And what's he then that says I play the villain?’ demands Iago. It seems likely that the development of dramatic style was able to assimilate the traditional Vice. The villain-hero who takes the audience into his confidence—for whom an antecedent can be found as far back as the Chester cycle⁷—is absorbed into the self-consciousness of Richard. Even at the very end there is no contradiction between tradition and psychology. The demoniac energy of Richard—

March on, join bravely, let us to it pell-mell;
If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell

(V.ii.312-3)

—calling for a horse with his last breath, is simply the ‘terrible exuberance’ of the Vice, riding off like Nichol Newfangle to hell.⁸ On all counts, traditional, tactical, and psychological, the Vice material strengthens Richard's bond with the audience.

The Vice is a technical means of establishing rapport. It will not in itself guarantee success. Richard remains, a man. His links with the audience must consist of something other than jokes and direct appeals. Behind the tricks is a sensibility; and Shakespeare develops in that sensibility a sympathetic exploitation of class attitudes. One cannot adequately discuss the core of this play without reference to class.

II

Richard is an aristocrat. And some of his utterances assert an aristocratic sensibility, one founded on pride of family and class:

Unmanner'd dog, stand thou, when I command!

(I.ii.39)

Ay, and much more; but I was born so high.
Our aery buildeth in the cedar's top,
And dallies with the wind and scorns the sun.

(I.iii.262-4)

Madam, I have a touch of your condition,
That cannot brook the accent of reproof.

(IV.iv.158-9)

But this is not his norm. The substantive mass of Richard's expression is not aristocratic or is so only in a highly qualified sense. Richard habitually expresses himself in a mode that is highly accommodating to his audience, one that is in essence bourgeois. Let us explore this class sensibility. Richard's imagery and turns of speech are often colloquial and often suggest the attitudes of businessmen. Thus the ‘pack-horse,’ ‘post-horse’ references; and ‘But yet I run before my horse to market’ (I.i.160). Financial and monetary terms crop up: ‘then must I count my gains’ (I.i.162); ‘And yet go current from suspicion’ (II.i.95); ‘Repair'd with double riches of content’ (IV.iv.319). Buckingham adjures him to act ‘Not as protector, steward, substitute, / Or lowly factor for another's gain’ (III.vii.133-4): Queen Margaret repeats the perception in

Richard yet lives, hell's black intelligencer,
Only reserv'd their factor to buy souls
And send them thither

(IV.iv.71-3)

A consistent strain of language suggests the concerns of a businessman. I do not conclude, as does Paul N. Siegel in his Marxist reading, that Shakespeare is drawing a blackly negative picture of bourgeois values and using it to establish Richard's evil.⁹ The dramatic function of this bourgeois language is to maintain contact; it is in the main jocular, ingratiating, reaching to the concerns and awareness of the general audience. It is oddly reassuring, as though Richard were saying, ‘I am really one of you, you know.’ Richard's is the language of the common man rather than the grand seigneur.

Moreover, this linguistic quality reinforces certain class attitudes that the play on occasion calls upon. In I.iii Richard seeks to unite his stage audience behind him and against the queen's kindred, the Woodvilles; and in this the stage audience is the model of the larger audience. ‘The world is grown so bad / That wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch’ (I.iii.69-70); for a moment there's a hallucinatory resemblance between Richard and Third Citizen, each crying woe! on social dissolution. The hits at ‘Jacks’ and ‘nobles,’ already quoted, extend the point. At bottom Shakespeare traces a commonplace of history, the alliance between nobles and people. No positive values are imparted to the Woodvilles. There is nothing in stage terms to counter Richard's stated view of them. Thus the Woodvilles focus whatever class resentment is in the audience: they are jumped-up gentry, a category which by definition no one (noble, popular, or simple bourgeois) cares for. So Richard succeeds in rallying the audience behind him.

Again, take Richard's relations with his subordinates. For most of the play he is affable enough, if with an edge. ‘How now, my hardy, stout, resolved mates! … I like you, lads, about your business straight’ (I.iii.339, 353). Richard's excellent relations with the workers reaffirms the audience rapport: ‘no side’ about Richard, one might say, a jovial and understanding employer. (Note how his word ‘business’ conflates the suggestions of trade and stage.) Not till IV.iii do these master-servant relations appear repellent (‘Kind Tyrrel,’ ‘gentle Tyrrel,’ which is altogether disgusting), and not till the last speech of all does Richard address Catesby as ‘slave,’ a word that reveals all by reducing Catesby from a name to an object. In sum, Richard for most of the play seems the sort of aristocrat of whom the general audience could reasonably approve, a noble with the common touch.

And this common touch emerges most subtly, I think, in the attitudes which Richard constantly invokes, sometimes by way of proverb. These attitudes I characterize as citizen morality. They are promoted (and of course subverted) by the very personae that Richard assumes: pious contemplative, unworldy innocent, country boy. All of them seem to me broadly bourgeois in origin, though I do not take the term literally as applying to a town resident. Take the country boy: the persona Richard affects in I.iii—one unused to the traffickings of court politics—sorts well with the rustic quality of some of his lines. ‘But yet I run before my horse to market’ (I.i.160); ‘He is franked up to fatting for his pains’ (I.iii.313); ‘Small herbs have grace, great weeds do grow apace’ (II.iv.13); ‘Short summers lightly have a forward spring’ (III.i.94); ‘A milksop, one that never in his life / Felt so much cold as over shoes in snow’ (V.iii.325-6). The ‘strawberries’ episode suggests a man more at home in a garden than the court, and ‘Chop off his head’ is a woodman's phrase. Beyond the suggestions of milieu lie those of values. The wooing of Lady Anne is conducted by the ardent lover; nothing in Shakespeare is closer to the world of Colley Cibber, and the language of Richard here is eighteenth century, pure drama of sensibility. It illustrates a vein of popular morality and moralizing easily detectable elsewhere: ‘Now by St. John, that news is bad indeed! / O, he hath kept an evil diet long, / And overmuch consum'd his royal person’ (I.i.138-40); ‘God will revenge it’ (II.i.139); ‘O, do not swear, my lord of Buckingham’ (III.vii.220; Buckingham has just said ‘Zounds’). The marketing of the candidate to the citizenry is founded on the proposition that Richard ‘is not an Edward! / He is not lulling on a lewd love-bed … Not dallying with a brace of courtezans …’ (III.vii.71-4) No phrase sums up this aspect of Richard's appeal better than Buckingham's ‘I never look'd for better at his hands / After he once fell in with Mistress Shore’ (III.v.50-1). This is proto-Peck-sniffianism, a homage to moralizing, bourgeois righteousness. A picture emerges from all this of a reformist Richard, clean of speech and living, dedicated to restoring the standards of civic morality that have so sadly lapsed during the reign of Edward the Lustful.

It is high comedy, reaching its zenith in III.vii. Just how much of an edge there was in the presentation, then guying of these bourgeois attitudes is hard to say. I suspect that the satirical bite may have been fiercer than is commonly imagined.¹⁰ After all, the Vice tradition was rooted in challenge to the status quo, in a ‘moral scepticism’ directed at the conventional pieties: ‘I pray thee, tel me what meneth this word charity? / Because thou doest make it so holy.’¹¹ Weimann suggests that the jingling language of the Vice may have recalled Lollard heresies¹²; and the ‘deep divines’ who flank the Protector in the draft-Richard convention may hark back to older traditions. It is not hard to see a vein of popular anticlericalism touched on here.¹³ One cannot dogmatize on such matters, but I propose a formulation of audience response along these lines: Richard and his accomplices promote a broad vein of citizen morality, bourgeois attitudes which are presented in an engagingly comic light in the early scenes; they culminate in the high-pressure, satiric comedy of III.vii which simultaneously delights and appals. Thereafter the mode changes. The comedy turns sour. (The formula is not so very different from Romeo and Juliet.) Buckingham's threnody on All Souls' marks a late conversion to conventional morality. Proverbs are extensions of ‘they say,’ and in the end it turns out that ‘they’ are right. Citizen morality, like God, is not mocked for five acts.

In all this, the movement of audience response is governed by an ancient formula: ‘The Vice criticizes from the audience's point of view.’¹⁴ Richard reaches out towards the platea: he is the presenter, the commentator on the locus scene. His genial mockery of civic values, his command of proverbial lore, his mode of delivery, all create a special relationship with his audience. But that is for three acts. The Vice stands outside the action to begin with and is then gradually sucked into it. The proverbs, jokes, word-plays die away. The audience becomes progressively more detached, then alienated. The Vice's ultimate dialogue (the V.iii soliloquy) is with himself, not the audience. The story of the last two acts is the turning of the audience against Richard. Much of this needs no comment; it is a simple revulsion against a monster. But I want to trace the lines of Shakespeare's technique in this matter. If class attitudes influence the bonding process in the early stages, the later stages rely on the imperatives of place. It is location, region, and ultimately nation that define the audience of Richard III.

III

No play of Shakespeare's is so strongly imbued with a sense of place, of national identity as the sum of many locations. Counting indifferently together names of places and titles (I shall come to the distinction later), I find some fifty English locations mentioned, whether of house (Crosby House), county (Devonshire), or city (Exeter). Of these fifty, many are referred to on several occasions. The Tower of London is mentioned no fewer than twenty-five times. All the major regions of the country are covered. The cumulative effect is of a massive impregnation of the text with a sense of England, the full extent of the land.

The broad effect is one thing. The individual references are something else. For each single allusion to a place there is a justification peculiar to drama: some member or members of the audience will know it or have some connection there. Shakespeare must have learned early that the chances of striking a chord in a spectator's mind through the allusion to some out-of-the-way place are fairly high. Someone always turns out to have come from Haverfordwest. It is not unlike the well-known odds against finding two people with identical birthdays in a quite small group. And all London references must connect with virtually the entire audience. The effect of each reference is a minor shock of recognition. The place-names are tiny foci of dramatic energy, pellets of meaning released into the audience's bloodstream. ‘I used to live near Baynard's Castle.’ ‘You can stay at Stony Stratford, but I wouldn't, not with the inns there.’ ‘Curious how you always get good strawberries in Holborn.’ ‘My mother came from Hereford!’ And so on. There is much dramatic energy stored in these innocent namings.

If that were all, it would at least justify raising the matter. But Shakespeare does not deploy place-names on a scatter principle. He organizes these far-flung places into patterns which are, as I take it, the final index to his sense of the audience's identity.

In act I, Richard III is above all a London play. Set in London, the milieu has great solidity of impression. The many references to the Tower, with all its associations, symbolize the dramatic centre of London; and we hear of Chertsey, St Paul's, Crosby House, Whitefriars. The provinces exist only through the references to St Albans and Tewkesbury (and thus, the past of the civil wars). Titles aside, that is all. Through this phase the audience enjoys the greatest rapport with Richard. Broadly, then: in the first act we are Londoners in London, and we approve of Richard.

Act II begins the move away. Although the play is still set in London, the impress of topography is much weaker. The talk is of travel, of Ludlow, Stony Stratford, Northampton. It is an undular strategy, in which Shakespeare creates a psychic wave away from London.

Act III anchors itself very firmly in London. All the manoeuvrings take place there, and the citizenry must establish itself as belonging to the capital. Similarly with the Recorder and the Lord Mayor of London. The Tower, of course, dominates all. The local allusions continue, and we are reminded of Holborn, the Crown, Baynard's Castle, Tower Bridge, Paul's, Crosby House. The provinces (Pomfret, Hereford) are still at the margin of this play's consciousness. The general audience, at the height of its pleasure in Richard, is continually reminded: this is London, our city.

The peremptory ‘Stand all apart’ (IV.ii.i) announces the second part of the play. That order to the courtiers figures Richard's relations with the audience. From now on he is distrustful, paranoid; the old rapport is gone. The allusions to place impart the new reality. We have no sense of London, though the play is still set there. All the talk is of the provinces, which now come to the fore of the play's consciousness. The roll-call is impressive: Exeter, Brecknock, Salisbury, Devonshire, Kent, Yorkshire, Dorsetshire, Milford, Pembroke, Haverfordwest. The west, Wales, even Kent are in arms. The north (of the ‘cold friends’) is the distrusted, hostage-enforced alliance with Derby. The drama, then, composes a map which we can discern without much difficulty: the great rough triangle of the British isle has arrows pointed, threateningly, towards London. And with them the psychology of the play changes. The provinces are right, and London is wrong.

With these harsh explicit indications come subliminal suggestions all tending to the same end. For we cannot confine our assessment of place-names to a simple symbolism of region and rebellion. We have to recognize the soft mutation of place to title. This play often broods on ‘title’ as Brackenbury does—Richard, the Duchess of York, Queen Elizabeth all talk about it—and the union of place and name has its significance. We have largely lost our sense of it today with our later traditions of title based on surname or battle-honour or simple euphony allied to tenuous local connection (Attlee, Alamein, Avon). It is salutary to be reminded, as one can still be in England today, that a local magnate counts for something in the area bearing his name. Titles were based on the possession of land; they were not empty honorifics. A name signified a reality. Thus insidiously the play makes its point along these lines: Dorset may be a cipher, but Dorsetshire (IV.iv.522) matters. The titles, hence the land, are in arms against the king.

And who supports the king? The symbolism of act V is clear. Only from the south-east is there any support: the Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Surrey, his son. (The name of Richard's horse, ‘White Surrey,’ underlines the symbolism.) Outside the south-east only Northumberland sides with Richard, and he is dubious, stigmatized as ‘melancholy’ and having his comments repeated for Richard's benefit. (‘What said Northumberland as touching Richmond?’) Derby has already made his arrangements. The titles offer a diagram of forces here.

The conclusion is a boar-hunt, conducted in the middle of England.

Thus far into the bowels of the land
Have we march'd on without impediment; …
The wretched, bloody, and usurping boar,
That spoil'd your summer fields and fruitful vines,
Swills your warm blood like wash, and makes his trough
In your embowel'd bosoms, this foul swine
Is now even in the centre of this isle,
Near to the town of Leicester, as we learn.

(V.ii.3-4, 7-12)

Bosworth is almost the dead centre of the land. There the forces of the south and west, united with the symbolic representatives of London and the midlands (Richmond and Oxford), defeat the tyrant, who is let down by the north and inadequately defended by his own south-east. The land renews itself, gathering together to kill the usurper to its title. (Again, as in King John, Shakespeare plays on the synecdoche of ‘England’ and ‘king of England.’) The triumph of right is also the triumph of the provinces. The alienation of the London audience is now complete: it detaches itself from ‘the bloody dog’¹⁵ and declares itself for the morality of the provinces, and thus the nation. Title (the Crown), land, people, and audience unite. In the end, the bonding principle of the audience is that it is English.

Notes

1. A. P. Rossiter Angel with Horns London 1961, p 2

2. Nicholas Brooke Shakespeare's Early Tragedies London 1968, p 67

3. Robert Weimann Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theatre: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function ed Robert Schwartz, Baltimore 1978, p 68

4. The practice is codified in Laurence Olivier's film. It is accepted as correct by Brooke Shakespeare's Early Tragedies p 56. Bernard Spivack cites an interesting anecdote on this point: it was the experience of Margaret Carrington, who prepared John Barrymore for his Richard III. Barrymore delivered the soliloquy at the end of the Lady Anne wooing scene to himself, with a mediocre response from the audience. Margaret Carrington suggested that he speak directly to the audience; he did, and the reaction was tremendous. Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil New York 1958, p 456

5. Weimann Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition p 150. ‘“Moralize,” in this sense, is a metaphorical statement about the literary history of the verbal figure …’

6. Ibid, p 151

7. Weimann quotes a ‘Tyrant’ who introduces himself thus:

   I am full of sotelty,
   ffalshed, gyll, and trechery;
   Therfor am I namyd by clergy
   As mali actoris.

   (Ibid, p 69)

8. Ibid, p 155

9. Paul N. Siegel ‘Richard III as Businessman’ Shakespeare Jahrbuch (Weimar) 114 (1978) 106

10. Wilbur Sanders, in The Dramatist and the Received Idea (Cambridge 1968), gives full weight to the ironic and satiric content of Richard III.

11. King Darius printed in 1565; cited by Weimann Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition p 111

12. Weimann Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition p 147

13. There is also a tradition in the visual arts of such a grouping. The iconography of the king flanked by bishops is discussed by Bridget Gellert Lyons, in ‘Stage Imagery and Political Symbolism in Richard III,’ Criticism xx (1973) 21-3.

14. Weimann Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition p 153

15. ‘“The bloody dog is dead” replaces the customary obituary on the tragic hero; “from the dead temples of this bloody wretch” Derby has plucked the now superfluous crown.’ Wolfgang Clemen A Commentary on Shakespeare's ‘Richard III’ London 1968, pp 235-6

Citations are to The Complete Works of Shakespeare ed David Bevington, Glenview Ill 1980.