SOURCE: Jowett, John. Introduction to The Tragedy of King Richard III, by William Shakespeare, edited by John Jowett, pp. 1-142. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

[In the following excerpt, Jowett presents a thematic overview of Richard III, highlighting such motifs as prophecy, curses, dreams, and conscience.]

Prophecy of Revenge. It is a distinctive quality of Shakespeare's representation of reality that, though the physical and social world is tangible and real, it is at the same time subject to intrusion and redefinition from something the plays' characters experience as beyond the material. For all its immediacy and solidity, the world's epistemological foundations are shifting and insecure. When Richard declares that he is ‘determined to prove a villain’ (1.1.30) he seems to speak of his autonomy of will, but the words might mean that his villainy is predetermined, an effect of destiny. The individual events in Richard III are not simply events in themselves. They are subject to prophecy, prefiguration, and repetition. They fall within larger patterns of symbolic meaning.¹

In the opening scenes the action seems subservient to Richard's will. Clarence enters on cue: ‘This day should Clarence closely be mewed up ❙ About a prophecy … Dive, thoughts, down to my soul; here Clarence comes.’ Lady Anne's first entry similarly follows hard on Richard's announcing his intention towards her. The action begins to assume a dynamic that is independent of Richard only in 1.3, when we are suddenly in the thick of court factions. The contrast between 1.2 and 1.3 is clear. In the wooing scene Richard develops plans he has announced in advance, and so takes control over what seem to be the last remnants of the house of Lancaster, the corpse of the king and its solitary mourner. In 1.3 the Yorkists and the Greys are busy squabbling over the present and the immediate future. Richard surprises and confuses us too with his disruptive and sudden entry, ‘They do me wrong and I will not endure it’. For the first time Richard's plots are beyond our immediate knowing. But no sooner has Richard stamped his fractious authority on the scene than Margaret enters, reframing the scene within a perspective that is far from that of Richard's choosing. Like Anne, she belongs to the house of Lancaster and comes into the play burdened with grievance. In other ways they will decisively contrast.

Even an audience member familiar with the chronicles might not know who this alien figure is, for Margaret had died in France. The play has already led us to assume her absence, for in 1.2 only Anne attends the corpse of Margaret's husband. Her presence is both ahistorical and ghostly. It is an extreme paradox that this figure, a fictive intrusion on the historical events, should be the guarantor of Tudor ideology and indeed of history itself. Because she preserves the past and makes it actively meaningful during the course of the play, she in effect preserves the future. Her interventions ensure that Richard's wrongdoings are remembered and avenged, and so ensure that the Tudor dynasty will finally be installed.

From the outset she cryptically defines herself in relation to past events that no one else wishes to remember. To the Queen she says, ‘Thy honour, state, and seat is due to me’ (1.3.112), and to Richard,

Thou slewest my husband Henry in the Tower,
And Edward, my poor son, at Tewkesbury.

(1.3.119-20)

In winning the hand of Anne, Richard has not quite eliminated the past, nor mastered the future.

Margaret might appear to be a pathetic war victim in hostile surroundings, someone who needs to believe that God, if only God, will hear, understand, and respond to her laments. Her belief in the efficacy of cursing might be evidence of crazed desperation. Yet her curses relate very closely to what will happen. The implications are unnerving. She sees Richard as a ‘cacodemon’ from hell (1.3.143-4), yet it is he who will fulfil her petition to God for vengeance against all the others. To the Protestant theologian Calvin ‘it is no absurdity that one self act be ascribed to God, to Satan, and to man’ (Institution, 2.4.2). There is no question of conspiracy; rather, there are different levels of explanation. Calvin recognized the challenge to common sense, admitting that ‘the sense of the flesh scarcely conceiveth how he [God] working by them [Satan and the reprobate] should not gather some spot of their fault’ (1.18.1). Understanding God's righteousness in inflicting natural disasters posed similar challenges. Richard III was probably written just before or during one of the worst outbreaks of the plague in Elizabethan London. Confronted with arbitrary suffering and death, potentially evidence of a cruel God, the pious could respond only by seeing plague as evidence of God's wrath at the depravity of the society upon whom he unleashes plague as just punishment.

As Margaret asserts that there is a machinery of divine retribution, Richard attempts to puncture such claims as mere rhetoric. Indeed, he takes the offensive, shifting the blame for Queen Margaret's misfortunes away from the immediate perpetrators: ‘And God, not we, hath plagued thy bloody deed’ (1.3.178). The piety is a barefaced use of religion for political ends. More subtly, it anticipates and compromises Margaret's attempts to enlist God on her side. Richard identifies Margaret as a ‘wrinkled witch’ (1.3.164), a monstrously cruel woman without pity for children, cursed by the patriarch of the York family, and the victim of God's wrath. He succeeds in rallying the court factions against her:

HASTINGS (to Margaret)
O, 'twas the foulest deed to slay that babe,
And the most merciless that e'er was heard of.
RIVERS (to Margaret)
Tyrants themselves wept when it was reported.
DORSET [Grey] (to Margaret)
No man but prophesied revenge for it.
BUCKINGHAM (to Margaret)
Northumberland, then present, wept to see it.

(1.3.180-4)

These accusations imply that it is Margaret rather than Richard who is the unnatural and cruel tyrant whose overthrow is anticipated in curses and prophecies. For a moment Margaret and Richard seem similar, caught in the symmetries of killing and counter-killing, rhetoric and counter-rhetoric, curse and counter-curse, patterns that typify the Henry VI plays. She has fallen prey to the curses poured on her when she tormented and killed Richard's father; her own curses will ruin him. The ‘hateful, withered hag’ fights it out verbally with the ‘elvish-marked, abortive rooting-hog’ (1.3.212, 225; …). Hog and hag both belong to a frightening supernatural twilight. Richard as much as Margaret is ‘hateful’ and ‘withered’, and it is even possible to see a symbiotic alliance between them. But politically at least Margaret is a spent force. Only a new tyrant can be subject to new curses and prophecies. The roles are rapidly demarcated along the lines of gender, with Richard as the aggressor and Margaret as the female voice of lamentation, curse, and prophecy.

The anti-Richard play has its origin here in 1.3 with Margaret's curses. Their rhetorical power depends on the comprehensiveness with which every person is caught within the mode of subjunctive petition for death. Margaret comes as it were from beyond the grave, breathing death on the living. Richard is last in her catalogue, and is cursed most fully. Yet this final catalogue of imprecation remains incomplete, for Richard returns her insults on the speaker, interrupting her ‘… thou detested—’ with ‘Margaret’ (1.3.230-1). It is a childishly glib intervention, but it unseats the speaker. Can curses pierce the clouds if they are so easily bounced back by the human respondent?

In fact their potency as predictions cannot be deflected. Richard shows no sign of caring that the machinations by which he kills Rivers, Vaughan, Grey, Hastings, and Buckingham enact not only his own programme but also Margaret's. By the logic that they die, so will he. We should probably understand that the drowning of Clarence brings about the King's death, and certainly the murder of the young princes causes the state of sorrow that Margaret so particularly describes as the property of their mother the Queen. The play, in particular the action that Richard orchestrates, is an almost comprehensive enactment of Margaret's prophecy, as was made particularly clear in Sam Mendes's production of 1992, in which Cherry Morris as Margaret was allowed to reappear hauntingly as each of Richard's victims went off to his death. Richard's interruption of Margaret's curse by replacing his name with hers implies that he can evade the larger syntax of prophecy with its final term ‘Richard’. But by 4.2, the scene after his coronation, he is muttering nervously about the ‘Rougemont’ prophecy (ll. 103-7). Like Henry VI's more formal prophecy, it might mean Richmond will be king: ‘perhaps, perhaps’ (l. 99).

Unquiet Slumbers. From Clarence to the Grey faction to Hastings to the young princes to Buckingham, Richard's victims process from confinement to the grave. The staged episodes all have relevance, indirectly, to the episode Shakespeare does not put on stage at all, the murder of the young princes. Repeatedly the audience sees what it is like to be a victim of abusive political power in a fragile interim before death, when the order has been given but the execution has yet to come. The depiction of Clarence's death in 1.4 gives particularly full amplitude to a Christian spiritual area of experience that can then be given more summary presentation later on. It allows those later and shorter episodes to resonate with understated implication.

Clarence dreams an imaginary version of his death, awakes to tell his dream, sleeps, and then awakes to face death itself, as though the whole sequence were an inescapable nightmare. His account of his dream is a richly intertextual passage, with echoes in its phrasing of journeys to the underworld in Virgil, Seneca, the Englished Seneca of Thomas Sackville, in his additions to Mirror for Magistrates, and Thomas Kyd, in The Spanish Tragedy. These are interwoven with recollections of drownings at sea in Ovid and the Cave of Mammon in Spenser's Faerie Queene.² There are also biblical allusions and echoes of Marlowe. Clarence's identification of the ‘grim ferryman’ Charon as a figure ‘which poets write of’ (1.4.43) affirms the allusive quality of the episode, and is in itself a formulaic literary tag. The very text dreams beyond itself. Harold Brooks writes of ‘a molten confluence of influences fusing together at high temperature and pressure of creative imagination, to yield the most eloquent poetry in the play’.³ At some overarching level the play is diversifying its status as a retold myth of English political nationhood, claiming its part in a new English vernacular literature that could comfortably assimilate the classical influence. The Plantagenet duke becomes a consciousness through which a poetic, visionary, and primarily pagan conception of death is transmitted to the audience of the popular theatre.

But it is the imaginative force of Clarence's account of his dream that is of most immediate impact. There is dream within dream, death within death, as the man about to die both in reality and in his dream sees the fantastical vision of those already dead mocked by the artificial life of glittering gems. Shakespeare's debt to Spenser's Cave of Mammon might alert us to the possibilities of moralizing the vision as an emblem of the vanity of earthly acquisitions, including power. It should also suggest that the vision is grotesque, not only as usually understood today, but also in an etymological sense of the word that relates it to the idea of a grotto or artificially ornamented cave. The dream goes on to become a vision of the death agony itself, and then goes on further as it is ‘lengthened after life’ (1.4.40). The drowning now alters to the ‘tempest to my soul’, and, in a very dreamlike transition, the underwater setting is transformed into a journey over the surface of the ‘melancholy flood’ (1.4.41-2). If this recalls Clarence's imagined escape from England in the opening of the dream, his companion Richard has now been translated into Charon, the Virgilian ‘grim ferryman’ who takes Clarence to the kingdom of perpetual night. Here the ghosts of Warwick and Edward of Lancaster confront Clarence before the tormenting fiends seize on him. The ghosts are a sharp anticipation of ghosts that later visit Richard as he confronts his imminent death.

The only sustained passage of prose occurs in the Executioners' dialogue as Clarence once more sleeps, a passage of grim humour shedding a grotesque but moralized light on death from the point of view of its agents. There are analogues such as the semi-comic tortures of Christ in medieval pageant plays such as the Wakefield ‘Coliphizacio’,⁴ but in such episodes the range of tone and subjective experience is, by virtue of the dramatic form, much narrower. As with the Porter scene that unexpectedly disrupts the brooding intensity after Duncan's murder in Macbeth, the comedy is far more complex than light relief. In this case the episode builds tension, and it develops the theme of conscience in a different key. Both here and in Tyrrell's account of the killing of the princes, Shakespeare contrasts Richard's radical amorality with the ‘dregs of conscience’ that remain in his henchmen. Conscience is as yet inexpressible in Richard's mind, though it will have its day after he is confronted by the ghosts of Clarence, the princes, and all the rest.

Much of the comedy lies in illogical shifts between a very literal Christianity learnt from the pulpit and the grim materialism of the needy:

SECOND Executioner
I pray thee, stay a while; I hope my holy humour will change, 'twas wont to hold me but while one would tell twenty.
                                                  [They wait]
FIRST Executioner
How dost thou feel thyself now?
SECOND Executioner
Faith, some certain dregs of conscience are yet within me.
FIRST Executioner
Remember our reward when the deed is done.
SECOND Executioner
Zounds, he dies. I had forgot the reward.
FIRST Executioner
Where is thy conscience now?
SECOND Executioner
In the Duke of Gloucester's purse.

(1.4.106-17)

Conscience is absurdly alienable from the person. It is materialized as the equivalent of the drainable dregs of a barrel, or coins that can be enclosed in someone's purse. It is like a spirit or demon that can afflict a person unless it is turned away or safely contained elsewhere. One moment it is conscience who is ‘at my elbow persuading me not to kill the Duke’; the next moment it is the Duke himself. The Executioners and Clarence are in effect the voice of each other's conscience.

Accepting that the King has ordered his execution, Clarence argues that God ‘holds vengeance in his hands ❙ To hurl upon their heads that break his law’ (ll. 180-1), recalling God's words in Deuteronomy 32:35, ‘Vengeance and recompense are mine’. Even the ‘Homily against Disobedience’ advised that rulers should be disobeyed ‘if they would command us to do anything contrary to God's commandments’.⁵ Clarence has a strong and simple case, but he is not well placed to urge it. In the Executioners' account, his guilt is twofold. He is a perjured turncoat who betrayed his brother Edward by swearing an oath of allegiance to the Lancastrians, and then reverted to the Yorkist cause. Clarence's second guilt puts him in line with his brother from the beginning, for both of them were implicated in butchering Edward of Lancaster at Tewkesbury. Thus Clarence, though in other circumstances he broke his loyalty, went along with a command that was against God's laws. One ‘bloody minister’ (1.4.200) can scarcely argue his case against another on the basis of the divine injunction.

When the truth is declared Clarence realizes that it is not King Edward who has arranged the killing but his other, more trusted, brother Richard. The excuse that ‘he that hath commanded is the King’ (1.4.175) collapses. But if the debate on disobeying royal command is redundant in relation to the Executioners, it raises the spectre of Richard in authority as king: what then would be the case? Principled disobedience is hard to find in the world ruled by dagger and purse. Moreover, the debate in 1.4 and the Homily both fail to provide a rationale for moving beyond disobedience to something that will materialize at the end of the play, forcible resistance and rebellion. There is no vindication of Richmond in prospect here.

Much is at stake in the debate, but nothing can detract from the foreground: the sense of a human existence, a man imprisoned, helpless, and struggling towards knowledge of what is most to be feared. The dream and the mock-trial offer both premonition and false hope. In theory at least a dreamer can awaken from nightmares; in theory an accused can be acquitted if innocent. It is not so in the world of terror. Here the riches of life's experience lie as relics amongst dead men's skulls. The murderer's blow and death by drowning are implacable and close, despite the momentary grotesque richness and grotesque comedy of the interim.

The word ‘dream’ and its cognates appear more often in Richard III than any other Shakespeare play.⁶ There are the prophetic ‘dreams’ that Richard unleashes on the King in 1.1, the butcheries that exclusively occupy Richard's dreams according to Anne in 1.2, the tormenting dreams of devils Margaret prophesies for Richard in 1.3 that are actualized in Anne's account in 4.1, Clarence's dream of drowning in 1.4, Stanley's emblematic vision of the boar razing his helm relayed to Hastings in 3.2 and mentioned again in 3.4, the Queen's reduction to ‘A dream of which thou wert a breath, a bubble’ (4.4.83), and Richard and Richmond's visions of the ghosts in 5.4, these probably the ‘babbling dreams’ Richard attempts to dismiss at 5.5.37. Though none of them is sweet, these dreams signify in a variety of ways, sometimes indeterminately. Some are prophetic, some reflect the dreamer's state of being; sometimes there is little distinction.

The dreams that have specific content are those of Clarence, Stanley, Richard, and Richmond. Stanley's is told indirectly by a messenger, and is no more than a single image. Hastings, when told of Stanley's dream, cannot see or accept its implication, preferring, like Clarence, to be lulled by another kind of illusion. In what they express and what they cannot express, dreams can be understood as expressions within the individual consciousness of the effect of political violence. They are expressions of political suffering—and even, in Richmond's dream, of resistance.

Details such as Stanley's dream, Hastings's coincidental meeting with the Pursuivant he previously encountered when going to the Tower under arrest, and his later recollection of his horse presciently stumbling on his way to the Tower, anticipate the omens of Caesar's fall in Julius Caesar. Hastings, like Caesar, is fed knowledge he chooses to reject; he leaves home and walks to his doom in voluntary ignorance. The imaginative experience of those facing entrapment, arrest, or murder by politicians and their henchmen, or betrayal by patrons in high office, would have registered in late Elizabethan London as much as a modern totalitarian state. In the play, dreams and omens represent the point at which nothing less than reality impinges on the life we think we lead.

Upon Record. In 3.1 Prince Edward formally enters the capital city as king-to-be. It is his first and last scene, unless one counts his reappearance after death as a ghost. The overall movement of the scene is to conduct him to join his brother in the city's oldest and most oppressive building, the Tower. It is a moment of hollow welcoming and contrived political manoeuvre. The princes themselves are not the innocent babes depicted by Tyrrell after they are murdered, but adolescents who are outstripping childhood and, in a vulnerable, gangly way, beginning to confront those who have control over them. There is a stage tradition going back as far as Colley Cibber's 1699 adaptation of the Duke of York or both princes being performed by women; indeed in the Victorian period the practice was invariable, and it continued into Frank Benson's 1910 film. George Bernard Shaw complained about the role of Prince Edward being taken in Henry Irving's revival by an assertive actress, Lena Ashwell: ‘he [Richard] is obviously addressing a fine young woman … who treads the boards with no little authority and assurance as one of the younger generation knocking vigorously at the door’.⁷ Perhaps that was the point. Perhaps the surprise arose because audiences had been brought up on Cibber's adaptation in which the princes are more simply pathetic figures.

What the Victorian stage did not reflect was the requirement in the Elizabethan theatre whereby the princes would be played by the same actors, boys, as some of the women. Mendes's 1992 production brought together the two traditions by having actresses double the princes with two of the female roles: Annabelle Apsion played both the Duke of York and Anne, whilst Kate Duchêne doubled Prince Edward and the Queen. Such an arrangement can inconspicuously bond the community of Richard's victims.

The princes are presciently mindful of their uncle. In 2.4 the Duke of York remembers Richard correlating physical growth and moral worth, ‘Small herbs have grace; gross weeds grow apace’ (2.4.13), an ironic variation on Richard's attitude to his own warped body, as his mother's comment makes clear:

He was the wretched' st thing when he was young,
So long a-growing and so leisurely
That if this were a true rule he should be gracious.

(2.4.18-20)

But the received memory of Richard's infancy suggests otherwise:

Marry, they say my uncle grew so fast
That he could gnaw a crust at two hours old.
'Twas full two years ere I could get a tooth.
Grannam, this would have been a biting jest.

(2.4.27-30)

Young York discloses Richard as the gross weed, as the infant with teeth, and then in 3.1 as the Vice with his hand on his dagger, as the grotesque hunchback, all these being the trademarks of the Richard whose picture departs from verisimilitude to join with political mythology. He imagines himself as the ape on the shoulder-saddle of Richard as the lopsided showman:

Uncle, my brother mocks both you and me.
Because that I am little, like an ape,
He thinks that you should bear me on your shoulders.

(3.1.129-31)

This can be a painful moment for Richard, and a correspondingly dangerous one for the future of his young adversary. In Sam Mendes's 1992 RSC production, York climbed up on Richard's shoulders. Henry Irving as Richard responded to the quip with a silent glare of concentrated hatred, and John Wood lunged murderously at a York who was parodying his gait. York's mock might suggest that he is a diminutive version of his uncle, and when Buckingham notes his ‘sharp, provided wit’ (3.1.132) he confirms that they share some qualities. The audience knows that Young York will never grow up to be his father or his uncle. But though Richard can do away with the princes, he cannot do away with the hunch that symbolizes his criminality in that act.

York's elder brother shows a more intellectual precocity, appearing as a ruler in the making who is educating himself, with a little ostentation, into a sense of his own place in history. He knows something about the past of London's main edifice representing coercive rule. It is a building he should ultimately control as king, but, reflecting his lack of real power, he has been consigned into it against his will—‘For your best health and recreation’, as Richard reassures him. His glance back in time to the founding of the Tower by Julius Caesar bears comparison with metatheatrical moments such as Shakespeare's glance forward in time from the period of Julius Caesar itself,

                                                            How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted over,
In states unborn and accents yet unknown!

(Julius Caesar 3.1.112-14)

Cassius refers directly to the way he and his fellow conspirators are making history by killing Caesar. More allusively, when the Prince hails the originatory moment of the Tower he prompts us to remember that an edifice bears the memory of the events that have happened in it. We might reflect that he is being literally, physically placed within the civic history and history of oppression associated with the Tower. It is not after all a monument like the bruised armour Richard describes as disarmedly hanging on the walls,⁸ for its malign potency continues.

It is relevant too that the Prince's own concerns with recuperating the classical past, interrogating documentary evidence, and establishing a polity based on scholarly learning identify him as a humanist in the tradition-to-be of More himself—the More of Utopia with its carefully regulated dispersal of power as well as the More of The History of Richard III. From this point of view, Richard's assassination of the Princes delays the emergence of humanist culture itself. Richard's England is no place for Erasmus, whose visits to England are celebrated in Sir Thomas More, a play written at about the same time as Shakespeare's Richard III, and perhaps commissioned by Lord Strange's Men.⁹ Humanist culture might seem one way in which the Tudor regime ushered in with Richmond's victory contrasts with the twilight medieval past. Here again, though, it might be remembered that More himself would suffer imprisonment in the Tower and execution at the hands of Henry VIII, epitome of the Tudor king.

The Prince has managed to pick up on a topical controversy about the past of the building in which he is about to be incarcerated and destroyed, as though the knowledge he has acquired might offer some purchase over the place and its ability to do harm. Yet the attempt to ward off the ominous presence of the Tower by positioning it as an object of knowledge is undermined by the very uncertainty to which the Prince refers. Interrogation of the truth about legendary figures such as Julius Caesar is symptomatic of an age witnessing the growth of antiquarian historical study, to whom oral tradition was no longer straightforwardly acceptable. The issue in question, whether Julius Caesar's building of the Tower is a matter of record or legend, was debated at the time Shakespeare was writing Richard III by that industrious recorder of London's past and England's, John Stow. In the 1592 edition of his Annals of England, Stow remarks as follows: ‘John Lydgate, John Rous, and others write that Julius Caesar builded in this land the castles of Dover, of Canterbury, Rochester, and the Tower of London; but it is not like that Caesar remained any such time here, neither do the Roman histories make mention thereof’ (B3^v).

The note of scepticism corrects Stow's own earlier naivety, for in his Summary of English Chronicles of 1565 and his Chronicles of England of 1580 he transmits the account of Caesar building the Tower without the qualification ‘but it is not like …’, as if it were undisputed.¹⁰ The Prince's question as to whether it is recorded or reported history seems to show Shakespeare's knowledge of Stow's newly acquired rigour, whether directly or by report. Buckingham assures the Prince that Caesar's building of the Tower is ‘Upon record’. No such record exists, so the Prince is suitably dissatisfied with the answer. Though he does not challenge Buckingham's supposedly superior knowledge, he continues to talk on the supposition that, as is the case, the records from the Roman period are silent on the matter:

But say, my lord, it were not registered,
Methinks the truth should live from age to age,
As 'twere retailed to all posterity,
Even to the general all-ending day.

(3.1.75-8)

The principle is exactly that attributed to Caesar for his edifications in the 1565 Summary, ‘for a perpetual memory, to put his name in remembrance’ (C3^v). For the Prince, the absence of a record does not mean the absence of a truth.

As Hammond notes, similar questions surround the play's own historical foundations. After all, Stow questions the authority of Rous, a determined vilifier of Richard whose manuscript Historia Regum Angliae was a major written source for More's History. In the play, the Prince's comments bring into close association the ideas that ‘succeeding ages have re-edified’ the Tower and that ‘truth should live from age to age’ (3.1.71, 76). The processes are correlated through the verb ‘re-edify’, as ‘edify’ can and could mean ‘to give instruction’. The truth, like the building itself, can be re-edified ‘from age to age’. And, to acknowledge again the interweaving of memory and document, the image of re-edification is conspicuously apt in relation to the retrospective retelling of Richard's life by More, in the chronicles, and in the play itself.

This idea of re-edified knowledge applies pre-eminently to Richard's responsibility for the two Princes' deaths. The Prince's seemingly intuitive wisdom carries with it an implication that is, presumably, beyond his conscious knowledge. When the Princes are murdered, Richard will silence the historical record, but he cannot silence the oral record that will have the story ‘retailed to all posterity’. Richard himself forces the issue by responding with the grimly joking aside ‘So wise so young, they say, do never live long’ (3.1.79), as if the principle of truth itself could be killed. By appealing to proverbial oral wisdom, ‘they say’, he unwittingly admits, however, that shared knowledge is not so easily silenced. It is one of those moments when the play has the last say over Richard himself. The very act of retelling or retailing the events of his life, as the play does, testifies that the murders will stimulate rather than silence his notoriety.

Ironically, John Stow, the touchstone for documented information about the Tower, was himself responsible for the transmission of an oral tradition concerning Richard III that was far more favourable than the chronicle account from More that he himself retails in print. As D. R. Woolf records, ‘Sir George Buck, whose dogged attempt to rescue the character of Richard III from a century of Tudor vilification was published only several years after his death, and even then in a bowdlerized, watered-down form, based his case not only on scrupulous scholarship but on traditions. Much of his information came orally from the octogenarian John Stow, who had himself spoken in the mid-sixteenth century with old men who recalled Richard in a favourable light.’¹¹ Might Shakespeare have been aware that what Stow said about Richard on record differed from the inadmissible accounts he later retailed to Buck? That is conjecture, but a wider cultural anxiety about the foundations of historical knowledge, specifically knowledge relating to these events, is clearly feeding into the play and posing questions as to the security of documented historical truth.

The concern with absent record is balanced out when the play considers too what is the truth in the presence of documentation. The quasi-judicial murder of Hastings becomes a matter of falsified record. A little scene introducing a new character specially makes the point. In so far as he is simply a copyist, the Scrivener in 3.6 is a nonentity. He acquires status as a contestatory voice behind the official declaration whose personal knowledge, like Stow's, conflicts with the document he has prepared. He is indignant but self-repressing, aware that the mechanics of repression flow directly and traumatically from politics to the inward experience of the divided self.

The Scrivener explains to the audience that Richard's henchman Catesby brought him a legal indictment of Hastings ‘yesternight’ and it has taken him eleven hours overnight for him to produce the copy in the ‘set hand’ of an official legal document. He infers that the ‘precedent’ from which he copied must have taken just as long to write. As Hastings was alive and unaccused just five hours ago, Catesby, or whoever wrote the original, must have begun penning the account of his execution and the reasons for it more than seventeen hours before Hastings was executed.

The Scrivener's speech is a protesting meditation on the manuscript he is carrying, on its position within a historical sequence of events and its function as a documentary falsification of those events. His words highlight the ironies of the situation. An ‘indictment’ (3.6.1) would usually be an accusation that would lead to trial by a jury, but in this case it is clearly a proclamation issued after Hastings's execution as a justification for what has already happened. In the sequence of things it has slipped from pre-trial to post-execution. When he draws attention to how the ‘sequel’ hangs together (3.6.4), the Scrivener's unusual choice of term draws attention to the lack of due order in the events as they have happened: this is a sequence without proper sequels. The bringing together of the scrivening terms ‘fairly’ and ‘engrossed’ at 3.6.2 brings out their moral connotation. This becomes even clearer when the Scrivener asks, ‘Why, who's so gross ❙ That cannot see this palpable device?’ (3.6.10-11). Richard earlier pointed out that ‘gross’ weeds grow apace. Here the large and elaborate ‘gross’ handwriting, part of the manuscript's character as a ‘fair’ legal document, draws attention to the palpable device that it tries to pass off. The truth of the matter, like the building of the Tower, is not on record. Indeed it cannot even be spoken of.

However, it can be ‘seen in thought’ (3.6.14). The play's very existence once again testifies to the durability and final prevailing of this kind of memory, at least when it can be translated into words by those who believe they have nothing further to lose. The critique of textual record and the vindication of thought and memory are exactly appropriate to a stage work that breaks free from chronicled history, creates the illusion of events re-membered, and depends on the actors' memories as the conduit from script to audience.

Woe's Scene. The play is punctuated by successive scenes, beginning with the killing of Clarence, that show Richard's victims just before their deaths. In these claustrophobic episodes the audience itself bears witness, and is the most immediate and effective vehicle of memory. Each death is private but monumentalized. The scenes show the living, sentient, aware person, and the person is set within an emblematically moralized frame. These are portraits in a gallery of the missing that moves through dramatic time. Sam Mendes's production made the point effectively by having each executioner make the same gesture of lowering his hand in front of the victim's face to represent his death. A choric Margaret (Medea Chakhava) evidently performed a similar gesture on the victims in Robert Sturua's production some thirteen years earlier. The ghost scene will later compress this procession into a single dramatic event. Meanwhile, as the executions take place, individuation of the victims is held in check by a growing sense of echo and repetition between their situations and between their belated condemnations of Richard.

Something more effectual emerges in the second and final scene where Margaret appears, 4.4. In her soliloquy that begins the scene there are specific echoes of Richard's soliloquy at the beginning of the play, not least in their shared theatrical vocabulary. Richard's ‘inductious’ plots set the cycle of murders in motion;¹² Margaret reformulates the murders themselves as an ‘induction’ to the tragedy of Richard's fall.¹³ From this point, Margaret as a figure of Nemesis will preside over the action, in spirit at least. Despite the rhetorical language and the abstract frame of reference, it is Margaret and the other women rather than the men who are attuned to the reality of the larger historical process. Indeed the loaded patterning of the rhetoric is, in line with classical tradition, a kind of artificial memory that signifies the retention of historical knowledge.¹⁴ The women unflinchingly see the past and the future, and construct choric narratives that make the past and the future manifest. Shakespeare empowers them as chroniclers, the voices of those who understand and know. They apprehend meaning in the dismal chaos of the moment. Through them the tragic complexion becomes bifocal. There is the tragedy of Richard, but also there is tragedy as a theatrical experience that moves the audience towards grief because of his deeds. These women are a stage audience: witnesses, interpreters, and, in contrast with Anne, points of resistance to the seductive masculine energies of Richard.¹⁵

Margaret knows exactly where the tragedy is going. Richard's latest murders offer her the opportunity for grim triumph over him. They are inexcusable even to someone who welcomes vicarious vengeance on behalf of the Lancastrians, and the scene shows how the Princes' deaths bring an unpredictable alignment between the representative mother figures of Lancaster, York, and the Greys. Having presided over this new configuration, Margaret can disappear for good. The ghosts of the dead will later follow the women's example, aligning themselves in their cry of outrage against Richard, calling on him to despair and die.

This magniloquent scene 4.4 is significantly shorter in Q1 [the first Quarto] than in F [the Folio],¹⁶ and in the vast majority of productions it is shorter still. Arguably the full weight of at least the Quarto version is needed, in that too much further diminishment of Margaret's role and the Queen's trenchant verbal resistance leaves Richard without any significant opposition. The thin presentation of ‘shallow Richmond’ (5.4.198) in Act 5 finds compensation in the almost excessive and static lamentation of 4.4. Richmond is the effect. The cause and meaning can be seen to lie in the interstices between political and military reality, in Richard's confrontation with the women.

Barber and Wheeler suggest that in the web of curses ‘verbal play releases and seems to confirm aggression and destruction by uncanny power, suggesting an under-the-surface or enveloping force beyond the control of will and executive intelligence’.¹⁷ The challenges for performers are to find a dramaturgical style that will allow the opening episode of 4.4 to give expression to this power, to recognize the simultaneous ugliness and necessity of retribution, and to allow the humanity of the women's suffering its place too.

An effect of tableau is indicated by the simple device of having at least two of the three women sit on the ground.¹⁸ They are at once stationary, abjected, and placed in choric equivalence one to another. As mourners, they will wear black. The repetition of names, at its most extreme in ll. 37-43, can resound impressively if the play is performed as the last of a cycle, as in Peter Hall's production, where one reviewer thought the passage particularly effective because the dead were remembered by the audience too.¹⁹ In a freestanding Richard III Margaret will be more of an inexplicable outsider, an ironic contaminator of the play's world. Many of the dead will not be remembered by an audience which has not seen the Henry VI plays, and there will be relatively little sense that the rhetoric matches a momentous reality spanning a large sequence of history. In this situation the incantatory quality of the women's patterned repetition of names of the dead is just as much to the point as the specific people and events mentioned. The circumstance that three victims happen to have been called Edward allows the word ‘Edward’ to become in itself a token in the female memory of kinship, princeliness, and loss. Facts and discriminations are levelled out, for, as Margaret prophesies, they share victims who have suffered ‘like’ untimely violence (1.3.198) just as they have the like names. This is memory at its most selective. It foregrounds the figuration of grief as an emotional artifice over the events that gave rise to it. It bleeds away the actual detail of narrative to reveal a skeletonic poetic structure of willed similarities.

In some stage performances—Bill Alexander's was an example—the ‘three queens’ all remain on stage to confront Richard. Three can be a portentous number, and to a modern audience the visual echo of the three witches meeting Macbeth and Banquo might make its own point. The early texts are clear, however: Margaret leaves before Richard enters. The effect is to put her beyond reach of his insult and insinuation. As elsewhere, Richard's entry is disruptive. He arrives in military haste with drums and trumpets. He will sneer at his mother, and he will seduce the Queen, as he thinks, into promoting the marriage he intends to the Lady Elizabeth. But this time he will not be able to confute Margaret's rhetoric with cheap interruption. Her encounter with Richard's mother and the Queen has achieved its effect, which is to forge the matriarchal commonality of grief that binds these women, and ultimately almost everyone else, against Richard. She has taught the Queen, furthermore, that she has become a second Queen Margaret, ‘For queen, a very caitiff crowned with care’ (4.4.95). This new caitiff must learn, like her, to curse. That is Margaret's final exit. The rest of the scene will provide fitting final exits for the other two women, and will intimate that Anne has already made hers.

Richard attempts to deal with his mother and the young Princes' mother by drowning out their accusations with trumpets and drums. Just as he seems about to march away, he instead implores the women to ‘be patient and entreat me fair’ (4.4.145), and so he enters into the endgame in his relationship with his mother. The Duchess of York exists primarily so that she can definitively reject him in this scene. Before she curses Richard and invokes a bloody death for him, she sketches the life-history of a son offensively violent and unlovable from his birth onwards (4.4.160-4). In many stage productions Richard becomes childish in this exchange. Though the use of a drum to drown out intercession has classical precedent, as a response to one's mother it is purely infantile. Richard is given no verbal response to his mother's curse, but in some productions he appears shaken.²⁰

The imagery of the scene develops the Duchess's earlier description of her womb as ‘the bed of death’ (4.1.49) and Margaret's account of Richard as a ‘hell-hound’ crept from ‘the kennel of thy womb’ (4.4.44-5).²¹ She cannot retrospectively make the womb a ‘bed of death’ to Richard himself, but her curse as mother can perhaps be equivalent:

KING Richard
Who intercepts my expedition?
DUCHESS of York
A she that might have intercepted thee
By strangling thee in her accursèd womb …
Thou cam'st on earth to make the earth my hell.
Therefore take with thee my most heavy curse,
Which in the day of battle tire thee more
Than all the complete armour that thou wear'st.
Bloody thou art, bloody will be thy end.

(4.4.130-2, 159, 177-9, 184)

After this desertion, Richard solicits the Queen for the hand of her daughter Lady Elizabeth in order to consolidate his right to the throne. It is a long exchange, and the Queen proves a fierce debater, suggesting that there is more to her than the vapid, suffering ‘Poor painted queen’ of Margaret's account (1.3.241).²² She drives Richard round in circles, making him return to repeat almost the same protestation he had uttered over a hundred lines earlier (see 4.4.211-12 and 317-19). What breaks the deadlock is Richard's urging of necessity, with an implied threat:

Without her follows to this land and me,
To thee, herself, and many a Christian soul,
Sad desolation, ruin, and decay.
It cannot be avoided but by this,
It will not be avoided but by this.
Therefore good mother—I must call you so …

(4.4.327-32)

A short passage of stichomythia follows this speech, reminiscent of Richard's seduction of Anne in 1.2. The exchange takes on a bizarre erotic coloration as Richard attempts to turn the woman on stage, already his sister-in-law, into a new mother figure.²³ Not long after addressing the words ‘good mother’ to the Duchess he is (in Q1) using the same phrase to the Queen. Despite his political aim, there are hints now that his earlier claims to self-fashioning might have been played out against a then invisible background of maternal dependency. It is only after rejection (by the Queen as well as his mother) that he can be existentially perturbed by the thought that ‘There is no creature loves me’ (5.4.179). His attempt to stave off this conclusion takes him through a contorted vision in which his offspring will bring his dead victims back to life:

THE Queen
But thou didst kill my children.
KING Richard
But in your daughter's womb I bury them,
Where in that nest of spicery they shall breed
Selves of themselves, to your recomforture.

(4.4.342-5)

The reference to the passive and sacrificially nurturing ‘nest of spicery’ invokes the legend of the Phoenix that dies by burning its nest, to be reborn in the ashes. The imagined act of sexual ingression supposedly compensates for the act of murder. In fancying that his own children might be new selves for his dead victims, by implication he proposes that he too can be re-mothered, by Lady Elizabeth the daughter as well as her mother. When he invokes the Phoenix he brings to mind new birth as resurrection and spiritual salvation. This is a desperate hope indeed. Moreover, from the Queen's point of view, nothing could be less plausible than the suggestion that this re-fathering of the children on their sister might transmute infanticide into a happy outcome. She may well take refuge in evasions and make her escape, though in some productions the eroticized intensity of Richard's language at last mesmerizes and subdues her. However enigmatic the Queen's response, the audience knows that it will be his rival Richmond who will breed new princes by marrying Elizabeth.

In 4.4 we therefore see a new version of ‘Love forswore me in my mother's womb’. As a consequence of his acts, women representing the gynocratic powers of motherhood, sexual love, and hope of dynastic succession forsake Richard. Something similar happens in King John at virtually the same stage in the action: in a single speech John hears that both his mother Eleanor and his sister-in-law Constance are dead (4.2.119-24). The concluding scenes of both plays are exclusively male.²⁴ In King John, however, there is no dynastic consequence, for a son mysteriously materializes in the final scene. For Richard the desertion is absolute. It is Richard's rejection by his mother that causes his overthrow from a psychological standpoint, and it is the Queen's off-stage resistance to Richard that secures the political outcome. She transfers her allegiance and her daughter to Richmond. She will be his ‘mother’,²⁵ and the conditions are ripe for him finally to come into being as a dramatic character.

Conscience. Richard first mentions Richmond by referring to two prophecies. One of them is about the castle called Rougemont, whose name Richard now imagines to be a bardic pun on ‘Richmond’. If such puns indeed mean anything, we might be disconcerted by the similarity between ‘Richmond’ and ‘Richard’ itself, as though Richmond were a kind of doppelgänger. They compete for both the hand of Lady Elizabeth and the crown itself. The whole of Act 5 is arranged as a series of episodes contrasting the two ‘Rich … d's, the present and future kings. Throughout, Richard has been associated with the inhuman, with the bestial and monstrous. He is a dog, a hell-hound, a charnel-cur, a hedgehog, an abortive rooting hog, a bloody boar. Richmond, in contrast with Richard, is associated with calm, goodness, and blessing. He is less vital and personable than Richard: he can be metallic and icy, or a calmly militant angel. In Alexander's production, Christopher Ravenscroft played him ‘humane, thoughtful, reaching out with love’.²⁶ His conversation flows unperturbed, more a form of quiet leadership than personal interaction. This effacing self-assurance acquires value because it represents what Richard is not.

The ghost scene bears witness to a disintegration of self—that is to say, of Richard's earlier self, the figure of unquenchable exteriorization, the man of wit and will. By a horrible irony, the self that now emerges is that of Christian polemics: the renegade soul seeing itself as in a mirror and despairing at what it sees. Now he is beyond cheering; wine, a white horse, and sound staves will do little for him, and his death might be, as several productions have suggested, a form of suicide. Alan Bates's Richard gave Richmond his dagger so he could kill him.

Perhaps surprisingly, Shakespeare keeps his presentation of Richard at a distance from the forms of subjectivity that were available to him even early in his career as dramatist. More's account provided plenty of hints that Richard was an ambitious villain tormented by bad conscience. In this respect Shakespeare's Richard subtly parts from Sir Thomas More's. It is distinct too from Colley Cibber's later Richard. Nor is Richard akin to Shakespeare's own conscience-plagued tyrant, Macbeth.²⁷ The play insists from early on, in its representation of other figures such as Clarence, that a more inwardly and spiritual sense of being is possible, but for most of the play it is not so for Richard. At least until he is king, his temperament is buoyant and sanguine. Even Richard's self-perceptions are so ironic and bemused that it is impossible to secure from them a residue of safe and serious content. His character is performative and phenomenological. Through that gambit Shakespeare hints at the experience of inner self behind the mask. This indirect, elusive, and unverifiable depiction of subjectivity is a technique to which he would return in presenting other role-playing figures, such as Rosalind in As You Like It, and Hamlet. But the hints from Richard are not reassuring. We may wonder whether the startling outwardly figure is of the same order of humanity as, for example, his brother Clarence.

But Richard does eventually wake up in his sleep and discover that, after all, he too partook of humanity as others experienced it. It could even be argued that the entire play's vantage point is that of Richard on the eve of the battle, a Richard on the point of death who meditates on the sequence that has brought him to where he is. By the end, the carefully patterned repetitions, implausible in themselves, might be understood as a retrospective narrative of self. After all, the ghosts are a condensed recapitulation of the longer story. If the viewpoint is Richard's, we might better understand why the logically absent Margaret is actually present in the play, why it can be coherent for Richmond, as an element in Richard's own account, to have a simultaneous dream in which he is simultaneously visited by the ghosts, and why the material world and the otherworld seem perfectly conjoined against Richard. To develop the speculative view that a subjectively based reading would be available to the early audiences, one might invoke Elizabethan forms of writing such as lamentation, complaint, spiritual autobiography, repentance, and deathbed meditation. For an audience familiar with the story, the play might be experienced as a horrible and remorselessly patterned unfolding of events that reached towards a moment of nemesis as well as a moment of triumph.

What Richard experiences after his nightmare of the ghosts is loss of grace, and in this the play is theologically orthodox. Richard is a sinner who knows himself as such and who cannot repent. Without grace there is no essential self: ‘I myself ❙ Find in myself no pity to myself’ (5.4.181-2; …). His dialogue with himself grows from the premiss that ‘There's none else by’ (5.4.161): specifically, no murderer about to kill him. He realizes that this is untrue, for spiritual despair makes him potentially his own self-assassin. John Donne wrote that ‘It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God; but to fall out of the hands of the living God is a horror beyond our expression, beyond our imagination.’²⁸ In Christian thought reaching back to St Augustine, the spiritual self finds validation in the knowledge of God's love. The consequences could be dire for those, following Calvinist assumptions, whose knowledge of God depended in the first place on interrogating the inner self. At worst, awareness of self could be experienced as rupture, the pain of exclusion from God.²⁹

After his call ‘Have mercy, Jesu’ uttered in sleep, Richard's dialogue with himself is pointed in its failure to mention God as the ultimate source of love and affinity. God speaks his judgement through the courtroom of Richard's conscience, which anticipates the Last Judgement itself, but in so doing actually signifies his absence. The absent God has left a record of his departure in the form of a morally aware self, and that self now joins with his victims in seeking his death. Richard has attempted to fabricate himself as an autonomous being, but his recognition of conscience is a discovery that he has done so within a larger scheme of creation.

Richard fended off any responsibility for his own actions for as long as he could blame himself on his ontological beginnings, and hence on his mother. Her rejection of him signifies not only that humanity as a whole has turned against him, but also that he must take new account of himself. Before, his self-awareness fed on the death of others, specifically those within the bonds of kinship. Now there is a vacuum of otherness of every kind. Richard's annihilation of form, kinship, and law has turned back on him.³⁰ ‘Richard loves Richard’ is a last-ditch gesture towards self-engendering through a narcissistic embrace of self, as well as a sad parody of God's love for humanity.

On the page Richard's soliloquy after his dream can seem disjointed and without eloquence, but as a script for performance its fragmentation is the whole point. In performance it can be and often has been the apex of the entire play. The speech occupies the space between what is no ordinary dream and the waking world of the battlefield. Though Richard revives impressively to fight his last battle, the speech is spiritually in extremis, poised between life and death. It is the critical moment in the play as a tragedy, as Richard attains theology by knowing of God's absence, and attains ironic self-awareness by seeing lost possibilities for selfhood.

Succeeding Ages. He is a figure about to die, and Richmond a figure ready to succeed. Shakespeare's dramatic elaborations on his sources throughout the play converge with historical hindsight in making this a certainty. Before the battle Richard is brave, monstrously: ‘A thousand hearts are great within my bosom’ (5.5.76). Off stage, in the battle itself, he ‘enacts more wonders than a man’ (5.6.2) as he kills phantom Richmonds who are really other soldiers in disguise.³¹ In Cibber's version especially, he can face Richmond heroically, even if that means enlisting on his side the ghosts that haunted him. Edmund Kean, playing Cibber's ‘aspiring soul’ for full, ‘fought like one drunk with wounds: and the attitude in which he stands with his hands stretched out, after his sword is taken from him, had a preternatural and terrific grandeur, as if his will could not be disarmed, and the very phantoms of his despair had a withering power’.³² Yet a staging of the combat that reflects Richard's mortal and spiritual desperation in Shakespeare's text might find his will finally disarmed. Sher's stooped Richard looked unable to fight; Richmond approached him ceremonially from behind and thrust his sword down on him.

Richmond's final speech is usually considered to be persuasive to the audience and sincere, though Wilbur Sanders calls it ‘a pious shell and a hard core of prudential self-interest’.³³ He also remarks that it is ‘tenuously integrated’ with the rest of the play.³⁴ Is it, as in Bogdanov's production, a smooth exercise in public relations, scarcely ruffled by the darkly ambiguous and repeated injunction ‘Let them not live’? Is it irrelevant because dissociated from the areas of emotional involvement that have typified the play? Or is this seedling of civic peace exactly what is most needed after Richard's manic and Herculean wrenching of England? At all events, by the end of the play Richmond is, as it were, remembering the future, speaking with the inflections of Elizabethan polity. The 1559 pageant celebrating the coronation of Queen Elizabeth had established the connection between the two new reigns at the earliest opportunity. Its theme, ‘Unity’, referred specifically to a concord aimed at healing the strife between church reformers and Catholics. The pageant stage was decorated with red and white roses illustrating ‘The Uniting of the Two Houses of Lancaster and York’, and the narrator, a child, petitioned that:

Therefore, as civil war and shed of blood did cease
When these two houses were united into one,
So now, that jar shall stint and quietness increase,
We trust, O noble Queen, thou wilt be cause alone.(35)

As the pageant looks to the past, Richmond's speech looks towards the original audiences' present, which has been made possible by his own impending marriage to an earlier Elizabeth. He himself has been all along a product of Elizabethan hindsight. This is a strong closure, to the tetralogy as well as the play, because it confirms an effective alignment between the projection forwards and the projection back in time. In contrast with the coronation pageant, where a child could usher in a new age even as it speaks of the past, Shakespeare's play is locked into a circular dialogue between the past it depicts and its own present moment, for by then Queen Elizabeth was without an heir and long past childbearing.

The play as a whole perhaps presents a conflict between what Richard P. Wheeler calls ‘a redemptive destiny’ that ‘makes history sacred’ and a profane history in which Richard's ‘terrible presence is a source of fascination’.³⁶ At narrative and thematic levels, the sacralizing myth prevails, and the play accords with Walter Benjamin's enigmatic thesis: ‘As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history.’³⁷ In terms of the play's emotional impact, the effect might be otherwise. For in the conflict between the singular and the dispersed, between the demotic and the formal, between charismatic evil and bland virtue, the singular, the demotic, and the charismatic are likely to work theatrically in Richard's favour.

The reader's play of the mind might be able both to celebrate Richard as a creature of the theatre and to denounce him as an actor in an imagined political world. It might, correspondingly, both trace the ‘secret heliotropism’ of retelling the past so as to vindicate the present, and find in Richard an explosive figure whose very theatricality reveals the artifice and gives away the secret. As a whole, these are extravagant expectations to have of any one production. But theatre has its own purposes. For the very reason that stage performance is capable of challenging and reshaping our understanding of the play, the practices of theatre cannot be bound by prior assumptions as to the text's potential, let alone one editor's summary of it.

Notes

1. Compare Kristian Smidt, Unconformities in Shakespeare's History Plays (1982), pp. 53-71.

2. Harold Brooks, ‘Richard III: Antecedents of Clarence's Dream’, Shakespeare Survey 32 (1979): pp. 148-50.

3. Brooks, ‘Antecedents’, p. 150. See Commentary to 1.4.9-19, 25, 41-8, etc. [in The Tragedy of King Richard III, by William Shakespeare, edited by John Jowett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000].

4. The Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle, ed. A. C. Cawley (Manchester, 1958), pp. 78-90.

5. Certain Sermons or Homilies (1547), and A Homily against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion (1570), ed. Ronald B. Bond (Toronto and London, 1987), p. 167.

6. Twenty-five occurrences in dialogue, plus one stage direction. The next play is Midsummer Night's Dream, with sixteen occurrences (a lower count, though an admittedly higher frequency, as it is a shorter play).

7. George Bernard Shaw, in Shaw on Shakespeare, ed. Edwin Wilson (1962), p. 168.

8. Compare Sigmund Freud's commentary on the monuments of London as ‘mnemic symbols’, in ‘Five Lectures in Psycho-Analysis’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. James Strachey et al., 24 vols. (1953-74), xi. 16-17.

9. The play was written by Anthony Munday, probably with Henry Chettle. A passage in it influences a passage in Richard III, or vice versa: see Commentary to 1.4.2-65 [in The Tragedy of King Richard III, by William Shakespeare, edited by John Jowett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000]. Shakespeare helped revise Sir Thomas More if, as many scholars believe, the ‘Hand D’ additions to the manuscript are his, but the revisions may have been a decade later (see T. H. Howard-Hill, ed., Shakespeare and ‘Sir Thomas More’ [Cambridge, 1989]).

10. Stow had edited one of his sources of information, Lydgate's Serpent of Division (1559). Lydgate uses the verb ‘edified’, which survives in Stow's Summary in the same passage to describe the building of Chichester.

11. D. R. Woolf, ‘The “Common Voice”: History, Folklore and Oral Tradition in Early Modern England’, in Past and Present, 120 (1988), 26-52, p. 37.

12. On the reading ‘inductious’, see Appendix D, Note 4 [in The Tragedy of King Richard III, by William Shakespeare, edited by John Jowett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000].

13. A later play with a similar structure is Henry Chettle's Tragedy of Hoffman (1602-3), where the first revenge sequence begins with Hoffman's opening soliloquy and the counter-revenge begins two-thirds of the way through the play with the entry of Martha, the widowed Duchess.

14. On Renaissance memory machines and their antecedents in classical rhetoric, see Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (1966).

15. Howard and Rackin [Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation (London and New York, 1997)] argue that the women are subordinated to Richmond's patriarchal agenda (pp. 113-18). I suggest, less retrospectively and more with a sense of the play as it develops in action, that Richmond is virtually a mere outcome of the feminized process, an agent for the voice of motherhood and a future king whose wife will carry the stronger right to the throne. Richmond's mother is mentioned long before he is (1.3.20), and the first mention of him identifies him as a figure free of Margaret's curse on the Queen as a mother whose name is ominous to children (4.1.34-42).

16. See Appendix A for the Folio-only material [in The Tragedy of King Richard III, by William Shakespeare, edited by John Jowett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000].

17. C. L. Barber and Richard P. Wheeler, The Whole Journey (Berkeley and London, 1986), p. 107.

18. Margaret might sit on the throne (see Commentary, headnote to 4.4, and 4.4.455.2 n. [in The Tragedy of King Richard III, by William Shakespeare, edited by John Jowett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000]) or remain standing.

19. Julie Hankey, Plays in Performance: Richard III (1981); 2nd edn. (Bristol, 1988), p. 213, citing Financial Times, 13 January 1964.

20. See …, pp. 108-9, on Troughton's interpretation [in The Tragedy of King Richard III, by William Shakespeare, edited by John Jowett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000].

21. Like ‘dream’, the word ‘womb’ appears more often in Richard III than any other Shakespeare play. On every occasion it is in connection with Richard, and that connection gives the word a strong negative connotation.

22. R. Chris Hassel, ‘Context and Charisma’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 36 (1985), p. 636, approves of Frances Tomelty's portrayal of the Queen as ‘a tough, smart, skeptical, worldly woman’ in Alexander's production, and cites reviews of other productions where she has proved ‘a strong adversary’ (n. 31). In Al Pacino's film Looking for Richard (1996), the actor playing the Queen, Penelope Allen, argues keenly for presenting her thus.

23. As noted by Barbara Hodgdon, The End Crowns All (Princeton and Oxford, 1991), pp. 104-11.

24. Compare also Portia's reported death and the all-male end of Julius Caesar.

25. As Richard recognizes in the ‘Freudian slip’ of 5.5.53: see Commentary [in The Tragedy of King Richard III, by William Shakespeare, edited by John Jowett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000].

26. Hassel, ‘Context’, p. 638.

27. Nevertheless, Richard III is an important precursor of Macbeth. Comparison of Richard and Macbeth played a central part in the development of eighteenth-century character criticism; see Joseph W. Donohue, Dramatic Character in the English Romantic Age (Princeton, 1970), pp. 189-215.

28. John Donne, Sermons, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley, 1953-62), v. 266.

29. John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination (Oxford, 1991), p. 70.

30. See William C. Carroll, ‘Desacralization and Succession in Richard III’, Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft West, Jahrbuch 1991, 82-96.

31. See 5.6.11. This detail, not in the sources, gives Richmond a touch of the Machiavel, though the role-playing works on the opposite principle to his opponent's earlier single-handed performance of many roles.

32. William Hazlitt (1820), in Jonathan Bate, ed., The Romantics on Shakespeare (Harmondsworth, 1992), p. 510.

33. Wilbur Sanders, The Dramatist and the Received Idea (Cambridge, 1968), p. 73.

34. A reader who considers it important to uphold the speech's detachment from the rest of the play may wish to reject the editorial emendation at 5.7.28.

35. The Passage of our most Dread Sovereign Lady Queen Elizabeth through the City of London to Westminster, the Day before her Coronation (1558 [1559]), sig. B1.

36. Richard P. Wheeler, ‘History, Character and Conscience in Richard III’, Comparative Drama, 5 (1971), 301-21; pp. 303, 304.

37. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, written 1940, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York, 1968), p. 255.