SOURCE: de Somogyi, Nick. Introduction to The Shakespeare Folios: Richard III, edited by Nick de Somogyi, pp. xxvii-xlix. London: Nick Hern Books, 2002.

[In the following essay, de Somogyi provides an overview of Richard III, tracing the play's performance and textual history as well as providing Richard's family tree.]

‘THE BEHOLDERS OF THIS FRANTIC PLAY’: RICHARD III IN PERFORMANCE

The lank black hair and sharply prominent nose are unmistakable; so is the limp, as the hunchback King turns towards the camera's slow zoom, and (to the sound of a gently strummed lute) delivers, in that inimitably clipped bark, some of the most famous opening lines in the world: ‘It has been a hard day's night, and I have been working like a dog …’¹ Peter Sellers's sublime impersonation of Laurence Olivier as Richard III (as John Lennon), recorded for a 1965 TV Beatles ‘spectacular’, is variously true to the play he didn't quote. The pleasure of Olivier's iconic performance—premièred on the London stage in 1944, immortalized on film in 1955—has been shrewdly located in ‘watching Olivier the consummate actor play Richard the consummate actor’;² how apt, then, that Sellers, the arch-mimic, should add his own twist to the sequence of eerily accurate impersonations by which Shakespeare's hero-villain usurps the throne. From the very first, Richard III has provided a ‘peerless vehicle for a virtuoso actor’,³ a tradition embodied in John Gielgud's gift to Olivier, ‘in appreciation of his performance’, of the sword Edmund Kean had worn in the rôle in 1814, which had in turn been presented to Sir Henry Irving in 1873.⁴ The theory that Sellers pinched Olivier's own wig for the part may represent a suitably Goonish extension of this tradition.⁵

‘Come, cousin,’ says Richard in Shakespeare's play, in a brief backstage masterclass with his protégé Buckingham,

          canst thou quake and change thy colour,
Murder thy breath in middle of a word,
And then again begin, and stop again,
As if thou were distraught and mad with terror?

(3.5, pp. 128-9)

‘Tut, I can counterfeit the deep tragedian,’ replies Buckingham. Richard's range is broader: he can counterfeit the faithful brother (1.1), the wooing lover (1.2), the political loyalist (1.3), the indulgent uncle (3.1), the persecuted innocent (3.4), and—perhaps his finest performance—the pious Christian prince, reluctantly enthroned (3.7). The play—his play—is indeed, as a recent editor has called it, ‘conspicuously a performance piece, and in many ways it is about the nature of performance’.⁶ Impersonation lies at the heart of the story Richard III tells, as one of Shakespeare's most influential sources acknowledged: ‘[King Richard] was of a ready, pregnant, and quick wit, wily to feign, and apt to dissemble.’⁷ And the seed—or better, perhaps, the replicating germ—of the play's conceit seems to have occurred to Shakespeare midway through its predecessor, the play known in the First Folio as Henry VI, Part Three. ‘I can add colours to the chameleon,’ boasts Richard in that earlier play, towards the end of a 70-line soliloquy that suddenly propels him centre-stage (3.2). Olivier shared in that boast, inserting this section of the speech into Richard III's opening soliloquy (see ‘The Story So Far’ below, pp. li-liv).

Richard III is often described as Shakespeare's most popular play, a statistic borne out by its enduring profile in the twentieth century, the era of mass entertainment—and mass murder. A scene from the play was among the first pieces of drama to be televised by the BBC (in 1937);⁸ and when Olivier's film was broadcast on NBC in 1956, American television audiences were estimated at over 60 million, a record number, and ‘more … than had seen the play in the theatres of England since it was first performed in 1592’.⁹ Olivier had partly modelled his performance in that film on the same detested individual—the theatre director Jed Harris—as had inspired the Big Bad Wolf in Walt Disney's cartoon, Three Little Pigs (1933).¹⁰ The other influence, of course, was Hitler—though Olivier's biographer revealingly detects ‘echoes of the mannerisms caricatured by Chaplin in The Great Dictator’.¹¹ Film, television, Chaplin, Disney, Hitler, the Goons, the Beatles: it is entirely fitting that the vast celebrity of each of these twentieth-century phenomena finds a place in the cultural history of Richard III. For the play was Shakespeare's first smash-hit, his first ‘Number One’; it also laid the foundation of his twenty-year partnership with Richard Burbage. The massive popularity of Richard III—an unbeatable combination of Burbage's starring performances and Shakespeare's masterpiece of script—accordingly prompted a sequence of parody, pastiche, and anecdote that place Richard III at the heart of sixteenth-century pop culture.

‘A boat! A boat!’ cries a character in the City Comedy Eastward Ho! (1605), ‘A full hundred marks for a boat!’¹² John Marston was particularly fond of this deflationary gag—the speaker is here merely hailing a river-taxi—and his earliest version of it appeared in his 1598 satire The Scourge of Villainy (1598).¹³ A few years later, in 1601, students at St John's College, Cambridge, went a little further. At around the same time that the Lord Chamberlain's Men were presenting their touring production of Hamlet in the town,¹⁴ they wrote and performed a play (a satire on the London literary scene known to scholarship as The Second Part of The Return from Parnassus) that features in its cast the real-life figures of Dick Burbage and Will Kemp. These glamorous figures (the leading actor and the clown of the Lord Chamberlain's Men) audition some dim-witted Cambridge undergraduates: ‘I like your face and the proportion of your body for Richard the 3,’ says Burbage, rather archly, to one of them; ‘I pray … let me see you act a little of it.’ ‘Now is the winter of our discontent,’ obliges his hapless protégé. ‘Very well I assure you,’ comments Burbage; ‘we see what ability you are of.’¹⁵

By this time, of course, Burbage and Shakespeare's abilities were very well known to London audiences. So much so, in fact, that they featured in a racy piece of theatrical gossip, first recorded in a diary entry (by the law-student John Manningham) in March 1602. ‘Upon a time when Burbage played Richard III,’ it relates, a star-struck member of the audience (a ‘groupie’, so to say) ‘grew so far in liking with him’ that she arranged an illicit liaison with him. Burbage was to announce himself ‘by the name of Richard III’ when he called; but:

Shakespeare overhearing their conclusion went before, was entertained, and at his game ere Burbage came. Then, message being brought that ‘Richard III’ was at the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made that ‘William the Conqueror was before Richard III’.¹⁶

The punchline for twenty-first-century audiences might better read ‘William the Conqueror came before Richard III’, but the story's modern status is plain: Burbage and Shakespeare are the subject of celebrity gossip—and, significantly, it is Richard III that underpins the joke. Burbage was as long identified in the rôle as Olivier remains to this day;¹⁷ and it was on the title-page of Richard III's second Quarto edition that Shakespeare's name was first used to advertise a printed play.¹⁸ Contemporary readers and playgoers alike testify to its vast popularity. Between 1597 (when its first edition appeared) and 1623 (when it was published as the ninth play in the Folio's ‘Histories’), no fewer than six separate Quarto editions were printed.¹⁹ But the play that Heminge and Condell laboured to procure for their discerning readership in 1623 was, in a thousand various ways, quite different to the play those readers and playgoers had known for the previous thirty years of its celebrity.

Modern students of pop-culture are familiar with the lavish boxed sets, anthologies, and re-issued CDs that continue to re-package the music of the 1960s. The inclusion of first takes, demos, ‘out-takes’ from rehearsal sessions, and ‘original’ tracks shorn of subsequent ‘overdubs’ are obligatory; one such re-issue boasts of the ‘intensive archival research to find the original masters’ from which it was produced.²⁰ Heminge and Condell would have recognized the principle (if not the vocabulary) of such claims. The preface to their collection, after all, claims to have restored to their readership the authoritative texts of previously bootlegged editions of some plays (‘cured and perfect of their limbs’), and ‘all the rest, absolute in their numbers, as he conceived them’ (see above, p. x). The following section is designed to explain what exactly it was that Heminge and Condell unearthed from the archive at their disposal, and how precisely they re-mastered The Tragedy of Richard the Third.

‘AND FROM THE CROSS-ROW PLUCKS THE LETTER “G’”: RICHARD III IN PRINT

‘William the Conqueror was before Richard III’: Heminge and Condell arranged the second section of Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies on the very same principle, sequencing its ten history plays in the chronological order of their reigns rather than in the order of their composition. Their procedure made grand sense of Shakespeare's achievement—an unbroken dramatic chronicle of England's history from 1398 to 1485, topped and tailed by related episodes from both her distant (King John) and recent (Henry VIII) past;²¹ but it skewed the astonishing trajectory of his creative development. For the so-called second tetralogy (Richard II to Henry V) there precedes the first (1 Henry VI to Richard III); and Richard III, the ninth in the Folio sequence (occupying pp. 173-204, sig. q5r-t2v)²² comes immediately before Henry VIII—despite the twenty years separating their theatrical premières. More confusing still is the fact that Henry VI, Part One is what we would nowadays call a ‘prequel’: it seems to have been written after the plays known in the Folio as The Second and Third Part of King Henry the Sixth;²³ and to make matters worse, Henry VI, Part Two was originally known (in its 1594 Quarto edition) as The First Part of the Contention of the two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster.

Something of the same dizzying perspective closely attends the textual history of Richard III itself: for its earliest printed edition (the First Quarto, 1597) preserves a much later version of the play than the one Heminge and Condell subsequently published in their 1623 collection. The Folio, as it were, came before the Quarto. The following chronological narrative represents (more or less) the expert consensus surrounding what has been called ‘the most difficult question which presents itself to an editor of Shakespeare’,²⁴ based on a minute analysis by generations of scholars of the seven editions of Richard III that were published between 1597 and 1623. (Scholarly consensus being what it is, however, it should be noted that almost every detail in the following account has been challenged.)

In around 1592, fresh from completing work on the three-part Henry VI sequence, Shakespeare decided to resume the historical chronology by developing the character of Richard, Duke of Gloucester into a play of his own, and so fulfil Richard's stated vow ‘to catch the English crown’ (3 Henry VI, 3.2. A modernized text of this originating soliloquy can be found below, pp. li-liii). Possibly he was influenced—perhaps even irritated—by an anonymous play on the same subject, The True Tragedy of Richard the Third, first performed around 1591.²⁵ Working from the chronicle sources of Edward Hall (1550) and Ralph Holinshed (1587), Shakespeare sat down to write the longest play he had so far written—and the second longest of his entire career.²⁶ Shakespeare presented this bundle of manuscript—possibly a fair copy he had prepared for the purpose, tinkering and tweaking as he went—to the theatrical company to which he was then attached: either Lord Strange's Men or Lord Pembroke's Men, depending on when precisely it was that he completed the play. (He certainly seems to have taken care to introduce gratuitously flattering references to both lords' descendants into the historical record that his script condensed.)²⁷

Shakespeare's Richard III probably first reached the stage in 1592-3, whereupon it swiftly established the simultaneous celebrity of both its author and its star (Richard Burbage). Both men joined the newly formed Lord Chamberlain's Men in the early summer of 1594; with them went the successful script of Richard III—but in a form already substantially removed from the manuscript draft Shakespeare had submitted, which would merely have formed the raw material from which to assemble (via a process of ensemble reading and collective rehearsal) the so-called ‘prompt-book’ (or ‘theatre copy’, or ‘play-book’): a ‘definitive’ transcript of the performed play, incorporating cuts, additions, and revisions, and marked up with the stage-directions, effects, and props necessary to ensure a smooth performance. The play remained in the repertoire of the Chamberlain's Men, and its enduring success led others to seek reflected glory: The True Tragedy of Richard the Third (the play it had outshone) was entered for publication in June 1594.

Just over three years later, in July 1597, the fragile relationship between London's players and its government violently broke down when news reached the Privy Council of the performance on Bankside of a scandalous, lewd, and seditious play called The Isle of Dogs.²⁸ That play—by Thomas Nashe and a young Ben Jonson—is lost, so it is impossible to know why it caused such a fuss. What is known is that on 28 July, the Council ordered the immediate closure—and subsequent demolition—of all London's theatres. In fact the theatres survived, and the storm had blown over by mid-October, when Philip Henslowe resumed his recording of box-office receipts at the Rose.²⁹ Meanwhile, however, faced with the collapse of their principal source of income, Shakespeare's company went on tour, mainly around the southern coast of England.³⁰ And now the textual history of Richard III gets complicated. For this play—by now a slightly dusty jewel in their crown—was evidently among those presented during this enforced touring season. But somehow, somewhere along the way, the prompt-book (the performance-text of the play that had been adapted from Shakespeare's original manuscript) went missing.

And so, in around August 1597, the assembled company gave a private performance of Richard III, at dictation-speed (by the seaside at Rye or Dover, it is pleasant to imagine), reconstructing from their collective memory the version of the play they were then touring. These speeches were written down, and an approximation of the prompt-book reproduced—an ‘approximation’ because not only did this transcript rely on the fallible memories of its cast, but the laborious recital of their parts would also necessarily have incorporated the fully rehearsed adaptation of the play that had been prepared in advance so as to cater for the more limited resources available to the smaller troupe that was touring it.³¹

The Chamberlain's Men's provincial tour came to an end in October, when news may have reached them that the Admiral's Men—their chief rivals in the city—had resumed performances at the Rose. They were certainly back in London by the 20th, when ‘The tragedie of kinge Richard the Third w^th the death of the duke of Clarence’ was entered in the Stationers' Register for publication. The version of the play they submitted for publication was the ‘memorial reconstruction’ of the touring script they had only recently compiled.

A play's publication generally signalled the end of its box-office pull. The formal rhetoric of Richard III must indeed have come to seem rather creakily old-fashioned by the time its First Quarto (‘Q1’) appeared a few months later—certainly by contrast with the supple naturalism of the Henry IV plays that Shakespeare was now in the throes of composing. Still, the appearance on London's book-stalls, in 1597, of the paperback of Richard III (‘As it hath beene lately Acted by the Right honourable the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants’) can scarcely have done the company's profile or reputation any harm. Unusually, the publisher (Andrew Wise), divided the printing work between two separate workshops, possibly in an effort to rush forward the publication date.³²

The book was a phenomenal success. A second edition appeared (this time under Shakespeare's name) within the year (Q2, 1598), and further reprints (Q3-Q8) were regularly issued until 1634. Each of these editions was laboriously typeset from its predecessor (the possibility of ‘Saving to Disk’ remaining an unimaginable luxury for the next four centuries). So although the odd ‘typo’-correction was here and there made by each new generation of compositors, each of these successive Quartos introduced errors of its own—rather as, these days, when photocopies are made of photocopies, each successive print displays a sometimes illegible degeneration. (It seems, however, that someone was well enough aware of the entropy of this process to insist that Q5 (1612) was set from a copy of Q3 (1602) that had been marked up with corrections.)³³

Shakespeare's Richard III was being read in paperback throughout his subsequent career—even as Much Ado About Nothing (1598), Hamlet (1602), King Lear (1605), and The Tempest (1612) were being performed. By the time of its Sixth Quarto in 1622, however, both its presiding geniuses (Burbage and Shakespeare) were dead; and their literary and theatrical heirs (Heminge and Condell) were well advanced in preparing their edition of Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. The editorial policy they adopted transformed the play from the ‘Tragedy’ by which it had been known and praised, into the volume's penultimate History;³⁴ but their work did not stop there. True to the pledge they made in the Folio's preface, Heminge and Condell took care to provide their readership with something new: ‘and all the rest, absolute in their numbers, as he conceived them’ (see above, p. x).

Their easiest course would simply have been to reprint the play from one or other of its many previous Quarto editions (as they more or less did, for example, with Much Ado About Nothing).³⁵ Instead they worked hard to improve on that variously distorted abridgement. The Life & Death of Richard the Third (as the play is called on the Folio's contents page) presented to its readers a version of the play previously unknown to more than a handful of professional actors: the manuscript bundle that Shakespeare had originally compiled. But the clarity of Shakespeare's handwriting seems to have been erratic; and besides, these pages were by now close to thirty years old. And so, rather than risking a fresh sequence of errors and misreadings at the printer's, Heminge and Condell devised a means by which to combine the legibility of the Quartos with the variant original text of Shakespeare's manuscript. What is certain is that a copy of Q3 (1602)—possibly also a copy of Q6 (1622)—was used as a sort of convenient template against which Shakespeare's original manuscript was checked, and onto which its variant readings were transplanted. From these two—or three—separate texts was created (or better, perhaps ‘recreated’) the ‘authoritative’ text of Richard III that appears in the First Folio. What is less certain is how this ‘collation’ was managed—what material, in other words, was presented to the Folio typesetters (‘compositors’) in early 1623. The two main alternative opinions are as follows.

The play was either typeset from a scissor-and-paste composite of the Quarto play, systematically annotated from Shakespeare's manuscript (‘insert’, ‘delete’, ‘substitute’, and so on); or from a fresh transcript prepared (by a ‘collator’) from the mess of correction such a process would have entailed. Whatever the truth, in around March 1623, two separate compositors, identified by scholarship as ‘A’ and ‘B’,³⁶ began work on typesetting the play. The text they prepared was the closest so far published to the play Shakespeare had conceived in the early 1590s. That is the text which this edition exactly reproduces—the version presented as definitive by its first editors. Yet (as the last four pages have sought to demonstrate) every step of a reader's way stands upon a shifting quicksand of gradually yielding authority. A single leaf of this 1623 edition may usefully illustrate the complex process of textual mediation that lies behind it.

Pages 181-2 (r3r-v) of the ‘Histories’ section of the First Folio advances the action of Richard III from the moment that the Duke of Clarence's murderers resolve to set about their work (1.4, pp. 60-61) to the public announcement of that murder at the meeting King Edward has convened (2.1, pp. 74-5). The second page (r3v) is reproduced in facsimile below, p. 274.

Certain elements of this 250-line sequence clearly found their way into the text at the time of its 1623 printing. The play's division into acts and scenes, for example (‘Actus Secundus. Scœna Prima.’), is unique to the Folio, and was probably introduced to smoothe the play's transition from stage to page: the sumptuous Folio is a book to read rather than an acting edition.³⁷ Other unique features were less helpful. As, for example, in the careless slip (by Compositor ‘B’) in the first line of r3r, when the First Murderer characterizes conscience as the devil: ‘'Tis euen now at my elbow, perswading me not to kill the Dkue [sic]’ (1.4, pp. 60-61). Readers would be able to correct this mistake (‘Duke’) without recourse to a Quarto version of the play; but if they did consult one, they would be faced with a more complicated problem. For in all its Quarto editions, the line reads (in modernized form), ‘Zounds it is even at my elbow, persuading me not to kill the Duke’. The word ‘Zounds’ (or ‘'Swounds’) is a conflation of ‘By God's wounds’, a reference to Christ's wounds on the cross and so an expletive of some force. Both Murderers use the word—but only in the Quarto; so does Buckingham, as part of the marvellous set-piece (3.7) in which Richard pretends to piety—but, again, only in the Quarto:

—Come, citizens. Zounds, I'll entreat no more.
—O, do not swear, my Lord of Buckingham.

The Folio omits both the expletive and Richard's superb rejoinder (see below, pp. 148-9), all of which suggests that, somewhere along the way, Shakespeare's original manuscript was systematically ‘toned down’, expurgated of all its more offensive slang. Some scholars explain the pattern by reference to the Act passed by James I in 1606 for ‘the avoiding of the great Abuse of the Holy Name of God in stage-plays’. It would certainly be ironic if Richard's fictional prohibition (‘O, do not swear’) itself fell foul of a real one by a later king; but James's Act did not extend to printed plays (which is why Q1-Q6 retain the sequence), and so, for its effect to be visible in the Folio, the manuscript underlying that text would need to have been edited for performance at some point after 1606—which seems to contradict the otherwise solid theory that F was based on Shakespeare's original manuscript. The alternative view is that these changes were specifically introduced under the prestigious auspices of Heminge and Condell's 1623 project, and that its more extreme oaths were excised on the grounds of late-Jacobean literary taste rather than early-Jacobean censorship.

Whatever the reason, our single Folio-page may also have minded its language at the moment when Clarence turns on his Murderers, by cutting the line italicized here: ‘I charge you, as you hope for any goodness, / By Christ's dear blood, shed for our grievous sins, / That you depart and lay no hands on me’ (1.4, pp. 62-3). On the other hand, of course, the line may simply have been omitted by mistake (whether by Compositor ‘B’ or the hypothetical ‘collator’), as seems may have happened in Clarence's subsequent plea:

Tell him, when that our princely father York
Bless'd his three sons with his victorious arm,
And charg'd us from his soul to love each other,
He little thought of this divided friendship.

(1.4, pp. 64-5)

The italicized line is again unique to Q—but can we be as certain as one recent editor in thinking that the ‘missing’ line is ‘essential to the sense’?³⁸ Or, indeed, if it is essential, that the same thought did not occur to the actors who first rehearsed the scene from Shakespeare's original script, and then prevailed upon him to add the line in order to spell out that sense?

That question is worth asking because this may well be the process by which one of the play's most famous sequences found its way into Quartos, but not into the Folio: the so-called ‘clock dialogue’ in 4.2, in which Buckingham's persistent interruption of King Richard's meditation prompts a vehement retort (see Textual Note 67 below). Compositor ‘B’, after all, must have been staggeringly negligent to have omitted these twenty-odd lines by mistake. A full range of theories has been proposed,³⁹ but the present consensus holds that the passage was added (probably by Shakespeare) to his original draft in the course of the play's first rehearsals in around 1592—in the name of suspense, perhaps, or to provide Tyrrell with a more credible period of time than originally afforded him in which to receive and carry out his orders (the murder of the Princes), and then return to report on the outcome (4.2, pp. 163-7).

This sequence is the only substantial passage that is unique to the play's Quarto texts. There are, however, around 200 lines that only appear in the Folio, thanks to the efforts with which Heminge and Condell prepared that volume, and which counted among its unique selling-points. Many of these extra lines (including their longest sequence) appear in the course of Richard's extended interview with Queen Elizabeth in 4.4 (pp. 182-97). Like most latter-day ‘bonus tracks’, however, to read these lines is partly to understand why they were never originally released. For it has been well-pointed out that Richard ends the previous scene with the injunction, ‘We must be brief when traitors brave the field’ (4.3, pp. 168-9)—but then speaks ‘with his mother for some 66 lines, and then debates with Elizabeth for another 257’.⁴⁰ It is generally agreed that the scene was probably cut at more or less the same time as the ‘clock dialogue’ was added, but for an opposite reason: to speed up the play's theatrical pace at a time when audiences' energies might fairly be thought to be at risk of flagging. It is not that such cuts would substantially reduce the playing-time of Richard III (its First Quarto was still the longest play ever printed);⁴¹ rather that ‘Shakespeare's youthful judgement’ significantly benefited from the judicious editing of his professional elders and peers.⁴² Not all the passages unique to the Folio necessarily represent this process; indeed, some scholars hold that Shakespeare at some point in fact added some of these passages rather than reluctantly conceding their deletion.⁴³ What does seem clear, however, is that modern productions that feature material from both Folio and Quarto versions present a mix-and-match play that neither Shakespeare nor his company would necessarily have recognized.

‘Either/or but not both’: that editorial rule of thumb would certainly hold good were a modern editor simply limited to treating Q as an accurate script of the play's touring production, and F as the originating authorial manuscript, and then having to choose between them. Such is the byzantine nature of Richard III's textual pedigree, however, that such a straight choice is often compromised. To return to our sample Folio page, for example, the First Murderer follows up the speech detailed above (p. xxxv) with the assertion, ‘I am strong fram'd, he [the devil] cannot preuaile with me’ (r3r; 1.4, pp. 60-61); in the Quarto he claims to be ‘strong in fraud’. Both readings are vivid: ‘strong-framed’ (F) carries the sense made of sterner stuff, while ‘strong in fraud’ (Q) comprises a suitably perverse adaptation of scripture (Abraham being ‘strong in faith’).⁴⁴ But whichever was Shakespeare's, the other is almost certainly a mistake for it, by a scribe or a compositor along the way (see our Series Introduction above, p. xx). It has been calculated that such variants account for fully 10 per cent of the play's words,⁴⁵ each of which summons a bewildering range of possible causes—compositorial or scribal error, authorial revision, theatrical adaptation, fallible memory, posthumous editorial intervention—that contaminates the distinct identity of the play's two principal texts.

In 3.1, for example, the little Duke of York asks his Uncle Richard for his sword. ‘What, would you haue my Weapon, little Lord?’ ‘I would’, replies York, ‘that I might thanke you, as, as, you call me’ (3.1, 104-5). The repetition (‘as, as,’) is an obvious slip (or ‘dittography’ as the jargon has it)—at first glance by the Folio compositor, since Q1 corrects the inadvertent stutter: ‘I would, that I might thanke you as you call me’. Further examination, however, traces the source of the blunder to Q3 (1602), which uniquely gives ‘I would that I might thanke you as as you call me’. The odds against two separate compositors (in 1602 and 1623) making an identical error in the same line are enormous (which in part explains why scholars identify Q3 as the partial ‘copy-text’ for F); furthermore, ‘the commas inserted by the F compositor suggest he was setting what he saw and perhaps trying to make sense of it through punctuation.’⁴⁶ At least on this occasion, then, the Folio presents to its readers a third-hand version (at the very least) of Shakespeare's manuscript original.⁴⁷

All of which is to assume, of course, that Shakespeare's manuscript original is the ideal to which the play's editors, following in the footsteps of Heminge and Condell, must aspire. That assumption is far from safe. We have already noted, for example, that one of its most famous exchanges (the ‘clock dialogue’) may have been added to that script as an afterthought; and that, despite their ‘pretty rhetoric’,⁴⁸ the eighty-odd lines that seem to have been cut from F's version of 4.4 may reasonably be considered superfluous, their removal streamlining the scene's pace and energy. The same might also be said for some of the pruning and conflation of the play's originally huge cast-list, that seems to have been effected in advance of the company's provincial tour of 1597.⁴⁹ Such opinions remain a matter of subjective taste; but the same cannot be said for the terms in which Richard seeks forgiveness of the assembled company in 2.1:

Of you and you, Lord Riuers and of Dorset,
That all without desert haue frown'd on me:
Of you Lord Wooduill, and Lord Scales of you,
Dukes, Earles, Lords, Gentlemen, indeed of all.

(2.1, pp. 72-3)

The third line here is unique to our Folio sample page; rather embarrassingly so, in fact, as cross-reference to one of Shakespeare's chronicle sources confirms: ‘The governaunce of this younge Prince was committed too lord Antony Woodvile earle Ryvers and lorde Scales,’ reads Edward Hall's The Union of the Two Noble … Families of Lancastre and Yorke (1550), ‘brother to the quene, a wise, hardy and honourable personage’.⁵⁰ Shakespeare, in the creative flush of his youthful inspiration, seems not to have noticed the second part of this sentence: for Anthony Woodville (1442-83) was both Earl Rivers and Baron Scales. To restore the ‘authentic’ and ‘original’ text is in this case to restore a schoolboy ‘howler’. ‘We learn from Horace, “Homer sometimes sleeps”’:⁵¹ it is perhaps reassuring to discover, from the text of Richard III that was typeset from his manuscript, that Shakespeare, too, occasionally snores.⁵²

Around midway through Richard III sits a short little scene (3.6, pp. 134-5), often cut in performance, that suddenly features an anonymous and entirely fictional character: the Scrivener. Scriveners were professional copyists of formal documents, and this particular member of the trade enters (according to the play's first Quarto) ‘with a paper in his hand’—‘the indictment of the good Lord Hastings / Which in a set hand fairly is engross'd’. But matters are not quite as they seem. For the Scrivener tells us he has spent the last eleven hours transcribing into his specialist calligraphy the terms of Hastings's capital impeachment, in readiness for its public proclamation (‘That it may be today read o'er in Paul's’); and the finalized text he has worked from must itself have taken at least another eleven hours to prepare (‘The precedent was full as long a-doing’), and yet—

And yet within these five hours Hastings liv'd,
Untainted, unexamin'd, free, at liberty.
Here's a good world the while!

The document publicly announcing Hastings's indictment, conviction, and execution has (in other words) been drafted, authorized, and copied before any legal processes have been instigated against him.

The Scrivener's account of this topsy-turvy chronology is profoundly acute, both as a grimly enduring meditation on the nature of totalitarianism, and as a disarming interrogation of the ‘truth’ of history.⁵³ But he is also perhaps the most eloquent spokesman for the textual chronology of the play itself: just as his account of Hastings's execution precedes that man's trial, so the 1623 Folio text of Richard III largely pre-dates the material published in Quarto a quarter-century before.

It has been well observed that the Scrivener's soliloquy—the first and last we hear of him—amounts to fourteen lines, the last two of which rhyme: ‘a quasi-sonnet’, Janis Lull calls it, marking out its speaker as ‘a bookish, thoughtful person’.⁵⁴ Such a person, perhaps, as William Shakespeare, some of whose own Sonnets may date from the same period.⁵⁵ Recent computerized research has advanced the theory that Shakespeare originally played the part himself.⁵⁶ If so, the ‘paper in his hand’ closely resembles the Folio text of Richard III, simultaneously the play's earliest and latest authoritative version. That script, ‘in a set hand … fairly engross'd’, is the version reproduced in the following pages.

‘FROM ALL THE IMPURE BLOTS AND STAINS’: MODERNIZING RICHARD III

Richard III is a play devoted to what a recent editor calls ‘repetition-with-variation’—the serial mimicries and serial crimes of its protagonist, the Edwards, Richards, and Henrys of its bewildering dynasties, and the numbing rhetorical method of its verse:⁵⁷

I had an Edward, till a Richard kill'd him;
I had a husband, till a Richard kill'd him.
Thou hadst an Edward, till a Richard kill'd him;
Thou hadst a Richard, till a Richard kill'd him.

(4.4, pp. 172-3)

The two names, recited by one former Queen of England to another, refer to four different people: Edward, Prince of Wales (the murdered son of Henry VI); Edward, Prince of Wales, and Richard, Duke of York (the sons of Edward IV—the Princes murdered in the Tower); and—of course—Richard, Duke of Gloucester, the son of Richard, Duke of York, and subsequently Richard III (the murderer in question). Shakespeare seems to have built such potential confusions about names into the texture of his play: the Quarto even goes to the trouble of providing a surname for the Pursuivant with whom Lord Hastings converses at 3.2 (pp. 116-17): he is called Hastings.⁵⁸ The principle of repetition-with-variation extends to the play's own texts.

It is the duty of an editor of the Folio play both to clarify its action and negotiate that tangled relationship with its Quarto forebears. The constant policy of our modernized parallel editions is to let the Folio speak for itself whenever it speaks sense. The procedural guidelines of our necessary intercessions are listed in our Series Introduction above, pp. xvii-xxi; such is the variously complicated nature of Richard III, however, that a further set of editorial procedures has been adopted that requires explanation here.

The first of these concerns our introduction of consistent speech-prefixes (‘SPs’). To take the obvious example, in the Folio Richard himself usually speaks as ‘Rich[ard]’, but sporadically does so as ‘Glo[ucester]’ in 3.1, and as ‘King’ in 5.3. (This is because those passages were apparently set directly from Quarto copy, where he is Gloucester until his coronation, and King thereafter.) In fact, many of the play's characters are referred to by more than one name. Richard's opening soliloquy, for instance, explains that he has engineered Clarence's imprisonment by convincing Edward of ‘a prophecy which says that “G” / Of Edward's heirs the murderer shall be’ (1.1, pp. 4-5): ‘G’ is for ‘George’, the Duke of Clarence's first name. Other characters come to share the same title or rank in the course of the play: it features five successive Kings of England, three successive Queens, and the ghosts of two Princes of Wales.

We have already commented on Shakespeare's inadvertent creation of those phantom figures ‘Lord Woodville’ and ‘Lord Scales’; similar confusions elsewhere punctuate the Folio apparatus. Queen Elizabeth, for example, the wife of Edward IV, makes her first entrance as ‘the Queene Mother’ (1.3, pp. 30-31), a rank (the sovereign's widowed mother) to which she is not entitled until Edward's death, and which she then only holds until her son, the uncrowned Edward V, is murdered in the Tower. By the same token, an unwary reader of the Folio might come away with the impression that Lord Stanley and the Earl of Derby are two separate characters, since the lines properly belonging to Thomas, Lord Stanley, Earl of Derby are evenly distributed, in both Q and F, between ‘Stanley’ and ‘Derby’.

Our modernized edition seeks to avoid such pitfalls by referring to a character's name rather than their rank (Lady Anne, later Duchess of Gloucester and later still Queen, is Anne throughout); or by shortened forms of their title, when those titles remain unchanged through the play (Clarence, Buckingham, Dorset, Grey, Stanley, Hastings, Richmond). One further explanation should be made. Richard's mother, the Duchess of York, retains her title throughout the play, and the Folio's SPs consistently refer to her as Dut[chesse]’. Since the play's Duke of York (‘York’, as we call him) is the Duchess's grandchild, and since Anne is briefly Duchess of Gloucester, we have decided to forestall confusion by affording her the same courtesy as we extend to Margaret, Elizabeth, and Anne by calling her by her proper historical name, Cicely, despite the fact that Shakespeare nowhere calls her by that name. The editorial imposition is justified, we feel, since our modernized edition runs in parallel to a scrupulous reproduction of the Folio text itself.

In a further bid to clarify the complications of the play's action, we have also compiled a pedigree of its royal family, above, that is designed to complement the conventional dramatis personae we provide on p. lv. This ‘family tree’ uses capitals to designate the form in which the character appears in the apparatus of our modern edition: ‘George, Duke of CLARENCE (later his GHOST)’; normal lettering to indicate those characters to which others refer during the course of the play: ‘Richard, Duke of York’; and square brackets to indicate extraneous but explanatory figures: ‘[Edmund Tudor]’.

As we have discovered, however, the textual genealogy of Richard III is no less complicated than Richard III's dynastic ambition within it. It is therefore also necessary to explain the measures we have taken in our modern edition of the Folio to accommodate its (often substantial) departure from the play's Quarto version. The most immediate difference between those two texts may be seen in the series of passages that are unique to one or other of them—the various result of the play's composition, rehearsal, revision, and adaptation. We have therefore extended our system of Textual Notes to include full reference to those sequences where Q provides substantially unique material—most notably the so-called ‘clock dialogue’ at 4.2, discussed above. On the other hand, F includes a full series of passages that are unique to it, and so, rather than troubling our readers with further end-notes, our modern edition discreetly encloses those lines within angle-brackets—‘‹Brief abstract and recòrd of tedious days,›’ (4.4, pp. 172-3). These marks may variously represent a conscious deletion, a revised insertion, or a mistaken omission; scholarly consensus is thin on the ground, however, and we prefer to flag this ‘extra’ material to our readers in as simple a form as possible, inviting them to ponder (should they wish to) the possible reasons for the lines' unique status. (Further comment is occasionally made, however, via our Textual Notes.)

Finally, a word should be said about two particular sequences. As we have already explained, two sections of the Folio play seem to have been set from a late Quarto with none of the usually careful cross-reference to and correction from Shakespeare's manuscript copy (see p. xlviii, n.47 below). So while it remains our policy to signal by a Textual Note every substantial discrepancy between our Folio reproduction and its parallel edition, it is sometimes the case that we silently ‘correct’ an F-reading from Q1, even when that reading makes an independent sense. At 3.1, for example, the young Prince asks his uncle where he and his brother should stay ‘till our coronation’. ‘Where it think'st best vnto your Royall selfe,’ he replies in F, as he also does in Q3-Q6. In Q1-2, however, the line begins, ‘Where it seems best’ (my emphasis). It is intrinsically unlikely that Shakespeare's authoritative manuscript would have duplicated this change independently of the ‘contamination’ inevitably arising from the Quartos' successive reprintings from each other. And since these Folio sequences seem not to have been checked against that original manuscript (which is why it is ‘Glo[ucester]’ rather than ‘Rich[ard]’ who speaks the line here), it is indeed ‘particularly tempting’ to treat such variants as unwanted corruptions, as Janis Lull admits in her 1999 modernized edition of the Folio text.⁵⁹ We have decided, however, to make the best of both worlds, and allow our readers to make up their own minds. Since the Folio text is scrupulously reproduced on the right-hand side of our page-spreads (a luxury denied to Lull's edition), we think it is both judicious and appropriate to balance that text with a modernized version more than usually indebted to Q1, from which F may very well have mistakenly deviated. This policy only extends to the two sequences that seem not to have been checked against Shakespeare's originating manuscript.

A summary of the editorial procedures we have followed in preparing our parallel editions may be found at the end of this introduction, p. 1.

The theatre is one of the few professions to have retained a sense of dynasty. It is appropriate that Shakespeare's Richard III, with all its impersonations, genealogies, and ghosts, should have so often embodied a sense of direct theatrical inheritance—sometimes literally so. In the nineteenth century, for example, the principal rôle passed from father to son—from Junius Brutus Booth (New York debut, 1821) to his son Edwin (London debut, 1878),⁶⁰ from Edmund Kean (Drury Lane, 1814) to his son Charles (Drury Lane, 1838). Henry Irving wore Edmund Kean's sword during his first performance as Richard in 1873, the same sword as was later presented to Laurence Olivier on the stage of his production in 1944 (a production and film that, remarkably, included additional material first inserted into Shakespeare's text by the actor-dramatist Colley Cibber in 1700).⁶¹ Ian McKellen's performance in the part on 14 June 1991 (four hundred years after Shakespeare had first conceived the play) featured an unlooked-for curtain-call:⁶² standing hand-in-hand with the youngest member of the cast (the little Duke of York) to his left, and the oldest (Queen Margaret) to his right, McKellen announced the death of Peggy Ashcroft—herself a celebrated Queen Margaret in the Royal Shakespeare Company's Wars of the Roses (1964). The following parallel text of Richard III aims to provide a similar bridge across the generations.

Notes

1. The Music of Lennon & McCartney (Granada TV), broadcast 17 December 1965 (Mark Lewisohn, The Complete Beatles Chronicle (Pyramid Books, 1992), p. 204).

2. Jack Jorgens, Shakespeare on Film (Bloomington, Indiana, 1977), p. 142.

3. King Richard III, ed. Janis Lull (Cambridge, 1999), p. 41. This introduction, and our parallel texts themselves, are particularly indebted to four recent modern-spelling editions of Richard III. Antony Hammond's Arden edition (1981) provides a thorough ‘conflated’ text, based on the Folio (‘F’), but incorporating material unique both to it and the 1597 First Quarto (‘Q1’). John Jowett's authoritative Oxford edition (2000) is based on Q1—what he calls the ‘performance text’ (p. 129)—and relegates to an appendix those passages that are unique to the Folio. Peter Davison's 1996 and Janis Lull's 1999 editions for the New Cambridge Shakespeare series respectively treat Q1 and F Richard III as fully independent plays.

4. Anthony Holden, Olivier (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), p. 192.

5. See Roger Lewis, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (Century Books, 1994), p. 231, which airs the view that Sellers wore ‘Olivier's actual Richard III wig’ for a still photograph in the rôle taken in around 1958. ‘It is hard to credit it isn't Olivier,’ comments Lewis.

6. The Tragedy of Richard III, ed. John Jowett (Oxford, 2000), p. 1.

7. Raphael Holinshed, The First and Second Volumes of Chronicles (2nd edition, 1587), quoted in Richard III, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann (1968, rev. ed. 1995), p. 9.

8. Richard III, ed. Jowett, p. 94, n. 2.

9. Holden, Olivier, p. 286.

10. Olivier recalled that Harris ‘transformed himself, like a chameleon, into the most hurtful, arrogant, venomous little fiend that anyone could meet’ (Laurence Olivier, Confessions of an Actor (Hodder and Stoughton, 1983), p. 100). On Disney's shared inspiration, see Holden, Olivier, p. 78.

11. Holden, Olivier, p. 193. Hitler—and Nazism in general—continue to influence productions of the play. See Antony Sher, Year of the King: An Actor's Diary and Sketchbook (Metheun, 1985), pp. 106-8; and Ian McKellen's Richard III (dir. Richard Loncraine, 1996).

12. Ben Jonson, George Chapman, and John Marston, Eastward Ho!, ed. C. G. Petter (New Mermaids, 1973), 3.4 (p. 67). The same play superbly features the tiny rôle of a nervous footman called Hamlet, who is interrupted in his duties by the immortal question, ‘'Sfoot, Hamlet, are you mad?’ (3.2, p. 47).

13. ‘A man! A man! A kingdom for a man!’: see Richard III, ed. Jowett, p. 81.

14. The First Quarto of Hamlet (1603) advertises on its title-page its recent performances ‘in the two Vniuersities of Cambridge and Oxford’.

15. The Three Parnassus Plays (1598-1601), ed. J. B. Leishman (Ivor Nicholson & Watson, 1949), p. 343 (lines 1835-41).

16. E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare, 2 vols (Oxford, 1930), 2, 212 (modernized text). It was John Manningham—a law student at the Middle Temple in London—who recorded the anecdote, which he heard from his room-mate Edward Curle. Manningham's interest in such lubricious backstage gossip may have been pricked by his enjoyment of the same author's Twelfth Night a month or so before, recorded in the same diary.

17. Burbage's name was synonymous with Richard III's as late as 1647, according to a travel-guide to England published that year (see Richard III, ed. Jowett, p. 81).

18. Q2 (1598). Two other Quartos printed that year (Love's Labour's Lost and Richard II) also advertised Shakespeare's name on their title-pages.

19. Q1 (1597), Q2 (1598), Q3 (1602), Q4 (1605), Q5 (1612), and Q6 (1622). Two further individual Quarto editions were issued after the Folio, namely Q7 (1629) and Q8 (1634).

20. Bob Dylan, Blonde on Blonde (1966) (‘Collector's Edition’), (n.d., Columbia 480417-2, sleeve copy). It might be added that eyebrows were raised in the same highbrow quarters at such monuments to ‘pop ephemera’ as once deprecated Ben Jonson's inclusion of his plays (of all things) in his 1616 Workes: Folios of ‘Complete Works’ more properly belonged to Classical scholarship than vulgar Bankside entertainments; musical boxed sets more properly to opera than pop.

21. Their inclusion of an authoritative text of Edward III (Q1 1596), between King John and Richard II, might have perfected that editorial scheme.

22. Technically speaking, the First Folio is a ‘folio in sixes’, by which three sheets of paper, folded once (<<<), were bound into a single three-sheet, six-page, twelve-sided ‘quire’ (or ‘signature’). This ‘quire’ was identified by a letter of the alphabet (e.g. ‘M’), whose pages were numbered from 1-6 (e.g. ‘M4’), the two sides of which are known as the ‘recto’ (on the right-hand side of the page-spread: ‘M4r’) and the ‘verso’ (on the reverse of that page: ‘M4v’). When the letters of the alphabet were exhausted, successive quires used variants such as lower-case letters (‘h5r’), and double letters (‘bb6v’).

23. For a summary of the chronology of 1 Henry VI, see The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, gen. ed. Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells (Oxford, 2001), pp. 200-201. A performance at the Rose of the play is thought to be the ‘harey the 6’ recorded in Henslowe's Diary for 16 January 1593, reproduced on the cover of this edition.

24. The 1863-6 editors W. G. Clark, J. Glover, and W. A. Wright, quoted in Richard III, ed. Hammond, p. 1.

25. See Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, 8 vols (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957-75), 3, 237-40. The influence was probably a negative one, since Shakespeare may have deliberately avoided treating certain events dramatized there, such as the on-stage murder of the Princes. Hamlet misquotes one of the play's lines (‘The screeking Raven sits croking for revenge’) during the play-scene: ‘Come: “The croaking raven doth bellow for revenge.”’ (3.2).

26. Shakespeare's longest play turned out to be the Second Quarto of Hamlet.

27. For a fascinating analysis of Shakespeare ‘hedging his bets’, see Richard III, ed. Jowett, pp. 6-8.

28. See Charles Nicholl, A Cup of News: The Life of Thomas Nashe (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), pp. 242-56.

29. Documents of the Rose Playhouse, ed. Carol Chillington Rutter (2nd edition, Revels, 1999), pp. 121-4.

30. For an exhaustive account, see The First Quarto of Richard III, ed. Davison, pp. 38-46.

31. The scholarly consensus assumes that Shakespeare himself was for some reason absent from the 1597 tour—else why should he not have challenged the wording of the occasionally mangled text his fellows recited?

32. Richard III, ed. Jowett, pp. 112-15.

33. Richard III, ed. Hammond, pp. 30-32.

34. All Quarto editions describe it as a Tragedy, and it was under this grouping that Francis Meres praised the play in his literary survey Palladis Tamia (1598).

35. See Much Ado About Nothing, ed. A. R. Humphreys (Arden, 1981), pp. 80-84.

36. As many as eight (perhaps nine) separate compositors are thought to have worked on typesetting the First Folio. They are known to scholarship by the initial letters A to H (or I), and distinguished by the distinct characteristics of their work. The most prominent members of this team, Compositors ‘A’ and ‘B’, worked on Richard III. It has been argued that while ‘A’ had a propensity for misreading the copy he was setting, ‘B’ had a ‘greater liability to carelessness’: see King Henry V, ed. T. W. Craik (Arden, 1995), p. 106, n.1. See also Peter Blayney's Introduction to the second edition of Hinman's Norton Facsimile (1996), pp. xxxiv-xxxvii.

37. The Classical five-act structure may also have found renewed purpose when adult companies began regular performances at indoor theatres, around 1607, so that candles might be conveniently trimmed or replaced between the acts.

38. Richard III, ed. Hammond, p. 183

39. For a useful summary, see Richard III, ed. Hammond, pp. 334-5.

40. Richard III, ed. Hammond, p. 14.

41. Richard III, ed. Jowett, p. 120.

42. Richard III, ed. Hammond, p. 14.

43. See, for example, Richard III, ed. Hammond, pp. 333-4.

44. Richard III, ed. Jowett, p. 201.

45. Richard III, ed. Davison, p. 1.

46. Richard III, ed. Lull, p. 214.

47. Two sections of the Folio play seem for some reason to have been typeset from Q3 without corrective cross-reference to that manuscript: all but the last 36 lines of 3.1 (pp. 96-106: to ‘In the seat royal of this famous isle?’); and much of Act Five, from Catesby's ‘It's supper time, my lord, it's nine o'clock’ (5.3, pp. 212-13) to the end of the play.

48. Richard III, ed. Hammond, p. 14.

49. As when, for example, the Quarto conflates the Folio rôles of the Keeper of the Tower and its Lieutenant, Sir Robert Brakenbury (1.4); or those of the Archbishop of York (2.4) and Cardinal Bourchier (3.1). Lovell, the Sheriff, Surrey, Oxford, and Herbert are all parts unique to F. It is probably for the same logistical reasons that the Ghosts of Richard's victims appear ‘out of sequence’ in Q1. See Richard III, ed. Davison, pp. 27-9, and Textual Notes 27, 58, 66, 88, 92, and 93 below.

50. Narrative and Dramatic Sources, ed. Bullough, 3, 255. See Richard III, ed. Hammond, pp. 17-18.

51. Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto III, Stanza 98. The reference is to Horace, Ars Poetica (‘Indignor quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus’), translated by Ben Jonson as ‘Sometimes, I hear good Homer snore’ (Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (Penguin, 1975), p. 368, line 536).

52. Shakespeare was repeatedly bested by this family's genealogy: his play contains a series of references to Queen Elizabeth's ‘brothers’ (plural), though Rivers (alias Woodville alias Scales) is the only member of her family to be so addressed. The Marquess of Dorset is referred to as her son, but the exact identity of Lord Grey is left rather vague. For a further inadvertent blunder, see Textual Note 98 below. On the preferred form of the title of ‘Marquess’ (as opposed to ‘Marquis’), see The Complete Peerage … of Great Britain, ed. V. Gibbs and H. A. Doubleday, vol. 5 (1926), pp. 798-9.

53. See for example Richard III, ed. Honigmann, pp. 15-16; Richard III, ed. Jowett, pp. 53-60.

54. Richard III, ed. Lull, p.141.

55. Edward III (c. 1591-4) includes a scene that dramatizes the composition of love-poetry, and contains a line verbatim with Sonnet 94: ‘Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds’. See Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Arden, 1997), pp. 13-18; and King Edward III, ed. Giorgio Melchiori (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 3-9.

56. The theory derives from the ‘Shaxicon 2.0’ project: Richard III, ed. Davison, pp. 15-18. It is tempting to compare Shakespeare's (debatable) cameo rôle with the discreet self-portraits that Renaissance artists often included within crowd scenes. The Scrivener's ‘quasi-sonnet’ perhaps most strongly resembles the tiny, central reflection of the painter himself in Jan van Eyck's The Arnolfini Marriage (painted 1434).

57. Richard III, ed. Lull, p. 22; see also Richard III, ed. Jowett, p. 66.

58. See Textual Note 53 below.

59. Richard III, ed. Lull, p. 42.

60. See Alice I. Perry Wood, The Stage History of Shakespeare's ‘King Richard the Third’ (Columbia, New York, 1909), pp. 152-9. John Wilkes Booth was another of J. B. Booth's sons: he ‘played Richard with all the ferocity of his father’ (p. 164), but found immortal fame by assassinating Abraham Lincoln.

61. Jonathan Croall, Gielgud: A Theatrical Life (Methuen, 2000), p. 322. The non-Shakespearean elements by Cibber that Olivier retained include Richard's response to Catesby's news that Buckingham ‘is taken’ (4.4, pp. 202-3): ‘Off with his head! So much for Buckingham’; and his later exclamation, ‘Conscience, avaunt! Richard's himself again’, replacing Shakespeare's ‘Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law’ (5.3, pp. 230-1). See Richard III, ed. Honigmann, pp. 44-5, and Richard III, ed. Jowett, p. 95.

62. The present author was in the audience on this occasion; the precise details are therefore subject to the fallibility of his memory.

Authorities Cited

Q1: The Tragedy of King Richard the third. Containing, His treacherous Plots against his brother Clarence: the pittieful murther of his iunocent nephewes: his tyrannicall vsurpation: with the whole course of his detested life, and most deserued death (1597)

Q2: The Tragedie of King Richard the third … By William Shakespeare (1598)

Q3: The Tragedie of King Richard the third (1602)

Q4: The Tragedie of King Richard the third (1605)

Q5: The Tragedie of King Richard the third (1612)

Q6: The Tragedie of King Richard the third (1622)

F: Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies [The First Folio] (1623)

F2: Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies [The Second Folio] (1632)

F4: Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies [The Fourth Folio] (1685)

Rowe: The Works of Mr. William Shakespear, ed. Nicholas Rowe, 6 vols (London, 1709)

Pope: The Works of Shakespear. Collated and corrected by the former editions, ed. Alexander Pope, 6 vols (London, 1723-5)

Theobald: The Works of Shakespeare. Collated with the oldest copies and corrected, ed. Lewis Theobald, 7 vols (London, 1733)

Hanmer: The Works of Shakespear, ed. Thomas Hanmer, 6 vols (Oxford, 1743-5)

Heath: Benjamin Heath, A revisal of Shakespear's text, wherein the alterations introduced into it … are considered (London, 1765)

Johnson: The Plays of William Shakespeare, ed. Samuel Johnson, 8 vols (London, 1765)

Capell: Mr William Shakespeare his Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, ed. Edward Capell, 10 vols (London, 1767-8)

Steevens: The Plays of William Shakespeare … with … Notes by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, 10 vols (London, 1773)

Rann: The Dramatic Works of Shakespeare, ed. Joseph Rann, 6 vols (Oxford, 1786-94)

Malone: The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, ed. Edmond Malone, 10 vols (London, 1790)

White: The Works of William Shakespeare. The plays edited from the folio of MDCXXIII, ed. Richard Grant White (Boston, 1857-66)

W. S. Walker: W. S. Walker, A Critical Examination of the Text of Shakespeare, ed. W. N. Lettsom, 3 vols (London, 1860)

Clark & Wright: The Works of William Shakespeare, ed. William George Clark, John Glover, and William Aldis Knight, 9 vols (Cambridge and London, 1863-6)

Furness: The Tragedy of Richard the Third, ed. H. H. Furness (New Variorum edition, Philadelphia, 1908)

Patrick: David Lyall Patrick, The Textual History of ‘Richard III’ (Stanford, 1936)

Alexander: The Complete Works, ed. Peter Alexander (Collins, 1951)

Alice Walker: Alice Walker, Textual Problems of the First Folio (Cambridge, 1953)

Wilson: Richard III, ed. John Dover Wilson (Cambridge, 1954)

Honigmann: King Richard the Third, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann (Penguin, 1968; rev. ed., 1995)

Hammond: King Richard III, ed. Antony Hammond (Arden, 1981)

Taylor: Gary Taylor, ‘Humfrey Hower’, Shakespeare Quarterly 33 (1982), 95-7

Oxford: The Complete Works, gen. ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford, 1986)

Textual Companion: Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, etc., William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford, 1987)

Davison: The First Quarto of King Richard III, ed. Peter Davison (Cambridge, 1996)

Lull: King Richard III, ed. Janis Lull (Cambridge, 1999)

Jowett: The Tragedy of King Richard III, ed. John Jowett (Oxford, 2000)