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Introduction Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-73556-8 - King Richard III, Updated Edition Edited by Janis Lull Excerpt More information INTRODUCTION In the histories section of the First Folio, only Richard III is called a ‘tragedy’.1 It unites the chronicle play, a form Shakespeare had developed in the three parts of Henry VI, with a tragic structure showing the rise and fall of a single protagonist. Like Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, written at about the same time, Shakespeare’s play concerns the damnation of an unrepentant soul, but Shakespeare also grapples with the problem of determinism. In his opening soliloquy, Richard says he is ‘determined` to prove a villain’ (1.1.30), and the play develops this ambiguous statement into an exploration of determinism and choice appropriate to both history and tragedy.2 History and meaning in Richard III Richard III is the last in a series of four plays – following three about the reign of Henry VI – that dramatise the English Wars of the Roses. As he had in the Henry VI plays, Shakespeare used the chronicles of Edward Hall and Raphael Holinshed as sources of historical material for Richard III.3 Hall’s Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and York (1548) incorporated a version of Sir Thomas More’s History of Richard III (written about 1513). Holinshed’s Chronicles of England (second edition, 1587) adapted More’s History from Hall, so that More should be regarded as the primary historiographic source for Shakespeare’s Richard III.More’s unfinished work, however, deals only with Richard’s rise to the throne. Shakespeare relied on Hall and Holinshed for Richard’s decline and final defeat at Bosworth, and those chroniclers had relied on the early Tudor historian Polydore Vergil. Never- theless, it is More’s ironic attitude toward Richard that pervades both the chronicle sources and Shakespeare’s play. Much has been made of the tendency of early Tudor historians to vilify Richard III in order to glorify Henry VII (Richmond) and his descendants.4 It is true that the concept of history writing in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries included the selective use of historical events to teach political and moral lessons, a practice most modern historians would reject. However, many of the stories of Richard’s villainy 1 The play is called The Tragedy of Richard III on its first page in the Folio, but subsequent pages carry the running title ‘The Life and Death of Richard the Third’. The word ‘tragedy’ may have been taken from the printed quartos, all of which use it. 2 On Richard’s pun as a play on providential determinism, see David S. Berkeley, ‘“Determined” in Richard III, I.i.30’, SQ 14 (1963), 483–4. 3 Shakespeare may also have used the Chronicle At Large of Richard Grafton (1569), but this repeats Hall almost word for word, making it impossible to tell which one Shakespeare employed. 4 See Tillyard, Campbell and Ribner. 1 © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-73556-8 - King Richard III, Updated Edition Edited by Janis Lull Excerpt More information King Richard III [2] originate in accounts written in Richard’s own time or soon after.1 It is impossible to tell whether these early narratives consciously promote propaganda or merely reflect the traditional literary and didactic aims of medieval historiography. The earliest known portrait of Richard as a usurper (first discovered in 1934) was recorded by the Italian priest Dominic Mancini. It cannot have been intended to advance an established Tudor dynasty, since Mancini wrote in 1483, when the victory of Henry Tudor over Richard III was still two years in the future. Neither can this early date guarantee Mancini’s objectivity. Yet no matter how the reign of Richard III was perceived by those who lived through it, by Shakespeare’s time, and probably much earlier, stories of Richard as a tyrant and a child-murderer were accepted as fact. In addition to the chronicle sources, Shakespeare’s Richard III draws upon a wide range of literary influences, especially the cycle plays and moralities of the native English drama. The influence of classical drama can be seen, not only in the women of Richard III, who have been compared to Seneca’s Trojan women, but also in the play’s formal rhetoric, its ghosts, its villain-hero, perhaps even in Richard’s stoic end. Closer to home, Shakespeare drew inspiration from other sixteenth-century English dramatists writing in the Senecan tradition, especially Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe. A Mirror for Magistrates, a sixteenth-century collection of verse ‘tragedies’ about the fall of historical figures, was available to Shakespeare. He may have read it for passages spoken by Richard, Clarence, Hastings, Edward IV, the Duke of Buckingham, and even Jane Shore, although he does not dramatise her story. An unpublished Latin play, Thomas Legge’s Ricardus Tertius, which was composed around 1579, does not seem to have been used by Shakespeare, though he may well have known it.2 The True Tragedie of Richard The Third, an anonymous English play, was published in 1594 but probably composed several years earlier.3 There seem to be passages in which The True Tragedie anticipates Shakespeare, notably in Richard’s call for a new horse (scene 18): King. A horse, a horse, a fresh horse. Page. A flie my Lord, and saue your life. King. Flie villaine, looke I as tho I would flie It is possible that the anonymous playwright borrowed from Shakespeare rather than the other way around. Even if The True Tragedie was written first, the printed version could have picked up this famous exchange from Shakespeare’s later but more popular play, perhaps via a copyist. Yet the text of The True Tragedie, often disparaged as 1 See Dominic Mancini, The Usurpation of Richard III (c. 1483), ed. C. A. J. Armstrong, 2nd edn 1969; The Crowland Chronicle Continuations, 1459–1486 (c. 1486), ed. Nicholas Pronay and John Cox, 1986; and John Rous, Joannis Rossi Antiquarii Warwicensis Historia Regum Angliae (c. 1487–91), ed. T. Hearne, 1745. 2 Shakespeare’s contemporary, Francis Meres, names Legge along with Shakespeare as among ‘our best for Tragedie’ (Palladis Tamia, 1598). See Jones, pp. 139–40. 3 The True Tragedie of Richard the Third, 1594; reprinted by the Malone Society as The True Tragedy of Richard the Third, ed. W. W. Greg, 1929. © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-73556-8 - King Richard III, Updated Edition Edited by Janis Lull Excerpt More information [3] Introduction a ‘bad quarto’1 or merely ‘contaminated’,2 emerges in Laurie E. Maguire’s recent analysis as a coherent play with few of the traditional signs attributed to pirated scripts or ‘memorial reconstructions’.3 It appears more likely, then, that Shakespeare echoed The True Tragedie rather then the other way around. Another parallel, in George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar (1594), offers a triangle of possible influences for the ‘horse’ passage: Moore. A horse, a horse, villain a horse That I may take the river straight and flie. Boy. Here is a horse my Lord. (1413–15)4 As Antony Hammond has pointed out, this dialogue seems more remote from Shake- speare’s than that of The True Tragedie,5 not so much because of the differences in the famous line itself, but because Peele’s Moor wishes to fly, while in The True Tragedie,asinRichard III, the protagonist has no intention of escaping. A possible line of descent for this passage, then, runs from Peele to Anonymous to Shakespeare. In addition to the verbal echo of ‘a horse, a horse’, George Bosworth Churchill, Geoffrey Bullough and John Dover Wilson all trace structural parallels between The True Tragedie and the last four acts of Shakespeare’s play. Emrys Jones and Ham- mond, on the other hand, stress how much The True Tragedie and Richard III differ in their emphases. As Jones puts it, ‘one is surprised to find out how undominating, by comparison, another playwright’s Richard could be’.6 A reasonable supposition might be that Shakespeare used ‘a horse, a horse’ from The True Tragedie and bor- rowed whatever structural elements he thought would work, just as he did from many other literary sources. Shakespeare’s own earlier plays also provided him with source material, especially Henry VI, Part 3, where Richard first emerges as an arch-villain. In Henry VI, Part 2, Richard appears as a warrior trying to take the crown away from Henry VI and give it to his own father, the Duke of York. Richard’s enemies mention his deformity, but his chief characteristics in this play are devotion to his father and warlike anger: ‘Sword, hold thy temper; heart, be wrathful still: / Priests pray for enemies, but princes kill’ (5.2.70–1). In Henry VI, Part 3, Richard adds to his loyalty and wrath a certain cunning. He persuades York to break a promise of peace because the oath was not sworn before a ‘true and lawful magistrate’ (1.2.23), then plunges eagerly into the next round of civil war. After York is killed by Queen Margaret, Richard begins to assume the character of a universal antagonist. Although he continues to fight fiercely to avenge his father and to put his brother Edward on the throne, he also mocks Edward’s love of women, Elizabeth Grey in particular (3.2), and begins the process of fashioning himself into the monster he will be: ‘Ay, Edward will use women honourably.
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