Richard III

Summary

Richard III follows Richard, Duke of Gloucester, youngest brother of the Yorkist King Edward IV, from his first soliloquy to his death at Bosworth Field in 1485. The Wars of the Roses are over and peace has come, but Richard, born misshapen and unfit for courtship, tells the audience he has determined to prove a villain and win the crown. He has already turned the sick King Edward against their brother George, Duke of Clarence, with a prophecy that someone whose name begins with G will murder the king's heirs. Clarence is taken to the Tower. Richard then woos Lady Anne over the coffin of King Henry VI, whom he killed, along with her husband, and wins her in a single scene. At court he quarrels with Queen Elizabeth and her kinsmen Rivers, Grey and Dorset, while old Queen Margaret, widow of Henry VI, curses them all. In the Tower, Clarence wakes from a dream of drowning and of the souls he wronged in the wars; Richard's hired murderers stab him and drown him in a butt of malmsey wine. King Edward, having just reconciled the factions, hears of Clarence's death and soon dies himself. With the Duke of Buckingham as his partner, Richard arrests the queen's kinsmen and has them beheaded at Pomfret, lodges the boy king Edward V and his brother in the Tower, and has Lord Hastings executed on the spot for doubting his claim, charging that witchcraft has withered his arm. Buckingham stages a show of popular demand, and Richard, appearing piously between two bishops, accepts the crown with feigned reluctance. Once king, he asks Buckingham to have the princes killed; when Buckingham hesitates, Richard hires James Tyrrel, who reports the boys smothered in their sleep. Richard spreads word that Anne is sick, and she dies; he plans to marry his niece Elizabeth, and in a long scene he presses the widowed queen to woo her daughter for him. The grieving women, Margaret, Elizabeth and Richard's own mother, the Duchess of York, gather to lament and curse. Buckingham rebels and is executed on All Souls' Day. Henry, Earl of Richmond, lands in Wales and marches against Richard. On the night before battle the ghosts of Richard's victims appear in turn, bidding Richard despair and die and blessing Richmond. Richard wakes in terror of his own conscience, then rallies his army. Unhorsed on the field, he cries for a horse; Richmond kills him, is crowned Henry VII by Lord Stanley, and promises to unite the white rose and the red by marrying Elizabeth of York. The play was printed in quarto in 1597 and appeared, in a longer text, in the First Folio of 1623.

Top Lessons

• The seduction of the audience

  Richard speaks directly to us from the first line, sharing his plots and jokes, and his wit draws spectators into enjoying what follows. The play teaches how charm and confidence can win assent to evil, and how the audience must learn to see through the man it enjoys.

• Religion as a mask

  Richard boasts that he clothes his villainy in scraps of Holy Writ and appears to the citizens with a prayer book between two bishops. The play shows the special wickedness of using piety as a tool of ambition.

• Sin that pulls on sin

  Each crime makes the next one necessary: Clarence's death leads to the princes', the princes' to Anne's, Anne's to the plan to marry Elizabeth. Richard admits he is so far in blood that sin will pluck on sin. The play traces the logic of a soul trapped by its own choices.

• Conscience and judgment

  Clarence's murderers argue with their consciences, Clarence dreams of judgment, and Richard himself wakes before Bosworth to a conscience with a thousand tongues. Margaret's curses come true, and the ghosts bless Richmond. The play presents history as answerable to a moral order.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Richard's body is central to the play. He calls himself deformed, unfinished and sent before his time, and his enemies call him a bunch-backed toad and an elvish-marked, abortive hog, reading bodily shape as a sign of moral nature in the Tudor manner. The Duchess of York speaks of his birth as a grievous burden. The history of medicine has added a coda: the skeleton found in Leicester in 2012 and identified as Richard's showed a marked spinal curvature, described in The Lancet in 2014 as adolescent-onset idiopathic scoliosis that would have raised one shoulder above the other but would not have produced a hunchback or a limp, and there was no sign of a withered arm. In the play, Richard's charge at the council table that witchcraft has withered his arm is a pretext to kill Hastings. The play is also full of sleep and dreams: Clarence's dream of drowning, Stanley's dream of the boar, Anne's report that Richard's timorous dreams broke his sleep, and the procession of ghosts before Bosworth. King Edward is described as sickly, weak and melancholy, his physicians fearing for him. Any modern reading of Richard's psychology should remain a reading.

• Act 1, Scene 1

  Richard's opening soliloquy describes his deformity and premature birth; Hastings reports that the king is sickly and his physicians fear for him.

• Act 1, Scene 4

  Clarence's dream of drowning and of judgment by the souls of Warwick and Prince Edward, followed by his murder and drowning in a malmsey butt.

• Act 3, Scene 4

  Richard bares his arm before the council and claims it was withered by witchcraft, condemning Hastings.

• Act 4, Scene 1; Act 4, Scene 4

  Anne says Richard's timorous dreams kept waking her; the Duchess of York recalls his birth and infancy as a grievous burden.

• Act 5, Scene 3

  The ghosts of Richard's victims visit his tent; he wakes in a sweat to the trembling and terror of conscience.

• Act 5, Scenes 4-5

  Richard fights on foot after his horse is killed and dies in single combat with Richmond.