Richard III

Shakespeare wrote Richard III around 1592-1593, early in his career, likely while the London theaters were closed due to plague. It was enormously popular from the start -- Richard Burbage's performance in the title role became legendary, and the play remained one of the most frequently performed works in the repertoire throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Shakespeare drew primarily from Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles and Thomas More's History of King Richard III, both of which reflected the Tudor party line: Richard as monster, the Tudors as divine rescuers. Shakespeare was writing under a Tudor-descended monarch (Elizabeth I was Henry VII's granddaughter), and the play's political sympathies are unmistakably pro-Tudor. Whether Shakespeare personally believed in Richard's absolute villainy is unknowable and probably irrelevant -- what matters is that he took a propaganda portrait and gave it psychological depth, theatrical brilliance, and a terrifying charisma that the propagandists never intended.

How the Era Shapes the Book

The play was written during the final decade of Elizabeth I's reign, a period of intense anxiety about succession -- Elizabeth had no heir, and the prospect of renewed civil war haunted English political thought. Richard III spoke directly to these fears. The Wars of the Roses, which the play dramatizes, had ended barely a century earlier, and the memory of dynastic chaos was still a powerful political argument for strong, legitimate monarchy. The play also belongs to the early 1590s vogue for English history plays -- Marlowe's Edward II, the anonymous Edward III, and Shakespeare's own Henry VI trilogy were all competing for audience attention. Richard III was the culmination of Shakespeare's first historical tetralogy (the three Henry VI plays plus Richard III), and it established him as the dominant voice in English historical drama. The historical Richard III (1452-1485) ruled for only two years before dying at Bosworth. Modern historians have substantially revised the Tudor portrait, noting that many of the crimes attributed to Richard -- particularly the murder of the princes -- remain unproven. The discovery of Richard's skeleton under a Leicester car park in 2012 confirmed his scoliosis but not the extreme deformity Shakespeare describes.