Richard III: Context & Background

More, Hall and Holinshed: Where the Story Came From

Shakespeare took the story from the standard Tudor history books, as he did for every English history play: Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles (second edition, 1587) and, behind it, Edward Hall's Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York (1548). Both chroniclers had lifted their account of Richard's reign almost intact from an earlier and far better writer. Sir Thomas More's History of King Richard III, written around 1513 to 1518 and never finished, is the origin of nearly everything people think they know about Richard: the crooked back and withered arm, the wooing of the Lord Mayor, the strawberries, the two murderers weeping over the smothered princes. More had grown up as a page in the household of John Morton, the Bishop of Ely who sends for the strawberries in Act 3 – a man who had every reason to remember Richard unkindly.

Other books fed the play. Polydore Vergil's Anglica Historia (1534), commissioned by Henry VII, supplied the providential frame; The Mirror for Magistrates (1559 onwards), a collection of verse laments spoken by the ghosts of the fallen, gave Shakespeare a model for the complaints of Clarence, Hastings and Buckingham; and an anonymous play, The True Tragedy of Richard the Third (printed 1594), had already put Richard on the London stage. What none of these contains is the play's most famous material. The wooing of Lady Anne over a coffin, Queen Margaret stalking the court with her curses, the procession of eleven ghosts, and a villain who confides in the audience from the first line are all Shakespeare's inventions.

Exam tip: The strongest source point is about what Shakespeare added, not what he borrowed. The chronicles gave him the crimes; he supplied the curses, the ghosts and the soliloquies – the whole machinery of prophecy and curses and conscience. Arguing that the play's supernatural frame is a deliberate addition to a bare historical record lets you treat it as design rather than decoration.

The Wars of the Roses and the Real Richard

The play compresses fourteen years of history into what feels like a few weeks. It opens after the Yorkist victories of 1471, when Edward IV recovered his throne, Henry VI died in the Tower and his son Prince Edward was killed at Tewkesbury; it ends at Bosworth in August 1485. In between, Shakespeare pulls events together so that they seem to cause one another. Clarence was executed in 1478, five years before Edward's death; Margaret of Anjou, far from cursing the court, had been ransomed to France in 1475 and died there in 1482; Richard's wife Anne died in March 1485, not in the days after his coronation. Richard's actual reign lasted a little over two years, from July 1483 to August 1485, and in the play it occupies about an act and a half.

The historical Richard, Duke of Gloucester, was born in 1452 and was a loyal and effective lieutenant to his brother Edward for a decade. What happened in 1483 is still argued over. As Lord Protector for the twelve-year-old Edward V he executed Hastings without trial, had the queen's relatives beheaded at Pontefract, and accepted the crown after a petition declaring Edward IV's children illegitimate. The two princes were last seen in the Tower that summer, and most historians hold Richard responsible for their disappearance, though no body was ever identified and no contemporary account of the murder survives. Buckingham rebelled and was executed at Salisbury in November 1483 – on All Souls' Day, as the play correctly has it. Henry Tudor landed at Milford Haven in August 1485, and Richard died at Bosworth, aged thirty-two, the last English king to be killed in battle. In 2012 his skeleton was found beneath a car park in Leicester, on the site of the friary where he was buried; it showed severe scoliosis, a sideways curve of the spine, but no withered arm and no limp, and he was reburied in Leicester Cathedral in 2015.

Exam tip: Treat compression as a technique. When the play makes Clarence's murder, Edward's death and the seizure of the princes happen in a single rush, it converts a sequence of separate events into a single design – Richard's. Pointing out where the chronology has been bent shows you understand that the play is an argument about history, not a record of it.

The Tudor Myth: History for the Winners

When the play was written, the queen on the throne was Elizabeth I, granddaughter of the Richmond who picks up the crown at the end of Act 5. The Tudors had come to power by conquest with a thin hereditary claim, and their historians spent a century explaining why it had been God's will. In this version of events the deposition of Richard II in 1399 was a sin that England paid for through decades of civil war; Richard III was the war's last and worst product, a scourge sent to purge the country; and Henry Tudor's victory, sealed by his marriage to Elizabeth of York, was the divine restoration of order. The play ends by saying exactly this. Richmond's closing speech promises to unite "the White Rose and the Red" and prays that civil wounds are stopped for good.

Blackening Richard was part of the job. The deformed body, the murder of the princes, the poisoning of Anne, the killing of Henry VI: some of these charges rest on evidence, some on rumour, and all of them served a dynasty that needed its predecessor to be a monster. The twentieth century's most influential reading, E. M. W. Tillyard's in Shakespeare's History Plays (1944), took the providential pattern as the play's true subject and Richmond as its instrument. Sceptics have argued the other way since Horace Walpole's Historic Doubts of 1768; the Richard III Society was founded in 1924 to clear the king's name, and Josephine Tey's detective novel The Daughter of Time (1951) made the case to a mass readership. The play, meanwhile, has always been more interested in its villain than in the providence that destroys him.

Exam tip: Keep the frame and the figure apart. The play's structure belongs to the Tudor myth – curses fulfilled, a saintly rescuer, a prayer for peace – but its energy belongs to Richard, who is on stage for most of it and gets all the best lines. An essay that shows how the audience is made to enjoy the man the pattern condemns has found the play's central tension, and it applies to fate and free will, power and ambition and appearance and reality alike.

The Vice, Seneca and the Machiavel: Where Richard Came From

Richard is built from three stage traditions, and he names the first himself. In Act 3 he compares his way with words to "the formal Vice, Iniquity" – the Vice being the comic tempter of the old morality plays, who joked with the audience, worked by double meaning, and dragged the hero towards damnation while everyone laughed. The Vice's intimacy with the crowd is the source of Richard's soliloquies and asides: the villain who lets the audience in on the plan. The second tradition is Roman. The tragedies of Seneca, translated into English in 1581 and taught in every grammar school, supplied the ghosts, the curses, the long formal laments and the line-by-line duelling of the wooing scenes – the whole apparatus of doom that surrounds the comedy.

The third figure was the newest. Christopher Marlowe's villains of the late 1580s – Barabas in The Jew of Malta above all, whose prologue is spoken by Machiavelli himself – had made the "Machiavel" a stage type: the schemer for whom religion is a tool, oaths are tactics and power is the only good. Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince was not printed in English until 1640, but its reputation had arrived long before the book, and Richard, who has already promised in Henry VI, Part 3 to outdo Machiavelli, is the type's fullest expression: the man who can "seem a saint, when most I play the devil". What is new is the combination. The Vice's charm, the Senecan fate and the Machiavel's calculation had never been fused in one part before, and the fusion is why the role has drawn great actors for four centuries.

Exam tip: When you analyse a Richard speech, ask which tradition it is drawing on. The asides to the audience are the Vice; the prophecies, ghosts and the wooing of Anne are Senecan; the scripture-quoting piety of the Baynard's Castle scene is the Machiavel. Naming the tradition turns a description of language and rhetoric into an argument about how the character was engineered.

1592–1593: Plague, Playhouses and an Ageing Queen

The play belongs to the beginning of Shakespeare's career. It was probably written in 1592 or early 1593, straight after the three parts of Henry VI, whose story it completes, and it was almost certainly the first part he wrote for a star. Richard Burbage, the leading actor of Shakespeare's company, was remembered in his own lifetime for the role; a law student's diary of 1602 records a joke about a woman who fell for Burbage's Richard and arranged to meet him after the play. In June 1592 plague closed the London playhouses, and they stayed mostly shut until 1594; Shakespeare spent the gap writing the poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. When the theatres reopened, Richard was one of the parts that made his company's name.

It was also a play written at a nervous moment. Elizabeth I was nearly sixty, unmarried and without a named heir, and open discussion of the succession was forbidden. A play about a disputed succession, a child king deposed by his uncle, and a kingdom passing by conquest was sensitive material, made safe only by its ending: the Tudor rescue. The play was a publishing success as well as a stage one – six quarto editions appeared before the First Folio of 1623, more than almost any other Shakespeare play – and its afterlife has been unusually shaped by adaptation. Colley Cibber's rewritten version of 1700, which added lines such as "Off with his head! So much for Buckingham" and cut Queen Margaret and Clarence entirely, held the English stage for a century and a half, and some of its lines are still mistaken for Shakespeare's. Laurence Olivier's 1955 film, which kept some of them, is for many people the Richard they know.

Exam tip: Performance history is context too. The fact that the play survived for 150 years in Cibber's cut-down version, built entirely around the star villain, tells you where audiences have always found its centre – and gives you a way of discussing why the women, the curses and the providential ending are the parts modern productions have restored.

Richard III Context – Frequently Asked Questions