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Richard III: Plot Summary
Plot Profile – At a Glance
- The Setting: England, 1471–1485 – the streets, palace and Tower of London, and finally Bosworth Field in Leicestershire.
- The Protagonist: Richard, Duke of Gloucester, youngest brother of the king, who tells the audience in the first speech that he is determined to prove a villain.
- The Antagonist: Richard is his own play's villain; the forces ranged against him are the cursing women led by Queen Margaret, his own conscience, and at last Henry, Earl of Richmond, who lands with an army in Act 4.
- The Inciting Incident: Richard has his brother Clarence arrested on the strength of a prophecy that "G" will murder the king's heirs – the first move in clearing his path to the throne.
- The Core Conflict: Richard's climb to the crown over the bodies of his own family, against the curses, prophecies and dreams that gather around him as he climbs.
- The Climax: The night before Bosworth in Act 5, Scene 3, when the ghosts of eleven victims visit Richard's tent and he wakes to find his conscience has caught up with him.
- The Outcome: Richard is killed in battle by Richmond, who takes the crown as Henry VII and marries Elizabeth of York to end the Wars of the Roses.
- Genre: History play – printed among the histories in the First Folio, though its earliest editions called it a tragedy.
The Wars of the Roses are over and the house of York has won, but the king's youngest brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, has no use for peace. In four acts he removes everyone between himself and the throne: his brother Clarence is drowned in a butt of wine, the sick King Edward is worried into his grave, the queen's kinsmen are executed, Lord Hastings is beheaded for saying "if", and the young King Edward V and his brother are smothered in the Tower. Along the way Richard woos the widow of a man he killed, is offered the crown he has arranged to be offered, and discards the ally who did the arranging. Then the curses begin to land. In Act 5 the ghosts of his victims visit him on the eve of battle, and at Bosworth Field he dies fighting on foot, crying out for a horse, as Henry, Earl of Richmond takes the crown and ends thirty years of civil war.
Act 1: The Winter of Our Discontent
Richard, Duke of Gloucester, enters alone and tells the audience the war is over – "Now is the winter of our discontent" – and that a peacetime court has no place for a man shaped as he is, so he is "determined to prove a villain". His first plot is already working: he has fed King Edward IV a prophecy that someone whose name begins with "G" will murder the king's heirs, and his brother George, Duke of Clarence is marched past him to the Tower. Richard then stops the funeral of the murdered King Henry VI and, over the coffin, woos Lady Anne, the widow of Henry's son – both men killed by Richard. She spits at him, curses him, and leaves wearing his ring; alone, he asks the audience "Was ever woman in this humour wooed" At court, Richard picks quarrels with Queen Elizabeth and her family until old Queen Margaret, the widow of Henry VI, walks in and curses them all, saving her longest curse for the "bunch-backed toad" Richard. In the Tower, Clarence wakes from a dream of drowning and pleads with the two murderers Richard has hired. One of them wavers; the other stabs him and drowns him in a barrel of wine.
Act 2: The King Dies
The dying King Edward stages a reconciliation, making the queen's family and the old nobility swear friendship with one another. Richard enters, agrees to everything, and then announces that Clarence is dead: the king's pardon, he says, arrived too late. Edward, who had revoked the death sentence, is shattered – nobody spoke for his brother – and dies soon after, offstage. The Duchess of York mourns two sons and Queen Elizabeth a husband, while Richard and Buckingham arrange to fetch the young Prince Edward from Ludlow with only a small escort. In the street three citizens fear what is coming – "Woe to that land" – and at the palace a messenger brings the queen the news: on the road to London, Richard and Buckingham have arrested her brother Rivers and her son Grey and sent them to Pomfret Castle. Elizabeth takes her younger son, the little Duke of York, into sanctuary at Westminster.
Act 3: Off With His Head
Prince Edward arrives in London and Richard, now Lord Protector, lodges him in the Tower; the boy's clever talk about Julius Caesar earns the aside "So wise so young" The Cardinal talks the queen into giving up the young Duke of York, and the two princes go into the Tower together. Richard and Buckingham test Lord Hastings through Catesby: will he support Richard as king? Hastings will not, and ignores a warning from Lord Stanley, who has dreamt that a boar – Richard's badge – struck off his helmet. At Pomfret, Rivers, Grey and Vaughan are led to execution. At the council in the Tower, Richard sends for strawberries, leaves, returns accusing the queen and Mistress Shore of witchcraft, and when Hastings begins a sentence with "if" ends it for him: "Off with his head!" Hastings is beheaded before dinner. Richard and Buckingham, in rusty armour, convince the Lord Mayor the execution was self-defence; a Scrivener notes that the indictment was written before the crime; and Buckingham goes to the citizens to declare the princes bastards and Richard the rightful king. The citizens say nothing. So the scene is staged instead: at Baynard's Castle Richard appears between two bishops with a prayer-book, refuses the crown twice, and on the third asking accepts it.
Act 4: The Princes in the Tower
Queen Elizabeth, the Duchess of York and Lady Anne meet outside the Tower and are refused access to the princes; Stanley arrives to summon Anne to Westminster to be crowned queen, and she goes, remembering the curse she laid on Richard's wife in Act 1. Richard is crowned and at once asks Buckingham to kill the princes. Buckingham hesitates; Richard hires Sir James Tyrrel instead, resolves to get rid of Anne and marry his niece Elizabeth of York, and when Buckingham comes to claim the earldom he was promised, refuses him: "I am not in the giving vein today." Buckingham flees to raise rebellion. Tyrrel reports that the princes are dead – "The tyrannous and bloody act is done" – and Richard notes that Anne has also died and that Richmond, in Brittany, is now the threat. Before the palace, Queen Margaret, the Duchess and Elizabeth pool their griefs; Margaret teaches Elizabeth how to curse and leaves for France; the Duchess curses her son to his face; and Richard, marching to war, stops to ask Elizabeth for her daughter's hand, exactly as he once asked Anne. She seems to yield. Then the messengers arrive one after another: risings in the west and Kent, Buckingham's army scattered by floods, Buckingham himself captured, Richmond's fleet at Milford. Stanley, whose son Richard holds hostage, secretly sends word to Richmond that the queen has promised him her daughter.
Act 5: Bosworth Field
Buckingham is led to execution at Salisbury on All Souls' Day and remembers Margaret's curse. Richmond marches from Tamworth, welcomed at every step, and the two armies camp at Bosworth. Richard orders his tent pitched and sends word to Stanley that his son dies unless he brings his troops by sunrise; Stanley slips across to Richmond's tent in the night to promise what help he dares. Both leaders sleep, and the ghosts of Richard's victims – Prince Edward of Lancaster, Henry VI, Clarence, Rivers, Grey and Vaughan, Hastings, the two princes, Anne, Buckingham – come one by one to tell Richard "Despair and die" and Richmond to live and flourish. Richard starts awake: "O coward conscience" Both men address their armies at dawn, Richmond in the name of God and a just cause, Richard in contempt of conscience and of the "vagabonds, rascals, and runaways" opposing him. Stanley refuses to bring his men; the battle begins; Richard's horse is killed and he fights on foot – "A horse, a horse" – refusing to withdraw. Richmond kills him in single combat. Stanley hands over the crown, Richmond announces the marriage that will unite "the White Rose and the Red", and the play ends with a prayer for peace.
Key Takeaways
- The villain is the narrator: Richard tells the audience his plans in soliloquy for three acts, so we watch every victim walk into a trap we already know about.
- The crown is won by seeming not to want it: Richard never seizes the throne; he arranges to be begged to take it, and the Baynard's Castle scene in Act 3 is the play's centrepiece of political theatre.
- Every curse comes true: Margaret's curses in Act 1 are the play's timetable, and Act 4 is the act in which they are paid off one by one.
- Richard stops confiding once he is king: The soliloquies dry up after the coronation, the allies fall away, and the man who ran the play from the inside becomes its hunted object.
- The ghosts are the climax, not the battle: Bosworth is decided the night before, in Richard's tent, when his conscience finally speaks and Richmond sleeps soundly.
Richard III Plot Summary – Frequently Asked Questions
How does Richard III end?
The play ends at Bosworth Field in August 1485. On the night before the battle the ghosts of Richard's victims visit both leaders' tents, cursing Richard and blessing Richmond, and Richard wakes in the only moment of fear the play allows him. In the morning Lord Stanley, whose son Richard is holding hostage, refuses to bring his troops to the king. Richard's horse is killed under him and he fights on foot, refusing Catesby's offer of another mount, until Richmond finds him and kills him in single combat.
Stanley picks the crown up from the field and gives it to Richmond, who is told that young George Stanley is alive, orders the dead of both sides buried, and pardons any of Richard's soldiers who submit. He then announces that he will marry Elizabeth of York, Edward IV's daughter, so uniting the houses of York and Lancaster, and closes the play with a prayer that England's civil wars are over. Richard's body is not mentioned again.
What happens to the Princes in the Tower?
They are murdered on Richard's orders in Act 4. The twelve-year-old King Edward V and his younger brother Richard, Duke of York, are lodged in the Tower in Act 3, first as a royal residence and then, once Richard has declared them illegitimate and taken the crown, as a prison. In Act 4, Scene 2 the newly crowned Richard asks Buckingham to have them killed; when Buckingham hesitates, Richard hires Sir James Tyrrel through a page.
The murder itself happens offstage. In Act 4, Scene 3 Tyrrel reports that the two men he hired, Dighton and Forrest, smothered the boys in their bed and wept as they described it; the chaplain of the Tower buried the bodies, but Tyrrel does not know where. Richard receives the news with satisfaction and moves straight on to his next marriage. The princes return only as ghosts, in Act 5, Scene 3, telling Richard to think of them in the Tower and despair.
How does Richard become king?
By removing everyone in front of him and then arranging to be asked. Richard has his brother Clarence murdered in Act 1, lets King Edward die believing himself responsible, and in Act 3 seizes the young Edward V on the road to London, executes the queen's brother and son at Pomfret, and beheads Lord Hastings, the one councillor who would not back him. With the princes in the Tower, Buckingham tells the citizens of London that Edward IV's children are illegitimate and that Richard is the true heir.
The citizens refuse to cheer, so the offer is staged instead. In Act 3, Scene 7, Buckingham brings the Lord Mayor to Baynard's Castle, where Richard appears on a balcony between two bishops, holding a prayer-book, and refuses the crown twice as unworthy of it. On the third asking he lets himself be persuaded, and the coronation follows at the start of Act 4. He never claims the throne in his own voice; the play's point is that he makes other people say it for him.
Why does Lady Anne agree to marry Richard?
It is the question the play asks itself: Richard, alone after the scene, wonders aloud whether any woman was ever wooed or won in such a mood. Anne is following the coffin of her father-in-law, Henry VI, when Richard stops the procession in Act 1, Scene 2. He killed Henry, and he killed her husband, Prince Edward, and she says so, at length, and spits in his face. Richard answers every accusation by turning it into a compliment, claims her beauty drove him to the murders, kneels, bares his breast and offers her his sword to kill him with. She cannot, and by the end of the scene she has taken his ring.
The play does not explain her further, and she is given no soliloquy. What it shows is a woman with no protector, no family, and a corpse to bury, worn down by a man who will not stop talking. In Act 4 she says she was won by his honeyed words, that she has not had one hour of quiet sleep as his wife, and that she expects him to be rid of her soon. He is: her death is reported in Act 4, Scene 3, in a single line, so that he can marry his niece.
Who are the ghosts in Act 5, Scene 3?
Eleven of Richard's victims, appearing in the order he killed them. Prince Edward of Lancaster, son of Henry VI, stabbed at Tewkesbury before the play begins; Henry VI himself, murdered in the Tower; Clarence, drowned in Act 1; Rivers, Grey and Vaughan, executed at Pomfret in Act 3; Lord Hastings, beheaded in the council scene; the two princes, smothered in the Tower; Lady Anne, Richard's wife; and Buckingham, executed in Act 5, Scene 1. Each speaks to Richard first, telling him to despair and die, and then crosses to Richmond's tent to wish him victory.
The procession does two jobs. It is the play's reckoning, a list of the dead read aloud so the audience can count them, and it is the fulfilment of Margaret's curse from Act 1 that Richard's sleep would be broken by dreams. Richard wakes calling for a horse and bandages, still fighting the dream, and the speech that follows is the first time he has spoken to the audience since he was crowned. Richmond wakes refreshed and calls it the sweetest sleep he has ever had.
How many acts and scenes does Richard III have?
Five acts and twenty-five scenes: four in Act 1, four in Act 2, seven in Act 3, five in Act 4 and five in Act 5. It is one of Shakespeare's longest plays, second only to Hamlet in most counts, and productions almost always cut it. The shape of the acts follows Richard's rise and fall: Act 1 sets the plots going, Act 2 clears away King Edward, Act 3 is the seizure of the crown, Act 4 the reign and its unravelling, and Act 5 the road to Bosworth.
The scenes vary enormously in size. Act 4, Scene 4, in which the three women lament, Richard woos Elizabeth's daughter by proxy and the messengers arrive, is by far the longest in the play; Act 3, Scene 6, the Scrivener's speech, is fourteen lines. The Shakespeare Retold translation follows the play scene by scene, and the links below open each act at its first scene.
Who dies in Richard III?
Almost everyone Richard touches. In order: Clarence, stabbed and drowned in a butt of malmsey in the Tower (Act 1, Scene 4); King Edward IV, who dies of illness and grief offstage between Act 2, Scenes 1 and 2; Rivers, Grey and Vaughan, the queen's kinsmen, executed at Pomfret (Act 3, Scene 3); Lord Hastings, beheaded on Richard's word in the council scene (Act 3, Scene 4); the two princes, smothered in the Tower and reported dead in Act 4, Scene 3; Lady Anne, whose death Richard reports in the same scene; Buckingham, executed at Salisbury (Act 5, Scene 1); and Richard himself, killed by Richmond at Bosworth (Act 5, Scene 5).
Two more deaths hang over the play from before it starts: Henry VI, whose coffin is on stage in Act 1, Scene 2, and his son Prince Edward, Anne's first husband, both killed by Richard in Henry VI, Part 3. The play keeps count for us. Margaret lists the dead in Act 4 and the ghosts list themselves in Act 5, so that by the end the audience has heard the roll twice.