Richard III: Famous Quotes

Anne is following the corpse of King Henry VI, her father-in-law, to burial. Richard killed him, and killed her husband, Prince Edward, too. Her curse works outward in a chain – hand, heart, blood – and then goes further than she knows: she wishes on the killer's future wife a life more miserable than her own.

Within the same scene she has accepted Richard's ring. The curse on his wife is therefore a curse on herself, and the play collects the debt in Act 4, when Anne recalls that her own mouth proved the curse and that she has never since enjoyed one hour of quiet sleep in Richard's bed. The modern verse makes the triple pattern hit as hard in plain English: "damn him", "damn the heart", "damn the blood".

Margaret, the widow of Henry VI, has no business at Edward's court and no power in it, so she does the only thing left to her: she curses everyone in the room. This is the heart of the curse she lays on Richard. "Begnaw" means to gnaw at continually, and the worm of conscience is a medieval image of the guilt that eats a sinner from the inside.

Each line becomes an event. The worm arrives in Act 5, Scene 3, when Richard wakes from the ghosts and cries out against his "coward conscience". Friends taken for traitors and traitors taken for friends describe, exactly, his treatment of Hastings and Buckingham and his blindness about Stanley. Margaret's curses are the play's timetable, and the modern verse keeps the shape of every clause so a reader can tick them off as they land.

Clarence, imprisoned in the Tower on Richard's arrangement, tells the Keeper his dream. He and his brother Gloucester were walking on a ship's deck; Gloucester stumbled and struck him overboard; and this is the drowning. The waters, the wrecks, the men gnawed by fishes and the jewels lodged in dead men's eye-sockets make the most sustained piece of poetry in the play, and it is given to a man who will be dead within the scene.

The dream is a prophecy Clarence cannot read. It tells him precisely who will kill him and he still greets Richard's murderers with the assurance that his brother loves him. It is also a confession: the second half of the dream, not quoted here, sends him to hell to meet the father-in-law he betrayed and the prince he helped to kill in the earlier wars. Guilt, in this play, reaches people first in their sleep – Clarence here, Stanley in Act 3, Richard in Act 5.

Two hired killers are waiting for Clarence to wake up, and one of them has been ambushed by his conscience. This is his description of the thing: a spirit that blushes, that mutinies, that makes a man give back a purse of gold he found by chance. It is comedy, and the murderers' whole debate is in prose, the play's only long stretch of it, so the modern translation runs as prose too.

The joke is the play's argument in miniature. Conscience is described here as a nuisance that ruins a man's livelihood, and the Second Murderer decides to do without it – until the deed is done and he wishes, too late, that he had kept it. Richard makes the same choice in the same words at Bosworth, telling his army that conscience is only a word that cowards use. The murderers are rehearsing their master's fate, and the audience laughs at what it will later watch destroy a king.

Edward has just learned that Clarence is dead. He had ordered the execution in anger and countermanded it; Richard tells him the reversal arrived too late. Then Stanley kneels to beg a pardon for a servant who killed a man in a brawl, and the king turns on the whole court with this question.

It is the moment the sick king sees what his reign has been. Nobody spoke for Clarence; nobody reminded Edward of the brother who had fought beside him. The speech is a confession made as an accusation, and the modern verse keeps its shape: the tongue that condemned a brother now being asked to pardon a slave. Edward dies within the scene that follows, and the guilt he names here passes, unacknowledged, to the brother who engineered it.

Three Londoners meet in the street with the news that the king is dead and a boy will succeed him. The Third Citizen answers with a proverb from the book of Ecclesiastes, and it is the ordinary people, not the lords, who see the shape of what is coming.

The scene is a small chorus. The citizens have no power and no names, but they have memories – of Henry VI, another child king, and of the wars that followed – and their fear is proved right within two acts. The modern verse drops the biblical register for a plain Londoner's voice: "It’s awful when a child rules the country!" The line is one of the play's many prophecies, and, like all the others, nobody who hears it can prevent it.

The young Prince Edward, arriving in London to be crowned, has been talking cleverly about Julius Caesar and the Tower. Richard, his uncle and Protector, answers with a proverb spoken aside – the audience hears it, the boy does not. It is a joke and a sentence of death in the same breath.

Charles Lamb, reviewing a performance in 1802 in the Morning Post, wrote: "This quality of unstrained mirth accompanies Richard, and is a prime feature in his character." This is that mirth at its coldest. The prince asks what his uncle said, and Richard smoothly gives him a different line about fame living long without records. The modern verse keeps the aside as a quoted saying, so the boy's innocent question, which follows at once, still lands.

A second aside in the same exchange, and the most self-aware line Richard speaks. The Vice was the stock villain of the old morality plays: a comic tempter who worked the crowd, joked with them, and wrapped his wickedness in double meanings. Iniquity was one of his names. Richard is telling the audience what kind of stage figure he is.

Bernard Spivack, in Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (1958), traced Richard's intimacy with the audience and his delight in his own tricks straight back to this tradition. The line also explains the whole play's way with language: one word, two meanings, and a listener who hears only the safe one. "Determined", "grace", "ever", "protector" all work this way. The modern verse names the old plays outright so a reader without the theatrical history still gets the point.

The council has met to fix the coronation date. Richard has left the room, and Hastings, asked what the Protector is thinking, assures everyone that Richard is the most transparent man alive. He is describing the least transparent man in the play, and he will be dead before the meeting ends.

The irony is total and the play does not hurry it. Hastings has already laughed off Stanley's dream of the boar, sent back word that he fears nothing, and chatted with a priest at the door without guessing why one might be needed. This speech is the last of his mistakes, and Richard re-enters a few lines later to make the arrest. The modern verse keeps the fatal confidence exactly: "you can know his heart by looking at him." Nobody in the play can, and the one man who thinks he can is the next to die for it.

Richard has returned to the council, displayed his withered arm, and blamed it on witchcraft by the queen and Mistress Shore. Hastings, Shore's lover, begins a careful sentence with the word "if", and gets no further. The order is given, and Richard adds that he will not eat until the head is off.

This is the play's most quoted line and its shortest trial. The offence is grammatical: a conditional clause, heard as treason. The speed is the point. Richard has used two acts of soliloquy, charm and scripture to reach a position where four words can end a life, and the scene lets the audience feel what that position is for. Note that the familiar sequel, "So much for Buckingham", is not Shakespeare's; it belongs to Colley Cibber's adaptation of 1700 (see the FAQ below).

Hastings, on his way to the block, understands his situation in one image: a man who trusts a great lord's favour is a drunken sailor on a mast, one nod from the sea. "Grace" is a pun – the grace of a patron against the grace of God – and the whole speech is a medieval lesson on the wheel of fortune spoken by a man who has just fallen off it.

What makes it more than a commonplace is the memory that surrounds it. In the lines before, Hastings recalls Stanley's dream of the boar and the stumbling horse on the way to the Tower, and sees that he was warned and refused the warnings. The speech is therefore also a confession: he did not fail to see the signs, he refused them. The modern verse keeps the sailor and the mast, the play's plainest picture of what it is to build a life on a tyrant's smile.

A clerk walks on with the official indictment of Hastings, written out in a fair hand, and does the arithmetic aloud. The document took him eleven hours to copy; the draft took as long to prepare; and Hastings was alive, untainted and at liberty five hours ago. The paperwork for the execution was commissioned before the crime it describes.

The Scrivener has no other scene and no name, and this short speech is one of the play's sharpest. Everyone can see the device; no one is bold enough to say so. It is Shakespeare's most direct picture of how a tyranny is administered – not by force alone but by a whole city agreeing not to notice. The modern verse keeps the rhyming couplet at the end, so the bitterness closes with a click.

Buckingham is briefing Richard before the Lord Mayor and citizens arrive at Baynard's Castle to offer him the crown. Richard is to appear between two bishops, book in hand, and refuse; Buckingham will press; Richard will refuse again; and at last he will let himself be persuaded. The maid's part is the whole plan in one line.

The scene that follows is the play's great set piece of political theatre, and this is its stage direction. Buckingham calls the shots as a director would, and Richard performs modesty so well that the Mayor believes it. The comparison to a maid's coyness is Buckingham's own coarseness showing through, and the modern verse lets the crudeness stand. It also marks the height of the partnership: within an act, Buckingham will ask for his reward and be refused in exactly the manner he taught.

Richard is king. Buckingham has hesitated over the murder of the princes, and Richard, who cannot tolerate hesitation, has decided to find a cheaper killer. This is the moment he sees his own position clearly: he is so far into blood that each sin drags the next one after it.

The image anticipates Macbeth, who will say he has stepped so far in blood that going back is as tedious as going over. Richard, characteristically, does not mourn the fact; the next line dismisses pity from his eye and the scene moves on to hiring Tyrrel. What the crown has changed is the register: this is an aside spoken while Buckingham waits, not a confidence shared with the audience, and the modern verse keeps the grim commercial logic: "each sin requires another sin."

Buckingham has come to claim the earldom of Hereford that Richard promised him when they were plotting together. Richard, brooding on Richmond and an old prophecy, ignores him, talks over him, and finally answers with this. A vein was a mood or a disposition; the line says the shop is shut.

It is the end of the partnership. Buckingham, alone a few lines later, asks himself whether he made Richard king for this, and rides to Brecknock and rebellion. The play has already shown the audience how the two men treat everyone else; this is what it looks like when the method is turned on a partner. The modern verse gives it in the flat modern idiom the moment deserves: "I am not in a giving mood today."

The princes in the Tower are dead, and the audience is told by the man who arranged it. Tyrrel reports that the two men he hired, Dighton and Forrest, wept as they told him what they had done, and that he cannot get the story out of his own mouth without breaking down. The play never shows the murder; this speech is all we get, and it is enough.

The choice to keep the killing offstage and give the account to a subcontractor is a deliberate one. The tenderness of the details – the boys asleep in each other's arms, a prayer-book on their pillow – comes to us filtered through hardened men who could not bear it, which is more damning than any staged violence. Richard enters at the end of the speech and asks only whether the deed is done and where the bodies are buried. The modern verse keeps the formal weight of the opening announcement.

In Act 1 Elizabeth was a queen, and Margaret's curses were something that happened to her. By Act 4 her husband is dead, her brother and one son executed, her two younger sons murdered in the Tower, and here she runs after the old woman who cursed her and begs for lessons. It is one of the great reversals in the play, and it happens in two lines.

The request marks the moment the play's women find their weapon. Deprived of everything else, they have language, and Margaret is its master. The modern verse keeps the odd, formal courtesy of the plea ("you master of the curses"), which is what makes it so bleak: Elizabeth is asking for tuition. Her lesson is put to use in the scene that follows, when she out-argues Richard line for line over the hand of her daughter.

Margaret's answer to Elizabeth is a recipe. Do not sleep; fast; measure dead happiness against living grief; imagine the murdered children sweeter than they were and their killer worse than he is. Make the loss bigger and the curse will come. It is the play's only lesson in its own dominant art, and it is taught by its only expert.

What Margaret describes is also what she has done to herself for four acts, and the speech has the authority of someone who knows the cost. She leaves the play on this exit, her work done, and the scene she leaves behind is proof that the lesson took: the Duchess of York curses her son, and Elizabeth turns Richard's own oaths against him. The modern verse keeps the method plain enough to follow step by step.

Richard's mother stops him on his way to war, tells him she will never look on his face again, and leaves him with this. A mother's curse was thought the heaviest a person could carry. The Duchess, who has already told us that Richard was a torment from the cradle, makes it a prophecy: bloody in life, bloody in death, shame at both ends.

It is the last and most intimate of the curses Richard collects, and the only one from someone who loved him once. He does not answer it; his mother leaves, and he turns at once to woo the woman whose sons he has killed. The prophecy is exact. At Bosworth he dies fighting on foot, bleeding, and the closing speech of the play is Richmond's, not his. The modern verse keeps the rhymed couplet, so the curse sounds as final as it is.

Daylight, and Richard is addressing his army. The man who a few hours earlier cried out against his coward conscience now tells his soldiers that conscience is a word invented to keep strong men in awe. The two speeches sit in the same scene so that the audience can measure one against the other.

The oration is a masterpiece of contempt – Richmond's men are vagabonds and rascals, Brittany's beggars, a milksop leading a rabble – and it works as rhetoric because Richard has always been good at that. What it cannot do is undo the night. The Second Murderer said the same thing about conscience in Act 1, and it did not save him either. The modern verse sets the word in quotation marks, so the sneer is audible.

Richard's horse is dead and he is fighting on foot. Catesby tells him to withdraw and offers to find him a mount, and this is the reply: he has staked his life on a single throw and will stand by the result. Richmond has put decoys in his own armour, and Richard has killed five of them looking for the sixth. Then the famous line comes round again.

The line is usually quoted as a cry of desperation, and it is, but not of retreat. Richard wants a horse to go on hunting Richmond, not to escape him, and the gambler's image before it makes that plain. The kingdom he offers is the one he spent five acts acquiring, now worth exactly one horse. The modern verse keeps the dice and the exchange rate, and puts the famous line in the plainest possible English, which is where Richard, at the last, has arrived.

Richard is dead, the crown has been picked up from the field, and Richmond, soon to be Henry VII, closes the play with a diagnosis. England has been mad and has wounded herself; brother has killed brother, father son, son father. The lines look back past this play to the three parts of Henry VI, and the whole cycle of civil war is summed up in four lines before the cure is announced.

E. M. W. Tillyard, in Shakespeare's History Plays (1944), took this speech as the point of the whole tetralogy, arguing that the main business of the play is to display the working out of God's plan to restore England to prosperity, with Richmond as its instrument. Modern readers have often found Richmond thin beside the man he replaces, and that thinness is arguably deliberate: after Richard, the play wants a king with nothing to say for himself. The modern verse keeps the pattern of the three killings, and the self-harm image in the first line.