Every scene in the play has its own guide – twenty-five in all, across five acts. Act 1 covers Scene 1 (the opening soliloquy and Clarence's arrest), Scene 2 (the wooing of Anne over Henry VI's coffin), Scene 3 (Margaret's curses) and Scene 4 (Clarence's dream and murder). Act 2 covers Scene 1 (King Edward's deathbed peace and the news of Clarence's death), Scene 2 (the lament for Edward and the plan to fetch the Prince), Scene 3 (three citizens read the signs) and Scene 4 (the Queen takes sanctuary). Act 3 covers Scene 1 (the Prince arrives in London and the princes are sent to the Tower), Scene 2 (Stanley's dream and Hastings' confidence), Scene 3 (Rivers, Grey and Vaughan executed at Pomfret), Scene 4 (the strawberries and Off with his head), Scene 5 (Hastings' head and the Lord Mayor), Scene 6 (the Scrivener) and Scene 7 (Richard accepts the crown between two bishops). Act 4 covers Scene 1 (the women turned away from the Tower and Anne summoned to be crowned), Scene 2 (the new king, Tyrrel hired, Buckingham refused), Scene 3 (Tyrrel reports the princes' murder), Scene 4 (the chorus of widows and the wooing of Elizabeth for her daughter) and Scene 5 (Stanley sends word to Richmond). Act 5 closes with Scene 1 (Buckingham's execution on All Souls' Day), Scene 2 (Richmond's march), Scene 3 (the ghosts at Bosworth), Scene 4 (A horse, a horse) and Scene 5 (Richard's death and the union of the roses).

Act 1, Scene 1 opens with Richard alone, telling the audience that the house of York has won – "Now is the winter of our discontent" – and that he has no place in the peace. He catalogues his own deformity, announces "I am determined to prove a villain", and reveals the plot already running: a planted prophecy that G will murder Edward's heirs, which the King has read as George, Duke of Clarence, and the audience knows is Gloucester. The guide follows the soliloquy's false logic (deformity as excuse, not cause), the double meanings in Richard's comfort to Clarence as he passes under guard, and the closing plan – Clarence, then Edward, then Anne – that serves as a table of contents for the next two acts. See Richard III Act 1, Scene 1 for the full analysis.

Over the coffin of Henry VI, whom he killed, and within two hundred lines of Anne cursing his future wife – who turns out to be herself. The guide traces the mechanism: the line-for-line duel of wits that drags Anne from lament into quarrel, the argument that her beauty caused the murders, the tears, and the sword Richard hands her with his breast bared, which she cannot use. It holds open the readings of why she yields – exhaustion, isolation, fascination – and ends with Richard's own astonishment, "Was ever woman in this humour wooed", followed at once by "I’ll have her, but I will not keep her long". See Richard III Act 1, Scene 2 for the full analysis.

Act 1, Scene 3 is the play's prophecy scene. Queen Margaret, Henry VI's widow – historically dead in France before these events – walks into a Yorkist court quarrel and curses everyone in it in order: Edward to die by surfeit, the Prince by violence, Elizabeth to outlive her glory, Rivers and Hastings to be cut off untimely, and Richard to suffer the worm of conscience and sleepless nights of devils. The guide checks each curse against the play (all are kept except Dorset's), explains Richard's trick of ending her curse with her own name, reads the "bottled spider" warning to Elizabeth, and shows why Buckingham – the one man exempted and warned instead – is the play's test of free will. It closes with Richard's soliloquy on his method: "And seem a saint, when most I play the devil". See Richard III Act 1, Scene 3 for the full analysis.

Act 1, Scene 4, in the Tower. Clarence wakes from a dream in which his brother Gloucester knocked him into the sea – "O Lord, methought what pain it was to drown" – and he sank past jewels lodged in dead men's skulls into a hell where Warwick and the murdered Prince Edward accused him of perjury. The guide reads the dream as prophecy Clarence forgets on waking, then follows the two hired murderers' prose debate about conscience ("O, in the Duke of Gloucester’s purse"), Clarence's failed defence of his life, and his refusal to believe that Richard sent them. It also answers the perennial question about the malmsey-butt – a story older than Shakespeare. See Richard III Act 1, Scene 4 for the full analysis.

Act 3, Scene 4: the council meets to fix the coronation, Hastings assures everyone that Richard's face shows his heart – "For by his face straight shall you know his heart" – and Richard leaves, returns, accuses the Queen and Mistress Shore of withering his arm by witchcraft, and asks what the plotters deserve. Hastings begins "If they have done this deed" and gets no further: "Talk’st thou to me of 'ifs'?" – "Off with his head". The guide covers the strawberries that send the Bishop of Ely out of the room, Hastings' recognition of Stanley's dream and Margaret's curse in his last minutes, and his farewell to "O momentary grace of mortal men". William Hazlitt, in Characters of Shakespear's Plays (1817), called Richard "equally impetuous and commanding", and this scene is the impetuous half at full speed. See Richard III Act 3, Scene 4 for the full analysis.

By being asked three times and refusing twice. Buckingham reports that the citizens would not cheer – "The citizens are mum" – so the two men stage a show at Baynard's Castle: Richard appears above between two bishops with a prayer-book, Buckingham and the Lord Mayor beg him to take the crown, he declines as unworthy, and on the third asking he accepts, on condition that everyone remembers he was forced. The guide explains Richard's instruction to "Play the maid’s part, still answer nay, and take it" – say no and take it – the case that Edward's children are illegitimate, what the citizens' silence tells us, and why this is the peak of Richard's career: everything after it is holding on. See Richard III Act 3, Scene 7 for the full analysis.

Two scenes. In Act 4, Scene 2 the new King asks Buckingham to kill the boys, Buckingham hesitates, and Richard hires Tyrrel through a page instead – then refuses Buckingham the earldom he was promised: "I am not in the giving vein today". In Act 4, Scene 3 Tyrrel reports that the deed is done – "The tyrannous and bloody act is done" – and that the two murderers wept as they smothered the children, "four red roses on a stalk". The guide asks why Shakespeare keeps the murder offstage and gives it to a hired man's second-hand account, why the killers weep when the King does not, and how Richard's position is already slipping as he resolves to become "a jolly thriving wooer" to his own niece. See Richard III Act 4, Scene 2 and Richard III Act 4, Scene 3 for the full analysis.

Three widows sit on the ground and pool their griefs. Margaret returns to count her fulfilled curses and, asked by Elizabeth to "teach me how to curse", gives the play's lesson in it; the Duchess of York curses her son to his face; and Richard tries the Anne speech again, wooing Elizabeth for her daughter and losing every oath he swears – by his crown, by himself, by God – to a woman who has learned to weigh his words: "for this is no oath". Then the messengers come, one after another, with rebellion everywhere. The guide compares the two wooings, shows why Elizabeth's apparent surrender is nothing of the kind, and reads the scene as the point where Richard's language stops working. See Richard III Act 4, Scene 4 for the full analysis.

Act 5, Scene 3 sets the two tents side by side. Eleven ghosts – everyone Richard has killed, from Prince Edward to Buckingham – pass between them, telling Richard to "Despair and die" and Richmond to live and flourish. Richard wakes – "O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me" – and argues with himself in broken half-lines, "Richard loves Richard, that is, I am I", the only time in the play his voice fails him. By morning he has decided that "Conscience is but a word that cowards use". The guide follows the ghosts in order, weighs whether Richard repents or shakes the dream off, sets the two orations to the armies side by side, and explains why Stanley's refusal to march decides the battle before it begins. Jan Kott, in Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964), heard in Richmond only the next turn of the same machine – a reading the guide holds against the play's providential ending. See Richard III Act 5, Scene 3 for the full analysis.

Act 5, Scene 4, the shortest scene in the play: Catesby calls for rescue, Richard's horse is dead, and the King enters on foot with the line everyone knows – "A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse" – refuses to withdraw, and goes back into the battle to find Richmond, having already killed "six Richmonds in the field". The guide explains what the line means (a horse to fight on, not to flee) and asks whether Richard dies bravely. Act 5, Scene 5 gives the answer: Richmond kills him in single combat, without a death speech, and Stanley brings the crown – "The day is ours, the bloody dog is dead". Richmond's closing speech, "England hath long been mad and scarred herself", announces his marriage to Elizabeth of York and the union of the two houses, and the guide asks whether the ending convinces. See Richard III Act 5, Scene 4 and Richard III Act 5, Scene 5 for the full analysis.