Prophecy and Curses
Theme Profile – At a Glance
- Focus: What is spoken in this play comes true. Queen Margaret’s curses, Lady Anne’s curse, Stanley’s dream, Clarence’s dream, Henry VI’s prophecy about Richmond and a planted rumour about the letter G all shape the action, and the victims remember each one as it lands.
- Key Characters: Queen Margaret, Richard III, Lady Anne, Queen Elizabeth, The Duke of Buckingham, George, Duke of Clarence, Hastings, Richmond.
- The Core Tension: The curses are spoken by people with no other power, and they all work. Whether that shows heaven listening or a playwright arranging is the play’s open question. What is not open is that the victims are warned, and choose not to hear.
- Key Manifestations: Richard’s forged prophecy about G (A1S1); Anne’s curse on the killer’s wife (A1S2); Margaret’s curses on the court (A1S3); Clarence’s dream (A1S4); Stanley’s dream of the boar (A3S2); Rivers, Grey and Hastings remembering Margaret (A3S3, A3S4); Anne recognising her own curse (A4S1); Margaret’s return and the lesson in cursing (A4S4); Buckingham on All Souls’ Day (A5S1); the ghosts (A5S3).
- Famous Quote:
"O but remember this another day,
When he shall split thy very heart with sorrow,
And say poor Margaret was a prophetess!"
(Act 1, Scene 3) - The Outcome: Every curse Margaret speaks is paid in order, and the last is paid at Bosworth. Richmond, whom Henry VI foretold as king, is crowned; Richard, whom his mother cursed to a bloody end, dies calling for a horse. The prophecies win, and the play leaves us to decide what that proves.
Drunken Prophecies, Libels, and Dreams
The first prophecy in the play is a forgery. Richard tells the audience in his opening speech that he has set the King against Clarence by planting a rumour, and he is precise about the tools.
Original
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the King
In deadly hate the one against the other...
(Richard, Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I’ve laid down devious and dangerous plots,
Through drunken prophecies, slander and dreams,
To pitch my brother Clarence and the King
Against each other through a deadly hatred...
"Drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams": the letter G, we learn a few lines later, is to be the murderer of Edward’s heirs, and Clarence’s name is George. The King believes it. Clarence goes to the Tower. The prophecy is nonsense, and it is also, as the audience will notice, true: G is for Gloucester, and Gloucester will murder Edward’s heirs.
The play begins, in other words, by showing prophecy as a political weapon in a cynic’s hands, and then letting the weapon turn out to be accurate. That double movement is the whole theme in small. Richard manufactures a prophecy for his own use; heaven, or the play, makes it come true in a way he did not intend. The theme of manipulation and deceit explains why the rumour works on the King. This theme is about why it works on the world.
Can Curses Pierce the Clouds?
Queen Margaret is the play’s chief prophet, and she arrives in A1S3 as the voice of the last war. She has stood unseen while the Yorkist court quarrelled; now she steps forward, is reminded by Richard of the paper crown and Rutland’s blood, and asks whether curses reach heaven at all.
Original
Can curses pierce the clouds and enter heaven?
Why then give way, dull clouds, to my quick curses!
(Queen Margaret, Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Can curses get to heaven just like that?
In which case, clouds divide and hear my curses!
What follows is the longest sequence of cursing in Shakespeare, and it is a table of contents for the rest of the play. The King will die by surfeit; the Prince will die young; the Queen will outlive her glory and die neither mother, wife nor queen; Rivers, Dorset and Hastings will be cut off by accident; and Richard will be gnawed by conscience, betrayed by friends, and denied sleep except for dreams of devils.
Every item is paid, in order, and each victim names her as it happens. Margaret’s question is answered by the play itself: the curses do pierce the clouds. What the play declines to say is whether that is because heaven heard them or because Margaret, who has watched this court for years, simply knows what it will do. The theme of fate vs free will takes up that question. This theme records that the curses were spoken, and that they worked.
Poor Margaret Was a Prophetess
Margaret spares one man. Buckingham has no Lancastrian blood on his hands, and she offers him friendship and a warning against Richard instead of a curse. He dismisses her, and her reply is the line the play will keep quoting.
Original
What, dost thou scorn me for my gentle counsel?
And soothe the devil that I warn thee from?
O but remember this another day,
When he shall split thy very heart with sorrow,
And say poor Margaret was a prophetess!
(Queen Margaret, Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
What, do you mock me for my kind advice?
And then appease the devil whom I warned of?
Oh, you’ll remember this another day,
When he will break your heart with grief and sorrow,
And you’ll say Margaret could predict the future!
The warning is the theme’s clearest test of free will, because it is not a curse. Buckingham is not doomed; he is told, plainly, what Richard is, and he laughs. Four acts later, on the way to execution on All Souls’ Day, he quotes her: "Remember Margaret was a prophetess."
The pattern repeats with every victim. Rivers and Grey at Pomfret; Hastings at the council table; Lady Anne on the way to be crowned; Queen Elizabeth outside the Tower. Each one was told, each one ignored it, and each one remembers at the end. The play’s prophecies are not secret. They are announced in public to the people they concern, and the play’s argument is that being told is not the same as listening.
Despair and Die
The last night of the play is the theme’s harvest. Eleven ghosts pass between the tents of Richard and Richmond, each with the same instruction for one and the same blessing for the other, and Henry VI’s ghost reminds Richmond of the oldest prophecy in the play.
Original
Harry, that prophesied thou shouldst be king,
Doth comfort thee in thy sleep. Live and flourish!
(Ghost of Henry VI, Act 5, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Henry, who prophesied that you’d be king,
Brings comfort whilst you’re sleeping. Live and prosper!
Richard has already remembered the same prophecy in A4S2, muttering "A king – perhaps – perhaps" while Buckingham tries to talk to him about an earldom. It was made when Richmond was a child, in the earlier plays, by a king Richard murdered; and the murderer is the one who cannot forget it.
The ghosts are prophecy in its final form: the dead announcing tomorrow. Richard wakes and, for one night, believes them. By morning he has decided they were shadows, and he goes out to prove the prophecy wrong and proves it right. The theme of conscience and guilt is about what the ghosts do to him inside. This theme is about the plain fact that they said what would happen, and it happened.
"In spite of the eminence of Richard’s character the main business of the play is to complete the national tetralogy and to display the working out of God’s plan to restore England to prosperity."
— E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays, 1944
Key Quotes on Prophecy and Curses
Quote 1
If ever he have wife, let her be made
More miserable by the life of him
Than I am made by my young lord and thee!
(Lady Anne, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
And if he has a wife, let her become
More miserable by spending life with him
Than I am losing my husband and you!
Quote Analysis: Lady Anne’s curse on whoever the killer of Henry VI marries, spoken over the coffin before Richard has appeared. Within two hundred lines she has accepted his ring, and in A4S1 she quotes the curse back almost word for word and recognises that she is its subject. It is the smallest and most personal of the play’s prophecies, and the one the play is most careful to have its speaker notice. Anne curses herself, marries, cannot sleep, and dies; the curse is paid to the letter.
O Buckingham, take heed of yonder dog!
Look when he fawns he bites; and when he bites,
His venom tooth will rankle to the death.
(Queen Margaret, Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Oh Buckingham, beware of that dog Richard!
When he is sucking up, he’ll bite; and his bite
Is venomous, and it’s enough to kill you.
Quote Analysis: Queen Margaret’s warning to the one man she does not curse. The image is a dog that fawns before it bites, and whose bite is poisoned. Buckingham answers with contempt, and Margaret’s next lines are the prophecy he will remember at the block. The warning matters to the theme because it is refusable: Buckingham is offered the future in plain words and turns it down. Every other prophecy in the play is a sentence. This one is a choice, and he makes it.
Now Margaret’s curse is fall’n upon our heads,
When she exclaimed on Hastings, you, and I,
For standing by when Richard stabbed her son.
(Grey, Act 3, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
And now Queen Margaret’s curse on us has happened
When she condemned Lord Hastings, you and me,
For standing by when Richard stabbed her son.
Quote Analysis: Grey, at Pomfret, with Rivers and Vaughan, minutes before execution. He remembers exactly which curse and exactly what for: they stood by when Richard stabbed Margaret’s son at Tewkesbury. Rivers adds that she cursed Richard, Buckingham and Hastings too, and prays God to remember those as well. The scene is the theme’s bookkeeping: the victims audit the curse before they die, and find it correct. Hastings will do the same within a scene.
I do remember me, Henry the Sixth
Did prophesy that Richmond should be king,
When Richmond was a little peevish boy.
(King Richard, Act 4, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I can remember when Henry the Sixth
Did prophesy that Richmond would be king,
When Richmond was a silly little boy.
Quote Analysis: Richard, newly crowned, talking to himself while Buckingham tries to claim his earldom. Henry VI once prophesied that Richmond would be king, and Richard, who killed Henry, cannot get the prophecy out of his head. The stammer that follows – a king, perhaps, perhaps – is the first crack in his confidence, and it is caused by a prophecy made about a child in another play. The theme reaches Richard here, before the ghosts do, in the form of a memory he cannot argue with.
Key Takeaways
- The First Prophecy Is a Forgery: Richard invents the rumour about G to destroy Clarence. G turns out to stand for Gloucester. The play makes a lie come true.
- Margaret’s Curses Are the Play’s Table of Contents: Every death she calls for in A1S3 happens in order, and every victim names her as it arrives.
- Warnings Are Refusable: Buckingham is warned, not cursed, and laughs. Hastings ignores Stanley’s dream. The prophecies are public; the deafness is chosen.
- The Dead Announce Tomorrow: Eleven ghosts tell Richard to despair and die and Richmond to live and flourish. Both instructions are carried out by noon.
Study Questions and Analysis
What are the main prophecies and curses in Richard III?
There are more than in any other Shakespeare play, and it helps to list them. Richard’s forged prophecy that G will murder Edward’s heirs (A1S1). Lady Anne’s curse on the killer’s wife and child (A1S2). Queen Margaret’s curses on the King, the Queen, the Prince, Rivers, Dorset, Hastings and Richard, and her warning to Buckingham (A1S3). Clarence’s dream of drowning and of the underworld (A1S4). Edward’s warning that God will confound false swearers (A2S1). Stanley’s dream of the boar (A3S2). Hastings’ own prophecy of a fearful time for England (A3S4). Anne’s recognition of her curse (A4S1). Margaret’s lesson in cursing and the Duchess’s curse on Richard (A4S4). Buckingham’s recognition on All Souls’ Day (A5S1). Henry VI’s old prophecy about Richmond, remembered by Richard (A4S2) and by Henry’s ghost (A5S3). And the ghosts themselves. Margaret’s curse on the Queen is the model for all of them:
Thyself a queen, for me that was a queen,
Outlive thy glory like my wretched self!
Long mayst thou live to wail thy children’s death,
And see another, as I see thee now...
(Queen Margaret, Act 1, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
May you, a queen, for me who once was queen,
Outlive your glory and be sad like me!
And may you live to mourn your children’s deaths
And see another queen, as I see you now...
Each clause is a scene to come. Wolfgang Clemen’s A Commentary on Shakespeare’s Richard III (1968) treats this structure of curse and fulfilment as the play’s principal dramatic device, a way of telling the audience the shape of the action in Act 1 so that the following four acts can be watched as the shape fills in. The list above is long because the device is used everywhere; the play is, among other things, a machine for making predictions and then keeping them.
Why does Margaret's cursing matter so much?
Because it is the only power she has, and it works. Queen Margaret has lost a husband, a son, a crown and a country; she has been banished on pain of death; she has no army, no allies and no future. What she has is a voice, and the play gives it more authority than any sword in it. Her curses are not wishes but descriptions, and when she returns in A4S4 she reviews them like an auditor:
So now prosperity begins to mellow
And drop into the rotten mouth of death.
Here in these confines slyly have I lurked,
To watch the waning of mine enemies.
(Queen Margaret, Act 4, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
The Yorks’ prosperity has started fading,
Like ripened fruit that rots upon the ground.
I’ve kept my distance, lurking in the shadows,
Observing all my enemies collapse.
E. M. W. Tillyard’s Shakespeare’s History Plays (1944) read her as the voice of providence, the character through whom God’s plan for England is made audible, and the fulfilment of her curses as the proof that the plan exists. Jan Kott, in Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964), kept the machine and dropped the theology: Margaret is the one figure who has already been ground by it and stays to watch it grind the others. Madonne M. Miner’s essay in The Woman’s Part (1980) took the title of Margaret’s curse on Elizabeth and read the cursing as what the play’s women are left with when everything else has been taken.
The readings agree on the fact and disagree on its meaning, which is the right state for an essay to leave it in. What can be said plainly is that Margaret is the play’s memory. She remembers Tewkesbury and the Tower when the Yorkists would rather not, and her curses are that memory pointed forwards.
How does the play use dreams as prophecy?
Three dreams shape the action, and the play treats each as a warning that could have been acted on. Clarence dreams that Richard knocks him overboard, and does not draw the conclusion; Stanley dreams that the boar has struck off his helmet, and sends a messenger to Hastings before dawn:
He dreamt the boar had rased off his helm.
Besides, he says there are two Councils kept;
And that may be determined at the one
Which may make you and him to rue at th’ other.
(Messenger, Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
He dreamt the Duke of Gloucester chopped his head off.
He also said there’ll be two meetings held;
And that the outcome of one of those meetings
Will make you and my lord regret the other.
Hastings laughs, and stays, and dies. The third dream is Richard’s own, on the last night, and it is the one dream in the play whose dreamer believes it, for about a hundred lines.
Nicholas Brooke’s Shakespeare’s Early Tragedies (1968) reads Clarence’s dream as the model for Richard’s: the same journey to the dead, the same accusers, the same waking terror, with the difference that Clarence repents and Richard does not. Wolfgang Clemen (1968) notes how the dreams are placed so that the audience always knows more than the dreamer: we have heard Richard plan Clarence’s death before Clarence dreams it, and we have watched the boar sharpen his tusks before Stanley sees him. Dreams in this play are prophecy for people who will not listen to Margaret. The play offers the warning in a second language, and it is refused in that language too.
What is the significance of Anne's curse coming true?
It is the play’s most intimate prophecy and the one its speaker is made to recognise most fully. Lady Anne curses the killer’s future wife before she knows she will be that wife; two acts later, on the way to be crowned, she recites the curse and names herself its subject:
Lo, ere I can repeat this curse again,
Within so small a time, my woman’s heart
Grossly grew captive to his honey words...
(Lady Anne, Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Now look at me! Before I’d cursed again,
My woman’s heart, within so little time,
Was captivated by his charming words...
"Grossly grew captive to his honey words": the curse was on a wife made miserable by the life of her husband, and Anne has been that wife since the night of the wedding, kept awake by Richard’s dreams. The self-curse is a small version of the play’s whole design, in which everyone who speaks harm into the air finds it landing near home.
A. P. Rossiter’s "Angel with Horns" (1961) argued that the play’s pattern of retribution is so exact that it becomes ironic – a providence this tidy looks like a playwright – and Anne’s curse is the clearest case, because she is punished for nothing except speaking. Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin’s Engendering a Nation (1997) read the women’s curses as the play’s alternative record of events, and Anne’s recognition as the moment that record turns on its keeper. She is the one prophet in the play who is also her own victim, and the play gives her the speech to say so.
Is the fulfilment of the curses proof of divine justice?
That is the reading the play most obviously invites, and the one it most carefully complicates. Everyone in the play who is cursed dies, and most of them say that God has arranged it. Buckingham makes the theological case on the way to the block:
Thus doth he force the swords of wicked men
To turn their own points in their masters’ bosoms;
Thus Margaret’s curse falls heavy on my neck...
(Buckingham, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
It’s how he turns the swords of wicked men
Upon themselves to stab them through the heart.
And so that curse from Margaret has come true...
But the play gives the same argument to both sides of the civil war. Richard tells Queen Margaret in A1S3 that God, not the Yorkists, punished her for Rutland’s death; Margaret says the same of the Yorkists; both have evidence. And the one prophecy that is demonstrably false – Richard’s rumour about G – comes true anyway, which suggests that the play’s providence does not much care who is speaking.
E. M. W. Tillyard (1944) took the curses as the audible working of God’s plan. Phyllis Rackin’s Stages of History (1990) argued that the histories keep providential and political accounts of events open at once and let the audience choose. Harold C. Goddard’s The Meaning of Shakespeare (1951) took a third view: the curses come true because the people cursed keep doing what they were cursed for, and calling the result justice is a way of not noticing the choices. The play’s treatment of fate vs free will works through these positions in full. For this theme the plain statement is enough: the curses are paid, the payers say it was God, and the play does not contradict them, or agree.
How does Richard respond to prophecy?
He forges it, mocks it, and is finally undone by it. In Act 1 Richard invents a prophecy about G and laughs at Margaret’s curses; when she reaches for his name he supplies it, so that she seems to have cursed herself. In Act 4, as king, a prophecy he did not make begins to work on him. Henry VI foretold that Richmond would be king; an Irish bard told Richard he would not live long after seeing Richmond; and the mayor of Exeter shows him a castle called Rouge-mount. Richard, who has spent three acts using other men’s superstitions, discovers his own:
Richmond! When last I was at Exeter,
The mayor in courtesy showed me the castle,
And called it Rouge-mount, at which name I started,
Because a bard of Ireland told me once
I should not live long after I saw Richmond.
(King Richard, Act 4, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
‘Richmond!’ When I was last in Exeter,
The mayor kindly showed me round the castle,
And called it ‘Rougemont’; that name startled me,
Because an Irish poet told me once
I would not live long after I saw ‘Richmond’.
The speech is spoken over Buckingham’s attempts to claim his earldom, and it is the first time Richard has ignored the man in front of him for a thought inside his head. Prophecy has reached him, and it has reached him as fear.
Stephen Greenblatt’s Tyrant (2018) reads Richard’s superstition as the tyrant’s characteristic weakness: a man who believes in nothing but his own will has no defence against omens, because he has no framework in which to weigh them. On the last night the omens arrive in person, and Richard’s answer at dawn is that conscience is a word for cowards and dreams are babble. It is the response of a man who has finally met a prophecy he cannot forge. The theme of conscience and guilt shows what the meeting cost him.
How should a student write about prophecy and curses in an essay?
Start with the structure, because the structure is the argument. The play announces its ending in Act 1 and then delivers it, and every major death is preceded by a prediction and followed by a recognition. An essay that lists the curses and their fulfilments has already described the play’s design; the interesting work is deciding what the design means. Hastings, at the council table, makes a prophecy of his own on the way out:
I prophesy the fearfull’st time to thee
That ever wretched age hath looked upon.
(Hastings, Act 3, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I can predict that terrifying days
Are coming, worse than ever seen before.
He is right, and he is also a man who laughed at a prophecy that morning. That doubleness – the victims become prophets at the moment of death – is the pattern worth writing about, because it shows the play turning each of Richard’s crimes into a new curse against him.
Three positions are available and all three are respectable. E. M. W. Tillyard (1944): the curses are providence, and the play is a demonstration that God restores England through Richmond. Jan Kott (1964): the curses are the machine, and the play shows a wheel turning with no hand on it. A. P. Rossiter (1961): the pattern is so neat that it becomes ironic, and the audience is meant to notice the playwright behind the providence. The strongest essays hold all three and use the text to test them – the forged prophecy about G, which comes true; the warning to Buckingham, which is refused; the dreams, which are ignored. The play has arranged its prophecies so that they can be read as fate and as choice at once. That, rather than either answer, is what it wants a reader to see.
