Richard III Read Online Free

its own decision) or a may exit or a piece of business placed between arrows to indicate that it may occur at various different moments within a scene.
    Line Numbers are editorial, for reference and to key the explanatory and textual notes.
    Explanatory Notes explain allusions and gloss obsolete and difficult words, confusing phraseology, occasional major textual cruces, and so on. Particular attention is given to nonstandard usage, bawdy innuendo, and technical terms (e.g. legal and military language). Where more than one sense is given, commas indicate shades of related meaning, slashes alternative or double meanings.
    Textual Notes at the end of the play indicate major departures from the Folio. They take the following form: the reading of our text is given in bold and its source given after an equals sign, with “Q” indicating that it derives from the First Quarto and “Ed” that it derives from the editorial tradition. The rejected Folio (“F”) reading is then given. Thus, for example, at 2.1.108 “at = Q. F = and” means that the Folio compositor erroneously printed “and,” which does not make sense in context, so we have adopted Quarto “at.”

KEY FACTS
    MAJOR PARTS: (
with percentage of lines/number of speeches/scenes on stage
) Richard III/Duke of Gloucester (32%/301/14), Duke of Buckingham (10%/91/11), Queen Elizabeth (7%/98/6), Queen Margaret (6%/33/2), George, Duke of Clarence (5%/33/3), Lady Anne (5%/51/3), Lord Hastings (4%/47/8), Duchess of York (4%/43/4), Henry, Earl of Richmond (4%/14/3), Lord Stanley, Earl of Derby (3%/32/9), King Edward IV (2%/ll/l), Sir William Catesby (2%/31/9), Earl Rivers (2%/24/5), Edward, Prince of Wales (l%/19/2), Richard, Duke of York (l%/21/2).
    LINGUISTIC MEDIUM: 98% verse, 2% prose.
    DATE: 1592? 1594? Must follow the
Henry VI
plays, so perhaps written shortly before the theaters were closed due to plague in June 1592. Alteration of the chronicle sources to flatter Lord Stanley, Earl of Derby, has led some scholars to suppose that the play was written for the acting company of Lord Strange’s Men, active at this time, whose patron was Stanley’s descendant. Alternatively, Shakespeare might have been writing for Pembroke’s Men in 1592: the text also includes brief praise of the Pembroke family name. Some scholars, by contrast, suppose the play to be Shakespeare’s first work for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the company formed after the post-plague reopening of the theaters in summer 1594. Support for this view might come from the way in which the play was clearly written as a showcase for Richard Burbage, the Chamberlain’s leading man.
    SOURCES: The main source for the representation of Richard as a hunchbacked villain is Sir Thomas More’s
History of King Richard III
(c.1513). Since More was writing at the court of King Henry VIII, son of Henry VII, who defeated Richard at Bosworth Field, he had a vested interest in portraying Richard as unfavorably as possible. He got much of his information from Bishop Morton of Ely, a bitter enemy of Richard. More’s account was incorporated in the major Tudor chronicles; Shakespeare probably read it via Edward Hall’s
Union of the Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and York
(1548). He may also have consulted Holinshed and one or more other chronicles. The historical poem sequence known as
The Mirror for Magistrates
(1559, expanded 1563) seems to have shaped Shakespeare’s treatment of the Clarence plot. The relationship to an anonymous drama
The True Tragedie of Richard the Third
(registered for publication June 1594, poorly printed) is unclear: it seems to have been an older play, belonging to the Queen’s Men, that was perhaps published to cash in on the success of Shakespeare’s version.
    TEXT: Quarto edition, 1597, with title advertising the content of the play:
The Tragedy of King Richard the third. Containing, His treacherous Plots against his brother Clarence: the pittiefull murther of his innocent