SHAKESPEARE SELECT PLAYS THE TRAGEDY OF KING RICHARD THE THIRD EDITED BY WILLIAM ALDIS WRIGHT, M.A., LL.D. Fellow and Bursar of Trinity College, Cambridge Oxford AT THE CLARENDON PRESS M DCCC LXXXIV All Rights reserved. PREFACE. ALTHOUGH printed among the historical plays, as the proper sequel to the three parts of Henry VI, with which it is immediately connected in the opening scene, Richard the Third is in all the early copies described as a tragedy. The title of the play as it appears in the first quarto, printed in 1597 without Shakespeare's name, is as follows: "The Tragedy of King Richard the Third. Containing, His treacherous Plots against his brother Clarence: the pittiefull murther of his innocent nephewes: his tyrannicall vsurpation: with the whole course of his detested life, and most deserued death.' The same is repeated substantially in all the seven subsequent quarto editions which appeared at intervals from 1598 to 1634. The third quarto, printed in 1602, with those that followed, professed to be, but was not, newly augmented. All these have Shakespeare's name on the title-page. In the first folio, printed in 1623, the play is called “The Tragedy of Richard the Third : with the Landing of Earle Richmond, and the Battell at Bosworth Field.' The quarto of 1597 was entered at Stationers' Hall on October 20. We have thus the inferior limit for the date at which the play was written. How much earlier it was composed is to a great extent matter of conjecture. A line in Weever's Epigrammes (Beloe, Anecdotes of Literature, vi. 159), printed in 1599, but supposed to be written in 1595, mentions Romeo and Richard as two of Shakespeare's wellknown characters : •Romeo, Richard, more whose names I know not,' and presumably this is Richard the Third and not Richard the Second. If therefore Weever wrote in 1595 there is evidence that Richard had by that time become an established favourite with the public, and had probably been out for a year or two. This would take us back to the earliest date which has been assigned to it, 1593 or 1594. About the same time there appeared The True Tragedie of Richard the Third, which was entered at Stationers' Hall 19 June, 1594, published the same year. Possibly it was revived in consequence of the attention which Shakespeare's play attracted to the subject, and in support of such a conjecture may be quoted the parallel instance of the publication of the old play of King Leir in 1605, nearly at the time when Shakespeare was engaged upon his own greater work. A passage from a song which is found in a volume containing Epigrams by Sir John Davies, and Marlowe's translation of Ovid's Elegies (Marlowe, ed. Dyce, p. 366), has been quoted as an imitation of some lines in Richard's first soliloquy: 'I am not fashion'd for these amorous times, I cannot dally, caper, dance, and sing,' &c. But even granting the imitation, this throws no light upon the date of the play; for the volume in which the lines first occur is undated, and is only supposed to have been printed before 1596. Mr. Stokes (Chronological Order of Shakespeare's Plays, p. 30) gives the following from The Mirror for Magistrates, 1594, which have some resemblance to lines in Richard's speech : "God Mars laid by his lance, and took his lute, And turn’d his rugged frowns to smiling looks.' And with • Now do I play the touch, To try if thou be current gold indeed,' he compares •Now is the hour come If it be current, or base counterfeit,' from A Warning for Fair Women, 1589. But in all these cases of resemblance it would be unsafe to insist upon imitation where the things compared are such evident poetical commonplaces. Mr. Fleay (Shakespeare Manual, pp. 20, 21) is of opinion that the wooing of Estrild in the old play of Locrine, which appeared in 1595, is imitated from Richard III, i. 2. But if so, this only helps us to some date before 1595. As our play was printed in 1597 it is unnecessary to refer to the often-quoted passage from Meres' Palladis Tamia, 1598, in which Richard the Third is enumerated among the plays upon which Shakespeare's fame securely rested. The date 1593 or 1594 which may be conjecturally assigned to Richard the Third brings it close to two other historical plays which were written about the same time, Richard the Second and King John. The metrical tests which have been applied to solve the question of the date of composition would place Richard the Third and King John very close together, and would make Richard the Second earlier than either. On such a point I am not careful to express a very confident opinion, but nevertheless I cannot read Richard the Third without feeling that in point of literary style, command of language, flexibility of verse, and dramatic skill, it is an earlier composition than Richard the Second and King John, and separated by no long interval from the Third Part of Henry VI, to which it is the sequel and the close. The earlier English play on the same subject has been mentioned, and may be dismissed without further consideration. Besides this there was a Latin play by Dr. Thomas Legge, Richardus Tertius, which was acted at St. John's College, Cambridge, as early as 1579. A supposed imitation of this, also in Latin, by Henry Lacey, of Trinity College, proves to be only a transcript (Cooper's Athenae Cantabrigienses, ii. 41). It is to Legge's play, in all probability, that Sir John Harington, in his Apologie for Poetry (1591), and Nash, in his Have with you to Saffron Walden, (1596), refer as having been acted at Cambridge. |