{"product_id":"richard-iii-isbn-9780553213041","title":"Richard III","description":"An exciting new edition of the complete works of Shakespeare with these features:  Illustrated with photographs from New York Shakespeare Festival productions, vivid readable readable introductions for each play by noted scholar David Bevington, a lively personal foreword by Joseph Papp, an insightful essay on the play in performance, modern spelling and pronunciation, up-to-date annotated bibliographies, and convenient listing of key passages.William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in April 1564, and his birth is traditionally celebrated on April 23.  The facts of his life, known from surviving documents, are sparse.  He was one of eight children born to John Shakespeare, a merchant of some standing in his community.  William probably went to the King’s New School in Stratford, but he had no university education.  In November 1582, at the age of eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior, who was pregnant with their first child, Susanna.  She was born on May 26, 1583.  Twins, a boy, Hamnet ( who would die at age eleven), and a girl, Judith, were born in 1585.  By 1592 Shakespeare had gone to London working as an actor and already known as a playwright.  A rival dramatist, Robert Greene, referred to him as “an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers.”  Shakespeare became a principal shareholder and playwright of the successful acting troupe, the Lord  Chamberlain’s Men (later under James I, called the King’s Men).  In 1599 the Lord Chamberlain’s Men built and occupied the Globe Theater in Southwark near the Thames River.  Here many of Shakespeare’s plays were performed by the most famous actors of his time, including Richard Burbage, Will Kempe, and Robert Armin.  In addition to his 37 plays, Shakespeare had a hand in others, including \u003ci\u003eSir Thomas More\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Two Noble Kinsmen\u003c\/i\u003e, and he wrote poems, including \u003ci\u003eVenus and Adonis\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Rape of Lucrece\u003c\/i\u003e. His 154 sonnets were published, probably without his authorization, in 1609.  In 1611 or 1612 he gave up his lodgings in London and devoted more and more time to retirement in Stratford, though he continued writing such plays as \u003cb\u003eThe Tempest\u003c\/b\u003e and \u003cb\u003eHenry VII\u003c\/b\u003e until about 1613.  He died on April 23 1616, and was buried in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford.  No collected edition of his plays was published during his life-time, but in 1623 two members of his acting company, John Heminges and Henry Condell, put together the great collection now called the First Folio.0553213040|excerpt\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Shakespeare: RICHARD III  introduction  A\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The fascinating evil ruler for whom Richard III is named has already made  his appearance in the third part of Henry VI, in the four-play sequence  that makes up Shakespeare’s first foray into English history. In the final  installment in this tetralogy, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, stands fully  revealed as the evil genius of England’s prolonged crisis of civil war.  With a bold stroke, Shakespeare opens Richard III with his arresting  soliloquy; Richard takes over the stage in a way that has held audiences  spellbound ever since Richard Burbage first performed the role. Richard  announces his determination to “prove a villain,” both defying and  fulfilling Nature, which made his body deformed. In fact, he has already  begun his treacherous course, and we see at once how his plot against  Clarence, founded on something so trivial as the letter G, has manipulated  the King and has ensnared Clarence. Then, with outrageous hypocrisy, he  “comforts” Clarence. Within less than a hundred lines, Shakespeare makes  us feel how brilliant, cynical, charming, and dangerous Richard of  Gloucester is. Richard proceeds to dominate the other characters—and the  whole play—to an extraordinary degree.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e By organizing this play firmly around Richard, Shakespeare solved the  problems of giving form to his drama and of concluding the series of plays  about the dynastic rivalry of York and Lancaster. Richard III begins and  ends with a peace, yet the recent peace of the Yorkist King Edward is  scorned and sabotaged by Richard as soon as it is introduced. It is  vulnerable to factions at court and is bitterly denounced by that living  embodiment of the cruel and violent past, Queen Margaret. There can be no  peace in England while Richard lives to undermine it. Still, as the plot  moves through Richard’s exhilarating rise to the throne and the events of  his tragic fall—when his conscience, the spirits of those he murdered, and  the Earl of Richmond punish and defeat him—we see that his career is part  of a larger order, a seemingly providential plan of retribution for  wickedness and injustice and for reconciling England’s divisions. For all  its specific reminders of past warfare and atrocity on both Yorkist and  Lancastrian sides, Richard III dramatizes an archetypal struggle between  good and evil, personified in Richard the   villain-hero and Richmond his opponent, who plays the role of the  righteous agent of divine and poetic justice.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Dramatically, Richmond, like Queen Margaret, is more a symbol than a fully  developed character. It is Richard who is the exciting figure as he  deceives and manipulates others and finally faces the chillingly isolated  condition into which he has brought himself by being so truly a villain.  He climbs to power by deceit, and so he is constantly acting a part.  Richard’s ability as an actor is seemingly limitless. He has already  boasted, in   3 Henry VI, that he can deceive more slyly than Ulysses, Sinon, or  Machiavelli and can put on more false shapes than Proteus. To us as  audience, he is cynically candid and boastful, setting us up in advance to  watch his unbelievable performances. In an instant, before our eyes, he is  the concerned younger brother of Clarence, sharing a hatred of Queen  Elizabeth and her kindred; he is the jocular uncle of the little princes;  or he is the pious recluse studying divinity with his clerical teachers,  reluctant to accept the responsibilities of state that are thrust upon him  by his importunate subjects (i.e., by Catesby and Buckingham, who are also  actors in this staged scene).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e None of these bravura performances, however, matches the wooing of Lady  Anne. Richard himself sees it as the great test of his powers and is  suitably impressed by his victory. The wooing scene, to some critics,  challenges credibility. One key to credibility must lie in superb acting.  The actor who plays Richard must transform himself from the gloating  villain we know in soliloquy to the grief-stricken lover. Richard’s  argument is, after all, speciously plausible: that he has killed Anne’s  husband and father-in-law out of desperate love for her. The   argument appeals to vanity, that most fatal of human weaknesses. What  power Anne suddenly appears to have over Richard! She can kill him or  spare his life. Richard shrewdly judges her as one who is not able to  kill, and so he risks offering her his sword. As stage manager, he has  altered her role from that of sincere mourner to the stereotype of the  proud woman worshiped by her groveling servant in love. With superb irony,  Richard has inverted the appearance and the reality of control in this  struggle between man and woman, winning mastery by flattering Anne that  she has such power over his emotions and his life. From his amazing  success, Richard concludes that ordinary men and women can be made to  believe anything and to betray their own instincts by “the plain devil and  dissembling looks” (1.2.239). Richard is indeed devil-like; his role as  actor stems in part from that of the Vice in the morality play,  brilliantly comic and sinister. Yet even the devil can prevail over his  victims only when they acquiesce in evil. The devil can deceive the  senses, but acceptance of evil is still an act of the perverted will. Anne  is guilty, however much we can appreciate the mesmerizing power of  Richard’s personality. By the end of the scene, she has violated  everything she holds sacred.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The image of Richard as devil or Vice raises questions of motivation and  of symbolic meaning, and suggests two seemingly disparate ways of reading  the play, one psychological and the other providential. Is Richard a human  character, propelled toward the throne by his insatiable ambition, like  Macbeth? Is there a clue to his behavior in his ugliness and misanthropy?  One might argue that he compensates for his ugliness and unlovability by  resolving to domineer. Feeling unwanted, he despises all humans and  undertakes to prove them weak and corrupt in order to affirm himself. He  expresses a universal   human penchant for cruelty and senseless domination. Yet the proposition  that Richard is evil because he was born ugly logically can be reversed as  well: he was born ugly because he is evil. In providential terms, Richard  can be seen as the result of a divine plan in which evil ironically has a  place in a larger scheme of things that is ultimately benign.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e This latter concept, owing much to Renaissance notions of platonic  correspondence between outer appearances and inner qualities, is grounded  on the idea of a vast struggle in the cosmos between the forces of  absolute good and the forces of absolute evil, one in which every event in  human life has divine meaning and cause. Richard’s birth is, according to  this theory, a physical manifestation of that divine meaning. Providential  destiny, having determined the need for a genius of evil at this point in  English history, decrees that Richard shall be born. The teeth and hunched  back merely give evidence of what is already predetermined. In the apt  words of the choric Queen Margaret, Richard was “sealed in thy nativity \/  The slave of nature and the son of hell” (1.3.229–30). Though he devotes  himself to selfish ambition and evil-doing, Richard ultimately serves the  righteous purpose of divine Providence in human affairs. He functions, in  this interpretation, as a scourge of God, whose tyrannous plotting is  permitted in order to bring just retribution upon offenders of the moral  law. He is fundamentally unlike Shakespeare’s more human villains, such as  Macbeth or Claudius, but belongs, instead, to a special group of villains,  including Iago in Othello and Edmund in King Lear. Like them, Richard is  driven both by human motivation and by his pre-existent evil genius;   he displays the “motiveless malignity” ascribed by Coleridge   to Iago.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Such a reading is only one approach to an understanding of Richard’s  character and function; he is also a human being   involved in a struggle for power, motivated by ambition and   hatred. The two readings, one psychological and the other providential,  are complementary and need not contradict each other. The psychological  reading seems more intelligible to us today, based as it is on character  and motivation. The providential reading, more traditional in its  ideology, helps explain not only Richard’s delight in evil but also the  necessity for so much evil and suffering in England’s civil wars. This  theory of history owes much to Edward Hall’s Union of the Two Noble and  Illustre Families of Lancaster and York (1542), Shakespeare’s chief  source, along with Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (1578), for his Henry VI  plays. Shakespeare’s treatment of Richard is   ultimately indebted to Polydore Vergil’s Anglica Historia (1534) and  especially to The History of King Richard the Third, attributed to Sir  Thomas More (published 1557). This latter work, adopted in turn by Edward  Hall, Richard Grafton, and Raphael Holinshed, purposefully blackens  Richard’s character. He becomes a study in the nature of tyranny, an  object lesson to future rulers and their subjects. He is, moreover, a  result of the curse placed by God on the English people for their sinful  disobedience.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Richmond, in this Tudor explanation, becomes God’s minister, chosen to  destroy the scourge and thereafter to fulfill a new and happy covenant  between God and humanity as King Henry VII. Thus, the play hardly touches  on the sensitive matter of his somewhat remote Lancastrian claim to the  crown. His victory at Bosworth is not one more turn of Fortune’s wheel  raising or deposing Lancastrian or Yorkist kings, but the end of   a long cycle of unnatural violence, and his marriage to the Yorkist  Princess Elizabeth is the restoration and the symbol of unity and peace in  England’s fair land. Although modern historians more impartially regard  the defeat of Richard III at Bosworth Field in 1485 as a political  overthrow not unlike Henry IV’s overthrow of Richard II, and stress that  Richard III was a talented administrator guilty of no worse political  crimes than those of his more fortunate successor, Elizabethan audiences  (under the constant promptings of the Tudor state) could not have found  sufficient meaning in such a neutral interpretation. They were taught to  see history as revealing God’s intention and to view Henry VII’s accession  not as a parallel to the deposing of Richard II by Henry IV but, instead,  as a divinely sanctioned deliverance of the English nation, to which  Elizabeth’s subjects were the happy heirs. Accordingly, the Tudor myth  stressed the tyrannical nature of Richard III’s seizure of power and  conversely minimized the political and Machiavellian elements in Henry  VII’s takeover. Bosworth Field was seen as an act of God, a rising up of  some irresistible force, and under no circumstances as a precedent for  future rebellion.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In the Henry VI plays, Shakespeare puts considerable distance between  himself and the Tudor orthodox reading of history, allowing the grim  realities of civil war to speak for themselves. In Richard III, however,  the pattern shown in the chronicles provides Shakespeare with an essential  structural device. Viewing the civil wars in retrospect, Richard III  potentially manifests a cohesive sense in which England’s suffering has  fulfilled a necessary plan of fall from innocence, leading through sin and  penitence to regeneration. Evil is seen at last as something through which  good triumphs, in English history,   as in the story of humankind’s fall and a restoration by divine grace.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e This providential scheme imposes a double irony on Richard III. In the  short run, Richard appears to be complete master over his victims. “Your  imprisonment shall not be long,” Richard assures his brother Clarence. “I  will deliver you, or else lie for you” (1.1.114–15). The audience, already  let in on the secret, can shiver at the grisly humor of these double  entendres. Clarence will indeed soon be delivered—to his death. Richard’s  henchmen are fond of such jokes, too. When Lord Hastings is on his way to  the Tower, where he plans to stay for midday dinner, Buckingham observes  aside, “And supper too, although thou know’st it not” (3.2.122).  Buckingham, knowing that Hastings is about to be arrested in the Tower and  executed for treason, chillingly suggests that Hastings will soon be a  feast for worms. Shortly before, Catesby has assured Hastings of Richard’s  and Buckingham’s favor: “The princes both make high account   of you— \/ [Aside] For they account his head upon the Bridge” (3.2.69–70).  That is to say, Hastings’s severed head will soon be raised on a pole on  London Bridge as a grim warning to those who run afoul of the new regime.  Richard has a phrase for such wit: “Thus, like the formal Vice, Iniquity,  \/ I moralize two meanings in one word” (3.1.82–3). The point of such  ironies is always the same: the scheming villain is cleverer than his  victims, deceiving them through equivocation and triumphing in their  spiritual blindness.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The delayed irony of the play, however, ultimately offers   another possible explanation for the seemingly nihilistic conclusions of  the early scenes; that is, there may be a larger plan   at work, of which Richard is unconscious and in which he plays a role  quite unlike the one he creates for himself. In this interpretive view,  Shakespeare’s Richard fulfills a plan of which he is unaware, as in the  chronicles of Edward Hall and others, even in the process of what he  gloatingly regards as his own self-aggrandizement.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Providential plans are always complex, inscrutable to the minds of  mortals, and understood least by those who unwittingly execute them. In  attempting to prove his own contention that human nature is bestial and  that a Machiavellian man of utter self-confidence can force his way to the  top, flouting all conventions of morality, Richard succeeds in  demonstrating the opposite. From the moment he takes the throne, he feels  it insecure beneath him; opposition and betrayal spring up from every  quarter, and, in his last moments, a mere horse is worth his whole  kingdom. With sardonic comedy and poetic justice, Richard becomes the  proverbial beguiler who is beguiled.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Even if this is not the only way to interpret Richard’s character, the  play does offer for our consideration a theory of divine causality in  which virtually all of Richard’s victims deserve their fate because they  have offended God. Prophecies and dreams give structure to the sequence of  retributive actions and keep grim score. As the choric Margaret observes,  a York must pay for a Lancastrian, an eye for an eye: Edward IV for Henry  VI, young Edward V for Henry VI’s son Edward. Thus, the Yorkist princes,  though guiltless, die for their family’s sins. The Yorkist Queen  Elizabeth, like the Lancastrian Margaret, must outlive her husband into  impotent old age, bewailing her children’s cruel deaths. Clarence sees his  death as punishment for breaking his oath at the battle of Tewkesbury and  for his part in murdering Henry VI’s son, Prince Edward. The Queen’s  kindred have been guilty of ambition, and Lord Hastings, in turn, is  vulnerable because he has been willing to plot with Richard against the  Queen’s kindred. Margaret’s curses serve both to warn the characters of  their fates (a warning they blindly ignore) and to invite each person to  curse himself or herself unwittingly but with ironic appropriateness. Lady  Anne wishes unhappiness on any woman so insane as to marry Richard.  Buckingham protests in a most sacred oath that whenever he turns again on  the Queen’s kindred, he will deserve to be punished by the treachery of  his dearest friend (i.e., Richard). Dreams serve the same purpose of  divine warning, giving Clarence a grotesque intimation of his death by  drowning (in a butt of malmsey wine) and warning Hastings (through  Stanley’s dream) that the boar, Richard, will cut off his head. Thus, the  English court punishes itself through Richard. He is the essence of the  courtiers’ factionalism, able to succeed as he does only because they  forswear their most holy vows and conspire to destroy one another. They  deserve to be outwitted at their own dismal game. Yet their falls are  curative as well; Richard’s victims acknowledge the justice of their  undoings and penitently implore divine forgiveness. Richard contrastingly  finds conscience a torment, rather than a voice of comfort and wisdom.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Richard III is not without its ironies and historical anxieties. Richard’s  own successful career of evil through much of the play demonstrates how  rhetoric and theater can be used to dupe and to corrupt. The political  process seems endlessly prone to cynical manipulation, and triumph comes  chiefly to those who know how to use rhetoric to calculated effect. The  Lord Mayor and his London associates are as pliable as the aristocracy.  For all the belated assurances of providential meaning in Richard’s rise  to power and overthrow, we are allowed to speculate un-  comfortably about the pragmatic action of history and its   seeming ability to thrust forward into prominence an evil king or a good  one, as individual temperament happens to dictate. Finally, there is the  question of how Richard is supplanted. Whatever the reasons for Richard’s  baleful emergence, the process of his overthrow requires human agency and  a rebellion against established (even if tyrannical) royal authority. To  thoughtful observers in the sixteenth century, including Queen Elizabeth,  any   such rebellion, no matter how seemingly necessary, established a  disturbing precedent and a threat to Tudor monarchical   stability. If Richard III finds reassuring answers in the victory of Henry  Tudor, Earl of Richmond, it does so in the face of pressing and  troublesome circumstances.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The pattern of reciprocity and retaliation is much more than a way of  demonstrating an ultimate divine purpose in human affairs; it is also a  theatrically effective way of structuring a drama so as to make it  coherent and entertaining. Shakespeare strikes us as above all a man of  the theater, an artist and entertainer who senses what his audiences want.  The shape of Richard III, as it moves through the anxieties of Richard’s  seemingly unstoppable rise to power to an eventual affirmation that brings  closure not only to this play but to the entire four-play cycle of the  three parts of Henry VI and Richard III, is immensely satisfying as  theatrical experience. Modern audiences, with no ideological commitment to  the propagandistic view that God chose Henry VII as the savior of England,  can respond warmly to the play’s artistic and theatrical depiction of  coherence and pattern. That pattern allows us to enjoy Richard’s  villainies as theatrical performance while perceiving that those  villainies are contained and disarmed by a larger structure.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Good eventually triumphs over evil in Richard III, if only because some  Englishmen have the patience and common sense to endure a presumably  deserved punishment and wait for deliverance. As in 3 Henry VI, the common  people have little to do with the action of the play. They are choric  spokesmen and bystanders, virtuous in their attitude (except for the two  suborned murderers of Clarence). In their plain folk wisdom, they see the  folly and evil their betters ignore: “Oh, full of danger is the Duke of  Gloucester, \/And the Queen’s sons and brothers haught and proud”  (2.3.28–9). And, although they accept Richard as ruler, they do so most  reluctantly; Bucking-  ham’s first attempt to persuade the people to this course meets with  apathy and silence. Their wisdom is to “leave it all to God” (2.3.46). In  the fullness of time, this faith in goodness brings its just reward.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Richard III compresses historical time. It begins where   3 Henry VI has left off, with the return of Edward IV to the throne in  1471, and ends with the defeat of Richard III, the last Yorkist king, at  the battle of Bosworth (1485). Because of its close relation in subject to  passages in 3 Henry VI and its similar Senecan style, the play appears to  have been written soon after its predecessors, sometime between 1591 and  1594. It greatly condenses events of fourteen years, particularly at   the beginning, when King Henry VI’s funeral rites (1471), Richard’s  courtship of Lady Anne (1472), Clarence’s murder in the Tower (1478), and  Edward’s death (1483) are made to take place in rapid succession.  Similarly, Buckingham’s rebellion (1483), Richmond’s thwarted sailing  (1483), and his landing at Milford Haven (1485) are also compressed. Queen  Margaret’s role is a nonhistorical addition to the play, for the widowed  Queen never left France after her ransom in 1475 by Louis XI.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Richard III is irresistible in performance. However much Richard reveals  himself to be a conscienceless villain, his versatility as a performer and  his taking us into his confidence invite a kind of complicity between  actor and audience that is the stuff of dramatic excitement. See the  essays on the play on stage and on screen, following, for detailed  histories and analysis.","brand":"Bantam Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303568003301,"sku":"NP9780553213041","price":7.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780553213041.jpg?v=1767735734","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/richard-iii-isbn-9780553213041","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}