About the play

Richard III is the final play in Shakespeare’s English history cycle, a long and complicated journey that begins with the story of the unfortunate King Richard II who, despite being a supposedly divinely appointed monarch, was none the less deposed from his throne by the ambitious and far more politically astute Henry Bolingbroke.

Richard II, as Shakespeare tells us, was subsequently murdered, an act together with his deposition that would haunt English history for several generations. Bolingbroke’s subsequent troubled reign as King Henry IV, in which he has to confront a nation increasingly divided amongst itself, is dramatised by Shakespeare in two parts, both of which give the audience a portrait not only of an unhappy nation, but also of a deeply troubled relationship between a father and his son. That son, Prince Hal, who so disappoints his father Henry IV both by his behaviour and by his choice of friends (especially Sir John Falstaff) eventually redeems himself in his father’s eyes and displays the character that will be the foundation for the great English hero he will become on his father’s death: Henry V.

In the play of that name that follows in the cycle Shakespeare dramatises a brief period in English history where, for once, the King could do no wrong. Henry V was victorious over the French and his exploits united (as they were designed to do) the nation. But Henry died young and the nation-building he achieved did not last.

At the beginning of Barrie Rutter’s three part adaptation of the four plays that conclude the history cycle ( Henry VI part 1, 2, and 3 and Richard III ) a coffin is prominent down stage centre: it is that of Henry V. Before he can even be buried news comes from France that most of the territory so recently claimed by the English and won in war has been lost. This news instigates a calamitous series of bloody and vicious battles for power that are given oxygen by the weakness of Henry V’s successor: the saintly but, as Shakespeare portrays him, politically naïve and un-worldly Henry VI.

In the second play in Rutter’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s sequence, to which he gives the title Edward IV , Henry VI is forced by the Duke of York into agreeing to abdicate his right to hand on the throne to his son. The powerful and impatient Duke aided and abetted by his four sons, Rutland, Richard, Clarence, and Edward, find they cannot wait for Henry’s death in order to seize his crown, and takes up arms against him. But York is taken prisoner by Henry’s wife, the redoubtable Queen Margaret, who tortures him on a mole hill with a handkerchief soaked in the blood of his beloved youngest son, Rutland, who is slaughtered by Clifford. However, this humiliation and the subsequent death of York does not signal the demise of the House of York. York’s remaining three sons continue the struggle against Henry and the House of Lancaster until, finally, Edward, the eldest, emerges triumphant as King Edward IV.

Edward is shown by Shakespeare as being far from the model of an ideal King. He is impetuous, a womaniser, and prone to superstition. Under his rule the festering sore that is his ruthless and ambitious youngest brother Richard is allowed to grow into a disease that will kill everyone it comes into contact with. When Edward dies still a relatively young man, it is not his brother Clarence who succeeds him because Clarence has been murdered under orders from Richard; it is Richard himself who, after killing the two son’s of Edward (the Princes held in the Tower) assumes the crown and title of Richard III.

The play of that name, the last in the history cycle, shows a brutal but seductively powerful man on his way to power, killing, seducing, and dissembling without conscience or pause until, finally, he is made King. But, like so many before him, once he has achieved power he fears losing it. His grip on the throne is slowly prized open by his own failure to recognise and reward his allies, notably Buckingham and by the sheer number of enemies he has made in his rise to power. At the close of the play, in the final battle in the Wars of the Roses at Bosworth, Richmond and his forces triumph over Richard because Richard’s ability to fight has been fatally undermined by the ghostly visitation to him in his tent before the battle of all those whom he has killed. The play ends with the coming to power of Richmond who will be subsequently crowned Henry VII, father to Henry VIII, himself the father of the monarch who sat on the English throne when Shakespeare wrote these English history plays: the great Queen Elizabeth I.