Edition: True Tragedy of Richard IIIExcerpts from The Complaint of Henry Duke of Buckingham
Source
Modernized excerpts of
The Complaint of Henry Duke of Buckinghamfrom Mirror for Magistrates (Baldwin).
And being thus, alone, and all forsake,
Amid the thick, forewandered in despair,
As one dismayed, ne wist1 what way to take,
Until at last, ’gan to my mind repair,
A man of mine, called Humphrey Banastre:
Wherewith me feeling much recomforted.
In hope of succor, to his house I fled.
Who being one whom erst I had upbrought
Even from his youth, and loved and liked best,
To gentry state advancing him from naught,
And had in secret trust, above the rest
Of special trust, now, being thus distressed,
Full secretly to him I me conveyed.
Not doubting there but I should find some aid.
But out, alas, on cruel treachery!
When that this caitiff, once an inkling had,
How that king Richard had proclaimed, that he
Which me descried should have for his reward
A thousand pounds, and farther be preferred,
His truth so turned to treason, all distained,2
That faith quite fled, and I by trust was trained.
For by this wretch I being straight betrayed
To one John Mitton, sheriff of Shropshire then,
All suddenly was taken, and conveyed
Unto king Richard there, encamped then
Fast by the city with a mighty host:
Withouten doom5 where head and life I lost.
And with these words, as if the axe even there
Dismembered had his head and corpse apart,
Dead fell he down: and we in woeful tear
Stood ’mazed when he would to life revert:
But deadly griefs still grew about his heart,
That still he lay, sometime revived with pain,
And with a sigh becoming dead again.
Thou, Banastre, ’gainst thee I clepe6 and call
Unto the gods, that they just vengeance take
On thee, thy blood, thy stained stock and all:
O Jove, to thee above the rest I make
My humble plaint. Guide me, that what I speak,
May be thy will upon this wretch to fall:
On thee, Banastre, wretch of wretches all!
O would to God, that cruel dismal day
That gave me light first to behold thy face,
With foul eclipse had reft7 my sight away.
The unhappy hour, the time, and eke8 the place,
The sun and moon, the stars, and all that was
In their aspects helping in ought to thee,
The earth and air, and all, accursed be.
And thou, caitiff9, that like a monster swerved
From kind and kindness, hast thy master lorn,10
Whom neither truth, nor trust wherein thou served,
Ne his deserts could move, nor thy faith sworn,
How shall I curse, but wish that thou unborn
Had been, or that the earth had rent in tway,11
And swallowed thee in cradle as thou lay.
To this did I, even from thy tender youth,
Believe the oath of thy undoubted truth?
Advance thee up, and trust thee evermore,
By trusting thee that I should die therefore?
O wretch, and worse than wretch, what shall I say,
But clepe and curse ’gainst thee and thine for ay!14
Hated be thou, disdained of every wight,15
And pointed at wherever that thou go:
A traitorous wretch, unworthy of the light
Be thou esteemed: and to increase thy woe,
The sound be hateful of thy name also,
And in this sort with shame and sharp reproach,
Lead thou thy life, till greater grief approach.
Dole and despair, let those be thy delight,
Wrapped in woes that cannot be unfold.
To wail the day, and weep the weary night
With rainy eyne16 and sighs cannot be told.
And let no wight thy woe seek to withhold:
But count thee worthy (wretch) of sorrow’s store,
That suffering much, ought still to suffer more.
Deserve thou death, yea be thou deemed to die
A shameful death, to end thy shameful life:
A sight longed for, joyful to every eye,
When thou shalt be arraigned as a thief.
Standing at bar, and pleading for thy life,
With trembling tongue in dread and dolor’s rage,
Lade with white locks,17 and fourscore years of age.
Yet shall not death deliver thee so soon
Out of thy woes, so happy shalt not be,
But to the eternal Jove this is my boon:
That thou mayst live thine eldest son to see
Reft of his wits, and in a foul boar’s sty
To end his days, in rage and death distressed,
A worthy tomb where one of thine should rest.
Yet after this, yet pray I more, thou may
Thy second son see drowned in a dyke,18
And in such sort to close his later day,
As heard or seen erst hath not been the like.
Ystrangled19 in a puddle, not half so deep
As half a foot, that such hard loss of life,
So cruelly chanced, may be the greater grief.
And not yet shall thy hugy20 sorrows cease,
Jove shall not so withhold his wrath from thee,
But that thy plagues may more and more increase.
Thou shalt still live that thou thyself mayest see
Thy dear daughter stricken with leprosy:
That she, that erst was all thy whole delight,
Thou now mayst loath to have her come in sight.
And after that, let shame and sorrows grief
Feed forth thy years continually in woe,
That thou mayest live in death, and die in life,
And in this sort fore-wailed21 and wearied so,
At last thy ghost to part thy body fro.
This pray I, Jove, and with this latter breath,
Vengeance I ask upon my cruel death.
Notes
1.Not knowing.↑
4.Armored.↑
5.Offering judgement.↑
7.Taken.↑
13.For this reason.↑
14.Forever.↑
16.Weeping.↑
17.Greyed hair.↑
19.Drowned.↑
21.Lamented.↑
Prosopography
Anonymous
Helen Ostovich
Helen Ostovich, professor emerita of English at McMaster University, is the founder
and general editor of Queen’s Men Editions. She is a general editor of The Revels Plays (Manchester University Press); Series
Editor of Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama (Ashgate, now Routledge),
and series co-editor of Late Tudor and Stuart Drama (MIP); play-editor of several
works by Ben Jonson, in Four Comedies: Ben Jonson (1997); Every Man Out of his Humour (Revels 2001); and The Magnetic Lady (Cambridge 2012). She has also edited the Norton Shakespeare 3 The Merry Wives of Windsor Q1602 and F1623 (2015); The Late Lancashire Witches and A Jovial Crew for Richard Brome Online, revised for a 4-volume set from OUP 2021; The Ball, for the Oxford Complete Works of James Shirley (2021); The Merry Wives of Windsor for Internet Shakespeare Editions, and The Dutch Courtesan (with Erin Julian) for the Complete Works of John Marston, OUP 2022. She has published
many articles and book chapters on Jonson, Shakespeare, and others, and several book
collections, most recently Magical Transformations of the Early Modern English Stage with Lisa Hopkins (2014), and the equivalent to book website, Performance as Research in Early English Theatre Studies: The Three Ladies of London in Context containing scripts, glossary, almost fifty conference papers edited and updated to
essays; video; link to Queen’s Mens Ediitons and YouTube: http://threeladiesoflondon.mcmaster.ca/contexts/index.htm, 2015. Recently, she was guest editor of Strangers and Aliens in London ca 1605,
Special Issue on Marston, Early Theatre 23.1 (June 2020). She can be contacted at ostovich@mcmaster.ca.
Janelle Jenstad
Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director
of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Beatrice Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.
Jennifer Parr
Jennifer Parr holds a Masters degree in European and Renaissance Drama from the University
of Warwick. She is an independent scholar and professional director and dramaturge
based in Toronto. As an undergraduate at the University of Toronto she became involved
as an actor with the P.L.S. Medieval and Renaissance Players’ productions of the Medieval
Mystery Cycles returning later to direct an all female company in the York Cycle Fall
of the Angels for the international full cycle production in 1998. Her recent productions
as director and dramaturge include an all female Julius Caesar and an experimental all female adaptation of Richard III: RIchard 3, Queens 4. Her ongoing research into the historical Richard III and the various theatrical
interpretations led to her joining the company of TTR3 as an observer and historical
resource for the cast. She also writes a monthly column on music theatre and dance
for The WholeNote magazine.
Jennifer Roberts-Smith
Jennifer Roberts-Smith is an associate professor of theatre and performance at the
University of Waterloo. Her interdisciplinary work in early modern performance editing
combines textual scholarship, performance as research, archival theatre history, and
design in the development of live and virtual renderings of early modern performance
texts, venues, and practices. With Janelle Jenstad and Mark Beatrice Kaethler, she
is co-editor of Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words New Tools (2018). Her most recent work has focused on methods for design research that deepen
interdisciplinary understanding and take a relational approach. She is currently managing
director of the qCollaborative (the critical feminist design research lab housed in the University of Waterloo’s Games Institute, and leads the SSHRC-funded Theatre for Relationality and Design for Peace projects.
She is also creative director and virtual reality development cluster lead for the
Digital Oral Histories for Reconciliation (DOHR) project. She can be contacted at
jennifer.roberts-smith@uwaterloo.ca.
Joey Takeda
Joey Takeda is LEMDO’s Consulting Programmer and Designer, a role he assumed in 2020
after three years as the Lead Developer on LEMDO.
Kate LeBere
Project Manager, 2020–2021. Assistant Project Manager, 2019–2020. Textual Remediator
and Encoder, 2019–2021. Kate LeBere completed her BA (Hons.) in History and English
at the University of Victoria in 2020. During her degree she published papers in The Corvette (2018), The Albatross (2019), and PLVS VLTRA (2020) and presented at the English Undergraduate Conference (2019), Qualicum History
Conference (2020), and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute’s Project Management
in the Humanities Conference (2021). While her primary research focus was sixteenth
and seventeenth century England, she completed her honours thesis on Soviet ballet
during the Russian Cultural Revolution. She is currently a student at the University
of British Columbia’s iSchool, working on her masters in library and information science.
Mahayla Galliford
Project manager, 2025-present; research assistant, 2021-present. Mahayla Galliford
(she/her) graduated with a BA (Hons with distinction) from the University of Victoria
in 2024. Mahayla’s undergraduate research explored early modern stage directions and
civic water pageantry. Mahayla continues her studies through UVic’s English MA program
and her SSHRC-funded thesis project focuses on editing and encoding girls’ manuscripts,
specifically Lady Rachel Fane’s dramatic entertainments, in collaboration with LEMDO.
Martin Holmes
Martin Holmes has worked as a developer in the UVic’s Humanities Computing and Media
Centre for over two decades, and has been involved with dozens of Digital Humanities
projects. He has served on the TEI Technical Council and as Managing Editor of the
Journal of the TEI. He took over from Joey Takeda as lead developer on LEMDO in 2020.
He is a collaborator on the SSHRC Partnership Grant led by Janelle Jenstad.
Nicole Vatcher
Technical Documentation Writer, 2020–2022. Nicole Vatcher completed her BA (Hons.)
in English at the University of Victoria in 2021. Her primary research focus was women’s
writing in the modernist period.
Peter Cockett
Peter Cockett is an associate professor in the Theatre and Film Studies at McMaster
University. He is the general editor (performance), and technical co-ordinating editor
of Queen’s Men Editions. He was the stage director for the Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men project (SQM),
directing King Leir, The Famous Victories of Henry V, and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (2006) and he is the performance editor for our editions of those plays. The process
behind those productions is documented in depth on his website Performing the Queen’s Men. Also featured on this site are his PAR productions of Clyomon and Clamydes (2009) and Three Ladies of London (2014). For the PLS, the University of Toronto’s Medieval and Renaissance Players,
he has directed the Digby Mary Magdalene (2003) and the double bill of George Peele’s The Old Wives Tale and the Chester Antichrist (2004). He also directed An Experiment in Elizabethan Comedy (2005) for the SQM project and Inside Out: The Persistence of Allegory (2008) in collaboration with Alan Dessen. Peter is a professional actor and director
with numerous stage and screen credits. He can be contacted at cockett@mcmaster.ca.
Sam Seaberg
Samuel Seaberg, a University of Victoria English undergrad, enjoys riding his bike.
During the summer of 2025, he began working with LEMDO as a recipient of the Valerie
Kuehne Undergraduate Research Award (VKURA). Unfortunately, due to his summer being
spent primarily in working to establish an edition of Thomas Heywood’s If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Part 2 and consequently working out how to represent multi-text works in a digital space,
his bike has suffered severely of sheltered seclusion from the sun.
Toby Malone
Toby Malone is an Australian/Canadian academic, dramaturg, and librarian. He is a
graduate of the University of Toronto (PhD, 2009) and the University of Western Australia
(BA Hons, 2001), and the University of Western Ontario (MLIS, 2023). He has worked
as a theatre artist across the world, with companies including the Stratford Festival,
Canadian Stage, Soulpepper, Driftwood Theatre Group, the Shaw Festival, Poorboy Theatre
Scotland, Pittsburgh Public Theatre, Arizona Theatre Company, CBC, BT/A, and Kill
Shakespeare Entertainment. He has published in Shakespeare Survey, Literature/Film Quarterly, Canadian Theatre Review, Borrowers and Lenders, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, appears in published collections with Routledge, Cambridge, and Oxford. Publications
include two monographs: dapting War Horse (Palgrave McMillan) and Cutting Plays for Performance: A Practical and Accessible Guide (Routledge), and is currently co-writing an updated version of Shakespeare in Performance: Romeo and Juliet with Jill L. Levenson for Manchester UP. Toby has previously taught at the University
of Waterloo and the State University of New York at Oswego, is currently Research
Impact Librarian at Toronto Metropolitan University.
Tracey El Hajj
Junior Programmer 2019–2020. Research Associate 2020–2021. Tracey received her PhD
from the Department of English at the University of Victoria in the field of Science
and Technology Studies. Her research focuses on the algorhythmics of networked communications. She was a 2019–2020 President’s Fellow in Research-Enriched
Teaching at UVic, where she taught an advanced course on
Artificial Intelligence and Everyday Life.Tracey was also a member of the Map of Early Modern London team, between 2018 and 2021. Between 2020 and 2021, she was a fellow in residence at the Praxis Studio for Comparative Media Studies, where she investigated the relationships between artificial intelligence, creativity, health, and justice. As of July 2021, Tracey has moved into the alt-ac world for a term position, while also teaching in the English Department at the University of Victoria.
William Baldwin
Bibliography
Baldwin, William.
The Complaint of Henry Duke of Buckingham.Mirror for Magistrates. London: for Thomas Marshe, 1563. S1r-X3v. STC 1248.
OED: The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Orgography
LEMDO Team (LEMD1)
The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project
director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators,
encoders, and remediating editors.
Queen’s Men Editions (QME1)
The Queen’s Men Editions anthology is led by Helen Ostovich, General Editor; Peter
Cockett, General Editor (Performance); and Andrew Griffin, General Editor (Text).
University of Victoria (UVIC1)
https://www.uvic.ca/Metadata
| Authority title | Excerpts from The Complaint of Henry Duke of Buckingham |
| Type of text | Primary Source |
| Publisher | University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform |
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This file has been converted from IML, the SGML markup language of the Internet Shakespeare
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