Edition: True Tragedy of Richard IIIExcerpts from Beauty Dishonored Written Under the Title of Shore’s Wife
Excerpts from Beauty Dishonored Written Under the Title of Shore’s Wife (Chute)
Hence haps1 her fortune to be illed so much,
Whom fourth king Edward excellently prized,
And hence it haps, because there was none such,
Shore’s wife, most fair, the most foul is surmised,2
And hence it haps, that dead to all, disdain her,
Her wronged ghost striveth to complain her.
Who, whilst she lived the subject of impiety,
Ground of a thousand voices disagreeing,
The matter of unhallowed3 fame’s variety,
(Which from her good hap4 had unworthy being)
Even on her dying bed divinely sorry,
Pensive in heart, she weeps forth thus her story.
For now, ambitious in her fabling humor5
Unto my king, my beauty she dispenses,
To whom she imparts a wonder-working rumor,
In speech authentical, to charm his senses:
With act, his eyes, his ears, with words she won,
His heart, his love, his soul, ere she had done.
She seemed sober, hearty, and precise,
Framing her false looks to a pleading fitness:
The unthought-on truth she adapts her humbled eyes,
And every act seemed her tale’s truth to witness:
And what she thought could win the king, she wrought on
In act, and speech she let not pass unthought on.
So as when at his oracles disclosing,
Divining Proteus, prophesying small things
His self from color from his shape disposing,
Deludes the suitor hold by seeming all things
Making himself a monster to the view
Before deceit can bring him to tell true.
Monster fame so, divining on supposes:
Suspicious of herself, (herself a liar),
In altering tales her flattery discloses
Wrought to report ill by her own desire
Whilst that the king credits her tale for truth
Which after turned a shame unto his youth.
For had she been more ready to report it
His apt belief had sooner given it credit:
His willing harkening ear did well import it,
Was so attentive to the tale that spread it:
For this fault even is incident to kings,
Too much to credit over pleasing things.
And that she might the better bring to pass,
Shame to my Lord, herself, and shame to me,
She adds how wanton, buxom, young I was,
Fit consort with his younger years to be,
And when at length she had discoursed her fill,
Away she flies: abominable ill.
But he that stands enchanted with the wonders,
By secret stealth dishonorable sin,
Him from his sense, his sense from virtue sunders,
And now in madding love lust doth begin,
And that foul stain his fury is incensed with
By majesty (sayeth he) shall be dispensed with:
Then to mine ear (divining my misfortune,)
Secret reports came whispering stranger wonders,
And with their oratory pleas, mine ears importune,
Whilst blind conceit me from my good hap sunders:
With charming proffers still my king salutes me
As one for absolutest fair reputes me.
And those, to whom he secretly commended,
The inquisition of my beauty’s being:
Those my attract, my change of fortune tended
My beauty’s worth and excellency seeing:
Report my beauty to be so divine;
As now he prized none so much as mine:
And soon had gifts, soon had my lord’s desire,
My soul from chastity, myself from me,
With often presents taught how to retire
Tasting the proffers of a high degree:
And then me thought though I ne’er proved before
A king’s embrace was even a heaven or more:
Lo then, to court, unto my king I came,
Monarch aspect of my recusant6 eye:
Mine eye, the matter of my body’s shame,
As long as shame, or sin were nursed thereby,
With niggard7 favor, at the first did seem,
As one that held his crown scarce worth esteem.
For now my scholar8 eyes had learned to fashion
Their looks authentical, and quaint precise:
My coyness argued a stranger passion,
To make him so, more pliant to mine eyes:
And I, whom he esteemed easy-won,
Made him my subject, ere mine eyes had done.
For now I saw: when equally precise,
He saw the honor was due worth my beauty:
My brows’ recusancy ’gan tyrannize,
And of my king exact a tribute duty.
And if he proffered love, I would forsake it
For women first say no, and then they take it.
I wrought so well, my face did seem to say,
I prized chastity, but even too much:
My apt framed countenance seemed to bewray,
A purposed firmness to my seeming such:
And my pretext by working so before:
Was but to make him love me so much more.
For now in me variety of love,
Had wrought such knowledge, by my seeming prone9
As whom I knew quickly seduced did prove,
I knew was quickly got, and quickly gone:
And therefore now opposed I seemed the stronger,
That late ere won, I might be loved the longer.
For when I saw him fawningly respect me,
I played upon him with a stranger “No”:
And so much more I saw he did affect me,
As I seemed further off in saying so,
Yet then I knew my coyness so might prove
A king would hardly bow too low to love.
In equal mean, therefore, did I contain
Th’ impatience of my seeming loath to sin,
No beggar humbleness my face did stain,
With apt desire to throw myself therein:
And if my coyness made him loath to woo
Then would I lend him smiles, and kisses too.
Nor did I in denying faintly so
But secretly seem to desire again,
The hoped proffers my consenting “No”,
In secret wish already did contain:
But long alas could not persist therein
For ere I left I sold myself to sin.
For now reigned tyranny in ambitious throne,
A trueborn infant-blood spilling murderer:
Usurping monster, yet controlled of none,
Foul guilt’s appeal, and mischief’s furtherer,
Proud Richard Gloucester in his pride I saw
Act all things at his will: for will was law.
He says (and then he shows a withered arm
Dried at his birthday, lame and useless still):
Quoth he, “’twas thou by charms wroughtst me this harm!”
And therefore dooms me to his tyrant will:
For never is the offended mighty armless
To wreak his fury on the hated harmless.
“Bear hence”, quoth he (and there withal reflected
Fire-sparkling fury from incensed eyes,
Whose madding threat his lunacy detected,
And told me he was taught to tyrannize)
And then again in more incensed rage
He cries, “bear hence this monster of her age!”
When lo, the servant sworn performeth on me
The unwilling office of a grieved sorry:
And whilst he yet lays forced hands upon me
Noting my beauty, and my beauty’s glory,
He does his duty: yet his looks do show
He craveth pardon for his doing so.
For what eye framed to envy and disdain
Would not enforce the heart to shake the head,
When that pure maiden blush that did distain10
My purple cheek with faint vermillion red,
Seemed constant fair not changed for threatening will
But fearful true and modest comely still.
I seemed unwilling that the tyrant should
By force of will have tyrant-like compelled me,
And therefore made the little shift I could
To burst away out of their arms that held me,
But as I struggled, beauty grew the more,
Which seen, they held me faster than before.
And those unwilling hands that preyed upon me
(Happy they held me to behold my beauty)
Embraced me faster11 with still gazing on me
To feed their eyes: lists not perform their duty,
For had it been in them I am assured
Such tyrant laws I should not have endured.
But he, whom hell-nursed fury hath infected,
Threats death to them, and me that him offended
And from his knitted brows horror reflected,
The enraged doom his felon thoughts intended:
Impatient, moody, mad, and full of ire,
He swears by heaven that shame shall be my hire.12
Posterity says he (and then again
The knit veins of his proudly-looking brows
Swelling with malice, and extreme disdain,
Like to an ireful boar he proudly bows)
And swears by hell heavy revenge shall date
The incensed displeasure of his falling hate.
“Posterity shall know thine act”, (quoth he)
And then he bids that my attires be rent13,
And terms the habit14 unbefitting me
A sorcerer witch full of her foul intent:
And that which words for anger could not say
A furious act in gesture did bewray15.
When I, ’reft16 of my habit and attire,
Stood yet as modest, as a maid should be,
Bashfully feared with the new admire,
Of this base tyrant’s ravishing of me,
Who, not content with this, commands that I,
Be turned into the streets and beg or die.
Even as an angry bull, incensed with ire,
Bellowing his menaces with a hollow roar,
Impatient, mad, wanting his lust’s desire,
Augments his madded fierceness more and more
And yet no quiet any murder brings
Although he prays upon a thousand things.
So unappeased, unquiet, mad, and ireful
Rages the insatiate fury of his will:
And in his look, fierce, wan, and pale, and direful
He seems impatient, moody, madded, still,
And not content with this disgrace to grieve me
He says that all shall die that dare relieve17 me.
Then from the court, the martyrdom of me,
All solitary, alone, forlorn, I went
Thither where discontentment I did see,
Threatening my misery ere my days were spent
And needy want as naked as was I,
Told me that thus perplexed I should die.
When I, unapt to frame a liar-tale,
Unapt18 to crave my bread with beggar prayer,
My poor discountenanced look all wan and pale
Through hunger’s nature waned from her fair
I could not: O, shame would not then that I
Should beg at all but rather choose to die.
And yet necessity did urge constraint,
To brook the impatience of her proper will,
Whilst silence breaking out to no complaint,
In secret passion hid her sorrow still:
And shame with fearful blush all grieved did cry
And wished she did but know but how to die.
Nor could remembrance of my high degree,
Brook my resorting into public place:
For I did sigh as oft as I did see,
Or think that any thought on my disgrace
And who despairs in such a kind as this
Thinks that the whole world knoweth all amiss.
Prosopography
Anonymous
Anthony Chute
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
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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.
Bibliography
Chute, Anthony. Beawtie dishonoured written vnder the title of Shores wife: Chascun se plaist ou il
se trouue mieux. London: I. Windet, 1593.
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 Beauty Dishonored Written Under the Title of Shore’s Wife |
| 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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Queen’s Men EditionsThe Queen’s Men Editions anthology is led by Helen Ostovich, General Editor; Peter
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