Edition: True Tragedy of Richard IIIExcerpts from How the Lord Hastings was Betrayed

Modernized excerpts of How the Lord Hastings was Betrayed, by Trusting Too Much to his Evil Counselor Catesby, and Villainously Murdered in the Tower of London by Richard Duke of Gloucester, the 13 June. Anno 1483. prepared from Mirror for Magistrates (Dolman).
The hilly heavens, and valley1 earth below
Yet ring his fame, whose deeds so great did grow;
Edward the fourth ye know, unnamed I mean,
Whose noble nature to me so did lean
That I his staff was, I his only joy.
And even what Pandar2 was to him of Troy,
Which moved him first to create me chamberlain,
To seem his sweets, to my most sour pain.
Wherein, too justly praised for secretness
(For now my guilt with shirking I confess)
To him too true, too untrue to the queen,
Such hate I won, as lasted long between
Our families. Shore’s wife was my nice cheat.
The holy whore, and eke3 the wily peat4:
I fed his lust with lovely pieces so,
That God’s sharp wrath I purchased my just woe.
See here of nobles knew the divers source?
Some virtue raiseth, some climb by sluttish sorts:
The first, though only of themselves begun,
Yet circle-wise into themselves do run:
Within their fame their force united so,
Both endless is, and stronger ’gainst their foe:
For, when endeth it that never hath begun?
Or by what force may circled knot be undone?
The other, as by wicked means they grew,
And reigned by flattery, or violence. So some rue:
First tumbling step from honors old, is vice,
Which once descend, some linger, none arise
To former type: but they catch virtue’s spray,
Which mounteth them that climb by lawful way.
Beware to rise by serving princely lust:
Surely to stand, one mean is rising just.
[…]
While thus he spake, I held within mine arm
Shore’s wife, the tender piece, to keep me warm.
Fie on adultery, fie on lecherous lust!
Mark in me, ye nobles all: God’s judgment’s just.
A Pandar, murderer, and adulterer thus,
Only such death I die, as I ne5 blush:
Now, lest my dame might fear appall my heart,
With eager mood up in my bed I start.
[…]
Frowning he enters, with so changed cheer,
As for mild May had chopped foul January:
And lowering on me with the goggle eye,
The whetted tusk, and furrowed forehead high,
His crooked shoulder bristle-like set up,
With frothy jaws, whose foam he chewed and supped,
With angry looks that flamed as the fires
Thus ’gan at hist6 to grunt the grimmest sire.
“What merit they, whom me, the kingdom’s stay7,”
“Contrived have council traitorously to slay?”
Abashed, all sat: I thought I might be bold,
For conscience, clearness, and acquaintance old:
“Their hire8 is plain”, quoth I, “be death the least”
“To whoso seeketh your grace so to molest:”
Withouten stay9: “The queen and the whore Shore’s wife,”
“By witchcraft”, quoth he, “seek to waste my life”.
“Lo, here the withered and bewitched arm,”
“That thus is spent by those two sorceress’ charm:”
And bared his arm and showed his swinish skin.
Such cloaks they use that seek to cloud their sin,
But out, alas, it serveth not for the rain.
To all the house, the color was too plain:
Nature had given him many a maimed mark,
And it amongs to note her monstrous wark10.
My doubtful heart distracted this reply.
For th’one I cared not: th’other nipped11 so nigh
That whyst I could not, but forthwith break forth:
“If so it be, of death they are doubtless worth?”
“If, traitor?” quoth he, “playst thou with ifs and ands?”
“I’ll on thy body show it with these hands!
And therewithal he mightily bounced the board12:
In rushed his bill-men, one himself bestirred.
Laying at lord Stanley, whose brain he had surely cleft,
Had he not down beneath the table crept:
But Ely, York, and I were taken straight,
Imprisoned they, I should no longer wait,
But charged was to shrive me, and shift with haste.
My lord must dine, and now midday was past:
The boar’s first dish, not the boar’s head should be :
But Hastings’ head, the boarish beast would see.
Why stay I his dinner? unto the chapel joineth
A greenish hill, that body and soul oft twineth:
There on a block my head was stricken off,
As Baptiste’s13 head, for Herod bloody knows.
Thus lived I, Baldwin, thus died I, thus I fell,
This is the sum, which all at large to tell
Would volumes fill: whence yet these lessons note
Ye noble lords, to learn and ken by rote.

Notes

1.Valleyed.
2.Pandarus of Lycia, who acts at the go-between for the lovers Troilus and Cressida in Chaucer and Shakespeare. Hastings notes that he was the go-between for Edward and his lovers.
3.Also, as well as (OED eke, n.1 4).
4.Young woman, sweetheart (OED peat, n.2 1.a); conceited, arrogant woman (OED peat, n.2 2.a).
5.Did not.
6.When he attracted attention.
7.Strength, comfort (OED stay, n.2 1.c).
8.Reward, payment.
9.Not pausing.
10.Pain, ache (OED wark, n.1).
11.Rebuked, reproved (OED nip, v.1 2).
12.Rapped upon the table.
13.St. John the Baptist, beheaded at the command of Herod Antipas in c.28-36CE. The presentation of John’s head on a platter is a common theme in art.

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.

John Dolman

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

Dolman, John. ow the Lord Hastings was Betrayed, by Trusting Too Much to his Evil Counselor Catesby, and Villainously Murdered in the Tower of London by Richard Duke of Gloucester, the 13 June. Anno 1483. Mirror for Magistrates. London: for Thomas Marshe, 1563. M8r-P2r. 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/

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