True Tragedy of Richard III: General Introduction

Preamble

Richard III, as historical figure and dramatic character, remains one of Western culture’s most divisive and recognizable figures. Given his short and violently abbreviated reign, it is easy to see why the last Plantagenet king was such a fecund source for writers, balladeers, and playwrights. Much of Richard’s latter-day notoriety springs from Shakespeare’s ca.1591 Richard III, which built on the Tudor chronicles of Edward Hall, Sir Thomas More, Polydore Vergil, and Raphael Holinshed to construct a narrative of a man hell-bent on power regardless of the cost. Lost in the shadow of Shakespeare’s second-longest play is the Anonymous The True Tragedy of Richard the Third (hereafter The True Tragedy), which, at a little over half the length, covers a strikingly similar timespan with a curiously different set of priorities. The Richard of The True Tragedy is a different figure from the title character of Shakespeare’s play: despite his overarching hubris, he exhibits less swagger, foresight, or arrogance. The True Tragedy’s Richard, while still strong, definite, and interesting (Churchill 469), is also insecure, fearful, and violent, without the many moments of introspection of Shakespeare’s Richard.

History has not been kind to The True Tragedy, with critics describing it as nearly as unreadable a play as one can find from the Elizabethan drama if one expects the dialogue to tell its own story (McMillin and MacLean 166), wretchedly corrupt and abominably printed (Churchill 404), an example of the ruin of half-remembered verse (Wilson 300), strangely amateurish (Greg vi), crude and inartistic (Churchill 469), and a contaminated palimpsest (Hammond 83). Most judgements are based in comparison to Shakespeare’s Richard III. Both plays share characters and scenarios, with touchstones like the murder of the princes in the Tower, the capture of George Stanley, and Richard’s plea for a horse on the battlefield at Bosworth, but The True Tragedy elides Queen Margaret, Lady Anne, and staged council and mayoral scenes, so there are fewer equivalent moments for the audience to witness Richard’s manipulation in full effect. Instead, The True Tragedy’s playwright offers significant room to various citizens such as a witty Page who often confides in the audience, and Shore’s wife, a historical figure whose story was popularly distorted to the extent that we have retained the naming convention from The True Tragedy to distinguish the character, as discussed below. The fate of Shore’s wife is a bellwether for public perception in the world of The True Tragedy, and draws influence from Sir Thomas More’s treatment of her story (More), crucial in setting the play’s tone.

While The True Tragedy has been poorly received, the broadly negative critical consensus seems to find its roots in anachronistic assumptions, poor transcription, and an underdeveloped sense of the play’s visual theatricality. The play’s style appears chaotic to modern eyes, with seemingly indiscriminate patches of verse and prose which change often by the page. But if, as McMillin and MacLean suggest (McMillin and MacLean 117-120), the play was recorded by an official company scribe who mistook prose sections for verse based on the actors’ cadence, then we may gain greater insight into the textual structure of the piece by re-scanning its lines according to conventional early modern verse forms (see the Textual Introduction for further discussion of this element). Similarly, the play as written is lacking its most potent weapon: visuals. Scenes that make little sense on the page, such as the description of Hastings’ arrest, are illuminated by insight into the uncodified physical action of supernumeraries who perform actions as the Page speaks (see McMillin and MacLean 132). Other scenes, like the Mother Queen’s escape with her family into sanctuary and the final battle sequences, are played entirely as dumb-shows; since we have no benefit of scene and act divisions, the reader is left to wonder about the dramaturgy of the work. Without what McMillin and MacLean call the visual literalism of the dramaturgy (McMillin and MacLean 131) the play tends to falter. It is important to remember, that is, that the text offers only part of the experience, and that we might also fill in presumed gaps in the play by considering performance possibilities and necessities. A simple stage direction like Enter Richmond to battle again, and kills Richard () conceals an elaborate and rousing fight and death reliant on the audience’s participation for its illumination.

Who was Richard III?

Richard, Duke of Gloucester, was the youngest son to Richard, Duke of York. Richard of York was, after attempts both through martial and bureaucratic means, awarded a tenuous claim on the English throne in 1460, and was officially proclaimed heir to Henry VI after the king’s death. Because Richard of York died before he could ascend to the throne, his claim was occupied by his eldest son, the future Edward IV, who took power after he defeated Henry VI at the battle of Tewkesbury in 1471. Given that the new king had ten children as well as a younger brother (George, Duke of Clarence), Richard’s chances for the throne was remote at best. It was only with the execution of Clarence for treason, Edward’s premature death from natural causes, and a legal challenge which saw Edward’s children disinherited, that Richard moved from the role of lord protector to king of the realm.

Richard’s two-year reign (1482-1484) was brief but eventful, and included peace treaties with Scotland, rebellion amongst his lords, and, ultimately, an invading challenge from Henry Tudor, the final Lancastrian claimant to the throne. After his death at the battle of Bosworth—he was the last English king to die in combat—Richard’s reputation was undercut by Tudor chroniclers and propagandists, and it becomes difficult to differentiate between historical events and skewed Tudor encomia to the new regime. The True Tragedy is a product of this biased reportage, based heavily on written accounts by Sir Thomas More (More), Edward Hall (Hall), Raphael Holinshed (Holinshed), Polydore Vergil (Vergil), and poems in the anthologized The Mirror for Magistrates (which features sections pertaining to Richard III; Shore’s Wife; Buckingham; Rivers; and Hastings).

While, in turn, The True Tragedy seems a likely source for Shakespeare, its author makes far less of an effort to make Richard seem a monster. As the play’s epilogue shows, the playwright goes to great lengths to glorify Richmond’s invasion and victory as indirect tribute to his granddaughter, Elizabeth I, making it essential that Richard be portrayed as a worthy adversary, lest Richmond’s triumph seem diminished. As with Shakespeare, this Richard refuses a horse to convey him from the battlefield, but far less emphasis is placed on his physical deformity, aside from only three passing references.

The historical figure of Richard III was exhumed from his resting place of over 500 years in late 2012, where he had lain under the remains of the Greyfriars Priory in Leicester. Analysis of his bones proved some curvature of the spine, but nothing like the hunchback that propagandists had purported him to be. In The True Tragedy, Richard is insecure and ambitious, and he desires only to be once hailed king before being remembered in death. Through plays like The True Tragedy and Richard III, this ambition is realized.

The remainder of this critical introduction will offer contextual information on the play, including on dates, sources, structure, historical contexts, performances, and the afterlives of the play.

Dates

The True Tragedy was registered in the Stationers’ Register on June 19, 1594, which remains the sole concrete date we may ascribe to this play. It was published in quarto (and as such, will hereafter be referred to as Q) by Thomas Creede, sold by William Barley at his shop in Newgate Market, neare Christ Church doore (Arber), and is dated on the title page as 1594. Chambers dates The True Tragedy as no later than 1594, which is entirely based on this registration and publication date (Chambers).

Various critics have speculated on the actual composition date of the play. Jennifer Roberts-Smith, for instance, notes that The True Tragedy or an earlier version of it had likely been performed for many years before 1594 and records that proposed dates for composition range from late 1588 to 1586 to some time before 1583 (Roberts-Smith 203 n.12). While we can be sure the play was performed for years prior to the publication of the 1594 Q text, other dating attempts are built on circumstantial evidence, not all of which is equal. For example, both Sams (Sams 180) and Smidt (Smidt 11) have explored the idea that The True Tragedy was a young Shakespeare’s early version of Richard III, but the two plays’ markedly different scene structure makes this idea fanciful at best.

While the date of the play’s composition remains a contentious issue, some less impressionistic approaches to dating have been more compelling. For example, Frederick Fleay notes an August 15, 1586 entry in the Stationers’ Register for A tragical Report of King Richard the Third, a ballad, which he assumes was written in response to The True Tragedy. Using this logic, he claims This Richard 3 was almost certainly acted early in 1586 or late in 1585, before the theatres were closed for the plague. The ballad founded on it was entered S.R. Aug. 15 (Fleay 64). There is little reason to believe there is connection between The True Tragedy and A tragical Report beyond a shared interest in the source material, but such surmise is common. Later in his same volume, Fleay recants his dating, convinced that the play’s epilogue must be evidence of a court performance in 1591 (Fleay 315). George B. Churchill argues, based on the Queen’s Men’s movements, that the play may have been produced in the windows of January to July 1592 and December 1592 to May 1593, and declares every thing points to the fact that from 1592 on the remnant of the old company made use of a previously acquired stock of plays (Churchill 526), of which The True Tragedy was included. He also notes, through fleeting textual agreements with 3 Henry VI, that the lower limit for composition cannot be earlier than 1590, and thus the play was very certainly written between 1589-1591, and probably somewhere between July 1590 and December 1591 (Churchill 528). These arguments are useful in narrowing the potential composition date beyond mere speculation.

Other perspectives take emphasis on particular characters as evidence. For example, Benjamin Griffin proposes a composition date of c.1586 for both The True Tragedy and The Famous Victories of Henry the fifth (hereafter The Famous Victories), partly in observation of the earl of Oxford’s expanded role in both pieces. While Oxford was a prominent Richmond supporter, there is no historical precedent to his being Richmond’s second self, and Griffin notes that if this is a nod to the patronage of the Queen’s Men by the current Earl of Oxford, the play would necessarily be composed around c.1586 (Griffin 65). To support this theory, Griffin argues that our extant Q text of The True Tragedy was a memorial reconstruction of an earlier play performed by the Queen’s Men, which was itself an expanded version of a play performed by Oxford’s Men in the early 1580s (Griffin 65). Such thinking offers a compelling perspective on the development of this text and expands on a theory first proposed by Sir Walter Greg.

Greg makes a case for memorial reconstruction as evidence for an earlier composition date in a 1929 old-spelling edition of The True Tragedy for the Malone Society Reprint series. Greg notes compositorial or scribal errors that seem surprising to the modern era, such as the mistaken Lord Marcus for Lord Marquess and the stage directions which call Catesby Casbe and Casbie (Greg vi). Such errors, suggests Greg, demonstrate there must clearly have been an oral stage in the transmission (Greg vi). After Greg proposed this stance, it was developed by Leo Kirschbaum (Kirschbaum 35-36) and John Dover Wilson (Wilson 300). A process of memorial reconstruction and transmission implies a performance history that significantly pre-dates the 1594 registration with the Stationers’ Register. McMillin and MacLean support this concept, but reject the bad quarto theory to maintain the transcriber misheard an authorized company dictation (McMillin and MacLean 117-120).

Turning from questions of patronage and literary influence, we might approximate the play’s date of composition by appeal to theater history or to the broader historical context. Brian Walsh, for instance, claims that the makeup of the Queen’s Men suggests the date of composition. Given The True Tragedy’s lack of a clown figure prominent enough to justify mention in the Q text, Walsh proposes that the play was first performed after Richard Tarlton’s death in 1588. Walsh immediately hastens to note that this theory is not certain (Walsh 76), but it offers interesting insight. This year appears time and again in discussions of the play’s composition that are based on a variety of historiographical methods. Kristin Bezio, for example, suggests 1588 as an earliest date of composition because that was the year of the Spanish Armada’s defeat (Bezio 58), which led to popular entertainment skewing towards increasingly negative and hostile depictions of the Catholic powers of Spain and France while simultaneously becoming increasingly nationalistic, an unsurprising consequence of the English victory over the Spanish Armada (Bezio 70). She further proposes that while the nationalistic, already extant history plays of The Famous Victories and The Troublesome Reign of King John gained in popularity, The True Tragedy was written specifically to capitalize on this sentiment where it synthesizes English Nationalism with the prevailing discussion on the nature of monarchy and the viability of tyrannicide (Bezio 70), notably one in which Lord Strange’s ancestor played a major role on the victorious side. 1588 is also nominated as a plausible date when we note that the Queen’s Men played for Ferdinando Stanley’s household (absent Lord Strange himself) on 10 October 1588; were The True Tragedy performed, they would have delivered immense satisfaction to the household and its assembled guests, compliments of the Stanleys’ patron and recent benefactor, the queen (Manley and MacLean 25). These connections to the Spanish Armada also inform Lewis F. Mott’s sense that the Mother Queen’s speech alludes to the Spanish defeat when she insists on Queen Elizabeth I’s role in that event: And through her faith her country lives in peace And she hath put proud antichrist to flight, And been the means that civil wars did cease. () Mott believes the proud antichrist to be the Spanish Catholic power (and by extension, Rome), when he confidently states this passage was obviously written to be spoken before Elizabeth. The date must lie between the performance of December 26, 1591, after which the Queen’s Men, to whom the piece belonged, ceased for three years to act at court, and December 26, 1588, their first performance after the defeat of the Spanish Armada (Mott 66). Collier, on the other hand, goes in directly the opposite direction by refusing to identify any reference to the Spanish Armada in the Mother Queen’s final speech. Given that the epilogue is filled with references to minor events or moments of little note, Collier finds it difficult to believe that the Armada would not warrant a more prominent mention. In any case, Collier uses this evidence to suggest that The True Tragedy was written before 1588 (Collier 342).

Where some critics date the play by turning to the Mother Queen’s final speech and see the Spanish Armada, T.W. Baldwin sees instead Queen Elizabeth I’s interactions with the Turkish Sultan in 1585, and relief offered to Geneva, beginning in 1583, and uses these events to date the play. Baldwin notes that the Geneva relief concluded in 1585, so coupling these events with Elizabeth’s movements in that time, Baldwin notes that reference to all these things together would probably be most natural late in 1585 or in 1586. It is not likely to have been much later (Baldwin 207). Further, Baldwin notes connection between the blessing conferred on Elizabeth I and An order of prayer and thankesgiving, for the preseruation of her Maiestie and the Realme, from the traiterous and bloodie practises of the Pope, and his adherents (1586). Baldwin suggests The True Tragedy epilogue follows the same outline and phraseology as this Order of prayer, which he then suggests would date the epilogue as being written for court performance the winter season of 1586-87 (Baldwin 207-208). In total, Baldwin proposes a composition date of 1585-1586 for the play, and 1586-1587 for the epilogue, appended specifically for court performance, and supports the idea of the 1586 Richard III ballad, noted above, being based on this play (Baldwin 209).

While each is more or less compelling, these perspectives are all based on the assumption that the text as registered for the Stationers’ Register in 1594 was identical to the text which the Queen’s Men first received. Were the Armada absent from The True Tragedy because the play was composed prior to 1588, it is not unreasonable to think that the epilogue might be adjusted to reflect this victory in the Q publication. That Q has no specific reference to the Armada beyond an oblique mention of the antichrist suggests that addressing the Armada was not a priority. Similarly, that no specific reference is made directly to the Armada suggests that the play was written as a something other than a glorious nationalistic memorial to victory. If the play was conceived as a means of glorifying Elizabeth’s triumph, it is subtle in its message.

Indeed, the assumption that Q is identical to the text first performed by the Queen’s Men, or even Oxford’s Men, is problematic, as Roberts-Smith suggests (Roberts-Smith 203 n.12). Should this be the case, composition in the early to mid 1580’s makes sense, where priority was given to the exploration of Richard’s story, rather than to commenting on recent events. Mott tries valiantly to match each element in the Mother Queen’s speech to contemporary events, but there is so little specificity that he is forced to enigmatically conclude: the records show that the Queen’s Men acted at court December 26, 1589. Was not The True Tragedy of Richard III the play then performed? While, as we have seen, no one incident referred to in the final speech is really sufficient to date the piece, the combined evidence, particularly that derived from the allusions to Turkey and France, points directly to that performance (Mott 71). Again, this may be accurate, but there is little reason to believe that this was the first performance of the play.

Assuming the early– to mid–1580s as the time of the play’s composition, Walsh’s dating of the play poses a problem. If, as Walsh suggests, Tarlton’s death explains the lack of clown in the play, then the date of composition must be later. However, we might question whether this is truly a clown-less play, even if it remains true that The True Tragedy is a particularly humorless history play on the surface. The antics of the Page (who, Churchill identifies as speaking almost the only hint of comic in the whole play Churchill 424), for instance, or Lodowick, Will Slaughter, Catesby, or Lovell, all have humorous potential that might be enlivened by any clown. Perhaps, in reaction to Walsh’s proposal, the clown’s role ordinarily filled by Tarlton evolved in the six years between his death and the publication of the Q text. Prior to that, we have no way of knowing whether the script had changed to account for a loss of a talent.

While June 19, 1594 is the sole date that we can be certain of with The True Tragedy, most evidence suggests composition in the early- to mid-prior decade is most likely. What the state of the text was before the intervention of the mishearing scribe is impossible to know, and any further clues that might anchor the text in the mid-1580s have been overwritten.

Sources

The True Tragedy relies heavily on chronicle sources, and its playwright was clearly familiar with the popular histories available. Bullough lists 15 different histories which featured material relevant to Shakespeare in the development of Richard III, ten of which he suggests are likely sources. Of these ten, we may identify three primary sources the author of The True Tragedy knew: Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancastre and Yorke (1548), Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1558), and More’s The History of King Richard the Third (written 1513-1518, published 1548, 1557 and incorporated into Holinshed), all of which describe versions of events directly or approximately represented in the play. As noted by annotations throughout the modern-spelling text of this edition, Hall and More are The True Tragedy’s primary sources.

The chronicle influence on The True Tragedy helped shape the focused perspective of the history play, wherein all events were discussed in relation to the monarch ruling at the time of the play’s performance. In using Hall, Holinshed, and More (at very least), the playwright of The True Tragedy draws focus to Richard, with occasional glances at the impact of Richard’s reign on those who surround him. Of these, scenes like those featuring the citizenry and Shore’s wife are also gleaned from the chronicles and with which the playwright needed to deal, and continuators expanded on previous histories which often led to conflicting accounts of historical events. Reading The True Tragedy in search of specific source passages reveals multiple sources, where specific phrasing is adopted from More and Hall in the same scene. Schwyzer identifies scenes such as the murderers’ many-faceted debate over how the princes should be killed and the Page’s reinterpretation of the battle to Report as moments which represent these multiple chronicle outlets and the differing options they provide (Schwyzer 200).

When it comes to Richard’s characterization, The True Tragedy similarly mixes sources, though it remains difficult to identify sources with much granularity as sources are themselves often derivative, and they often overlap. Antony Hammond usefully notes Richard of More’s history as a proto-Shakespeare Richard: In More we find the Richard of the play: a witty villain, described in ironical terms by the author (Hammond 75). Arguably, this same impression could be comfortably applied to the Richard of The True Tragedy: while not as well-rounded as Shakespeare’s version, we see the makings of the character as inspired by More’s prose. Thomas Legge’s Latin-versed Richardus Tertius (1579) is also a direct ancestor to The True Tragedy, covers a similar time frame, and received sufficient attention to give little reason to believe The True Tragedy’s playwright did not take it into account. As the first play dealing with medieval English history both written and performed in the reign of Elizabeth (Schwyzer 196), Richardus Tertius shares a similar dependence on chronicle sources. The events of Richardus Tertius derive from Hall and More (Lordi x), but Legge was selective in his decisions on what to dramatize. Ullyot notes Legge’s use of Hall, More, and Vergil, based on his content: More’s history was the first to characterize Richard as a murderous tyrant and Vergil wrote explicitly for the approval of Henry VIII, while Hall is suited to dramatic adaptation because he depicts history in a Tacitean style, vividly quoting speeches and dialogues at length (Ullyot 111).

Apart from sources that provide specific details about Richard’s character and the action depicted in the play, The True Tragedy was also considerably influenced by the surrounding culture of playwriting and more generic habits of characterization. Citing the influence of Senecan models, for instance, Churchill notes that Legge’s Richard is decidedly weaker than his successors because both The True Tragedy playwright and Shakespeare benefited from the growth and development of Elizabethan playwriting since the late 1570s, particularly in an increasing focus on character (Churchill 469-470). In The True Tragedy, Richard is significantly more intelligent and independent, which essentially reduces his advisers (Catesby, Lovell, and the Page) to henchmen and scapegoats. The True Tragedy’s Richard is similarly Senecan where self-aware and cunning, willing to act without support, and able to dismiss moral fears for the sake of winning what he seeks. He is not as calculating or transparently ambitious as Shakespeare’s Richard, but is clearly the new generation Richard, perched on the shoulders of Legge’s protoype. Both, of course, feed into the creation of Shakespeare’s king. Churchill cautiously notes that the author of The True Tragedy should have been acquainted with Legge’s play is a priori, not improbable (Churchill 474), and sees little reason why our likely-educated playwright would not be familiar with it, and yet the playwright clearly developed what he found in Legge, producing a more compellingly modern style drama, where Richard is undeniably the central character in his play. Even though he does not speak until the fourth scene, he is mentioned in every scene in one way or another, and his presence looms over the proceedings much as he physically, silently intrudes on his brother’s Scene 1 death. Again, this is likely due to Richardus Tertius’s influence. As Siemon notes, Richardus Tertius was widely known despite its language, length (some 4,700 lines) single academic performance, and its remaining in manuscript until modern times (Siemon 74). Such tenacious pervasiveness means it would have factored into the minds of The True Tragedy’s playwright and the Queen’s Men’s audiences. Griffin suggests that Richardus Tertius was known to the author of The True Tragedy, which has frequently been characterized as rugged fare for the undiscriminating, and flaunts its Latin quotations from Seneca (though it also condescends to translate them) (Griffin 69).

Among less likely sources for The True Tragedy is a second Latin version of the life of Richard III known as Lacey’s edition (British Museum, MSS. Harl. 2412, 6926); Field cites James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, who calls this drama a poor imitation of Legge (Field 74). Field dates this poor imitation to 1586, but Churchill goes further to suggest this is less than an imitation than a direct transcript of Legge’s play for presentation at Trinity College, Cambridge (Churchill 395). As such, Lacey’s edition is of little concern here, not least because there is no direct evidence to suggest that the author of The True Tragedy was familiar with it.

Beyond the characterization of Richard and the development of the play’s central plot, The True Tragedy relies on a greater variety of sources in the characterization of its secondary characters such as Shore’s wife. Shore’s wife’s scenes seem to owe thanks to Thomas Churchyard’s poem (Churchyard) about that character’s downfall in The Mirror for Magistrates (1563). Her sympathetic treatment in The True Tragedy, specifically in her final penance scene, owes a great deal to The Mirror. Shore’s wife repeats references to herself throughout the play as a mirror for society (For now shall Shore’s wife be a mirror and looking glass to all her enemies ), which subtly points to her own intertextual roots, traced to the final stanza of Churchyard’s poem: Beware, take heed, fall not to folly so: A mirror make by my great overthrow, Defy the world and all his wanton ways, Beware by me, that spent so ill her days. (Churchyard) Further, late in the play, Lodowick vows to cloister himself to write a poem of her downfall in heroical verse (), the playwright metatheatrically points to his own scene of composition and reliance on The Mirror. With the playwright’s familiarity with Churchyard’s poem, the other entries in this same volume—including ballads about Rivers, Richard III, Buckingham, and Hastings—are all peripheral contextual materials.

Among other sources for marginal characters and plot points, we might also look to the requirements of a playwright who serves powerful patrons. Manley and MacLean, for instance, note the emphasis placed on Stanley throughout The True Tragedy, due in part to his descendant Lord Strange’s patronage of the Queen’s Men, indicates familiarity with the more extensive humanist histories of More and Polydore Vergil, among the first chroniclers to note Stanley’s participation in Richard’s reign (Manley and MacLean 25-27). Schwyzer notes a link between Stanley’s battlefield coronation of Richmond and the Ballad of Bosworth Field (c.1495), which suggests the king’s elevation is a matter of aristocratic choice more than inherited right, and marks the first attempt after 1485 to portray the fallen Richard as a real—if bloody minded—human personality (Schwyzer 178). Further, Schwyzer also points to The Stanley Poem as a potential source, and questions whether the Queen’s Men’s 1589 performances for Lord Strange at Knowsley might explain access to these then-unpublished materials (Schwyzer 181).

Notable Elements

As one of our earliest examples of an Elizabethan history play, The True Tragedy is notable for its structure and style, which helped to pioneer a genre that Shakespeare would soon master. This section will examine some of these notable elements.

Treatment of Women and Children

The role of women and children throughout The True Tragedy is telling and innovative, with sympathy offered beyond mere pathos as a means of supplementing the central story. While The True Tragedy features only three female characters if we exclude Mistress Shore’s briefly seen maid Hursly (a nickname for Ursula) and the allegorical figures of Truth and Poetry (see below), these women—the Mother Queen, princess Elizabeth, and Shore’s wife—are each characterized to a considerable depth, and demonstrate both critical agency and rhetorical sophistication. The play treads a fine line in the depiction of these women, offering ample opportunity for them to protest their mistreatment while also consigning them to traditional gender roles.

The presence of Shore’s wife as a major character in this play is unusual, and it speaks to the play’s ambivalent interest in female characters. She appears at length in The Mirror for Magistrates, which records her lament (Churchyard) after showing her performing penance, but, as in The True Tragedy, she is always referred to as Shore’s wife, and the playwright likely adopted the sobriquet from there. In neither work is her first name mentioned, and in any case, her given name was Elizabeth, which would have made for confusing viewing with three Elizabeths in a single play. She was erroneously given the Christian name Jane Shore in Heywood’s The First and Second Parts of Edward IV (1599), where she appears as a major character, and this name has stuck in modern legend.

While known primarily in relation to her husband and her king, Shore’s wife remains central to the play, and her role is established from the play’s title-page, where the third-billed event promised in the play is a lamentable end of Shore’s wife, an example for all wicked women. The notoriety of Shore’s wife and her eventual downfall is well covered in the chronicles, and this play was written barely two generations after her death (c.1527), so the audience would have been aware as to what to expect from the character, particularly during her hubris-laden first scene. The treatment of Shore’s wife as an object of ridicule and cautionary tale for wayward wives is clear throughout: her sins overtake her immediately, as the audience has witnessed the death of her lover and security-keeper, Edward IV, in the scene prior.

But Shore’s wife also remains something more than a mere negative exemplum. After her initial pride, the play shows her to be more than a mere profligate who has made a cuckold of her husband with the king. She is generous and caring of her friends, for instance, as when she restores Lodowick’s lands, presumably lost to Lancastrian loyalists, despite the fact that he is a mere servant. She has also managed to stay the execution of a citizen of London, whose father appears to have begged her for mercy. None of these favors are for power or fame, it seems, but for the open generosity that she embodies. Yet, despite the presence of such positive character traits, Shore’s wife cannot escape her sinful actions, and is punished with open penance in the streets, which she undertakes stoically if not cheerfully. And the play ultimately shows us that Richard’s interest in undermining and destroying her is curiously puritanical, and that it fails to undermine her spirit or belief. Much of this sympathetic treatment is reminiscent of Thomas More’s account (More), which likely provides the source for Shore’s wife’s relative redemption after her fall from grace. Ultimately, Shore’s wife is established as a cautionary figure as the title page suggests but is also the beacon in this play of goodness and repentance, and of the power of forgiveness. We never get to see her after she has repented, but an audience might be familiar with the fact that she long out-lived Richard, and while her latter-life notoriety might have helped define who she was (she is said to have become a prostitute and harlot), this play is notable in its even-handed treatment of a character branded a witch by the new king.

This largely sympathetic treatment of Shore’s wife is not repeated in Shakespeare (who spares her two passing, if cruel, references) but the tragic cautionary theme appears to have been popular: Anthony Chute published his narrative poem, Beauty Dishonored (Chute), written Under the title of Shore’s Wife in 1593, almost exactly concurrent with Shakespeare’s Richard III and just prior to the Q publication of The True Tragedy, which situates her with the contemporary cultural zeitgeist. Similarly, Giles Fletcher singles her out in just the second stanza of his 1593 narrative poem The Rising to the Crown of Richard the Third, Written by Himself: Shore’s Wife, a subject though a prince’s mate, Had little cause her fortune to lament. Her birth was mean, and yet she lived in state; The king was dead before her honor went. Shore’s wife might fall, and none can justly wonder To see her fall that useth to lie under. (Fletcher) The implied sense that she is somehow crucial to the moral force of Richard’s story explains her relative ubiquity in the period where, as Fleay notes, she also appears in Drayton’s Heroical Epistles, which he claims were certainly written years before their publication in 1599 (Fleay 242). These multiple publications, along with her prominence as a character in Heywood’s Edward IV plays (1599) suggests that The True Tragedy aims to raise her profile even further than The Mirror for Magistrates could, and it does so by drawing a particularly rich and complex character.

Similarly unnamed, the Mother Queen (as the play fashions the title for Elizabeth Woodville, who is never so named in the play), represents another extraordinary depiction of women on the Elizabethan stage. The fierceness with which she protects her children and her defiance against clear mortal danger are both emotionally stirring and they transfer directly to the same character’s portrayal by Shakespeare. Unlike in Shakespeare, however, the Mother Queen here takes little time for self-pity over Edward IV’s death, which potentially reflects the play’s investment in Shore’s wife. Neither, unlike in Shakespeare, is the Mother Queen present at Edward’s death-bed. In her very name of Mother Queen, Elizabeth Woodville is defined by her maternal connection to the young king, and then later to princess Elizabeth. She retains this informal title even after her husband’s death, and after the disinheritance and murder of the princes, which signifies that the character’s role as Mother Queen goes deeper than a mere honorific.

Princess Elizabeth’s role in this play is unsurprising given that she was Elizabeth I’s grandmother and represented the key to the unification of the Houses of York and Lancaster. This significance was, of course, clear to Richard III, as dramatized in both The True Tragedy and Richard III, who attempted to woo her to consolidate power. Fitting her historical significance and the play’s sense of decorum, princess Elizabeth appears always in the company of one of her parents and always as a cool, calm, reasonable presence. She is the only one of Edward IV’s children present in his death scene, and she acts as an intermediary between her step-brother Dorset and her father’s friend Hastings as they jockey for influence. She achieves this peace even though she was only 17 years of age at the time of her father’s death, so her youth and wisdom are significant. Later, she becomes the rock on which the Mother Queen depends when her uncles and brothers are done away with. Finally, and most significantly, Elizabeth joins the Mother Queen and two messengers to deliver the epilogue, immediately after agreeing to marry Richmond. Although her contribution to the epilogue comprises only three lines, the staging of the boys who represent the current queen’s grandmother and great-grandmother is distinctly optimistic, and confers great power upon the maternal lineage. The four characters who end the play are all apprentices, with the messengers earlier representing feminine Truth and Poetry, and as the play looks towards the future, women are positioned strongly at the front.

As with the significant and meaningful roles for women in the play, the three children who appear in The True Tragedy have a very specific role in their interactions with the audience. Roberts-Smith suggests the young king and duke of York (the princes in the Tower) were represented by young apprentices of 13-14 years of age (Roberts-Smith 198), and, significantly, would be doubled with the roles of Truth and Poetry, and the two messengers of the epilogue. This means that in casting, the boys become the moral center to the play, beginning with the promise to offer truth in poetry, ending with a prayer for the future, and in between eliciting sympathy for their guiltless deaths. The young king, in particular, is positioned as a young man wise beyond his years: a great loss to England as he is cut off before he could come to power. By placing the young king and his brother at the zenith of Richard III’s horrific actions, the children become emblematic of hope and justice. Similarly, the youngest member of the company, a young boy of perhaps 11 years old, portrays George Stanley, the son who would grow up to become Lord Strange, but at this juncture is left as a sacrifice for the good of England. Having the smallest member of the company as the most vulnerable of figures, but one who the audience is assured will survive, secures sympathy throughout.

Allegorical and Framing Figures

As Benjamin Griffin notes, among early modern history plays, the most extensive apparatus of induction is found in The True Tragedy (Griffin 87), which points to the play’s self-conscious moralization of historical action. Within The True Tragedy’s first ten lines, three non-human characters are introduced. First comes the ghost of the murdered duke of Clarence, a Senecan figure who mournfully calls for revenge and drops an inscribed shield to the stage, the meaning of which is immediately explained by two apprentice actors who immediately introduce each other: Truth, well met. / Thanks, Poetry (). The physical representations of Truth and Poetry not only suggests a historical story is about to be told, but that it is true. Audiences unclear about the verity this play’s title claims are given no option but to mark Truth’s presence, in opposition to lurid or untruthful prior accounts. The double presence of these figures is particularly telling: such plays as The True Tragedy, The Famous Victories and King Leir reached the stage because they could be presented as true rather than poetic, the sort of entertainment English people could be drawn to see in crowds without abjuring the combination of God, queen, Protestant church, and nation which the government depended on (McMillin and MacLean 166). In its very title, the Queen’s Men make clear that in The True Tragedy they place great stock in truth, over the shadows and images such as poetry, and enact Truth’s liberation of the narrative from Poetry (McMillin and MacLean 33).

Even as Truth and Poetry’s initial greetings offer context about who these actors represent, what visual signifiers might have illuminated their characters? Roberts-Smith proposes that the apprentices would likely be dressed in allegorical women’s clothing (Roberts-Smith 192). Truth represented the Roman figure of Veritas, or her Greek counterpart, Aletheia, a version of which also appears in plays such as Vice (or, Orestes, 1567), Freewill (1572-1573), Truth Faithfulness and Mercy (1573-1574), and An Interlude of Minds (1575) (Wiggins and Richardson). Truth was traditionally depicted nude—the naked truth—as described by Ripa: Verity. This naked Beauty holds a Sun in her right Hand; in her left, a Book open, with a Palm; under one Foot the Globe of the World. Naked, because downright simplicity is natural to her (Ripa 78), although by the sixteenth century images of Veritas became gradually more demure and clothed. Walsh suggests Truth might carry an emblematic large book and writing implements could announce ’truth, particularly if Truth is meant to be synonymous with Clio, the muse of history, of whom there was an extant tradition in painting (Walsh 78).

The personification of Poetry appears less frequently in early modern drama, unless we expand our view to depictions of the Muses, as seen in The Masque of Discord and Peace (1572). In The True Tragedy, Poetry personifies performance itself, as Ribner notes: the appearance of Truth and Poetry to set the stage is of some significance, for in it there is evidence that the Elizabethans conceived of the history play as a joint work of history and poetry, that poetry might be used to forward the purposes of history, the supposition upon which our definition of the history play as been based (Ribner 83). Ripa describes Poetry as a lady in a sky-colour’d Garment; with Stars and Wings on her Head; a Harp in her right Hand; crown’d with Laurel, and a Swan at her Feet (Ripa 61). In noting the Queen’s Men’s tendency to say and show, Walsh proposes Poetry might carry a laurel or a lyre as objects that might be sufficiently associated with poetry to work as an emblematic prop (Walsh 78).

These allegorical figures, however, do more than act as a Chorus of a pre-determined story, serving also to inspire anticipation in the audience as they witness on stage the birth of the Tudor Myth. As Griffin notes, the Arguments in editions of Seneca set out the narrative that was to follow; but they gave the whole story. The True Tragedy by contrast only sets forth the story up to the point at which the stage-action is to commence (Griffin 88). From that point, the audience sees the action unfold, rather than watch for the events they have been told are coming. The framing devices lay out the recent past and the immediate-to-distant future, and establish focus on the here and now of the performance, located as a moment in time. Indeed, as Bezio suggests, the conclusion of The True Tragedy seems to subscribe to Tillyard’s theory of the Tudor Myth—that the wars of the roses were a divine cleansing to pace the way for the accession of Henry VII (Bezio 72), which means the induction and epilogue encapsulate the time leading up to Richmond’s victory. The prologue means not only that the audience is not required to bring any foreknowledge of history, but they are also asked to forget what they think they know, for the promise of the truth that is to come. The play stands apart and ends with the assurance of plenty, incorporating the fruits of Richmond’s and Elizabeth’s union: with the conquest achieved, the gesture toward the future must be made—a gesture toward a future that is, ultimately, the audience’s present (Griffin 88). By including the same apprentices who play Truth and Poetry in the final scene, verity is assured, and they are able to bring the history down to the present moment, with its triumphs and its fears (Griffin 90). Notable, of course, is the epilogue, which may be the play’s future, but is in the audience’s past (Griffin 91). Aside from fervent prayers that Queen Elizabeth live for ay (), no attempt is made to predict the future. In this sense, this is very much an attempt at a true tragedy, as Truth promised in the induction.

While these seem to be the ideological and historiographical goals of the play’s allegorical features, the presentation of the epilogue by these four apprentices, however, raises an interesting matter of optics. Field questions the use of the Mother Queen and princess Elizabeth in delivering these final lines: he notes, it is so absurd that the Queen and her daughter should take this Chorus out of the mouths of the two Messengers, that I at one time thought that the words Eliza., Queene, were misplaced from a marginal note in the manuscript, calling the attention of the reader that Queen Elizabeth was now the subject of the Chorus; but that king Richard’s two murderers should speak this Epilogue is perhaps equally preposterous (Field 71). Field associates the two messengers who return George Stanley as Richard’s two murderers which problematically links them to those who play Will Slaughter and Jack Denton, but this is presumably in response to the messengers noting that they had been tasked with killing George. Perhaps aligned with the play’s claims to truthfulness, then, the vagaries, ambiguities, and ambivalences of history persist, despite The True Tragedy’s apparently sincere attempts to conceal them beneath a state-sanctioned ideology.

The optics of who should speak these final speeches, offering what Griffin calls a genealogical trope (Griffin 91), are certainly made more complex considering the vexed religious and political history that they foretell to an audience that has already witnessed them. Here, the first messenger speaks of Henry VII; the second messenger covers Henry VIII and Edward VI; princess Elizabeth speaks very briefly on Queen Mary, before the Mother Queen takes over for a 31-line appraisal of Elizabeth I. While Field notes that the Mother Queen’s delivery of these lines is absurd, we might here ask who is better suited to speak of Henry VII’s lineage than the two remaining characters who portray Elizabeth I’s ancestors? Richmond is surely a poor option, given as the character is portrayed as pious and humble, and to ask two anonymous messengers to deliver such rousing hyperbole seems similarly problematic. Key to this final moment, if Roberts-Smith’s casting proposition is to be considered (Roberts-Smith 198), is that these final, most important lines are spoken by young adult apprentices—all between 13 and 15 years old, all representing hope and beauty. Whether an audience would revolt against the final speech if it were spoken by Richard’s two murderers is unclear, but it appears calculated that the names of the two monarchs within the audience’s living memory are spoken by characters who represent royalty. To respond to Field’s suggestion of absurdity might be to note that the baton is passed to the more senior apprentices to deliver these key phrases.

After Truth and Poetry exit, the play settles in to a strictly linear, human story, and follows Richard’s complete rise and fall, and the impediments he meets on the way. While the play suggests an allegorical or moralizable content, then, it also demonstrates its interest in the concrete unfolding of historical events. Consequently, it is not until 2002 lines into the play, after the battle of Bosworth is fought and won, that a new allegorical character appears. The figure of Report, who appears in a single scene of 31 lines, is a curious presence this late in the play. Rather than use a reporting figure like Mountjoy (Henry V 4.3.79) or Lucy (1 Henry VI 4.3.17), the playwright inserts the nameless Report, whom the Page appears to know well. More than a battlefield herald, Report is as much an allegorical figure as Truth and Poetry (Wiggins and Richardson 489). In this sense, Report is aligned with a character like Rumor (2 Henry IV 1.1.1; Clyomon and Clamydes), as personifications of gossip and innuendo, although, as Walsh notes, Report’s interest in accurate detail sets him apart from Rumor (Walsh 89-90). Interestingly, unlike these related characters, Report does not deliver news, but only receives it (Churchill 465).

There is no indication as to how Report is attired, or if he resembles Shakespeare’s Rumor, dressed painted with tongues. Ripa records Rumor as a man arm’d with a coat of mail of divers colours; throwing of darts every where the Darts show flying Reports among the multitude the Coat of Mail of different Colours, the diversity of Opinions of the Rabble (Ripa 66). Report certainly throws no darts, nor is it clear that his mail is colorful. Indeed, as Walsh notes, we can only speculate as to whether the identification of this figure as Report was purely verbal, or whether, in line with the Queen’s Men’s theatrical literalism, it involved costume or props as well (Walsh 88). Further, Walsh associates Report with George Puttenham’s term for the first degree of repetition in verse, which means Report can be read as a corporeal subset of the opening figure that embodied poetry itself, as well as a more particular embodiment of the stylized repetition of language, even if that repetition can be corrupted in the retelling (Walsh 90).

Afterlives

Given the wide range of potential composition dates for The True Tragedy (as discussed above), we may consider the play’s influence on other writers, including Shakespeare. While Hammond pessimistically suggests that trying to find reliable evidence of influence from The True Tragedy’s Q text is akin to building a house on quicksand (Hammond 83), chronology bears out trace evidence of influence. Siemon sets the date of composition for Shakespeare’s work as between 1587 (when the second edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles were published) and the Q1 entry into the Stationers’ Register on 20 October 1597 (Siemon 44). Such a broad potential span overlaps significantly with the proposed composition dates of The True Tragedy.

If, as Siemon suggests in taking the mean date of 1592-1593 (Siemon 45), it is almost certain that The True Tragedy preceded Shakespeare. As Schwyzer perceptively notes, in light of the palpable influence of Shakespeare’s play over almost every subsequent treatment of Richard III, it is difficult to imagine that the author of The True Tragedy would have found nothing in Shakespeare’s play worthy of emulation (Schwyzer 203). So while the ambiguity around dates of composition continues to muddy the critical waters, impressionistic evidence suggests that The True Tragedy must precede and likely influence Shakespeare’s subsequent work.

Assuming the precedence of The True Tragedy, the relative paucity of direct parallels between the two plays suggests Shakespeare had a working knowledge of his predecessor, but created his own version afresh, meaning the mere likelihood that The True Tragedy pre-dates Shakespeare does not necessarily make the anonymous play a direct source. Richard III certainly refers to The True Tragedy, however, which indicates familiarity with an existing property, and he did indeed dramatize many of the scenes that appear in The True Tragedy. Since both plays present historical scenes gleaned from similar chronicle sources, it is fruitless to suggest The True Tragedy’s staging of Hastings’ arrest, for example, was emulated by Shakespeare, since this event is described in Hall, Holinshed, and More, and both plays share turns of phrase with those other sources, as when Gloucester says I have been long a sleeper (Richard III 3.4.23), for example. While conclusions are difficult to draw with certainty, Siemon’s assessment seems compelling where he questions whether Shakespeare was familiar with Legge while remaining unequivocal in his belief that Shakespeare knew The True Tragedy (Siemon 77).

The points at which the two plays intersect are sufficient to confirm Shakespeare’s knowledge of the Queen’s Men’s repertoire. The most obvious connection between The True Tragedy and Shakespeare comes in Richard’s final scene, in which he calls for a horse. In this final desperate moment, The True Tragedy’s A horse, a horse, a fresh horse! () notably prefigures Shakespeare’s A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse! (Richard III 5.6.7). Both moments link to Holinshed and Hall’s reportage of Richard’s final battle, and agree with the moment as originally reported in The Ballad of Bosworth Field (The Ballad of Bosworth Field) but the echo in phrasing is difficult to disregard.

Similarly, Shakespeare’s use of the phrase Come, the croaking raven doth bellow for revenge (Hamlet 3.2.226-227) in Hamlet appears to be a knowing nod to a similarly-phrased The True Tragedy line, The shrieking raven sits croaking for revenge (), which McMillin and MacLean suggest is a self-aware inside reference, a joke out of one of its more bizarre lines (McMillin and MacLean 254). Whether it would have been interpreted that way by a contemporary audience is uncertain, but if it was deliberately recycled for the audience’s amusement this suggests The True Tragedy was well enough known to serve that purpose.

Other parallels between the plays seem inevitable given that they shared the same sources. Some of the more familiar elements of Shakespeare’s play that appear in The True Tragedy—Richard’s deformity, the plot to murder the princes, the Mother Queen’s flight to sanctuary, Richard’s self-described over-sleeping, Buckingham’s arrest—all appear in The True Tragedy, but all are clearly adapted from a shared chronicle source. Other major elements, such as the plight of Shore’s wife (in The True Tragedy) and the marriage to Lady Anne (in Shakespeare) are dismissed from their correspondents, despite their mutual presence in the chronicles.

If Shakespeare’s play indeed premiered in 1592-1593 (as Siemon suggests), it is more than coincidence that The True Tragedy was registered in the Stationers’ Register in 1594. Arguably this is evidence of an opportunistic move to capitalize on the playhouse success of a new play, particularly since Shakespeare’s play was not published in Q form for another three years. Such a decision has precedent with the Queen’s Men. The 1605 publication of King Leir, 11 years after its entry into the Stationers’ Register, was likely intended to capitalize on the playhouse success of Shakespeare’s King Lear in the same year. Such opportunism acknowledges the Queen’s Men’s awareness of both the selling potential of a similarly-named play, but also an attempt to claim prior authorship over a property that was gaining new success, potentially on the back of the earlier edition.

Characters

The historical figures who populate both plays have clear real-life correspondents, usually gleaned from the chronicle sources and cultural memories for audiences who were asked to remember the lives of figures who lived in London only a century prior. Richard’s band of advisors were well enough known to garner attention through a seditious poem written by a bureaucrat, William Collingbourne, who nailed his verse to the door of St. Paul’s in 1484: The Cat, the Rat, and Lovell our dog, / Rule all England under an hog (Holinshed). The public ridicule of Catesby (the Cat), Ratcliffe (the Rat) and lord Lovell (named for his heraldic wolf standard), alongside the hog Richard (named for his heraldic boar standard) was enough to see Collingbourne executed for his troubles. The prominence of these characters, therefore, make their inclusion in The True Tragedy and Richard III almost inevitable.

While historically well known, The True Tragedy treats these figures differently from previous stage productions, emphasizing their historical rather than their moral or allegorical significance; this is a feature of The True Tragedy that Shakespeare would subsequently develop. As noted above in Sources, Catesby and Lovell act as demonic advisors in Legge’s Richardus Tertius, but through The True Tragedy and Richard III, they settle into supporting roles that give far more agency to Richard. Ratcliffe does not appear in The True Tragedy—potentially replaced by the unnamed Page, who is Richard’s closest advisor—but Catesby and Lovell do. It is curious to see the gradual expansion of these advisor characters into Shakespeare, where they offer unflinching loyalty to the end. In The True Tragedy, Richard has occasion to doubt his advisors, and even threatens Catesby with death if he does not keep quiet. Catesby is a glorified messenger, his role usurped by the enterprising Page. In Shakespeare’s play, the Page is replaced with the Rat, the Cat, and Lovell, yet it is notable that in Richard III, a page (as per More) recommends Sir James Tyrrell to Richard in the same way the Page does in The True Tragedy. While it is fruitless to align nameless messengers and servants between plays, the connection between pages in this moment suggests a potential influence on Shakespeare.

The True Tragedy’s Page is a memorable figure for his choric ability to comment on Richard’s folly and ambition. There is no character in Shakespeare’s play that speaks to the audience aside from the title character himself, and rarely do his staff question him. The closest any advising character comes to disobeying Richard in Shakespeare’s play is Catesby’s plea that Richard take to horse as the battle of Bosworth unravels, whereas when Catesby makes this same plea in The True Tragedy, it is the latest in several defiant and negative moments. While Shakespeare leaves room for ambiguity in Norfolk’s deflective refusal to murder George Stanley (reasoning that the battle is too near to waste time), Lovell and Catesby in The True Tragedy are openly defiant, as are the two messengers who return George in direct contravention of their ordered slaughter.

As noted above, women and children garner serious attention in The True Tragedy, but all evolve markedly in Shakespeare. The murder of the princes in the Tower, for instance, which The True Tragedy presents on the inner stage, is shifted to reportage from Tyrrell, although the same pathos-laden final scene for the princes remains as the murderers close in. The murder scene would later be revived by Colley Cibber in his 1699 adaptation, but was quickly removed after negative audience reactions. Jowett suggests Shakespeare omitted the murder scene perhaps because he wished to avoid staging an episode that had been prominent in The True Tragedy (Jowett 38), but Cibber’s failure to reinsert this moment speaks to Shakespeare’s more effective tactic of allowing the audience to imagine rather than witness.

It is easy to point to details like the fact that for the entire duration of The True Tragedy, Richard never once speaks to a woman, nor does he appear on stage with a woman, aside from his silent lingering at Edward IV’s death-bed where his niece Elizabeth grieves. While it is true that interactions between men and women are given greater complexity in Shakespeare’s play, it is short-sighted to conclude that the playwright of The True Tragedy has little care for his female characters. Distance between Richard and the women of the play is notable: he communicates with the Mother Queen and Shore’s wife through intermediaries like messengers and servants; Shore’s wife is condemned through proclamation; and the Mother Queen discovers the fate of her sons through the archbishop’s servant. This speaks in part to logistical casting challenges, of course: only a limited number of company members perform women and children so the dramaturgy of the scenes must reflect that. More interestingly, however, is the fact that when separated from the domineering vice figure that Richard represents, the women of the play are given far greater agency to speak, plot, and proclaim without censure. This is a play in which women are empowered to speak to an unusually high extent, unfettered by interruption or condescension. As a result, the audience finds opportunities to empathize with characters like Shore’s wife, a woman condemned by chronicle history and narrative character assassination, to show that after her abrupt fall she is given the speaking focus throughout the central scene of the play and concludes by being able to hold her head aloft with dignity. Other plot points, such as the Mother Queen’s terrifying sanctuary experience or Princess Elizabeth’s proposed marriage, are given room for discussion and consideration in a way that demonstrates that the playwright is interested in the agency and feelings of these characters, and by extension, asks the audience to share in them.

Conclusion

It is natural, perhaps, to tend towards reading The True Tragedy in comparison to the more famous works on the same topic: Shakespeare and Heywood loom large, even if their works are likely this play’s antecedent. Natural or not, this perspective deflects attention from the achievements of what The True Tragedy represents, particularly in relation to the play’s treatment of women and children. The Mother Queen demonstrates a savvy political acumen even as she manages a great deal of bottled resentment against Richard for his slaughter of her family. Similarly, Shore’s wife emerges as a choric voice for history, speaking against the assumptions of the chroniclers to show her goodness and tenacity. By play’s end, it is the embattled women and children who remain to deliver the epilogue, and each woman who is attacked (excepting the unseen Lady Anne) emerges with dignity. As the Mother Queen and Princess Elizabeth stand defiantly in the play’s final scene, they represent the final two members of their family, which is now solely comprised of women. There is great power in this gesture for an audience to witness characters who represent Queen Elizabeth’s grandmother and great-grandmother as they celebrate the feminine strength that survives this play and is personified by Elizabeth herself. The True Tragedy may appear clumsy and difficult to read to a modern eye, but within the Queen’s Men’s context, this was a savvy political piece, well directed towards the needs of its audience. The play’s influence on later, more prominent playwrights is certain—as certain as is the importance of this work within the Elizabethan canon—and as a forethinking, sophisticated history work, The True Tragedy of Richard the Third deserves greater attention and a position of prominence in the conversation in early modern drama.