Queen’s
Men Editions

Para1Richard 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.

Para2History 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.

Para3While 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 that change often by the page. But if, as McMillin and MacLean suggest (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 (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 (Sc19 SD4) conceals an elaborate and rousing fight and death reliant on the audience’s participation for its illumination.

Para4Richard, 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 were remote at best. It took the execution of Clarence for treason, Edward’s premature death from natural causes, and a legal challenge that saw Edward’s children disinherited for Richard to move from the role of lord protector to king of the realm.

Para5Richard’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 (The History of King Richard the Third), Edward Hall (The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York), Raphael Holinshed (Holinshed’s Chronicles), Polydore Vergil (Anglia Historia), and poems in the anthologized The Mirror for Magistrates (which features sections pertaining to Richard III, Shore’s Wife, Buckingham, Rivers, and Hastings).

Para6While, 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 in Shakespeare, this Richard refuses a horse to convey him from the battlefield, but far less emphasis is placed on his physical deformity, with only three passing references.

Para7The 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.

Para8The 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.

Para9The 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); the imprint line on the title page gives the date 1594. Chambers dates The True Tragedy as no later than 1594, which is entirely based on this registration and publication date (Chambers).

Para10Various 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.

Para11While 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.

Para12Other 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 Wilson Greg.

Para13Greg 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).

Para14Turning from questions of patronage and literary influence, we might approximate the play’s date of composition by appeal to theatre 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.

(Epilogue Sp4)

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 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).

Para15Where 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).

Para16While 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.

Para17Indeed, 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 1580s 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 surmise may be accurate, but there is little reason to believe that this was the first performance of the play.

Para18Assuming 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—whom 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 been changed to account for a loss of a talent.

Para19While 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.

Para20The 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.

Para21The 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).

Para22When 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 ‘quotingʼ speeches and dialogues at length (Ullyot 111).

Para23Apart 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).

Para24Among 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.

Para25Beyond 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 Sc2 Sp17), 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 (Sc11 Sp12), 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.

Para26Among 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).

Para27As 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

Allegorical and Framing Figures

Para44Given 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.

Para45If, 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.

Para46Assuming 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).

Para47The 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! (Sc19 Sp1) 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.

Para48Similarly, 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 (Sc18 Sp1), 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.

Para49Other 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.

Para50If 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.

Para51The 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.

Para52While 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.

Para53The 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.

Para54As 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.

Para55It 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.

Para56It 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.