He is the first full embodiment of a Shakespearean obsession that culminates in Macbeth’s “poor player” and Prospero’s “These our actors.” It is Iago in Othello who says, “I am not what I am.” But Richard could have said it too. And, as the critic Lionel Trilling remarked in a study of Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), so could almost every one of Shakespeare’s most memorable characters: Hamlet has no sooner heard out the Ghost than he resolves to be what he is not, a madman. Rosalind in As You Like It is not a boy, Portia in The Merchant of Venice is not a doctor of law, Romeo’s beloved Juliet is not a corpse, in Measure for Measure the Duke is not a friar and Mariana is not Isabella (nor is Helen Diana in All’s Well That Ends Well), Edgar in King Lear is not Tom o’ Bedlam, Hermione in The Winter’s Tale is neither dead nor a statue.

Marlowe’s characters invest everything in their aspirations. Shakespeare’s are more flexible. They are not what they are. That is surely because Shakespeare was an actor and Marlowe was not. It is also one reason why Shakespeare’s characters have a richer, more varied and continuous stage afterlife than Marlowe’s. Only in his dreams does Richard stop acting. And when that happens, his identity collapses:

Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.

What? Do I fear myself? There’s none else by.

Richard loves Richard: that is, I am I.

Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am.

Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why:

Lest I revenge. What? Myself upon myself?

Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any good

That I myself have done unto myself?

O no! Alas, I rather hate myself

For hateful deeds committed by myself!

Since he has forged his identity through acting, Richard denies the possibility of an essential being that is anterior to performance. He cannot sustain a language of being—“I am,” “I am not”—because he keeps coming back to particular roles (“villain”) and actions (murdering). The moment when an authentic self ought to be asserted, as in a deathbed repentance, becomes that when the self collapses. This is an actor-dramatist’s way of looking at the nature of human being.

The Ghosts who appear to him in his dream the night before the last battle force him into the realization that actions have consequences: murder will bring him “to the bar” and a verdict of “guilty” will be pronounced. This final emphasis upon guilt is the pragmatic Shakespeare’s correction of the blasphemous Marlowe toward religious and moral orthodoxy. Having been granted his earthly crown, Richard is defeated by Henry of Richmond, who has spent the night before the battle of Bosworth Field in pious prayer to the Christian God: “O thou, whose captain I account myself, / Look on my forces with a gracious eye.” The fall of the overreacher is thus yoked to the Tudor myth of that providential scheme of history which combined the Houses of York and Lancaster and established the dynasty that brought unity, then Reformation and ambition for imperial glory to the nation.

Further selections from critical commentaries on the play, with linking narrative, are available on the edition website, www.therscshakespeare.com.

ABOUT THE TEXT

Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare’s classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can’t).

But because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, editors also have to make decisions about the relative authority of the early printed editions. Half of the sum of his plays only appeared posthumously, in the elaborately produced First Folio text of 1623, the original “Complete Works” prepared for the press by Shakespeare’s fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else. The other half had appeared in print in his lifetime, in the more compact and cheaper form of “Quarto” editions, some of which reproduced good quality texts, others of which were to a greater or lesser degree garbled and error-strewn. In the case of Richard III, there are hundreds of differences between the two early editions, the Quarto of 1597 and the Folio.

Generations of editors have adopted a “pick and mix” approach, moving between Quarto and Folio readings, making choices on either aesthetic or bibliographic grounds, and creating a composite text that Shakespeare never actually wrote. Not until the 1980s did editors follow the logic of what ought to have been obvious to anyone who works in the theater: that the Quarto and the Folio texts represent two discrete moments in the life of Richard III; that plays change in the course of rehearsal, production, and revival, and that the major variants between the early printed versions almost certainly reflect this process.

If you look at printers’ handbooks from the age of Shakespeare, you quickly discover that one of the first rules was that, whenever possible, compositors were recommended to set their type from existing printed books rather than manuscripts. This was the age before mechanical typesetting, when each individual letter had to be picked out by hand from the compositor’s case and placed on a stick (upside down and back to front) before being laid on the press. It was an age of murky rushlight and of manuscripts written in a secretary hand that had dozens of different, hard-to-decipher forms.