The Fable. Act I. The play begins in the last days of King Edward IV, when the King's two brothers, Clarence and Gloucester, are debating who shall succeed to the throne when the King dies. In the first scene Clarence is led to the Tower under suspicion of plotting to succeed. Richard, Duke of Gloucester, the cause of the committal, pretends to grieve for him, but hastens to compass his death. In the next scene Richard woos the Lady Anne (widow of the dead son of Henry VI, and daughter of the Earl of Warwick), who is likely to be useful to him for the moment as an ally (she being of the house of Lancaster). The third scene displays the passionate quarrelling of the Court factions. The Queen, her brothers and Richard's party, are cursed by Margaret of Anjou. In the fourth scene Clarence is murdered in the Tower.
Act II. King Edward IV dies, having patched up a seeming truce between the factions. His son is to succeed him. Before this can happen, Richard strikes down the leaders of the Queen's party, and lays a deep scheme to secure the crown for himself.
Act III. There is a deeply tragical scene in which the unsuspecting Hastings, who is faithful to Edward's memory, is hurried out of life. Afterwards, through the management of Buckingham, Richard is proclaimed King.
Act IV. Richard makes himself sure by casting off Buckingham and causing the murder of Edward's sons in the Tower. He plots to marry Edward's daughter. But by this time the land is in upheaval against him. Buckingham and Richmond lead forces against him.
Act V. Buckingham is taken and put to death; but Richmond's forces gather head. Richard leads his army to oppose them. The armies front each other at Bosworth Field near Leicester. The night before the battle the ghosts of the many slain during the progress of the Wars of the Roses menace Richard and promise victory to Richmond. In the battle that follows Richard is slain. Richmond takes oath to end the Wars of the Roses by marrying Edward's daughter, so that the two royal houses may at last be joined.
Richard III is the last of the great historical [plays] about the Wars of the Roses. The subject of the wars had occupied Shakespeare's mind for many months. He had traced them from their beginning in the long ago to their end among the dead at Bosworth. All that bloodiness of misery was due to a forgotten marriage and the chance that Edward III had seven sons, the eldest of whom died before his father. In this great tragic vision Shakespeare saw the wheel come full circle, with that giving of justice which life renders at last, though it may be to the dead, or the mad, or the broken.
Largely, this play deals with the coming of that justice. Much that is most wonderful in the play comes from the faith that blood cruelly or unjustly spilt cries from the ground, and that the human soul, wrought to an ecstasy, has power, as the blood has power, to draw God's hand upon the guilty. But Shakespeare's mind was also occupied with the knowledge that self-confident intellect is terrible and tragical. One of the truths of the play is the very sad one that being certain is in itself a kind of sin, sure to be avenged by life. The obsession of self-confidence betrays person after person, to misery or death. All the heads that lift themselves proudly go bloody to the dust or bow in anguish. Only one man moves by other light than his own. He is the only one who achieves quiet triumph. Nothing in the play is more impressive than the speech in which the intellect that has ended the bloodshed prays humbly that God may bless and help England with peace.
It was said of Napoleon that he was as great as a man can be without virtue. The intellect of Richard III is like that of Napoleon. It is restless, swift, and sure of its power. It is sure, too, that the world stays as it is from something stupid in the milky human feelings. Richard is a "bloody dog" let loose in a sheep-fold. It is a part of the tragedy that he is nobler than the sheep that he destroys. His is the one great intellect in the play. Intellect is always rare. In kings it is very rare. When a great intellect is made bitter by being cased in deformity one has the tragedy of intellect turned upon itself. Had Richard been born without his deformed shoulder he could have known human sympathy, and human intercourse. Without human intercourse he goes gloating, clutching himself, biting his lip, muttering at the twist in his shadow. This warped, starved mind knows himself stronger than the minds near him. It is tragical to be deformed, it is tragical to have an intellect too great for people to understand. But the deformed and bitter intellect would suffer tragedy indeed if he, the one constant Yorkist, were to be ruled by a gentle, half-witted Lancastrian saint like Henry VI, or by Clarence the perjurer, or by the upstart Woodville, a commoner made noble because his sister took the King's fancy, or by the Queen herself, the housewife who caused great Warwick's death, or by one of her sons, who are pert to the man who had spilt his blood to make their father king. The snarling intellect bites rather than suffer that. It is very terrible, but how if he had not bitten? The vision of all this bloodiness is less terrible than that vision of the sheep triumphing, so dear to us moderns—
"Strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill."
As in all Shakespeare's greater plays, a justice brings evil upon the vow breaker. Curses called down in the solemn moment come home to roost when the solemnity is forgotten or thrust aside. Clarence, who broke his oath to the House of Lancaster, is done to death by his brother. Anne, cursing the killer of her husband, curses the woman who shall marry him, is, herself, that woman, and dies wretchedly. Grey, Rivers, Dorset, Buckingham and Hastings make oaths of amity, call down curses on him that breaks them, themselves break them, and die wretchedly. Richard, too wise to make oaths, too strong to curse, dies, as his mother foretells, "by God's just ordinance," when the measure of the blood of his victims becomes too great, and when his victims' curses, after wandering from heart to heart, get them into human bodies and walk the world, executing justice.