The Invention of Richard of Gloucester

Abstract

it is impossible to describe with any confidence the process by which the playwright learned to transmute the raw theatrical materials available to him in 1590 into the refined works he was able to produce less than a decade later. When Shakespeare first began to put to good use what he would modestly call his rough, and all-vnable Pen, he had already absorbed a variety of deeply rooted theatrical genres. As a youth in Stratford, he had almost certainly heard companies of travelling professional actors perform the late moralities that were popular choices for the mayor's play. Shakespeare had also studied the works of Plautus and Seneca and, after his move to London, had paid careful attention to the liberating innovations of Kyd and Marlowe. In his first years as a playwright, Shakespeare discovered how to integrate a varied inheritance into a sophisticated drama that at its richest moments was simultaneously mimetic and symbolic. Attempts to chart Shakespeare's progress as a dramatist often bog down in specialist bibliographical detail. It is good fortune that the circumstances out of which the astonishing Richard of Gloucester emerges are quite clear. Richard appears in two plays that antedate Richard III: he plays a brief part in 2 Henry VI and one considerably more extensive in 3 Henry VI, which was written and performed sometime before September 1592, when Greene's Groatsworth of Wit was entered in the Stationers' Register. (A sentence from the invective aimed by Richard's father, the duke of York, at Margaret of Anjou-Oh Tygres Heart, wrapt in a Womans Hide [TLN 603; 1.4.137]1-had been extracted by Robert Greene and transformed into an attack on Shakespeare himself.) The assumption that 3 Henry VI must have preceded the composition of Richard III (usually dated about 1593 or 1594) has not been challenged.2