The True Tragedy of Richard III

The play was entered into the Stationers' Register on 19 June 1594; it appeared in print later that year, in a quarto printed and published by Thomas Creede and sold by the stationer William Barley, "at his shop in Newgate Market, near Christ Church door." In addition to Creede's 1594 quarto, another edition of the play was "Printed at London by W.W. for Thomas Millington and are to be sold at his shoppe under Saint Peters Church in Cornewall, 1600." [3] This is likely Cornhill; "under' meaning below, since it is on a hill. No further editions are known prior to the nineteenth century. [4]

Only three copies of the play are known to have survived, all of which are now in the US.[5] One copy can be found in the Carl Pforzheimer library at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas,[6] one is at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.,[7] and the third can be found in the Huntington Library in California.[8]

W. W. Greg prepared a modern edition of the play for the Malone Society; it was published in 1929 primarily from the Pforzheimer copy.

"The question of date is confused and unsettled."[9] Most scholars and critics, relying on internal clues in the text, have estimated a date of authorship within a year or two of 1590, though dates as early as c. 1585 have also been posited.[10]

The title page of the 1594 quarto states that the play was acted by The Queen Majesties Players. The title page of the 1600 quarto states that the play was acted "sundry" times by the "Right Honourable the Earle of Pembrooke his servantes". Any date of authorship for The True Tragedy in the mid-to-late 1580s to the early 1590s would be compatible with performance by the Queen's Men.

Critics generally judge the author of The True Tragedy to have been influenced by Thomas Legge's Latin play Richardus Tertius (c. 1580) — though that relationship is of little help in dating the True Tragedy.

Apart from the question of Richardus Tertius, the author of The True Tragedy relied upon the standard historical sources of his generation for the story of Richard — principally Edward Hall's chronicle on the Wars of the Roses, and the chronicle by John Hardyng later continued by Richard Grafton.

While The True Tragedy clearly belongs to the genre of the Elizabethan history play, some critics have also pointed out its relationship with the revenge tragedy.

There is no external attribution of authorship for The True Tragedy; and the question of authorship is complicated by the fact that the single text of the play, the 1594 quarto, is notably inferior. Modern critics have tended to treat it as a bad quarto and a "reported text." Individual commentators have nominated Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Lodge, George Peele, and Thomas Kyd, among other writers of their generation, as possible authors or revisers of the play; but no scholarly consensus in favour of any single candidate or hypothesis has evolved.[11]

The True Tragedy bears a general resemblance to Shakespeare's Richard III, as any play on the same subject would. Critics are not unanimous on the view that Shakespeare used The True Tragedy as a source for his play, though the majority tend to favour this judgement. Geoffrey Bullough treats The True Tragedy as a "probable source" for Richard III, citing several commonalities (as when, in both plays, Richard calls for a horse on Bosworth Field (1485), yet refuses to flee the battle) — though Bullough admits that the nature of the plays' relationship is "not clear."[12]

The uncertainty in dating has allowed a few commentators to propose a reversed priority, and to argue that the author (or reviser) of The True Tragedy may have borrowed from Shakespeare's play.[13]

Shakespeare appears to have known of The True Tragedy, since he paraphrases it in Hamlet, III,ii,254, "the croaking raven doth bellow for revenge." Line 1892 in The True Tragedy reads "The screeking raven sits croking for revenge."

Unlike Shakespeare, "The True Tragedy" has no act or scene division.

• The text online