To shed obsequious tears upon this trunk.

(Kissing Titus) O, take this warm kiss on thy pale cold

lips,

These sorrowful drops upon thy bloodstained face,

The last true duties of thy noble son.

MARCUS (kissing Titus)

Tear for tear, and loving kiss for kiss,

Thy brother Marcus tenders on thy lips.

O, were the sum of these that I should pay

Countless and infinite, yet would I pay them.

LUCIUS (to young Lucius)

Come hither, boy, come, come, and learn of us

To melt in showers. Thy grandsire loved thee well.

Many a time he danced thee on his knee,

Sung thee asleep, his loving breast thy pillow.

Many a story hath he told to thee,

And bid thee bear his pretty tales in mind,

And talk of them when he was dead and gone.

MARCUS

How many thousand times hath these poor lips,

When they were living, warmed themselves on thine!

O now, sweet boy, give them their latest kiss.

Bid him farewell. Commit him to the grave.

Do them that kindness, and take leave of them.

YOUNG LUCIUS (kissing Titus)

O grandsire, grandsire, ev’n with all my heart

Would I were dead, so you did live again.

O Lord, I cannot speak to him for weeping.

My tears will choke me if I ope my mouth.

Enter some with Aaron

A ROMAN

You sad Andronici, have done with woes.

Give sentence on this execrable wretch

That hath been breeder of these dire events.

LUCIUS

Set him breast-deep in earth and famish him.

There let him stand, and rave, and cry for food.

If anyone relieves or pities him,

For the offence he dies. This is our doom.

Some stay to see him fastened in the earth.

AARON

Ah, why should wrath be mute and fury dumb?

I am no baby, I, that with base prayers

I should repent the evils I have done.

Ten thousand worse than ever yet I did

Would I perform if I might have my will.

If one good deed in all my life I did

I do repent it from my very soul.

LUCIUS

Some loving friends convey the Emperor hence,

And give him burial in his father’s grave.

My father and Lavinia shall forthwith

Be closed in our household’s monument.

As for that ravenous tiger, Tamora,

No funeral rite nor man in mourning weed,

No mournful bell shall ring her burial;

But throw her forth to beasts and birds to prey.

Her life was beastly and devoid of pity,

And being dead, let birds on her take pity.

Exeunt with the bodies

ADDITIONAL PASSAGES

A. AFTER 1.1.35

The following passage, found in the First Quarto following a comma after ‘field’ but not included in the Second or Third Quartos or the Folio, conflicts with the subsequent action and presumably should have been deleted. (In the second line, Q1 reads ’of that’ for ‘of the’.)

and at this day

To the monument of the Andronici

Done sacrifice of expiation,

And slain the noblest prisoner of the Goths.

B. AFTER 1.1.283

The following passage found in the quartos and the Folio is difficult to reconcile with the apparent need for Saturninus and his party to leave the stage at 275.1-2 before entering ‘above’ at 294.2-4. It is omitted from our text in the belief that Shakespeare intended it to be deleted after adding the episode of Mutius’ killing to his original draft, and that the printers of Q1 included it by accident.

⌈TITUS⌉

Treason, my lord! Lavinia is surprised.

SATURNINUS

Surprised, by whom?

BASSIANUS

By him that justly may

Bear his betrothed from all the world away.

C. AFTER 4.3.93

The following lines, found in the early texts, appear to be a draft of the subsequent six lines.

MARCUS (to Titus) Why, sir, that is as fit as can be to serve for your oration, and let him deliver the pigeons to the Emperor from you.

TITUS (to the Clown) Tell me, can you deliver an oration to the Emperor with a grace?

CLOWN Nay, truly, sir, I could never say grace in all my life.

RICHARD III

IN narrative sequence, Richard III follows directly after Richard Duke of York, and that play’s closing scenes, in which Richard of Gloucester expresses his ambitions for the crown, suggest that Shakespeare had a sequel in mind. But he seems to have gone back to tell the beginning of the story of Henry VI’s reign before covering the events from Henry VI’s death (in 1471) to the Battle of Bosworth (1485). We have no record of the first performance of Richard III (probably in late 1592 or early 1593, outside London); it was printed in 1597, with five reprints before its inclusion in the 1623 Folio.

The principal source of information about Richard III available to Shakespeare was Sir Thomas More’s History of King Richard III as incorporated in chronicle histories by Edward Hall (1542) and Raphael Holinshed (1577, revised in 1587), both of which Shakespeare seems to have used. His artistic influences include the tragedies of the Roman dramatist Seneca (who was born about 4 BC and died in AD 65), with their ghosts, their rhetorical style, their prominent choruses, and their indirect, highly formal presentation of violent events. (Except for the stabbing of Clarence (1.4) there is no on-stage violence in Richard III until the final battle scenes.)

In this play, Shakespeare demonstrates a more complete artistic control of his historical material than in its predecessors: Richard himself is a more dominating central figure than is to be found in any of the earlier plays, historical events are freely manipulated in the interests of an overriding design, and the play’s language is more highly patterned and rhetorically unified. That part of the play which shows Richard’s bloody progress to the throne is based on the events of some twelve years; the remainder covers the two years of his reign. Shakespeare omits some important events, but invents Richard’s wooing of Lady Anne over her father-in-law’s coffin, and causes Queen Margaret, who had returned to France in 1476 and who died before Richard became king, to remain in England as a choric figure of grief and retribution. The characterization of Richard as a self-delighting ironist builds upon More. The episodes in which the older women of the play—the Duchess of York, Queen Elizabeth, and Queen Margaret—bemoan their losses, and the climactic procession of ghosts before the final confrontation of Richard with the idealized figure of Richmond, the future Henry VII, help to make Richard III the culmination of a tetralogy as well as a masterly poetic drama in its own right. The final speech, in which Richmond, heir to the house of Lancaster and grandfather of Queen Elizabeth I, proclaims the union of ‘the white rose and the red’ in his marriage to Elizabeth of York, provides a patriotic climax which must have been immensely stirring to the play’s early audiences.