Richard III (1699 play)

The end of the play reflects the accession to the throne of the Earl of Richmond, descendant of the Tudor family and future King Henry VII.

In Cibber's version the years 1471–1485, during which Richard gained power and was able to rise to the throne of England, are presented to the audience in five acts.

Richard has powerful kinsmen of Edward's wife, the Queen consort Elizabeth Woodville, arrested and executed, which leaves the two young princes unprotected.

In the fourth act, Richard has his political allies, particularly his right-hand man, Lord Buckingham, campaign to have himself crowned king.

In the battle on the following morning, Richard is killed, and Richmond is crowned King Henry VII, which concludes the fifth act.

Even though Cibber takes fewer than 800 lines from Shakespeare, he stays for the most part with the original design, mainly adapting the plot to make it more suitable for the Orange stage, as well as performable in less than two hours.

One example is the conversation between Lady Anne and Richard in the second act, after the death of King Henry VI, in St. Paul's Cathedral.

However, Cibber reduces the interplay between the dead and still living characters by allowing the ghosts to appear only before Richard and not Richmond.

Unlike Shakespeare's version, the ghosts of Rivers, Grey, Vaughan, Hastings—servants to the Queen—and Richard's brother George Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence, do not emerge on stage.

He points out Richard's intent to kill his nephews by having the Duke talk to Sir James Tyrrell about the murders.

Another reason for the censorship lies in the fear that the rewritten first act might show parallels to James II and might create sympathy for him.

The prohibition to stage the play entirely caused its commercial failure, as well as a financial disaster for Drury Lane Theatre in the first years after the premier.

Around the middle of the eighteenth century, David Garrick began to establish himself at the London stages, and eventually became one of the most widely known actors for the role of Richard III.

In 1745, William Hogarth, generally considered the most influential painter of his generation, painted Garrick in his role as Richard III.

The painting shows Richard III in the tent scene,[10] in which he is haunted by the ghosts of people he has killed on his path to the throne.

The night before the decisive battle at Bosworth Field is presented on stage in a luxurious tent in which Richard tries to find some peace and quiet.

In the same way that Garrick's performance marked an important step in the eighteenth-century revival of Shakespeare, so Hogarth's work represents a crucial development in the evolution of history painting during the period.

Hogarth's portrayal, which draws on Charles Le Brun's celebrated version of Family of Darius before Alexander the Great, shows the halting steps by both actors and artists to achieve an historically exact rendering of the past.

Though such an accessory as armour, specially loaned from the Tower of London, is included in the left foreground, and Garrick is shown without his wig, his vaguely Elizabethan costume points to the relatively approximate sense of period which still dominated the British stage.

Famed for his naturalistic acting style, Garrick is displayed frozen with fear in a pose familiar from pictorial manuals on gesture and expression, a source widely used by Georgian actors to achieve appropriate dramatic effect.

Midway between a theatrical portrait and an historical rendering of an episode from the nation's past, Hogarth's work offers insight into 18th-century stagecraft.

At the same time, it represents an important episode in the pictorial reconstruction of British history which so preoccupied both Hogarth's contemporaries and his successors.

A frenetic and lively manner characterised Kean's style of performance, but his tendency to drink too much before coming to work caused rumour and criticism.

Before he began to establish himself on the London stages he earned his living on the roads as a strolling actor, similar to the life his parents had led.