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Overwhelmingly, to be sure, critical attention to Richard III has focused on the title character. Indeed, as Mark Eccles notes, Richard speaks over a third of the plays' lines and appears in fourteen of twenty-five scenes--with five of his ten soliloquies occurring in the first three scenes--such that ''his shadow hangs over the rest.'' Thus, the play as a total creation merits judgment based on the single portrait of King Richard III.

In that Richard III began life in performance, then, the actors who have inhabited the character of Richard deserve discussion in the context of critical opinion. Indeed, at the turn of the nineteenth century, Nathan Drake asserted that the play had gained renown largely by virtue of the portrayals of the title character: ''The popularity of [Richard III], notwithstanding the moral enormity of its hero, may be readily accounted for, when we recollect that, the versatile and consummate hypocrisy of the tyrant has been embodied by the talents of such masterly performers as Garrick, Kemble, Cooke, and Kean.'' Regarding those men--all of whom graced the stage in the latter half of the eighteenth century or the beginning of the nineteenth-- Eccles confirms that David Garrick was ''the most brilliant actor of his time''; John Philip Kemble, as Richard, was ''stately and eloquent''; and George Frederick Cooke made the villain ''diabolical.'' Eccles offers especial praise for Edmund Kean, who distinguished himself as Richard in London beginning in 1814. After citing Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who said that watching Kean was like ''reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning,'' and John Keats, who lauded the actor's ''intense power of anatomizing the passions,'' Eccles offers his own assessment: ''The play gave Kean chances to display the whole range of his virtuosity: his violent passions, his pantherlike gaiety, his energy and power. In the last act he held his audience spellbound. His awakening from his nightmare sent a shudder of terror through the spectators.'' Shakespeare is understood to have had Richard Burbage, one of the leading actors in his own company, in mind when he conceived of the role of King Richard III--and if the playwright had not had access to Burbage's talent, he might have written that role quite differently.

Regarding the role itself, A. P. Rossiter finds Richard to be ''a huge triumphant stage personality, an early old masterpiece of the art of rhetorical stage writing, a monstrous being incredible in any sober, historical scheme of things.'' Similarly, Morton J. Frisch declares,

Shakespeare has performed the extraordinary feat of presenting the serpentine wisdom of the tyrannic soul in such a way that it cannot fail to excite our sensibilities. In the satisfaction we receive in contemplating the character of Richard, in the various situations in which Shakespeare has shown him, it is almost as if we lost sight of the cold-blooded, calculating tyrant whose ugly soul is overshadowed and even to some extent obscured by the marvelous play of his intellect.

In turn, William E. Sheriff praises the portrayal of Richard for its prodigious fusion of tragedy and comedy: ''As the dramatist developed in his handling of the English history play genre, he obviously became more adept at using comic elements to enrich his work. He dared to portray his most wicked king as his most comic king.'' Rossiter, too, highlights Richard's comedic traits in the context of his theatricality: ''Through his prowess as actor and his embodiment of the comic Vice and impish-to-fiendish humor, he offers the false as more attractive than the true (the actor's function), and the ugly and evil as admirable and amusing (the clown's game of value reversals).'' Indeed, from almost every imaginable perspective, critics have praised and wondered at the extraordinary, sometimes paradoxical complexity of Shakespeare's King Richard III.

The play Richard III is often considered in its context in Shakespeare's First Tetralogy, where it is the closing entry, following the three parts of Henry VI. August Wilhelm von Schlegel, quoted by Howard Staunton in The Complete Illustrated Shakespeare, asserts that in terms of tone and content, the four do function together as a unified work. Comparing the quality of Henry VI, Part Three and Richard III, E. M. W. Tillyard gives the latter qualified praise: ''In style the play is better sustained than its predecessor. There is less undifferentiated stuff, and the finest pieces of writing (as distinguished from the finest scenes) are more dramatic.'' Tillyard speaks less enthusiastically about the overall length and pace of the play in light of Shakespeare's artistic endurance, contending, ''Richard's plotting with Buckingham and his acquisition of the throne though strongly organized must have tired Shakespeare. There are even signs of strain in the last stage of the process when Richard appears between the two bishops; the verse droops somewhat. After this . . . the vitality flags, except in patches.'' Other commentators offer similar criticism of minor or peripheral aspects of the play. Rossiter notes that certain scenes, like the collective lamentation of Queens Margaret and Elizabeth and the Duchess of York, constitute such contrived ''quasi-realistic costume-play stuff'' that ''even editors have found the proceedings absurd.'' Overall, however, critics have expressed great appreciation for this fairly early Shakespearean history.

Bibliography:

Eccles, Mark, ''Introduction,'' in The Tragedy of Richard the Third, by William Shakespeare, edited by Mark Eccles, Signet Classic, 1988, pp. lxiii-lxxi.

Frisch, Morton J., ''Shakespeare's Richard III and the Soul of the Tyrant,'' originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Vol. 20, No. 3, Spring 1993, pp. 275-84.

Rossiter, A. P., ''Angel with Horns: The Unity of Richard III,'' in Angel with Horns and Other Shakespeare Lectures, Longmans, 1961, pp. 1-22.

Shakespeare, William, The Tragedy of Richard the Third, edited by Mark Eccles, Signet Classic, 1988.

Sheriff, William E., ''The Grotesque Comedy of Richard III,'' originally published in Studies in the Literary Imagination, Vol. 5, No. 1, April 1972, pp. 51-64.

Tillyard, E. M. W., ''Richard III,'' originally published in Shakespeare's History Plays, Chatto & Windus, 1944, pp. 198-214.

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