our stage. In every point of view it may be asserted that few more curious dramatic relics exist in our language. It is the most ancient printed specimen of composition for a public theatre, of which the subject was derived from English history.

BARRON FIELD (Introd., p. vi): Antiquity and priority to Shakespeare constituting the only interest of this piece, I have refrained from enforcing the metre and modernizing the spelling. . . and have made it, with the exception of palpable errors of the press, a fac-simile of the old edition, now reprinted through the liberality of His Grace the Duke of Devonshire, the owner of the copy. . . . I have in the notes pointed out several parallel ideas. The following line in the battle-scene is, in my opinion, quite enough to show that Shakespeare considered Nature, as Moliére said of Wit, as his property, and that he had a right to seize it wherever he found it. A horse, a horse, a fresh horse.' Collier's [remark in regard to that 'portion of the story in which the two plays make the nearest approach to each other'] should hardly be called strange in our dramatist, since it is authorized in the history by Sir Thomas More. [In regard to the authorship, Field shows that little reliance can be placed upon the resemblance between the passages from Locrine and the True Tragedie, suggested by Boswell, as the repetition of a word 'is one of the commonest artifices of rhetoric, and has been beautifully employed by Shakespeare himself in the Mer. of Ven., V, i, 193–202.']

VERPLANCK considers that 'beyond such straggling hints' as the line in the True Tragedie, 'A horse, a horse, a fresh horse!' and 'the substitution of the ghostscene, in place of Richard's dream of devils related by Hall,' Shakespeare was but little indebted to the older play.

W. W. LLOYD (Introd. Essay): On the whole, I think it quite within the range of possibility that the plays that are to be assumed as the ground-work of Shakespeare's Henry VI. emanated from the same author as this wild and disorderly play of Richard III. That Shakespeare knew this play there can be little doubt, partly from agreement in general course, though that was aided by common dependence on another source and still more from correspondence of terms and of tone in particular passages. . . . From the custom of the stage at the time, it is probable enough that this drama may have been altered and realtered frequently and very variously before Shakespeare took the subject in hand. With all its defects it is at least free from the affectation of classical allusions, and, comparatively so, from frigid inflation and bombast; and the honest attempt of the author to convey the story he had to tell with some variety and force, has been worthily rewarded by some of his thoughts, here a phrase and there a trait, being recollected by Shakespeare. As to any further comparison of versification, characterization, and design, it is, of course, out of the question entirely. [See also note by Lloyd on I, iv, 123.]

C. KNIGHT (Studies, etc.; p. 22): There is not a trace in the True Tragedie of Richard the Third, of the character of Shakespeare's Richard:-in that play he is a coarse ruffian only-an intellectual villain. The author has not even had the skill to copy the dramatic narrative of Sir Thomas More in the scene of the arrest of Hastings. It is sufficient for him to make Richard display the brute force of the tyrant. The affected complacency, the mock passion, the bitter sarcasm of the Richard of the historian, were left for Shakespeare to imitate and improve.

F. G. FLEAY (Biog. Chron. of English Drama, ii, 315): The True Tragedie was played at court (see prayer at end), and therefore cannot date later than 1591; but as it was evidently meant as a continuation of the series 1 Henry VI. and The Contention of York and Lancaster, it cannot be much earlier. . . . As to the authorship, I doubt not that the Induction is by Lodge; Sc. 1, 3, 4, 8, 11, 12, including the death of Edward IV., and the smothering of the Princes, seem to be Peele's; Sc. 2, 6, 7, 9, 13, 10, and 14-20 I attribute, as also the Epilogue to Lodge. . . . Indications are not wanting that it is founded on an earlier play in which Kyd had a hand. Note especially in Sc. 9 the phrase: 'Blood is a threatener and will have revenge'; Nash, when twitting Kyd with his Seneca phrases in the address before Menaphon, quotes as one of them, 'Blood is a beggar.'

G. B. CHURCHILL (p. 398): As a history play the True Tragedie is undoubtedly the first in which the interest is fixed upon one central and dominating figure. It is not the first to abandon the loose and unorganised method of writing chroniclehistories which spread out the events of a period in their historical succession without attempt at unity; for in the Edward II. of Marlowe these plays had already advanced to a point where the historical events are not detailed purely for their own sake, but are unified by their relation to a central figure, and where the history play becomes in a high degree a study of character. . . . The Richard of The True Tragedie is not only central but dominating, not merely attracts the chief interest, but absorbs practically all of it. The play is not the chronicle-history of a reign, it is purely the history of a character. [For an exhaustive account of the 'historical position, nature, and style of the True Tragedie,' see Churchill, pp. 398-496.]

THE

TRUE TRAGEDIE OF RI

CHARD THE THIRD:

Wherein is showne the death of Edward the fourth, with the smothering of the two yoong Princes in the Tower:

With a lamentable ende of Shores wife, an example
for all wicked women.

And lastly the coniunction and ioyning of the two noble Houses, Lancaster and Yorke.

Printed by Thomas Creede, and are to be sold by William Barley, at his shop in Newgate Market, neare Christ Church doore. 1594.

THE

TRUE TRAGEDIE OF RI

CHARD THE THIRD

Enters Truth and Poetrie. To them the Ghoast of George Duke of Clarence.

Ghost.

Cresse cruor sanguinis, satietur sanguine cresse,

Quod spero scitio. O scitio, scitio, vendicta.

Poetrie. Truth well met.

Truth. Thankes Poetrie, what makes thou vpon a stage?

Poet. Shadowes.

Truth. Then will I adde bodies to the shadowes,

Therefore depart and giue Truth leaue

To shew her pageant.

Poe. Why will Truth be a Player?

Truth. No, but Tragedia like for to present

A Tragedie in England done but late,

That will reuiue the hearts of drooping mindes.
Poe. Whereof?

Truth. Marry thus.

Richard Plantagenet of the House of Yorke,

Claiming the Crowne by warres, not by dissent,

Had as the Chronicles make manifest,

In the two and twentith yeare of Henry the sixth,
By act of Parliament intailed to him

The Crowne and titles to that dignitie,
And to his ofspring lawfully begotten,
After the decease of that forenamed King,
Yet not contented for to staie the time,
Made warres vpon King Henry then the sixth,
And by outrage suppressed that vertuous King,
And wonne the Crowne of England to himselfe,
But since at Wakefield in a battell pitcht,
Outragious Richard breathed his latest breath,
Leauing behind three branches of that line,
Three sonnes: the first was Edward now the King,
George of Clarence, and Richard Glosters Duke,
Then Henry claiming after his decease

His stile, his Crowne and former dignitie
Was quite suppressed, till this Edward the fourth.

Exit.