Act One: The Winter of Our Discontent · Richard III

The long civil war between the Houses of York and Lancaster was over. The Yorkists had won; Edward IV, of York, was king. And his youngest brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, came out alone on a London street and spoke to us:

"Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York; and all the clouds that loured upon our house in the deep bosom of the ocean buried. Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths . . . Grim-visaged war hath smoothed his wrinkled front; and now, instead of mounting barbèd steeds to fright the souls of fearful adversaries, he capers nimbly in a lady's chamber to the lascivious pleasing of a lute.

"But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks, nor made to court an amorous looking-glass; I, that am rudely stamped . . . cheated of feature by dissembling nature, deformed, unfinished, sent before my time into this breathing world, scarce half made up, and that so lamely and unfashionable that dogs bark at me as I halt by them — why, I, in this weak piping time of peace, have no delight to pass away the time, unless to spy my shadow in the sun and descant on mine own deformity. And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover, to entertain these fair well-spoken days, I am determinèd to prove a villain, and hate the idle pleasures of these days."

He had laid plots already. He had set the King against their brother George, Duke of Clarence, by a prophecy that "G" should murder the King's heirs. And here came Clarence now, under guard, on his way to the Tower. Richard pretended sympathy, and blamed the Queen's family — Queen Elizabeth's brother Lord Rivers, her sons by her first marriage, Dorset and Grey. "Well, your imprisonment shall not be long; I will deliver you, or else lie for you." When Clarence had gone: "Simple, plain Clarence! I do love thee so that I will shortly send thy soul to heaven."

The King was sick; if he died, Richard meant to marry Lady Anne — the widow of the Lancastrian Prince Edward, whom Richard had killed, and daughter-in-law of King Henry VI, whom Richard had also killed.

And there she was: Lady Anne, following the coffin of Henry VI through the street, mourning, cursing his murderer. Richard stopped the procession. She cursed him to his face: "Foul devil, for God's sake, hence, and trouble us not . . . O, gentlemen, see, see! dead Henry's wounds open their congealed mouths and bleed afresh!" — the old belief that a murdered body bleeds in the presence of its murderer. Richard answered with flattery, with wit, with an argument for every curse: it was her beauty that had caused the deaths; he had killed her husband to win her. "Was ever woman in this humour wooed?" She spat at him. He offered her his sword, and bared his breast: "Nay, do not pause; for I did kill King Henry, but 'twas thy beauty that provokèd me. Nay, now dispatch; 'twas I that stabbed young Edward, but 'twas thy heavenly face that set me on." She could not do it. He gave her his ring; she took it.

When she had gone, he gloated:

"Was ever woman in this humour wooed? Was ever woman in this humour won? I'll have her; but I will not keep her long." He, who had killed her husband and her father-in-law, had won her, with nothing to back his suit but the plain devil and dissembling looks. "I'll be at charges for a looking-glass."

At the palace, the Queen and her kin were anxious about the King's health, and about Richard, who hated them. Richard burst in, complaining that they had slandered him to the King: "Cannot a plain man live and think no harm, but thus his simple truth must be abused?" They quarrelled bitterly; and into the middle of it came old Queen Margaret, the widow of Henry VI, the Lancastrian queen, who had stayed in England like a ghost. She cursed them all — the Yorkists who had killed her husband and son: may the Queen outlive her glory and die neither mother, wife, nor England's queen; may Rivers, Dorset, Hastings die by some unlooked accident; and Richard — "Thou elvish-marked, abortive, rooting hog!" — let the worm of conscience gnaw his soul. She warned Buckingham, Richard's ally, to beware of him. Nobody heeded her.

Margaret's curses come true, one by one, through the rest of the play.

In the Tower, Clarence woke from a terrible dream: he had dreamed that he was drowning, and saw the bottom of the sea strewn with wrecks and skulls and jewels; and that after death he passed to the kingdom of perpetual night, where the ghosts of those he had betrayed in the wars accused him. Two murderers came in, sent by Richard with a warrant. One of them hesitated — "Some certain dregs of conscience are yet within me." Clarence woke, and pleaded with them, and told them his brother Richard would reward them for sparing him. "Ay, millstones, as he lessoned us to weep." They stabbed him, and drowned his body in a butt of malmsey wine.

Clarence's murder is told here in a line.