SOURCE: Lull, Janis. Introduction to King Richard III, by William Shakespeare, edited by Janis Lull, pp. 1-41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

In the following excerpted introduction, Lull probes the sources of Richard III and studies Shakespeare's depiction of history, women, the figure of Richard, and the play's theme of determinism.

In the histories section of the First Folio, only Richard III is called a ‘tragedy’.¹ It unites the chronicle play, a form Shakespeare had developed in the three parts of Henry VI, with a tragic structure showing the rise and fall of a single protagonist. Like Christopher Marlowe's Dr Faustus, written at about the same time, Shakespeare's play concerns the damnation of an unrepentant soul, but Shakespeare also grapples with the problem of determinism. In his opening soliloquy, Richard says he is ‘determinèd to prove a villain’ (1.1.30), and the play develops this ambiguous statement into an exploration...