Richard III (play)
Shakespearean history play
The Tragedy of Richard the Third, often shortened to Richard III, is a play by William Shakespeare, which depicts the Machiavellian rise to power and subsequent short reign of King Richard III of England.
It was probably written c. 1592–1594. It is labelled a history in the First Folio and is usually considered one. In the quarto edition and elsewhere it is a listed as tragedy given its meditations on conscience, decision making, and death. Richard III concludes Shakespeare's first tetralogy which also contains Henry VI, Part 1, Henry VI, Part 2, and Henry VI, Part 3.
It is the second longest play in the Shakespearean canon by word count and the fourth longest by number of lines, as well as the longest of the First Folio. Hamlet, otherwise the longest, is shorter than its quarto counterpart. The play is often abridged for brevity, and peripheral characters removed. In such cases, extra lines are often invented or added from elsewhere to establish the nature of the characters' relationships. Shakespeare also assumed his audiences' familiarity with his Henry VI plays, frequently referring to them.
The public source identifies “Richard III (play)” as shakespearean history play. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Richard, play and Shakespearean.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q652011. VIAF identifies the subject as 192632325. The Library of Congress control number is n82015147. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1592 and 1594.
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This entry incorporates text from “Richard III (play)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.