Richard III and his historical legacy

Garrick and Kean as Richard III

David Garrick in the eighteenth century and Edmund Kean in the early nineteenth would both make their reputations on performing the title role in Shakespeare's Richard III, but as with the stage history of King Lear in the same time period, they were not performing Shakespeare's text unaltered but in the adaptation of former poet laureate (and Alexander Pope's King of the Dunces) Colley Cibber. Nicoll relates that Garrick became an overnight sensation playing the crook-backed usurper: the morning after his debut, Garrick wrote to his brother "Last Night I play'd Richard ye Third to ye Surprize of Every Body & as I shall make very near 300 pounds p Annum by It & as it is really what I doat upon I am resolv'd to pursue it" (Nicoll 1). Meanwhile Green notes that "Richard III was Kean's most popular role, and he played it more than any other, using it to open many of his London seasons and virtually every new engagement in England and also in America during his tours there in 1820 and 1825" (510).

As a way of contrasting their styles, we may look at differing accounts of how each actor played the scene which contains the play's (arguably) most famous line. Garrick's biographer of 1801, Arthur Murphy, describes how Garrick had performed the battlefield scene:

The audience saw an exact imitation of nature… He was then on the eve of a battle, and in spite of all the terror of conscience, his courage mounted to a blaze. When in Bosworth field he roared out "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!" All was rage, fury, and almost reality. (Murphy 17)

Meanwhile William Hazlitt -- who was a great admirer of Kean -- described his performance in the final act in passing while describing the extraordinary popular acclaim Kean was receiving for the role: "If you had not been to see the little man twenty times in Richard, and did not deny his being hoarse in the last act, or admire him for being so, you were looked on as a lukewarm devotee, or half an infidel!" Kean played the final act with mounting energy, but overall Hazlitt's fellow critic Leigh Hunt would describe Kean's Richard as a "gloomy and reflective villain, rendered so by the united effect of his deformity and his subtle-mindedness" (Wood 122).

Another excellent point of comparison, well described in the surviving sources which offer details of both Kean's and Garrick's performance, comes at the moment when Richard finally turns upon his toady the Duke of Buckingham, having heard of his capture and not caring for his fate. (We will look in vain for the moment described in Shakespeare's text, for the dialogue here was Cibber's addition.) Wood quotes Davies' 1780 biography of Garrick for a description of how he played this moment: