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...

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…