Becoming Shakespeare’s Richard III

In a new biography of Shakespeare’s leading man, scholar Siobhan Keenan explores Richard Burbage’s rise to stardom. In this excerpt from Richard Burbage and the Shakespearean Stage: A ‘Delightful Proteus’, we look at Burbage’s first signature role, Richard III.

Whatever the precise date or auspices for the revival, Richard III, and Burbage’s performance in it, proved impressively popular. The play was reprinted the following year (1598), as well as three more times in Burbage’s lifetime (1602, 1605, 1612) and Burbage’s performance prompted multiple contemporary allusions. These allusions include John Manningham’s bawdy 1602 anecdote about a play-going citizen’s wife who is reported to have arranged a secret assignation with Burbage after seeing him as Richard III:

Vpon a tyme when Burbidge played Rich. 3. there was a Citizen grewe soe farr in liking with him, that before shee went from the play shee appointed him to come that night vnto hir by the name of Ri: the 3. Shakespeare ouerhearing their conclusion went before, was intertained, and at his game ere Burbidge came. Then message being brought that Rich. the 3^d. was at the dore. Shakespeare caused returne to be made that William the Conquerour was before Rich. the 3.

Whether such an incident ever happened is debatable, but the fact that Manningham regards it as plausible points not only to Burbage’s fame in the role of Richard but also to his apparent charisma and sexual appeal in the part.

Burbage’s fame in the role of Richard is, likewise, suggested by the allusion to Shakespeare’s Richard III, Richard Burbage and Burbage’s fellow Chamberlain’s Man, Will Kemp in a university drama written around the same time as the Manningham anecdote. The allusion to the pair and the role of Shakespeare’s Richard III occurs in the final of three anonymous Parnassus plays performed by students at St John’s College, Cambridge between 1598 and 1602, known as The Return from Parnassus. The play, which focuses primarily on the experiences of two scholars, Philomusus and Studioso, and their attempts to make a living, briefly features Burbage and Kemp as characters for whom the two students audition. Burbage invites one of the students to perform the opening speech from Shakespeare’s Richard III, after the professional actor mischievously jokes about the student’s appearance suiting him for the part:

Bur.     I like your face and the proportion of your body for Richard the 3. I pray M.
Phil. let me see you act a little of it

Phil.    Now is the winter of our discontent,
Made glorious summer by the sonne of Yorke.

Although there is some implicit mockery of the professional players in the text, Burbage and Kemp had evidently become well known enough that the academic playwright expected them, and the role of Shakespeare’s Richard III, to be recognisable to his university audience.

We get a similar idea of the enduring impact of Burbage’s portrayal of Richard III from Richard Corbet’s Jacobean poem Iter Boreale. Not printed until 1647 but probably written in the early 1620s, the poem includes a joke about a host who inadvertently conflated Burbage and Richard during an account of the Battle of Bosworth, ‘For when he would have said, King Richard dy’d / And call’d a Horse, a Horse, he Burbage cry’d’. Not only does this suggest the extent to which Burbage’s performance dominated people’s memories of Richard III, but, as Alexander Leggatt observes, it illustrates how ‘for his generation’ Burbage did not simply act Richard, he ‘was Richard III’. Marvin Carlson reflects on the phenomenon whereby certain actors ‘create so strong a bond between’ themselves and a role ‘that for a generation or more all productions are haunted by the memory of that interpretation’. It would seem that this proved true of Burbage’s Richard. At the same time, Corbet’s poem, like the Parnassus play, highlights the personal celebrity Burbage had come to enjoy as an actor through his performance as Richard.

Although modern theorists of celebrity have often argued that it is a phenomenon that can only be traced back to the eighteenth century, more recent work in the field has acknowledged that aspects of celebrity culture and the concept of the ‘star’ can be traced earlier, including in the world of late Elizabethan theatre. Susan A. Cerasano has argued, for example, that the 1590s witnessed ‘the rise of the celebrity player’ in the shape of actors such as Edward Alleyn and Richard Burbage, a view echoed more recently by Jennifer Holl who writes of a ‘nascent celebrity culture in early modern London that flourished on the city’s stages and pages’ and, likewise, cites Alleyn and Burbage as examples of performers who ‘achieved remarkable celebrity in their lifetimes’.

But what was it about Burbage’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s ‘crookback’ king that made his performance so striking to contemporaries, to the extent that memories of previous (and later) performers of the role on the early modern stage appear to have been overshadowed by it? We have no eyewitness accounts of Burbage’s performances as Richard III to help us, but we perhaps find some clues to his fame in the part if we look more closely at the role and the qualities for which Burbage was to become celebrated as an actor. One of the most immediately striking features of the part is its size: it runs to over 1060 lines in the First Quarto, consists of nearly 9,000 words and features Richard in sixteen of its twenty-seven scenes. As one might anticipate, these facts make it one of the largest roles in the surviving corpus of early modern English plays. It is also one, if not the first, of a series of ‘outsized leads’ known to have been played by Burbage, offering the twenty-nine-year-old a uniquely extended opportunity to show off his acting skills.

Later accounts of Burbage’s acting emphasise his versatility as a performer, his lifelike performance and his talent for combining rhetoric, gestures and looks compellingly. Perhaps most famously, Restoration theatre historian Richard Flecknoe praised Burbage as a ‘delightful Proteus’, capable of ‘wholly transforming himself into his Part’, and as someone with ‘all the parts of an excellent Orator, (animating his words with speaking, and Speech with action)’. Burbage’s ability to charm the ‘attention’ of audiences and his talent for convincing impersonation are, likewise, celebrated in the character of ‘An excellent actor’ (thought to be modelled on Burbage) in Thomas Overbury’s Characters: ‘for what wee see him personate, wee thinke truly done before vs’. Richard III was a part ideally suited to the cultivation and display of these skills. It is, for example, a role which calls for an especially eloquent speaker—someone capable of moving the sympathy of would-be enemies such as Lady Anne—but also an actor who is capable of reinforcing his rhetoric with telling gestures or actions, as when Richard reinforces his performance of piety in scene 15 (Act 3 scene 7) accompanied by two clerics.

About the author

Siobhan Keenan is Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at De Montfort University, UK, where she is also Associate Dean Research and Innovation for the Arts, Design and Humanities Faculty. She is the author of several books on early modern theatre history and performance culture, including The Progresses, Processions and Royal Entries of King Charles I, 1625-1642 (2020), Acting Companies and their Plays in Shakespeare’s London (2014), and Travelling Players in Shakespeare’s England (2002).