![]() Second, Cibber eliminated one of Shakespeare's greatest characters, Margaret of Anjou, who appears in all four plays, beginning (in T he First Part of Henry VI) as a young bride and ending (in Richard III) as a kind of living ghost, haunting and cursing the Yorks. ![]() ![]() ![]() First, he began with Richard murdering the Lancastrian king Henry VI, the penultimate scene in The Third Part of Henry VI, the play that precedes Richard III in Shakespeare's first tetralogy of history plays. In fact, Garrick was an eighteenth-century actor and Cibber an eighteenth-century playwright, and Olivier's reference to them gives us our first hint about the relationship between his movie and Shakespeare's play.įor almost two centuries, from the beginning of the eighteenth to the late nineteenth, the most familiar version of Richard III was by Colley Cibber, a theater manager, actor, and playwright best remembered as the Dunce in Alexander Pope's mock epic.Ĭibber made two large structural changes to Shakespeare's play. Laurence Olivier opens his 1955 Richard III with stirring tympani and trumpets and titles reading "Laurence Olivier Presents Richard III by William Shakespeare With some interpolations by David Garrick Colley Cibber etc." Viewers unfamiliar with English theater history might suppose that Garrick and Cibber were screenwriters and that the title resembles the one that supposedly opened the 1929 Taming of the Shrew with Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and Mary Pickford: "Written by William Shakespeare with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor." ( Erskine 341). ![]()
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