ABSTRACT
Polonius, ever ready to expatiate upon the obvious, would inform us that the dramatic repertory has many different genres; it could encompass such hybrid modalities as the “tragical-comical-historical-pastoral.” Tragedy and comedy had set up their classic polarity, but they were not turning out to be mutually exclusive, and the ever-widening middle ground offered room for multiform possibilities. The decisive business of the histories — civic, conspiratorial, military — falls within the unrelenting conflicts of man’s world. Yet Richard has a surprising way with women, as he demonstrates in his hectic courtship of Lady Anne, an episode of Shakespeare’s own invention. With the departure of Richmond’s battalions, leaving the last words before the battle to be uttered in Richard’s camp, Shakespeare reversed the sequence of the historical narrators, for whom the ascendancy of Richmond would be the climax.
