Richard III’s opening lines are also their most familiar: ‘Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York’ (1.1.1–2). Their recognizability may obscure just how unusual they are. Richard is the only one of Shakespeare’s major characters to begin his own play. You may recall – perhaps you’ve experienced this in the theatre – the bewilderingly oblique way Shakespeare tends to begin his plays, via marginal characters whom we struggle to place as they recount or anticipate some major narrative event in a conversation that begins in the middle, leaving us flailing
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