“Richard, Solus”: Richard III on the American Stage in the 18th and 19th Centuries

Abstract

Abstract: Richard III was the most popular Shakespearean play on the American stage in the 18th and 19th centuries. So far, scholarship on this popularity has been mostly centered around the original play by Shakespeare, overlooking the fact that the stage performance at that time was actually based on a script adapted by Colley Cibber in the late 17th century. By removing the historical theme from Shakespeare's play, Cibber's version places Richard at the very center of the play and converts the history play to a personal tragedy. Although Cibber had not the American stage in mind at the time of the adaptation, his Richard III nevertheless appealed to the spirit of individualism in American values, and corresponded well to the operational mode of the American stage and the aesthetic taste of its audience in the 18th and 19th centuries, making it a sensational success at the time. While Cibber's adaptation is admittedly of limited literary value in itself, it is still worth studying because its popularity in the US offers contemporary readers a chance to observe the multiplication of intentions in the production and dissemination of early modern literary texts.

Key words: Richard III, Cibber, adaptation, US, intentions

Chen Xing. “Richard, Solus”: Richard III on the American Stage in the 18th and 19th Centuries[J]. Foreign Literature Studies, 2022, 44(2): 120-134.

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