

Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (1851), by John Faed; oil on canvas, 53 x 68 inches, collection of Mr. and Mrs. Sandor Korein

L ook here upon this picture, and on this: Shakespeare’s Richard III and Richard II, the first written in 1592 or 1593, the second in 1595. The title characters are very different: Richard III dominates his play, which is constructed as a series of dramatic tableaux heavily indebted to Senecan rhetoric modulated through Kyd, Marlowe, and other popular dramatists of the early 1590s, while Richard II exists as part of a network of character relationships...