Richard III (1699 Play) - Reception

Reception

The date of the first performance of Cibber’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of King Richard III is not known. But the Dedication of the play (dated February 1699/1700) and the Term Catalogues as well as advertisements, which all appeared in February and March 1699/1700, show that the latest possible month for the production would have been January 1700.

As Lincoln’s Inn Fields was performing the play 1 Henry IV in December 1699, it is very likely that Cibber’s The Tragical History of King Richard III was also performed in the last month of the year 1699 in order to offer an equivalent.

What is known for sure is the fact that Cibber’s play was first staged at Drury Lane Theatre. After the première the play was staged again in February and March 1700 before its performance was discontinued. Cibber’s play was not staged again for the next four years. It made its first reappearance on the stage in 1704 and had to wait again for another six years before being taken back into the performance circuit in 1710. It can be said that the play took at least 10 years to become established. The adaptation therefore did not suffer of being a failure for too long. Only a few years later the play became a huge success, which it remained for nearly two hundred years up to the nineteenth century. This is also reflected in the editions of this play published in the eighteenth century. After 1731 the play was frequently reprinted and published, which shows a huge demand and interest in this play. (For further details see Appendix A).

In between the years 1714 to 1749 it was at least performed for 170 times in different theatres. (Kavenik, 1995: 119) The quantity of performances rose even further after the year 1749. According to the author Kavenik, who concentrated on collecting information on Restoration Drama plays, Richard III was staged for 241 times between 1747 and 1779. This meant an immense increase.

Appendix B shows the huge increase of the number of performances of this play with the year 1710. The popularity of the play is also reflected by the presence of the Prince and Princess at the performance on 27 January 1715 in Drury Lane Theatre.

All performances referred to in Appendix B were based on Cibber’s adaptation The Tragical History of Richard III. Nevertheless, different directors tried to return to the original version in the eighteen hundreds. Their attempts were granted with an outcry of society. Macready attempted to reintroduce more of the original text into the play in 1821 but was unsuccessful. The disappointment of the audience forced him to return to Cibber’s more familiar version of the play. Twenty-three years later, Samuel Phelps launched a similar attempt at Sadler’s Well; he was equally unsuccessful. The public opinion did not change until as late as the turn of the eighteenth century. Even then Samuel French stated Cibber’s version of the play as the “acting version” of the plot.

Consequently, the fact that Cibber’s adaptation was performed on stages up to the later half of the nineteenth century underlines this. (Owen, 2001: 282) Later in the century a movement back to the original Shakespearean version took place, which might be due to the people’s arousing interest in original texts. From this point on Cibber’s adaptation vanished from the stages and also from people’s minds. This situation lasts up to today.

It took two centuries to change critical and audience opinion and to make a staging of the original script possible again. The once discredited original now rules the stage unchallenged. Cibber's version, which was the most oft-produced "Shakespeare" play in nineteenth century America, cannot be found on stage any longer. Some directors thought it a good idea to preserve some of Cibber’s most famous lines, such as "Off with his head! So much for Buckingham.", (act four, last scene) which fit into the original version quite nicely.