He almost certainly created the title role for Richard Burbage, the leading tragedian of Shakespeare's time.

Judging by the number of reprints, Hamlet appears to have been Shakespeare's fourth most popular play during his lifetime — only Henry IV Part 1, Richard III and Pericles eclipsed it.

House of Cards draws heavily from Shakespeare's Macbeth and Richard III, both of which examine issues of power, ambition and corruption.

After Collingridge's resignation, Urquhart — in imitation of Shakespeare's Richard of Gloucester — at first feigns unwillingness to stand before announcing his candidacy.

Sam Mendes directed Spacey in a Shakespeare's Richard III.

Here is an example from Shakespeare's Richard III:

After his death, Richard's image was blackened by his Tudor successors, culminating in the famous portrayal of him in Shakespeare's play Richard III as a physically deformed machiavellian villain who cheerfully commits numerous murders in order to claw his way to power.

The anonymous play The True Tragedy of Richard III ( c1590 ), performed in the same decade as Shakespeare's work, was probably an influence on Shakespeare.

Perhaps the best-known film adaptation of Shakespeare's play Richard III is the 1955 version directed and produced by Sir Laurence Olivier, who also played the lead role.

In the 1960 BBC series based on Shakespeare's history plays, An Age of Kings, Paul Daneman played Richard.

To highlight his evil and villainous rise to power, Ui is compared to Shakespeare's Richard III and Macbeth in both the introductory prologue and in scene 14 when he experiences similar visitations from the ghosts of his victims as Richard and Macbeth do ; while Hitler's own learned prowess at public speaking is referenced by Ui receiving lessons from an actor which include him reciting Mark Antony's famous speech from Julius Caesar.

Between 1512 and 1519, Thomas More worked on a History of King Richard III, which was never finished, but which greatly influenced William Shakespeare's play Richard III.

Both More's and Shakespeare's works are controversial to contemporary historians for their unflattering portrait of King Richard III, a bias partly due to both authors ' allegiance to the reigning Tudor dynasty that wrested the throne from Richard III in the Wars of the Roses.

* March 11 – After having opened in London the previous year, Laurence Olivier's film, Richard III, adapted from Shakespeare's play, has its U. S. premiere in theatres and on NBC Television on the same day.

* December 9 – Probable first performance of William Shakespeare's Richard II.

Shakespeare's plays about the lives of kings, such as Richard III and Henry V, belong to this category, as do Christopher Marlowe's Edward II and George Peele's Famous Chronicle of King Edward the First.

Thomas More wrote that the princes were smothered to death with their pillows, and his account forms the basis of William Shakespeare's play Richard III, in which Tyrrell murders the princes on Richard's orders.

" Richard Field, Shakespeare's first publisher and printer, was a Stratford man, probably a friend of Shakespeare, and the two produced an excellent text.

One, advanced by Katherine Elwes Thomas in 1930 and adopted by Robert Ripley, posits that Humpty Dumpty is King Richard III of England, depicted in Tudor histories, and particularly in Shakespeare's play, as humpbacked and who was defeated, despite his armies at Bosworth Field in 1485.

Burton showed a subtle flair for comedy in a 1970 guest appearance with Elizabeth Taylor on the sitcom Here's Lucy, where he recited, in a plumber's uniform, a haunting excerpt of a speech from Shakespeare's Richard II.

He is also remembered as the character in William Shakespeare's play Richard III who was drowned in a vat of Malmsey wine.

( In Shakespeare's Richard III, he is framed for treason by Richard.

It may be that the events of 1054 are responsible for the idea, which appears in Shakespeare's play, that Malcolm III was put in power by the English.

In Act 3, Scene VI of Shakespeare's Macbeth ( c. 1603 – 06 ) Lennox refers to Edward as " the most pious Edward ," and in Act 4, Scene III, Malcolm describes his powers of healing those afflicted with " the evil ", or scrofula.

Anne appears in three scenes in William Shakespeare's Richard III, in the early scenes when Richard persuades her to marry him, in one brief scene just before Richard's coronation, and towards the end of the play as a ghost.

The title is taken from Act III, Scene III of Shakespeare's Othello:

In 1958, he won an Obie Award for his performances in Children of Darkness ( in which he made the first of many appearances opposite his future wife, actress Colleen Dewhurst ), for As You Like It, and for playing the title character in William Shakespeare's Richard III ( a performance one critic said was the " angriest " Richard III of all time ).

Shakespeare's Shylock, too, is of dubious value in the modern world.

This clergyman should have referred to Shakespeare's dictum: `` So-so is a good, very good, very excellent maxim.

* Shakespeare's Hamlet is an anagram for the Danish Prince Amleth.

* Lord Abergavenny is a character in William Shakespeare's play Henry VIII.

Banquo is a character in William Shakespeare's 1606 play Macbeth.

Why Shakespeare's Banquo is so different from the character described by Holinshed and Boece is not known, though critics have proposed several possible explanations.

Helsingør (; often known in English-speaking countries by Shakespeare's spelling Elsinore ) is a city and the municipal seat of Helsingør Municipality on the northeast coast of the island of Zealand in eastern Denmark.

It is known internationally for its castle Kronborg, where William Shakespeare's play Hamlet is set.

He was " the creator of ... that cage which is the theatre of Shakespeare's Othello, Racine's Phèdre, of Ibsen and Strindberg ," in which "... imprisoned men and women destroy each other by the intensity of their loves and hates ", and yet he was also the literary ancestor of comic dramatists as diverse as Menander and George Bernard Shaw.

Middle High German has a feminine singular elbe and a plural elbe, elber, but the word becomes very rare, mostly surviving in the adjective elbisch, and is replaced by the English form elf, elfen via 18th century German translations of Shakespeare's A Midsummernight's Dream.

In addition to the anonymous The Famous Victories of Henry V, in which Oldcastle is Henry V's companion, Oldcastle's history is described in Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles, Shakespeare's usual source for his histories.

Guilt is a main theme in John Steinbeck's East of Eden, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Tennessee Williams ' A Streetcar Named Desire, William Shakespeare's play Macbeth, Edgar Allan Poe's " The Tell-Tale Heart " and " The Black Cat ", and many other works of literature.

The phrase " gaudy night " is taken from Shakespeare's Antony & Cleopatra:

Its name is often used as a general term for graphic, amoral horror entertainment, a genre popular from Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre ( for instance Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and Webster's The White Devil ) to today's splatter films.

* In William Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, Hector's death is used to mark the conclusion of the play.

Hamlet is Shakespeare's longest play and among the most powerful and influential tragedies in English literature, with a story capable of " seemingly endless retelling and adaptation by others.

According to a popular theory, Shakespeare's main source is believed to be an earlier play — now lost — known today as the Ur-Hamlet.

Most scholars reject the idea that Hamlet is in any way connected with Shakespeare's only son, Hamnet Shakespeare, who died in 1596 at age eleven.

Sadler's first name is spelled " Hamlett " in Shakespeare's will.

Q1 is considerably shorter than Q2 or F1 and may be a memorial reconstruction of the play as Shakespeare's company performed it, by an actor who played a minor role ( most likely Marcellus ).

What is known is that the crew of the ship Red Dragon, anchored off Sierra Leone, performed Hamlet in September 1607 ; that the play toured in Germany within five years of Shakespeare's death ; and that it was performed before James I in 1619 and Charles I in 1637.