On 22 June 1602, Philip Henslowe recorded the payment of a loan of ten pounds to Ben Jonson ‘in earnest of a book called Richard Crookback and for new additions for Jeronimo’ (Electronic Edition, Life Records, 26). (The additions to Jeronimo – Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy – are discussed elsewhere in this edition: Dubia, Electronic Edition.) No copy of Richard Crookback survives, and it is not known whether the play was ever completed or performed. Its progress may have been impeded by Jonson’s illness late in 1602 (see Letter 1, Commentary).

The history of Richard III had been a popular one throughout Tudor times (Churchill, 1976; Hanham, 1975). Jonson’s Fitzdottrell in Devil, 2.4.11–14 knows his history ‘from the play-books’, which he finds ‘more authentic’ than the chronicle. Jonson himself would have been familiar with Shakespeare’s Richard III (probably completed by 1593) and the anonymous True Tragedy of Richard the Third, published in 1594 but probably composed a few years earlier (see the editions of these plays by Lull, 1999, and Greg, 1929). He may also have known the Latin play Ricardus Tertius by Thomas Legge, Master of Caius College, Cambridge, acted c. 1579. He certainly studied with close attention Thomas More’s influential but unfinished account of the life of Richard III, as the heavy markings in his personal copy of the 1566 Louvain edition of More’s Omnia Latina opera reveal (examined by Evans, 1995a, ch. 5). While preparing his English Grammar many years later, Jonson drew freely on two different English texts of More’s work to illustrate grammatical matters (English Grammar, 2.2.31–2, n.). It was More who had given fullest currency to the traditional portrait of Richard III which Jonson (to judge at least from the title of this lost play) seems to have inherited. Richard, wrote More, was ‘little of stature, ill-featured of limbs, crook-backed, his left shoulder much higher than his right, hard-favoured of visage . . . malicious, wrathful, envious, and from afore his birth, ever froward’ (More, 1976, 81).

Scribbled on the back of a note from Robert Shaa (or Shaw) to Philip Henslowe, dated 8 November 1599, is a memorandum which reads: ‘see: K Rich: Catesb: Louell. Norf. Northumb: Percye’ (Henslowe, 1907, 49). If the memorandum is roughly contemporary with the note on which it is written, it could refer to an earlier play on the subject of Richard III which the Lord Admiral’s Men had in their repertoire, which Jonson’s play was designed to replace or update. If the memorandum is of later date, it may conceivably refer to Jonson’s own play. The evidence is tantalizingly inconclusive.

(See also JONSON’S LOST PLAYS)