"Contexts" provides readers with the sources and analogues that informed Shakespeare's composition of Richard III. These include excerpts from Robert Fabyan's New Chronicles of England and France, Thomas More's The History of King Richard III, Edward Hall's The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York, A Mirror for Magistrates, and The True Tragedy of Richard III. A selection from Colley Cibber's eighteenth-century adaptation records the compromised form in which Richard III held the stage for approximately two hundred years before twentieth-century editors brought it back into recognizable shape. A representative selection of commentary on stage and film reproductions of Richard III is also provided, ranging from reviews of nineteenth-century productions by William Hazlitt and George Bernard Shaw, a survey of stage performances by Scott Colley, and in-depth analyses of twentieth-century film adaptations by Saskia Kossak, Barbara Hodgdon, and Peter S. Donaldson.

"Criticism" collects eight major pieces of scholarship, including early accounts of the play's major themes by William Richardson and Edward Dowden, modern critical assessments by Wilbur Sanders, Elihu Pearlman, Linda Charnes, Katherine Maus, and Ian Moulton, and an essay by Harry Berger Jr. especially commissioned for this volume.

A Selected Bibliography is also included.