Richard opens the play by contrasting the peaceful celebrations of his brother's kingship with his own physical deformity and isolation. He announces his intention to become a villain since he cannot be a lover.
The opening of the play. Richard, Duke of Gloucester, walks onto an empty stage and addresses the audience directly. The Wars of the Roses have just ended in Yorkist victory. His brother Edward IV is now king of England; their other brother Clarence is alive but in danger; the country is at peace. The court is celebrating. Richard is alone. Within twenty lines of this speech ending, Clarence will be led across the stage on his way to the Tower under a warrant Richard has secretly engineered. By the end of the scene, Richard will have begun the seductions and murders that carry him to the throne and to Bosworth Field. The audience is meeting him for the first time. Everything they know about him for the next four hours is established here — including his physical body, his intelligence, and the bargain he is making with them as conspirator-witnesses.
Richard is not brooding. He is brilliant, bored, and beginning a project. What he wants from the audience, specifically, is complicity — he is going to do extraordinary things over the next five acts and he needs them on his side, or at least on his side enough to enjoy watching. The famous opening — "Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York" — is sarcasm, not celebration; he is mocking the peace his brother has won, because peace bores him and excludes him. The pivot at "But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks" is the real beginning of the speech: a list of what his body cannot do, delivered without self-pity, ending in the decision to "prove a villain." His deformity is named flatly and used as logic, not as wound. He has chosen this. The speech is the choice being made aloud.
Two pitfalls dominate. First: do not play the deformity as suffering. Richard names his body matter-of-factly — "rudely stamp'd," "curtail'd of this fair proportion," "deformed, unfinish'd" — and the lack of self-pity is what makes him dangerous. Second: do not play the sarcasm as sneering. The opening eight lines are dryly funny and superior; they should sound almost like a court chronicler being mildly snide. The big turn is "But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks." Mark it as the gear-change from public commentary to private confession. From there the speech accelerates: the catalogue of physical exclusions, the inability to be a lover, the consequent decision to be a villain, and the sketch of the plot already in motion against Clarence. Direct address is essential throughout — find the audience, choose people, share the joke. The "Plots have I laid" passage should sound like a man genuinely enjoying his own cleverness. The arrival of Clarence at the end of the speech is the cue: Richard has been telling you what he is about to do, and now he does it. Do not slow down for "I am determined to prove a villain"; it is a line of decision, not declamation.
A first-rank classical audition piece for men, particularly for MFA programs, classical theatre generals, and any audition testing direct address, intelligence, and comic-dark range. It is well-used but consistently distinguishes the actor who plays the wit from the actor who plays the villainy. It works best for actors who read sharp, ironic, and slightly dangerous — Richard is funny before he is frightening, and the panel will know within fifteen seconds whether you have that. The speech is short, self-contained, has a clear arc (public irony to private decision), and gives the auditor a complete piece of work. Avoid it if you cannot make direct address feel like conversation rather than declamation, or if you instinctively play the disability as tragedy — the speech does not support that reading. Also avoid pairing it with any other Shakespeare history; let it stand against contemporary or comic material.
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front;
And now, instead of mounting barded steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.