Now is the winter of our discontent
The 2010 film, The King's Speech, features a scene where the king's speech therapist Lionel Logue, as played by Geoffrey Rush, auditions for the role by reciting the lines, "Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun [or son] of York". Shakespeare critic Keith Jones believes that the film in general sets up its main character as a kind of antithesis to Richard III.[22] The same antithesis was noted by conservative commentator Noah Millman.[23]
In the Red Dwarf episode "Marooned", Rimmer objects to Lister's burning of the Complete Works of Shakespeare in an attempt to maintain enough heat to keep him alive. When challenged, Rimmer claims he can quote from it and embarks upon the soliloquy: "Now! ... That's all I can remember. You know! That famous speech from Richard III – 'now, something something something something'."
In the 1967 film Billion Dollar Brain, Harry Palmer is told to use the verse as a code phrase.
John Steinbeck used the opening line for the title of his novel The Winter of Our Discontent.
The phrase "Winter of Discontent" is an expression, popularised by the British media, referring to the winter of 1978–79 in the United Kingdom, during which there were widespread strikes by local authority trade unions demanding larger pay rises for their members.
My kingdom for a horse!
Richard begins act 5, scene 4 by exclaiming "A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!" after being knocked from his steed during the climactic battle.[24][25] The phrase illustrates the drama and desperation of his sudden fall from grace and has entered common parlance as such.
In the 1949 Looney Tunes cartoon A Ham in a Role, the dog actor says Catesby and Richard III's lines, "Rescue, fair lord, or else the day is lost! A horse, A horse, My kingdom for a horse!" before being kicked out of the window by a Goofy Gophers-hauled horse.
Noël Coward's 1941 song Could You Please Oblige Us with a Bren Gun? includes a lyric referring to Colonel Montmorency: "He realised his army should be mechanised, of course/ But somewhere inside/ Experience cried/ 'My kingdom for a horse!'"
In the 1993 Mel Brooks film Robin Hood: Men in Tights, the character Robin of Locksley, played by Cary Elwes, says "A horse, my kingdom for a horse!" as he arrives in England in the opening scene.
In E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1816 story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, the Nutcracker shouts in one scene; "A horse – a horse – my kingdom for a horse!"
Other quotations
The film Being John Malkovich has many Shakespeare allusions, including a scene in which Malkovich is shown rehearsing Richard III's lines "Was ever woman in this humour woo'd? / Was ever woman in this humour won?" where Richard is boasting about using power, lies, and crime to seduce Lady Anne. As Visual Cultures professor Lynn Turner notes, this scene anticipates a parallel scene in which Craig uses deceit to seduce Maxine through Malkovich.[26] Mariangela Tempera has noted that the subservience of Lady Anne in the scene contrasts with the self-assertiveness of the actress playing Lady Anne as she seduces Malkovich offstage.[27]
In Adam Sandler's 2011 film Jack and Jill, Al Pacino reprises his role as Richard III, although the scenes are modified as Pacino interacts with the audience in a heavily comedic way.[28]
In V for Vendetta when V confronts Father Lilliman, he quotes the line "And thus I clothe my naked villany in old odd ends stol'n forth of holy writ, and seem a saint when most I play the devil."
In Freaked, an arrogant movie star who has been transformed into a "hideous mutant freak" makes use of his deformity by performing the opening soliloquy, condensed by a local professor in subtitles for the "culturally illiterate" to the more succinct "I'm ugly. I never get laid." One reviewer mentioned this as the best example of how the film seamlessly moves between highbrow and lowbrow culture.[29]
In The Goodbye Girl, an ambitious actor played by Richard Dreyfuss is forced by his off-Broadway producer to play Richard III as a caricature of a homosexual.[30]
In the 1975 film L'important c'est d'aimer, directed by Andrzej Żuławski, a production of Richard III in French is a mise en abyme for the drama enveloping the characters in the film.
The manga Requiem of the Rose King by Aya Kanno, which began in 2013, is a loose adaptation of the first Shakespearean historical tetralogy. It depicts Richard III as intersex instead of hunchbacked.[31]
The title of the Alistair MacLean film Where Eagles Dare is inspired by Richard's complaint that the "world is grown so bad, that wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch." (Quoted in Act I, Scene III)
Lincoln's assassination
US President Abraham Lincoln was renowned for his love of Shakespeare, and of Richard III in particular.[32] This fed Confederate propaganda, especially in Virginia, where residents of Richmond, Virginia, saw Lincoln as a Richard-like tyrant and identified their capital city with the Earl of Richmond, the hero of Shakespeare's play. Some interpreted Richard's Act IV speech as an omen favourable to the South:
a bard of Ireland told me once I should not live long after I saw Richmond.
Within a fortnight of the president's visit to the defeated city, he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, a Shakespearean actor known for playing both Richard and Richmond. Booth's notorious final words from the stage were "Sic semper tyrannis".[33]
