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# Weekend Words: Bones
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/weekend-words-bones/
- Published: 2013-02-10T15:00:09.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:35:43.000Z
- Description: With this week's discovery of the bones of King Richard III, Weekend Words takes a break from its usual format to present some favorite lines from one of Shakespeare's most demonic plays.
- Author: Weekend Editors
- Tags: Opinion, Weekend, Weekend Words, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 06:51 (2012, 2013, part 1)

![Unknown artist, "King Richard III" (late 16th century). Oil on panel, 25 1/8 in. x 18 1/2 inches. National Portrait Gallery, London. Given by James Thomson Gibson-Craig, 1862. (Image via National Portrait Gallery", London)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2013/02/richard_iii_of_england.jpg)

Unknown artist, “King Richard III” (late 16th century). Oil on panel, 25 1/8 in. x 18 1/2 inches. National Portrait Gallery, London. Given by James Thomson Gibson-Craig, 1862\. (click to enlarge) (image via National Portrait Gallery, London)

With this week’s discovery of the bones of King Richard III, Weekend Words takes a break from its usual format to present some favorite lines from one of Shakespeare’s most demonic plays:

> Either heaven with lightning strike the murderer dead,  
> Or earth, gape open wide and eat him quick,  
> As thou dost swallow up this good king’s blood  
> Which his hell-govern’d arm hath butchered!  
>  
> **—Lady Anne, cursing Richard for the deaths of her husband and father-in-law.**

> Was ever woman in this humour woo’d?  
> Was ever woman in this humour won?  
> I’ll have her; but I will not keep her long.  
> What! I, that kill’d her husband and his father,  
> To take her in her heart’s extremest hate,  
> With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes,  
> The bleeding witness of her hatred by;  
> Having God, her conscience, and these bars against me,  
> And I nothing to back my suit at all,  
> But the plain devil and dissembling looks,  
> And yet to win her, all the world to nothing!  
> Ha!  
>  
> **—Richard, after winning the heart of Lady Anne a few moments later.**

> Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am:  
> Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why:  
> Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?  
> Alack. I love myself. Wherefore? for any good  
> That I myself have done unto myself?  
> O, no! alas, I rather hate myself  
> For hateful deeds committed by myself!  
> I am a villain: yet I lie. I am not.  
>  
> **—Richard, upon waking from a nightmare filled with his victims’ ghosts.**