Richard III (play) "Hamlet" is shorter than its Quarto counterpart. The play is often abridged; for example, certain peripheral characters are removed entirely. In such instances, extra lines are often invented or added from elsewhere in the sequence to establish the nature of characters' relationships. A further reason for abridgment is that Shakespeare assumed that his audiences would be familiar with his "Henry VI" plays and frequently made indirect references to events in them, such as Richard's murder of Henry VI or the defeat of Henry's wife, Margaret. "House of York" "House of Lancaster" "Woodville family" "Richard III's group" "Earl of Richmond's group"
Characters of Shakespear's Plays stated theme, to which Hazlitt returns several times—in "Macbeth", "A Midsummer Night's Dream", "Henry IV", and elsewhere—is that Shakespeare does not only create highly individual characters. More than any other dramatist, he creates characters that are of similar general types, and yet, as in real life, differ in subtle ways: Shakespear was scarcely more remarkable for the force and marked contrasts of his characters than for the truth and subtlety with which he has distinguished those which approached the nearest to each other. For instance, the soul of Othello is hardly more distinct from that of Iago than that of