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IN Richard III, Queen Elizabeth (mother of the princes murdered in the Tower) confronts the newly-crowned Richard with his crimes:

Hid’st thou that forehead with a golden crown

Where should be branded, if that right were right,

The slaughter of the Prince that ow’d the crown,

And the dire death of my poor sons and brothers?1

I have been unable to find any comments by Richard III’s editors on this striking image. However, similar imagery is used by Shakespeare’s contemporaries. In Pierces Supererogation (1593), Gabriel Harvey responds to the attacks of his enemies, including Thomas Nashe, Robert Greene, and John Lyly: to ignore them, he writes, would be to ‘offer his throte to the blade of villany, or his forhead to the brand of diffamation’.2 In order to denigrate them, he draws comparison between their (ephemeral) works and those of Philip Sidney, James VI, and Guillaume du Bartas, and declares: ‘Such Mercuriall, and Martiall Discourses, in the active, and chivalrous veine; pleade their owne eternall honour: and write everlasting shame in the forhead of a thousand frivolous, and ten thousand phantasticall Pamflets’ (sig. H2v).3 Later in the same text, Harvey deals with Pappe with an Hatchet, a tract of 1589 attributed to Lyly. This anti-Puritan satire had made slighting references to Harvey’s brothers and his rope-maker father (referred to as a ‘tiburn-wright’) and had suggested that Harvey himself might be associated with Martin Marprelate, the anti-episcopal satirist.4 Harvey reproduces the title-page of Pappe with an Hatchet, and then asks:

What devise of Martin, or what invention of any other, could have sett a fairer Orientall Starre upon the forhead of that foule libell? Now you see the brande, and know the Blackamore by his face, turn over the leafe … (sig. Kr)

In 1602, Samuel Rowlands (denouncing prostitutes) wrote: ‘such unchast Libertines … not onely indanger the bodie by lothsom diseases, but ingrave a perpetuall shame in the forehead of the partie’.5

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