Podcast

Thursday, January 30, 2025

37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 27: Richard III

The Tragedy of Richard III, first broadcast January 23rd, 1983
  • When was it written? Somewhere between 1592 and 1594, possibly his fourth play (and the earliest of his plays that still gets performed a lot)
  • What’s it about? York’s son Richard is determined to seize the crown, so he manipulates the crowds and murders his way to the top, including killing two innocent princes in the Tower of London, but Henry VII finally kills Richard at the Battle of Bosworth Field and brings an end to the War of the Roses
  • Most famous dialogue: “Now is the winter of our discontent” (or “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse”)
  • Sources: Hall and Holinshed, of course
  • Best insult: “Thou elvish-marked, abortive, rooting hog, Thou that wast sealed in thy nativity the slave of nature and the son of hell; Thou slander of thy heavy mother’s womb, Thou loathed issue of thy father’s loins”
  • Best word: They keep saying that one character was drowned in a barrel of malmsey-butt, which I guess is a kind of wine?
  • Best production of this play I’ve seen: I saw a great production in Stratford, Ontario, with a female Richard. The Ian McKellen movie is also great.
  • Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: A very young Patsy Kensit (Lethal Weapon 2, Angels and Insects) shows up in a small part, Zoe Wannamaker (Harry Potter’s Madame Hooch) is Lady Anne
How’s the cast?
  • Ron Cook continues to do a great job as Richard, Julia Foster continues to steal the show as Queen Margaret and everybody else does a good job falling like chaff before Richard’s scythe. Howell has everyone who died in previous plays come back as different characters in small roles, then appear to Richard as hallucinations, then finally appear in a pile at the end, with Margaret (still alive!) cackling atop it.
How’s the direction by Jane Howell?
  • Still excellent. I would say that this is the weakest of the four, but only slightly. (More on this below) All told, this and the three Henry VI plays come together to form an exquisite 15 hour saga, and it’s well worth watching on Britbox. I know, you thought you were badasses for sitting through all three and a half hours of The Brutalist, but this makes that movie look like a music video by comparison.
Straying From the Party Line: Evoke Pathos

These days (and indeed ever since Shakespeare died) everyone stages (and films) Richard III over and over and nobody stages (or films) the Henry VI plays, unless they’re doing all four together. But why? In this production it seemed like the weakest of the four.

Henry VI and several of the people surrounding him in the previous three plays were tragic figures, meeting sad ends, but Richard in this play doesn’t evoke much emotion. He’s just unreservedly evil, and he’ll be the first one to admit that. Shakespeare does not attempt to wring much pathos from his death. As a study of the nature of absolute evil, this is still a great play, but it’s not as morally meaty as the previous three.

So why does this one get staged so much more often? Most obviously because it’s not identified as Part 1, 2, or 3. Its title implies it’s a standalone play, and indeed, this one doesn’t end on a cliffhanger. Also, because actors love putting on a hump and limping.

But if I were running a Shakespeare company, I would be more drawn to doing the Henry VI plays, and I do believe that each can be staged independent of each other (or this play). Each of the four is great in its own way, and each deserves a chance to shine on its own.

(Of course one of the problems is that this is the only one of the four in which Shakespeare had to pick a side. His own queen was descended from Henry VII, who had to seem legitimate and blameless, while Richard III had to be pure evil. That bring us to…)

Storyteller’s Rulebook: All Writing is Propaganda

One problem with enjoying this play is that there’s another piece of classic English literature which exists for no other reason than to insist that this play is bogus.

Josephine Tey was a mystery writer who had written several novels about a detective named Alan Grant, solving murders in modern-day England. But for the fifth Grant novel, she broke with the formula. In “The Daughter of Time”, Grant is in the hospital and happens to see a portrait of Richard III. He believes he can spot criminals easily, and Richard’s eyes don’t look villainous, so he determines to prove Richard’s innocence. From his bed, he does a bunch of research and concludes that Richard was actually a good guy. But what about the Princes in the Tower? Grant concludes they both survived Richard and were actually slaughtered by Henry VII himself once he seized power.

Grant (and Tey herself?) makes the case that Shakespeare was a propagandist for the Tudors, so he had to shift the blame from Henry VII to Richard III, but now we can look back dispassionately and see that it was all lies.

Both the play and the novel are great, but surely we have to pick one, right? We can’t like both, when one completely impeaches the other. Well, not so fast. Grant makes a strong case that Shakespeare’s case was specious, but Grant’s own logic, founded on his ability to spot guilt in an official portrait, is dubious as well, and it’s not clear that Tey backs him up.

And, ultimately, as someone who is admittedly not an expert, I side with Shakespeare. My understanding of the current state of the historiography is that Richard, not Henry, was the true villain. But what do I know?

All writing is propaganda. Often, it is intentional propaganda for the writer’s chosen cause, but, at the same time, it might be unintentional propaganda for a cause the writer doesn’t even know he’s promoting.

On the surface, Arthur Miller is condemning the Salem witch hunts in “The Crucible”. In the intentional subtext, he’s really condemning the 1950s Red Scare. But looking back on it today, we see that, by portraying a man as the victim of the witch hunts and a teenage girl as the victimizer, he was also unintentionally exposing his era’s sexism and panic about teenage girls’ sexual independence.

So there are three levels of text: The text, the intentional subtext, and the unintentional subtext. All three are present in just about every work of literature. It’s good to be suspicious of all three in everything we read. Tey gets a great book out of a detective’s attempt to investigate and reverse Shakespeare’s verdict. Ultimately, she doesn’t need to convince us she’s right to remind us that skepticism is always a good thing to maintain.

2 comments:

CTKD said...

A malmsey butt is a type of barrel, a really big one, just the right size for drowning a couple of young princes!

Matt Bird said...

Ah, thanks!