marie-hélène besnault and michel bitot
diversity of the uses Shakespeare makes of this function points to thematic
and symbolic relevance beyond dramatic efficacy. Lamenting women in this
play are always three. As a result, they can in turn signify suffering mankind,
the three Furies of Greek and Roman mythology who pursue and punish the
doers of unavenged crimes, or the three Fates or Parcae who govern human
destiny. For a Christian audience, they can also evoke the three Maries at
the foot of the Cross. Given the ambivalence of the play and the syncretic
spirit at work in the period, they may draw from the audience moral and
aesthetic as well as emotional responses.
The same applies to the eleven ghosts of Richard’s victims who successively appear to him and to Richmond as they sleep, on the eve of the
battle (5.3). Another Senecan feature adapted to the dramatic uses of a
hybrid play, they too have a choric and tragic function, as they hammer
into Richard’s brain formulaic condemnations ‘Let me sit heavy on thy soul
tomorrow’ (5.3.121, 134, 142), ‘Despair, and die’ (5.3.123, 129, 138, 143,
146, 151, 157, 166), before they lavish encouragement with identical incantatory force on Richmond: ‘live and flourish!’ (5.3.133, 141), ‘Live, and
beget a happy race of kings’ (5.3.160). They induce ‘the fairest sleep and
fairest-boding dreams’ (5.3.228) in the future Tudor king and the foulest
nightmares in Richard. The curses and blessings of these supernatural apparitions come true at Bosworth. This makes them prophetic instruments
of revenge and of divine justice. Again, theatricality vies with pathos and
moral implications. For an Elizabethan audience, the final fight was most
probably warfare between the forces of Evil and the forces of Good, entrenched on the two sides of the stage, as in earlier Moralities and Interludes, even if the traditional Good and Bad Angels had undergone a tragic
metamorphosis. For a modern audience, the ghosts of Richard’s victims, anticipating Macbeth’s hallucinations, tend to appear more like a theatrical
representation of Richard’s bad conscience. This feeling is reinforced by his
confessing:
By the apostle Paul, shadows tonight
Have struck more terror to the soul of Richard
Than can the substance of ten thousand soldiers . . .
(5.3.217–19)
In his final soliloquy, although at times his self-dramatisation is a direct
appeal to audience sympathy, ‘And if I die, no soul shall pity me’ (204),
Richard is self-absorbed. It is the dichotomy within himself that the dialogic
quality of his monologue is meant to reflect; the split between his former unquestionably courageous self and the fears spoken from his still unconscious
mind as he awakes from his troubled sleep; the being torn between an old
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self-love and a new-born self-horror and self-pity. The naturalistic, chopped,
questioning syntax of the verse conveys this dichotomy:
What? Do I fear myself? There’s none else by.
Richard loves Richard, that is, I am I.
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? (5.3.185–91)
Richard’s command of rhetoric seems to have vanished as he utters short,
chaotic sentences. The acting and stage-managing powers he had so brilliantly displayed have now turned against him too as he imagines a trial of
himself in the old homiletic fashion:
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.
Perjury in the highest degree,
Murder, stern murder, in the direst degree,
All several sins, all used in each degree,
Throng all to th’bar, crying all ‘Guilty, guilty!’
(5.3.196–202)
At this point, Richard is no longer a gleeful dramatic archetype. Nor is he
presented as the scourge of England’s long accumulated sins. He has become a
pathetic man who realises both his isolation from the rest of mankind and the
loss of his soul: ‘I shall despair. There is no creature loves me . . . ’ (203). We
are reminded that, beyond being antagonistic to martial victory, despair was
the cardinal sin for the Church, the unforgivable sin committed by Lucifer,
Cain or Judas. Like Marlowe’s Faustus, Richard is incapable of repentance.
He even becomes an anti-Christ figure, not only through his soliloquy –
Antony Hammond20 says ‘one of the most celebrated antecedents for an
inner dialogue of this kind is Christ’s agony in the garden of Gethsemane’ –
but also because the sun does not rise and shine on his newly recovered
courage and on his death: ‘The sun will not be seen today’ (5.3.284).
A sense of tragic waste is conveyed to the audience. It seems, however, that
Shakespeare refused Richard full tragic awareness and stature. Like Senecan
tyrants, he is allowed to die a Stoic death:
Slave, I have set my life upon a cast,
And I will stand the hazard of the die.
(5.4.9–10)
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But the pangs of conscience he displays are made to sound hollow. They are
not as heart-rending and lyrical as those of Faustus, Richard II or Macbeth.
They are indeed mechanised by a deconstructed syntax and externalised by
the recourse to ghosts who also address Richmond. Although he comes closer
to tragedy than any other character in the history plays so far, and clearly
dominates his play, as only Richard II and Henry V will later, Richard returns
to machiavellian pronouncements, confusion, misdirection and dedication to
Evil at the end when he addresses his army:
Let not our babbling dreams affright our souls,
For conscience is a word that cowards use,
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.
Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law!
March on! Join bravely! Let us to’t pell mell,
If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell.
(5.3.310–15)
What he appeals to is scorn of the enemy, those ‘stragglers’, ‘overweening
rags of France’, ‘famished beggars’, ‘poor rats’, ‘bastard Bretons’, ‘heirs of
shame’ (5.3.329–37), and self-pride again: ‘Spur your proud horses hard
and ride in blood’ (342). So there is some poetic justice when, fallen from
his horse, he stoops howling ‘A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!’
(5.4.7), a living medieval emblem of pride, rather than a self-fashioning and
self-cancelling Renaissance tragic hero, like Thomas More himself.21
If there is tragedy in Richard III, it is rather that which has made, and
will still make ‘poor England weep in streams of blood’ (5.5.37), in spite of
the union of the white rose and the red, and before it enjoys ‘smiling plenty
and fair prosperous days’ (5.5.34), themselves threatened by succession wars
at the death of Elizabeth I. Despite its ambiguity, the play suggests that the
tragedy of power is not that it is doomed to fail one day, as Richard’s does,
but that it is bound to crush innocent victims, like Lady Anne and the two
young princes.
With Richard III, Shakespeare reached a stage where he could shape to his
own needs all the available dramatic traditions and create an enriched, more
ambiguous medium to deal with history; a medium which in its versatility
can still make him everybody’s contemporary in the theatre or in real life.22
Richard III: theatrical and filmic afterlife
The first actor to be associated with the famous title role was Richard
Burbage, and the popularity of Richard III, its continuing appeal, was attested by a late performance in 1633, before the closing of the theatres in
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1642. Interest was revived by Colley Cibber’s 1700 adaptation, a shortened version which he partly rewrote and combined with fragments from
the Henry VI plays. Cibber put Richard’s deformity to the fore, giving the
tyrant king a comparatively larger share in the dialogue than in the original drama. Although a number of later attempts were made at adapting
Richard III, Colley Cibber’s version valiantly pursued its career on the stage
well into the nineteenth century.
The fascinating, demonic king found a new lease of life when David
Garrick seized the part in 1741, a blessing for great performers, and maintained it on the stage almost without interruption between 1747 and 1776.
His unprecedented triumph as Richard was followed by a line of remarkable performances as Kemble, Cooke and Kean successively took the part,
each with his personal stamp and some variations upon the Cibber script. In
1821, however, Macready attempted a return to the original play, although
with little success, and it was not until the 1870s that a serious revival of the
Shakespearean text proved possible: Henry Irving’s production kept to the
text, even if it was in a shortened version, focusing again, in keeping with a
long-standing tradition, upon the title role.
In the twentieth century the status of Richard III underwent obvious
changes with a reinstatement of the original text, and even more importantly, with a move from pure acting concerns to problems of interpretation
and production. The emphasis was placed on presenting the play as a case
of political tyranny, along with the theatricality of the main character. The
memorable Berlin production of 1920, directed by Leopold Jessner, led to
fresh symbolic and political treatments of Richard III. Jessner, at a time
of social and political upheaval in Europe, had the tyrant ascend bloodred steps for his coronation. His version not only fascinated critics in his
own time, prompting a reappraisal of the play’s significance, but it seems
to have retained its hold on more recent productions, as shown by the use
in the 1963 Peter Hall and John Barton version of a symbolism redolent of
the Berlin performance. At the time of Nazi horror haunting the whole of
Europe, Donald Wolfit was acclaimed in 1942 with his impersonation of a
Hitler-like Richard, no doubt because terror and the havoc of war were
very real things for the spectators who had, on one occasion, to run for
shelter during a bomb alert. Wolfit’s achievement was followed in 1944 by
a memorable production by Laurence Olivier in which this actor offered a
very powerful representation of Richard as a supremely cunning and devilish
character. The constantly spying and preying presence of the tyrant, together
with his cold-blooded ruthlessness, may have reminded Olivier’s spectators
that Nazi monstrosity had not yet receded. The number of modern productions attests to the continued popularity of the play, as well to a general
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interest in politics that derives from manifestations of dictatorship in recent decades. Among the most imaginative treatments we should mention
the versions of Terry Hands (1970), Bill Alexander (1984), Adrian Noble
(1989), Sam Mendes (1992), and Steven Pimlott (1996). One of the most
striking productions in recent years was the much praised Bill Alexander’s
Richard III, in 1984, for the Royal Shakespeare Company, with Antony Sher
in the leading role. The emphasis on the monstrous features of the tyrant was
remarkable as Antony Sher, making use of a pair of crutches, hopped on four
legs like a large, nightmarish insect. Although he seemed to be handicapped
by some crippling disease, Sher’s Richard moved about the stage with alarming speed and animality, which further manifested his spider-like appearance.
Bill Alexander’s production was so impressive in its bringing out this combination of abnormality and vitality that it was compared to Laurence Olivier’s
virtuoso creation.
Olivier himself directed a filmed version of Richard III in 1955. His
Richard retained the cunning superiority of the role in the theatre play.
However, some major cuts (Margaret’s role in particular) and some adjustments were made for the film. The result, even if it often greatly departs
from Shakespeare, displays some terrifying effects because of the set and its
expressionist treatment of shadows. A more recent film version, released in
1995, is Richard Loncraine’s Richard III which is based on a theatre production with Ian McKellen in the title role.23 In the film, McKellen is once again
Richard, combining features borrowed from the dictator and the gangster,
and with strong links to both Nazi terrorism and British fascist movements
of the 1930s. The film is often shot in and around actual buildings in London
that create a milieu redolent of that era, while the text of the play is adapted
to a situation suggesting a vaguely decadent totalitarian state – a familiar
reference for modern picture-goers, if one thinks, for instance, of Visconti’s
The Damned.
Richard III was twice filmed on video, first in 1982 for the BBC series, by
Jane Howell as director. In this production she clearly chose to depart from
the Olivier filmic heritage – her Richard looked somewhat less inhuman.
Another version of the play on video is Michael Bogdanov’s 1990 production for the English Shakespeare Company which was taped live during
performance.24
NOTES
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2
3
4
Walker 2000, p. 35.
Marienstras 1995, p. 160.
See Vergil 1844, p. 227.
Ibid., p. 189.
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