“REVENGE IN SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS”
“RICHARD III” – LECTURE/CLASS
WRITTEN: Finished in 1593 “at the latest”; Shakespeare was 29 years of age and prior to this had completed the trio of plays in the Henry VI series.
QUARTO: Included in the Quarto of 1597 as “The Tragedy of King Richard the Third”
FOLIO First Folio of 1623 different significantly from the Quarto missing 230 lines and cutting an additional 50 lines
GENRE: “The First Histories”
SOURCE: Shakespeare did not invent the character of the villainous Richard; about 1516, Sir Thomas More wrote an unfinished “History of Richard III” which was appropriated by chroniclers and forms part of the account of Richard’s reign in the “Chronicles” of Raphael Holinshed (1577).
WAR: The play is the final of Shakespeare’s eight plays covering “The War of the Roses” describing the civil wars in England between the Lancastrian and Yorkist dynasties between 1422 and 1471; Richard III was the last of the Yorkist kings; the other plays in Shakespeare’s collection are Richard II; Henry IV, Part 1; Henry IV, Part 2; Henry V; Henry VI, Part 1; Henry VI, Part 2; and Henry VI, Part 3; sthe final four plays are referred to as the “first tetralogy of The War of the Roses” with the remaining four as the “second tetralogy”.
ROSES: The Red Rose of York Plantagenets and the White Rose of Lancaster.
TEXT: The play is often considered by critics as “amongst the most perplexing of Shakespearean textual puzzles”.
FAMOUS: “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse! (Act V, Sc 4, Line 7)
STRUCTURE: The play follows the treacherous plots and actions of Richard III from prior to the death of his dying brother Edward IV, his usurping of the throne from his elder brother George, Duke of Clarence along the bloody path to his dying moments in the 1485 battle of Bosworth Field led by Henry, Earl of Richmond who assumes the throne as King Henry VII.
SUCCESS: “Richard III is the earliest English play to have had continuous success on stage from its first performance to the present day”; “part of the immediate success is attributed to the actor Richard Burbage for whom the play was written; the play’s popularity derives from the outrageous wickedness of its title character.”
HIGHLIGHT: Performed at the Court of King Charles in November of 1633.
AFTER: “Curiously, for over a century and a half from 1700 the approved acting version was not Shakespeare’s but a mosaic devised by the actor-dramatist Colley Cibber for production at the Drury Lane theatre”; Cibber even added lines from other Shakespeare histories; Henry Irving restored the text in 1877 although some of Cibber’s “improvements” can even be heard in Laurence Olivier’s 1955 film version.
CRITICS: 1700 – Unrecorded critic of Cibber: “the distorted heavings of an unjointed caterpillar”.
1741 – Contemporary critic of David Garrick: “…splendidly relaxed, sardonic and menacing, he dwindles neither into the buffoon nor the brute.”
1944 – Old Vic post of Laurence Olivier: “Outwardly a limping panther, there was no lameness in his mind; pale, lankly black-haired, evilly debonair, he preserved Richard’s pride; he had a glittering irony, a frightening rage.”
RICHARDS: Richard Burbage, David Garrick, Edmund Kean, Edwin Booth, John Barrymore, Hume Cronyn, Alec Guinness, Christopher Plummer, Henry Goodman
RECENT: Antony Sher (1984), Ian McKellen (1995), Al Pacino (1996), Kevin Spacey (2011)
SETTING: Various locations in England including the castle of the York family and the Bosworth Fields.
YEAR: 1471-1485
OPENING: “Shakespeare has no more dramatic opening than the entry in a London street of Richard, Duke of Gloucester following the key battle won by his Yorkist dynasty glumly uttering the words: “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York.”
ACTION: The play opens following the victory over the last Lancastrian threat smashed at Tewkesbury. Old King Henry VI and his son, Prince Edward, were killed immediately by Richard and his inner circle, and no one was left to dispute the right of his eldest brother to the throne as King Edward IV. The “sun” of York does not satisfy Richard who will confine himself to the joys of ambition, and labor to make himself king. In order to become the King, he must dispose of six people who stand between him and the throne when his dying brother has gone. Discounting the sick King as the first, he murders his middle brother, George, Duke of Clarence who has the right to the throne. Through court alliances, desperate acts and the “removal” of the other four rightful ascendants – including the two young sons of the former king – the Prince of Wales & the Prince of York -- Richard crowns himself as King only to be destroyed by the return from exile of Henry, Earl of Richmond who murders Richard and ends the War of the Roses.
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F O R C L A S S E X P L O R A T I O N : R I C H A R D I I I
FACT: Born in 1452 Richard is the youngest of three sons of Richard, Duke of York.
FACT: Richard’s oldest brother is the current King Edward IV as the play begins.
FACT: Richard’s body was deformed from birth at least with one shoulder higher than the other, one club foot and a facial birthmark (“stamped”). (Actors have amplified his deformity in a wide variety of ways over the years.)
FACT: From his early days to the present people in the court and within the castle have always referred to him in derogatory terms.
FACT Richard first appears in “Henry VI, Part 3” at eight years old urging his father Richard to make himself King outright without waiting for Henry’s death: “And father, do but think / How sweet a thing it is to wear a crown, / Within whose circuit is Elysium / And all that poets feign of bliss and joy.” (The speech will gain a kind of grisly irony soon enough.)
NEW: In Richard’s soliloquy that opens the play he says: “I am determined to prove a villain / And hate the idle pleasures of these days” – a self-professed key and cause of all other actions of the play to his murder on Bosworth Field.
NEW In that same soliloquy he addresses his own deformity. (Read aloud Act I, Sc 1, 1-40)
NEW Margaret, widow of the dead Henry VI, most vocally casts insults at Richard even though risking her life in doing so: “thou elvish-mark’d, abortive, rotting hog”, “That bottled spider”, “This poisonous hunchback’d toad”.
NEW: Richard’s first heinous act unfolds when he meets the bearers of the coffin bearing Henry VI (the King he murdered) followed by Henry’s daughter-in-law, Lady Anne, whose husband he and his brothers had killed at Tewkesbury. Out of mischief or masochism, or both, he woos her over the coffin……and she yields; Richard gloats. (Read aloud Act I, Sc 2, 232-235)
NEW: Of the many convoluted plots safeguarding himself and his heinous actions at every turn Richard achieves his goal if only temporarily. NEW: Is there other NEW information we learn about Richard – either spoken by him or by others in the court – that helps us create a picture of this iconic character?
DISCUSS: From the facts, the actions and the words of Richard himself and of other people, how has this villain of envy, jealousy and revenge emerged.
DISCUSS: Although spoken cynically in his first soliloquy, note the blind determination in Richard’s words: “Then, since the heavens have shaped my body so, / Let hell make crook’d my mind to answer it.”
DISCUSS: Richard’s wooing of Lady Anne over the casket of her husband, the eldest son of Henry VI, both of whom he murdered himself; Lady Anne later marries Richard.
DISCUSS: Being torn between an old self-love and a new-born self-horror and self-pity Richard speaks the lines…..Act V, Sc 3, 183-204 (Read aloud)
DENOUEMENT: Harassed by the ghosts of his past victims during the night, Richard leads the battle and fights desperately only to be defeated and killed by Richmond who ends the generation-long War of the Roses, marries the daughter of Richard’s brother, the deceased Edward IV who gives birth to a son thus uniting “the White Rose and the Red”.
“The day is ours; the bloody dog is dead.”
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F O R O P T I O N A L V I E W I N G…..
NETFLIX RENTAL
Richard III (1995) – Ian McKellan (1930s England following Civil War)
Richard III (1983) – Ron Cook (BBC Historical Setting)
Richard III (1955) – Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson (Historical Setting)
YOUTUBE SCENES
Laurence Olivier ''Now is the winter of our discontent'' - Soliloquy
Ralph Fiennes in Richard III - Soliloquy -- Kevin Spacey in Richard III - Soliloquy
Ian McKellan in Richard III - Soliloquy
YOUTUBE AUDIO RECORDING – Full Play
Richard III (1946) - Radio drama starring Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson