A Grain of Salt”

R I C H A R D I I I 1471-1485 / Wars of the Roses 1455-1485 “A GRAIN OF SALT” William Shakespeare was a story-teller. He was a renowned playwright in the 16th century and still is in our 21st century. Perhaps he was the greatest playwright since…….well, since at least 1564 when he shared his newborn baby cry with the world. (I wonder if it was “to be or not to be”?) As a master teller-of-tales William Shakespeare never shied away from a little embellishment of the facts in his plays, even his History plays. Nor did he find anything wrong with telescoping the passage of time. Nor, to the chagrin of historians far and wide, was he reticent about “re-shaping” a few of the facts to better enrich the story. (Naughty, naughty! But, oooooo the stories he crafted.) As you explore RICHARD III -- perhaps his most popular history play after the infamous travails of Sir John Falstaff in HENRY IV, Parts 1 and 2 -- consider a few of these sly “re-shaped” historical points that may well steer you to refer to his plays as more “historical fiction” than pure and accurately “historical”. Best to take William Shakespeare with “a grain of salt” in RICHARD III… ** * * * * * * * * RICHARD’S DEFORMITIES: “Shakespeare drew much on Sir Thomas More’s ‘A History of Richard III” which vilified Richard endlessly and shamelessly to air the worst theories of the man. But, contemporary portraits and descriptions of Richard do not indicate that he was particularly deformed in any way. He was small, perhaps, though this was more noticeable than it might otherwise have been through a comparison with his older brother Edward who was over six feet tall and a giant of a man by the standard of those days. It is also true that Richard suffered from a curvature of the spine and that one of his shoulders was slightly higher than the other. But the full list of his deformities in his own Act III soliloquy in HENRY VI, Part 3 is all fictitious; he was far from a ‘hunchback, club-footed and hideous’. Can a man with a hunchback with a withered arm and a clubfoot fight like a demon in battle and be superlatively skillful in strenuous hand-to-hand battle as we know from history as even as is true in Shakespeare’s plays?”... With a grain of salt. ALWAYS A VILLAIN?: “In actual history, Richard wasn’t always a villain.” He remained loyal and utterly faithful to his brother King Edward IV in the hard times with the warring Warwick factions of the House of Lancaster even at one point when they had attempted to hurl him from the throne. He had fought with distinction at key battles especially the Battle of Tewksbury; he had “done King Edward’s dirty work” in arranging the death of old Lancastrian King Henry VI in the Tower. In all respects, Richard was as much the loyal brother as George, Duke of Clarence was the faithless one. Despite the prophesy that his throne would one day be usurped by someone with the initial “G”, Edward never suspected Richard of Gloucester because the real Gloucester’s unshakable loyalty left no room for suspicion. Richard defended his brother openly at all turns “which took courage.” Perhaps when the throne came closer into view with the failing health of brother Edward, Richard grew more and more focused on his long-held determination to capture the throne and THEN evil came his way?.... With a grain of salt. MARGARET IN EDWARD’S COURT?: What would the aged and prophetic widow of the former Lancastrian King Henry VI be doing in Yorkist Edward IV’s court? “In real life, she was not there! She could not be. Louis XI of France had ransomed her as part of the general settlement after King Edward’s abortive invasion of France in 1475, four years after mounting the throne. She had then gone back to her native land of Anjou in the northwest of France to remain there in poverty for the rest of her life. She never returned to England. She was, to be sure, alive at the time of the imprisonment of George of Clarence, but she was in France. Her appearance at the court is utterly fictitious and is designed merely to produce another dramatic scene.” Her prophesies in Act 1, Sc 3 make for wonderful story-telling, especially since ten of the eleven prophesies DO come true…..With a grain of salt. GEORGE OF CLARENCE MURDERED BY BROTHER RICHARD?: “Actually, of course, nothing of the sort happened. The law DID take its course, after a fashion. That is, after George had been committed to the Tower on January 16, 1478, he was tried before a jury of English peers. King Edward himself was prosecutor and in person came to demand his brother’s condemnation for treason. The peers could scarcely refuse and it was the Duke of Buckingham who acted as ‘foreman of the jury’ and pronounced the death sentence. On February 7 the speaker of the House of Commons demanded that the sentence be carried out, and soon afterward it was announced that George of Clarence was dead. Obviously, he had been executed as the law had demanded. And, what had Richard of Gloucester to do with that death? Nothing at all. Except that, even according to Sir Thomas More’s dreadfully prejudiced account, he openly protested the whole procedure.” (Sly chameleon!) “Was George really drowned in a barrel of sweet malmsey wine? Surely not. Shakespeare uses the tale to inject not only an added bit of gruesomeness to the play but also a bit of dramatic irony in light of George’s poetic recounting of his own nightmare of death by drowning.”….With a grain of salt. RICHARD MURDERS THE YOUNG PRINCES?: “After Richard becomes King, these two young sons of his deceased brother in line of succession to the throne as King Edward V are never seen again; and within a month of his coronation the rumor began to go round that they were dead. Undoubtedly, they did die eventually, and the skeletons of two small bodies have been located in the Tower, bones that could very easily be their remains. The question is: ‘Did Richard III order them killed?’ Certainly, the enormity of killing two children was too great, and even arguments of state failed to cover the matter completely. If Richard III did order the young princes killed then even his apologists must shake their heads uneasily. Supposedly, when Richard asked a page for the name of an ‘unscrupulous person’, Sir James Tyrell is ‘interviewed’ as some obscure ‘gunman for hire’. Nothing of the sort. Tyrell was a member of a distinguished family and was knighted in 1471 and served as a Member of Parliament in 1477. Having long-survived Richard there is nothing in his later years to indicate he was a murderer. However, years later in 1502 during the reign of King Henry VII (Richmond) Tyrell was accused of treason, arrested and executed; before he was executed, however, he confessed, or was forced to confess, or was reported to have confessed, that he had been placed in charge of the Tower on the day the princes were killed and that he had supervised that killing at the hands of two assassins. There are some who maintain that the princes were kept alive throughout Richard’s short two year reign and were killed by his successor.” We shall never know the real truth, but surely Shakespeare’s crafting of Tyrell’s soliloquy is a beautiful piece of tragic writing. (Act IV, Sc 3, Lines 1-22)…...With a grain of salt. Source: “Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare”, Isaac Asimov, 1978 .

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