“Revenge in Shakespeare's Plays”
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“REVENGE IN SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS” “RICHARD III” – LECTURE/CLASS – UPDATED 1 WRITTEN: Finished in 1593 “at the latest”; from 1589-1591 (ages 25-27) Shakespeare had already completed the trio of plays in the Henry VI series. AGE: 29 Years Old (B.1564-D.1616) CHRONO: Fourth play in the canon after “Henry VI, Parts 1, 2 3”; final play of the War of the Roses. 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 of 1597; the “new” version was missing 230 lines with the cutting of 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 which form 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 include “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”; the Henry VI trio with “Richard III” are referred to as the “first tetralogy of The War of the Roses” with the remaining four as the “second tetralogy” focusing on the earlier years of the War. ROSES: The White Rose was a symbol of the Yorkist Plantagenets and the Red Rose was a symbol of the Lancastrians. 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 by the murder of 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; it was not until 1877 when Henry Irving restored the text 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: Mostly at the York family castle plus various other locations in the plot-building and finally at the Bosworth Fields for final battle and the end of the play, the end of Richard and the end of The War of the Roses”. YEAR: The play covers the years of 1471 to 1485 (1471 --The previous King Henry VI is murdered and Richard’s oldest brother Edward assumes the throne as King Edward IV; 1485 – The Battle at Bosworth fields and the demise of Richard III.) 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; he begins his soliloquy with the glumly-uttered words: “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York.” (The sun was a symbol for the Yorkist dynasty.) 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 he will labor to make himself king. In order to become the King, however, he must dispose of six people who stand between him and the throne – the King his brother, his older brother Clarence, the two bastard sons of the King and the legitimate sons of Clarence.; his dying brother is first and inevitable soon. Richard first imprisons then murders his middle brother, George, Duke of Clarence; heartbroken over the death of his brother, the King dies a natural death. Through court alliances and desperate acts Richard then “removes” the two “bastard” younger sons of the King from a second marriage ruled illegitimate and finally the two sons of Clarence. Richard crowns himself as King only to be destroyed a short two years later by the return from exile of Henry, Earl of Richmond who is victorious over Richard and is crowned the new King at age 28 thus ending the War of the Roses. --------------------------------------------------- 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: Historically, 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 to do 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 the body of the dead King Henry VI; it is well-known that Richard himself murdered both the King and his son and heir in the battle at Tewkesbury; following the coffin is his grieving daughter-in-law wife, Lady Anne, who at first curses and defies Richard; 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 and was crowned King at age 31 on July 6, 1483 – but at such a cost of life. 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? Class members are welcome to introduce discussion topics to augment any or all of these: 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 father-in-law, the murdered King Henry VI; 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 by winning ends the generation-long War of the Roses; he soon marries the daughter of Richard’s brother, the deceased Edward IV.