The Oxford Shakespeare, as its name might suggest, seems to have been prepared with the student or scholar in mind. (The RSC Shakespeare, again as its name might suggest, seems to be aimed more at the actor or theatrical director, and the Penguin Shakespeare at the general reader). This Oxford edition of “Richard III” features a very lengthy introduction, almost the length of a short novel in itself, and very copious explanatory and textual notes.
“Richard III” opens where “Henry VI Part 3” left off; the dead body of the murdered Henry is brought onto the stage at the beginning of the play. It is often regarded as forming a tetralogy with the three “Henry VI” plays, but whereas those plays are among Shakespeare’s least known and least performed works, “Richard III” has long been a favourite on the stage. The title role, the longest in Shakespeare apart from Hamlet, is regarded as one of the greatest challenges for a Shakespearean actor. Lines from the play, notably the opening “Now is the winter of our discontent” and “My kingdom for a horse!” have passed into proverbial use.
The play which has most in common with “Richard III“ is “Macbeth”. Both plays are based, albeit loosely, on British history, and both deal with the rise and fall of a usurping tyrant who dies in battle at the end of the play. “Macbeth”, however, is normally classified as a tragedy and “Richard III” as a history play, even though it was originally published under the title “The Most Tragicall History of King Richard III”. The reason, I think, is the difference between the ways in which the two protagonists are presented. Macbeth is a prime example of a tragic hero, a great man brought down by a flaw in his character, in his case ambition reinforced by the promptings of his fiendish wife and the three witches. He is initially presented as a loyal subject of King Duncan and a successful soldier, and even after he has murdered the king and usurped the crown he is still troubled by his conscience, from which he can only escape by a retreat into moral nihilism.
Richard, by contrast, is no tragic hero. He needs no outside promptings to reinforce his monstrous ambition; his wife, Lady Anne, is no Lady Macbeth but a victim of Richard’s cruelty, and there is no supernatural element in the play other than the ghosts of his victims who appear to reproach him for his crimes. Moral nihilism is not something into which he escapes; it is an essential part of his character. He is a ruthless, Machiavellian schemer, motivated only by self-interest; conscience is something wholly alien to him. In his dealings with the other characters in the play he is a hypocrite, hiding his true nature beneath a façade of goodness, but with the audience he is gleefully honest about his villainy.
By any objective standards, Richard was a minor character in English history. His claim to the throne was a weak one, and he was overthrown after only two years as king. (Since the Norman Conquest, only his unfortunate nephew and predecessor Edward V, Edward VIII and the disputed Jane Grey have had shorter reigns). Yet the effect of Shakespeare’s play has been to confer a posthumous fame on Richard which he would not otherwise have enjoyed, something evidenced by the enormous interest in his recent reburial in Leicester Cathedral. Some have criticised Shakespeare for blackening Richard’s character, and there is a certain amount of truth in the accusation as the play attributes crimes to Richard of which he was not historically guilty. (Prince Edward, the son of Henry VI, died in battle, and George Duke of Clarence was executed for treason against Edward IV, but in the play both are murdered by Richard or on his orders).
The “Tudor propaganda” aspect of the play can, however, be over-emphasised. Certainly, it would have been imprudent for Shakespeare to have depicted Richmond, the future Henry VII and grandfather of his patron Elizabeth I, in anything other than a good light, or to have cast any doubt on the legitimacy of the Tudor dynasty. On the other hand, there is no evidence to suggest that the play was written on the instructions of Elizabeth or her government. Shakespeare was writing more than a hundred years after the events he describes, long after any possibility of a Yorkist revival had vanished. Richard had died without legitimate heirs, and although some of Clarence’s direct descendants still survived nobody regarded them as serious candidates for the Crown. The only serious challenge to Elizabeth’s rule had come from partisans of Mary Queen of Scots who was, like her, a descendant of Henry VII.
When Shakespeare departs from historical accuracy he generally does so for the sake of dramatic licence, not because he wanted to slander a good man. (The historical Richard was not a good man, and nobody in Shakespeare’s day believed him to have been one). Another example comes in his treatment of Henry VI’s widow, Queen Margaret. She is an important character in the play, yet by rights she should not appear in it at all; during the earlier events portrayed she was in exile in France, and by the time Richard came to the throne she was actually dead. Here, however, she appears as a sort of personification of vengeance, exulting at the downfall of those who have wronged her.
The play is not primarily an examination of the rights and wrongs of the Wars of the Roses; it has a much deeper political significance than that, which is another reason to explain its continuing popularity. Richmond is not merely Elizabeth’s grandfather in the literal sense; Elizabethans would also have seen him as her spiritual ancestor, bringing peace and reconciliation after a period of bitter division in the same way as Elizabeth attempted to reconcile the conflicting factions after the Reformation. For similar reasons the play was popular after the Restoration as Royalists sought to draw parallels between Henry VII and his distant descendant Charles II, another monarch who took power after the nation had been divided by civil war.
For modern audiences, of course, much of the interest of the play lies in the parallels between Shakespeare’s portrait of tyranny and the dictatorships of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. (The same is also true of “Macbeth”). This explains why many modern productions- notably Richard Loncraine’s film starring Ian McKellen- have sought to portray Richard as a proto-fascist, even a proto-Hitler. Richard’s dictatorship may have different ideological underpinnings to the modern fascist or communist state, but in other respects, especially the all-pervading atmosphere of fear and suspicion, it is essentially the same. Richard’s ruthless treatment of his one-time friend Buckingham, who helped him to seize power, has its parallels in Hitler’s “Night of the Long Knives” and Stalin’s purges in which they turned on their former allies. As in “Henry VI Part 2”, Shakespeare shows that he understood the underlying psychology of fascism and communism long before either ideology actually existed.
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- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 20 October 2013
- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 February 2015
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- Nedra VoorheesReviewed in the United States on 7 July 2021
excellent introduction and great notes
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