Shakespeare should have the last word
By far
the most important English King for me during my childhood was Richard III; or,
more accurately, Shakespeare’s Richard III; or, more accurately still,
Laurence Olivier playing Shakespeare’s Richard III. The film captivated me when I was
about 10, and I have subsequently found the malignity of evil always more
fascinating, emotionally and intellectually, than the beneficence of good.
Fictional or dramatic heroes have been to me ever since but pale and
uninteresting shadows of villains. Heroes, in fact, tend to bore me as villains
seldom do. And this is thanks to Richard III, in the special sense above.
When,
therefore, I saw a biography of Richard III (Richard III: England’s Black
Legend by Desmond Seward) in the window of a charity (thrift) shop near my
home, together with a book about owls, I bought it. Not only did I buy it but I
read it, and was somewhat surprised that, in effect, it endorsed the
Shakespearian view of Richard’s character. Published on the
500th anniversary of Richard’s accession to or usurpation of the throne,
Richard emerges as very much the unscrupulous, hypocritical, treacherous
monster depicted in the play.
I
believe this is no longer the orthodox view of him. The accusers are now the
dissenters. And a friend of mine, who grew up in the Soviet Union and lived
there until he was twenty-five, dislikes Shakespeare’s play because of its
crude and seemingly propagandistic encomium to Henry VII, of the type to which
his upbringing in the great motherland of ubiquitous and compulsory lies had
made him allergic. Henry VII himself in truth was no mean slayer of his
enemies, at least the equal of Richard III at his worst, but he was the
grandfather of Queen Elizabeth, reigning monarch when Shakespeare wrote. Queen
Elizabeth’s title to the throne depended upon Henry VII’s,
and his depended on the right of conquest rather than on any plausible
claim by royal descent. That conquest could itself be justified only if Richard
III were a bloody and tyrannical usurper of a quite unparalleled type; so that
my friend sees the whole play as an elaborate apologia for a current political
regime.
The irony
here, of course, is that the objection to the play is itself highly political.
The sycophantic message at its end – assuming that it was not justified by the
historical facts, and that Henry VII did not ‘Enrich the time to come with
smooth-fac’d peace,/ With smiling plenty and fair prosperous days!’ – could
hardly efface, neutralise or outweigh the poetic, dramatic and psychological
brilliance of what had gone before. And it should be remembered that
Shakespeare’s depiction of Queen Elizabeth’s father in Henry VIII is
by no means flattering: though of course he was a mere continuator of the
dynasty, not its founder, so the question of his character was perhaps less a
sensitive matter despite his reign having been more recent.
There
is probably no finer portrayal of the intelligent, charming, plausible,
unctuous, ruthless psychopath in literature than that of Richard:
What do I fear? myself? There’s none else by: Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.