My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.
- The Tragedy of King Richard the Third (King Richard at 5.3)
When I was an undergraduate, I worked for a summer as the sound board operator for a local theater company. They specialized in productions of Shakespeare, and that summer, they did Richard III. Theirs was a pseudo punk rock, noirish staging of the show. I didn't fall in love with the show through that production; actually, I had told the company that I didn't have time to run the sound board for the show, but after some pleas and laments at not being able to find anyone, I agreed to do it, and found myself spending three plus hours of my life each night trying to navigate a sound system that would have been considered modern in the '40s. Regardless, my remembrances of the show and what I saw them trying to do in that production, coupled with my greater understanding of Shakespeare after having acted in several productions myself since becoming a grad student, have caused a steady swell of appreciation in me for Richard III along with a strong sense of how the play should be performed.
Nearly everyone I know who is into Shakespeare adores Sir Ian McKellen's film version of Richard III. I've never been a big fan of it myself. Richard I feel is a young man's play. It was one of the first plays ever written by Shakespeare (the dating of Shakespeare plays is somewhat uncertain, but the Henry VI - Richard III tetralogy were certainly among Shakespeare's earliest plays), and it was Shakespeare's first really huge success. The historical Richard III was a very young man. He was 18 when he led armies at the Battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury, resounding victories for Richard and the Yorkists which won the throne for Richard's brother, Edward. At 20, Richard married Lady Anne, and by the age of 30, with the death of Edward IV, and with some political maneuvering by Richard, Richard became king of England.
Although there is a great deal of controversy regarding the life and actions of the historical King Richard III (check out websites here, here, and here), the facts, or arguments over the facts, of the life of the actual Richard only serve to amplify for me the tragedy of Shakespeare's Richard. Shakespeare's Richard III is a charmer. He loves to talk, he delivers long soliloquies to the audience, he woos Lady Anne with his words, though he has just murdered her father and her husband, he convinces the people of England that despite the fact that he has no legitimate right to the throne, he should be their king. He is a con man, he is the ultimate con man, in fact, he has no morals, he is morally repugnant. But we, the audience, the viewers, love him. We have to, or the play is tedious. We fall in love with Richard, even as we hate what he does. The tragic part is that Richard is not only extremely intelligent, but he is also remarkably self-reflective. He knows he's a terrible person and he hates himself, but he knows no other life except a life where he must be king at all costs. For me, knowing that the historical Richard may in fact have been a good man, more or less, with good intentions adds another level of injustice and tragedy to the fictional Richard. The historical Richard, according to some sources, seem to be a dully pious religious man who is referred to as "old Richard" in some court documents because he is so dour and unexciting, and somehow, it's sad to think that the real Richard, a Richard who is not evil or malevolent, would be of no interest to us nowadays except for the skewed picture of him that Shakespeare has provided.
I disliked McKellen's film because I do not want an elderly scowling brooding Richard. Shakespeare's Richard must be young, he must be vibrant, and he must be charming. He is a cripple, but he leads men into war and inspires them to great victory (not, of course, when he is killed at the end of Richard III, but all of Richard's earlier military victories in the Wars of the Roses are documented in Henry VI, Parts 2 and 3). He seduces women, he wins over all of England. This character is not a scowler, he's not a sourpuss. You are excited to see him made king, and you are worried when he becomes besieged by plots against him.
That's the Richard III I am longing for, one that is colorful and vibrant and alive with excitement, only to grow darker and more scary as the great ascent leads to a great descent. Is the audience indicted for loving Richard even though he is undoubtedly an evil and horrible person? I don't think so. They are in on the fiction. Shakespeare knew that people would have little enthusiasm for a play that wallowed in the evil machinations of an evil man; he needed a hero, so he made the villain the hero. Shakespeare's audiences went into the play knowing Richard was a villain (this was 100 years after the death of Richard, and the Lancastrians had by that time sufficiently altered the record to make Richard out to be the horrible tyrant that was depicted in Shakespeare), so the revelation for them was how endearing Richard was.
I pitched my version of Richard III to one of the theater committees on campus, but they chose Othello instead. I have heard of productions of Richard that have followed a lot of the ideas I've discussed in this post, I certainly don't imagine that I'm the first to come across this point of view on the play. But I want to see one of those productions, whether it be mine or someone else's. So, step aside Sir Ian (and for that matter, Sir Laurence), give me a production of Richard by a bunch of young madmen and madwomen.
