So today's lecture is on which is the third a history play from the beginning of Shakespeare's career, probably dating from 50 in 91 to two, and a play which is a huge success in print. Probably the largest success of a play by Shakespeare in print. Six editions in Cuarto Cuarto, those small single play book, six editions in Quarto before the First Folio text of sixteen twenty three. So probably the most popular play of Shakespeare's in print.
But of course, the most by far the most popular work of Shakespeare's imprint in this period is actually Venus. And Adonis is not a play at all. If the Elizabethans had been asked about Shakespeare, the writer, they would have talked about Shakespeare, the poet, the poets of Venus and Donis.
And we'll talk a little bit more about the difference in the text, the difference between the quarto, the quarter text and the folio and the way they might be interesting for the way we interpret the play a bit later on. But first, let's start with the question that I posed about the play at the end of last week's lecture. The question that I don't try and focus on is, do we want Richmond to win? Do we want Richmond to win? And let's start by putting that in an account of the plot.
So the plot of Richard the third is a basic rise and fall political narrative. The details are probably less important than the overall shape. And certainly giving a synopsis of the history play plot always makes it sound enormously more complicated than it really is. Essentially, Richard rises and he falls. Richard opens the play as Duke of Gloucester.
But it doesn't become king until Oct four plots against his brother, King Edward, the fourth falsely accusing their other brother, George, the Duke of Clarence of treason. Richard pretends to be friends to Clarence, but in fact sends two assassins to murder him in the Tower of London. This is part of his overall strategy to eliminate other contenders, other other political rivals.
Richard, meet Lady Ann, who is mourning the coffin of her father in law, Henry, six, not her husband, which you might think if you watch the McKellen film where it is her husband. But it's a bit of a giveaway that you've watched the film rather than the play. It's actually her father in law, Henry the Sixth in the play. She's mourning at the coffin of her father in law, who Richard has killed in a bravura display of persuasion.
He persuades lady and to marry him, claiming his murders were prompted by her beauty. He's also married her first husband. Not married, actually murdered. And there's a Freudian slip there. Clearly on the death of King Edward. Richard becomes Lord Protector to his young nephew, also called Edward. This part of the problem, isn't it? History plays Richard's mother, the Duchess of York, and old Queen Margaret, who is the widow of Henry the Sixth. Both curse him as Lord Protector.
Richard executes his opponents and with his chief adviser, the Duke of Buckingham, he lodges the young princes in the tower. He and Buckingham manipulate the lord mayor of London and the citizens into begging Richard to take the throne, Richard puts on a show of not wanting to pretending to be unwilling for a coronation. But but but he's persuaded overseas. Richmond is gathering strength from discontented subjects of Richard. Richard reneges on his promise to reward Buckingham.
His associate with an Oldham because Buckingham refuses to countenance the murder of the young princes in the Tower of London. Richard, anyway, send Tirrell to kill the princes. And Buckingham joins Richmond in opposition to Richard Lady and death allows Richard to propose marriage to Princess Elizabeth. We don't see this in the play. The daughter of the former King Edward The Forth. The queen pretends to agree to this marriage, but it doesn't, in fact, take place.
Richmond lands at Milford Haven and he marries Elizabeth, the daughter of King Edward, the fourth on the eve of the battle. Richard is Kirsten adream by the ghosts of all his victims, who then go on to Richmond to bless his enterprise. Bosworth Field The Battle. Richard is defeated by Richmond in single combat. Richmond is crowned and he announces he will unite the houses of York and Lancaster and bring peace to the role of Richmond in the play,
which is partly one of them. Try and focus on is to be Richard's nemesis. The end of his megalomaniacal progress to the English throne, the end of the Wars of the Roses, the Union of the White and Red. The end of the long historical fallout from the deposition of Richard the second that scar's the second half of the 15th century and animates Shakespeare's three plays on the walls of the roses, the three parts of Henry, the sixth place he's already written and have been performed before.
Richard the third. So Richmond, this is is the is the kind of saviour at the end of all this turmoil. How then could we not want him to win? Well, mid 20th century criticism was very clear that in Richmond, Shakespeare presented the idealised solution to the dynastic and political turmoil he had previously dramatised.
The standard critique on this is E and W Tilyard Tilyard in his Shakespeare's history plays, Tilyard argued that the these plays were like other forms of late 16th century historiography in both prose works like Rafael Hollinshead Chronicles,
which is Shakespeare's main source, but also in verse. Things like Samuel Daniel's long poem on the Wars of the Roses that these taken together, these historical writings were a way of consolidating Elizabeth the first rule by providing a historical and a genealogical sanction for the Tudors. The so-called Tudor myth. Richmond's victory at Bosworth Field at the end of Richard, the third marks the establishment of the Tudor dynasty.
He becomes Henry, the seventh father of Henry, the eighth grandfather of Queen Elizabeth. Furthermore, Richmond's victory at Bosworth establishing the Tudor dynasty attempts to impose this transfer of sovereignty not as a usurpation, not as the murder of a reigning king, which in fact it is, but as a deliverance from tyranny. So there are some kind of political problems historically about the way Henry the 7th comes to the throne.
And in part, Tilyard argues, the historical writing of this period is an attempt to smooth out those problems. So for Tilyard, this is an influential argument which still pertains in many critical quarters. Now, the tuda myth that was Shakespeare's subject in the history plays reaches its high point in the presentation of Richmond, the Providencia list. Tell us of the history play sequence.
The idea that it's all going to an end point where it all works out OK is completed as Richmond represents reparation and restitution after a sequence of illegitimate kings following the deposition of Richard the second and a period of violent, turbulent civil expiation for this crime, according to Tilyard. Richmond comes to reinstate the tarnished monarchy in the blessed form of the Tudors for this play, right, Tilyard?
Shakespeare accepted the prevalent belief that God had guided England into her haven of Tudor prosperity. Shakespeare accepted the prevalent belief that God had guided England into a haven of due to prosperity. Now there are lots of different ways we could challenge this vision of Elizabethan politics. Setting aside for a moment the politics of the play itself. For one thing, as we know, the establishment of The Tudors by Henry the seventh was by no means the end of that.
Dynasties problems. The struggle for an heir to Henry the eighth comes immediately to mind. More immediately, presenting The Tudors as the sanctified antidote to civil war is really rather a backhanded compliment. In the early 50s, 90s, even the most optimistic politicians had given up. By that point on the idea that the 15 year old queen would marry and have an heir, the Tudors were, although nobody could say it at the time.
Toast. There are dynasty, which had run entirely out of steam and out of, as they were, a dynasty at the end of its life. So to suggest that the only antidote to civil war, the only peaceful and prosperous future for England is with the Tudors is a slightly odd thing to argue in the 15 nineties, many more recent critics following and articulating themselves against Tilyard and trying to assess how Shakespeare's history plays might intervene into contemporary politics have suggested that,
in fact, their role is to rehearse repressed anxieties about the Elizabethan succession, not to try and massage it much of those anxieties away. So they rehearse these anxieties by showing us different versions of monarchies in decline, different versions of power changing hands. They become documents of political uncertainty, not historical triumph. Or perhaps rather, they suggest that political certainties are a thing of the past.
The turn to history in the culture of the late 16th century can itself be seen as a sign of cultural confidence. If you like, a turn to the past rather than a step forward into the future. Something a number of commentators were saying about the Oscar shortlist last night. A whole whole sequence of historical films suggesting a kind of an anxiety about the present under comfort or security in the past.
So we could answer our question about Richmond with reference to the historical context of the early 50s nineties. Can his victory at the end of Richard the third really register as the triumphant conclusion to the politics of conflict? Or does it appear rather as another contingent version of the theatre's appetite for parables of regime change?
The disturbing conclusion to Michael Boyd's RISC production in 2007 had Richmond delivering his pious, platitudinous final speech even as his flak jacketed troops watched the audience through the sights of their machine guns. Now we write, we might relate this point to something about the chronology of Shakespeare's own writing. Shakespeare writes his history plays, rather, as George Lucas makes the Star Wars films.
That's to say he begins by writing towards an end of history moment for George Lucas. This is Skywalker becoming a fully fledged Jedi and destroying the empire for Shakespeare. It's the victory of Richmond at Bosworth Field. If you know both text, you can see that they actually share a number of Sims or plot elements in quite a recognisable way.
The end of Richard, the third. That's to say, takes the historical story to a point where there is no possibility or no interest in pursuing it any further abate the edge of traitors. Gracious Lord, praise the godly Richmond, predicting his descendants will enrich the time to come with smooth faced peace, with smiling plenty and fair, prosperous days. This may indeed be a worthy political aspiration, but it's certainly not a very dramatic one.
What both Shakespeare and Lucas do is to pursue their themes, the themes which have been so commercially successful for them by reverting to an earlier prequel part of the story after the end. That's to say we go back to the beginning. The next play is Richard the second.
The start of that cycle of deposition, expiation and restoration that Tilyard saw as the sequence of the history plays the next plays then, Richard, the second and the two parts of Henry the fourth return us to an earlier chronological point in the historical story, just as they return us to a world of conflict and embattled sovereignty. In this recurrent schema, in the way the plays work out on the Elizabethan stage, Richmond's victory is provisional and temporary.
It's just like the victory at Shrewsbury, which ends Henry, the fourth part one, or the Battle of Agincourt, which ends Henry the fifth. It concludes an episode, not the whole story. And then I come back to the implications that might have for Richard. The third in a moment. As I've already talked about in lectures on which the second and on Henry the fourth part one, the fashion for performing complete sequences of Shakespeare's history plays is a decidedly 20th century one.
There is no evidence from the Shakespearean period that these history plays were seen as serial or episodic in their own time. Rather, I think they were complete self standing, dramatic entertainments. The critic Nicolas Green argues differently in a book which helpfully gives its argument in its title, Shakespeare's Serial History Plays. So if you want to think about an alternative to this view, I'm giving you of distinct history plays. Green is the place to go.
But the habit of reading them and particularly performing them as a sequence has been cued by their arrangement in the First Folio. We've seen here before that the history plays apparently uniquely, since it's very difficult to see any organising principle in the order of plays in the comedy or the tragedy sections.
If you look at those and have any bright ideas, you should pass them on, because that's one of the great mysteries about the way the folio is put together, why the play's in this order. Why is the Tempus past Weitzen symbol in last? Why a certain place next to each other? But when we come to the sectionals on the history plays, we can see why they've been put in the order. They have been put in historical chronological order, like look like a history book of kings.
The earliest one first King John, the latest one, King Henry. The eighth at the end. The titles of the history plays a regularised in the Folio to make the sequence work. Henry forth part one. Henry the fourth. Part two. Henry the sixth. Parts one, two and three. All of those plays had slightly different titles when they were printed previously. So the history plays are presented in the Folio as a serial epic rather than a set of individual plays.
It's here and here alone. So after Shakespeare, almost certainly not directed by Shakespeare. Shakespeare doesn't have any influence. I think in the way the First Folio looks. So it's only here that Richard the third takes on the kind of culminating position in the sequence.
And it's bolstered in that by the very last play in the history section. The collaboration with Fletcher All is true or Henry the Eighth, which we might argue picks up the sort of analogical implications of Richmond's Tudor victory at the end of Richard the third. So the establishment of The Tudors with what happens at the end. Henry the eighth, which is the baptism of Queen Elizabeth, the infant Queen Elizabeth and the salt prediction of water, great rain reign she's going to have.
So it's this arrangement of the play as the last of a long sequence of historical plays in the Folio that gives rise to that providential list. Tell us to tell us meaning and purpose from which we get to theology, a kind of narrative that she's very much and driven, driven towards a particular conclusion. So I've been suggesting, I think, that the First Folio arrangement of the plays makes Richmond's climactic entry into Richard the third overdetermined.
It's not only the ending of this play, but the ending of a sequence. But I've also been reminding us that this sequence is a later construction. It's not the experience of the first playgoers. The First Folio organisation has prompted, I think, over teleological readings of the play in which Richmond functions as the ultimate figure of resolution, conclusion and future promise. And it's not surprising then that the Folio title has the additional information.
The tragedy of Richard, the third with the landing of Richmond and the Battle of Bosworth Field. We don't know where that additional information comes from for the title. In fact, I'd never noticed until I was reproducing it for you or for your handout, which is probably goes to show that there is plenty to see and notice in Shakespeare, even though we feel everything that's already been talked about. So we might take a different view of Richard the third.
If we returned to its early publications before the Folio, those six quarters that I mentioned at the beginning, like the Folio, all six called the play the tragedy of Richard the third. The tragedy of Richard the third. It's a challenging designation for us because we are still largely wedded to that. Essentially good, but with a tragic flaw model of tragic protagonist which has been shaped for us out of Aristotle's poetics via AC Bradley's Shakespearean tragedy.
Bradley, like Tilyard, is one of the most influential books in our discipline, one that we can't really escape no matter how many people and how often we say it's just wrong. But as I've discussed before and I've been talking about Titus Andronicus and other players, the tragic hero model is quite limited, even even Bradley. It's great. Exponent can only really make it fit four of the dozen or so plays which Shakespeare writes, which are tragedies.
Seeing Richard the third as a tragedy is less about an ethical judgement on the qualities of its central character and more a simple description of its shape. What we've got here is the day, Kasie, both mediaeval tradition of great figures falling due to the operations of Fortune's Wheel. The monks prologue in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales has it. Tragedy is a certain story of him that stood in great prosperity and is a fallen out of high degree into misery and end death and wreck Adli.
As you can see that that mediaeval idea is just a structure of footballing from high to low of a moral or ethical judgement of any of any sort. It's is a structure based on it's a definition based on structure. One thing we can be sure about in a tragedy is where our focus of interest lies in the structure of the tragedy of Richard the third. We might then say Richmond is about as interesting as 14 brasses in Hamlet.
Not very. The very fact of being alive at the end of a tragedy is an index of your irrelevance. Think about Edgar in King Lear or Malcolm in Macbeth or the Prince in Romeo and Juliet. Who cares? Let's pursue this just a little bit further to think about the relative time onstage of these protagonists. The part of Richard, it's a huge one in the Shakespearean canon. And he speaks 32 percent of the play's lines, 32 percent of the play's lines.
It's the biggest role in Shakespeare outside, apart from Hamlet, 37 percent, well above Macbeth, who speaks. Twenty nine percent of his line of that plays lines and Lear, 22 percent of that plays lines. Case of Richard's got 32 percent of his play, but bigger than all those other tragic protagonists apart from Hamlet. When I'm quoting this kind of quantitative data, I'm always quoting it from those useful tables in the RISC Shakespeare, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen.
So Richard's at 32 percent of the play's lines. Richmond, by contrast, speaks four percent, four percent. So it makes him the statistical equivalent of the prince of Morocco in the Merchant of Venice, the Duke of Cornwall in King Lear. Ribboned Tío in Othello. Richard is in 14 of the play's 22 scenes. I would guess about two and a half hours of stage time. Richard is in three. I reckon about 20 minutes. The implications of this are actually substantial.
Shakespeare has done as much as he possibly can to minimise and to downplay Richmond's role. The character of Richmond is not even mentioned until Act four, when Dorsett is sent to join him and he does not appear on stage until Act five scene to. The strategy of reduction works, if you read any review, if you Google, for example, the Kevin Spacey production of last year or Michael Boyd's three or four years ago with Jonathan Slinger.
If you look at reviews of that, you'll be bet you'll find it really, really difficult to find out how Richmond was played. He's never, ever mentioned in performance is the necessary but personally uninteresting person who will speak the dead protagonist's eulogy and whose presence kills us. We have come to the end of the play. We know that Shakespeare cannot in writing history plays. Change historical fact, winners and losers.
Kings and challenges appear in his plays, as in the historical record. Even as he manipulates events, battles and motives and often collapses them. Henry Earl of Richmond did win the Battle of Bosworth Field on the 22nd of August 14 85, killing Richard, the third to take the throne.
The play acknowledges this historical fact, but it does it, I think, quite grudgingly, without any attempt to characterise Richmond to make him attractive or to counter suggestions that his own claim to the throne is questionable. It's interesting that Richmond does exactly what Richard had been trying, trying to do marry the Princess Elizabeth to secure his claim to the throne. He is he, too, is a is a weak has a weak claim.
So this is a play, Richard. The set, Richard. The third is a play resonantly about Richard and Richmond. That means, I think, that we can approach the question of audience sympathies towards Richmond via an analysis of the structure of the play, Richmond's role is, as I've said, as nemesis. But it is also as a kind of day a sex machinea figure. The day a sex machinea is the person, sometimes divine and sometimes human, who comes in usually unexpectedly at the end of the play to sort things out.
The phrase was originally used by Horace as a negative playwright. He instructed, should not resort to this mechanical trick. It's a kind of equivalent of. And then I woke up. You know, it's a kind of throwing up. It's throwing your arm, shrugging their shoulders by going to resolve the things that you set up fictionally. But in Shakespeare's hands, it seems that the very inadequacies of this device, the death that much in a device, are being used for effect.
Richard's personal charisma in Nietzsche, in terms his will to power, can only be defeated by a historical plot, not by a dramatic rival. Richmond is no match for Richard and therefore only the clunky deus ex machina device can bring about Richard's downfall. The play and then with whimper, not bang or with tragic in escape ability rather than with historical competition. Richard Long, Crane's film set in the 1930s fascist London with Ian McKellen as Richard.
And with his refusal to be captured in the battlefield, jumping instead in a willed fall into a kind of battle inferno set against the music of Al James Al Jolson's disconcertingly jaunty. I'm sitting on top of the world. It's a disc discordant ending, but one which emphasises Richard's irrepressible will as the kind of ultimate victory over his duller enemies.
For this reason, then, I think that the teleological reading of Richard, the third in which Richmond is the ultimate and crucial conclusion, is not for most readers their experience of the play, partly because of Richard's own personal dominance and partly because the play insists upon a kind of nostalgic or recursive memorial structure.
It's always looking backwards rather than forwards. This is not a play whose momentum is largely forward, and I want to argue in next part of the lecture that invite us kind of a. logical play instead of trying to get to its ending, it's trying desperately to kind of pedal back its it's like trying to go the wrong way up an escalator. So there's a kind of Stacie's about that is trying to resist the movement. Let's think first about Richard's own personal dominance in the play.
We've already quantified that in terms of the high proportion of lines he speaks. But it's interesting to notice that this play has been identified as the first major collaboration between Shakespeare and his leading actor, Richard Burbage. The first of Shakespeare's plays, we might say that is that is distinctly for a star actor, not as the previous plays an ensemble. But let's dig a bit deeper. Richard is the only one of Shakespeare's major characters to begin his own play.
You'll recall that Shakespeare's usual method is more oblique. We tend to come into play as via marginal characters who are describing something which has just happened or is about to happen in the main part of the plot here. The opening direction is Enter Gloster. Soulless, soulless alone makes it clear that he does not only open the play, he does so in soliloquy. No other play by Shakespeare. Does this other play begins with a soliloquy in this way.
Therefore, he begins by addressing the audience. I've talked to my lecture on Othello. How very difficult it is for us to avoid a kind of conspiracy with the argot given his meatiness towards us and the concurrent difficulty of forging any empathy with the distant and grandiloquent Othello. Something similar happens in Richard. The Third, and indeed some of the Argo's demonic charm recalls this earlier character.
In Richard, the third, a stream of asides and sardonic remarks throughout serve to consolidate this initial alliance we make with Richard through his opening soliloquy. Richard is also funny, more like the mediaeval vice character with whom he compares himself. Richard's opening speech is itself striking. We can see that the famous line, which opens the play now is the winter of our discontent, begins decisively with an inverted metrical foot.
The stress is on now. The first syllable, not as regular iambic pentameter would have it on the second. Now is the winter of our discontent. The contrast between the turbulent maelstrom of competing interests in the Henry the Sixth plays where no one is able to assert any control over events is striking. Richard seises his own play by the scruff of the neck right from the start.
And if we look at the history of performances of this play, thinking perhaps particularly about this spider ish representation by Anthony Share, for instance, it seems that it is almost impossible for the Richard character to over act. The histrionic quality of his deformed and manic self presentation is intrinsic to the part. It is an over the top and overacted kind of hyperbolic role. Subtlety is not part of Richard's armoury. Excess is the keynote from that first long opening soliloquy.
Part of the relish of his role for Richard is its opportunity for self-conscious role playing his cues to Buckingham in his appearance before the Lord Mayor and citizens when he's playing the part of a devout hermit between two bishops, is a good example of his actually delight. Richard's personality is a series of roles rather than an identity.
The broken jerky soliloquy, as he wakes from his ghost haunted sleep at the end of the play, gives us a good example of this fractured self kind of fretting around an absence centre. I am a villain. Yet I lie. I am not. Am the villain. Yet I lie. I am not. The second I am may refer back to the first clause. I am not a villain, but it might also stand alone. A kind of statement of self cancellation. I am not. Throughout Richard's manic energy is irresistible.
In the second scene of the play, he woos Lady Morning, her father in law, Henry the sixth, telling her that he murdered both the dead king and her husband. The scene is a really difficult one to pull off. You can watch a number of film versions by Olivier and by McKellen and others on YouTube to see just how difficult, in fact, it is to make it convincing. If it does work, it works by making Lady Arm feel she is complicit in even culpable for Richard's behaviour.
I did kill King Henry, says Richard. But was thy beauty that provoked me cause I that stabbed young Edward, but was thy heavenly face that set me on Richard gives arm the chance to kill him. And the only alternative is to accede to him. She came under the first. So she has to do the second. The cost of submitting to Richard's rhetorical railroading in this scene is that she hardly speaks again in the entire play.
This, I think, is because she has served her purpose, the scene, as I say, which is only the second in the play, must be, I think, an allegory for the audience, his own reaction to Richard. As such, it's interesting to compare it with a comparable scene in Marlowe's Tamburlaine, where Tamburlaine was Zanotti pretty. As the most extreme and circumstantially unsympathetic person with regard to Richard.
Audience sorry, and plays the role of the audience deciding whether to take up Richard or to turn against him like her. We choose him even as we laugh at his epigrammatic. I'll have her, but I will not keep her long. We have, like her, entered into a masochistic compact with this charismatic, alluring protagonist. Part of the audience is role in relation to Richard, I think is encapsulated in this enchanted revulsion, which is, quite interestingly, according to the play, feminised.
It's striking that this most violent of plays focuses itself on acts of rhetoric like this one, like the wooing of Lady Am, not acts of murder. In that it's more obviously SEMICON owing a debt to the Roman tragedian Seneca than the bloody plays Elizabethan plays, we tend to identify under that heading. Sandakan violence was always reported, not staged. The revenge play structure that is faintly visible in the action in the cycle of action and retribution in Richard.
The third is not, as we might expect, accompanied by revenge play. Gore. If we compare the play with kids, Spanish tragedy, for instance, or with Titus Andronicus, we can see the significance of the fact that the deaths happen offstage sinisterly by diktat, but not bloodily before our eyes. Even the death of Clarance is shifted off stage, although we do see the terrifying Build-Up.
The horrors of the Quarto title page, the long quarto title is The Tragedy of King Richard, the third containing his treacherous plots against his brother Clarence, the pitiful mother of his most innocent nephews, his tyrannical usurpation with the whole course of his detested life and most deserved death. These horrors are misleading in their emphasis.
And it's also really striking to me that the one piece of information about the play that the Folio gives us, that it ends with Richmond and the Battle of Bosworth is completely absent from this Quarto title page.
That's not an interesting part of the play in its quota publication, but the event of this displacement of physical violence, like the emplace emphasis on performative speech acts like curses, is to put Richard's rhetorical charisma's centre stage and to make this a play about verbals rather than violent interaction. While labia cannot in this scene resist, Richard, another chorus of women in the play. Can Shakespeare has amplified the role of women in this play.
In sharp contrast to the later history plays. And so if you're interested in female characters, the Henry the Sixth plays on this one offer some compelling examples. Richard, the third gives us Richard's mother, the Duke of York, the Queen Elizabeth. Wife toured with the fourth and additionally Queen Margaret, the widow of Henry the Sixth. Margaret's presence in particular is decidedly a historical.
The real Queen Margaret died in France, having been taken prisoner after the death of her husband. So Shakespeare has revivified her, brought her back as a kind of deliberate memory of the past, the past in particular of his own. His Henry the six plays in which he's a prominent character. And as such, he's one of the structural features of the play that is constantly dragging it backwards, away from teleology towards recollection.
This backwards mentum, this umpty teleology, is one of the most significant roles for the women in the play. Established as mourners for the dead who have suffered for Richards rise and in the civil strife that created him. Their speeches are always full of recollection and remembrance. So they do very little to move the move, the play forward or to talk about the future. What they do is to intervene, to bring the past back into the play.
At her first entrance, Margaret reminds Richard Undoes of his previous actions out devil. I do remember them too well. That killed my husband Henry in the tower and Edward, my poor son at Tewksbury in the Kevin Spacey production. Part of her role was to mark deaths with chalk crosses on doors on the stage, taking up the role of witness and recorder in the text, Richard responds in kind. In all which time you were factious for the House of Lancaster. Let me put that in your minds.
If you forget what you have been at this and what you are with all what I have been and what I am. In part, the struggle between Richard and the female chorus in the play is a struggle over the historical past and who has the right to tell of that past? The role of historian in the play is a vexed one. Different characters make their case for the remembrance of different events and tell the story of the past in a different way.
This indicative encounter that I've just quoted them between Richard and Margaret, therefore takes on something of a massive theatrical quality about the play itself as a version of history. To the historians, since Thomas Moore writing under Richmond's son, Henry the eighth, had worked to demonise Richard the Third and Shakespeare's Richard embraces this vision enthusiastically. I am determined to prove a villain, he declares in his opening soliloquy.
I am determined to prove a villain. The line is double edged. Determined has the dual meaning both of human agency. I am determined that I will do this. And of cosmic direction, it has been determined that you will do this. The question of whether Richard does determine his own fate or has it determined for him echoes throughout the play. Just as his physical deformity act both as cause and the symptom of his moral character.
Mors The History of Richard, the third written around 15, 13. It's a really interesting source to look out for Richard the third, not least because it's an unfinished work and thus deals only with Richard's rise to the throne. The part of the story that I've been arguing Shakespeare also finds most interesting. So, as I've said, it's the women in the play who take on the role of historians recording and lamenting the past Act four.
Scene four is a particularly significant lock us for this as all three. The Duchess of York, the Queen Mother, Elizabeth and Margaret, the widow Henry, the sixth vie with each other in their grief, perhaps here, drawing on the religious symbolism of the three women mourning at the foot of the cross. The language of the scene is strikingly stylised, turning on rhetorical patterns of repetition, which give a sense of stay, says a lack of movement.
This is Margaret. I had an Edward Teller. Richard killed him. I had a husband tell Richard killed him. Thou hardstand Edward Teller. Richard killed him. Thou hearts to Richard Tilla. Richard. Killed him. Their conversation is a. teleological in many on many different levels. Firstly, it does nothing to advance the plot. In fact, it interrupts the plot. The scene immediately before. This is one where Richard hears news of Richmond's advancing forces.
And when Richard himself enters the scene of these three women, his question is apposite. Who intercepts me in my expedition? Who intercepts me in my expedition expedition? There means both military plan but also haste expedite to do something in a hurry. So he acknowledges that they're somehow interrupting that the business, the business of the play and its depiction of female grief. The scene has no historical precedent.
Almost all the scenes of women in Shakespeare's history plays are invented by Shakespeare that don't form part of the historical sources he's using. So so that that makes the scene a kind of interpolation into unfolding historical events.
But perhaps most significantly, in its language, as the four lines I just read to you suggest strongly, the language privilege is circularity and repetition over linearity and teleology the rhetoric of repetition, of restating is the opposite of teleology of forward movement, even at the point when the play's hurtling towards its conclusion.
That's to say there's a counter movement, structurally and particularly linguistically and rhetorically, away from the future towards the past, appropriately capturing histories, contradictory movements, forwards and backwards.
Here, we might try and draw in another influential critical reading of the history play sequence to counter that Providenciales reading of Tilyard that we covered earlier in his book, Shakespeare, our contemporary young Kott offered a bleakly existentialist reading of the history plays. Not surprising, perhaps, in a book which also links King Lear to Beckett's play End Game. And finally puts paid to the sentimental idea that Midsummer Night's Dream is a children's fairy tale.
Cops analysis of the history players was ultimately for Shakespeare. History stands still. Every chapter opens and closes at the same point. The verbal index of this Stacie's is for Kott repeated names, Henries and Edwards and Richards constantly recurring, passing across the stage. So the language of the repeated language, the repeated names in history plays give it give a sense that nothing is changing.
His visual index for this cot was a theatre director. It was what he called the image of the grand mechanism, the grand mechanism. A kind of moving staircase which never got anywhere. Another umpty teleological reading, which has been very influential on the stage. If you saw any of Michael Boyd's history sequence at the RISC might remember a kind of metal staircase in the middle of this Courtyard Theatre.
A very definite borrowing. I think from Kott we can see the difference between Kots argument until the arts. The histories for Tilyard are about progress to an end point. The glorious reign of the Tudors. But for Kott they're just about circularity, repetition, unstated. Queen Margaret then serves as a kind of ghost in the play, bringing with her the unquiet traces of the past in Michael Boyd's production, her during her first scene.
She unwrapped from a bundle the skeleton of her son, lovingly reassembling the dry bones on a piece of cloth as she spoke. Quite literally. She carried the past on her back. Typically of Boyd's direction, that production was full of other ghosts. When Richard was crowned, a procession of his dead victims came to kneel before him on the battlefield. He addressed his famous cry for a horse to the spirits of his parents who rejected him.
Boyd's directorial Ghosts here add their instinct for retrospection and looking backwards to Shakespeare's own. In a scene at the end of Richard the third, just before the decisive battle, Richard is visited in a dream by the ghosts of those he has killed. They curse him and travel across the stage to Richmond, giving him their blessing. The dream sequence here reminds us of the people in the play's past, but also back to an earlier dream in the play that have.
At the end of the first act. Again, the movement is backwards rather than forwards recapping rather than going ahead.
So this like you have been thinking about the ending of Richard the third and the victory of Richmond in ethical and in political terms, but also in dramaturgical and structural ones, I've tried to think about the way Shakespeare's constructed the play to minimise the ending through his underplayed characterisation of Richmond and his insistence on an anti teleological structure of memory and recollection.
And I've suggested these might draw attention away from an overly literal historical telos in which Richmond functions. And Saviour. I've tried to point out that reading the Folio history in the Folio, I think is quite a different experience from reading them or experiencing them individually. Next week then I'm going to talk about parallelise, a late play about travel, incest and reconciliation. The question I think I want to ask there is why wasn't parallelise included in the First Folio?
Why wasn't Pericles glued in the First Folio? I hope I'll see you then. Thank you.