Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 37
Staging (on film) R ic h a r d III
to Reflect the Present
Whether fihnine Shakespeare's play R iclnin l III, or an original screen play
ahoul the events of his life and times, almost everything surrounding this short
lived Hnglish king is controversial and shrouded in mystery. Within the past fifty
years sev eral “scholarly" biographies have sought to construct a “true” picture of
the life, actions, motivations, and character of Richard III. The three most widely
read clearly demonstrate the polarity of opinion about Richard III. Paul Murray
Kendall’s R ich ard III (1955) presents a revisionist view of a good man, forced into
making choices sometimes contrary to his nature, blackened by Tudor propaganda,
and enshrined as a monster by popular myth. Charles Ross {Richard III, 1981)
depicts a “man of his time”: a violent time in which Richard’s acts of violence and
cruelty are no better and no worse than those of his contemporaries, for those
contemporaries, like his uncle the Earl of Warwick and his brother Edward IV,
must have served as his role-models. Desmond Seward’s E ngland's B lack L egend
(1983) comes full circle to assert the “reality” of the Tudor portrait. For Seward,
Thomas More’s portrait of a scheming Machievelli (perhaps minus the hunchback
and limp) should be taken as close to literal truth. Needless to say, these disparate
portraits stem from the fact that contemporary sources for Richard are scarce, most
written after his defeat and death at Bosworth Field, and shaped to fit the version
of the past suited to the notions and purposes of the Tudor victor, Henry VII (Field
6-22). Ironically, therefore, the BBC satirical comedy Black Adder, which makes
no claim to stage “true” history, stages two almost incontrovertible historical “truths”
about Richard III.
Richard’s lurching up from his seat, one shoulder pulled down, and then freeing
his cloak and standing erect, is Black A dd er's comical way of explaining away the
500 year old image of Richard Crookback. In its own way, it presents the truth.
There is no contemporary evidence that Richard was a hunchback; indeed, one
near-contemporary artistic representation of him shows signs that it was altered
after the fact to give him a hump. In like manner. Black A dd e r's portrayal of Henry
Tudor with pen in hand frenetically altering old documents also reflects truth;
there is no doubt, even among the most anti-Riccardian of scholars, that clienthistorians in Tudor’s pay colored Richard’s image to create the deformed
Machievellian monster which Shakespeare dramatized, and which dominated
English historiography down into the twentieth century (Field 6-22, Ross xix-liii).
As my students would testify, contemporary, or near-contemporary sources
give no clear record even of the Battle of Bosworth Field, except for the fact that