Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 39

Staging R i c h a r d III

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to the throne by removing all human obstacles. As the capstone to his Henry VI
trilogy, this play represents the ultimate warning to late 16th-century English
subjects, about the dangers of ambitious men and unsettled times — a message
especially pregnant to a society anxious over the lack of any named successor to
an aging Virgin Queen (Rackin 55-6).
In like manner, the 1939 film. The Tower o f London, starring Basil Rathbone,
attempts to use England’s past as an allegorical warning for the present. Released
in December 1939, barely three months after the German invasion of Poland on
September seventeenth, it begins with the sober declaration: “No age is without its
ruthless men, who in their search for power, leave dark stains upon the pages of
history.” This film seems to wish the audience to take the film as factual in content,
and indeed, it does seem that the screen writers read historical narratives, and
perhaps even some primary sources, rather than creating a screen-play adapted
from Shakespeare’s play.
The film collapses the battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury, but both the
anonymous A
o f Edw ard IV (Part III) and John Warkworth’s Chronicle (Part
VI) assert that Edward IV took the enfeebled Henry VI into the first of those battles,
though neither offer an explanation that Edward and Richard hoped he might be
thereby killed, as does the film. It is only from narrative histories, or the chronicles
themselves, not Shakespeare, that the screen-writers could have derived scenes
which portray: Lady Ann Neville as a childhood playmate of Richard, Clarence
arranging her marriage to Henry Vi’s son Edward, Clarence hiding her from Richard
to keep him from marrying her and her half of the Warwick inheritance, to Edward
IV himself desiring the death of his brother Clarence, to an Edward IV who was so
concerned with aggrandizement of lands and power that he would arrange the
marriage of his five year old son Richard to the five year old heiress of the duke of
Norfolk Anne Mowbray (Kendall 49-59, 91-101, 122-32, 142-9). And though in
the film the incident is couched in terms of Queen Elizabeth Woodville and a
fictional cousin resisting Richard’s tyranny, relatives of Edward’s Queen Elizabeth
Woodville did abscond with much of the royal treasury, and probably did turn it
over to Henry VII (Field 67-76).
In short, though not a sympathetic view of Richard, this film does weave
historical incidents into a story of crafty, unyielding ambition steadily and surely
climbing, one step at a time, upwards towards domination. In view of the film’s
appearance when the shadow of Hitler was growing longer, the film’s use of history
is clear, especially to a British audience. Its past is portrayed to speak to the present.
Earlier in the year (April), Shakespeare’s Richard III had be staged in Stratfordon-Avon clearly alluding, as one critic wrote to “the ruthless singleness of purpose
observed in the Dictators [Hitler, Mussolini]” (Colley 167).The life and times of
Richard III serve as warning and metaphor for men of good will to guard their