Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 42

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Popular Culture Review

condemned as trivializing the horrors of the Nazis and World War II. The playwright
Robert Bolt admitted that he sought to produce a play which would portray the
existential dilemma of a person pressured by circumstance, friends, society, and
authority to conform to behaviors that person deems wrong or immoral. His first
two attempts failed miserably when written in the form of a modern play with
modern characters. Hence he turned to staging history — Thomas More in A Man
f o r A ll S ea son s — because history teaches by its distance (Lindenberger 55).
Therefore, it may not matter whether we stage an historically accurate life and
times of Richard III, especially when it is remembered that scholars themselves
cannot agree about his behavior and character.
Ironically, the Tudor attempt to “blacken” Richard may well be what has given
him an immortality which far overshadows the winner of Bosworth field. Far more
has been written, and will continue to be written about the life and two and one
half year reign of Richard III than about the life and twenty-four year reign of
founder of the Tudor dynasty. One historical novel I know of focuses on Henry VII
(I am at a loss to come up with another), and he never, to the best of our knowledge,
had an entire play written around the events of his life. Nor has his image served
more of an historical purpose than to be the coldly efficient, stingy, grandfather of
Queen Elizabeth I. Inscrutable, controversial, and blackened though it may be, a
dynamic image of King Richard III lives on. Perhaps it is not “fair,” but the myth
is more important than the reality. What is perhaps more important than the reality
is that the leg end of the historical Richard RRH\