Conventional wisdom states that the play Richard III is
merely a piece of Tudor propaganda with little in the way of historical
accuracy. This, though, is a view taken by a modern audience. Shakespeare’s
playgoers were Elizabethan when the play was written around 1593-4 and they had
a very different mind-set, one that was bound to be influenced by their
contemporary politics.
At this time, William Shakespeare was a young actor
who was struggling to establish himself as a dramatist among the best players’
groups in England. He had no aristocratic credentials to promote him, just his
own intrinsic ability. His sponsor when the play was first performed was lord
Strange, Ferdinando Stanley, son and heir of the fourth earl of Derby, Henry
Stanley, a man who also sponsored a group of players. The first earl, Thomas
Stanley, was responsible for
betraying the last Plantagenet king, Richard III, and placing the crown of
England on the head of Henry Tudor, creating him king Henry VII. It is peculiar
that the young playwright decided to write a play pregnant with danger by
commenting on events pertinent to the Tudor dynasty, particularly when the
current monarch was the granddaughter of Henry VII.
Shakespeare was dealing with subject matter that
would be scrutinised intensely by lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s chief minister,
and others for signs of treasonable content. This was thin ice indeed. In
Elizabeth’s reign the subject of the dubious Tudor bloodline was death to
comment on, so what caused Shakespeare, yet to make a name for himself, take on
a subject he could easily, and pragmatically have left well alone?
In the years after the Battle of
Bosworth and the death of king Richard III, there were several revolts with the
objective of removing Henry Tudor from the throne. He managed to overcome these
and many who sided with him at Bosworth soon came to regret their decision. Sir
William Stanley, the one who led the charge that perhaps mistakenly toppled King
Richard was himself caught up in a plot to depose Henry, the man he claimed to have helped
to the throne. He was subsequently beheaded. Many nobles fell victim to the
dictates of the Star Chamber and excessive taxation. Then in the following
reign, his son Henry VIII broke with the Pope in Rome, declared himself the
head of the Church in England, and plundered the former monastery lands thus
bringing upon himself and his house the opprobrium of his fellow English
Catholics. Even worse, his daughter, Elizabeth, went a step further and finally
established a Protestant Church of England, which forbad the practice of
Catholic doctrine.
We can see from this that there
were plenty of people in England who were less than enchanted with the Tudors
and many of them were in the audiences of the playhouses.
Henry VII had attempted to
establish a royal bloodline by marrying the daughter of king Edward IV,
Elizabeth of York. The problem here was that she had been found to be
illegitimate, the marriage of her mother, Elizabeth Wydville to king Edward IV
being bigamous. As the legitimacy of Henry’s claim was also dubious this was
serious and he attempted to rectify the problem by destroying the evidence. All
copies of the Titulus Regius, the document produced by Parliament
setting out the circumstances of Elizabeth of York’s bastardy, along with her
other siblings including the two princes, Edward and Richard (the princes in
the Tower), were ferreted out and burned. The problem here, though, was that
the content of the document was well known, and Henry could hardly purge the
knowledge from the collective minds of his subjects.
Those in an Elizabethan audience
would have known of the events before and after Bosworth; they knew perfectly
well the dubious lineage of the Tudors and it would have passed by
word-of-mouth through families. Those who had Catholic sympathies had good
reason to preserve this knowledge. It justified perfectly their opposition to
Tudor rule whatever the religious question or other rights and wrongs might
have been.
Evidence suggests William
Shakespeare was a Catholic; so was his sponsor, lord Strange. We know this
because in 1593 Ferdinando was the object of a plot (the Hesketh Plot) to
murder Elizabeth and place himself on the throne as a catholic monarch. Ferdinando
declined to be a part of it and it seems was afterwards poisoned for his
refusal. His father, Henry Stanley was ostensibly a Protestant, being a
prominent magnate with a wish to hang on to the family fortune. This was
similar to the position his forebear the first earl had before Bosworth
(Thomas, lord Stanley, not yet an earl as depicted fictionally by Shakespeare).
During the battle lord Stanley held back his own forces, which should have been
on the side of king Richard letting Henry Tudor win by default. He was rewarded
with his earldom for doing so.
Here, then, we have the reason why William
Shakespeare wrote the play Richard III. He had created for his sponsor a
caricature of Richard, a crouchback with a withered arm who had come into the
world half made up, legs first and complete with his teeth and a full head of
hair. In case the audience had not understood that here was a villain, he tells
them so in his opening lines. Anyone of the queen’s faction would have been
satisfied with this portrayal, thus ensuring the play’s performance.
Those in the audience who were Catholic would view
the scene quite differently. They would recognise the absurdity of the
character and thus would understand the underlying tone of the work – none of
which is true! Were the Stanley’s up to their old tricks of playing both ends
against the middle? If we look at it from their point of view, should a
Catholic monarch take the throne of England, (not an impossible objective in
the final uncertain years of Elizabeth, a Protestant queen without an heir),
then they could show how they had sponsored a play whose author had been
working subversively to ridicule the hated Tudor crown. If a Protestant monarch won
through, then no harm was done.
There is a painting by Holbein in
the National Gallery, London, called “The Ambassadors” involving a trompe
d’oile, or more precisely oblique anamorphosis. A hideous and
unintelligible shape in the bottom centre of the painting reveals itself to be
a human skull only when viewed from a particular angle. The viewer must seek
out a specific viewpoint for the image to appear. Taking a conventional view
merely presents the observer with a distorted monstrosity. Shakespeare’s
Richard III works on the same principle; you simply have to look at it from the
appropriate direction.
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