Richard III Act 1 - Now is the winter of our discontent..."

Richard III Act I – “Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this sun of York…”

This week, it was finally confirmed, that the skeleton and skull found by archeologists on their first day of their ‘dig’ underneath a council parking lot in Leicester, was that of Richard III, King of England and France, Lord of Ireland and the last of the Plantagenet or House of Lancaster kings. He died in 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth Field and his death heralded in the age of the Tudors.

A lot is said about Shakespeare’s rendering of Richard III, which is probably not as historically accurate as a portrait of Richard III as the facial bust made of Richard III from the remains recently found in Leicester. Let’s put this in context. Shakespeare was first and foremost, a writer of fiction for the stage. In 1591 or 1592, he is, as Robert Greene refers to him, “an upstart crow, beautified with… feathers…” bombasting out blank verse. I doubt that his “Shakescene” had reached the pitch of Beatlemania or Abba’s first trip to Australia or even that of a Coldplay concert. If he thought times were hard for a young playwright, he certainly knew that the time of the War of the Roses had been horrific for everyone in England. Just ask anyone in Syria or Lebanon what the cost of civil war actually is. While writing was starting to prove lucrative for Shakespeare, it was, in 1591, not a money tree by any means. Besides, he was living in Tudor England and Elizabeth 1 had brought stability to England and Richard III’s shadow and the Plantagenet’s pikes still lay resting on the doors of the palace. Besides, Shakespeare was probably still yet to have one of his plays performed at the palace or the court. So even if the older generation like Robert Greene felt threatened, Shakespeare had not made it financially, nor had fame come down the cobblestones and up the stairs to knock on his door in Bishopsgate. He probably wouldn’t have answered the door anyway because he probably would have thought it was the tax collector or the bailiff coming to collect what they were owed or to serve a summons for him to appear before the magistrate.

It was probably a no-brainer for Shakespeare to move on to write about Richard’s reign after the completion of the Henry VI trilogy. Going back to Henry V was a little problematic since most of his dramatic potential lay on the battlefield and Henry VIII’s prowess lay in the bedroom and on the chopping block and that made Henry V momentarily un-stagable and Henry VIII untouchable, for the moment. So Richard III it was. Besides, the public had enjoyed and followed Richard’s growth as an intelligent manipulator in Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays. How to frame Richard dramatically was always going to be drenched more in blood than history after the success of Shakespeare’s ‘Titus Andronicus’. So Shakespeare, having probably recently read Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’, knew that political intrigue, manipulation, blood and gore would bankroll another play. He also had other reasons. He wanted to please the Tudors and Elizabeth I, he needed to pay for the new granary he had started to build in Stratford, and he knew that everyone loves a good villain. So 'The Tragedy of Richard the Third' it was.  And what a play it turns out to be. It was, perhaps, the first great play Shakespeare was to write.

“ …since I cannot prove a lover

To entertain these fair well-spoken days,

I am determined to prove a villain

And hate the idle pleasures of these days.”

As Richard III speaks directly to the audience (and himself) in the opening of the play, we instantly warm to him as a character, even though he is a killjoy to the celebrations of his older brother King Edward IV’. He is not made for court life and its trivial “sportive tricks” for he is a soldier and a politician. Civil War is over, but Richard’s desire now in peace is power and to gain the crown for himself. To start the process he decides:

"To set my (his) brother Clarence and the king

In deadly hate against the other..." 

Richard sets up his younger brother Clarence and Clarence finds welcoming accommodation in the Tower of London and, with Richard vowing to champion Clarence’s cause, we know that the Tower will become Clarence’s own ‘Hotel California’.

Richard then woos the Lady Anne, the widowed wife of the former King Henry VI, who Richard stabbed to death mid-speech. Richard is amused by this irony and after suffering Anne’s derision, insults and spit, he convinces Anne that he killed her husband for love of her. Anne succumbs to this story, lowers the knife with which she could have killed Richard in Act I (making this the shortest tragedy in Shakespeare's list), and she accepts a ring from Richard believing him to be changed and penitent. But as Richard tells himself and the audience, “I'll have her; but I will not keep her long…” as he contemplates Anne’s place in his shadowy plans. He even muses that he wishes the sun to keep itself hidden, "... till I have bought a glass, that I may see my shadow as I pass."

Richard then plays victim and accuses almost everyone of slandering him “… with silken, sly, insinuating jacks…”. But Queen Elizabeth’s eyes are open to his deceptions. Enter the ex-Queen Margaret, swearing and cursing more than Courtney Love’s or Patti Smith’s lyrics. She curses Elizabeth and hopes her son dies before she does but for Richard she saves the worst curses calling him a “bottled spider” and an “elvish-marked, abortive, rooting hog”.

We then are transported to Clarence’s room in the Tower where Clarence’s dream needs no Freudian analysis from Brackenbury to be seen as a foreshadowing of his death. What is striking in the last scene of Act I is Clarence’s refusal to believe that Richard is behind the plot to imprison and kill him. “O do not slander him, for he is kind… he bewept my fortune…” Richard’s hired hands, after being brushed by a shadow of conscience, kill Clarence. The stage is set for the rise of Richard III.