Richard III (Vol. 39) | David Riggs (essay date 1971)
David Riggs (essay date 1971)
SOURCE: "The Tradition of Fame and the Arts of Policy: Richard III and 1 Henry IV," in Shakespeare's Heroical Histories: Henry VI and Its Literary Tradition, Harvard University Press, 1971, pp. 140-60.
[In the following excerpt, Riggs sees Richard III as Shakespeare's reappraisal of the validity of the assumptions of traditional epic heroism associated with the king.]
I Henry VI opens with a lament for Henry V, the hero-king who was "too famous to live long." As Elizabethan audiences were soon to learn, he was also too famous to be buried and forgotten. In I Henry IV Shakespeare had already begun to reassemble the legend that is forfeited in the earlier cycle, and Henry V, while it is uncompromisingly severe in its repudiation of the French chivalric style, remains the only play that he could have written with Hall's Union in one hand and Erasmus'...
[The entire page is 5074 words long]
Navigate
