SOURCE: “Richard III: Tonypandy in the Twentieth Century,” in Literature/Film Quarterly 25, No. 2, 1997, pp. 133-45.

[In the following essay, Mitchell discusses the ways in which Ian McKellen's 1996 cinematic performance of Richard III powerfully reinforces the Tudor myth that presents Richard as an immoral monster.]

In her 1951 detective novel, Daughter of Time, Josephine Tey proffers the theory that Richard III, last of the Plantagenet kings, was a victim of Tudor character assassination. Richard, Duke of Gloucester, House of York, brother of Edward IV, had long been accused and by many convicted of a long list of heinous crimes, not the least of which was usurping the throne and murdering his nephews in the Tower. We know him today as Shakespeare's “bottled spider,” “foul devil,” “fouler toad.” We also know today that Shakespeare based his portrait on the works of Polydore Vergil, Sir Thomas More, Edward Hall, and Raphael Holinshed: Tudor chroniclers who had their motives for blackening the White Rose. In his biography, Richard the Third, Paul Murray Kendall suggests that “the history of Richard's reputation is a drama; it exhibits a cumulative plot, a powerful central conflict, and scenes of passion, scorn, vituperation, and ridicule. It begins more than [500] years ago, and is not yet ended” (496). He also suggests that at the heart of this drama stands “the Tudor myth, or tradition, a collection of alleged facts and attitudes and beliefs concerning the course of history in fifteenth-century England, which was … given its final expression in the three plays of Henry the Sixth and the Richard the Third of William Shakespeare” (Kendall 496).

The traditionalist view of wicked Uncle Richard persists in the twentieth century, yet we know that at least part of the portrait is a fake. Infra-red photography reveals the literal fake: some portraits touched up in Tudor times to make one shoulder appear higher than the other (Williamson 68). In Daughter of Time, Tey calls this practice of perpetuating myth and flouting fact “tonypandy,” after a village in South Wales whose citizens still claim that the government used troops to shoot down Welsh minors striking for their rights in 1910 (94). Everyone knows that the riot was quelled with little more than a bloody nose, but the myth is much more exciting (Tey 94). As Tey's Detective-Inspector Alan Grant, Scotland Yard's “face expert,” lies bed-bound and bored in the hospital, his actress friend Marta Hallard brings him a diversion: a packet of portraits, one of which is Richard III. With the help of a young American student, Grant spends the rest of his recovery period trying to solve a fifteenth-century mystery. At one point in their investigation, frustrated with the tangle of “historical” evidence, Grant cries, “Give me research. After all, the truth of anything at all doesn't lie in someone's account of it. It lies in all the small facts of the time. An advertisement in a paper. The sale of a house. The price of a ring” (95). The detectives conclude that the small facts about Richard don't add up to a portrait of a killer.

Josephine Tey's revisionist theory set forth in her novel wasn’t new. Richard always had his defenders. William Cornwaleys, Sir George Buc, Horace Walpole, Sharon Turner, Caroline Halsted, and Sir Clement R. Markham had long ago dealt with the monarch as if he actually had been a human being, as Kendall points out. Some of his defenders looked for evidence in sources more contemporary to Richard. Some pointed out the inconsistencies and inaccuracies of Tudor chroniclers. Some acquitted him of all charges—even the murder of his nephews—a stand as dangerous as his prosecutors’. While Tey's position wasn't new, her forum for it was. Using the popular detective novel genre, she achieved what few pro-Ricardians had ever done. She mass marketed the revisionist theory that perhaps Richard III was not the Antichrist. In a sense, then, Tey's novel, Daughter of Time, is to the revisionist theory what Shakespeare's drama, Richard III, is to the traditionalist theory. They represent two camps that still exist today, long after Richard's death in 1485 on Bosworth Field. Saint or Sinner? Few hold a moderate position. For a monarch who ruled England only a little over two years, Richard III has generated more controversy than all the other rulers put together. As A.J. Pollard says in Richard III and the Princes in the Tower, “It seems that he was one of those charismatic public figures to whom people react strongly, either enthusiastically for or violently against” (200). The Richard III Society in England, with a thriving chapter in the United States, continues its search for information that will vindicate their much-maligned monarch. While academic scholars continue their debate, Pollard tells us that, since Tey's work was published, more than forty novels have appeared on Richard III, some of them bodice-ripping romance novels set in his household or court (222). “Over a longer period, twenty-four plays have been written for stage or radio, mostly to set Shakespeare straight, including one in which the bard is arraigned in Hell on a charge of falsifying history” (Pollard 222). In 1979 the BBC broadcast a courtroom drama based on Elizabeth Jenkins's The Princes in the Tower, and, in 1984, London Weekend Television broadcast an unscripted courtroom drama in which Richard III was tried for murdering his nephews. The verdict: not guilty.

In spite of the increasing numbers who have joined the ranks of the revisionist camp, however, it's the traditionalists who hold sway. Shakespeare's “bottled spider” is too vivid an image to shake. As Taylor Littleton and Robert R. Rea point out in To Prove a Villain: The Case of King Richard III, every schoolchild knows that “villainy hath charms that never fade” (xi). The bad guy is not only more fun to play, but also more fun to watch. The list of actors who have played Richard on stage and screen reads like a who's who in theater and film: Barrymore, Olivier, Bates, Holm, Sher, Pacino, Washington, and McKellen, to name only a few. These varied performances by popular actors have helped perpetuate the traditionalist line that Richard usurped the throne and shed innocent blood to do it. In fact, Richard Loncraine and Ian McKellen's film Richard III, based on the London stage production, is a brilliant adaptation of Shakespeare's text. Both revisionist and parodic in the cinematic sense, this version provides a riveting visual portrait of evil personified. In her review “Tricky Dick III,” Plain Dealer film critic Joanna Connors says:

No invisible proscenium arches or thundering declamations from castle parapets here. This “Richard” is a movie movie, trimmed to fighting weight and primed for action and speed. Director Richard Loncraine and actor Ian McKellen … have thrown out great chunks of the play, rearranged the rest, and transposed it all to 1930s England. In their updated War of the Roses, European fascism pounds at the palace gate while dissipated royals blithely dance the night away inside. … It works. Spectacularly.

(Friday! 6)

Shakespeare's portrait of the Duke of Gloucester isn't going away. Neither, it seems, is our interest in the man: witness the recent discovery of the 1912 version of Shakespeare's Richard III, the oldest complete feature film made in the United States, and Al Pacino's 1996 drama/documentary Looking for Richard. Therefore, the issue today isn't which camp to choose, either the hard-line traditionalist or the over-zealous revisionist. The issue becomes one of avoiding the camps for fear of continuing a battle that can never be won. This is one puzzle that probably will never be solved, unless new evidence surfaces. The challenge is to come to the field with an open mind and enough information to separate propaganda from fact, storytelling from history. In The Mystery of the Princes, Audrey Williamson says that “the tentacles of the propaganda octopus stretch wide and few people seem born with questioning or sceptical minds” (194). Some, like Tey, do question the truth as history would give it to us. Her work is probably not so much a vindication of Richard as it is an indictment of historians and the way they’ve written history and served it up in textbooks. A comparison of Shakespeare's drama, Loncraine and McKellen's film adaptation, and the actual sources helps us to pinpoint the tonypandy and to reconstruct a modern-day portrait of a fifteenth-century king, a portrait of a complex man living in brutal times.

In Richard's Himself Again: A Stage History of Richard III, Scott Colley says that today we're tempted to play Richard as the complicated man he was; however, it's better to play him as Shakespeare's villain because “too much psychology ruins the part” (11-12). Ian McKellen felt the same way. In his London stage version of Richard III, McKellen thought that there was just too much to Richard to explore in one performance so he “settled upon a portrait of a mandarin-soldier who has been too long at war, and who returns to a detested peace to wreck the privileged club of which he has so long been a member” (257). Colley writes:

“What is it that goes so terribly wrong when soldiers are idle?” McKellen wondered. “What happens when a great soldier like Richard returns from the war and suddenly finds himself out of a job? What happens when he finds people are talking to women?” McKellen thus created a stiffly military, asexual World War I combat general who brings the terrors he had known on the battlefield to the corridors and council rooms of government buildings.

(257-58)

This is the Richard that McKellen brings to the screen. Loncraine and McKellen's film adaptation, set in 1930s England, also explores the question of what would have happened if Hitler had invaded England. It's an interesting hypothesis given the number of British aristocracy who sympathized with Germany in the early days of the conflict. In his introduction to the published screenplay, McKellen himself says:

The historical event of the play had occurred just a couple of generations before the first audience saw them dramatised. The comparable period for us would be the 1930s, close enough for no-one to think we were identifying the plot of the play with actual events, any more than Shakespeare was writing about the real King Richard. He was creating history-which-never-happened. Our production was properly in the realm of “what might have been.” Also, the 30s were appropriately a decade of tyranny throughout Europe, the most recent time when a dictatorship like Richard III's might have overtaken the United Kingdom, as it had done Germany, Italy, Spain and the empire of the Soviet Union.

(13)

The House of York in this War of the Roses is depicted as the Nazi Party, and Richard in a Nazi uniform seals his fate as eternity's archvillain. In one of the film's many homages, a Star Wars scroll tells usof events unfolding while the tickertape message warning the Lancastrians of an attack on Tewkesbury reminds us of the opening of Casablanca. Inside the palace, old Henry VI and his son Edward, Prince of Wales, are gearing up for a Yorkist attack. Edward sits behind his desk, eating his dinner, his dog chomping a bone before the fire. On his desk, we see a photograph of his wife, Anne of Warwick (Kristin Scott Thomas). A distant rumble shakes his wine glass and unnerves his dog. Suddenly, a tank crashes through the walls of the palace into his office. We hear the mechanical sound of breathing. A figure in a Darth Vaderesque mask shoots Edward in the head, moves quickly into the connecting chamber, and shoots the old king at prayer. The figure strips off his mask, and Richard (Ian McKellen)—with his thin mustache and yellowed, rotten teeth—sneers into the camera, the first of many close-ups that forces us to get up close and personal with this charming dissembler. Opening the film with these murders immediately heightens the drama of Shakespeare's first act, which begins with Richard's “winter of our discontent” speech, by intensifying the villainy of Richard. As Pollard states, Edward was killed in battle. No sources contemporary to Richard even hint “at cold-blooded murder at the hands of the Duke of Gloucester” (Pollard 52). The fate of Henry VI is less clear. Imprisoned in the Tower at the time of the battle, he died shortly thereafter of “pure displeasure and melancholy” (Pollard 54). Williamson offers another explanation: “In 1499 when a group of clergymen petitioned the Pope to move Henry's remains to Westminster Abbey, they stated: ‘He had yielded to a pitiable death, by the order of Edward, who was then king of England’” (35).

A series of visual images and a big band score set the mood for the House of York's Victory Ball. Exposition shots include the city of London; cars pulling up in front of the palace; the happy, loving King Edward (John Wood) and Queen Elizabeth (Annette Bening) playing with their children; gentle George (Nigel Hawthorne), the family photographer, snapping pictures; and Earl Rivers (Robert Downey, Jr.) arriving at the airport, slightly tipsy, cigarette dangling from his lips. When he arrives at the party with presents, his coat carelessly thrown over his shoulders, the camera is at a high angle long shot which suggests that fate is being played out here. Rivers is doomed. Cut to the ballroom scene with Edward and Elizabeth dancing, smiling into each other's eyes. Cecily, the Duchess of York and Queen Mum (Maggie Smith), looks on. This exposition establishes the warm, family atmosphere that makes Richard's deeds seem all the more dastardly. As he makes his entrance, the camera technique changes. A steady cam follows him as he winds his way, smiling and gladhanding, across the floor toward his family and the stage where an entertainer is singing the words to Christopher Marlowe's poem “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.”

Throughout this film, Richard is in almost constant motion, like a spider weaving his web. In fact, the mise en scène, photography, and editing technique visually create the spider unloosed: calculating and cunning, spinning webs to snare his victims. Elizabeth dances with her youngest son on her feet. The rakishly attractive Rivers joins them for a threesome. A Kodak moment. How can we not care what happens to these people now? Some sources suggest that Elizabeth's family, the Woodville clan, actually gained controlling influence at court through acts of nepotism. When Edward secretly married widow Elizabeth Woodville while the Earl of Warwick, Richard Neville (the “Kingmaker”), was negotiating for his royal marriage in France, he ruptured the peace between the Plantagenets and the Nevilles and tipped the scales of power in favor of the Woodvilles. Owen Tudor says that when Edward died unexpectedly at the age of 40, the Woodvilles not only controlled the court but also the king's council, “the Tower of London, the arsenal, the King's treasure, the fleet and above all … the new young king and his younger brother” (4). In the power struggle that ensued between Richard and the Woodvilles over the protectorship of young Edward and control of the country, Richard won. She who would be Queen Regent fled to sanctuary with her children and the royal loot. In Loncraine and McKellen's adaptation, the “innocent” Woodvilles once again become Richard's victims as he systematically sets about to exterminate the lot of them.

Richard begins his “Now is the winter of our discontent” speech on stage, at the microphone, in medium close-up. Cutaways to reaction shots of the family, especially his mother, show their subtle disapproval of him. The camera slowly moves in to an extreme close-up of his mouth, the thin mustache above a curling lip, and cuts on the line “To fright the souls of fearful adversaries.” Richard delivers the rest of his speech, which picks up with “I, that am not shap’d for sportive tricks,” over a urinal. He's become very skillful at using one hand. McKellen plays Richard as Shakespeare painted him—with all his physical deformities: crookback, withered arm, and uneven legs. It was John Rous in his Historia Regum Angliae who started the rumor that one shoulder was higher than the other. Thomas More added a few things:

Richarde … was … little of stature, ill fetured of limmes, croke backed, his left shoulder much higher then his right, hard fauoured of visage … in other menne otherwise, he was malicious, wrathfull, enuious and, from afore his birth, euer frowarde. It is for trouth reported, that … hee came into the worlde with the feete forwarde … and also not vntothed. … He was close and secrete, a deepe dissimuler, lowlye of counteynaunce, arrogant of heart, outwardly coumpinable where he inwardely hated, not letting to kisse whome hee thoughte to kyll; dispitious and cruell, not for euill will alway, but ofter for ambicion, and either for the sureitie or encrease of his estate. Frende and foo was muche what indifferent, where his aduauntage grew, he spared no mans deathe, whose life withstoode his purpose.

(5-6)

Of course, now More's account is pretty much dismissed as a history and is taken as it was intended, as a drama, a morality piece, or, as Elizabeth Story Donno calls it in Thomas More and Richard III, a “declamation, specifically a controversia” (410). Pollard says that no contemporary evidence exists about Richard's physical description. The Italian, Mancini, writing at the time, saw him and “says nothing of his appearance which would seem to suggest that it was unexceptional” (Pollard 12). In Richard III: The Man Behind the Myth, Michael Hicks says, “It was after his death that it was first declared unnatural by enemies who tried to denigrate him. … He was certainly neither a cripple nor incapable of bearing arms” (49). One “Countess of Desmond, who claimed at an immense age to have danced when a girl at Edward's court” said that “Richard was ‘the handsomest man in the room except his brother Edward, and was very well made’” (Williamson 140).

As Richard finishes his speech, he stares into the mirror above the sink, then turns to the camera, breaking the fourth wall of the screen, and says, “I am determined to prove a villain / And hate the idle pleasures of these days.” He moves to the door, and, with a conspiratorial crook of his finger, invites us to join him: “Plots have I laid … To set my brothers, Clarence and the King, / In deadly hate, the one against the other.” The scene shifts to a wharf where George, Duke of Clarence, is being taken by boat to the Tower. Richard feigns ignorance as to why George has been arrested and kisses whom he thinks to kill, promising to plead his brother's part to the king. The spider has snared another. However, it's the next scene that so vividly illustrates this image of Richard.

Anne, dressed totally in black, slowly walks down a hospital corridor. Bloody soldiers and wounded citizens lie to both sides of her, waiting for treatment. The camera follows her down the stairs to the morgue where she finds her husband, Edward Prince of Wales, lying on a slab. Blue filters give the room a hard, cold, impersonal feel. Light streams through narrow windows high in the walls. The music is low, sultry. Distraught, Anneleans over her husband's body and begins, “Cursed be the hand that made these holes!” We see Richard, the spider, quietly approach her from behind. He startles her. She's venomous toward him: “Foul devil, you have made this happy world my hell.” He begins to court her, circling her around the steel slab, cocooning her with his honeyed words and flattery. She's immobile. At one point, he grabs a knife, drops to his knee, holds the knife to his throat and says, “If your revengeful heart cannot forgive, / I humbly beg for death, upon my knee. … It was I who killed your husband; / But it was your heavenly face that set me on.” The high angle shot is on him and the low angle on her as she responds, “I will not be thy executioner.” He slowly takes the ring off his finger with his mouth, slips it on her finger, rises and salutes her. She cannot move. In the next shot, an elated Richard skips down the hospital corridor, smiling, shaking hands with the sick and dying. Looking directly into the camera, he confides in us, his intimates: “Was ever woman in this humor wooed? / Was ever woman in this humor won? / I’ll have her, but I won’t keep her long.” Big band music swells. He dances up the stairs, motioning for us to follow him.

When next we see him, Richard is sitting at the breakfast table alone, smoking and drinking, burning Edward's reprieve for George's life. Richard is seldom seen without his cigarette, nor far from a bottle. Shakespeare reverses some of the brothers' characteristics. It's long been known that Richard disapproved of Edward's carousing. While Edward was a notorious boozer and womanizer, Richard himself was actually somewhat of a prude. It was also Edward who had George executed for treason. Though the film depicts George as almost childlike and naive, many sources document his shady political dealings, jealousy, and greed. In the next scene, we see a very different breakfast with Elizabeth, the children, and her brother Rivers who is reading the Wall Street Journal in Native American headdress. Casting Americans in the Woodville roles subtly reflects their tenuous position. McKellen says, “In the play Queen Elizabeth's Woodville Family are reviled by Richard as provincial outsiders to the metropolitan power-center. A 30s equivalent was to make them American: witness the British Establishment's outcry in 1936, when King Edward VIII wanted Wallis Simpson to be his queen” (54). In this scene, Elizabeth confides in Rivers. She's worried about what will happen to her and her children should Edward die. Edward enters with young Elizabeth on his arm and assures his Queen that Richard will take good care of her. The juxtaposition of this scene with the next suggests just how well Richard plans to take care of them. Nazis march by as Richard meets Tyrell (Adrian Dunbar), his “most obedient servant,” at the boar pen. As Tyrell feeds a white boar, Richard's symbol, Richard recruits Tyrell to kill his brother George.

An immediate cut to George shows him sitting in profile position on a hard, straightbacked chair in his cell. Blue filters, huge pipes, and light streaming through an upper window (reminiscent of the morgue scene) create a sense of impending doom. Loncraine and McKellen have streamlined the play here, which makes the rising action move quickly and heightens the dramatic effect. They’ve eliminated some characters like Henry VI's Queen Margaret, and they’ve cross cut George's death with the dinner scene in which Elizabeth and Richard accuse each of plotting against the other. As George's jailer walks him down a narrow basement corridor out into the jail yard, we wait for someone to call out “Dead man walking.” George, in medium to medium close-up, tells the jailer about his dream in which Richard struck him overboard. The prison yard behind him looks like a Roman pit with its dirt floor, murky moat, and crumbling walls. The sky darkens, thunder begins, and rain pours down on him. It's a pathetic, isolated figure who finally says, “I, trembling, waked and for a season after / Could not believe but that I was in Hell.” The camera pulls back to a high angle long shot as we leave George drenched and alone in the prison yard. Cut to a street scene where Richard is paying Tyrell and Brackenbury to kill George. Two of his speeches are combined here as he says to them, “Your eyes drop millstones, when fools' eyes fall tears.” They leave and he turns to the camera: “Clarence hath not another day to live. / Which done, God take King Edward to his mercy—/ And leave the world for me to bustle in.” Cut to the dinner scene. Richard arrives late (as he usually does to make an entrance), holding hands with a radiant Anne in a red dress. As he smiles and flatters and looks fair, he says, “Because I cannot flatter and speak fair, / I must be held a rancorous enemy.” He accuses Elizabeth of having George arrested. She calls him a “bottled spider.” During this exchange, everyone at the table is uncomfortable except Anne, who smiles and touches her husband's hand across the table. The Archbishop (Roger Hammond) tries to be conciliatory. Rivers defends his sister, who at one point leans over to Buckingham (Jim Broadbent) and whispers, “O Buckingham, take heed of yonder dog! / Look, when he fawns, he bites.” Margaret actually has the argument with Richard in the play, but transferring the conflict between Richard and Elizabeth heightens sympathy for her in the film. Richard rises as Elizabeth exits, walks toward Buckingham, and asks, “What did she say?” Buckingham replies, “Nothing that I respect.” The whole scene is done in parallel editing with Tyrell and Brackenbury murdering an unsuspecting George in his bath, not “in the malmsey-butt.”

The film moves from George's bloody bath water to a medium close-up of Richard sitting alone in his chair, his face in profile. As the camera pulls back to a medium shot, we see that he's smoking and drinking, his man Ratcliffe massaging his withered arm. A knock at the door. A package. Richard opens it with one hand. It's George's reading glasses. Cut to Anne standing seductively in a white nightgown at the foot of their wide staircase. Richard moves toward her, switches off the lights, and walks out of the frame to the right. She pulls her gown back up over her shoulder and turns to climb the stairs to bed—alone. Cut to Richard and Anne in the back seat of their limousine. She's in red again, her husband's favorite color and symbol of her own degradation. She pops a pill and looks wordlessly at Richard, who simply ignores her. He's through with her, but as they arrive at Edward's seaside resort where the sickly king is recuperating, he's holding her hand. The film visualizes Richard's duplicity by juxtaposing scenes like these two which reflect the private and the public man. Smiling, touching, kissing all, he marks his victims. He gives Buckingham a little fake jab to the jaw and slaps Hastings on the back. Edward in his wheelchair attempts to reconcile his administrators with the Woodville clan. Instead of at his bedside as in Shakespeare's drama, the scene is played out in the bright, sunny veranda by the ocean to create an irony between appearance and reality. The obsequious Richard reconciles to all, stoops to Edward, looks into the camera and says, “I thank God for my humility.” Upon hearing that George has been executed, Edward collapses and is rushed into the palace. We see a close-up of his face from his bed where he draws his last breath. Elizabeth screams and descends the stairs where others are waiting. Low, jazzy, fatalistic music heralds the news: “Our king is dead.”

Shakespeare would have us believe that the Duchess of York's attitude toward her son was one of thinly veiled contempt. In this film adaptation, Maggie Smith plays Cecily, the Rose of Raby, with smoldering suspicion and increasing horror at Richard's behavior. After Edward's death, he becomes Lord Protector and stops his mother as she is ascending the stairs to Edward's room. He looks up at her: “Madam, mother, I do humbly crave your blessing.” She looks down at him: “God bless you—and put meekness in your breast, / Love, charity, obedience and true duty!” She knows these are all the things he does not have.

Buckingham has approached Richard from behind, whispering in his ear that he's off to part Earl Rivers from the Prince. Richard sanctions his mission by calling him “my other self.” Kendall says that Buckingham virtually appeared out of nowhere to become Richard's alter ego. He gained Richard's trust to the point that Richard bestowed great titles and wealth on him. He did not, as Shakespeare dramatizes, deny Buckingham anything, least of all the Bohun inheritance. The two were inseparable. When Buckingham betrayed Richard, Richard allegedly was so hurt that in a letter to his Chancellor he called Buckingham “him that had best Cause to be true” and “the most untrue Creature living” (323-24).

The next several scenes move with lightening speed. We see Rivers in bed with a stewardess he met on the plane. One of his hands is cuffed to the bedpost as her lips move down his body, and she exits the frame. As his body writhes in ecstasy, a knife suddenly shoots up from under the bed and slashes him through the chest. His lover screams. We cut to the sound of a train whistling, roaring, bearing the future Edward V through a tunnel. Cut to a toy train racing around a Christmas tree at the palace where the young Duke of York is playing while Cecily and Elizabeth hear of Rivers's death. In the film, Lord Stanley and Richmond (the future Henry VII) deliver the news. From this point on, Richmond is always lurking in the background somewhere, plotting Richard's overthrow with Stanley and the Archbishop. The ominous Tyrell stops the toy train with his foot as we cut to the real train arriving at the station. The young Edward says, “I want more uncles here to welcome me,” and Richard tells him, “Those uncles which you want were dangerous.” Edward defends Rivers: “God keep me from false friends—but they were none.” Prince Edward was raised almost exclusively by the Woodvilles and tutored by his uncle, the scholar Rivers. Richard rarely saw the boy. When Rivers plotted to usurp Richard's position as Lord Protector, Richard had him killed and the boy removed from Woodville influence.

Much has been written about Shakespeare's Act III, Scene IV, in which Hastings is framed, accused of treason, and beheaded immediately. By this time in the play, Richard's list of sins is mounting. Backed by Buckingham and Catesby, Richard traps Hastings who refuses to give his support to his usurpation of the throne, even though Edward's children have been declared illegitimate through Titulus Regius. The film adaptation sets the scene around a board table in the Council Chamber, before Richard arrives. Buckingham is smoking a big cigar. Catesby suggests that Richard should be king. Stanley and the Archbishop look nervous. Hastings has already told Catesby, “I’ll have this crown of mine cut from my shoulders, / Before I’ll see the crown so foul misplaced.” He pulls out a flask and takes a drink to calm his nerves. He's just dreamed of Richard with a boar's face showing his tusks, a bad sign. Richard enters, sits opposite Hastings, covers his eyes with his hand, and says, “Tell me what they deserve / Who do conspire my death.” Hastings answers, “They deserve death.” Richard rises, rolls up his sleeve, and circles the table, shaking his withered arm in each man's face. He stops behind Hastings, hits him on the shoulder screaming, “You are a traitor. Off with his head.” Cut to Hastings's body falling through a ceiling shaft on a rope. In one of the film's most outrageous scenes, Richard is stretched across his sofa, smoking, drinking, tapping his feet, and humming to a catchy little swing tune, drooling over photographs of Hastings with a noose around his neck.

The parody in the film version undercuts the seriousness of Richard's crimes. He's too evil to be true. He's made us an intimate, almost an accomplice, in his schemes by addressing us in his asides with devilish grins and coy mugging and winking at us with his baby blues. We're captivated by his audacity. We're drawn into the web. Like his victims, we get taken in by his charm, until he sends us reeling with a one-two punch. McKellen explains:

All of Shakespeare's troubled heroes reveal their inner selves in their confidential soliloquies. These are not thought-out-loud, rather true confessions to the audience. Richard may lie to all the other characters but within his solo speeches he always tells the truth. I never doubted that in the film he would have to break through the fourth wall of the screen and talk directly to the camera, as to a confidant. If this unsettled the audience, so much the better. They should not be comfortable hearing his vile secrets and being treated as accomplices. They would also better appreciate the brilliance of his ability to fool, deceive and seduce his hapless victims. Men and women are all players to Shakespeare but Richard is a consummate actor.

(23)

When Buckingham and Richard plot to gain the support of Council and citizens alike, they are in Richard's dressing room, complete with lighted mirror. A make-up artist and hairdresser come in while Buckingham tells him to affect a little humility and piety so they will back his bid for the throne. Buckingham says,

Pretend some fear!
And, look you, get a prayerbook in your hand.
Be not easily won by our requests.
Play the maid's part—still answer ‘No’ and take
it!

Richard picks up a random book lying on the dressing table, and Buckingham pulls off the cover. The act begins. Richard allows Buckingham and the rest of the Council members to talk him into taking up the burden of king. Finally, Richard assents, looks into the camera with affected innocence and says, “I am not made of stones.” At their exit, we get a shot through a keyhole. Stanley, Archbishop, and Richmond are plotting to send Richmond to France for safety. The camera pulls back, and we see Catesby at the keyhole. Cut to a huge convention hall filled with uniformed soldiers with red sashes and red banners. Red flags line the walls as Richard in full uniform ascends the stairs to the stage. Buckingham shouts, “Long live King Richard,” and the hall fills with the chant of “Richard, Richard.” Like Hitler, Richard waves from the podium. Suddenly a huge red and black banner bearing his symbol of the boar unfurls behind him. The camera moves in on him until we are left with another close-up of Richard's twisted face and false smile. The road to the podium has been paved in blood, and the immediate cut to the next scene foreshadows more to come. Elizabeth, Cecily, Anne, and young Elizabeth are at the Tower gates. They are refused admittance. The camera is on the inside of the gates. Denied access to her sons, Elizabeth clutches the iron bars which make a pattern of squares on her face like a wall full of television screens. In a high angle medium shot she says,

Pity, you ancient stones, those tender princes
Whom envy has immured within your walls.
Rough cradle for such little pretty ones.
Rude, ragged nurse, use my babies well.

Richard quickly rises from Lord Protector to King. His coronation is shown through Anne's drugged haze. She's now a heroin addict—almost totally immobile, like a fly that's been caught in a web for a long time and has finally given up. A slick dissolve takes us from the actual coronation with Richard in profile on the throne to a black and white film of the same shot. Richard and Anne and his handful of intimates are now sitting in his screening room watching a film of the coronation. Anne is on the extreme right of the frame in a red dress, a cigarette dangling from her red lips. She's comatose. Buckingham is on Richard's left. Three times Richard says to him that young Edward still lives and urges Buckingham to speak on the subject. Buckingham avoids the issue until Richard, irritated with him, says, “Shall I be plain? I wish the bastards dead.” Buckingham begs some time to think and leaves his chair. Cut to a shot of Stanley and Richmond standing underneath the blue skies of France planning their invasion of England. Cut to Catesby now in Buckingham's chair. Richard says to him, “Rumor it abroad / That Anne, my wife, is very grievous sick … and like to die.” Aside, Richard explains: “I must be married to my brother's daughter, / Or else my kingdom stands on brittle glass. / Murther her brothers and then marry her.”

Richard is eating a box of chocolates when he calls Tyrell to him and asks him to kill the princes. Tyrell doesn't hesitate as he takes a candy and leaves. The look on Richard's face is orgasmic. It could be the chocolate, but it's probably death and power that turn him on. “Tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye.” The moment is shattered by Buckingham who appears before him in a low angle shot, blocking the screen. He demands the lands that Richard promised him. They step out into the night and onto the balcony, under a huge clock. The inference, visually depicted, is that Buckingham is like a Jack or manikin in an old clock that strikes the bell. He’s, as The Riverside Shakespeare notes, ready for action but does not strike (741). He wants to force his request but won’t. This angers Richard who finally screams at him: “You trouble me. I am not in the vein!” The cut is to Anne. Buckingham comes back into the screening room, and Anne looks up at him, delivering lines from an earlier speech in the play that work better in this scene in the film. She tells Buckingham:

Never yet one hour in his bed,
Have I enjoyed the golden dew of sleep;
But have been wakened by his timorous dreams.
Besides, he hates me:
And will, no doubt, shortly be rid of me.

Buckingham exits on the lines, “O, let me think of Hastings and be gone.”

The previous scene is a long but important one because it illustrates Shakespeare's attitude toward power: too much corrupts and turns the world order to chaos. Shakespeare feared chaos. He used Richard as an example of tyranny's destructiveness. In his work Richard III, Charles Ross says that Shakespeare was “acutely sensitive to the political climate of his own time. Civil war was abhorrent … sedition … was hateful; rebellion could not be forgiven” (xxxi). More was writing along the same conviction. But Henry Tudor usurped the throne. He was a bastard with no rightful claim. His actions had to be justified, so Richard became the monster and Henry the savior of England. Ross says, “His coming fitted into a scheme of divine providence, which ended the long period of suffering and atonement for England's sins” (xxxi). Both the play and the film are built on what The Riverside Shakespeare calls a “mounting sequence of crime and retribution … that finds its climax in the master-villain's death” (711). As Richard's treachery mounts, he is ensnared in his own web. Sin has plucked on sin. The shots of him are closed and tight. The space around him becomes claustrophobic, yet the spider evades the bottle for a while longer. When next we see Richard, it's in extreme long shot as he works at his desk under an enormous painting of himself. Tyrell enters his vast chamber and tells him that the deed is done. The distance between them is now very public. Tyrell has fulfilled his mission. He has killed the bastards by smothering them with a red scarf.

In a high angle medium shot Richard swivels in his chair at the news and says, “The sons of Edward sleep in Abraham's bosom.” Cut to a long shot of Anne's bedroom. Cut to a close-up of her lying in bed, eyes open and staring. Suddenly a black widow spider walks down her face. Cut to Elizabeth in extreme long shot crying on the staircase. Her circle of friends and family is fast dwindling. Cut to the Council Hall where Cecily is confronting her son. They begin their confrontation on opposite sides of a high balcony and continue until they meet midway at the staircase. In the play, Cecily's words are not as venomous as Maggie Smith delivers them in the film adaptation; however, the way Smith plays the scene with open hostility seems more appropriate and dramatic here. She's praying for the enemy. Practically spitting the words, she gets Richard's attention:

You came on earth to make the earth my hell. …
Bloody you are: bloody will be your end.
Shame serves your life and will your death attend!

It's the only time in the film where Richard loses his composure; his face is ashen, blue eyes vacant. Cut to Cecily boarding a plane for France as Elizabeth and young Elizabeth, arms tight around each other, see her off.

In the next scene, mother and daughter arrive at Richard's camp, a train station, where he is preparing for battle with Richmond. Things are in a state of chaos as soldiers bustle in all directions, horses and tanks move back and forth randomly. This is in direct contrast to Richmond's camp with its neat, ordered rows of tents and calm atmosphere. Elizabeth spots Richard entering his railway car office and cries, “Where are my children?” The hard, cold steel of railroad tracks, cars, tanks, and beams reminds us of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. While soldiers grab the young Elizabeth and hold her outside, Elizabeth follows Richard into his office. The tight, confining space, with slits of light streaming in from the window, looks like the inside of a blue tinted bottle. Richard opens a bottle with one hand, circling Elizabeth as he did Anne in the morgue. He will marry his niece to thwart Richmond who wants to marry her to legitimize his claim to the throne and unify the houses of the white and red rose. Elizabeth, shocked and disgusted by Richard's suggestion, backs away from him but plays it cool. To buy time, she says she will give him her answer tomorrow. In a gesture he knows will repulse her, Richard says, “Be the attorney of my love to her. … Bear her my true love's kiss” and plants a big, sloppy kiss on Elizabeth. He laughs into the camera. McKellen explains that “this kiss has a double nastiness” (256). The audience by now can imagine the innocent young Elizabeth's “revulsion were she forced to be intimate with her brothers' killer” (256).

Elizabeth promptly heads for France and secretly marries her daughter to Richmond who is shown on his knees looking saintly in a close-up as he prays. “Defend me still!” It's the night before the Battle of Bosworth. Their marriage scene is juxtaposed with Buckingham's death. Tyrell strangles him in the back of an army truck while Richard waits in the front seat. As the newlyweds consecrate their marriage, Richard awakes in a cold sweat. In a high contrast, tightly framed close-up, Richard's sins visit him. Shakespeare has the ghosts of Richard's victims visit him and Richmond. While they promise support to Richmond, they curse Richard. In the film, as Richard cries, “There is no creature loves me. / And if I die, no soul will pity me,” Ratcliff appears and rocks him like a baby. Cut to young Elizabeth and Richmond in bed. Cut to an exterior shot of their tent as he takes his leave of her. Music swells.

Richmond gets into his tank. His attack takes Richard by surprise. Bombs rip his rail car. Richard's troops are in disarray. Men are on fire. Through the smoke we see Richard grab a machine gun on the back of a jeep and shoot at a bomber overhead. Ratcliff pulls him into a jeep, but its wheels catch in a ditch. Richard wrestles the wheel away from Ratcliff, who has been shot, and tries to dislodge the jeep. He cries, “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” He sees Richmond in a tank, braving the crossfire, leading his men. Richard makes a limp for a steel staircase on the outside of an industrial power plant. He climbs the stairs and walks out onto a steel beam. Richmond follows him. Just as Richmond is ready to shoot Richard, Richard smiles, extends his hand and says, “Let us to it pell-mell. If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell.” He deliberately falls backward into the flames below, and the song “I’m Sittin’ On Top of the World” begins. The question becomes, whom is the song for, Richard or Richmond? The ending is wonderfully ambiguous. The song could be for Richard. As Milton wrote, it's better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven. On the other hand, Richmond is now King Henry VII. He shoots too late to kill Richard, and, for a split second, looks disappointed. Then he smiles. We’ve seen this smile before. It's Richard’s.

The ending of the film almost invites us to question Henry's motives and speculate on his own reign. When we look at Henry's trail of blood, Richard's sins seem minor. Richard's character, for example, seems unquestioned before 1483. Hicks says, “From 1468 to 1483 Richard's career is one of continuous and conspicuous royal service and fidelity to the crown” (52). He did disagree with Edward on taking annuities from France and would have attacked France; this is probably why France backed Richmond. His biographers suggest Richard and Anne were happy together and dismiss the accusation that Richard wanted to kill his wife so that he could marry young Elizabeth. Anne supposedly died of tuberculosis a year after their only son died. Overall, Williamson says. “The family of York was a conspicuously united one, Clarence apart” (28). Many of Richard's subjects in the north country were so loyal that they continued to rebel against Henry long after Richard's death. Elizabeth eventually reconciled with him. The question everyone asks is why would Elizabeth be so reconciled with Richard if he had killed her sons. It seems astonishing she would turn over the rest of her children to him if she thought he was guilty.

Richard did, however, pass Titulus Regius bastardizing Edward's children. Robert Stillington came forward with a marriage contract between Eleanor Butler (not Shakespeare's Lady Lucy) and Edward IV before his marriage to Elizabeth. The pre-contract would have been binding had the couple consummated the agreement. We can't know if this happened. Was this a set-up? We don't know. Kendall suggests that Richard was taken by surprise by Stillington's announcement. He killed Hastings but pardoned Archbishop Morton and Lord Stanley (who, it seems, refused to join the Battle of Bosworth until he knew which side was winning). Richard also killed Buckingham but paid Buckingham's widow an annuity of two hundred marks and paid Buckingham's debts so she wouldn't have to worry about them (Williamson 105). The jury's still out as to whether he murdered his nephews. No evidence exists that he did and none exists that he didn’t. Books have been written just on this little mystery—all of them have a different theory. Some sources say that Perkin Warbeck was actually the young prince, Richard of York. With the help of Richard's sister and ally, Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, he made a failed attempt to invade England. Some claim Henry himself is guilty, having more cause than Richard to murder the princes. In marrying Elizabeth, he legitimized her brothers, the rightful heirs; therefore, he had to kill them. In Henry's defamation of Richard, he doesn’t mention this worst crime of all. Why didn't he use this against Richard. Or, did he just not know what happened to them? This would have made him pretty nervous. The discovery of the bones of two children beneath the foot of a stairway in the Tower is tantalizing but cannot be linked directly to the princes or Richard.

Richard's admirers would argue that some of his crimes were justified. The stability of a kingdom and the Plantagenet line were in jeopardy. Though he took drastic measures, he showed mercy to many who didn't deserve it. On the other hand, it is possible that he developed a lust for power and removed anyone who got in his way. As Hicks points out, “In the rough world of medieval politics, the most effective kings were not the most engaging of men” (165). The times were brutal, and the stakes were high. Henry's hit list is longer than Richard’s. It includes every last Plantagenet. The meticulous search for facts that Inspector Grant cried out for has revealed some interesting skeletons in Henry's closet. Many people today know the truth, yet Henry is the saint and Richard the sinner. Tonypandy. Still, Shakespeare's Richard III makes a good story—so good that it has all but obliterated the human being behind the story. As Kendall says, “The forceful moral pattern of Vergil, the vividness of More, the fervor of Hall, and the dramatic exuberance of Shakespeare have endowed the Tudor myth with a vitality that is one of the wonders of the world. What a tribute this is to art; what a misfortune this is for history” (514).

Works Cited

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Connors, Joanna. “Tricky Dick III.” The Plain Dealer: Friday! 16 February 1996: 6.

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Markham, Sir Clements R. Richard III: His Life and Character. New York: Russell & Russell, 1906, 1968.

McKellen, Ian. William Shakespeare's Richard III. New York: The Overlook P, 1996.

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Pollard, A.J. Richard III and the Princes in the Tower. New York: St. Martin's P, 1991.

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Tudor, Miles. The White Rose Dies. Surrey: A Tudor Sovereign Publication, 1991.

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Works Consulted

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Hallam, Elizabeth, ed. The Plantagenet Encyclopedia. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990.

Halliday, F.E. England: A Concise History. London: Thames and Hudson, 1964, 1994.

Hanham, Alison. Richard III and His Early Historians 1483-1535. Oxford:Clarendon P, 1975.

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Saccio, Peter. Shakespeare's English Kings: History, Chronicle, and Drama. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.

Seward, Desmond. Richard III: England's Black Legend. New York: Franklin Watts, 1984.

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Weir, Alison. The Princes in the Tower. New York: Ballantine Books, 1992.

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