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Book Review: Richard III
Dec. 7th, 2009 12:27 amRichard III! What a villain! Shakespeare’s play may be a pack of propagandistic lies, but what brilliant lies they are. What style Richard has, what wit, what a complete and utter lack of conscience; you love every minute he’s on stage (or on the page) but you’re still cheering when he dies. Now that’s good writing.
My very favorite scene is the one where he woos Lady Anne. Of course it’s ridiculous that she would say yes to him – she’s standing next to the corpse of her father-in-law, being wooed by the man who killed him AND her original husband - but at the same time…how could she say no?
(Of course later on he uses the exact same trick on Queen Elizabeth [the widow of Edward IV] and, as she is a female character in Shakespeare and thus completely useless, she falls for it too; that's somewhat less enthralling. The scene where everyone he's killed comes back to haunt him is pretty awesome, though.)
In the interest of fairness I visited York’s Richard III museum, which is almost as biased in Richard’s favor as Shakespeare was against him. (He was a scion of the house of York.) It did prove a few parts of Shakespeare’s play decisively wrong – Richard almost certainly was not a hunchback, for instance.
However, the fate of the princes in the tower remains a mystery. It’s not even entirely clear when they died, although it appears to be sometime after Richard left London. So…did he leave then send someone to do his dirty work for him, so he could claim clean hands? Did Buckingham, who was in London, do them in? (Could that be why Richard executed him without even granting an interview?) Or did they survive until Henry VII became king, and he killed them?
Josephine Tey wrote a book, which I’m told is quite good, called The Daughter of Time which explores those very questions. I may read that next: a nice light book to finish the term.
My very favorite scene is the one where he woos Lady Anne. Of course it’s ridiculous that she would say yes to him – she’s standing next to the corpse of her father-in-law, being wooed by the man who killed him AND her original husband - but at the same time…how could she say no?
(Of course later on he uses the exact same trick on Queen Elizabeth [the widow of Edward IV] and, as she is a female character in Shakespeare and thus completely useless, she falls for it too; that's somewhat less enthralling. The scene where everyone he's killed comes back to haunt him is pretty awesome, though.)
In the interest of fairness I visited York’s Richard III museum, which is almost as biased in Richard’s favor as Shakespeare was against him. (He was a scion of the house of York.) It did prove a few parts of Shakespeare’s play decisively wrong – Richard almost certainly was not a hunchback, for instance.
However, the fate of the princes in the tower remains a mystery. It’s not even entirely clear when they died, although it appears to be sometime after Richard left London. So…did he leave then send someone to do his dirty work for him, so he could claim clean hands? Did Buckingham, who was in London, do them in? (Could that be why Richard executed him without even granting an interview?) Or did they survive until Henry VII became king, and he killed them?
Josephine Tey wrote a book, which I’m told is quite good, called The Daughter of Time which explores those very questions. I may read that next: a nice light book to finish the term.
