Shakespeare and the Remains of Richard III
Philip Schwyzer
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 0198728034
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This book explores how recollections and traces of the reign of Richard III survived a century and more to influence the world and work of William Shakespeare. In Richard III, Shakespeare depicts an era that had only recently passed beyond the horizon of living memory. The years between Shakespeare's birth in 1564 and the composition of the play in the early 1590s would have seen the deaths of the last witnesses to Richard's reign. Yet even after the extinction of memory, traces of the Yorkist era abounded in Elizabethan England - traces in the forms of material artefacts and buildings, popular traditions, textual records, and administrative and religious institutions and practices. Other traces had notoriously disappeared, not least the bodies of the princes reputedly murdered in the Tower, and the King's own body, which remained lost until its dramatic rediscovery in the summer of 2012. Shakespeare and the Remains of Richard III charts the often complex careers of these pieces of the past over the course of a century framed on one side by the historical reign of Richard III (1483-85) and on the other by Shakespeare's play. Drawing on recent work in fields including archaeology, memory studies, and material biography, this book offers a fresh approach to the cultural history of the Tudor era, as well as a fundamentally new interpretation of the wellsprings and preoccupations of Richard III. The final emphasis is not only on what Shakespeare does with the traces of Richard's reign but also on what those traces do through Shakespeare--the play, in spite of its own pessimistic assumptions about history, has become the medium whereby certain fragments and remains of a long-lost world live on into the present day.
many as three of his royal predecessors: Henry VI, Edward IV, and (probably) Edward V. The first, as already noted, was translated with dignity from Chertsey to Windsor, though without being granted a monument. The last, as will be seen later in this chapter, was variously rumoured to lie hidden in the Tower of London or in the darkest depths of the Thames estuary. But it was Edward IV whose funeral rites and interment conformed most fully to the conventions of royal burial, and whose sending off
describes the abuse of Richard’s corpse: “slain in the fielde, hacked and hewed of his enemies handes, haryed on horsebacke dead, his here in despite torn and togged lyke a cur dogge.”79 For all his animus against Richard, did More recognize that the doggishness of his death and posthumous maltreatment might redound as much to the discredit of the victors as of the vanquished? Very probably he did; earlier chroniclers, no less ill-disposed to Richard, had admitted qualms over the “insufficient
collections of relics up to date, and were quick to seize on the sort of items which might draw interest and offerings from visitors motivated by a mixture of reverence and fascination with the celebrated personalities of the recent past. Were objects like Richard’s dagger and Rivers’ shirt genuine relics? What distinguishes the relic from the trophy or the souvenir? As Alexandra Walsham has observed, the membrane dividing these categories is “shifting and porous”; what seems to divide relics
performance as the past embodied in the ghosts cuts across the present on the night before battle. The rotten armour-as-prop has a story of its own to tell—one that is neither Richard’s story (about resistance to Hastings’ supposed coup), nor Shakespeare’s story (about Richard and Buckingham’s sinister theatricality). The full story of what peregrinations led from its first manufacture to its tattered last hurrah on the Elizabethan stage was no doubt as unknown to Shakespeare’s audience as it is
the Tower throughout the sixteenth century became ever more associated with the confinement and execution of enemies of the regime. This meaning, too, had roots in the past—specifically in the use made of the Tower by the Yorkist kings Edward IV and Richard III.81 Hundreds of prisoners were confined in the Tower over the course of the Tudor era, and dozens died there, by formal execution, malnourishment, or 79 Johnson, Behind the Castle Gate, 133. 80 Keay, Elizabethan Tower of London, 39, 28. 8¹