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Will the Real Richard Please Stand Up?

"I have set my life upon a cast, and I will stand the hazard of the die."

Richard, Act V

In explaining the singular position of William Shakespeare in the modern world, author Marjorie Garber suggests that to limit his influence to the realms of literature and language is to miss the point. Shakespeare, she suggests, "has come to haunt our culture . . . whether in literature, history, psychoanalysis, philosophy, or politics."* Perhaps nowhere in the canon of Shakespeare's characters is this truer than in the case of Richard III.

Historians continue to debate the true nature of the historical Richard. Was he the monster, the fiendish villain and child murderer described in Sir Thomas More's History of King Richard III (1513)? Or was he more likely the royal victim of Tudor historians who sought to sully both his reputation and claim to the throne of England, a view espoused by Horace Walpole in his Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard III (1768)?

One fact remains certain--the view of Richard most widely known in the world today is the portrait drawn by William Shakespeare. Here is the Richard who makes the audience his confidant and, in the process, reveals his vice, his self-mocking humor, his inexplicable powers of verbal persuasion (indeed, his own amazement at how deftly he manages to manipulate the most unlikely of characters--including the wife of one of his victims). Richard's psychology is morbidly fascinating as much to himself as to the audience. We know this because he tells us. And we will be with him when he begins to unravel before our very eyes. He is Shakespeare's Richard, capable of the ultimate evil--the murder of children, so horrifying a deed. We have witnessed such mass destruction in our own time, have struggled to understand how a person could unleash such violence, have recoiled from the perpetrators of such crimes, have wondered what engenders this evil in the world. Was Richard such a creature?

Who was the "real" Richard? Historians have the task of examining the shape of the past. Shakespeare, however, has cast the die against which all interpretations will take their stand.

Cynthia M. SoRelle
Dramaturg

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*"Descanting on Deformity: Richard III and the Shape of History"

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