Page 38 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

The Winter of Our Discontent / 27

attractive character. Burbage hungered for a similar role; in the tale
of Richard (Duke of Gloucester), of the House of York, Shakespeare
found material of the same mettle. The still-insecure writer emu-
lated not only Marlowe's substance but also his in-vogue style, pen-
ning most of Richard III in blank verse.
Shakespeare had devoured the chroniclers of English history: Hall,
Grafton, and Holinshed. In fact, they printed hearsay and gossip in
the guise of unvarnished truth. Will raided their storehouses of
highly embellished and narrowly interpreted anecdotes for his three-
parter on Henry VI. The miniseries allowed him to warn fellow En-
glishmen against internal conflict by transforming old stories into
cautionary fables for the present. Now he scoured the chronicles for
background material on England's next significant king, who came
alive in Will's imagination.
The chroniclers themselves had been influenced by Historiae
Anglicae Libri XXVI, a 1534 tome by Polydore Vergil. The Italian
writer had filtered long-ago, faraway struggles of that isle called
Aengland through the conscience of his popular contemporary
Machiavelli, as presented in The Prince. Vergil portrayed Richard as
a symbol of superhuman cunning, truly a Dark Prince. Richard's
ambition, having soared out of control, loosed anarchy on the land in
a brief two-year (1483-85) reign marked by cruelty and chaos.
Richard would, in the forthcoming production, be presented as an
antagonist-as-central-character, the villain-as-hero.
The real Richard may have been guilty of some crimes history has
ascribed to him. Other bits of bloodletting are now believed to have
been perpetrated by his predecessor, Edward IV, or his successor,
Henry VII. The most heinous murders ascribed to Gloucester (the
killing of his own princely young cousins in the cold, dank Tower of
London, thus eliminating any stumbling blocks to the throne) prob-
ably occurred years after Richard's death. Despite his legendary status
as Richard Crookback, it's difficult to accept the myth of Richard as
a hunchback, since his surviving armor suggests otherwise. More
likely, young Will seized on that cruel nickname, endowing his
Richard with an ugly body to symbolize his dark mind. This allowed
for a vivid theatrical vision of the "wrong" that reigned supreme
before the ascension of the "right" Tudors, including Queen Bess.
Once Shakespeare made his dramatic decision to further a reduc-
tive representation of Richard, it was necessary to fashion an equally
simplistic protagonist. Today most historians agree that Henry VII
was a mean-spirited ruler, interested only in his own well-being.