Richard III (32 page)

It is clear that Richard has been rejected from birth by his mother; she says so unequivocally to Clarence’s children, and her words of contempt spoken to her son in front of his troops confirm this. It is impossible to escape the conclusion that Shakespeare is attempting to give some history, some causality, to Richard’s evil.

The design of the production emerged empirically. We started with an empty model box, and put minimal elements into it—rows of overhead lamps to create a series of institutionalized public areas, a world of prisons and cabinet rooms and hospital corridors; palaces and areas of ceremonial display, set off against candlelit areas of private pain. We drew some parallels with the rise of Hitler, but these were forced by Hitler himself; his rise shadows that of Richard astonishingly closely, as [Bertolt] Brecht showed in [his play]
The Resistible Rise
of Arturo Ui
. Specific elements of Hitler’s ascent to power, or [Sir Oswald] Mosley’s to notoriety, were echoes that bounced off a time
less sounding board. The play is set in a mythological landscape, even if it draws on an apparently historically precise period; I say “apparently” because Shakespeare treats historical incident with little reference to fact—incidents are conflated, characters meet whose paths never crossed, Tudor myths prevail.

Tyrants always invent their own ritual, synthetic ceremonies borrowed from previous generations in order to dignify the present and suggest an unbroken continuum with old traditions. Hitler played up all the themes of historical restitution. Napoleon, the little man from Corsica, designed the preposterous Byzantine ceremony which is represented in David’s painting. Most of the English ritual, our so-called time-honored ritual, is not very old either. The order of the last British Coronation, in 1953, had been almost wholly invented by Queen Victoria. Putting Richard in medieval costume in the Coronation, as we did, was a way of showing how tyrants, the authors of the Thousand Year Reich, would have us believe that medievalism and modern time coexist; the past is consistently made to serve the needs of the present.

Richard III
is so much a one-man show in our acting tradition that the miseries visited on woman by the male appetite for power tend to be ignored or obscured. The female characters are as strong as in any of Shakespeare’s plays. The legacy of men’s cruelty is swept up by women who have been educated by the experience of grief. They have caused pain to Richard and they are taught by him to suffer: Elizabeth—proud, arrogant, and abusive of him—loses her brother and her sons; the Duchess of York—sealed in her own self-importance, openly contemptuous of her son—loses another son and grandchildren at his hands; Lady Anne—blinded by her grief and her hatred and seduced by him—loses her self-respect and, finally, her life. Only Queen Margaret needs no education at his hands; “Teach me how to curse my enemies,” says Elizabeth to her. Their models in our times are only too obvious: the women who wait in Chile and in Argentina for news of their sons who have “disappeared,” and the mothers I saw in Romania shortly after the Revolution, putting candles and flowers in the streets on the spots where their sons had been killed. The play is called
The Tragedy of Richard III
, and it is the tragedy of the women that is being told.

The crude villain of melodrama has managed to overrule a play of considerable political subtlety. Richard does not appear in an untainted Eden; his England is the world of realpolitik. Clarence and Edward have both committed crimes in the civil wars, Clarence even admitting his guilt to the Keeper; Queen Elizabeth’s family are greedy parvenus; Buckingham, Stanley, and Ely are all morally ambiguous. At the beginning of the play Clarence has just been capriciously arrested; such behavior may be exceptional and outrageous, but not unprecedented. What right have any of the characters to call Richard a villain?

Hastings, the prime minister, is a politician’s politician, expedient, and amoral—when he is told of the impending execution of his political enemies, he can’t fault this transparent abuse of justice; within minutes he is himself under sentence of execution. “The rest that love me, rise and follow me,” says Richard, and at this point self-preservation takes over from courage, morality, or political expediency. We all hope that we will never have to face this choice; it takes formidable courage to say “No” when the consequence is imprisonment or worse, and where there is a crying need for reform, it’s easy enough to agree that minor infringements of liberty are a small price to pay for the benefit of an able leader. We are comfortably insulated in our unchallenged, liberal, all-too-English assumptions.

The play ends with the triumph of Richmond—a young man, almost a boy, in the hands of mature soldier-politicians who are promoting him. It is essential for their purposes that he succeed, and he is equally determined to show that he can succeed. I set his first entrance against a backdrop of a peaceful country village, in Devon in fact, near where I was born, the England of “summer fields and fruitful vines.” If I were asked what I thought Richmond was fighting for, it would be this idealized picture of England. It was more than a metaphor for me; it was a heartland.

When I took my production of
Richard III
to Romania a year after their Revolution, familiar landmarks in Bucharest were obscured entirely by the snow and the people were unrecognizably changed from the years of oppression. Though some claimed that nothing had altered, the mere fact of being able to say this openly contradicted what they were saying. A stagehand said he wasn’t at all
frightened of being killed in the Revolution; after all, better to be dead than how it was. A small pixielike woman was helping at the theater; she was slightly retarded but had some English. “Are you happy? I am happy” was her refrain. Like many others she was homeless, and lived in the theater, where at least she could get hot water. Outside it was often one hour of hot water a day.

At the end of the last performance I went onstage with the actors and made a speech, starting through an interpreter. She was shouted off: “English! English!” they chanted and I continued in English. I told them the production had come to its spiritual home, that this sort of cultural exchange was the only true diplomacy, and thanked them for their hospitality. They didn’t want us to go, clapping rhythmically and incessantly, but we walked offstage slowly, blinking back tears. As we left the stage a man walked up to us and handed a note and a bouquet to one of the actors. The note read: “Nobody can play Sir William Shakespeare’s plays better than his English people. I’ve seen with your remarkable help that somewhere in England Sir William Shakespeare is still alive. Thank you. Signed: a Simple Man.”

William Shakespeare was an extraordinarily intelligent man who was born and died in an ordinary market town in the English Midlands. He lived an uneventful life in an eventful age. Born in April 1564, he was the eldest son of John Shakespeare, a glove-maker who was prominent on the town council until he fell into financial difficulties. Young William was educated at the local grammar in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, where he gained a thorough grounding in the Latin language, the art of rhetoric, and classical poetry. He married Ann Hathaway and had three children (Susanna, then the twins Hamnet and Judith) before his twenty-first birthday: an exceptionally young age for the period. We do not know how he supported his family in the mid-1580s.

Like many clever country boys, he moved to the city in order to make his way in the world. Like many creative people, he found a career in the entertainment business. Public playhouses and professional full-time acting companies reliant on the market for their income were born in Shakespeare’s childhood. When he arrived in London as a man, sometime in the late 1580s, a new phenomenon was in the making: the actor who is so successful that he becomes a “star.” The word did not exist in its modern sense, but the pattern is recognizable: audiences went to the theater not so much to see a particular show as to witness the comedian Richard Tarlton or the dramatic actor Edward Alleyn.

Shakespeare was an actor before he was a writer. It appears not to have been long before he realized that he was never going to grow into a great comedian like Tarlton or a great tragedian like Alleyn. Instead, he found a role within his company as the man who patched up old plays, breathing new life, new dramatic twists, into tired repertory pieces. He paid close attention to the work of the university-educated
dramatists who were writing history plays and tragedies for the public stage in a style more ambitious, sweeping, and poetically grand than anything which had been seen before. But he may also have noted that what his friend and rival Ben Jonson would call “Marlowe’s mighty line” sometimes faltered in the mode of comedy. Going to university, as Christopher Marlowe did, was all well and good for honing the arts of rhetorical elaboration and classical allusion, but it could lead to a loss of the common touch. To stay close to a large segment of the potential audience for public theater, it was necessary to write for clowns as well as kings and to intersperse the flights of poetry with the humor of the tavern, the privy, and the brothel: Shakespeare was the first to establish himself early in his career as an equal master of tragedy, comedy, and history. He realized that theater could be the medium to make the national past available to a wider audience than the elite who could afford to read large history books: his signature early works include not only the classical tragedy
Titus Andronicus
but also the sequence of English historical plays on the Wars of the Roses.

He also invented a new role for himself, that of in-house company dramatist. Where his peers and predecessors had to sell their plays to the theater managers on a poorly paid piecework basis, Shakespeare took a percentage of the box-office income. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men constituted themselves in 1594 as a joint stock company, with the profits being distributed among the core actors who had invested as sharers. Shakespeare acted himself—he appears in the cast lists of some of Ben Jonson’s plays as well as the list of actors’ names at the beginning of his own collected works—but his principal duty was to write two or three plays a year for the company. By holding shares, he was effectively earning himself a royalty on his work, something no author had ever done before in England. When the Lord Chamberlain’s Men collected their fee for performance at court in the Christmas season of 1594, three of them went along to the Treasurer of the Chamber: not just Richard Burbage the tragedian and Will Kempe the clown, but also Shakespeare the scriptwriter. That was something new.

The next four years were the golden period in Shakespeare’s career, though overshadowed by the death of his only son, Hamnet,
age eleven, in 1596. In his early thirties and in full command of both his poetic and his theatrical medium, he perfected his art of comedy, while also developing his tragic and historical writing in new ways. In 1598, Francis Meres, a Cambridge University graduate with his finger on the pulse of the London literary world, praised Shakespeare for his excellence across the genres:

For Meres, as for the many writers who praised the “honey-flowing vein” of
Venus and Adonis
and
Lucrece
, narrative poems written when the theaters were closed due to plague in 1593–94, Shakespeare was marked above all by his linguistic skill, by the gift of turning elegant poetic phrases.

Elizabethan playhouses were “thrust” or “one-room” theaters. To understand Shakespeare’s original theatrical life, we have to forget about the indoor theater of later times, with its proscenium arch and curtain that would be opened at the beginning and closed at the end of each act. In the proscenium arch theater, stage and auditorium are effectively two separate rooms: the audience looks from one world into another as if through the imaginary “fourth wall” framed by the proscenium. The picture-frame stage, together with the elaborate scenic effects and backdrops beyond it, created the illusion of a self-contained world—especially once nineteenth-century developments in the control of artificial lighting meant that the auditorium could be darkened and the spectators made to focus on the lighted stage. Shakespeare, by contrast, wrote for a bare platform stage with
a standing audience gathered around it in a courtyard in full daylight. The audience were always conscious of themselves and their fellow spectators, and they shared the same “room” as the actors. A sense of immediate presence and the creation of rapport with the audience were all-important. The actor could not afford to imagine he was in a closed world, with silent witnesses dutifully observing him from the darkness.