All the world knows that King Richard III—Crookback Dick—was a monster of evil who murdered his way to the English Crown. In A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Winston Churchill remarked that Richard’s contemporaries seem never to have noticed his hunchback or his withered arm. Other historians have cast doubt on the story that he murdered the sons of his brother King Edward IV—the “Princes in the Tower” of London, the elder of whom was the rightful heir to the throne. Indeed, it seems probable that the Princes were killed at the instigation of Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, the man who deposed Richard and replaced him as King Henry VII, first of the Tudor monarchs.
But all the world knows that Crookback Dick was a monster of evil.
This was William Shakespeare’s achievement. His play The Tragedy of King Richard III was written in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, granddaughter of the man who displaced Richard, and it was politic as well as dramatically shrewd to present him as a murderous, Machiavellian villain. Richard III was, in the parlance of our day, Master Will’s first great hit and despite its flaws it remains one of his most popular plays. The blackening of Richard’s historical reputation, though regrettable, seems a small price to pay for such a rollicking good time:
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace, Have no delight to pass away the time, Unless to see my shadow in the sun And descant on mine own deformity. And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover To entertain these fair well-spoken days, I am determinèd to prove a villain And hate the idle pleasures of these days. Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous, By drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams, To set my brother Clarence and the King In deadly hate, the one against the other…
Thus Richard, exercising his sinister charm, taking the audience into his confidence as he plots his path to power.
Monarchy—its splendors, squalors, discontents—was grist to the playwright’s mill. Shakespeare served his apprenticeship in the War of the Roses, which he chronicled in the three parts of Henry VI. Compared with his mature works, these plays were nothing special, though here and there Shakespeare’s dawning brilliance shone through. Ancient and recent history provided him with copious material; for instance, he plundered Plutarch for Julius Caesar. This was perhaps Shakespeare’s best-wrought play, unusual in honoring the dramatic unities, and though it featured no king, there was a crown at stake:
I saw Mark Antony offer him a crown (yet ’twas not a crown neither; ’twas one of these coronets), and, as I told you, he put it by once; but for all that, to my thinking, he would fain have had it. Then he offered it to him again; then he put it by again; but to my thinking, he was very loath to lay his fingers off it. And then he offered it the third time. He put it the third time by, and still as he refused it the rabblement hooted and clapped their chopped hands and threw up their sweaty nightcaps and uttered such a deal of stinking breath because Caesar refused the crown that it had almost choked Caesar, for he swooned and fell down at it. And for mine own part, I durst not laugh for fear of opening my lips and receiving the bad air.
Thus “honest Casca,” describing how Caesar so very reluctantly declined the crown he so very much desired. But “moderate men” with the noble Brutus at their head feared that someday, Caesar would yield to the royal temptation. And so on the Ides of March they stabbed him to death in the Senate House, Brutus justifying the bloody deed to the Roman people:
If there be any in this assembly, any dear friend of Caesar’s, to him I say that Brutus’ love to Caesar was no less than his. If then that friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer: not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more. Had you rather Caesar were living, and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all freemen?
Shakespeare, that most enigmatic figure in the canon of English literature, seems particularly equivocal in his attitude towards monarchy. The Crown of Denmark was fatal to the father, the uncle and the son. Old King Lear went mad. Macbeth was possessed by the demon of bloody ambition. Cleopatra threw it all away for love. Richard II was imprisoned and murdered. Even Henry V, superficially a patriotic epic, expresses a shadow of a doubt about that “star of England.” In the play’s prologue, Chorus begins:
O, for a muse of fire that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention! A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, And monarchs to behold the swelling scene! Then should the warlike Harry, like himself, Assume the port of Mars, and at his heels, Leashed in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire Crouch for employment...
“Famine, sword, and fire”: ominous words!
And later in the play, Shakespeare calls upon a common soldier in the ranks of Henry’s army for a second opinion on “the quality, pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war”:
But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day, and cry all “We died at such a place,” some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle, for how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it, who to disobey were against all proportion of subjection.
Henry has his answer ready, of course—but still, the soldier’s words stir up an echo of unease. Was he speaking for Shakespeare, though? We cannot know. As ever, the playwright kept his own counsel.
In a famous essay, George Orwell nominated Rudyard Kipling as the unofficial historian of the red-coated, pre-machine gun British Army, citing the poet’s Barrack-Room Ballads and other works. Much the same could be said of Shakespeare and monarchy, particularly the English monarchy. That thought occurred to me as I reflected on the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Like Kipling, Master Will often played fast and loose with the historical record. But always, he had the themes well in hand: duty, responsibility, ambition, ruthlessness, self-indulgence, hubris, nemesis.
Shakespeare would have found much dramatic material in the later history of the English monarchy. Not long after his time there was the English Civil War, culminating in the trial and execution of King Charles I. Oliver Cromwell would surely have made for a grand character in Shakespeare’s hands. Closer to our own time there was the Abdication Crisis of the 1930s. Oh, and of course there was Princess Diana…
But such fancies all dissolve. We have only what Shakespeare left to us: a volume of profound meditations on kings, queens, princes, potentates, crowns and coronets. And as it happens, the last of his plays on the theme of monarchy, Henry VIII, opens with a ceremonial prologue well suited to the sad occasion of Queen Elizabeth II’s passing:
I come no more to make you laugh. Things now That bear a weighty and a serious brow, Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe, Such noble scenes as draw the eye to flow, We now present. Those that can pity here May, if they think it well, let fall a tear; The subject will deserve it…