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So today's lecture is on which is the third a history play from the beginning of Shakespeare's career,

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probably dating from 50 in 91 to two, and a play which is a huge success in print.

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Probably the largest success of a play by Shakespeare in print.

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Six editions in Cuarto Cuarto, those small single play book, six editions in Quarto before the First Folio text of sixteen twenty three.

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So probably the most popular play of Shakespeare's in print.

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But of course, the most by far the most popular work of Shakespeare's imprint in this period is actually Venus.

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And Adonis is not a play at all.

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If the Elizabethans had been asked about Shakespeare, the writer, they would have talked about Shakespeare, the poet, the poets of Venus and Donis.

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And we'll talk a little bit more about the difference in the text, the difference between the quarto,

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the quarter text and the folio and the way they might be interesting for the way we interpret the play a bit later on.

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But first, let's start with the question that I posed about the play at the end of last week's lecture.

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The question that I don't try and focus on is, do we want Richmond to win?

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Do we want Richmond to win? And let's start by putting that in an account of the plot.

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So the plot of Richard the third is a basic rise and fall political narrative.

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The details are probably less important than the overall shape.

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And certainly giving a synopsis of the history play plot always makes it sound enormously more complicated than it really is.

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Essentially, Richard rises and he falls. Richard opens the play as Duke of Gloucester.

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But it doesn't become king until Oct four plots against his brother, King Edward,

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the fourth falsely accusing their other brother, George, the Duke of Clarence of treason.

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Richard pretends to be friends to Clarence, but in fact sends two assassins to murder him in the Tower of London.

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This is part of his overall strategy to eliminate other contenders, other other political rivals.

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Richard, meet Lady Ann, who is mourning the coffin of her father in law, Henry, six,

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not her husband, which you might think if you watch the McKellen film where it is her husband.

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But it's a bit of a giveaway that you've watched the film rather than the play. It's actually her father in law, Henry the Sixth in the play.

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She's mourning at the coffin of her father in law, who Richard has killed in a bravura display of persuasion.

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He persuades lady and to marry him, claiming his murders were prompted by her beauty.

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He's also married her first husband. Not married, actually murdered.

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And there's a Freudian slip there. Clearly on the death of King Edward.

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Richard becomes Lord Protector to his young nephew, also called Edward.

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This part of the problem, isn't it? History plays Richard's mother, the Duchess of York, and old Queen Margaret, who is the widow of Henry the Sixth.

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Both curse him as Lord Protector.

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Richard executes his opponents and with his chief adviser, the Duke of Buckingham, he lodges the young princes in the tower.

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He and Buckingham manipulate the lord mayor of London and the citizens into begging Richard to take the throne,

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Richard puts on a show of not wanting to pretending to be unwilling for a coronation.

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But but but he's persuaded overseas.

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Richmond is gathering strength from discontented subjects of Richard.

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Richard reneges on his promise to reward Buckingham.

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His associate with an Oldham because Buckingham refuses to countenance the murder of the young princes in the Tower of London.

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Richard, anyway, send Tirrell to kill the princes.

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And Buckingham joins Richmond in opposition to Richard Lady and death allows Richard to propose marriage to Princess Elizabeth.

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We don't see this in the play. The daughter of the former King Edward The Forth.

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The queen pretends to agree to this marriage, but it doesn't, in fact, take place.

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Richmond lands at Milford Haven and he marries Elizabeth, the daughter of King Edward, the fourth on the eve of the battle.

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Richard is Kirsten adream by the ghosts of all his victims, who then go on to Richmond to bless his enterprise.

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Bosworth Field The Battle. Richard is defeated by Richmond in single combat.

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Richmond is crowned and he announces he will unite the houses of York and Lancaster and bring peace to the role of Richmond in the play,

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which is partly one of them. Try and focus on is to be Richard's nemesis.

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The end of his megalomaniacal progress to the English throne, the end of the Wars of the Roses, the Union of the White and Red.

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The end of the long historical fallout from the deposition of Richard the second that scar's the

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second half of the 15th century and animates Shakespeare's three plays on the walls of the roses,

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the three parts of Henry, the sixth place he's already written and have been performed before.

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Richard the third. So Richmond, this is is the is the kind of saviour at the end of all this turmoil.

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How then could we not want him to win? Well, mid 20th century criticism was very clear that in Richmond,

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Shakespeare presented the idealised solution to the dynastic and political turmoil he had previously dramatised.

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The standard critique on this is E and W Tilyard Tilyard in his Shakespeare's history plays,

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Tilyard argued that the these plays were like other forms of late 16th century historiography in both prose works like Rafael Hollinshead Chronicles,

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which is Shakespeare's main source, but also in verse. Things like Samuel Daniel's long poem on the Wars of the Roses that these taken together,

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these historical writings were a way of consolidating Elizabeth the first rule by providing a historical and a genealogical sanction for the Tudors.

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The so-called Tudor myth. Richmond's victory at Bosworth Field at the end of Richard, the third marks the establishment of the Tudor dynasty.

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He becomes Henry, the seventh father of Henry, the eighth grandfather of Queen Elizabeth.

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Furthermore, Richmond's victory at Bosworth establishing the Tudor dynasty attempts to impose this transfer of sovereignty not as a usurpation,

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not as the murder of a reigning king, which in fact it is, but as a deliverance from tyranny.

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So there are some kind of political problems historically about the way Henry the 7th comes to the throne.

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And in part, Tilyard argues, the historical writing of this period is an attempt to smooth out those problems.

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So for Tilyard, this is an influential argument which still pertains in many critical quarters.

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Now, the tuda myth that was Shakespeare's subject in the history plays reaches its high point in the presentation of Richmond, the Providencia list.

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Tell us of the history play sequence.

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The idea that it's all going to an end point where it all works out OK is completed as Richmond represents reparation and

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restitution after a sequence of illegitimate kings following the deposition of Richard the second and a period of violent,

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turbulent civil expiation for this crime, according to Tilyard.

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Richmond comes to reinstate the tarnished monarchy in the blessed form of the Tudors for this play, right, Tilyard?

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Shakespeare accepted the prevalent belief that God had guided England into her haven of Tudor prosperity.

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Shakespeare accepted the prevalent belief that God had guided England into a haven of due to prosperity.

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Now there are lots of different ways we could challenge this vision of Elizabethan politics.

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Setting aside for a moment the politics of the play itself.

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For one thing, as we know, the establishment of The Tudors by Henry the seventh was by no means the end of that.

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Dynasties problems. The struggle for an heir to Henry the eighth comes immediately to mind.

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More immediately, presenting The Tudors as the sanctified antidote to civil war is really rather a backhanded compliment.

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In the early 50s, 90s, even the most optimistic politicians had given up.

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By that point on the idea that the 15 year old queen would marry and have an heir, the Tudors were, although nobody could say it at the time.

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Toast. There are dynasty, which had run entirely out of steam and out of, as they were, a dynasty at the end of its life.

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So to suggest that the only antidote to civil war,

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the only peaceful and prosperous future for England is with the Tudors is a slightly odd thing to argue in the 15 nineties,

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many more recent critics following and articulating themselves against Tilyard and trying to assess

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how Shakespeare's history plays might intervene into contemporary politics have suggested that,

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in fact, their role is to rehearse repressed anxieties about the Elizabethan succession, not to try and massage it much of those anxieties away.

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So they rehearse these anxieties by showing us different versions of monarchies in decline, different versions of power changing hands.

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They become documents of political uncertainty, not historical triumph.

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Or perhaps rather, they suggest that political certainties are a thing of the past.

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The turn to history in the culture of the late 16th century can itself be seen as a sign of cultural confidence.

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If you like, a turn to the past rather than a step forward into the future.

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Something a number of commentators were saying about the Oscar shortlist last night.

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A whole whole sequence of historical films suggesting a kind of an anxiety about the present under comfort or security in the past.

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So we could answer our question about Richmond with reference to the historical context of the early 50s nineties.

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Can his victory at the end of Richard the third really register as the triumphant conclusion to the politics of conflict?

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Or does it appear rather as another contingent version of the theatre's appetite for parables of regime change?

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The disturbing conclusion to Michael Boyd's RISC production in 2007 had Richmond delivering his pious,

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platitudinous final speech even as his flak jacketed troops watched the audience through the sights of their machine guns.

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Now we write, we might relate this point to something about the chronology of Shakespeare's own writing.

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Shakespeare writes his history plays, rather, as George Lucas makes the Star Wars films.

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That's to say he begins by writing towards an end of history moment for George Lucas.

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This is Skywalker becoming a fully fledged Jedi and destroying the empire for Shakespeare.

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It's the victory of Richmond at Bosworth Field.

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If you know both text, you can see that they actually share a number of Sims or plot elements in quite a recognisable way.

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The end of Richard, the third. That's to say,

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takes the historical story to a point where there is no possibility or no interest in pursuing it any further abate the edge of traitors.

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Gracious Lord, praise the godly Richmond, predicting his descendants will enrich the time to come with smooth faced peace,

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with smiling plenty and fair, prosperous days.

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This may indeed be a worthy political aspiration, but it's certainly not a very dramatic one.

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What both Shakespeare and Lucas do is to pursue their themes,

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the themes which have been so commercially successful for them by reverting to an earlier prequel part of the story after the end.

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That's to say we go back to the beginning. The next play is Richard the second.

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The start of that cycle of deposition, expiation and restoration that Tilyard saw as the sequence of the history plays the next plays then, Richard,

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the second and the two parts of Henry the fourth return us to an earlier chronological point in the historical story,

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just as they return us to a world of conflict and embattled sovereignty.

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In this recurrent schema, in the way the plays work out on the Elizabethan stage, Richmond's victory is provisional and temporary.

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It's just like the victory at Shrewsbury, which ends Henry, the fourth part one, or the Battle of Agincourt, which ends Henry the fifth.

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It concludes an episode, not the whole story. And then I come back to the implications that might have for Richard.

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The third in a moment. As I've already talked about in lectures on which the second and on Henry the fourth part one,

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the fashion for performing complete sequences of Shakespeare's history plays is a decidedly 20th century one.

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There is no evidence from the Shakespearean period that these history plays were seen as serial or episodic in their own time.

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Rather, I think they were complete self standing, dramatic entertainments.

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The critic Nicolas Green argues differently in a book which helpfully gives its argument in its title, Shakespeare's Serial History Plays.

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So if you want to think about an alternative to this view, I'm giving you of distinct history plays.

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Green is the place to go.

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But the habit of reading them and particularly performing them as a sequence has been cued by their arrangement in the First Folio.

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We've seen here before that the history plays apparently uniquely,

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since it's very difficult to see any organising principle in the order of plays in the comedy or the tragedy sections.

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If you look at those and have any bright ideas, you should pass them on,

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because that's one of the great mysteries about the way the folio is put together, why the play's in this order.

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Why is the Tempus past Weitzen symbol in last? Why a certain place next to each other?

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But when we come to the sectionals on the history plays, we can see why they've been put in the order.

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They have been put in historical chronological order, like look like a history book of kings.

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The earliest one first King John, the latest one, King Henry. The eighth at the end.

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The titles of the history plays a regularised in the Folio to make the sequence work.

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Henry forth part one. Henry the fourth. Part two. Henry the sixth.

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Parts one, two and three. All of those plays had slightly different titles when they were printed previously.

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So the history plays are presented in the Folio as a serial epic rather than a set of individual plays.

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It's here and here alone. So after Shakespeare, almost certainly not directed by Shakespeare.

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Shakespeare doesn't have any influence. I think in the way the First Folio looks.

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So it's only here that Richard the third takes on the kind of culminating position in the sequence.

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And it's bolstered in that by the very last play in the history section. The collaboration with Fletcher All is true or Henry the Eighth,

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which we might argue picks up the sort of analogical implications of Richmond's Tudor victory at the end of Richard the third.

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So the establishment of The Tudors with what happens at the end.

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Henry the eighth, which is the baptism of Queen Elizabeth,

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the infant Queen Elizabeth and the salt prediction of water, great rain reign she's going to have.

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So it's this arrangement of the play as the last of a long sequence of historical plays in the Folio that gives rise to that providential list.

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Tell us to tell us meaning and purpose from which we get to theology,

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a kind of narrative that she's very much and driven, driven towards a particular conclusion.

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So I've been suggesting, I think,

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that the First Folio arrangement of the plays makes Richmond's climactic entry into Richard the third overdetermined.

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It's not only the ending of this play, but the ending of a sequence. But I've also been reminding us that this sequence is a later construction.

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It's not the experience of the first playgoers. The First Folio organisation has prompted, I think,

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over teleological readings of the play in which Richmond functions as the ultimate figure of resolution, conclusion and future promise.

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And it's not surprising then that the Folio title has the additional information.

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The tragedy of Richard, the third with the landing of Richmond and the Battle of Bosworth Field.

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We don't know where that additional information comes from for the title.

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In fact, I'd never noticed until I was reproducing it for you or for your handout,

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which is probably goes to show that there is plenty to see and notice in Shakespeare, even though we feel everything that's already been talked about.

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So we might take a different view of Richard the third.

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If we returned to its early publications before the Folio, those six quarters that I mentioned at the beginning,

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like the Folio, all six called the play the tragedy of Richard the third.

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The tragedy of Richard the third. It's a challenging designation for us because we are still largely wedded to that.

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Essentially good,

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but with a tragic flaw model of tragic protagonist which has been shaped for us out of Aristotle's poetics via AC Bradley's Shakespearean tragedy.

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Bradley, like Tilyard, is one of the most influential books in our discipline,

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one that we can't really escape no matter how many people and how often we say it's just wrong.

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But as I've discussed before and I've been talking about Titus Andronicus and other players,

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the tragic hero model is quite limited, even even Bradley.

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It's great. Exponent can only really make it fit four of the dozen or so plays which Shakespeare writes, which are tragedies.

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Seeing Richard the third as a tragedy is less about an ethical judgement on the

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qualities of its central character and more a simple description of its shape.

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What we've got here is the day, Kasie, both mediaeval tradition of great figures falling due to the operations of Fortune's Wheel.

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The monks prologue in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales has it.

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Tragedy is a certain story of him that stood in great prosperity and is a fallen out of high degree into misery and end death and wreck Adli.

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As you can see that that mediaeval idea is just a structure of footballing from high to low of a moral or ethical judgement of any of any sort.

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It's is a structure based on it's a definition based on structure.

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One thing we can be sure about in a tragedy is where our focus of interest lies in the structure of the tragedy of Richard the third.

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We might then say Richmond is about as interesting as 14 brasses in Hamlet.

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Not very. The very fact of being alive at the end of a tragedy is an index of your irrelevance.

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Think about Edgar in King Lear or Malcolm in Macbeth or the Prince in Romeo and Juliet.

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Who cares? Let's pursue this just a little bit further to think about the relative time onstage of these protagonists.

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The part of Richard, it's a huge one in the Shakespearean canon.

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And he speaks 32 percent of the play's lines, 32 percent of the play's lines.

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It's the biggest role in Shakespeare outside, apart from Hamlet, 37 percent, well above Macbeth, who speaks.

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Twenty nine percent of his line of that plays lines and Lear, 22 percent of that plays lines.

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Case of Richard's got 32 percent of his play, but bigger than all those other tragic protagonists apart from Hamlet.

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When I'm quoting this kind of quantitative data,

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I'm always quoting it from those useful tables in the RISC Shakespeare, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen.

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So Richard's at 32 percent of the play's lines. Richmond, by contrast, speaks four percent, four percent.

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So it makes him the statistical equivalent of the prince of Morocco in the Merchant of Venice, the Duke of Cornwall in King Lear.

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Ribboned Tío in Othello. Richard is in 14 of the play's 22 scenes.

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I would guess about two and a half hours of stage time. Richard is in three.

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I reckon about 20 minutes. The implications of this are actually substantial.

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Shakespeare has done as much as he possibly can to minimise and to downplay Richmond's role.

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The character of Richmond is not even mentioned until Act four,

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when Dorsett is sent to join him and he does not appear on stage until Act five scene to.

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The strategy of reduction works, if you read any review, if you Google, for example,

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the Kevin Spacey production of last year or Michael Boyd's three or four years ago with Jonathan Slinger.

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If you look at reviews of that, you'll be bet you'll find it really, really difficult to find out how Richmond was played.

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He's never, ever mentioned in performance is the necessary but personally uninteresting

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person who will speak the dead protagonist's eulogy and whose presence kills us.

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We have come to the end of the play. We know that Shakespeare cannot in writing history plays.

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Change historical fact, winners and losers.

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Kings and challenges appear in his plays, as in the historical record.

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Even as he manipulates events, battles and motives and often collapses them.

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Henry Earl of Richmond did win the Battle of Bosworth Field on the 22nd of August 14 85, killing Richard, the third to take the throne.

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The play acknowledges this historical fact, but it does it, I think, quite grudgingly,

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without any attempt to characterise Richmond to make him attractive or to counter suggestions that his own claim to the throne is questionable.

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It's interesting that Richmond does exactly what Richard had been trying, trying to do marry the Princess Elizabeth to secure his claim to the throne.

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He is he, too, is a is a weak has a weak claim.

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So this is a play, Richard. The set, Richard. The third is a play resonantly about Richard and Richmond.

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That means, I think, that we can approach the question of audience sympathies towards Richmond via an analysis of the structure of the play,

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Richmond's role is, as I've said, as nemesis. But it is also as a kind of day a sex machinea figure.

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The day a sex machinea is the person, sometimes divine and sometimes human,

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who comes in usually unexpectedly at the end of the play to sort things out.

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The phrase was originally used by Horace as a negative playwright.

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He instructed, should not resort to this mechanical trick. It's a kind of equivalent of.

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And then I woke up. You know, it's a kind of throwing up.

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It's throwing your arm, shrugging their shoulders by going to resolve the things that you set up fictionally.

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But in Shakespeare's hands, it seems that the very inadequacies of this device, the death that much in a device, are being used for effect.

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Richard's personal charisma in Nietzsche, in terms his will to power, can only be defeated by a historical plot, not by a dramatic rival.

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Richmond is no match for Richard and therefore only the clunky deus ex machina device can bring about Richard's downfall.

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The play and then with whimper, not bang or with tragic in escape ability rather than with historical competition.

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Richard Long, Crane's film set in the 1930s fascist London with Ian McKellen as Richard.

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And with his refusal to be captured in the battlefield,

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jumping instead in a willed fall into a kind of battle inferno set against the music of Al James Al Jolson's disconcertingly jaunty.

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I'm sitting on top of the world.

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It's a disc discordant ending, but one which emphasises Richard's irrepressible will as the kind of ultimate victory over his duller enemies.

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For this reason, then, I think that the teleological reading of Richard,

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the third in which Richmond is the ultimate and crucial conclusion, is not for most readers their experience of the play,

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partly because of Richard's own personal dominance and partly because the play insists upon a kind of nostalgic or recursive memorial structure.

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It's always looking backwards rather than forwards. This is not a play whose momentum is largely forward,

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and I want to argue in next part of the lecture that invite us kind of a. logical play instead of trying to get to its ending,

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it's trying desperately to kind of pedal back its it's like trying to go the wrong way up an escalator.

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So there's a kind of Stacie's about that is trying to resist the movement. Let's think first about Richard's own personal dominance in the play.

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We've already quantified that in terms of the high proportion of lines he speaks.

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But it's interesting to notice that this play has been identified as the first major collaboration between Shakespeare and his leading actor,

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Richard Burbage. The first of Shakespeare's plays, we might say that is that is distinctly for a star actor, not as the previous plays an ensemble.

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But let's dig a bit deeper. Richard is the only one of Shakespeare's major characters to begin his own play.

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You'll recall that Shakespeare's usual method is more oblique. We tend to come into play as via marginal characters who are describing something

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which has just happened or is about to happen in the main part of the plot here.

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The opening direction is Enter Gloster. Soulless, soulless alone makes it clear that he does not only open the play, he does so in soliloquy.

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No other play by Shakespeare. Does this other play begins with a soliloquy in this way.

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Therefore, he begins by addressing the audience. I've talked to my lecture on Othello.

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How very difficult it is for us to avoid a kind of conspiracy with the argot given his meatiness towards

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us and the concurrent difficulty of forging any empathy with the distant and grandiloquent Othello.

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Something similar happens in Richard. The Third, and indeed some of the Argo's demonic charm recalls this earlier character.

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In Richard, the third,

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a stream of asides and sardonic remarks throughout serve to consolidate this initial alliance we make with Richard through his opening soliloquy.

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Richard is also funny, more like the mediaeval vice character with whom he compares himself.

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Richard's opening speech is itself striking.

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We can see that the famous line, which opens the play now is the winter of our discontent, begins decisively with an inverted metrical foot.

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The stress is on now. The first syllable, not as regular iambic pentameter would have it on the second.

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Now is the winter of our discontent. The contrast between the turbulent maelstrom of competing interests in the Henry the

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Sixth plays where no one is able to assert any control over events is striking.

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Richard seises his own play by the scruff of the neck right from the start.

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And if we look at the history of performances of this play, thinking perhaps particularly about this spider ish representation by Anthony Share,

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for instance, it seems that it is almost impossible for the Richard character to over act.

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The histrionic quality of his deformed and manic self presentation is intrinsic to the part.

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It is an over the top and overacted kind of hyperbolic role.

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Subtlety is not part of Richard's armoury. Excess is the keynote from that first long opening soliloquy.

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Part of the relish of his role for Richard is its opportunity for self-conscious role playing his cues to Buckingham in

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his appearance before the Lord Mayor and citizens when he's playing the part of a devout hermit between two bishops,

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is a good example of his actually delight. Richard's personality is a series of roles rather than an identity.

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The broken jerky soliloquy, as he wakes from his ghost haunted sleep at the end of the play,

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gives us a good example of this fractured self kind of fretting around an absence centre.

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I am a villain. Yet I lie. I am not. Am the villain.

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Yet I lie. I am not. The second I am may refer back to the first clause.

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I am not a villain, but it might also stand alone. A kind of statement of self cancellation.

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I am not. Throughout Richard's manic energy is irresistible.

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In the second scene of the play, he woos Lady Morning, her father in law,

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Henry the sixth, telling her that he murdered both the dead king and her husband.

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The scene is a really difficult one to pull off.

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You can watch a number of film versions by Olivier and by McKellen and others on YouTube to see just how difficult,

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in fact, it is to make it convincing. If it does work, it works by making Lady Arm feel she is complicit in even culpable for Richard's behaviour.

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I did kill King Henry, says Richard. But was thy beauty that provoked me cause I that stabbed young Edward,

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but was thy heavenly face that set me on Richard gives arm the chance to kill him.

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And the only alternative is to accede to him. She came under the first.

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So she has to do the second.

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The cost of submitting to Richard's rhetorical railroading in this scene is that she hardly speaks again in the entire play.

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This, I think, is because she has served her purpose, the scene, as I say, which is only the second in the play,

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must be, I think, an allegory for the audience, his own reaction to Richard.

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As such, it's interesting to compare it with a comparable scene in Marlowe's Tamburlaine, where Tamburlaine was Zanotti pretty.

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As the most extreme and circumstantially unsympathetic person with regard to Richard.

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Audience sorry, and plays the role of the audience deciding whether to take up Richard or to turn against him like her.

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We choose him even as we laugh at his epigrammatic.

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I'll have her, but I will not keep her long. We have, like her, entered into a masochistic compact with this charismatic, alluring protagonist.

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Part of the audience is role in relation to Richard, I think is encapsulated in this enchanted revulsion,

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which is, quite interestingly, according to the play, feminised.

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It's striking that this most violent of plays focuses itself on acts of rhetoric like this one, like the wooing of Lady Am, not acts of murder.

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In that it's more obviously SEMICON owing a debt to the Roman tragedian Seneca than the bloody plays Elizabethan plays,

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we tend to identify under that heading. Sandakan violence was always reported, not staged.

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The revenge play structure that is faintly visible in the action in the cycle of action and retribution in Richard.

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The third is not, as we might expect, accompanied by revenge play.

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Gore. If we compare the play with kids, Spanish tragedy, for instance, or with Titus Andronicus,

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we can see the significance of the fact that the deaths happen offstage sinisterly by diktat, but not bloodily before our eyes.

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Even the death of Clarance is shifted off stage, although we do see the terrifying Build-Up.

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The horrors of the Quarto title page, the long quarto title is The Tragedy of King Richard,

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the third containing his treacherous plots against his brother Clarence,

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the pitiful mother of his most innocent nephews, his tyrannical usurpation with the whole course of his detested life and most deserved death.

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These horrors are misleading in their emphasis.

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And it's also really striking to me that the one piece of information about the play that the Folio gives us,

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that it ends with Richmond and the Battle of Bosworth is completely absent from this Quarto title page.

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That's not an interesting part of the play in its quota publication,

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but the event of this displacement of physical violence, like the emplace emphasis on performative speech acts like curses,

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is to put Richard's rhetorical charisma's centre stage and to make this a play about verbals rather than violent interaction.

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While labia cannot in this scene resist, Richard, another chorus of women in the play.

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Can Shakespeare has amplified the role of women in this play.

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In sharp contrast to the later history plays.

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And so if you're interested in female characters, the Henry the Sixth plays on this one offer some compelling examples.

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Richard, the third gives us Richard's mother, the Duke of York, the Queen Elizabeth.

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Wife toured with the fourth and additionally Queen Margaret, the widow of Henry the Sixth.

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Margaret's presence in particular is decidedly a historical.

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The real Queen Margaret died in France, having been taken prisoner after the death of her husband.

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So Shakespeare has revivified her, brought her back as a kind of deliberate memory of the past, the past in particular of his own.

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His Henry the six plays in which he's a prominent character.

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And as such, he's one of the structural features of the play that is constantly dragging it backwards, away from teleology towards recollection.

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This backwards mentum, this umpty teleology, is one of the most significant roles for the women in the play.

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Established as mourners for the dead who have suffered for Richards rise and in the civil strife that created him.

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Their speeches are always full of recollection and remembrance. So they do very little to move the move, the play forward or to talk about the future.

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What they do is to intervene, to bring the past back into the play.

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At her first entrance, Margaret reminds Richard Undoes of his previous actions out devil.

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I do remember them too well. That killed my husband Henry in the tower and Edward, my poor son at Tewksbury in the Kevin Spacey production.

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Part of her role was to mark deaths with chalk crosses on doors on the stage,

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taking up the role of witness and recorder in the text, Richard responds in kind.

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In all which time you were factious for the House of Lancaster. Let me put that in your minds.

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If you forget what you have been at this and what you are with all what I have been and what I am.

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In part,

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the struggle between Richard and the female chorus in the play is a struggle over the historical past and who has the right to tell of that past?

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The role of historian in the play is a vexed one.

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Different characters make their case for the remembrance of different events and tell the story of the past in a different way.

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This indicative encounter that I've just quoted them between Richard and Margaret,

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therefore takes on something of a massive theatrical quality about the play itself as a version of history.

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To the historians, since Thomas Moore writing under Richmond's son, Henry the eighth,

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had worked to demonise Richard the Third and Shakespeare's Richard embraces this vision enthusiastically.

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I am determined to prove a villain, he declares in his opening soliloquy.

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I am determined to prove a villain. The line is double edged.

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Determined has the dual meaning both of human agency. I am determined that I will do this.

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And of cosmic direction, it has been determined that you will do this.

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The question of whether Richard does determine his own fate or has it determined for him echoes throughout the play.

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Just as his physical deformity act both as cause and the symptom of his moral character.

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Mors The History of Richard, the third written around 15, 13. It's a really interesting source to look out for Richard the third,

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not least because it's an unfinished work and thus deals only with Richard's rise to the throne.

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The part of the story that I've been arguing Shakespeare also finds most interesting.

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So, as I've said, it's the women in the play who take on the role of historians recording and lamenting the past Act four.

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Scene four is a particularly significant lock us for this as all three.

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The Duchess of York, the Queen Mother, Elizabeth and Margaret, the widow Henry, the sixth vie with each other in their grief,

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perhaps here, drawing on the religious symbolism of the three women mourning at the foot of the cross.

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The language of the scene is strikingly stylised, turning on rhetorical patterns of repetition, which give a sense of stay, says a lack of movement.

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This is Margaret. I had an Edward Teller. Richard killed him.

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I had a husband tell Richard killed him. Thou hardstand Edward Teller.

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Richard killed him. Thou hearts to Richard Tilla. Richard. Killed him.

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Their conversation is a. teleological in many on many different levels.

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Firstly, it does nothing to advance the plot. In fact, it interrupts the plot.

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The scene immediately before. This is one where Richard hears news of Richmond's advancing forces.

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And when Richard himself enters the scene of these three women, his question is apposite.

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Who intercepts me in my expedition? Who intercepts me in my expedition expedition?

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There means both military plan but also haste expedite to do something in a hurry.

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So he acknowledges that they're somehow interrupting that the business, the business of the play and its depiction of female grief.

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The scene has no historical precedent.

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Almost all the scenes of women in Shakespeare's history plays are invented by Shakespeare that don't form part of the historical sources he's using.

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So so that that makes the scene a kind of interpolation into unfolding historical events.

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But perhaps most significantly, in its language, as the four lines I just read to you suggest strongly,

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the language privilege is circularity and repetition over linearity and teleology the rhetoric of repetition,

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of restating is the opposite of teleology of forward movement, even at the point when the play's hurtling towards its conclusion.

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That's to say there's a counter movement, structurally and particularly linguistically and rhetorically,

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away from the future towards the past, appropriately capturing histories, contradictory movements, forwards and backwards.

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Here, we might try and draw in another influential critical reading of the history play sequence

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to counter that Providenciales reading of Tilyard that we covered earlier in his book,

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Shakespeare, our contemporary young Kott offered a bleakly existentialist reading of the history plays.

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Not surprising, perhaps, in a book which also links King Lear to Beckett's play End Game.

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And finally puts paid to the sentimental idea that Midsummer Night's Dream is a children's fairy tale.

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Cops analysis of the history players was ultimately for Shakespeare.

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History stands still. Every chapter opens and closes at the same point.

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The verbal index of this Stacie's is for Kott repeated names, Henries and Edwards and Richards constantly recurring, passing across the stage.

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So the language of the repeated language, the repeated names in history plays give it give a sense that nothing is changing.

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His visual index for this cot was a theatre director. It was what he called the image of the grand mechanism, the grand mechanism.

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A kind of moving staircase which never got anywhere. Another umpty teleological reading, which has been very influential on the stage.

380
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If you saw any of Michael Boyd's history sequence at the RISC might remember a kind of metal staircase in the middle of this Courtyard Theatre.

381
00:42:15,080 --> 00:42:23,870
A very definite borrowing. I think from Kott we can see the difference between Kots argument until the arts.

382
00:42:23,870 --> 00:42:27,650
The histories for Tilyard are about progress to an end point.

383
00:42:27,650 --> 00:42:37,590
The glorious reign of the Tudors. But for Kott they're just about circularity, repetition, unstated.

384
00:42:37,590 --> 00:42:41,490
Queen Margaret then serves as a kind of ghost in the play,

385
00:42:41,490 --> 00:42:49,230
bringing with her the unquiet traces of the past in Michael Boyd's production, her during her first scene.

386
00:42:49,230 --> 00:42:57,870
She unwrapped from a bundle the skeleton of her son, lovingly reassembling the dry bones on a piece of cloth as she spoke.

387
00:42:57,870 --> 00:43:06,660
Quite literally. She carried the past on her back. Typically of Boyd's direction, that production was full of other ghosts.

388
00:43:06,660 --> 00:43:12,960
When Richard was crowned, a procession of his dead victims came to kneel before him on the battlefield.

389
00:43:12,960 --> 00:43:19,720
He addressed his famous cry for a horse to the spirits of his parents who rejected him.

390
00:43:19,720 --> 00:43:28,330
Boyd's directorial Ghosts here add their instinct for retrospection and looking backwards to Shakespeare's own.

391
00:43:28,330 --> 00:43:35,890
In a scene at the end of Richard the third, just before the decisive battle, Richard is visited in a dream by the ghosts of those he has killed.

392
00:43:35,890 --> 00:43:42,160
They curse him and travel across the stage to Richmond, giving him their blessing.

393
00:43:42,160 --> 00:43:50,980
The dream sequence here reminds us of the people in the play's past, but also back to an earlier dream in the play that have.

394
00:43:50,980 --> 00:44:02,430
At the end of the first act. Again, the movement is backwards rather than forwards recapping rather than going ahead.

395
00:44:02,430 --> 00:44:10,500
So this like you have been thinking about the ending of Richard the third and the victory of Richmond in ethical and in political terms,

396
00:44:10,500 --> 00:44:14,460
but also in dramaturgical and structural ones,

397
00:44:14,460 --> 00:44:20,970
I've tried to think about the way Shakespeare's constructed the play to minimise the ending through his underplayed

398
00:44:20,970 --> 00:44:29,160
characterisation of Richmond and his insistence on an anti teleological structure of memory and recollection.

399
00:44:29,160 --> 00:44:35,010
And I've suggested these might draw attention away from an overly literal historical telos in which Richmond functions.

400
00:44:35,010 --> 00:44:39,570
And Saviour. I've tried to point out that reading the Folio history in the Folio,

401
00:44:39,570 --> 00:44:46,110
I think is quite a different experience from reading them or experiencing them individually.

402
00:44:46,110 --> 00:44:53,910
Next week then I'm going to talk about parallelise, a late play about travel, incest and reconciliation.

403
00:44:53,910 --> 00:44:59,100
The question I think I want to ask there is why wasn't parallelise included in the First Folio?

404
00:44:59,100 --> 00:45:03,330
Why wasn't Pericles glued in the First Folio? I hope I'll see you then.

405
00:45:03,330 --> 00:45:09,629
Thank you.