Richard II & Richard III: Shakespeare's Version

Did Shakespeare shape the way we remember England's Plantagenet kings more than history itself? How much of his plays Richard II and Richard III are fact, fiction, or Tudor propaganda? Professor Emma Smith joins Matt Lewis to separate the history from drama, and discover how Shakespeare balanced historical truth, theatrical brilliance and the political realities of writing under Elizabeth I, to create plays that still shape our understanding of medieval English history today. MORE: The Bishop who Took Down Richard II Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-bishop-who-took-down-richard-ii/id1564113746?i=1000757253335&uo=4&itscg=30200&ls=1&mttnsubad=6442463604&at=1000l3ctA&itsct=podfollow_podcasts&ct=gone-medieval-eplink Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/1pifvRJGKKgwxbryZT5JMC Richard III Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/richard-iii/id1564113746?i=1000537294510&itscg=30200&ls=1&mttnsubad=6442463604&at=1000l3ctA&itsct=podfollow_podcasts&ct=gone-medieval-eplink Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/5uokefeIX33Z2jRVGWwC2V Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. Audio editor is Aliza Dams, the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ WATCH Matt and Eleanor's new documentary The Rise of the Plantagenets on History Hit TV! Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week, PLUS early access ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Matt Lewis?

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• 0:42Speaker 01

  In Our Time is a world-class seminar every week. Why was Jeremy a lonely snail? What were lines doing in York in the third century? I'm Misha Glennie and every week I'm joined by expert guests to explore the ideas that shape our world.

• 0:57Speaker 02

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• 1:16Matt Lewis?

  Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and latest groundbreaking research, from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders, to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval.

• 1:59Matt Lewis?

  This week on Gone Medieval, we're debunking some of the things we think we know about the Plantagenet kings of England, not because they come from the chronicles, court records or battlefield dispatches, but from William Shakespeare.

• 2:13Matt Lewis?

  In the last episode, Eleanor surveyed Shakespeare's take on kings Henry IV and V, and how the bard freely bent the truth whenever the drama demanded it. Do go back and have a listen to that episode if you haven't done so already. We heard how living in the Elizabethan and early Stuart world also meant that Shakespeare was often commenting on his own times or labouring under certain restrictions on his speech, rather than sticking to the facts about past monarchs. Having looked at the Henrys, today we're going to meet the Richards. Shakespeare gives us two of them. Richard II, depicted as a doomed poet king, forced to hand over his crown. And Richard III, who Shakespeare labelled, or in my view libelled,

• 2:56Matt Lewis?

  a murderous, misshapen villain, smiling as he clawed his way to power through a river of blood. But why did the Tudors need Richard III to be so spectacularly evil? And how much of either man was real or just brilliant drama, Tudor propaganda, or Shakespeare's own political survival? I'm pleased to welcome back Professor Emma Smith to explore Richard II and Richard III, two plays which are concerned with kingship, legitimacy, rebellion and the terrible fragility of power. Two medieval kings spun perhaps for an Elizabethan audience, still haunted by the question, what happens when a monarch can be overthrown?

• 3:45Matt Lewis?

  Welcome back, Emma. We kind of been too bad the first time round with Eleanor. You've come back and joined us for a second instalment.

• 3:50Speaker 04

  Those Richards, they're just waiting, they're calling to us.

• 3:53Matt Lewis?

  They are, they need to be addressed. So I hope everyone has managed to listen to your episode with Eleanor, which did a fantastic job of talking about Henry IV and Henry V, but also kind of teeing up some of the historical context in which Shakespeare is writing and why he's writing his plays. So you can find all of that in Eleanor's episode from earlier this week. So we're going to focus today on Richard II and Richard III. And I've just given you a warning that listeners are probably well aware of, that once I get on to Richard III, we're in for the long haul then. So Richard II is a really interesting one of Shakespeare's history plays, I think, in that it's one where he doesn't particularly stretch out the time. You know, he's not looking at the whole reign of Richard II. He really just focuses on the last couple of years and some of the key events around that.

• 4:37Matt Lewis?

  And in many ways, it's often positioned as one of his more historically accurate plays. Do you think that's fair in terms of the kind of the facts that he deals with, the politics that he's dealing with and the drama? How close does it stay to the history?

• 4:51Speaker 04

  That's a really interesting take. I think it is quite close to the history, but as you suggest, by focusing in on the end of the reign, it means that some of the things that have led us up to the point that we're at in that period are very opaque somehow. We haven't seen them ourselves, they haven't been laid out for us. It's a good example actually of how the history plays are often telling us, showing us something we know to be a truth about history, which is that it's always competing. There are competing narratives about what happened in the past. And in a way, the play sort of embodies those because we don't see for ourselves. So yes, it is close to the history of the end, but by focusing so closely,

• 5:35Speaker 04

  I think Shakespeare opens up quite a lot of the questions about why things have got to the place they've got.

• 5:42Matt Lewis?

  And even within that kind of narrow window of Richard's reign that he's dealing with, there are lots of things that we can talk about that he deals with that are fairly true to the history. The exile of Bolingbroke and Mowbray, seizure of Gaunt's lands, Bolingbroke's return. Are there places where he more definitely departs from the history and reshapes some of those events? And what might we see him doing where he does do that?

• 6:04Speaker 04

  It's an interesting element that's not so often talked about, where Shakespeare's clearly sort of combined the two queens of Richard II together. You know, we often think about the history plays as being all about men, politics, military escapades, male bonding and male frictions, fathers and sons and so on. But it's an interesting moment to highlight where the queen is given a voice in an ahistorical way. Shakespeare's clearly wanted to construct that, to give us a different angle on what's happening.

• 6:38Matt Lewis?

  And is there a reason he might want a more, I guess, interesting, slightly more powerful female voice in there at that point?

• 6:44Speaker 04

  I think, as we talked about in our conversation about the Henrys, I think Shakespeare wants the opportunity to humanise his monarchs and to recognise that they are private individuals to some extent, as well as public ones. And sometimes it's the sort of domestic insight maybe that helps us to see that.

• 7:09Matt Lewis?

  And it's an interesting way to twist the history as well because it kind of ignores the fact that Anna Bohemia's death marks a turning point for Richard, which again, we don't see all of that build up in the play. We don't see how Richard kind of arrives at this point of crisis that is ultimately going to cost him his crown. Shakespeare tries to present it as sort of being really around the confiscation of the Lancasterian inheritance and that that sort of blows up in Richard's face. But we also need to be aware that really this is a culmination of a much longer political crisis. I mean, I think Eleanor told you, she's not a big fan of Richard II. I think I'm slightly more sympathetic to him than Eleanor might be. But the arrival at the last couple of years of his reign is really the story of a decade or more

• 7:52Matt Lewis?

  of really intense political problems and confrontations that we simply don't see, do we? It's all just hinged on this seizure of the Lancasterian estates. Is there a reason why Shakespeare might have wanted to pick that to hang it all on?

• 8:06Speaker 04

  I think it's thematically really fantastic that it's about, somehow it's a moment of interrupted succession, the interruption of patrilineer inheritance that brings about this crisis in the monarchy. I mean, Richard doesn't have a direct heir, but he has named an heir that Bolingbroke supersedes. I think it's so interesting what you say. It makes me think about the very opening scene of the play, which is all about a kind of mystery about what has been happening. Why is it that Mowbray and Bolingbroke are having this duel? What is it that they're talking about? What is the death of Gloucester? You know, this event from the past that is brought into the courtroom

• 8:50Speaker 04

  and it seems very difficult to judge what's going on. I mean, of course, later, perhaps it becomes slightly clearer that what can't be said there is that Richard himself is heavily implicated in this, in this crime. But the play and the scenario with which it opens can't quite say that directly. And so it gives us a sort of test case for how mysterious the past is and how subject it is to powerful interests in the present that don't want us to know what happened. So it's almost as if the play opens by dramatising precisely its own obfuscation of how we got here.

• 9:28Matt Lewis?

  There's sort of a hint that there is more going on that you can't be completely aware of, but it's there in the background. And I guess it's tempting, I think, to see something like that as well in the light of more contemporary politics, when you've got Elizabeth I, the monarch who has executed Mary, Queen of Scots, in a way that she herself has tried to obfuscate and kind of say, oh, it was an accident, you know, I didn't mean to sign the death warrant. I was tricked into it almost. There is this element of kings killing other kings, rulers killing other rulers. It is not meant to happen and it's kind of covered up and it's pushed away and it's secret and we can't know about it.

• 10:01Speaker 04

  It's such a great point because it makes me realise that that's precisely what Bolingbroke does at the end of the play. We start with the play where Richard, the king, won't admit to, you know, can't be blamed for this murder before the play's begun. And we end with the new king saying, well, that's not what I meant. I didn't mean you to go and kill him. It's a really interesting parallel structure. But you're right that the parallels with Elizabeth are very prominent. And Elizabeth herself supposedly said to the antiquary William Lambard that she was Richard II. No, you not that. And historians have sort of pondered over quite what she meant there. But certainly the reign of Richard II and the role of the so-called flatterers,

• 10:45Speaker 04

  the malign advisers, people too close to the throne, exerting an unhealthy influence, that seemed a very resonant element of critiques of Elizabeth's court, particularly towards the end of her reign, the last decade or so.

• 11:04Matt Lewis?

  And also, I guess the other big parallel is the impending succession crisis that everybody in Elizabethan England by this point knows is coming. And we're aware that that's going to be a huge thing in Richard II because he has no heir, at least no heir apparent. So there is a big question mark over what might happen, what could happen, what should happen? How do you decide what's going to come next? And ultimately, it will be Bolingbroke with the military might to make it stick. But this must be something that is playing on the minds of Elizabethans by the 1590s.

• 11:34Speaker 04

  Completely. I think that's the appeal really of these medieval history stories, primarily in drama but in other modes too, rehearsing and going through these different models of reigns ending, kings losing power, transitions of power and transitions of dynasty, all as ways of filling this genuine abyss, actually. I mean, in retrospect, it seems very smooth, the death of Elizabeth and the proclamation of James VI of Scotland as James I of England. But I don't think that's how it felt at the time, either for those Elizabethans who had never known another monarch, or for those who had known that extraordinarily

• 12:16Speaker 04

  turbulent decade between the end of Henry VIII's reign and the accession of Elizabeth.

• 12:23Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, it's true, because whether you knew that or not, it's a moment of uncertainty and fear.

• 12:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, and particularly since, you know, the Edward, Mary, Elizabeth succession is so religiously and politically turbulent, it seriously creates traitors to the realm, you know, just sort of overnight. And so the uncertainty about what the policy of a new monarch might be. And the big question for many Elizabethans is whether a Catholic monarch is the most likely outcome of this succession uncertainty. So I definitely think that Richard's succession questions are resonant with the contemporary history.

• 13:09Matt Lewis?

  There's long been a reading or an interpretation of Richard II that sees it as opening the wound, which the rest of the history cycle up to the end of Richard III is all about healing, constantly picking at and reopening, until eventually the Tudors come along and heal that wound. Do you think the play itself, does it support a view that that's what Shakespeare's trying to do, that he's trying to really open this wound that we can then dig around in and think about what different types of succession might mean for a nation?

• 13:39Speaker 04

  It's so interesting. Ella and I talked a bit about the retrospective construction of these history plays as a cycle versus their appearance on the stage and in print as individual self-contained dramas. And one of the consequences of seeing it as a cycle has been this quite small c conservative, crime, expiation, chaotic repentance, healing model that you've just outlined. I think that in some way is an interpretation of Richard's downfall, which gathers momentum almost over the historical sequence. And

• 14:20Speaker 04

  it doesn't seem quite to be so clearly indicated here at this point. When Richard is bundled off the throne, the Bishop of Carlisle predicts that the blood of English shall manure the ground and future age is grown for this sad act. So he sort of predicts the Wars of the Roses and says it's all going to come from here. But where the play itself ends, there's no particular indication of that. There's no sense that that's coming. We also talked in the other podcast about Shakespeare's choice about where to start and end his plays. And with Richard II, he started it and ended it as a tragedy. It ends really with the downfall of Richard. And the kind of consequences are perhaps slightly less interesting, just

• 15:04Speaker 04

  as we're not that interested in Fortinbras taking over from Hamlet at the end of that play. And Bolingbroke, I think, in this play, struggles to be the equal in dramatic terms of Richard.

• 15:19Matt Lewis?

  You quite often see that with the kings. I mean, I guess the exception maybe being Prince Hal, who is quite a powerful figure in the Henry IV plays. But you tend to see the next king sort of arriving at the last second as almost an afterthought, to the extent that Richard III, at the end, you know, the Tudors simply arrive right at the end as a little bit almost of an afterthought. And the plays are really dominated by the kings and their story. And I think it's interesting that Shakespeare gives us a Richard II, who is in many ways more attractive than we might think the historical Richard II is. You know, he is eloquent, he's quite self-aware, he's accepting of his defeat. Do you think

• 16:01Matt Lewis?

  Shakespeare manages to make Richard II seem almost less tyrannical by making him a slightly more attractive figure? Is he asking us to sort of pity Richard and sympathise with him rather than condemn him as the tyrant?

• 16:14Speaker 04

  I think to a large extent he is. But I think what's so compelling to me about this play, and what makes it a bit more difficult to fully buy into that narrative of the larger sequence going from the wound to the healing, is that it is, I think, Richard II, the play is really ambivalent about how we should see Richard himself. So I think, you know, when Richard hears that John of Gaunt is ill and goes to visit him, he says, you know, completely callously, I hope we come too late, you know, I hope he's dead. It's an absolutely callous moment. And as you've said, the seizing of the Lancastrian lands

• 16:54Speaker 04

  has all the weight of the moral harm of this play on it. So that's a moment where I think it's really hard to sympathise with Richard. It's hard to see an old man near death and somebody, you know, being so callous about that. But in other places, you're right, Richard is himself sometimes called a poet king. He is always the centre of poetic and rhetorical attention when he's on stage. The scene of his abdication to Bolingbroke is an absolute masterclass in how to lose the kingdom and completely carry the play. So it's almost as if he's willing to sacrifice being King of England in order to be the tragic

• 17:37Speaker 04

  centre of the play, a comparison perhaps with what Ella and I were discussing about Henry IV, who is really hardly a figure in his own play at all. That's the aftermath.

• 17:47Matt Lewis?

  And if Richard, you know, Richard is widely considered by historians to have been a tyrant, at least in this later part of his reign. But Shakespeare seems to make the act of deposing him, of removing him from the throne, something that is politically, morally, and even spiritually dangerous. He's not saying this is a good thing. He's not saying even if Richard was a bad king, it's great that he was removed from the throne.

• 18:12Speaker 04

  He isn't. And in that, he may be following, you know, the Elizabethan homilies on disobedience and wilful rebellion, which said, even the worst king is better than the best rebel, that if you have a bad king, it's God's punishment or God's challenge to you to stoically kind of go along with it. So there is a strong Elizabethan cultural mindset against rebellion and pro the monarch. But on the other hand, Richard is depicted in a very clear way, taking actually private land that doesn't belong to him. I mean, in some ways, the absolute

• 18:53Speaker 04

  definition of a tyrant, except that, you know, he wants it to fight wars in Ireland, not as in certain versions of the historical record, to pay for very lavish lifestyle and fancy clothes and so on. So again, I think Shakespeare's balance here is really striking, to write a play about the deposition of a lawful monarch, and for us to emerge, not quite knowing whether we were meant to think that was a good thing or a bad thing, seems quite an act of political tightrope walking, which often productions unbalance to make something more sympathetic to one side or the other.

• 19:38Matt Lewis?

  But actually, I think the interest is in the tension between saying enough but not saying too much and saying something dangerous but not quite so dangerous that it really gets you into trouble. Because I mean, we're still both in the time of Richard II and into the time of Shakespeare. We're still in a world in which the idea of kingship is bound up with a kind of sacred authority. And there are these questions about can you depose a monarch that God has placed there? Can you remove even a bad king or queen without fundamentally damaging the institution of kingship?

• 20:11Speaker 04

  I think that's true. And, you know, in a way, there's an attempt in this play to perform a deposition. But in fact, it has to be, as it were, regularised by the death of the previous king. It's only once Richard is dead that Henry feels that he is really called Henry, as opposed to Bollingbrook, and that he has taken up the role of king. So even as the play is stripping kingship from Richard, it is still very invested in what he says about himself, that no one can wash the divine oils from an anointed king. And the play sort of believes that and dramatises how it's done anyway.

• 20:55Matt Lewis?

  And Shakespeare gives us that moment of the deposition. And as you mentioned, Richard, right at the centre of it, as the the main character, you know, drawing all of the attention. And is this Shakespeare painting a picture for a theatre audience of high politics as ultimately being theatre? It's all about show and it's all about display. And Richard might be losing the crown, but he's doing it in real style.

• 21:20Speaker 04

  I think it is. So far as we know, Richard and Bollingbrook did not meet at this point. So it's not a scene from the historical record. It's a showdown which gives both of them the chance to display their inner or true essential character. And for Richard, that is grandiloquent, grandstanding, poetic, beautiful, self-regarding. For Bollingbrook, it is pragmatic, reef, slightly gruff, slightly, let's get on with it. And they're there, you know, both as themselves. And we realise that Bollingbrook might be a better king.

• 22:00Speaker 04

  But even that, you know, attaching the adjective better to king is itself a real challenge, isn't it? The king can't be better or worse. It's just, it's an absolute, isn't it? The king just is. Once you say, is it better or worse? You've got a kind of meritocracy, which is not the same as a monarchy at all. But we might think in that scene, Bollingbrook would be a better king, but you wouldn't necessarily want to play about him.

• 22:24Matt Lewis?

  When you're talking to Eleanor, you spoke a little bit about the relationship, the tension, the differences that are highlighted between Hotspur and Prince Hal. You know, this idea of two different types of person, and one has to die for the other to be victorious. And we've almost got that same kind of thing going on here with Richard and Bollingbrook. You've got the poet king, the man who knows how to put on a show. And you've got the much more businesslike Bollingbrook, who just wants it done. Like, Richard wants this to be, you know, hours and hours of theatre and pomp all about him. And Bollingbrook's like, let's just get on with it. And it's two different approaches, isn't it? And it's almost the the loss of the high drama and theatre of politics in favour of something a bit more pragmatic.

• 23:05Speaker 04

  I think that's right. And often, it's performed with a real sense of an era changing. There's a very memorable production with Richard as a sort of regency king, and Bollingbrook as a very austere dressed Victorian in a frock coat, you know. And so you've got a sense, an age of excess is giving way to an age of a sort of austerity of dress and of speech and of action. So I think it is more than just a handover of the crown from one of the descendants of the Black Prince to another. There's a sense that this is all changing. And I suppose we're changing, if you wanted to see it in broadly political

• 23:45Speaker 04

  terms, we're changing perhaps from an autocratic king, where Richard's sequestration of John of Gaunt's lands suggests he believes in his own absolute ownership of the country, to a kind of baronial, the support of the nobles is what enables the the king to exercise power over his kingdom, which is kind of what Bollingbrook as Henry seems to embody.

• 24:12Matt Lewis?

  Before we leave Richard II, I mean, ultimately, it's a play about a failed king. We may not, within the play, get all of the detail about why he fails. We're given the Lancastrian inheritance and the seizure of that. And we're hinted at the other things like the murder of Gloucester. But is it about Richard II's failure? Or is it really about a broader, dangerous and slightly terrifying question for every monarch about what happens if you can't maintain the obedience of your people, that you could be deposed? Because again, that feels dangerous in late Elizabethan England.

• 24:48Speaker 04

  It feels very, very dangerous indeed. And it feels dangerous, particularly because of the metaphor Shakespeare gives one of his characters for thinking about it. There's a description in the play of Bollingbrook entering into London as the new king. And the metaphor is that Bollingbrook is like a really good actor, and that when the really good actor leaves the stage, and a poor actor comes afterwards, everybody is bored and fed up and, you know, doesn't enjoy it. I love that image so much, because it would be a much more straightforward image if it said, we had the king, and then we had somebody acting the king. But it doesn't say that. It says, we had a good actor as a king, and

• 25:30Speaker 04

  then a bad one in in Richard. I mean, taking away the sense of him being such a great rhetorical presence in the role. Now, once you've somehow established that your kings are good or bad actors, in a theatrical sense, you have done quite a lot of damage, haven't you, to that sacred sense that we were just talking about? So I think there's one extreme line which says, you know, that there's a, you can trace the progress from these plays to the execution of Charles I. This is part of what enables the English people to desacralise their monarch to the extent that they're able forcibly to depose and to execute him. Now, that may

• 26:13Speaker 04

  be too extreme, but it does suggest that this opens a door to a radically different view of monarchy, and that that can't quite be contained in the way that Elizabeth, or even Shakespeare, might want it to be.

• 26:42Matt Lewis?

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• 27:25Matt Lewis?

  specific goals and background. Plus, there are no wait lists. You can often get an appointment as soon as tomorrow. Thousands of people are already using Ruler to get affordable, high-quality therapy that's actually covered by insurance. Visit ruler.com-medieval to get started. That's R U L A dot com forward slash medieval. You deserve mental health care that works with you, not against your budget.

• 27:57Speaker 05

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• 28:50Matt Lewis?

  We need to move on to Richard III next. And when we start on Richard III, one of the things that I always like to point out is that Shakespeare never positioned Richard III as a history play, does it? It's a tragedy of King Richard III.

• 29:01Speaker 04

  Yes, absolutely. So it's another play like Richard II, organised around the sort of biopic of a considerable and charismatic figure. We already mentioned the ways in which structurally that really pushes Richmond, Henry Tudor, to the margins. So he may be the most important figure in the political national narrative that's being told, but he is one of the least important figures in the play, in the way the play is told. And that gives us an interesting focus on what the pleasures of this play are, that often it's read in a very moralistic way, whereas I think the idea, as one critic put it, that this play gives us a moral holiday.

• 29:46Speaker 04

  It's actually rather nice, that we know Richard is doing terrible things, we know it would be terrible to kill the sweet rosebud princes in the tower, we know all of that's terrible, but somehow this fictional affordance gives us the thrill of doing it anyway, or watching it and endorsing it anyway.

• 30:05Matt Lewis?

  I absolutely love this play. And one of the things I love is the fact that it kind of asks questions of us as an audience, because you're watching Richard, you know, move around the stage saying, now I'm going to kill this person, then I'm going to kill that person, and I'm going to do this and destroy that and kill everybody. And then he cracks a joke and we all laugh with him. We, as an audience, we're laughing at this mass murderer telling us what he's going to do. And even when he comes to the point where he's going to murder innocent young children, we're not jumping up from our seats and stopping him. We're just sitting there and watching him do it and then laughing at his next joke as well. And almost, almost by the time he gets to Bosworth, feeling like we quite like him.

• 30:41Speaker 04

  Yes, absolutely. We're there with him. I mean, it's a technique that Shakespeare is going to develop later in his career. It's what he does again with Iago in Othello. And he's interested in these highly charismatic, highly controlling, energetic, wily stage figures. They have one foot in the inheritance of the medieval vice figures who talk directly to the audience. And, you know, part of the moral of their position in those plays was that they were attractive, like vice is attractive. But you're absolutely right, there isn't any space around Richard, actually, for us to side with someone else. You know, he's on stage all the time, he's almost all the time, you know, he really keeps us with him.

• 31:22Speaker 04

  So it's very, very demanding for the actor, very cleverly constructed play which keeps us with Richard all the way through. And that, for me, is a really crucial counter to the idea that ultimately this play is about how wonderful and providential and grateful we are that Henry Tudor came to the throne. I don't think if that's the message that you wanted, I don't really believe Shakespeare does messages. I'm with that early cinema boss saying, you know, Hollywood for movies, Western Union for messages or something. I think, you know, the Globe for movies, as it were. But I do think that if you had wanted to show how terrible Richard III was and how

• 32:05Speaker 04

  lucky we all were that the Tudors came in at Milford Haven, you would not structure a play in this way.

• 32:12Matt Lewis?

  Because there is a need for the Tudor dynasty to have Richard III viewed as a monster. They need him to be a tyrant in order to legitimise Henry VII's ultimate seizure of his throne, his victory in battle and his slaying of God's anointed king. Because again, we're asked the question about, how do you remove a king, someone that has been anointed by God for that position? There's an element in which the play does seem to justify the Tudor arrival and their kind of salvation and what, in some views, is presented as this healing of the long wound that's begun by Richard II. But I also agree that this is a long way from simple Shakespeare sucking up to the Tudors story.

• 32:57Speaker 04

  Yes, I think if he's doing that, he isn't doing it very skillfully, or he becomes entranced by his figure of Richard III, this sort of monstrous, brilliant, energetic, anarchic figure. And that, that sort of takes over. But you're right, I mean, historically, the claim of Henry Tudor to the English throne was very, very shaky. And so it needs a lot of retrospective bolstering. And part of that during the 16th century is the systematic blackening of Richard III's character in order to smooth out what's otherwise a very awkward transition for the Tudors to tell a story about.

• 33:43Matt Lewis?

  And it's quite hard to imagine how much Shakespeare is really influenced by something that happened 100 years earlier and trying to justify that. Because I think as you said to Eleanor, you know, by this point in Elizabeth I's reign, it's clear whoever the next monarch is, is not going to be a Tudor. So there's now a limited need to reinforce the Tudor providential right to the throne. So is Shakespeare really just taking a reputation for Richard that's been gradually getting worse and worse throughout the 16th century, you know, from Moore and Virgil through Hall and Hollinghead, who is a big source for Richard? The story has just got darker and more salacious and more evil all the way through. Is Shakespeare just taking that and thinking, oh, I can do something with this, rather than thinking, I'm going to tell the history of this man?

• 34:28Speaker 04

  I think he is. And I think here it's useful to remember that Shakespeare's influences for history plays are not just prose histories or views of history. So here, I would say, I think he's really heavily influenced by larger-than-life, amoral figures written by Christopher Marlowe. Everybody who's writing in the early 1590s wants to sound like Marlowe. Richard III is in part Shakespeare's attempt to beat the Jew of Malta, maybe, which has Barabas as a self-proclaimed amoral villain who we sort of have a sneaking sympathy for. And I think that theatrical impetus is really important to think about here.

• 35:10Speaker 04

  This is an incredible, almost a solo show, a one-man show, I mean, lots and lots of other characters, but it's really organised around one person in a way, even Richard II isn't, but certainly the other histories which are ensemble plays. So there's something about the moment in the theatre which wants to explore this real star vehicle. And the star of the monarch and the star of the actor somehow come together, I think.

• 35:40Matt Lewis?

  And to what extent do you think we should see Shakespeare, when he writes this play, kind of reproducing and magnifying what is by that point the orthodox history of his age, the accepted view of Richard III? And how much is he consciously trying to create something that is politically relevant to late Elizabethan England as well? I mean, you've said you don't think Shakespeare really deals in messages, but I'm quite persuaded by the theory that he's potentially talking about someone like Robert Cecil when he talks about this play and having this scheming guy, you know, Robert Cecil has kyphosis, the forward curvature of the spine. So there are lots of similarities there. Do you think he's getting dangerously close to commenting on late Elizabethan politics with this play? Or is it really just a playful version of the history?

• 36:25Speaker 04

  I think you could absolutely see that, couldn't you? And it's a reminder that when we read a Shakespeare play, we are seeing a script rather than a play. You know, a play was the performance, the moment, the audience's reaction. And there are all kinds of clues which we can immediately sort of imagine, but that are not there in the play. The connection with Cecil is not hugely strong in the written text of the play, although this shared physical disability may be. But you could absolutely imagine that in the performance it could be and that that could be made absolutely clear. So, you know, there are things that we just don't know about the tone here.

• 37:07Speaker 04

  And I think even if the tone is humorous rather than directly political, that humour, as we've already talked about a bit, even in relation to Richard II, is itself rather sceptical about some of the pieties of, you know, late Elizabethan England. I think for Shakespeare, you know, clearly the murdering of the princes in the tower, an ongoing question in Ricardian circles and so on, that's a terrible slur on Richard. It's on the title page of the printed text of the play. You know, this is one of the things that's pinned on him.

• 37:48Speaker 04

  But in the play itself, the princes are, like all, most of children in Shakespeare, you know, annoying, precocious, you know, brats. Within the logic of the play, you're not too sorry to see them go. I'm not advocating child murder, please, please don't. Of course I'm not. It's part of that moral holiday that rather than being absolutely appalled by this, as we would be in any other context, somehow, within the way this play is structured, it's possible to think, yeah, well, they were a nuisance.

• 38:19Matt Lewis?

  I'm also interested in what Shakespeare does with the physicality of his Richard. So we know from the discovery of his remains that he did suffer with scoliosis, a sideways curvature of the spine that may have given him uneven shoulders, that nobody seems to have been aware of in his lifetime. And if people became aware of it in the immediate aftermath of his death, it seems to have been forgotten again. And yet Shakespeare here... Kind of takes that and magnifies it, exaggerates it and adds to it. What do you think Shakespeare is doing with the physical characteristics that he gives his Richard? How is he helping an audience understand his character?

• 38:56Speaker 04

  It's so fascinating, isn't it? Because I think the sort of Richard apologists and the people who had studied Shakespeare's amplification of the Tudor, the Moore, Thomas More and Polidog Virgil version of of Richard had pretty much come to think, you know, this disability, this deformity, as the play calls it, is invented. It's a way of abusing Richard's character. And so the discovery in the Leicester car park of the skeleton showing these signs, I think, was rather a surprise in lots of ways. What's interesting about the play is our changing appreciation of what the relation of Richard's body and his character and his behaviour is.

• 39:39Speaker 04

  And there's a one line right at the beginning, which is a sort of crucial pivot for this, that Richard tells us, I am determinate to become a villain. I'm determinate. And it's hard to know whether it means I am determined, that means my own will to power is going to do this, or I am predetermined, you know, quite the opposite. I don't have the control over this. And in a way, sometimes Richard's body has been the sign that he could not behave otherwise. There's a very wonderful film of this play directed by Richard Longcrane with Ian McKellen, set in the 1930s.

• 40:20Speaker 04

  One of the things I like about that is those nephews are always sort of trying to jump on his back and he is in absolute agony. You can see that this is agony. And there's a more modern sense there that constant pain twists the, you know, the mind and twists your empathy and so on. So it's still a connection between the body and the behaviour, but not quite the kind of moralistic or determined one that we had to start with. So I think Shakespeare is exploring that and he's exploring that in ways which say a lot about the presuppositions of his own time, but which have been actually quite productive

• 41:00Speaker 04

  for modern discussions of disability and of casting. I mean, Richard III has become a difficult case about whether this is a role that should be played by an actor with a visible physical disability, or whether it's acceptable for an able-bodied actor without such a physical disability to perform. You know, and that's really just come in the last few, really sort of handful of years as a, as a question about the significance in modern terms of a disabled body.

• 41:51Speaker 06

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• 42:28Speaker 05

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• 43:20Matt Lewis?

  One of the other things I wondered about the play as well is, so lots of the murders that Richard III commits in the play. Shakespeare is, is often one of the first times that we get a really unambiguous sense that Richard is 100% responsible for these things, that he definitely, definitely did them. There is no kind of nuance around what may or may not have happened, who may or may not have been responsible. And this goes all the way back to the Henry VI plays when Gloucester is murdering Henry VI himself, involved in the murder of the Prince of Wales and all of those kinds of people. So Shakespeare is utterly unequivocal about things that the historical record tells us are, are open to interpretation and debate. Why do you think he's so happy to say, here is a long list of things that I'm going to

• 44:05Matt Lewis?

  show you Richard doing on stage? And he doesn't offer us any kind of nuance about it?

• 44:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a really interesting question, isn't it? Given the conversation we've had, I realised that we began by saying, you know, what's so interesting about Richard II is it, it dramatizes the processes of interpretation and of gathering the facts of the past and weighing them up and having a sort of partial view based on current politics and so on. And now, now with Richard III, we're talking about what seems like a completely opposite dramaturgical strategy, which is to make everything absolutely clear and almost to dare us to say, what are you going to do about it? You know, I'm not even going to try and hide this. And I dare you not to laugh when Richard presents himself to the mayor of London, saying, I don't really want to be king and he's holding a prayer book.

• 44:54Speaker 04

  You know, we are absolutely on his side in that moment, even though it's clearly a terribly wrong thing to do. So there's something, isn't there? You're making me see that there's something about the absence of nuance there, the declarative certainty about what has happened, which is almost a sort of moral provocation. You can't argue your way out of this, so what do we do with it?

• 45:17Matt Lewis?

  Because as we said, Richard II, we don't really know all of the terrible things that he's done. This is the culmination, we know he seizes the Lancaster inheritance, but there's this kind of vague, unspoken stuff that might have happened before the play that we can't quite know. But here we've got a step by step, you know, you're going to watch him kill all of these people with absolutely no ambiguity about who is behind it.

• 45:40Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 45:40Matt Lewis?

  There's a very different approach to the presentation of the, in air quotes, I guess, crimes of a king.

• 45:47Speaker 04

  Yes, absolutely. And I suppose that, you know, one of the scenes we haven't yet got to is the scene when Richard woo's Lady Anne. Part of her resistance to him is saying, you know, you did all these terrible things, you know, you killed my husband, you killed my father-in-law and so on. And one might expect Richard to say, no, no, I didn't, you know, you've got that wrong. But he doesn't, he says, yes, I did, you know, and I did it for the love of you, or I did it, you know, whatever. He doesn't attempt to mince those crimes at all. And I've always felt that the wooing of Lady Anne, which is such a bravura scene, you know, she begins by resisting him and in the end she is brought round to accept him,

• 46:30Speaker 04

  is a sort of miniature version of the audience's relation to Richard himself. We're all being wooed by him. We've got this moment early on to walk out, as it were, or the equivalent of walking out saying, I'm not doing it. But like her, we don't. And then we're, we're his, we're, we're won over, you know, we have been seduced. That, that language of, of seduction is quite helpful, I think.

• 46:55Matt Lewis?

  And, and you, you end the scene thinking, well, hang on, how on earth has she fallen for that? That's ridiculous. She's gone from, you know, I'm going to kill myself rather than marry you to, to fine, I'll marry you then. That actually sounds great. So we're wondering how on earth that can happen to someone. While Shakespeare is building towards us by the end of the play, having also fallen for Richard's stories and, and almost his personality, so that by the end of the play, we are Lady Anne, we've been wooed by Richard.

• 47:20Speaker 04

  I think that's absolutely right, yeah. And I think an important step along that process that you've just set out is, was ever woman in this humour wooed, was ever woman in this humour won? One of those jokes that we laugh at, that you pointed out right at the beginning of this part of our conversation, you know, that this is one of the ways we endorse his behaviour is by laughing at them and we do that straight away. So we're already in his sway.

• 47:44Matt Lewis?

  And how easily we can all fall for it. We might watch somebody else falling for that and think that's stupid.

• 47:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:49Matt Lewis?

  And yet, we all fall for it in the end. And as we get to the end of the play, you know, we've mentioned that Henry Tudor, Richmond, the future Henry VII, kind of appears at the end. And I wonder why you think, given that so many people will see Shakespeare as a kind of Tudor apologist and bolstering the Tudor regime, why does he give us a Richmond who is such a kind of flat and colourless and almost deeply unattractive character in comparison to Richard?

• 48:18Speaker 04

  Well, I think that has to ask us a question about the moral assumptions that we still bring to the play, that the play itself can't quite carry out. So I don't think the play really condemns Richard, to the extent that we probably feel it should or we maybe expect that it did. It enjoys Richard and it recognises that what's really important for the play is that Richmond is deeply anti-theatrical. Again, he's a person you don't want to play about. And that, in the dramatic context, is a different kind of moral judgement. A good person or a person who is committing all these crimes, there's a one sphere in which it's clear how you would judge those. But in the sphere of watching

• 49:03Speaker 04

  them for entertainment, you would probably prefer the more interesting one to the more moral one. So I think Shakespeare makes very little effort with Richmond, or we might say he deliberately makes him as dull as possible and holds back his entrance for as long as possible, in order to give Richard himself as much time, you know, in the limelight as we can manage.

• 49:31Matt Lewis?

  Which, again, you know, is quite different from the historical Henry VII. We quite often see him as a very calculating, intelligent figure, a good ruler, a man with a, later in his reign, capable of immense financial extortion of his own subjects and the use of judicial killing. You know, he's not the kind of bland figure that Shakespeare presents us with at the end of the play. He's, and he seems to have more in common maybe with Henry IV, who is not someone who comes out of the cycle particularly favourably. You know, he's, he's the, the end of someone else's glorious story, in the way that Bolingbrook is kind of the end of Richard II's story.

• 50:09Speaker 04

  Yes, in a way, back to that image, he's like the bad actor who comes after the good one. You know, it's not so enjoyable to watch. And I think sometimes contemporary performances of this play are not necessarily very happy with the Deus ex machina kind of figure of Richmond coming in as the saviour of everything, and often present him as a deeply chilling and troubling tyrant himself. You know, I've seen versions of the play where, as Richmond speaks his last speech as Henry Tudor, that the audience is being circled with the barrel of a garden, you know, that the troops are there. If this

• 50:51Speaker 04

  is the saviour, it looks an uncomfortable redemption. What we have there, I suppose, in those kinds of readings, is a sense that these kings, this view of the medieval period is one self-interested person after another coming to the fore, and that there are no real heroes in that historical narrative.

• 51:15Matt Lewis?

  It's almost pointless asking who's a good king and who's a bad king, because you've got a king and that's what you've got in your story. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Emma. This has been absolutely fascinating to explore the connection between the history of those reigns and Shakespeare's interpretation of them and what it, what it's done to affect our view of Richard II and Richard III, what a contemporary audience might have taken from it, and the things that we're still affected by from the plays today. I've found this absolutely wonderful. Thank you very much.

• 51:42Speaker 04

  I've really loved it. Thanks for having me.

• 51:46Matt Lewis?

  I mean, wow, Eleanor, welcome back. Hello.

• 51:49Eleanor Janega?

  Hello.

• 51:50Matt Lewis?

  I've been completely blown away by that couple of episodes.

• 51:54Eleanor Janega?

  I have to say that this has been such an incredible pleasure. Emma is such an absolute powerhouse to speak to. And it's really genuinely shifted the way that I relate to Shakespeare's histories. Because I suppose as a historian, the thing that we tend to do, and especially, you know, a social historian such as myself, is I'm attempting to sort of place these plays into society and say what it is they are doing. And I tend to relate to them as Tudor propaganda, things that are done in order to make sure that Shakespeare has his oar in at court. And I guess I just hadn't considered the fact that Shakespeare's also trying to sell tickets, right? You know, yeah, it's great if the

• 52:35Eleanor Janega?

  Queen is on your side, but also you need feet in the globe, right?

• 52:40Matt Lewis?

  Bums on seats, but not seats, but yeah.

• 52:42Eleanor Janega?

  Well, you know, just get them through the door, baby, right? And what we need in these cases is crowd pleasers. And it's actually a barnstormer to go through history, because these guys are going to have a big fight and they want to see the fight choreography. And you know, listen, I'm not above that myself. I will see every Jason Statham movie ever created, just to watch fight choreography. So they're just like me, truly, truly, you know?

• 53:11Matt Lewis?

  And interesting, I think, that Emma talks about that's why the women are so in the background of some of these plays, because what the audience really want is to watch the men come up with a reason to have a massive fight and then watch them hit each other a lot on stage. That's the entertainment. And there's almost this sense that, you know, is it some kind of misogyny that pushes the women to the back? And it's like, it's probably not. It's the, it's the audience wanting action.

• 53:35Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, you know, the minute a woman is allowed to pick up a sword and bop someone, I'm sure they would be into it. But we are not here to learn a history, I guess. We're here to watch a fight scene. And that's fair enough, I think. I, I guess that it is important to realise that ordinary people go to these things and they aren't necessarily there for a history lesson.

• 53:57Matt Lewis?

  And I think I was struck as well by the, the idea that working through these history plays is almost an examination of the different types of ruptured successions or problematic successions. You've got Richard II being kicked off the throne. You've got Henry IV falling out with his oldest son and heir. You've got Henry V leaving behind a baby. And then you've got the crown being taken, kind of in back, we skip over how Edward IV becomes king. And then you end up with Richard III kind of plotting and scheming and murdering his way to the crown. And for Shakespeare, who's living at the end of a century that has seen a long reign of Henry VIII, closely followed by very short reigns of Edward VI, Mary I, and then a long reign of Elizabeth I, you've had all of these questions

• 54:39Matt Lewis?

  about what is a rightful succession? What does a good succession look like? And at the end of Elizabeth I's reign, everyone is staring down the barrel of that gun again. What is the next one going to look like? Because there isn't an heir apparent to succeed Elizabeth. So he's almost talking about what's gone on in the past, but also with an eye to the future and saying, guys, there might be a bit of trouble coming down the line.

• 55:00Eleanor Janega?

  Absolutely. And I think that this is so interesting, because it shows the ability of ordinary people to engage with the dangers of politics. And indeed, what I suppose we're seeing is Shakespeare really questioning the concept of monarchy in and of itself. Because what happens as a result of these things is violence, is ordinary people bearing the brunt of these silly little power games. And I was inclined, before speaking to Emma, to think of this as Shakespeare saying, oh, well, until the Tudors came along, and then isn't it wonderful that we have such a lovely and easy succession? But he just as easily could be saying, yeah, monarchs are bad. This is what happens when you have monarchs.

• 55:44Eleanor Janega?

  And to say that with a straight face to a ruler like Elizabeth I is actually incredibly brave.

• 55:51Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. I mean, Emma made the point in Richard II that Shakespeare is quite careful not to say that there are good kings and bad kings, but rather that what there is, is a good actor playing a king. So Richard II is given all of this eloquence and power and presence on stage, despite being also a tyrant. Henry IV is pitched as a, the alternative that everybody wants, but he's actually a really flat drab character, very similar to the way that Henry VII makes his entrance at the end of Richard III. And that Shakespeare says, he doesn't say there's no good kings and bad kings, they just are kings, they just are rulers, you're going to get what you're given. But what there are are people who know how to play a king, and people who aren't so good at that. And the similarities

• 56:34Matt Lewis?

  that I think he draws out between the idea of high politics, court politics, the art of being a king, and the stage, I think are really interesting. He's essentially saying all of these people who are kings are acting it, just like we are for you now.

• 56:51Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, it's so interesting because it really shows us the incredible possibilities of theatre and of literature and what we're able to do. So, you know, these conceptions of performance, conceptions of archetypal ideals are so interesting and something that we really work with now, still. And to see Shakespeare doing that in real time is incredibly interesting. And I guess this is why I think art is so important in general now as then, because it allows us to make these political points. It allows us to really critique powerful people in a way where as ordinary folks, we don't get to have our say ordinarily. But

• 57:36Eleanor Janega?

  sometimes you can make a piece of art that is going to bring this to life. And I think it's also a really interesting and an important argument for why we need the expertise of academics such as Emma, right? Because even you and I, who live and breathe medieval history all the time, are susceptible to older interpretations of Shakespeare. And it's why we have to be doing these continual check-ins with the literature, with the history, to make sure that we are completely on top of things, because there are always new things that are coming to the fore. So, yeah, Shakespeare as important now as then, and having people who really are able to interpret it is always important.

• 58:17Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, and interpret it and reinterpret it, because it can mean something different to everybody at any given time and in any given circumstance. And that's the power of art, which, you know, Shakespeare wasn't creating non-fiction narrative history. He was creating a piece of art that he hoped people would go and enjoy watching and pay money to see. And I think sometimes we've been guilty of falling into the trap of thinking that Shakespeare was a historian, which I think he would have laughed at you for.

• 58:44Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, I think that he knows entirely better than that, right? And I think, unfortunately, it's probably a failing on our part as a society, you know. I hardly need to say this to a Ricardian, right? But because people are not offered in-depth medieval history a lot of the time, it's easier to just assume that what Shakespeare was doing is the actual history and move on with your life, because you might have a Shakespeare unit in school and you certainly know the line "My kingdom for a horse", because it's a really successful piece of art that people enjoy seeing, right? You know, they like to see these kind of scheming villain characters. And it's not Shakespeare's fault fundamentally, if we

• 59:24Eleanor Janega?

  lack the proper background in the history to understand that that's not what he's doing, right?

• 59:30Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah, I agree. But yeah, I mean, for me, I found both of those episodes absolutely intriguing, almost revelatory. Like, I think I'm coming out of it with a new understanding of Shakespeare's plays, of his attitudes to those medieval kings, and of what those plays were trying to deliver to an audience, but also in a political context as well, which is different from what I went into the episodes thinking it was.

• 59:53Eleanor Janega?

  I'll tell you what, I'm coming out of it with homework, because Emma was so interesting, I didn't even get to Henry VI, so I have to have her back, you know?

• 1:00:01Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, I think we need to find more excuses to get Emma back as well, because she was absolutely fantastic. You can check out the episode on Shakespeare's Henrys with Eleanor if you haven't already. It's the one before this in your feed, and they make a great pair. I feel like I've taken a lot away from both of these episodes to think about. There are new instalments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back to join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week at historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 1:00:45Matt Lewis?

  Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone medieval with History Hit.

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