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A brief background on the central character of 'Richard III'

By Richard von Busack

The Richard of Shakespeare's creation is an early example of spin-doctoring. For centuries the best thing to be said of him was that he died well. Whatever he's accused of, from being a gimp to being a child murderer, all agree that Richard was killed in battle--the last English king to do so, and not the custom of kings before or since. He rides into history to face a libel that's lasted half an eon. "For slander lives ... forever hous'd once it gets possession," Shakespeare wrote in The Comedy of Errors.

The annals of royal history are full of unnatural siblings, bad sons, maniacal fathers, murderous wives. Despite the popular notion of moral decline, our ancestors are refreshingly like us. Richard's particular notoriety comes from a deliberate campaign of slander instituted by writers trying to flatter their king, Richard's successor, Henry VII, first of the Tudors. You wouldn't want to climb on a tree rooted as shallowly as that which bore the Tudors' coat of arms. To establish the new dynasty, a legend grew to imply the illegitimacy of the dynasty before it.

In accounts starting with Thomas More's History of Richard III, Richard's reputation was poisoned. In various chronicles, Richard Plantagenet grows a crooked back, a withered arm and a bad limp, an ugly clouded face, and a form that makes dogs bark at him as he walks by. There's no evidence of this in the paintings of King Richard, from which a face much like Dennis Hopper's looks back at you: the same pleasantness of feature combined with neurotic spirituality, the tight, almost puckered mouth, firmness that could become a snarl. It was from these materials that Shakespeare drew his rousing account of the ultimate nightmare king; that the character should be so strangely lovable is, of course, Shakespeare's own doing.

The real Richard emerges in the 1470s at the end the civil war of barons, earls and knights known as the War of the Roses, a literal battle royal. This younger son of the house of York is a fighter of such fearlessness that he is made Constable of England at age 19. He was not, though, as fierce a beast as Shakespeare portrays him; he would have been a toddler during some of the conflicts he's portrayed in as cleaning up with his sword, in the different parts of Shakespeare's Henry VI.

Richard takes the throne through realpolitik, by deposing his nephew, Edward V, a boy of about 13. Says historian Paul Murray Kendall in Richard III: The Great Debate (Norton, 1965), the real-life King Richard was crowned amid "an atmosphere heavy with the beating wings of chickens coming home to roost." Historian Michael J. Bennett in The Battle of Bosworth concurs; "Before the reign was a year old, the king began to appear to his subjects, perhaps even to himself, as a man headed for divine retribution."

Some people were born under a bad star, and Richard Plantagenet was one of them. His father was killed early; his son and his wife die of TB. He is connected, falsely or truly, to the murder of his two nephews, the prince and his brother, the Duke of York, who disappear forever after being sent to the Tower. Finally he is killed, stripped and, in the fullness of time, disintered and thrown into the river Soar.

The libel itself may be the aspect of the story that seems the most hard to bear, which is why the debate over Richard's guilt or innocence still interests scholars. There are 20 books on the king at the San Jose State library. The horror of the story is plain to an audience of centuries ago, reminded constantly that they were, as subjects, the children of the king. Whether it was Herod slaughtering the innocents in early medieval miracle plays, or Shakespeare's Richard commanding the deaths of his nephews in indirect language worthy of a corporate press release, the murder of a child by a king thus speaks the unspeakable about misrule and the capriciousness of kings, that we who elect our rulers may miss.

To a 20th-century audience, accustomed to rulers who kill thousands of children in the name of ethnic cleansing, Richard is a mere trickster: well-spoken, a gentleman when it suits his purpose--representing not the worst case of leadership, not a leader who has broken his contract with God and man, but the other voice in one's head, the bad angel. A good villain goes out fighting, and Richard's will to power is what makes him as dynamic a figure now as he was in 1592.

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