Gone Medieval - Richard II & Richard III: Shakespeare's Version

Episode Date: September 25, 2026

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 IIListen on AppleListen on SpotifyRichard IIIListen on AppleListen on SpotifyGone 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 podcastHistory 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 for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. 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. 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. In the last episode, Eleanor surveyed Shakespeare's take on Kings Henry, the 4th, and fifth, 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 laboring 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 the Second depicted as a doomed poet king forced to hand over his crown, and Richard III, whose Shakespeare labelled, or in my view, labelled, 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, for Shakespeare's own political survival. I'm pleased to welcome back Professor Emma Smith to explore Richard II and Richard the third, 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? Welcome back, Emma. We can't have been too bad the first time around with Eleanor, you've come back and joined us for a second instalment. Does Richard, they're just waiting, they're calling to us. 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 the 5th, 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 the 2nd and Richard the 3rd. And I've just given you a warning that listeners are probably well aware of, But once I get on to Richard the third, we're in for the long haul then. Richard the second 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 the second. He really just focuses on the last couple of years and some of the key events around that. 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? 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 rain, 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, I think Shakespeare opens up quite a lot of the questions about why things have got to the plays they've got. 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 Bollingbrook and Mowbray, seizure of Gaunt's lands, Bollingbrook's return. Are there places where he more definitely departs from the history and reshape some of those events and what might we see him doing where he does do that? It's an interesting element that's not so often talked about where Shakespeare's clearly sort of combined the two queens of Richard the second together. 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 a historical way. Shakespeare's clearly wanted to construct that, to give us a different angle on what's happening. And is there a reason he might want to. want a more, I guess, interesting, slightly more powerful female voice in there at that point? 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. 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 buildup 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 Lancastrian inheritance, and 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 the second. 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 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. I think it's thematically really fantastic that it's about somehow it's a moment of interrupted succession, the interruption of patrilinear inheritance that brings about this crisis in the monarchy. I mean, Richard doesn't have a direct air, but he has named an air that Bollingbrook 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 Bollingbrook are having this jewel? 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 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 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 interest in the present,

that don't want us to know what happened. So it's almost as if the play opens by dramatizing precisely its own obfuscation of how we got here. 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 first. The monarch has executed Mary Queen of Scots in a way that she herself has tried to obfuscate and kind of said, 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, 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. It's such a great point because it makes me realize that that's precisely what Bollingbrook 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 has begun. And we end with the new King saying, well, that's not what I meant. I didn't need 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 the Second, know you not that. And historians have sort of pondered over quite what she meant there. But certainly the reign of Richard the second and the role of the so-called flatterers, the malign advisors, 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 in the last decade or so. And also, I guess the other big parallel is the impending succession crisis,

that everybody in Elizabeth in England by this point knows is coming, and we're aware that that's going to be a huge thing in Richard the second, because he has no air, or at least no air 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 would be Bolingbrook with the military might to make it stick. But this must be something that is playing on the, the minds of Elizabethans by the 1590s.

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 the 6th of Scotland as James I first 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 turbulent decade between the end of Henry the 8th's reign and the accession of Elizabeth.

Yeah, it's true, because whether you knew that or not, it's a moment of uncertainty and fear. Yeah, and particularly since, you know, the Edward, Mary, Elizabeth succession is so religiously and politically turbulent, it serially 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. Have 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 the 3rd 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 is 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? 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 sort of self-contained. dramas. And one of the consequences of seeing it as a cycle has been this quite small

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 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 ages 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 the second, 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 as we're not that interested in Fortin Brass taking over from Hamlet at the end of that play. And Bolingbrook, I think in this play, struggles to be the equal in dramatic terms of Richard. 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 Henry the fourth 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 the third 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 the second, who is in many ways more attractive than we might think the historical Richard the second is, you know, he is, he's eloquent. He's quite self-aware. He's accepting of his defeat. Do you think Shakespeare manages to make Richard the second 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? 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 Lancasterian lands 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 Bolingbrook 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 centre of the play. A comparison perhaps with what Ellie and I were discussing about Henry IV, who is really hardly a figure in his own play at all. That's the aftermath. 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. He isn't, and in that he may be following, you know, the Elizabethan homilies on disobedience and willful 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 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 on balance to make something more sympathetic to one side or the other.

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? 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, regularized 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 Boringbrook,

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 dramatizes how it's done anyway. And Shakespeare gives us that moment of the deposition. And as you mentioned, Richard right at the centre of it as 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. 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, 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, Bolingbrook would be a better king, but you wouldn't necessarily want to play about him. When you're talking to Eleni, you spoke a little bit about the relationship, the tension, the differences that are highlighted between Hotspur and Prince Hal, 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 business like Bollingbrook who just wants it done. Like Richard wants this to be hours and hours of theatre and pomp, about him and Bolingbrook's like, let's just get on with it. And it's two different approaches, isn't it? And it's almost the loss of the high drama and theatre of politics in favour of something a bit more pragmatic. I think that's right. And often it's performed with a real sense of an era changing as a very memorable production with Richard as a sort of regency king

and Bolingbrook as a very austerely dressed Victorian in a frock coat. 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 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 king to exercise power over his kingdom,

which is kind of what Bolinbrook as Henry seems to embody. Before we leave Richard the second, 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 the second'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 Elizabeth in England. 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 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 then a bad one 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 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 desacralize their monarch to the extent that they're able forcibly to depose and to execute him. Now, that may 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. We need to move on to Richard the Third next. And when we start, I'm Richard

the third. One of the things that I always like to point out is that Shakespeare never positioned Richard the Third as a history play, does it? It's a tragedy of King Richard the Third. Yes, absolutely. So it's another play like Richard II organized 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. 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. us the thrill of doing it anyway or watching it and endorsing it anyway. 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. 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 Eago 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 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. He's on stage all the time.

He's almost all the time. He really keeps us with him. 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 lucky we all were that the Tudors came in at Milford Haven,

you would not structure a play in this way. Because there is a need for the Tudor dynasty to have Richard III viewed our... as a monster. They need him to be a tyrant in order to legitimize Henry the 7th'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 is this healing of the long wound that's begun by Richard the second.

But I also agree that this is a long way from simple Shakespeare sucking up to the Tudor's story. 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 sort of takes over. But you're right. I mean, historically, the claim of Henry Chiebushabre,

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 the 3rd's character in order to smooth out what's otherwise a very awkward transition for the, for the Tudors to tell a story about. 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 she said to Elinor, you know, by this point in Elizabeth I 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 Hollenhead, 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? 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 the third is in part Shakespeare's attempt to beat the Jew of Malta maybe, which has Barabbas 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. This is an incredible, almost a solo show, a one-man show, I mean, lots of lots of other characters, but it's really important. It's really important. really organized around one person in a way, even Richard the second, it 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. 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 the third. And how much is he consciously trying to create something that is politically relevant to late Elizabeth in 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 kifosis, the forward curvature of the spite. So there are lots of similarities is there. Do you think he's getting dangerously close to commenting on late Elizabethan politics for this play, or is it really just a playful version of the history? 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. 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 can 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. 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 skeptical about some of the pieties of late Elizabeth in England. I think for Shakespeare, you know, clearly the murdering of the princess in the tower, an ongoing question in Ricardian circles and so on.

That's a terrible slur on Richard. on the title page of the printed text of the play. You know, this is one of the things that's pinned on him. 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. 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? 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 Moore and Polydor-Virgil version 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. 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 determined to become a villain. I'm determined. 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. 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 mind and twists. 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 for modern discussions of disability and of casting. I mean, Richard, The third 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 question about the significance in modern terms of a disabled body.

One of the other things I wonder about the play as well is, so lots of the murders that Richard the third commits in the play, Shakespeare 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 the Sixth plays when Gloucester is murdering Henry the Sixth 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 tell us 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 show you Richard doing on stage, and he doesn't offer us any kind of nuance about it? Yeah, that's a really interesting question, isn't it? Given the conversation we've had, I realized that we began by saying,

you know, what's so interesting about Richard the second is it dramatises the pretexties 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 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. 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? Because as we said, Richard the second, we don't really know all of the terrible things that he's done. This is the culmination. We know he sees his Delancastery 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're going to watch him kill all of these people with absolutely no ambiguity about who is behind it. Yes. There's a very different approach to the presentation of the, the, in air quotes, I guess, crimes of the king. Yes, absolutely. And I suppose that, you know, one of the scenes who haven't yet got to is the scene when Richard Wu's lady Anne, part of her resisted 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 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 around to accept him, 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 his, we're one over. You know, we have been seduced that that language of seduction is quite helpful, I think. And you end the scene thinking, well, hang on, how on earth is she fallen for

that? That's ridiculous. She's gone from, you know, I'm going to kill myself rather than marry you to find I'll marry you then. That actually sounds great. So we're wondering how an 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 almost his personality. So by the end of the play, we are Lady Anne. We've been wooed by Richard. I think that's absolutely right, yeah. And I think an important step along that process that you've just set out is,

was there a woman in this humor, wood, was ever woman in this humor one? 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 behavior is by laughing at them. And we do that straight away. so we're already in his sway. And how easily we can all fall for it. We might watch somebody else falling for that and think that's stupid.

Yeah. 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 the 7th 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 an almost deeply unattractive character in comparison to Richard? 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 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 judgment. 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 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 in the limelight

as we can manage. Which again, you know, it's quite different from the historical Henry the 7th. 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. 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 the end of someone else's glorious story. in the way that Bollingbrook is kind of the end of Richard the second story. 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-Mashina kind of figure of Richmond coming in as the savior 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 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 four and that there are no real heroes in that historical narrative. 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. Yes, Laurie. 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 was. what it's done to affect our view of Richard the 2nd and Richard the third, 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. I've really loved it. Thanks for having me.

I mean, wow, Eleanor, welcome back. Hello. I've been completely blown away by that couple of episodes. 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, as 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 tutor 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? Yeah, it's great if the queen is on your side, but also you need feet in the globe, right? And so... Bums on seats, but not seats, but... 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 to history because these guys are going to have a big fight and they want to see the fight choreography. And you don't listen. and 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. 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 audience wanting action. 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 guess that it is important to realize that ordinary people go to these things and they aren't necessarily there for a history lesson. And I think I was struck as well by 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 the 2nd being kicked off the throne. You've got Henry the 4th 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 with skipover how Edward the 4th becomes

king. And then you end up with Richard the 3 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 is seen a long reign of Henry the 8th, closely followed by very short reigns of Edward the 6th, Mary the 1st, and then a long reign of Elizabeth I first. You've had all of these questions about what is a rightful succession, what does a good succession look like? And at the end of Elizabeth I first 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. 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. And to say that with a straight face to a ruler like Elizabeth I first is actually incredibly brave. 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 the alternative that everybody wants, but he's actually a really flat-drab character, very similar to the way that Henry VIII 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're just are kings. They're 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 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.

Yeah, it's so interesting because it really shows us the incredible possibilities of theater 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 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. 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 nonfiction 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 Shakespeare was a historian, which I think he would have laughed at you for.

Yeah, I think that he knows it in. 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 say this to a Ricardian, right? But because people are not offered in debt 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, they, they, they, They like to see these kind of scheming villain characters. And it's not Shakespeare's fault, fundamentally, if we lack the proper background in the history to understand that that's not what he's doing, right? 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. 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 the 6th, so I had to have her back, you know? 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 Henry's 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 installments 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 forward slash subscribe. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone medieval with history hits.