Gone Medieval - Shakespeare's Richard III

Episode Date: June 25, 2022

Richard III is one of Shakespeare’s most controversial plays, often cited as the basis for the King’s reputation as a scheming murderer. But what do the Bard’s history plays tell us about the period they are set in and how that era was viewed in Shakespeare’s time? Are there allusions to Elizabethan figures in Richard III that Shakespeare knew his viewers would understand?In this edition of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis heads to Stratford-upon-Avon to catch up with director Greg Doran and Arthur Hughes - the first actor with a disability to play Richard III in a major production - to talk about the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new production of the iconic play.The Senior Producer on this episode was Elena Guthrie. The Producer was Rob Weinberg. It was edited by Seyi Adaobi.For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Mondays newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store. 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. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. We're going a little bit Tudor and a little bit today on this episode, but don't worry, like everything else, it's all medieval really. The Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Shakespeare's Richard the 3rd began on the 23rd and runs until the 9th of October. I know, I know more Richard the 3rd. I'll try and ease off, but this was just too good an opportunity to miss.

Director Greg Doran is completing his series of Shakespeare's history plays that began with Richard II a decade ago and is stepping down from his post afterwards. Arthur Hughes is the first disabled actor to play Richard III, and that brings a whole new dimension to the play. Does it help separate the fiction from the history that it's been used to tell for far too long? I had the pleasure of speaking to Greg and Arthur

join a break in their rehearsals. We discussed what the history plays tell us about the 15th century, about how it was perceived by the end of the 16th century, about how Shakespeare was refining his art with these stories, reaching a climax with his Richard III. We also talked about the ways in which the play might have been a satirical commentary on the politics of Shakespeare's own day. I love Shakespeare's Richard III as an examination of the anti-hero, the villain that we find attractive, and what it says about us as an audience. The history, though, is nonsense, but I don't think it was ever meant to be a documentary. I really enjoyed this chat, and I hope you do too. Thank you so much, Greg and Arthur, for joining me here at The Other Place. It's fantastic to speak to you both.

Pleasure. So if I could start with you, Greg, this performance of Richard III rounds off 10 years of Shakespeare's History, Wars of the Roses cycle for you. So was this an important series that you wanted to get all the way through to the end? Why did you feel it was so important? Oh, yeah, definitely. I've started so I'll finish sort of thing. And what has been interesting with both of the tetralogies we've done, we started with the second tetralogy from a chronological point of view, i.e. starting with Richard the 2nd and Henry the 4th and Henry VIII, and then went back to the earlier tetralogy of Henry 6 parts, 1, 2 and 3 and Richard the 3rd. And what has been really interesting is comparing also the fact that the later tetralogy is much more sophisticated in the way it's written and you watch in the Henry 6th plays and Richard the 3rd, you watch Shakespeare honing his talent and shaping his art. And so by the time, I mean, I think that there's brilliant, brilliant

things in the Henry 6th plays, but when he gets to Richard the 3rd, he's just learnt so much more about psychology and what you can do on the stage and what an audience will tolerate as well. Do you think that's why Richard the 3rd is so much more well-known and popular that he's honed his skills by then? Oh, definitely. And also because it has this sensational character right at the central of it, the history of why certain Shakespeare plays are done and why others are not done is we have to remember for many centuries it was about the actors who wanted to play those parts and the audiences who wanted to see those actors play those great big parts. And there isn't as particularly central a character in the Henry Sixth plays, with the possible exception of

Queen Margaret, who goes all the way through, of course. But I think that is part of how he writes them, but it's also part of how he shapes the narrative, because if you think about it, one of the things he is doing in terms of, because I think he's not interested in historical accuracy, which we may come back to, but he is interested in pulling in an audience and keeping their attention. So if you are going to take that huge sway of history from 1400 to 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth, anyway, viewed from his perspective, you get, Richard the second, the volatile skipping king, you get Henry the fourth, the usurper, so therefore bad. Henry the fifth, glorious hero, warrior king, and Henry the sixth, peacemaker, loving, saintly, and possibly weak. And

then what do you follow that with? Well, Rich the third, and let's ring the changes and show you what happens when somebody as manipulative and Machiavellian as that is on the throne. So in a way, they're defined by their sequence to some extent. And that has been fascinating, following that through and seeing the effect on the audiences. That's very interesting. Do you have a favourite play? The one I'm doing is always my favourite. Which is lucky, hey. Especially with Arthur next to you as well.

Yeah, exactly. That's the right. So I guess if I could ask you, Arthur, a role like Richard of Third, I think, feels like a really daunting one for an actor to take on. There's a lot of controversy around the history and around Shakespeare's representation of the events, I guess. But it's also one of theatre's great roles. How do you feel about taking this on? Well, delighted since I was offered the part, but the delight has changed.

I think I've always wanted to play Richard III ever since I knew Shakespeare's play, which was kind of, you know, I guess my first introduction into who he was. Everyone I've told goes, oh, no pressure. Oh, it's quite a big one. It's quite difficult, you know, which actually now when I hear it, I just go, yeah, I've been hearing that a lot. But it's a different thing, having the part and gearing up to it and gearing up to rehearsals and everything. But now we're doing it.

I feel it's another part. It's probably the greatest part I've ever played. I'm absolutely loving it, I feel immersed in it. And, you know, it is the most I think I've ever had to do. And the deepest probably I've had to go with the character. I suspect that Shakespeare would never write a character like that again because Richard Burbage said to him, don't ever give me a part of that size again.

I need an act off. I need somewhere in Act 4 where you can give me a rest before I have the great big last push and a fight at the end. And I'm sure that that symbiosis between Act and writer shaped Shakespeare's future writing after that, because all the heroes after that get an act off. Feet up in Act 5. Because it is such a marathon,

and when we've been close to just putting what we have together, I think it kind of really landed in my mind, oh, wow, this is relentless. But, man, what a great rise and fall of a story in this play. And I think there's always been a quiet voice in my head ever since I was an actor being like, one day you will play Richard the 3rd, you'll play him and you'll be a disabled actor playing him.

Don't know where, don't know when. But I've always, you know, I've never seen the play, but I have read it and always been very attracted to it. I auditioned for drama school with a was ever woman in this humor wood. And yeah, so, you know, it all feels quite, you know, like it's come together that we're here now. And yes, it's a different thing, you know, to speak in theory about doing it. And now I'm speaking about doing it in practice.

And it's every bit and more as challenging and wonderful as I hoped it would be. I think that what you've got, which is most Richard the Thirds, don't have, is getting the warm-up. Henry the 6 is kind of the trailer for Richard the 3rd. The cast, weren't very happy when I told them that. The cast of Henry the 6, I mean. But being able to play Gloucester and understand Shakespeare's shaping of the Wars of the Road story is really helpful. Oh, completely. I think from understanding the boy becoming the man and the whole life, you know,

I think just to have any sense of longevity with a part as an actor is such a gift. And here to understand as complex a character as Richard, and I think, you know, to truly understand him in the play, to really understand the life he's lived before, the society and the upbringing he's had, you know, in a civil war with the relationship he has with his family and into Richard III. It's almost like, well, God, these plays should be kind of always done together. So, yeah, no, it's been massively useful to go on the journey of him in War of the Roses

and to now bringing that into Richard the Third. Yes, I think if you watch Henry the 6th, you can very much see Richard the 3rd coming in the character that's in Henry the 6th, he's there, just waiting to step to the centre of the stage, really, Richard the 3rd. Richard the 3rd has this huge, you know, as the play on its own, is this big rise and fall, which is what's so satisfying to watch as an audience and interesting and compelling to watch him go through that.

But the rise begins halfway through 6 part 3, and so joyful as well to that first turn to the audience. and then to see that as the play is going along. Richard the 3rd has kind of already started halfway through that play, and it'd be great a thing to see both of them in a day. Like a Lord of the Rings marathon of all the movies kind of thing. So Greg, one of the things I think with Richard the 3rd character in the play is that he is likable while he's doing all of these terrible things.

The audience is meant to be sucked into almost egging him on and hoping he wins by the end maybe. As a director, do you feel you're exonerable? much control over how much sympathy or empathy an audience has for the character? Yes, somebody said to me before I started rehearsing it, I hope it's going to be a funny Richard, because, you know, you can play Richard completely from the other perspective and get many laughs. And clearly Shakespeare knows that laughter is assent. And, you know, if you can make them laugh, you can get them onto your side. And that is, of course, a fantastic magic trick that he manages to do. Though, of course, it does

doesn't continue. He pushes and pushes and pushes. So, you know, you see him seduce Lady Anne and win. You see him basically trap Hastings with Buckingham as an enabler by his side. By the time he gets to the crown and, you know, has got that throne, that's when it all starts to fall apart and he really, really pushes you and your sympathies when the princes in the tower are murdered. And then, of course, he starts to fall apart. So I think what we've found is that I think it's a very sophisticated and not a static relationship with an audience. I think it's kinetic. You know, he keeps on asking you and he takes you along on his journey with you, which is what is so fascinating and what Shakespeare has clearly learnt during the Henry the Sixth place, that as soon as somebody

says an aside, it's effectively saying, seeing it from my point of view, audience. And that is something that he's balancing in this play, even with somebody like the Scrivener, who's a small character, he's just a secretary, a scribe, who comes on and says, I've just written out the indictment for Lord Hastings. This is appalling. And why is nobody standing up and saying that? And he, suddenly, the Scrivener, has a voice to the audience, which makes him very special in particular, because not that many characters talk to the audience. Lady Anne never gets to talk to the audience, for instance. Characters tend to speak to the audience when they've had a sentence of execution. That's what tends to happen. But the scrivener is like a pivot in the play. And of course,

it's also something that makes us realize how contemporary Shakespeare's Richard III is, because it speaks to now. It speaks to that young man in Novosibirsk in Siberia back in March who held up a piece of blank paper in the town square and was arrested. and you kind of go, that's it. It's about freedom of speech. It's about speaking out under dictatorships. And John Peter, the late leader-critic of the Sunday Times, told me that when they did a production of Richard III,

just after the death of Stalin in 1953, it was later than that. And Stalin had banned Richard III, so Richard III had never been performed in Russia at that time. So it was when they did it in Budapest in the early 50s, that speech suddenly spoke to the audience, powerfully that they applauded and the production got a reputation. People kept on coming back to the production and by the time they had been playing it for a very short while, that scene was always getting a standing evasion.

And the authorities shut the production down. And very shortly after that, the Hungarian Revolution broke out. And John Peter's assertion is that, because he was there, he was in, a teenager in Budapest. And he said it was that speech which in some ways triggered the Hungarian Revolution. And we're looking at it now in the context of Putin's Russia. It's extraordinary how Shakespeare manages to touch the moment. We had the kids in last night, the boys who were playing the princes in the tower. And so these guys are actually nine and twelve.

And the innocence of these tiny wee children was so touching and moving. And I took them into the theatre at the end of rehearsal to watch a bit. Well, in fact, we watched the fight call, which they happened to be doing on the execution, on beheading of the Duke of Suffolk. And the kids loved that. But I went home just shortly after that, turned on the Channel 4 News, and there is the Yuvalde Elementary School with all those nine-year-olds, exactly the same age as our kids, massacred, being hunted down.

And you kind of realize that what Shakespeare knows is that the death of innocence, the death of children, is going to be a real trigger. It's the final straw from the audience's point of view. and Shakespeare's very precise at how he presents the Prince is in the Tower and what that does to the audience and what that does to our perceptions of Richard and how we should regard him. I feel like Richard III, the play is much more about the audience than most of Shakespeare's are the plays you're being asked to go along with all of these things

and you laugh along with Richard and you join in, even though he tells you he's murdering people, tells you what all his plans are, he's going to do all these terrible things and we like him and we laugh along with him and more than any of the Shakespeare player, I think, that speaks to what does that say about us? We're sitting here watching it, no one jumps up from the audience to stop it. No, the devil always has the best lines, doesn't he? I think that's right. I think Shakespeare knows that, because what he is setting out

is actually precisely how a society sort of colludes with its governance. And I don't know whether you've read a book called Tyrant by Stephen Greenblatt, wonderful book by, he's an American Shakespeare scholar. and he wrote this during 2016, so it was in reaction. It was initially a New York Times article that was in reaction to the possibility that Trump was going to come in and win the election. And he writes this article saying what Shakespeare tells us about the 2016 elections. And basically what he does, he does a kind of biography of Shakespeare's Richard III. And in every detail, you kind of go, oh, my goodness, that is Donald.

It doesn't ever mention the word Trump. But you kind of go, you know, who are the enablers around him? Who are the people letting this happen? Who are we? How is it that a whole country can buy in to accept a man who is manifestly unfit to govern and go along with that? In 2016, and the book came out a year later, it's a fully realized portrait of Shakespeare's Richard III

and an analysis of tyranny and how we let it happen. How do we let these despots get away with it? And of course now we're not talking about Trump, we're talking about Putin. And Shakespeare's play, again, is sort of extraordinarily making us think very specifically about where we're at now and why we got there and how we got there. Have you ever thought about sex in ancient Rome? Perhaps you've pondered over the origins of civilisation. Or maybe you've had restless nights contemplating where Alexander the Great's lost tomb might be. I know I have.

If so, we've got the perfect remedy. It's the Ancients on History Hit, the ancient history podcast. We've got interviews with leading experts on all of the above and so much more. So why not give the podcast a listen? Subscribe to the Ancients on History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. And Arthur, coming back to the character of Richard the Third, so your lived experience as someone with radial dysplasia must give you a kind of different insight into this character. Do you feel like when you play Richard the Third, there's less of putting on,

on the character, less of putting on the costume, and there's more of you in the character, not in the sense that I mean you're gonna go around murdering people, but there's more Arthur in this, Richard, then there might be for other actors. Yes, I think when you put a disabled body on stage, that is a statement in the society we live in now. Disability is woefully underrepresented.

And when you do see it, you go, okay, there is. I think in the context of Richard III, yes, absolutely. You know, with Richard historically for hundreds of years being played with humps and limps and all sorts. I don't have the chyphosis, scoliosis that Richard had. My disability, radial displays, I don't have a thumb on my right arm, and it's slightly bent and shorter than my left.

But what do I know about being looked at differently, underestimated, thought of in maybe a bit of an unspoken, hardwired hierarchy that exists, as many do in our world? Yes, I do have experience of that. And Rich's experience, you know, as the character in the play, being part or not being part of a system and realizing this system doesn't serve me. So why should I serve it and who should I serve? Well, myself. I mean, I haven't got to that point yet of just serving myself, but you know, maybe I'm on the path. But yeah, but I think when you look at

our world and there's a lot of ableism in the world, Richard the third, I think, exists in a very ablest world. And how does he use his position outside of that to manipulate and work it, you know? And I I think it's when he realizes that, for yet I am not looked on in the world, which is from War of the Roses. I think it's realizing, no one suspects me, because no one values me, no one sees me as anything a threat or anything like of worth that can challenge. And so it's realizing his power through that. And I think having a disabled Richard is massively empowering for me, for the disabled

community, I think, to see not just one of the most famous characters in disabled characters in the English-speaking language, but to see a main part. one of the leading main parts in literature being taken on by a disabled person. I think also when Arthur agreed to take on the role, I didn't know quite what that would mean in terms of having a lived experience of disability on the stage. But it does mean that when characters are throwing these incredible insults at him, they're not throwing it at a prosthetic.

They're throwing it to a man who has lived through that experience. And you kind of begin to understand the impact of those insults tends to kind of rebound in the faces of the people who speak them rather than the other way around. And when his mother finally tackles him, he goes right back to being rejected by his mother. And Shakespeare has, I don't know how he's managed it, but he charts it in a very particular way. This man who is excluded initially, the first thing we hear about is sex. You know, he's excluded from the want and ambling nymphs and the sported tricks and all that. And what's the first thing we see him do is actually against all.

odds conquer whether it's the heart of Lady Anne or not, but certainly her consent. So that is a very interesting perspective on which that I've never seen before. One of the advantages do is quite often in this play. Richard is played by actors in the late 40s and 50s and early 60s and Arthur at 30 is closer in age to Richard was and his two-year reign that finished at age 32. So that makes Lady Anne seem completely different because it has different kind of potential rather than feeling a bit sort of predatory. Yeah, yeah. It's one of the things about all the representations of Richard.

Everywhere, I think, he tends to look like a man in his 50s with the weight of the world on his shoulders when actually he's 30 when he comes to the throne, 32 when he dies. He's a much younger man than we usually think he is. And perhaps that seems like a good point to get on to more of the historical Richard. So, I mean, I've given full disclosure here. I'm a Ricardian. Richard III is my historical bag.

So, Greg, where do you stand? on the historical Richard the 3rd? Good guy, bad guy, somewhere in between? Okay, well, there are two different questions there. One which is Shakespeare's Richard, anything to do with the real Richard the 3rd. Well, that's not his purpose, his responsibility, or his intent. And however, if you look at the real Richard, and I do find it really fascinating, that all the Richard of the Third Society and all the work done, and indeed, without the rich of the Third Society, we would not have found Richard the Third's body, though I would argue, without Shakespeare's play, they wouldn't have to go on looking for it.

Absolutely. I mean, there's no doubt that Shakespeare's Richard III has caused Richard to be so infamous, famous, and popular for centuries afterwards. Yeah, and I would say that's probably the case with a lot of, certainly British folk like me anyway, and coming through the educational system that I came through. my English history is very good from Richard the 2nd through to Richard the 3rd a little bit

Henry the 8th, great, Elizabeth, I'm fine and we're on but that's because Shakespeare wrote plays about them and forged characters out of messy human beings and chose what he wanted to make of them in the same way that I know a man who wrote a biography of Henry the 4th

thinks that actually Shakespeare's Henry the 4th should be the one who is celebrated rather than Henry the 5th But anyway, you know, what is truth, said Justing Pilot. I think that what Shakespeare does is clearly, and one has to say that Shakespeare didn't invent Richard III as the villain. There's his historical record and then how that is interpreted through Thomas More and Holland Sheldon Hall and everybody else, Polydor and Virgil.

And I think that if you are looking at the charges against Richard, you probably didn't kill Henry the Six, did he? It seems as though Clarence cheesed off his brother. brother, Edward and had a fairer choosing trial and was executed as a result of that. Much better than have drowned in a mamsy butt, God say. But Hastings is a bit of a blot. I don't think one can clear away. I think that makes, you know, the fact that or indeed the attack that Richard made on

Queen Elizabeth's family, the widow of Edward the Fourth, that I don't think it's in doubt that he had Rivers and Gray and Vaughn executed, that and then I suppose you, or indeed proclaimed the bastardie of her children. So you then get the issue of, did he kill the princess in the tower? Well, there is a sort of smoking gun next to him, one has to admit, and of course it could have been the Duke of Buckingham, it could have been Richmond in some way, but from my point of view, it's very, very hard not to accept that he probably had a hand in the murder of those people. And Shakespeare's take on that is that having got to the throne and even having proclaimed them removed from the succession, that didn't make.

him secure. You know, why should Richard be a different from any other king who has cleared out the opposition? So I think if clearly Richard did some great stuff and getting representation in government from people who lived north of Watford, that's not a bad, that's a good tick. But I think the balance sheet, I don't think the balance sheet completely exonerates him. And I know the Richard the Third Society don't want to whitewash Richard either. They just want the truth. But truth is not what Shakespeare is interested in. He's. He is in writing a history play. He's writing, it's both a prophecy and a warning, I think.

He's deriving from history something that is relevant to his period. And one of the things that clearly the Wars of the Roses clearly exposes, if you like, is the need for a secure succession, because without that country falls into anarchy, as witnessed in those plays. So that is part of what is important to the Elizabethan, an audience as Shakespeare perceives it, which is what happens when this queen dies, and you're not allowed to talk about the queen. It's a treasonous offense to talk about who's succeeding Elizabeth. But I think what he's trying to do is really nothing to do with the historical Richard the Third

per se. I think it's interesting that the original claims from the Richard III society, as I understood them, were about the fact that his deformity had been exaggerated from Thomas Moore on, and even the portrait in the National Portrait Gallery had had a little hump attached. And in a way, from that point of view, the discovery in the Lester Car Park was a bit of a home goal, because he indeed, 99% sure that is his body, and he had adolescent, idiopathic, incipient scoliosis. And therefore, however visible that was or was not, it seems to me there was virtually a corkscrew spine, and that would have, A, have been very painful and would have affected his mobility in particular ways. So in one way, you could say, if it hadn't been for

the defection of Stanley at the Battle of Bosworth's Field, and Richard had won that battle, we would be seeing Richard, and Shakespeare would have had to see Richard as the man who sort of concluded the Wars of the Roses. So history is a series of crossroads that have multiple possible routes to choose. Shakespeare's choosing one of them. And Arthur, I guess same question for you as someone who's playing Richard the third. Do you investigate the historical Richard the third or do you try and detach that from the character that you're playing? And if you've thought about the historical Richard the third, again, you know, good guy, bad guy somewhere in between? Yeah, no, I have, you know, looked in, I've done my research into the real Richard and what we know about the real Richard and

Shakespeare's Richard, yes, the differences. I think in terms of with the play, with Shakespeare, so much of it is within the language. It's the star. of the show and following from Wars of the Roses, following my instincts, my actor's instinct with playing Richard there has given me such a good grounding for coming into Richard the Third to follow this arc, this rise and fall with him. I think I probably lean more towards the Richard in the play because figuring out what this play is about and certainly like what's the message of this play and just what you were saying earlier about how complicit we make the audience and how I think that's absolutely a big part of it. A big part of the play is about the

society that is the way it is, Richard is a certain symptom of a society that has these prejudices and these ways of thinking. And so one of the things we've been discussing a lot is about, I think the play is about your conscience, about your inner voice, you're in a sense of morality and how it serves you. And you know, you like to think everyone has that voice in them. And I think because of what we know of Richard in the play from the start to finish, it's about that relationship with the audience and figuring out whether he listens to that or not, and he doesn't, I think, until kind of the very end of the play where he turns on it. And in a society, I guess one of the things with the real Richard and that time in history

of how important God is and in terms of the monarchy and that system, talking about this system that he doesn't belong to, if you've got God at the top and then the king underneath and then everyone else, that's the system of what we're ruled by. and if conscience is this divine voice that comes from God and tells you what's right and what's not, if you don't feel part of that society, you go, well, why should I listen to? Why should I invest in God at the top if I'm shunned everywhere else? And that's what Shakespeare gives us, I think.

That's what I think I'm more interested in is this kind of eternal question of your conscience, which Richard is a great vessel to explore that as someone who just decides not to listen to it and only listened to himself. I mean, yes, a fascinating historical character as a theatrical character, that endless question of listening to, is it right to do that or is it wrong? I think, well, it's probably why

this play is just done, well, like all Shakespeare plays, just done over and over again, because there is an eternal question in there. I also think it's, in the end, that it is kind of irrelevant to go back to the real history of Richard III, other than to see where Shakespeare diverges from it

and ask the question, why? because that seems to me to be where the kind of confusion has lain, if you like. And I wanted to read you a little quote. So this is from a book that's precious to me because it was written by my husband, my late husband, Anthony Schur, who rather famously played Richard III on crutches. And as he gets to the press night, the rich of the third society do a block booking.

And he writes in the diary that he wrote, the Year of the Kid, he writes, the Rich of the Third Society descends in force. Most of them celebrate our production and write thrilling letters, but one or two are less enthusiastic. I read in the papers that you are yet another actor to ignore truth and integrity in order to launch yourself on an ego trip by the monstrous lie perpetrated by Shakespeare

about a most valiant knight and honourable man and most excellent king. And that just makes me laugh. What a letter. You kind of go, well, yeah, that's a opinion. Well, the truth is they probably did enjoy the play and just didn't find it as close to the history as they hoped that it might be. Just to end on, I have my theory about Shakespeare's Richard III that it talks about contemporary politics, as you were mentioning, Greg. They're heading towards a succession crisis.

No one wants to talk about it, but they're on the brink of all of this stuff. And if Shakespeare was a recalcitrant Catholic, which lots of people think he was, then he's watching the Cecil family. So William, Cecil, Lord Burley, and his son, Robert Cecil, organised the Protestant succession of James I 6th of Scotland. He becomes James I first of England. And we know that Robert Cecil suffers with kifosis, so that forward curvature of the spine that Shakespeare calls the bunch back. So I think that when a late Elizabethan audience goes to the theatre and watches this character come on stage, I think they would understand that they're looking at Robert Cecil. And so all of that politics about talking to the audience, about all the evil that you're going to do,

is telling the audience, you're watching this happen, you're watching this man plot in the play, it's murders, but in reality it's the murder of England to a Catholic mind. It's the succession of another Protestant monarch. Do you think there's any mileage in that? I do. I do. I think the film Anonymous, which I think was meant to be an Oxfordian take on the who wrote Shakespeare, well, it precisely was. I think it rather shot itself in the foot by very interestingly taking the Robert Sessel and his spinal challenges, but making the key fact, the performance of Richard the second that happened before the Essex rebellion and just hoping that they can slip that one by us and say that it was Richard the third, not Richard the second,

that was being performed just before the Essex rebellion. And you kind of go, I think I was going along with it until that point. So, yeah, I think that is interesting. I think it's very difficult to pin Shakespeare down to one source or kind of meaning or indeed autobiographical identification. like, you know, it's very, very tempting to think about it, when you're thinking about Hamlet, to think about the fact that his father's just died and are these conversations he's been having with his father or in Coriolanus, his mother has just died. Shakespeare's never

written such a fantastic role for a mother, albeit she's a proter but of a gorgon, and he waits to his mother's, you know, and all those autobiographical assumptions are really quite challenging, but they are intriguing, and we love doing this with ourselves, don't we? And I think the other thing is that Shakespeare often is the sort of catalyst for debating conversation. And just as it has, as I'm saying about, it's thanks to Shakespeare that we found the body of Richard the Third, via the Richard of the Third Society, no doubt. And I know that for a while, whenever anybody did The Merchant of Venice, Arnold Wesker would be on the phone saying, why aren't you doing my production of The Merchant and not this one? Because, you know, it's anti-Semitic. So questions

about misogyny or racism in Othello or anti-Semitism are kind of focused around Shakespeare. But what I love about that is that it is opening the debate about them. So in a way, let's continue having the debate about Richard III. That's great. Yeah. And I think, as you say, a villain like Richard III remains relevant today. We can see him in the world today. So it's not unreasonable that Shakespeare would have seen him in his day,

but he also created something that lasts for all time. We could possibly see it in Trump. We could possibly see it in Putin. Now, all of those things are in the world today. So as someone who's obsessed with Richard the third, I absolutely acknowledge that Shakespeare's play is nothing like the historical Richard the third, but is the reason most of us are interested in Richard the third

and is the reason that I have this fascination in my life. So I love the play of Richard the third, and I wish you all the best with this run when it goes out and I look forward to seeing it, and I hope you enjoy playing Richard the third, Arthur. Thank you very much, yes, yes. Thank you very much for your time. Cheers, bye-bye.

Thank you. You can join Dr Kat Jarman on Tuesday, another brand new episode. Don't forget to also subscribe wherever you get your podcasts from and to tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you get a moment, please drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to your podcasts, including Spotify now. It really does help new listeners to find us. If you're enjoying this and looking for a bit more medieval goodness in your life, then please do subscribe to our Medieval Monday's newsletter. You can find the links in the show notes below and I'll drop into your inbox every Monday

with news and thoughts from the medieval world. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hit.