Robert Fripp talks about the historical Richard III and the vicious caricatures that Shakespeare drew upon to produce his famous play:
In 1983, I was working a high-stress job pulling together CBC TV’s weekly investigative program The Fifth Estate. I still ask myself: Why, on top of that, did I spend my nights and weekends imitating a long-dead playwright? My labour of love was a play called Dark Sovereign, which I wrote in the four-century-old English of William Shakespeare and his 17th-century contemporaries.
The same year, 1983, also happened to be the 500th anniversary of King Richard III’s accession to the English throne. Richard III, the last Plantagenet king, is widely believed to have murdered his two nephews in the Tower of London, usurping the elder boy’s crown and reigning just 25 months before the upstart Henry Tudor (Henry VII) killed Richard in battle in 1485 and displayed his body for three days.
King Henry went on to inflict judicial murder on many whose claim to the throne was better than his. Nearly 20 existing portraits of Richard III were disfigured after his death to show humps painted onto the subject’s back. Writers, principally Sir Thomas More and Raphael Holinshed, gave the dead king a hostile press.
Then Shakespeare borrowed from Holinshed to write The Tragedy of Richard III. (It may be significant that the first edition’s title omits the word “King.”) Shakespeare wrote his character assassination around 1591. It was probably performed first for the Court of Queen Elizabeth I shortly thereafter. Tudor monarchs had been ruling for more than a century by then, but their tenuous claim to the throne still seemed to trouble them. Having denied Richard a decent burial a century earlier, they still had need to heap dirt on his reputation.
In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that I portrayed the Earl of Northumberland in the 1983 re-enactment of the coronation of Richard III (at the Cathedral Church of St. James in Toronto) on local TV, and I portrayed the Earl of Lincoln in the (non-televised) version on the actual anniversary date. You could say I’m biased in favour of the revisionist view of the character of good King Richard.
