Restoring Richard III?

Press, 18 March 1985, Page 20

Restoring Richard III?

Good King Richard? By Jeremy Potter. Hutchinson, 1984. 287 pp. Illustrations. $34.95.

(Reviewed by

Hugh Stringleman)

To borrow an observation from “Good King Richard?,” there are good kings and bad kings and, any schoolboy knows, or has been taught the difference. But once the revisionists have been to work on the history of the English monarchy, the differences may not be so clear. A prime example of a bad king has been Richard the Third (1452-1485), reputedly the “small, dark and physically misshapen” king, unforgettably portrayed by Sir Laurence Olivier in the 1956 film of Shakespeare’s play. Jeremy Potter, chairman of the Richard 111 Society, has marshalled an impressive amount of evidence to show that his patron, as it were, has suffered from a very bad press. While very little can be, at the span of 500 years, stated absolutely categorically, Potter maintains that Richard’s nephews may not have been murdered in the Tower, but died by misadventure. Potter also asserts that Richard did not have a hunchback, because none of his contemporaries even mentioned it in their writings, but that his “lump of foul deformity” was invented by his Tudor successors and detractors. Shakespeare, writing political as well as historical plays, gave his imagination full reign on the monstrous Richard. Imagine the Bard’s

delight in finding that Richard was reputed to have come into the world after two years in the womb, long haired and fully toothed!

“It is difficult to believe that better poetic drama has ever been written than the soliloquy in which the deformed Richard introduces himself to the audience and announces his own villainy,” says Potter. Few people would care much more for Richard’s reputation than is contained between f ‘Now is the winter of our discontent” and “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse.” But apparently there is a large Sot aficionados who take their lys on Bosworth Field and care passionately about righting the record. Potter’s book is a commendable work of history, enjoyable to read and attractively presented. But surely the horse of Richard’s reputation bolted around about the 1590 s when William Shakespeare turned his attention to the last of the Plantagenets? Although he makes no claims to impartiality, Potter cannot hope to undo the damage done by: Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time into this breathing world, scarce half made up, and that so lamely and unfashionable that dogs bark at me, as I halt by them. —Act 1 scene 1, Richard 111.