Who Was Shakespeare’s King Richard III?

Sharon Turner spent fifty-three years thinking about Richard III before writing his epic poem, published only two years before his death. This was much to the chagrin of John Lingard, who complained that ‘For he is seventy-seven, and a man who publishes a poem in his seventy-seventh year must be on the high road to a second childhood.’¹ There are two things that are still relatable here. First, this length of interest in Richard III is not unusual; a lot of Ricardians have been members of the society for decades (I have only been a member since 2014). Second, disdain towards Richard III’s cause is long-standing and centuries-old. The third volume of Lingard’s History dedicates all three appendices to Richard III, demonstrating a definite preoccupation with reassessments of Richard III’s reign, which were emerging with alacrity during the rise of the nineteenth-century school of scientific history.

I have been thinking about this as I enter my sixth year of ‘official’ research on Richard III. 2020 to 2021 was taken up with my undergraduate thesis. Like most undergraduate theses, it’s fairly scrappy, but it remains the bones of my research. When I began my Honours research I was confident that I would find instances of the historical Richard III that were uncomplicated by the influence of the Tragedy. I did not succeed. There seem to be no representations of Richard III without Shakespeare’s Richard looming; either in Shakespeare’s overt or unconscious influence, or even in attempts to defend Richard III from Shakespeare. The Tragedy is simply always there. This changed my direction, and in my doctoral research I am examining how the Tragedy has informed the way we think about Richard III through a study of his historical reputation.

Where I think we are still stuck with Richard III is the enduring ‘Tudor Propaganda’ myth. I shared research from my undergraduate thesis in 2022 on our blog in three articles. They are dated, but they are a core of the argument I am still developing. The first, Who Was Shakespeare’s King Richard III? Part I: The Tudor Propaganda Myth tackles some of the basics of this problem. I had yet to discover CSL Davies’ excellent study on so-called Tudor propaganda, which he describes as a historical cliché. What Davies reveals in an uncomfortable silence around the disappearance of Edward V and Richard Duke of York, rather than a propaganda campaign.  I am now developing this research further to consider the impact the Tudor propaganda myth has had on how we think about Richard III. After all, if Tudor propaganda is treated as the definitive explanation for Richard III’s historical reputation, then we seldom look elsewhere. And what indeed are we overlooking?

The second article, The Tragedy and Disability, looks at why Shakespeare exaggerated Richard III’s disability, and how the play treats disability. Jeffrey R. Wilson has since observed that the Tragedy suggests what we now call the social model of disability. A closer look at the text of the play reveals that Richard is indeed disaffected with how he is perceived by others. You may be interested in reading further on how the discovery of Richard III’s scoliosis led to reductive and ableist discourse from the press in Un-disabling the King: Richard III and the ‘New Evidence’.

The third article, History and The Tragedy, examines the historical context of the play, which has diminished over time. ‘Nemesis Action’ remains one of the most significant frameworks applied to the Tragedy,  despite being written in the nineteenth century, and of course the Scrivener has long been recognised as a warning on the dangers of the written word and state propaganda. I have since been able to undertake a more thorough study of this period which shows how prevalent writing was about Richard III, and how the broadening of genres in historical writing over the sixteenth century contributed to the construction of Richard III’s reputation rather than the popular idea of Tudor propaganda.

This is a continually surprising and rewarding research project. As I have mentioned elsewhere, there is a finiteness in popular historical and biographical studies on Richard III. Even though new documentary sources are still being uncovered, we go over and over the same questions about his character and motivation. If we are to move forward, studies must look beyond the limits of Richard III’s perceived character and the ‘Tudor propaganda’ myth, and examine the broader processes that have informed Richard III’s reputation. It is a line of enquiry I will pursue for some time yet, though I may not be able to match Turner’s fifty-three years.