Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 41

Staging R i c h a r d III

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which turn more pointed as scenes of Richard’s office clearly evoke images of
Hitler’s office, and after accepting the “pleas” of the Alderman that he become
king, much in the way Hitler was granted emergency powers after the R eichstag
crisis, Richard presides over a rally clearly modeled on the Nuremberg rallies.
The use of American actors Annette Benning and Robert Downey Jr. as the
Woodvilles shows the subtle interplay of British histories McKellen interweaves.
Fifteenth and sixteenth century sources are almost unanimous in depicting the
Woodvilles as parvenu, grasping, parasites at court, their sole reason for
advancement coming from Elizabeth Woodville’s marriage to Edward IV. The
American Elizabeth Woodville (Annette Benning) and her brother (Robert Downey
Jr.) at McKellen’s royal court of the 1930s evoke the parvenu, slightly disreputable
image attached to the choice of a 20th-century King Edward, Wallace Simpson,
divorced, ambitious, pushy, paramour of Edward VIII (Black and Helmreich 438).
And as the Woodvilles helped bring down the line of Edward IV, Wallace Simpson’s
involvement with Edward VIII helped lead to his abdication and the succession of
his younger brother George VI.
Ultimately, what is at work in all these film-stagings of history, is a notion that
in some way or other staging history teaches us “something.” Now that “something”
may vary according to temporal circumstance and locale, but nonetheless none of
these stagings suggests that history is meaningless to the era for which it is staged.
Further, staging h is to fy enables examination of current issues — concerns, values,
attitudes — through the seemingly dispassionate and unbiased lens of hindsight.
In its original, sixteenth-century context, Shakespeare’s staging of the historical
Richard III served to reflect, and thereby perhaps abate, late sixteenth-century
uncertainties about Elizabeth’s succession and possible civil disturbance over that
succession. Rathbone’s Richard III obliquely addressed the fears of Englishmen
(and Americans) that the world might be overwhelmed by evil, ambitious tyrants.
Price’s Richard III reflected the pop-psychology of the mid-20th century that evil
is created by society, not inherent in certain human beings. B lack A dd e r suggests
that our concerns with political matters ofttimes are taken too seriously. Each of
these films seems constrained to present the story of Richard III in some kind of
recent hindsight, even if only the recent hindsight of Ian McKellen’s fascist Richard,
which, incidentally, almost seems to suggest that unsettling though the 1930s and
1940s were, unlike now, they were at least exciting times to be alive. Issues were
clearer, and positive actions produced positive results.
Indeed, that historical hindsight may well make presentation of contemporary
issues bearable to an audience which would find a contemporary narrative too
uncomfortably close, and hence reject the narrative out of hand (Lindenberger 5478). Perhaps even McKellen’s Hitler-Richard would have failed if staged before
50 years had elapsed. Before the softening influences of time it might have been