What is it with the European fascination with unearthing resting
corpses? One might think King Tut’s Curse, or at least Raiders
of the Lost Ark, might have cured them of their necrophilia.
But continentals, who increasingly disbelieve in the souls of the
dead, increasingly retrieve the bodies of the dead for the land of
the living.
The latest victim of a rude awakening from eternal slumber is
Richard III, if you can believe the scientists’ global PR machine.
The hunched cadaver found beneath a parking lot in Leicester
exhibits signs of a violent death. Richard, of course, remains the
last English king killed in battle. And some guy in Canada, who a
few years ago discovered that blood shed on Bosworth Field may now
flow through his veins, shares DNA with the dead man.
American anthropologists, though our folkways are a relatively
recent creation, could reveal an even more startling historical
curiosity if they cared to look. Though Shakespeare hated Richard
III, Americans once loved him — at least the theatrical
presentation of him. Nineteenth-century America was a
Shakespeare-crazed country that seized upon Richard III as
the Shakespeare to go the craziest about. Americans once made
Richard III — not Hamlet, As You Like
It, or Romeo and Juliet — their favorite Shakespeare
production.
Pop culture connoisseurs now celebrate the slut, the gangster,
the addict. Were our pop-culture forbears even more susceptible to
the glamour of evil?
Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe:
Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law.
Americans didn’t come to celebrate. They came to hate, and the
poor actor who uttered those villainous lines invariably became the
means of their public catharsis.
In Highbrow/Lowbrow, Lawrence Levine detailed how our
high culture once served as our ancestors’ pop culture. Rather than
artistic content, audience conduct determined the popularity of
performances. If the audience could behave as though at a
monster-truck rally while at the symphony, to the symphony the
audience did go.
When Richard gratuitously stabbed the fallen Henry in an 1856
performance, the Sacramento audience pelted him with cabbages,
carrots, and even a dead goose. A bag of soot rained on the actors.
Everything remained calm until Richard lecherously preyed upon Lady
Anne, widow of the slain heir, Edward. Hecklers, intent on revising
Shakespeare’s play to include a courtship more pleasing to them,
loudly petitioned Anne to kill Richard. Theater-goers then
unleashed firecrackers and a cornucopia of edibles upon the stage.
A contemporaneous account noted that “a well directed pumpkin
caused [the lead] to stagger, and with still truer aim, a potato
relieved him of his cap, which was left upon the field of glory,
among the cabbages.”
Even Englishman Edmund Kean, regarded as the greatest actor of
his day, became a moving target in the eyes of his audience.
Playing Richard on the stage, and Romeo to other men’s wives off
it, Kean incited Bostonians in 1825. “A barrage of nuts,
foodstuffs, and bottles of odorous drugs drove him weeping from the
stage and the theater,” Levine relays, “after which the
anti-Keanites in the pit and gallery turned on his supporters in
the boxes and did grievous damage to the theater.” After receiving
similar treatment in Baltimore, Kean stayed keen on staying out of
the United States.
But Americans returned to the theater, at least until stiff and
silent replaced brash and boisterous as spectator protocol. Then
they lined up in the queue beneath the marquee at Andre the Giant
wrestling matches, Andrew WK concerts, and The Rocky Horror
Picture Show, events where the audience becomes part of the
show.
Playwrights exhibit similar wishes for their work — for their
plays to replace the past and for literature to subsume history.
Ricardians insist that no evidence links Richard to the murder of
the two cute child princes, and point out that Richard was just
two-years-old when the Duke of Somerset, one of his victims in
Richard III, died. Richard may not have murdered all those
people. Shakespeare certainly murdered Richard’s reputation.
There are worse fates than being entombed beneath an English car
park. Unsuccessfully dodging rotten eggs and fresh tomatoes, and
getting hacked to death on the battlefield, come to mind.
If the bones of Richard III could talk, he might tell you that
watching your character become a caricature from the silent beyond
surely ranks as a fate worse than death — or getting plunked with a
potato.
