There is one king who simply will not lie down quietly and stay in the past. Richard III, the English monarch with perhaps the worst image problem, keeps fighting back, aided by some determined scholars and a group of loyal international supporters.
Now, eight years after the king’s rediscovered remains were reburied in Leicester Cathedral, and more than 500 years after his death on the battlefield, the historian and best-selling novelist Philippa Gregory, author of The Other Boleyn Girl and The White Queen, has made the vilified king the subject of her first play. And she believes it could set the record straight at last.
“His story just continues to grip people,” said Gregory, revealing this weekend that her debut play, Richard, My Richard, will premiere next spring. “He has become an evil, pantomime figure, an idea that persists, although it didn’t happen like that.”
Gregory’s play opens, aptly enough, with Richard bursting up from his grave in a Leicester car park to challenge the way his reputation has been smeared. Tackling his notoriety head-on, the maligned king at last has the chance to explain his reign.
“I wanted to write a play about the real Richard and the people – especially the influential women – around him,” said Gregory, who blames historians for “giving us such a dark picture of the king whose motto was loyalty and whose passion was chivalry”.
The Yorkist king’s most significant detractor was, of course, another playwright. William Shakespeare set him up as a hunchbacked supervillain, prepared to kill everyone between himself and the throne, in The Tragedy of Richard III, first performed at least 390 years ago. An early subtitle for the play, an addition possibly made by a printer, promised audiences it would detail … “His treacherous plots against his brother Clarence: the pitiful murder of his innocent nephews: his tyrannical usurpation: with the whole course of his detested life, and most deserved death.”
But many of these crimes are at best unproven and at worst the result of an effective political smear job. Shakespeare made his Richard a charismatic rogue, but he had to be careful. Although the king had been dead for more than a century by then, he was killed at Bosworth Field by the grandfather of the reigning monarch, Queen Elizabeth I.
So Shakespeare drew on the popular idea of Richard as a twisted and dastardly usurper. It was a line already taken by the influential Tudor statesman and historian Sir Thomas More in his History of Richard III, the basis of one of Shakespeare’s major sources, Holinshed’s Chronicles.
Richard already excites more opinion than anyone who has been dead for so long has a right to, due to the global membership of the Richard III Society. “He is the only English king with a fan club and the society is passionate. But history is always reworked and this play is my view,” said Gregory, who is braced for dissent. “I have toughened myself after years of writing about history and religion. I write about saints as well as sinners, and people always have a view.”
She aimed to paint a less biased picture of the king and the women in his life. “You only have to look at the famous seduction scene in Shakespeare’s play, in which a widowed Anne Neville is so quickly won over. What woman would ever behave like that? It is a man’s vision,” said Gregory. “The women in my version behave much more sensibly and believably.”
The author first approached these characters in her 2012 novel, The Kingmaker’s Daughter. Already an admirer of Richard III, Gregory became convinced he had been slandered by those who defeated him, and then by Shakespeare.“My novel about Anne had done something to address the problem, and I was on tour promoting that book when his body was first found,” she said.
The discovery made in the former grounds of a Leicester priory astounded the world. Formal identification took time, but medieval historians were on tenterhooks.
Gregory had the idea for the play when she was invited to the reinterment of the royal remains three years later. She commentated on the event on television, sharing the screen with the acclaimed actor Robert Lindsay, who had played the Shakespearean role. Lindsay suggested there was scope for a revisionist staging of the story.
Watching the coffin arrive in Leicester Cathedral, Gregory was moved to hear a man sitting beside her bow his head to say “God bless and keep your Grace”. “It was extraordinary,” she recalls. “And outside people lined the streets, throwing down white Yorkist roses. I realised I had done what all historians dream of. I had stepped back in time to attend a Plantagenet funeral.”
For the renowned geneticist Turi King, one of the experts who confirmed the identity of the king, the ceremony at Leicester was also a powerful moment. “I remember the crowds queuing up for hours to be able to pay their respects and file past the coffin. I and other members of the team who excavated and identified his remains went and spoke to people in the queue. Some had travelled from as far away as the US and Australia to be there.”
Gregory’s play, written, like Shakespeare’s tragedy, in iambic pentameter, will premiere at the Shakespeare North Playhouse, a replica Elizabethan theatre that opened in July last year at Prescot, Merseyside, and then go to the Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds. “Philippa has a great skill in humanising historical characters, allowing us to understand their world and their choices,” said Owen Calvert-Lyons, artistic director of the Bury St Edmunds theatre. “Now she is taking on one of history’s most notorious villains and inviting us to reassess what we know, or think we know about him.”
