This afternoon I attended Richard III at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox. I had never seen the play (nor read it) so I was a bit unprepared for just how many people the Duke of Gloucester killed or had killed before and during the play. They all showed up as ghosts during the night before the battle with Richmond's forces in the last act; there must have been a dozen or more. The most famous of his victims were the "two little princes", his nephews whom he had imprisoned in the Tower of London and then had killed. They were in the way, having a legitimate claim to the throne after their father the King died (also due to Gloucester), so they were eliminated. In fact, pretty much everyone was eliminated because they somehow stood in Gloucester's way as he seized the throne.
Gloucester, who became King Richard III, was clearly a psychopath, at least as Shakespeare portrayed him. He had no empathy for others, was completely amoral in his actions, and could charm the parka off an Eskimo. He readily admitted most of the deaths he caused, but then insisted that nothing could be done about them because that was in the past, it was time to move on. When he was accused of killings, he would castigate his accuser for lacking Christian charity. A true piece of work.
Ever since Shakespeare, King Richard III has been one of those men that people "love to hate." There's some debate about just how vile Richard really was, with the author Josephine Tey (pseudonym for Elizabeth Mackintosh) making a case for his innocence in the killing of the princes in her novel The Daughter of Time. For myself, if he didn't kill the princes, then what about the other 10 or so he is supposed to have killed?
John Douglas Thompson, who played Gloucester/Richard III, was truly outstanding. That's him in the photo above, although the continuity checker didn't catch the photographer in a faux pas: Richard was a cripple, with a hunchback, a limp, and a withered arm. As played by Thompson, the withered arm was the left one, which looks pretty healthy in the photo! Also very good was Johnny Lee Davenport, who played the Lord Mayor of London. Davenport is black, and he played the part as if it were a mix of modern black politician and black preacher -- it was funny, and very effective. He told the audience members, who were assumed to be the people (rabble, really) of London, "Don't forget to vote!" as he made one of his exits. The woman playing Queen Elizabeth (named Tod Randolph) was also excellent. Buckingham was played by Nigel Gore, an Englishman. It was a bit odd to hear the play performed with one British accent, the rest being American.
I'm very glad I got to see the play. It's full of famous lines, such as "A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!" and "Now is the winter of our discontent." This line, as it happens, is often used in isolation and thus out of context. The full text is "Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York; / And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house / In the deep bosom of the ocean buried." The meaning is just about the reverse of what the first line alone is taken to mean. As Bill Clinton famously said, "It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is."
Tomorrow is my last full day here, and I'll spend it cleaning up the house and packing for departure on Saturday morning. I can't leave before about 10:30 because I have to make a run to the town dump (there's no garbage pickup here), which opens at 10:00. As a result, I'm not traveling too far on Saturday, just to Hazelton, Pennsylvania. I think I'm going to have to get a beanbag chair for the cat when I get home. She loves to sleep on the ones here, as shown in the Facebook photo.
Tomorrow night I volunteer at Tanglewood and attend a concert there for the last time this summer.
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