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6 - Filming Shakespeare's history: three films of Richard III

from PART 2 - GENRES AND PLAYS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2006

Russell Jackson
Affiliation:
Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham
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Summary

Sir Laurence Olivier's 1955 film of Richard III centres on a single character and has, according to Anthony Davies in Filming Shakespeare's Plays, more links with his Hamlet than with his Henry V. It is, says Davies, a 'psychological study developed along the lines of attitudes to and conceptions of power'. The film is unabashedly theatrical, with the kind of stylised sets that Peter Holland labels 'fake medievalism'. As Davies shows, however, the play becomes cinema. 'The primary articulation of Olivier's Richard III is essentially filmic.' Richard III, writes Jack Jorgens, is 'not really a history play'. Olivier depicts a 'renaissance wolf among medieval sheep . . . Richard's opponents [in the film] are weak and stupid, but they do not seem as evil as they do in Shakespeare'. Indeed, his victims tend to yield to him without resistance. Clarence does, of course, not reading his own vivid treachery as a family trait that inheres in his brother. Hastings does, ignoring Stanley's dream and his own stumbling horse. But Lady Anne, we notice, has taken off her wedding ring before her second meeting with Richard. It is as if she is waiting for him to ask 'Is not the causer of the timeless deaths . . . As blameful as the executioner?' in the second confrontation that Olivier crafts from the script.

Olivier notoriously includes some of Cibber’s lines (‘Somuch for Buckingham’ and ‘Richard is himself again’), some of Garrick’s structural improvements and segments of Richard’s speeches from 3 Henry IV (‘Clarence beware.Thou keep’st me from the light; / But I will sort a pitchy day for thee’: 5.7.85–6) and parts of the long speech beginning at 3.2.124. Olivier’s choice is shrewd here, because that speech marks the ‘invention of Richard of Gloucester’ and his ‘differentiation from the comparatively colorless orators and warriors who populate the Henry VI plays’.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

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