Yesterday, my wife and I went to
the movies with good friends to see the National Theatre Live screening of Richard III, starring Ralph Fiennes, who
was magnificently, seductively vile in the title role. The equally stellar
supporting cast included Vanessa Redgrave as King Henry VI’s widow, Queen
Margaret, whose curses early in the play prophesy the eventual unhorsed fatal downfall
of Shakespeare’s first great archvillain.
The three hour performance was
emotionally challenging, especially in the aftermath of a US presidential
election, which finds an uneasy half of the electorate (myself included) casting
a worried collective gaze on a president-elect who was compared six weeks ago to
Shakespeare’s Richard III by Stephen Greenblatt, writing with eerie prescience:
“For his theatrical test case,
Shakespeare chose an example closer to home: the brief, unhappy reign in
15th-century England of King Richard III. Richard, as Shakespeare conceived
him, was inwardly tormented by insecurity and rage, the consequences of a
miserable, unloved childhood and a twisted spine that made people recoil at the
sight of him. Haunted by self-loathing and a sense of his own ugliness — he is
repeatedly likened to a boar or rooting hog — he found refuge in a feeling of
entitlement, blustering overconfidence, misogyny and a merciless penchant for
bullying. From
this psychopathology, the play suggests, emerged the character’s weird, obsessive
determination to reach a goal that looked impossibly far off, a position for
which he had no reasonable expectation, no proper qualification and absolutely
no aptitude.” END QUOTE
The current production of Richard III also made that eerie
contemporary resonance clear. It exerted a subtle, hypnotic appeal to the
audience’s Schadenfreude, as
Fiennes’s twisted, brilliant, exhibitionistic sociopath constantly confides in
us, while he, Iago-like, orchestrates a slow motion royal trainwreck. He pulls
the strings on a series of murders of every person he imagines blocks his path
to the crown, and seduces women in every direction, only to find himself
overwhelmed with guilty dreams once seated on the throne for a brief historical
moment.
As always when I see a good
production of a Shakespeare play for the first time, it brings aspects of the
play to life for me in ways that I can never quite equal from a mere reading of
the play, and this was no exception. And, as also regularly happens, a surprising
Jane Austen connection popped up when least expected. In Act 1 Scene 2, the
young, recently widowed Lady Anne, addressing the shrouded corpse of her
murdered father in law (the late King Henry VI), utters a bitter string of
insults and curses at the absent Richard, Duke of Gloucester (and future King
Richard III), the deformed Machiavel who has recently murdered both Henry VI
and his son, Lady Anne’s late husband. Near the end of her speech, she conjures
up this macabre fantasy:
If ever [Richard] have child,
abortive be it,
Prodigious, and untimely brought to light,
Whose ugly and unnatural aspect
May fright the hopeful mother at the view;
And that be heir to his unhappiness!
If ever he have wife, let her be made
As miserable by the death of him
As I am made by my poor lord and thee!
Prodigious, and untimely brought to light,
Whose ugly and unnatural aspect
May fright the hopeful mother at the view;
And that be heir to his unhappiness!
If ever he have wife, let her be made
As miserable by the death of him
As I am made by my poor lord and thee!
As I
listened to those lines, for the first time I heard a distinct Austenian echo.
Do any of you Janeites reading this post hear that same echo? Scroll down to
see…..
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In Jane
Austen’s Letter #10 dated October 27-28, 1798 to sister Cassandra, Jane infamously
makes what appears to be a shocking, and –- dare I say it?---Richard the
Third-like?--- heartless comment about a neighbor’s childbearing misfortune: “Mrs.
Hall of Sherbourn was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks
before she expected, oweing to a fright.—I supposed she happened unawares to
look at her husband.”
Think
about the startlingly close parallels: in both Lady Anne’s final curse, and in Jane
Austen’s tasteless joke, we have a mother giving birth to a stillborn child
sired by a very ugly father; and that mother suffers a severe fright caused by her
suddenly viewing an extremely ugly face (in one case the ugly face of her
husband triggering the stillbirth; in the other Lady Anne describes the ugly
face of Richard’s as yet imaginary infant son, who takes after his ugly father).
This already is all too close for coincidence, but there is much more to this
allusion by Jane Austen, once we delve more deeply.
Here’s what
Le Faye has to say about Mrs. Hall and her frighteningly ugly husband: “Reverend
Dr. Henry Hall was the vicar of Monk (West) Sherborne and Pamber in Hampshire.
“Dr. Hall may have been ugly, but his parishioners remembered him as being ‘a
man of a kindly disposition and none ever went to the rectory without being
well cared for”. “
Despite
Dr. Hall’s seeming to be undeserving of JA’s bile, I recalled that I had first
written about that very bad joke of JA’s more than five years ago here… http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/02/dr-halls-stillborn-child-and-mrs.html …a post in which I also showed that JA had revisited
a variation of her bad joke on poor Dr. Hall in Letter 19, written only 6 1/2 months after Letter 10: "…at the bottom of
Kingsdown Hill we met a gentleman in a buggy, who, on minute examination,
turned out to be Dr. Hall — and Dr. Hall in such very deep mourning that either
his mother, his wife, or himself must be dead. These are all of our
acquaintance who have yet met our eyes."
Clearly,
Dr. Hall triggered some pretty strong hostility from JA! And think about how that equally black humor in Letter 19 resonates
with Shakespeare’s Lady Anne who, in the same speech I quoted, above, is “in such
very deep mourning” because her
father in law and her husband were
indeed dead! And think also about how the real life Dr. Hall was in fact much
older than his young wife, just as Richard III was much older than his
wife-for-a-brief-time before he had her murdered, Lady Anne!
So it
is pretty clear from the above two examples that Jane Austen, in writing to
sister Cassandra, strongly associated the unhandsome Dr. Hall with
Shakespeare’s Machiavellian deformed monster, Richard III. We may never know
why this was so, but it seems sure that Cassandra was in on this literary joke.
But that’s still not all.
In that
above-linked post of mine five years ago, without the slightest inkling that Richard III might be involved, I wrote
the following about Austen’s two epistolary swipes at Dr. Hall and their “...strong parallels to the passage about
Mrs. Musgrove and her dead son [in Persuasion]….: "They were actually
on the same sofa, for Mrs. Musgrove had most readily made room for him: they
were divided only by Mrs. Musgrove. It was no insignificant barrier, indeed.
Mrs. Musgrove was of a comfortable, substantial size, infinitely more fitted by
nature to express good cheer and good humour, than tenderness and sentiment;
and while the agitations of Anne's slender form, and pensive face, may be
considered as very completely screened, Captain Wentworth should be allowed
some credit for the self-command with which he attended to her large fat
sighings over the destiny of a son, whom alive nobody had cared for."
Here we
have another mother mourning a son
dead far too young. But surely you now also recall the Christian name of Mrs.
Musgrove’s ‘thick-headed, unfeeling, unprofitable’ son ---Richard, as in Richard III! And Anne Elliot shares the Christian
name of Lady Anne in Richard III. The coincidences pile upon
each other in a remarkable heap of veiled allusion on JA’s part, spread among
her letters and her fiction.
So,
have I just finally found the explanation to one of the great Austenian
mysteries --- just as it’s not clear what was so bad about Dr. Hall, many have
wondered what’s so bad about the name “Richard”? Why is it that Mr. Morland in
NA is called “a very respectable man, though
his name was Richard”? In Letter 6 dated Sept. 16, 1796, to CEA, JA wrote
“Mr Richard Harvey’s marriage is put off, till
he has got a Better Christian name”. And why was Richard Musgrove called a “troublesome, hopeless son”?
Many Austen scholars have attempted to explain this
mysterious antipathy for this very common English
surname,
in both her letters and her novels, and I even wondered long ago whether it
might have anything to do with Shakespeare’s arch-villain Richard III. But
until today, I never had anything specific to go on beyond the name itself, and
other than my knowing how deeply JA drank in general from Shakespeare’s
bottomless well.
So I
now see Jane Austen, barely into her twenties, seemingly deeply immersed in,
and fascinated by the character of Richard III. Might Richard III have provided
part of the inspiration for JA’s great female Machiavelle, Lady Susan Vernon,
which was written by her during the same time period as Letters 10 and 15 containing
her Dr. Hall vendetta.
And she
never lost that fascination ---look at what she famously wrote to her sister
Cassandra 15 years after Letter 15, while watching a London stage performance
of the Don Giovanni story: “I have seen nobody on the stage who has
been a more interesting Character than that compound of Cruelty and Lust”.
I cannot imagine a better description of the character of Shakespeare’s Richard
III than that, and so we see that JA’s fascination with seductive literary
Machiavels never waned from one end of her writing career to the other!
So
please indulge me as I conclude with “A Richard, a Richard, my kingdom for a
Richard!”
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
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