Richard III's Bodies From Medieval England to Modernity by Jeffrey R. Wilson;

Author:Jeffrey R. Wilson;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781439922682
Publisher: Temple University Press
Published: 2022-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

IV. Different Worlds: Dramatic Reality in Modernity’s Richard III

The late-eighteenth-century paradigm shift in readings of Richard’s disability occurred alongside a change in how the tent scene was understood, drawn, and staged. While Shakespeare allowed the visitation to be either ghosts or a dream, and Cibber encouraged the dream reading, the Johnson circle explicitly argued that it is a dream. Johnson reprinted Warburton’s note that Richard’s conscience “takes advantage of his sleep, and frights him in his dreams.”72 Montagu wrote a long chapter “On the Praeternatural Beings,” looking especially at the Ghost in Hamlet, apologizing for Shakespeare’s superstitions by arguing that they are “allegorical beings” suited to “an age that affected abstruse learning.”73 Steevens gave a literary history of the Tudor chronicles that relates Richard’s disturbed dreams developing into Shakespeare’s “phantoms, speaking in their particular characters, on the stage.”74 And Griffith frankly stated that “the Ghosts here are not to be taken literally; they are to be understood only as an allegorical representation of those images or ideas which naturally occur to the minds of men during their sleep.”75 Shakespeare set the scene at night, when Richard and Richmond are dreaming, she noted, “which intirely removes the seeming absurdity of such an exhibition” (320–321). Griffith elsewhere declared that Elizabethans misunderstood the mind: “admonitions of conscience [were] taken for supernatural emotions” (77). Johnson’s circle really was living in a different world than Shakespeare’s early-modern audiences.

Shakespeare’s audiences lived in the world depicted by Henry Fuseli, whose work always demonstrates a flair for the supernatural and, around 1769, shows the ghosts rising vertically through the trapdoor of the stage to haunt a sleeping Richard, candle burning in the center of the image to indicate the supernatural.76 This paradigm representing the tent scene as the “ghost scene” includes another Fuseli drawing, lost to history, but preserved in James Neagle’s engraving, which shows some almost comically bedsheeted ghosts stacked vertically, one on top of the other, a candle burning on the left of the image.77 There is also a late-eighteenth-century sketch by a little-known artist known as the Master of the Mallet that shows an alert Richard visited by a King Henry VI who seems to be stepping down from heaven on stairs of clouds, past a burning candle.78 And there is William Blake’s early-nineteenth-century watercolor painting of the translucent ghosts stretched out vertically around a fully awake Richard swinging his sword through their immaterial presence, a candle burning off to the left.79

But the paradigm soon shifted, perhaps symbolized by Fuseli’s 1777 sketch of Richard III Visited by Ghosts. The starkly black-and-white right side of the image shows a swirl of vertical movement, indicating the presence of the supernatural, while the lightly sketched left side shows Richard’s visitors in a horizontal train, one holding a mirror with lines drawn to Richard’s head, suggesting projections of his guilty conscience.80

By the late eighteenth century, Shakespeareans were altogether embarrassed by what Edward Capell called in 1779 “that awful scene of the ‘Ghosts’ rising.”81 Like Hogarth, the Danish Nicolai Abildgaard’s

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