The Plays of Shakespeare

Some of Shakespeare’s plays were extremely popular during their author’s lifetime, only to fall into relative obscurity in the centuries that followed his death. Others were less successful in their first runs, forced to wait centuries in some cases to have their genius fully recognized and their just desserts duly awarded. And a select few are perennials, as popular today as they were more than 400 years ago.

At the top of this class stands Richard III. From the moment the evil hunchback made his stage debut circa 1593, the leading actors of every age have relished the chance to caper and taunt and chew the scenery in the role, just as much as audiences have relished watching the mayhem. Nary a decade has gone by between Shakespeare’s time and our own without some momentarily recognizable figure clumping onto a stage to intone, “Now is the winter of our discontent…” in what he fondly imagines to be his own inimitable fashion, then making his exit some amount of time later with a cry of, “My horse! My horse! My kingdom for a horse!” Factoring in its high profile down through time, Richard III stands as the most popular of all the plays that Shakespeare wrote.

Over the years, it has been edited, expanded, bowdlerized, translated, remixed, and rewritten ad nauseam, while the purists have shrieked as bootlessly as Richard did at the Battle of Bosworth Field. The most common modified version — some might prefer the term “mutilated” — was for many years the one by a workmanlike English playwright and actor named Colley Cibber. His 1741 production of the play, starring himself in the title role, opened with some of the concluding scenes from Henry VI, Part 3, in which Richard first demonstrates his villainy by killing the young Lancastrian Prince Edward at the Battle of Tewkesbury and doing away with King Henry VI himself in the Tower of London. Other parts of the script were edited out to make space for these additions, with some somewhat less than melodious passages of Cibber’s own devising inserted to bridge the gaps and help an audience who hadn’t seen the full tetralogy to follow along. The production, and particularly Cibber’s performance in the lead role, were roundly panned at the time. But the modified script took on a life of its own. Yes, it was clumsy in places, but in the opinion of many directors it made for a better standalone experience. For Shakespeare’s play is at its best whenever Richard is on the stage; it threatens to descend into some of the same muddle of names and events that bogged down the Henry VI plays whenever he’s away. Whatever else can be said about it, Cibber’s version gives us more Richard, turns the play indubitably into his story alone, and that cannot be an unmitigated bad thing. Although it’s seldom used as the primary acting script these days, you can still feel its influence in most modern productions.

Speaking of which: when folks first started to fiddle with strange gadgets that were capable of reproducing moving images of reality on a screen, Richard was right there with them.

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It is said that an audience of jaded Parisian sophisticates broke into a childish panic in January of 1896, when a pair of bright-spark brothers with the perfect last name of Lumière assailed them with a 50-second film of a locomotive charging head-on down the track toward them. This story may even be true. But what is more certain is that this public debut defined the fundamental character of the new medium for years to come. It became a fixture of amusement parks and vaudeville theaters, marvelous and vaguely unnerving simply for existing at all. Few films ran for much over ten minutes. You couldn’t get more than that onto a single reel — and anyway, people said that the experience of watching one was just too intense to be withstood for a longer stretch of time.

At first glance, this literal carnival attraction of a medium seemed to be a poor fit for the plays of Shakespeare. Not only was the allowed running time absurdly short, but films were also completely silent in those days. As any schoolchild then or now could tell you — many of them in dismay — Shakespeare is all about the words the characters say. His stage directions regarding the visual action seldom extend beyond “they fight” or “he dies.” And yet Robert Hamilton Ball, who in 1968 wrote a definitive and exhaustive history with the descriptive title of Shakespeare on Silent Film, was able to track down documentation of dozens of silent Shakespeare movies, almost all of them lost now, that were made before the First World War, beginning with some scenes from King John that were shot at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London in September of 1899. The standard approach in those days seems to have been a “scenes from” format, interspersing very brief title-card descriptions of what was happening with pantomimes of the action. The result was, in the words of one contemporary critic, nothing more than “a bewildering mass of moving figures to the majority of the patrons of the electric theaters,” but the spectacle of film and the eternal allure of the Bard were apparently sufficient to compensate for the drawbacks in the opinion of most of those patrons.

Richard III was showcased in this fashion by the Co-operative Cinematograph Company of London in 1911, on the heels of movie versions of Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and The Taming of the Shrew, all of them directed by and starring the noted stage actor Frank Benson. Unlike its three direct predecessors and most of its other peers, Benson’s Richard III film has survived. It’s an unusually lengthy specimen of its breed, running almost twenty minutes, but is all too typical in the sense of being utterly incomprehensible for anyone who doesn’t already know the play well.

While this is the oldest filmed version of Richard III that we can still watch today, it isn’t the most famous and celebrated silent adaptation. That status belongs to another film that was released a year later and an ocean away.

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Beginning in Europe about ten years after the Lumière brothers shocked Paris and then the world with that oncoming train, some filmmakers experimented with longer-form content. This idea of “feature” films that you might actually sit down to watch took several more years to reach North America. When it did, however, Richard was there, ready to write himself into film history.

The man who first played Richard at length for the camera was an avuncular chap named Frederick Warde, who had been born in England in 1851. Determined to live the acting life from the day his mother took him to see a production of Hamlet at age ten, he came to the United States at age 23, hoping to make a name for himself in a country whose stages were less overcrowded with talent than those of his own. In New York City, he fell in with Edwin Booth, the brother of the infamous John Wilkes Booth, who had assassinated President Abraham Lincoln nine years earlier. Edwin had been one of the most lauded actors in the land before that fateful evening at Ford’s Theatre. Afterward, he had condemned his brother with sufficient vociferousness to salvage his reputation and restore himself to his former stature after only a brief interruption. It really can be a small world sometimes.

By all contemporary accounts, Edwin Booth was a genuinely brilliant Shakespearean actor. Frederick Warde was not, but he was competent and reliable at the actor’s craft; he always hit his marks and he knew how to enunciate to a packed crowd. These abilities, combined with his innate likability, were enough to make him a valued member of Booth’s supporting casts.

Warde eventually graduated from this apprenticeship to become a headliner in his own right, albeit never one in the same artistic class as his mentor. He and his friends put together a traveling show that functioned as a kind of revue of the Bard’s greatest hits, recapitulating famous scenes and soliloquies from a dozen plays on a single evening. Increasingly over the years, Warde interspersed these performances with chatty lectures, in which he explained to the audience what they were about to witness. The highbrows scoffed at his folksy style, but the masses ate it up; Warde’s troupe spent most of their time in smaller towns, performing for plain folks in Texas, Nebraska, and Ohio who would never get a chance to see the fabled lights of Broadway. By the time Edwin Booth died in 1893, Frederick Warde was much more famous in the country’s far-flung places. And more power to him: anyone who succeeds in taking some of the snobbery out of Shakespeare appreciation is A-okay in my book.

In 1912, when he was 61 years old, Warde agreed to star in a Richard III movie directed by one James Keane.

A company had been incorporated to present Shakespeare’s tragedy of Richard the Third in pictures, and I was selected to play the Duke of Gloucester. Richard the Third had been one of the popular plays in my repertoire for many years. I had played Gloucester frequently, and the idea of recording it by motion photography interested me greatly.

An unoccupied estate on City Island, New York, was the location of our labors. There the Tower of London, Guildhall, and other historic buildings were reproduced, and the charming landscape of Westchester County served as the green fields of midland England.

I found the action of the camera necessitated entirely different methods of acting from the stage. Spontaneity must be replaced by deliberation and concentration take the place of words. I had much to learn and considerable to unlearn, but the director and photographers were very considerate, although my ignorance of the camera must have tried their patience almost to the limit.

The director simply told the other actors what to do, telling them when to look glad or sorry, when to shout and when to fight, without telling them why they did any of these things. It was another matter for me. I simply couldn’t act without saying my lines, and I had to suppress all sense of the ridiculous to go through with the thing in such surroundings.

Many vexatious yet humorous incidents occurred. A picture of Gloucester’s ride from Tewkesbury to London was required. Most of the roads in Westchester County are flanked by telegraph and telephone poles. That would not do for England in the fifteenth century, but our director discovered a lane that had not been disfigured by modern utilities and would serve the purpose. A negative was taken, but a refractory horse made several retakes necessary. However, we finally secured a very good picture, only to find on examination a modern nursemaid, wheeling a baby carriage with two small children, had come into the background, unseen by the director but largely in evidence on the screen.

In spite of any discouraging conditions, the picture was completed and my first appearance in moving pictures was voted a success.

Film scholars use the adjective “feature” to designate a movie with a running time of more than 40 minutes. This adaptation of Richard III qualifies, being 55 minutes long, spread over five reels that had to be changed one after another as it progressed. It is difficult to say exactly where it stands in the chronology of American feature films; as so often happens with such things, when the feature-length dam broke in the United States, it did so all at once, such that at least eight long films were released there in 1912 alone. But we can say with real confidence that it is the first play of Shakespeare ever to be given the feature-length treatment, anywhere in the world. That we can still watch it today is well-nigh miraculous. For back in the day, “old” films were not respected or preserved. After their turn in the movie houses was over, they were routinely tossed in the trash.

Indeed, this precious artifact of Shakespearean and cinematic history was widely believed lost as early as 1922. But then, in 1996, a 78-year-old Oregonian, a retired flour-mill foreman named William Buffum, wrote a letter to the American Film Institute, explaining that he had had an original print of the movie in his possession since approximately 1960, when he had horse-traded for it with another collector. Now, he was willing to donate it to the AFI if he could just have his shipping costs paid. The AFI’s archivists sent a check for that purpose, but were skeptical until the package actually arrived. After that, skepticism turned to elation. One of them called up the source of the windfall. “She told me the film was ‘mint,” Buffum remembered later. “I didn’t know exactly what she meant, but I knew it was in good condition, and I knew it was made before The Birth of a Nation.” The AFI gave it a lavish premiere in October of 1996, close to the heart of a Hollywood film industry that hadn’t yet existed when it was made. In addition to the movie itself, the evening’s festivities included a live orchestral performance, ushers dressed in Elizabethan costumes, live readings by actors, and a scholarly lecture. But the highlight came when a bemused-looking William Buffum took the stage to a resounding standing ovation, to be awarded a plaque that labeled him “a hero of America’s film heritage.”

The legendary film composer Ennio Morricone provided a soundtrack for a painstakingly restored edition of the movie that was released on DVD a few years later. Today, you need go no farther than YouTube to see it.

In the words of critic Beverly Walker, the film is “no masterpiece,” but “well done.” Starting with the Battle of Tewkesbury, it manages to run through most of the plot beats of a typical populist production of the play. It doesn’t offer much in the way of nuance; a silent Richard, after all, can’t whisper his poisonous plans and sly jests in our ears, can become no more interesting than his murderous actions alone make him. Nonetheless, the movie is a fascinating artistic artifact, being caught at the intersection between film as a mere recording of live theater and an art form in its own right. On the one hand, Frederick Warde steps out to take a bow at the opening and the conclusion, just as he would if we saw him play Richard in person. On the other, we see James Keane beginning tentatively to make use of the new affordances at his disposal, to cut fairly quickly from scene to scene in a way that would not have been possible on the stage.

By way of blurring the lines still further, Frederick Warde toured the country with the movie, acting out between the scenes in the film some of the dialog that could not be captured by a silent camera. One has to suspect that Warde was attempting to reassert a measure of control, to reassure himself that, as film historian Barbara Freedman puts it, “the public still needed and wanted the body of the actor, as much as Warde, the actor, still wanted and needed a live audience.” Warde would go on to star in a number of other films prior to his death in 1935, but he must surely have been wondering as he did so what the new medium would mean for the art of live performance that he understood and loved best.

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He needn’t have worried so much. Live theater has survived and often thrived alongside its younger companion. Shakespeare’s plays have been adapted for film again and again, even as live Shakespeare festivals have become more of a staple of community calendars all over the world than ever. Rather than separating themselves into warring camps, as some might have feared was happening in film’s formative days, many actors and directors flit freely between movies and live theater.

One of those who once did so was Laurence Olivier, the man who is sometimes deemed the greatest single British actor of the entire twentieth century. Early in his illustrious career, he told an interviewer flatly that “I don’t believe in Shakespeare on screen.” He later reversed that opinion. Three of his best-remembered films are Henry V, Hamlet, and Richard III; he was the driving force behind all of them, serving as their conceiver, producer, director, script-doctor, and star.

Richard III was the last of the trio, released in 1955. Even at that time, it came across as a rather strange mixture of the ultra-modern and the old-fashioned. In the former category, it was shot in Paramount’s new VistaVision, a format that was, like its more successful competitor CinemaScope, capable of eye-popping color and unprecedented fidelity, having been introduced specifically to give punters a reason to continue to go down to the movie houses in the burgeoning age of television, the latest disruptor on the acting scene. Yet the movie which VistaVision displayed in this case was almost defiantly stagey. Olivier filmed quickly, accepting little imperfections in the performances and just pushing on, the way you had to do when you were acting for a live audience. Some people love the movie for its breakneck spontaneity. Me, I’m not so sure.

As is to be expected, Olivier plays Richard. From the dark yet flamboyant wardrobe to the prosthetic nose that could take your eye out if you aren’t careful, everything about this Richard’s appearance is a little exaggerated, as is necessary in a theater, where the folks in the back row have to be able to tell who is who. Olivier’s performance is full of vim and vinegar, but I find it more distancing than intimate. This may be a case of a generational divide. Oliver came from a school that predated Method acting, when good elocution — something he certainly does possess — was considered as important as feeling the role. I grew up with more naturalistic approaches.

That said, I still find some of his choices as a director nothing short of baffling. The final battle scenes at Bosworth Field are the only ones not to be filmed on obviously artificial interior sound stages, which is jarring in itself. But worse, those scenes were shot in Spain, on an arid landscape that looks nothing like the wet and rainy English Midlands.

Richard doesn’t become king until 130 minutes into this 160-minute film. Once he does, the rest of the story flies by in a madcap whirl. Olivier cuts out the scene on the night before the Battle of Bosworth Field in which Richard is visited by the ghosts of the people he has killed, in which he is finally forced to reckon with all of the sins he has committed and the hollowness of his victories. Olivier likewise cuts out the contrasting speeches of Richard and Henry Tudor — the bad leader and the good one, respectively — on the morning of the battle. It’s for all the world as if he had a look at the running time and/or the number of days he still had to shoot and said, “Okay, folks, time to rush this one along!” Absent the two aforementioned scenes, Richard III becomes a far less meaningful play, one that is more about the process of tyranny than its ramifications. I’m kind of flabbergasted that Laurence Olivier, of all people, failed to recognize that. But this was apparently the case; he prefers to waste time with convoluted subplots early on instead of getting to the heart of the matter in the climax. The end result manages the neat trick of feeling overly drawn-out and rushed at the same time. I don’t know what the maestro was thinking.

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Faithful, slightly stodgy cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare like Laurence Olivier’s became less the rule after the culture began to let its hair down a bit in the 1960s. It became trendy to “re-contextualize” Shakespeare, as the lingo went, by moving his plays into radically different times and settings. Predictably enough, some purists saw this as blasphemy. Personally, I have no problem with emphasizing the Bard’s universality in this way. But, like all things in the arts, it can be done well and it can be done poorly.

The best-publicized Richard III film of the later twentieth century took him into an alternative 1930s where Britain has fallen victim to the Oswald Mosleys in its ranks and succumbed to fascism. It was the pet project of Ian McKellen, another hugely respected British actor, who first played a fascist Richard before a live theater audience in 1990 in a well-received West End production. Like Frederick Warde long before him, McKellen was a latecomer to film, displaying no serious interest in the medium until he was over 50 years old. Yet it became an obsession for him after his Richard III play closed to bring it to movie screens. He pitched the project all over Hollywood. When Richard Eyre, the director of the play, declined to participate, McKellen wound up being partnered  with Richard Loncraine, an intensely visual director who shot movies in between the television commercials and music videos that were his real bread and butter. Together they assembled an all-star cast, featuring names like Annette Benning, Robert Downey Jr., Kristin Scott Thomas, and Maggie Smith.

Released in 1995 to strong reviews and more middling box-office returns, this Richard III goes a fair distance on sheer audacity. Its first ten minutes boast no dialog whatsoever, but do offer up, among other attractions, a tank crashing shockingly through an interior wall (what would viewers of the Lumière brothers’ film have made of this?) , Richard wandering through a gassed-out room wearing a ventilator that makes his breathing sound like that of Darth Vader, and an extended cocktail-jazz performance by Stacey Kent.

Alas, the cognitive dissonance starts to poke through the stylish surface as soon as the actors start speaking. It becomes clear that Ian McKellen and Richard Loncraine, who reportedly argued constantly during the process of shooting and editing, have made two completely different movies and crudely spliced them together. McKellen delivers a soliloquy, after which Loncraine, who has confessed to knowing nothing about Shakespeare, delivers a tangentially related visual set-piece. And so it goes, and so it goes. The most memorable scene of the film for many viewers is the one where Robert Downey Jr., cast in the oddly minor role of Lord Rivers, the brother of Edward IV’s Queen Anne and the scion of her Woodville clan, is killed in gruesome fashion while on the receiving end of a blow job. (At least he died happy!) Needless to say, this scene — another wordless one, although there is a modicum of moaning — was not envisioned by Shakespeare.

Even had it been executed better, the change in time period and setting would be awkward. As I’ve made a point of saying at some length by now, much of the psychology of despotism and tyranny truly is universal. And yet the details of how they come about are not, and those details matter as well in a work of historical fiction. The Wars of the Roses were a series of dynastic conflicts over family trees, bloodlines, and the prerogatives of royalty. Fascism, for all its well-known obsession with blood and soil, isn’t that. Fascism is built upon the popular support of the aggrieved masses, being the evil twin of enlightened liberal democracy; it is not the palace intrigues that Richard uses to attain power. Fascism is a revolutionary ideology; Richard seeks not to remake society, only to elevate himself to its apex. Conflating the pomp and circumstance of royalty with jackbooted thugs and SS uniforms results in a lumpy, confusing mixture of discordant tastes in tyranny.

Ian McKellen does his best amidst it all, but the film is all artifice, all glittering surface. None of the messages Shakespeare was trying to deliver can be discerned. By the time we get to the climax, with Richard slinging a machine gun around, jumping on and off of jeeps and tanks, and finally fighting mano a mano with Henry Tudor on the girding of a ruined building, we’ve descended to the level of either rote action-movie clichés or premeditated postmodern farce; take your pick. This heavily redacted Richard III — there had to be room for all those action scenes in its 104-minute running time! — lands even farther away from the heart of the play than Laurence Oliver’s overly loquacious one.

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Richard III returned to movie houses just one year later, in another heavily twentieth-century-inflected production, with a cast that was if anything even more star-studded: Al Pacino in the title role, Alec Baldwin as Richard’s brother George, Winona Ryder as his reluctant wife Anne, Kevin Spacey as his co-conspirator Buckingham. But this movie, which went under the name of Looking for Richard, was as different from the last one as it was superior. It wasn’t another straight adaptation of the play at all, but rather a searching inquiry into it, in the form of a documentary film.

As far as I can divine, it didn’t start out that way; it started out as Al Pacino’s attempt to make another traditional feature film out of Richard III, his first ever as director as well as star. But, for whatever reason, that movie never came together, leaving him with scattered footage of casting calls, creative discussions, and rehearsals in and around New York City, along with video of his research trips to England. Not wanting to let all of this go completely to waste, he remixed and re-contextualized it (there’s that word again!) into a movie about the play and its place in our culture. It’s really, really good, better than any of the straightforward adaptations I’ve told you about to this point.

That said, the rehearsal footage here is enough to make you wish that the original feature film had gotten made as well, that the documentary was merely a companion piece to it. As befits one of the finest actors of his generation, Al Pacino makes for a riveting Richard. There’s an odd sort of synergy here. One of the aspects of Richard III which comes up for discussion from time to time is its uncanny similarity to a mob movie. It’s got the violence, the anti-hero at its center that you love to hate and/or hate to love, the amoral machinations piling upon machinations, and the cathartic climax where the wages of sin come home in one last savage explosion. Although he spent much of his career running away from the stereotypes, Al Pacino will forever be defined in the eyes of the viewing public by the roles of Michael Corleone in the Godfather films and Tony Montana in Scarface. He brings a feral mob-boss energy to Richard; after watching him slip into character in a disused bell tower or an empty rehearsal hall, the depictions of Frederick Warde, Laurence Olivier, and even Ian McKellen seem tame and mannered. As Looking for Richard makes a point of emphasizing, all kinds of actors — even Italian-American ones from the Bronx — can do Shakespeare.

But for all that as we might wish to see more of the acting performances, they’re only a part of Looking for Richard’s appeal. The fly-on-the-wall glimpses into backstage offices as the actors hash through the material are equally compelling. What can they afford to simplify? Where do they dare to second-guess the Bard? These are discussions and arguments which are held by every company that mounts a Shakespeare play, from the tiniest community-theater troupes to the glitziest Hollywood casts. But we rarely get to see them.

What Al Pacino himself cares most about, however, is the people’s Shakespeare. He takes the camera into the streets of New York to ask random passers-by about their relationship to the Bard. Some of them are dismissive or noncommittal, but some of what happens is faith-restoring. A dentally challenged homeless fellow literally twitches with energy as he tells us how Shakespeare can help us learn to feel, man; Kevin Spacey entrances a crowd with an extemporaneous performance in Central Park.

Along the way, the film tells us about the play, its title character, and the man who wrote it, and offers some tips for approaching all three. I’m gratified to say that Al Pacino echoes my advice — or rather I echo his — not to get too hung up on the exact meaning of any lines you don’t understand, to just keep moving and trust that you’ll get the gist; Shakespeare should not be such hard work as so many of us try to make him. The recommendation that follows comes lamentably late in our own examinations of Richard III, but I’ll make it anyway: if you haven’t yet taken the plunge to read, hear, or see the play in its entirety, Looking for Richard can serve as an excellent primer. In his memoir, Al Pacino shared an anecdote from one of the first test screenings of the film.

One of the people who came was a woman in her forties. She was, I believe, a teacher; she was attractive and exuded intelligence and grace. She watched the whole film, and at the end, she was crying. I just sat there, waited, and wondered. Her words were “I never thought I could understand Shakespeare, but I do now.” She had a feeling of revelation. As if to say, I didn’t trust that part of myself. She was an educated person who had probably spent a lifetime taking a certain posture toward Shakespeare. She was aloof to it and had possibly convinced herself to look down on it. She had been moved to tears because she was both happy with herself and uncomfortable that this was something she might have missed out on at certain points in her life.

So, Looking for Richard is a movie after my own heart. It’s one film in this survey that I can heartily recommend to everyone. As for the other one…

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The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses, which first aired on the BBC in 2016, stands out from this crowd not only for being a television production but for tackling the entirety of Shakespeare’s tetralogy over the course of its three two-hour episodes. Its director Dominic Cooke was working with film for the very first time, after a much-lauded career presenting Shakespeare on the stage. Yet he had none of the trouble that Laurence Olivier or Ian McKellen had bridging the divide. The Hollow Crown is as richly cinematic as it is indelibly Shakespearean, balancing its visuals and its words perfectly. The production values are crazy-high, and the cast is to die for. I love it to little bitty pieces.

While there can be no doubt which play in the tetralogy is the strongest, there can likewise be no denying that the impact of Richard III is greatly heightened by first getting to see all of the backbiting, treachery, and conflict that created the conditions he exploits. The first two episodes of The Hollow Crown give us the three Henry VI plays, edited and rejiggered to try to make them more comprehensible for the viewer who isn’t steeped in late-Medieval English history. I won’t say that they succeed entirely in removing all of the stumbling blocks from Shakespeare’s slightly didactic plays — the second episode in particular threatens to lose the viewer at times amidst all of the twists and turns — but they probably do so as well as any adaptions could. And this leaves the stage set for my favorite ever movie version of Richard III.

The large cast are uniformly amazing, whether their roles be big or small. I have to give special props to Tom Sturridge, who cracks a code that has defeated many a better-credentialed Shakespearean actor: that of how to make King Henry VI interesting enough to seem worthy of having three plays named after him. Sturridge’s Henry is a blend of royal entitlement, native diffidence, heartfelt faith, and yawning loneliness. He makes you want to slap him at times, but you can’t bring yourself to hate him — not even as events in his kingdom are spinning out of control as a direct result of his congenital indecisiveness. I will never see the character of Henry in the same way after seeing his depiction in The Hollow Crown.

But the actor who truly steals the show, who demands and commands your attention every time he is in the camera’s field of view, is Benedict Cumberbatch as Richard. The other portrayers of Richard whom we’ve met today treated his physical deformities subtly: a raised shoulder here, a hitch in the walk there. Not so Cumberbatch. He and Dominic Cook made the brave decision to go all-in on body horror. This Richard lists and sways from place to place like Frankenstein’s monster, his body as crooked as his mind. But he isn’t only a tribute to the film’s costumers; Cumberbatch makes the monster all too human.

In short, my friends, this is the Richard we’ve been waiting for, in all his seductive and repulsive glory. Cumberbatch’s performance is not just one of my favorites in the Shakespearean canon: it’s one of my favorite acting performances in any category, ever. Really. It’s just that good.

Looking back on it as I write these words today, precisely one decade after its television debut, The Hollow Crown takes on a fresh and unwelcome resonance. In a little “making of” featurette included with the DVD version, Dominic Cooke states what he considers to be the central dramatic arc of the whole tetralogy: “How many bad decisions does it take to put a psychopath in power?” From the perspective of today, the statement rings as downright chilling.

For the year when this miniseries was first shown was of course the year when the Western liberal order’s crisis of confidence in its own values became undeniable, when the land where Shakespeare was born chose to exit from an important part of said world order and the one where I was born elected the person I have not so subtly compared to Richard to its pinnacle of power.  Cooke might just as easily have been describing how the historians and playwrights of the future will come to look back on our own times. All of which is to say that Richard continues to demonstrate his relevance again and again, whether we like it or not.

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(A full listing of print and online sources used will follow the final article in this series.)