Frailty, Thy Name is Entertainment

Fark.com has put up this article from the BBC that suggests that maybe, just maybe, Shakespeare was less than fair to Macbeth. This is not surprising as the entertainment industry from the Euripides to Michael Moore has always served agendas and sensationalism.

The Lion in Winter and the Robin Hood legends paint King John as an incompetent hoodlum, but the truth of the matter was that John actually took more after his famous father Henry II than his elder brother Richard I had done, being far more interested in England, the Law and governmental administration. While popular history paint’s John tax collecting as personal greed the fact was when John came to the throne the country had been almost completely bankrupted by Richard I, first by his raising funds to go on Crusade and then by the funds raised for his ransom. While John was a very dangerous man to be friends with, violently personally vindictive, a poor battle commander and a great maneuver-er & manipulator in the corridors of power (all of which damaged him irrevocably in the eyes of the Chivalric nobility), as a ruler of the English people was actually rather smart and fairly just.

Richard III probably suffered the most cruelly at popular history’s hands. Shakespeare drew material for his famous tragedy from Sir Thomas Moore’s history who had drawn his information from John Morton, Bishop of Ely and long time constant foe of the Yorks (ala War of the Roses), histories. Morton had actually fled the country to support Henry of Lancaster’s, later Henry VII, French supported invasion. Henry later promoted him to Archbishop of Canterbury.

Actual record shows Richard to have been a very just and popular king. There is no evidence that he had anything to do with the deaths of his brothers or wife and there is even evidence to suggest that the Princes in the Tower were still alive into the reign of Henry VII. When Richard was killed at the Battle of Bosworth, the city of York (which Richard had long ruled as Duke of Gloucester) recorded in it’s ledger…

"...bring tidings from the same unto the City, that King Richard, late mercifully reigning upon us, was, through great treason of the Duke of Norfolk and many others that had turned against him, with many other lords and nobility of these northern cities, was piteously slain and murdered, to the great heaviness of this City ... " [extract from the records of the City of York, resolved the day after Bosworth by the council members - August 23, 1485]

For a great fictionalization of the unraveling of the mystery of the Princes in the Tower, Josephine Tey’s Daughter of Time (from the phrase, “truth is the daughter of time”) is quick and very enjoyable.

And the physical deformities? Crap. Almost wholesale crap. Contemporary record from a visiting german dignitary observes that Richard's shoulders were uneven from a ill-healing fall from a horse he took as a youngster. But it would be very hard to imagine a fighter of Richard's prowess (he led the van in several engagements during his brothers fight for the throne) weilding a battle ax (his favored weapon) with the list of malformities Shakespeare gave him.

And I am quite sure there are many more unjustly maligned throughout history.

On a side note; I am reading Robert Fagles translation of the Iliad which is very readable and supplies a great deal of excellent support information. But I was thinking of the relationship between Agamemnon and Achilles, or rather their roles. It’s sort of similar to kings and war leaders, which were quite different jobs in Saxon cultures. Will have to do a little more research on that one. Or maybe my free associative memory is in overdrive... ;)

Commentary on State of The Union Address to follow.

P.S. I just wandered into the lunch room to use the microwave and was audience to a riveting, in-depth group discussion about mayonase and the benfits of Miricle Whip(tm). (And these were gals in their 20's and 30's!) If I ever get that boring, someone shoot me.