Des Wilson

5.2.13
So they found poor King Richard the Third under a carpark. That is not only interesting for the rest of us but it's a great achievemeht for those who did it. Poor Dickey , he was one of the victims of a very sophisticated propagandist, William Shakespeare who led us to believe he was a ripe villain whose victims included helpless children. For some reason  we have never quite understood there are always good people who don't like that kind of thing and so a society gets formed , as in the case of Richard the Third, to restore the good name of the man we used to refer to in school as Dickey Trio ( Richard the Second being Dickey Duo). In Shakespeare's day theatre was as much an instrument of propaganda as it is today - theatre on the boards or on TV or radio -and  Shakespeare had to trim his sails to suit the prevailing political wind. But in his day the penalties for saying the wrong thing were a lot worse than now. Heads  did literally roll and if you were lucky enough to avoid that, you could find yourself without job or reputation and with very little help from anyone apart from those willing to help behindbacks. People argue still about what side was William on, religiously or politically, even  was  he a Catholic or what. Actually he was  a man of his time, with ideas swirling around his head which included  handed-down myths and stories from history and from religious beliefs and superstitions and political propaganda. The strange thing is not that he appears one thing now and another again but that he made such a wondrous job of what he knew and experienced and what other people said other people experienced. In school we relished stories of villainy - Cicero's speech against a rascal called Verres was a delight amid otherwise encircling gloom and Richard the Third was much more appealing that either Romeo or Juliet. So it is likely that some of us at least will feel disappointed  that Dickey Trio is being honoured at last and may turn out to be quite a reasonable fellow after all.
One uneasy thought though. There was a time when people who wanted to portray someone as wicked would give that person some physical difference as if physical difference, a limp, a less  appealing face or whatever had to be accompanied by mental or spiritual defect. That existed well into our own times and is only disappearing now. And was it Laurence Olivier  who emphasised Richard's  supposed villainy by acting him with distorted physical features as well?
Historical narrative  works two ways of course - Shakespeare was not the only one to portray Dickey Trio as a hopelessly wretched villain - he seems to have taken  that picture of him from Thomas More - variously called Saint Thomas More or Sir Thomas More depending on your point of view . More is looked on by some as a saint,has been for many a day, but people like  Hilary Mantel  have now painted a different picture and made him look like someone who greatly approved of and caused other people to be tortured.
So the lesson seems to be , if you are really keen to separate historical or theatrical wheat from chaff, truth from fiction, propaganda from truth, well, it can be done. Certainly. It may however take a long time until you can persuade the archeologists to dig up a carpark  or scholars to blow the dust of some of their long neglected tomes.