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Authors: William Shakespeare
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more than a dozen men in his home and disposed of the bodies in his garden, attic, and other rooms about his house. Reading up on the case in preparation to play Richard, Sher became fascinated by the banal normality of elements of the psychopath’s character sitting alongside the perversity.
Richard’s “unnatural” tendencies are linked in the text with animal imagery. In Elizabethan times man was held to be the highest of creatures and exhibiting animalistic behavior was seen as a fall from grace, a sin against the order of the universe, which rendered the sinner somehow subhuman. In Shakespeare, characters who upset the natural order of things, whether turning against their family members or against the state, are often referred to as predatory or poisonous animals. Richard is referred to as a “poisonous bunch-backed toad,” a “bottled spider.” In productions of
Richard III
these beliefs about “unnatural” behavior are embodied in Richard’s deformity, physically demonstrating his twisted nature and his closeness to the animal world. In 1970 Norman Rodway repulsed many a critic by his resemblance to swine: “He lumbers onstage at Stratford, blinking at the sun: his great pig-head appears to have been crew-cut, and some animal’s skin is slung over his hump.” 20 Antony Sher (1984) paid more attention to the spiderlike qualities of Richard as he wove his web of deception around the court: “The central image of his Richard he built on the ‘bottled spider,’ the assumption being that here was a creature too venomous to be set free.” 21
The most dominant characteristic of the Sher portrayal was his use of crutches to give Richard an extraordinary mobility: “huge black arachnid-legs which flew him across the stage in giant leaps, and which he used as extension limbs to fight off attackers, beat lackeys and, in one famous moment, lift Lady Anne’s skirt and probe between her legs.” 22 Dressed entirely in black throughout most of the production he appeared for the opening soliloquy like a black spider emerging through the finely wrought gothic screen which covered the stage, from the tombs of the dead, which lay behind in darkness. The
Sunday Times
critic described the effect:
The opening lines are spoken quietly, almost didactically; but with “But I, that am not framed for sportive tricks” [1.1.14], Sher advances menacingly on the audience, his body swinging like a missile on the adeptly manipulated callipers that support it, his hump displayed with a kind of inverted pride … we are spellbound by a sense of fiendish energy and huge physical strength. 23
2. Bottled spider with calipers—Antony Sher, 1984.
Simon Russell Beale (1992) admitted: “I haven’t the physical dexterity to play him as a spider, as Tony Sher did. I’m the ‘bunch-backed toad.’ ” 24 This was another performance much admired by the critics:
He supremely shows physical self-hatred rebounding into social revenge … Shrouded in ankle-length cloaks hidingwho knows what deformities, small flat head rocking with reptilian cunning on a roll of neck fat, he outdoes even Queen Margaret’s catalogue of bestial comparisons. 25
We are first aware of him not as a body, however, but as an undefined threat, a sinister creaking noise as he paces about shrouded in darkness. 26
A stick is heard tapping across the stage, the lights go up, and there he is with his scrubbed skull, pink jowls and vast hump: a depraved blend of Mr. Punch and A. A. Milne’s Piglet, gloating over the havoc he will wreak. 27
Many actors have found Richard’s deformity a pitiable circumstance, motivating his decision to “prove a villain” and take the path of evil. Like Iago, he despises the beauty in other people’s lives that makes him seem ugly by comparison. Unlike Iago, he is outwardly marked and this sets him apart: “I am myself alone.” Deformity lay at the center of Alan Howard’s performance in 1980. This is how
Richard’s “unnatural” tendencies are linked in the text with animal imagery. In Elizabethan times man was held to be the highest of creatures and exhibiting animalistic behavior was seen as a fall from grace, a sin against the order of the universe, which rendered the sinner somehow subhuman. In Shakespeare, characters who upset the natural order of things, whether turning against their family members or against the state, are often referred to as predatory or poisonous animals. Richard is referred to as a “poisonous bunch-backed toad,” a “bottled spider.” In productions of
Richard III
these beliefs about “unnatural” behavior are embodied in Richard’s deformity, physically demonstrating his twisted nature and his closeness to the animal world. In 1970 Norman Rodway repulsed many a critic by his resemblance to swine: “He lumbers onstage at Stratford, blinking at the sun: his great pig-head appears to have been crew-cut, and some animal’s skin is slung over his hump.” 20 Antony Sher (1984) paid more attention to the spiderlike qualities of Richard as he wove his web of deception around the court: “The central image of his Richard he built on the ‘bottled spider,’ the assumption being that here was a creature too venomous to be set free.” 21
The most dominant characteristic of the Sher portrayal was his use of crutches to give Richard an extraordinary mobility: “huge black arachnid-legs which flew him across the stage in giant leaps, and which he used as extension limbs to fight off attackers, beat lackeys and, in one famous moment, lift Lady Anne’s skirt and probe between her legs.” 22 Dressed entirely in black throughout most of the production he appeared for the opening soliloquy like a black spider emerging through the finely wrought gothic screen which covered the stage, from the tombs of the dead, which lay behind in darkness. The
Sunday Times
critic described the effect:
The opening lines are spoken quietly, almost didactically; but with “But I, that am not framed for sportive tricks” [1.1.14], Sher advances menacingly on the audience, his body swinging like a missile on the adeptly manipulated callipers that support it, his hump displayed with a kind of inverted pride … we are spellbound by a sense of fiendish energy and huge physical strength. 23
2. Bottled spider with calipers—Antony Sher, 1984.
Simon Russell Beale (1992) admitted: “I haven’t the physical dexterity to play him as a spider, as Tony Sher did. I’m the ‘bunch-backed toad.’ ” 24 This was another performance much admired by the critics:
He supremely shows physical self-hatred rebounding into social revenge … Shrouded in ankle-length cloaks hidingwho knows what deformities, small flat head rocking with reptilian cunning on a roll of neck fat, he outdoes even Queen Margaret’s catalogue of bestial comparisons. 25
We are first aware of him not as a body, however, but as an undefined threat, a sinister creaking noise as he paces about shrouded in darkness. 26
A stick is heard tapping across the stage, the lights go up, and there he is with his scrubbed skull, pink jowls and vast hump: a depraved blend of Mr. Punch and A. A. Milne’s Piglet, gloating over the havoc he will wreak. 27
Many actors have found Richard’s deformity a pitiable circumstance, motivating his decision to “prove a villain” and take the path of evil. Like Iago, he despises the beauty in other people’s lives that makes him seem ugly by comparison. Unlike Iago, he is outwardly marked and this sets him apart: “I am myself alone.” Deformity lay at the center of Alan Howard’s performance in 1980. This is how
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