Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 40

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Popular Culture Review

backs, to avoid being charmed by subtle, persuasive, and seemingly rational evil,
and to band together to resist tyranny. It also offers hope; just as good men, heroic
sacrifice, and resolve ultimately overthrew the seemingly unstoppable Richard III
in our past, we, too, ultimately will see good triumph over the evil now seeming to
overwhelm us.
Richard’s appearance in the 1990 BBC television series. Black A dder, is brief,
and used to introduce the series. B lack A dd e r is comedy, a staging of history to
spoof England’s own past, its treasured myths, and above all elicit chuckles and
belly laughs. Ironically, it points to what historians have ferreted out of the sources
at several points. Two have already been mentioned, the Tudor rewriting of the
immediate past, and Richard’s lack of deformities. Even Richard’s death at Bosworth
alludes to the controversies surrounding our received pictures of Richard III as a
warrior-king. In B lack A dder, Richard wins the battle, but is killed, by accident, by
his great nephew — a suggestion that Richard did not lose because of his military
ineptitude, nor because of Henry Tudor’s superior strategy, but because of accidental
treachery. Such a view dovetails with both traditional, and revisionist views of
Richard’s end, that is, that it was treachery, side-switching in the midst of the fray,
rather than desertions or superior battle tactics that carried the day for Henry VII
(Ross 215-17, Kendall 428-44).
But even though this is history used for comedic entertainment, English writers
tend to be a bit more informed about their history. Hence there are sometimes
insightful, if humorous, explorations of issues relevant to the late 15th-century—
church-state relations (one episode enacts a parody of the Henry II/Thomas a Becket
controversy), lingering crusading ideals, witchcraft crazes. Underneath it all is the
suggestion that history proves that the political scene, in every age, is dominated
by personal ambition and greed, self-seeking, short-sighted actions, smarmy, petty,
ineptitude, and despite it all, somehow or other, things muddle through.
Ian McKellen’s film version of Shakespeare’s R ich ard III stages history on
several levels. First, it represents a long tradition in stage-history to shape
Shakespeare’s play to appeal to the mind’s eye of a contemporary audience. Second,
it attempts to use the play and character to make a contempora