I know that it's not this easy, but the thought crossed my mind this evening, and I thought it might be worth sharing. Two boys died so that we might have Hamlet. No, it's not that easy.
So Richard III is accused of killing his two nephews in the tower at the end of the War of the Roses in order to make his path to the throne easier. But the truth was that he was already Lord Protector and was essentially the king already. Most people were buying that the boys were bastards or didn't deserve a shot at the throne, and Richard was a war hero and a friend of the people. Many have pointed to the fact that the death of the two boys really served Henry Tudor, the Earl of Richmond better. With the Plantagenet family completely erased, his family stood nearest the throne.
The Tudor family brought nothing but chaos to the English throne. The trials of Henry VIII trying to get an heir -- first he fought for the Roman Church, then he fought against it. His two daughters did the same -- one for, one against. By the time that Elizabeth was able to bring some semblance of order to the nation, the fundamentalists had managed to get in there and change the direction of the country. Education was low; the health of the people was low; leadership was weak at best. The theater was a perfect place for cheap and easy entertainment away from all the troubles of the world.
Shakespeare emerges from this time as a shining light -- a man who brought the theater to a place of moral quandary, of self-examination. While he wrestled with big questions of government and religion and war and sickness, he also managed to get in the very personal. Would this have happened without the death of those two boys, without the rise of the Tudors? I know it's not this easy, but the thought crossed my mind, and I thought it might be worth sharing.
There's an interesting bit of revisionist history possible there, Rob. I don't know, but has anyone written a story about the sparing of the lives of those two boys? How history would have unfolded differently, as you speculate? Maybe that's your angle: the long and prosperous reign on Edward V. But what happens to Richard?
ReplyDeleteThe Tudors were a disaster. Hard times create great art? Maybe then we are in for a wave of great art.
Edward VI, actually -- Richard probably would have gone the way of John of Gaunt and just been one of those nosy uncles always trying to exert influence on the king.
DeleteDo you know Orson Welles's movie, The Third Man. It's set in Post-World War II Vienna, and Welles plays a crook -- I won't explain the whole thing, it's a great movie. Here he tries to explain why he does his crooked deeds to his friend, and he ends the explanation with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cydkTy6GmFA .