This is my response to our Winter writing prompt.
Now is the Winter of our Discontent …
My Selection — Richard the Third by Wm. Shakespeare
The powerful and moving speech made by Richard, Duke of Glouceshire, in Act.1, Scene 1 of Wm. Shakespeares’ “Richard, the Third”, always struck me as an agonized cry from a tortured, bitter soul.
Shakespeare’s Richard, supposedly born a hunchback, was portayed as an angry, bitter, crippled and vindictive man, moved to murder to serve his ends.
Shakespeare supposedly based his story on historical records of the time, but it now seems that those historians may have produced highly biased writings, wrongly portraying Richard in a bad light. He may not, in fact have been the twisted, murderous monster revealed in the play. Those interested can read more about it in this Wikipedia article.
Mine is not to ponder the veracity of the Shakespeare portayal, but to discuss his powerful poem as it affected me.
The first few lines describe celebration of the end of a long and gruelling war.
“Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.”
And what a description it is.
I love those four first lines. “The Winter of our discontent” invokes visions of restless, irritable knights, fretting about in castle hallways, clanking around in heavy armour and dragging swords about as they worry about the ongoing war. Then like a burst of joy “Made glorious summer by this sun of York”. Suddenly the war is done and the figurative sun breaks through, bringing joy and peace.
Then he declares joyously: And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried”
The dark clouds of war that hung oppressively over the land, and weighed down on the family and the country, have now been metaphorically buried under the sea.
He goes on to mention the post battle celebratory activities of those returning from the battle.
I love these next two lines. I can imagine the weary, battled-tired knights loosing their heavy metal armour and placing flowery wreathes around their brows, brought to them by smiling maidens.
“Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Their swords and spears, axes, knives and bows and arrows much used, dented, chipped , bloodstained and tarnished are hung up and left as a testament to their victory.
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Here the grim sounds of war drums and trumpets give way to happy greetings to friends and neighbours.
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
And now the sound of minstrels playing minuets take over from the awful sound of war marches.
Grim-visaged war hath smooth’d his wrinkled front;”
What a great way to describe the change to peace from war.
And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
These two lines perfectly sum up the fierce war horses, often stallions, which were aggressive, bad tempered and tended to pick fights with other horses, and weighed down with hefty saddles, and breastplates made of leather and clad with metal to help protect them in battles. They also had their heads adorned with awful masks and feather head pieces. It is amazing how these animals managed with their own heavy harness bits and the armour worn by the knights.
So, yes, I can see where these “barbed steeds” might well have stricken fear into the hearts of adverseries as they plunged furiously toward them, urged on by their grim riders.
The next two lines refer to how the victorious returning knights will soon be enjoying the favours of ladies.
He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
But then, Shakespeare reminds us of poor Richards supposed deformities, in these next lines.
But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
It is in these lines that one is made aware of the anger and bitterness in Richard. He is saying that his physical appearance is such that he is not destined to be a lover.
He rages on:
I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
Here he hints that his birth was premature, leaving him with deformities. and thus he is cheated of being a normal man, unable to enjoy the passtimes of a normal man.
In the next lines he continues to bemoan his physical appearance, hinting that he is so terrible looking that even dogs bark at him when he passes by.
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Richard comes across as a very bitter man as he carries on his rant, In the first line, he plainly decries what he calls “this weak piping time of peace”. In peace he is nothing, but in war he can be the valiant knight.
In the first line, he plainly decries what he calls “this weak piping time of peace”. Hinting that in peace he is nothing, but inferring that in war he can be the valiant knight.
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
In the second line he regrets that he has no pleasant activities to pass the time, except to watch his shadow, and to grumble about his deformed shape.
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
And since his appearance prevents him from a successful love life, he reasons:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
He must therefore become a bad guy, despising the peacetime frivolities indulged in by others.
The last lines of the poem reveal his evil plot to set his brother and the King against each other, in the hopes that their lives will unravel and he will be victorious.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the king
In deadly hate the one against the other:
And if King Edward be as true and just
As I am subtle, false and treacherous,
This day should Clarence closely be mew’d up,
About a prophecy, which says that ‘G’
Of Edward’s heirs the murderer shall be.
Dive, thoughts, down to my soul: here
Clarence comes.
I am sorry that poor Richard got such a bad rap in this play, because it appears that his actual body was finally found, dug up, identified and the remains indicate that he was not a hunchback at all, but rather suffered from Scoliosis of the spine, which would merely have caused one shoulder to be slightly higher than the other, and would not have impeded his activities at all. As previously mentioned, those interested can read all about how his body was found and exhumed in 2012 in this excellent Wikipedia article.
