Great drama, a somewhat... um... flexible attitude to history, and scarcely a character alive by the end. There are the famous lines ("Now is the winter of our discontent"; "A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!") and some that really ought to be more famous ("fair Saint George,/ Inspire us with the spleen of fiery dragons!"). Very entertaining. ( )

shakespearean play, war of roses

There is a vicious scene at the end of Henry Vi part iii where Richard, Duke of Gloucester, murders the hapless King. Henry dies, asking God for forgiveness for both his sins and those of his murderer, and Richard responds to the corpse with fury:

Down, down to hell, and say I sent thee thither—

(He stabs him again)

I, that have neither pity, love, nor fear.

(Henry VI, part iii Act V, Scene 6)

It should have set me on my guard, that speech. It should have warned me that the confused, unfocused, erratic brilliance of the Henry VI plays I had been keeping company with for the last week thanks to my new copy of The Arkangel Shakespeare were about to bloom into something new and entirely different.

Unfortunately, as Richard—who has been called numerous names during the play, the most amusing of which was “Bent Dick”—was launching into his diatribe on my car’s CD player, I was pulling onto Route 74/76 east and found myself trapped in traffic by one of those annoying drivers who won’t speed up, won’t slow down, wouldn’t let me pass, wouldn’t even let me change lanes. I glanced over at him through the open window of his car, ready to glare, only to see him leering at me while he masturbated.

“Bent Dick!” I thought hysterically while I fished for my cell phone to call the highway patrol. “Ha ha ha ha!” full review here

FFYAA

It took awhile to get into Richard III - it's set during/just after the War of the Roses, and there's a lot of politics going on that are pretty obscure now. However, reading it as a tragedy with a touch of modern thriller makes it awesome.

Richard is brother to the sickly king, and a very respected military officer, but he craves more power and admiration than that. He has to work his way through most of his family and acquaintances though, picking them off one by one, to capture the crown. He's a master of manipulation and psychology, yet throughout the play we see Richard's own psyche and facades crumbling beneath the weight of this single-minded obsession. Wonderful, thrilling play that is completely worth the work to get through ( )