LOOKING FOR RICHARD III IN ROMANTIC TIMES: THOMAS BRIDGMAN'S AND WILLIAM CHARLES MACREADY'S ABORTIVE STAGE ADAPTATIONS

Abstract

In his commendatory poem from the First Folio, Ben Jonson asserted that Shakespeare “was not of an age, but for all time.” This has proved true, and Shakespeare has been able to speak to many succeeding generations of readers and theatregoers. This, however, is not because essential, unchangeable, and universal truths about human nature, the world, and experience lay hidden in his plays or his characters but (quite the opposite) because succeeding generations, over the centuries, have been able to appropriate, exploit, and reuse Shakespeare to make sense of their world and their lives. Shakespeare is for all time precisely because he has relentlessly changed over time. The author and his texts have been unceasingly reinvented, and a virtually infinite number of “alternative Shakespeares” has come to embody specific contemporary issues and conflicts. As Jean Marsden put it in 1991, Shakespeare is the object of “an ongoing process of literary and cultural appropriation in which each new generation attempts to redefine Shakespeare's genius in contemporary terms, projecting its desires and anxieties onto his work.” This is true for both the “dramatic” Shakespeare and the “theatrical” Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays have been as tirelessly reinterpreted on the page by scholars (and others) as they have been reinvented on the stage by actors and directors. The fate of King Richard III, however, is peculiar from this point of view, insofar as an often-denigrated Restoration revision of Shakespeare's play totally replaced the “original” one in the theatre and held the stage for nearly 200 years. This peculiarity acquires interesting overtones when we look at the treatment the staged play received at the hands of the Romantics, who, in spite of the bardolatry prevailing at the time and their often-vented disesteem for the adapted version, apparently missed their opportunity to make Shakespeare's original play speak for their own time.