‘Retailed to all posterity’: Post-truth, oral tradition, and the popular voice in Richard III

Abstract

This article proposes a presentist reading of Richard III, a play that can be used to reflect on – and critique – our perversely post-truth historical moment. While the powerful distort the past for political purposes, the play dramatises the way abiding truths about history are nevertheless passed down through time by a popular culture of oral tradition. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, I also relate a timeless, oral tradition to proverbial wisdoms and to the concept of redemptive, Messianic time.