Richard III: Self-Hatred at Loose in the World

In the film as distinct from the play, there are numerous segments with little or no dialogue, and there are occasional segments where the dialogue has been adapted at the expense of common sense. An example of a non-dialogue sequence is the love-making scene which is interrupted by a knife or

sword being thrust through the queen's brother. This does not appear in the play as it has been handed down to us; it is entirely an interpolation of the script writer and director. But such intrusions are not an unusual event in the rendering of one of Shakespeare's plays. The fact of the matter is that we have very little awareness of how these plays were originally mounted. So far as is known, Shakespeare was strictly a man of the theater. He never had any of his plays published during his lifetime, although a number of his works, probably from versions stolen by one of the actors or stagehands, did appear in quarto form with many omissions and errors. Nor did Shakespeare appear to have edited any of the plays for printing. Indeed, the definitive first folio (which includes most - not all of the canon) was not issued until some seven years after his death.

Shakespeare died in 1616, and it was 33 years after that that Oliver Cromwell beheaded Charles I and established a Puritan government. Then, until the Restoration, no public plays were performed in England. This was a sufficiently long hiatus for a whole generation of actors, producers and directors to disperse or die off. When the Restoration came in 1660, and the public could once more attend public entertainment, no one was there to say for certain how they were originally enacted, and what the overall production plan, costumes, scenery, etc., were like. With no standard or traditional model to follow, all subsequent Shakespeare productions have been innovative - and often unique.

This stands in contrast to the works of such a playwright, for example, as Molière, whose stage tradition, placement of actors, scenery, mo