The First Soliloquy in Ian McKellen's Richard III

Ian McKellen begins his 1995 film of Richard III with the Lancasters' defeat and the murder of Prince Edward and his father Henry VI. After an opening title, we see the Yorks celebrating their victory: talking, laughing, dancing, and listening to Stacey Kent singing Christopher Marlowe's "Passionate Shepherd to His Love." As she finishes the song, we hear a squawk from another microphone as Richard prepares to speak. He delivers the first couplet—"Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York"—and looks at his brother Edward. The crowd laughs at his wit and applauds his subsequent, triumphant lines.

The mood changes when he says, "Grim-visaged war hath smoothed his wrinkled front" (9). The camera moves closer to his own visage, focusing on his teeth as he talks of frightening his adversaries' souls.

Though still in the speech's first third, in which Richard celebrates peace under the Yorks, we are headed toward something different. When we reach the couplet, "He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber / To the lascivious pleasing of a lute" (12-13), we move to a different chamber, a men's room, where Richard unbuttons his fly as he talks of "the lascivious pleasing of a lute" (13). The change of setting emphasizes that he describes peace negatively, as being corrupt and "lascivious."

He urinates as he begins the speech's second third—"But I, that am not made for sportive tricks / Nor made to court an amorous looking glass" (14-15)—then buttons up and walks stiffly toward the room's looking glass, his gait imitating what he says about "halt[ing]" past barking dogs (23). Before the mirror, he washes his one good hand and dries it, beginning stage business that we'll see throughout the film: the one-handed lighting of cigarettes, putting on of gloves, taking off of rings, pouring of drinks, and so on. When he speaks of looking at his shadow and "descant[ing] on [his] own deformity" (26), he illustrates his words by looking at himself in the mirror. He then leans closer, examining his face as speaks lines from the character's first soliloquy, in The Third Part of Henry VI:

Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

And wet my face with artificial tears,

And frame my face to all occasions.

                                                            (3.2.182)

As he contemplates one of his best weapons, his face, he seems to realize that we've been watching. He looks at us in the mirror, then directly at us as he begins the soliloquy's last third: "And therefore since I cannot prove a lover / . . . I am determinèd to prove a villain" (28, 30).

He goes to the door, opens it, and says, "Plots have I laid" (32), then gestures with his little finger, inviting us to see the results of his schemes.

We then move outside, above a dock, where Richard finishes the speech by telling us that he has set the king against their brother Clarence.

Olivier's Richard III: Title Sequence and Opening Scenes

Laurence Olivier opens his 1955 Richard III with stirring tympani and trumpets and titles reading "Laurence Olivier Presents Richard III by William Shakespeare With some interpolations by David Garrick[,] Colley Cibber[,] etc." Viewers unfamiliar with English theater history might suppose that Garrick and Cibber were screenwriters and that the title resembles the one that supposedly opened the 1929 Taming of the Shrew with Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and Mary Pickford: "Written by William Shakespeare with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor."¹ In fact, Garrick was an eighteenth-century actor and Cibber an eighteenth-century playwright, and Olivier's reference to them gives us our first hint about the relationship between his movie and Shakespeare's play.

For almost two centuries, from the beginning of the eighteenth to the late nineteenth, the most familiar version of Richard III was by Colley Cibber, a theater manager, actor, and playwright best remembered as the Dunce in Alexander Pope's mock epic.

Colley Cibber, Workshop of Henry Cheere? (c. 1740)

National Portrait Gallery

Cibber made two large structural changes to Shakespeare's play. First, he began with Richard murdering the Lancastrian king Henry VI, the penultimate scene in The Third Part of Henry VI, the play that precedes Richard III in Shakespeare's first history play tetralogy. Second, he eliminated one of Shakespeare's greatest characters, Margaret of Anjou, who appears in all four plays, beginning (in The First Part of Henry VI) as a young bride and ending (in Richard III) as a kind of living ghost, haunting and cursing the Yorks.


Like Cibber's Richard III, Olivier's starts with a scene from The Third Part of Henry VI—the last rather than the second-to-last—and eliminates Margaret. Olivier also includes Cibber's lines, "Off with his head. So much for Buckingham" and "Richard's himself again," lines made famous by the actor-manager who succeeded Cibber at the Drury Lane theater: David Garrick, the most celebrated English actor of the eighteenth century.

"David Garrick as Richard III," William Hogarth (1741)

Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

As the best-known English actor of twentieth century, Olivier presumably felt himself to be Garrick's heir, especially when performing Garrick's most famous role. The connection may have been in film director Alexander Korda's mind when he commissioned Salvador Dalí to paint Olivier in costume as Richard.

Just as William Hogarth's painting of David Garrick as Richard is the most familiar portrayal of that actor, so Dalí's is now the most famous of Olivier.

Dalí Theatre-Museum, Figueres, Spain

Those who've seen Olivier's film will recognize his hat and the hand with two missing fingers. The ring on his pinky may allude to the ring Richard gives Tyrell when commissioning the little princes' murder. His double face represents both Richard's double nature and the actor behind the role. In the background is one of Dalí's Spanish-looking landscapes, now standing for Bosworth Field, which Olivier recreated outside Madrid.


As the film's title sequence indicates, in recreating this story, Olivier drew not just on Shakespeare's play but on the theatrical tradition surrounding that play. He also drew on Richard's legend. The final titles tell us: "Here now begins one of the most famous and at the same time the most infamous of the legends that are attached to The Crown of England."


Olivier may have stressed the legendary aspect of the story in part as a response to defenses of the historical Richard. Such defenses must have existed when the Tudor legend of Richard's deformity and wickedness first took shape. They began in earnest with Horace Walpole's Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third in the eighteenth century and saw a resurgence after the publication of Josephine Tey's mystery novel The Daughter of Time in 1951. In 1954, the actor Richard Clarke formed the Friends of Richard to defend the last Yorkist king. The following year, after the release of Olivier's film, Clarke claimed Olivier told him he included the shot of the inscription on Richard's garter—"honi soit qui mal y pense," "shame on those who think of ill of it"—near the end of the film "especially for you people."


Appeasing Ricardians no doubt mattered less to Olivier than drawing the audience into the film's atmosphere. The title sequence does this with medieval-looking calligraphy, border decorations, and illustrations that give us the sense that what follows is a filmed version of a tale from a medieval manuscript. Olivier's strategy here resembles what he does in his Henry V (1944), where he begins with a playbill for the original Globe performance, moves to a shot over a model of London, then to the Globe itself (Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman may be imitating this opening in Shakespeare in Love). When the performance in the Globe moves to a more realistic setting, we get the sense that what we are watching resembles what would be happening in the original audience's imagination. Olivier reinforces that sense at the end of the film when he returns to the Globe performance.


Olivier similarly bookends his Richard III by beginning and ending with the legendary crown. In the opening titles, a drawn crown dissolves into a filmed one—a trick Olivier reverses at the film's end—and the camera pans down to show us that this crown is actually an enormous sculpture suspended over the real crown, which is being lowered onto the "son of York" who is about to become Edward IV. A different angle shows us the other Yorks and their followers, lowering still more crowns, "victorious wreaths," onto their own heads. (There are far too many crowns here.) We see Richard from behind, his crown in front of royal one. The framing hints at his ambition, at which crown he wishes were settling on his head. Later Olivier as Richard will reinforce this impression by carelessly handing his crown to a servant, who drops it; Olivier will register annoyance so mild that we will know how little he values his inferior crown, the sign of his present, lower position in the Yorkist hierarchy.


Olivier introduces the hierarchy's factions after the crowd chants "God save King Edward the Fourth! Long live King Edward the Fourth! May the king live forever!" Richard looks over his shoulder, giving us our first sight of his huge triangular nose. Another shot reveals that he's not looking at us but at his ally Buckingham (Ralph Richardson), who in turn looks at Richard's first victim: Clarence (John Gielgud), who stands with piously folded hands, blinking, his insipid expression contrasting with Richard's and Buckingham's knowing ones. Clarence turns and looks at his mother the Duchess of York, at the little princes, and at Queen Elizabeth and her brother and sons by her first marriage. In a few quick shots, we have been introduced to every character that stands between Richard and the throne.


As these characters leave the coronation chamber, we're introduced to a character who doesn't appear in Shakespeare's play: Edward's mistress Jane Shore (Pamela Brown).

Pamela Brown as Jane Shore

She moves her hand toward the king, who almost touches her cheek with his scepter. Jane's eyes gleam, and Queen Elizabeth's face freezes as she moves with her husband into the next room, where Olivier gives us the last scene of The Third Part of Henry VI. Before Edward speaks of his son inheriting the crown, Jane slips behind the throne. When he announces celebrations that suit the "pleasure of the court" (46),² we see her in the right foreground. As the celebrations begin with a procession through the streets, we see her following in a litter.

Her character highlights Edward's loose morals, which Richard will use to delegitimize his son's succession. In later scenes, she underscores the weakness that allows Richard to manipulate his brother. For example, after Richard gets Edward to sign Clarence's execution order, we see Jane hand the king a goblet of wine: we understand that, distracted by his pleasures, Edward isn't paying adequate attention to serious matters. We see this again when he tries to make peace among the Yorks: as his wife addresses them with her back to her husband, Edward takes the opportunity to kiss Jane's hand. After his death, Jane plays a similar role in Hastings's downfall, distracting him from warnings that might save him from destruction.

Just as Jane's presence in the busy opening scenes gives us a sense of Edward's vulnerability, the next scene—Richard alone—shows us Richard's strength and determination. At the same time, the scene establishes a powerful sense of intimacy between Richard and the movie audience. The scene starts with the camera moving toward the palace door, which opens to reveal Richard leaning on the throne. When the door shuts behind the camera (behind us) Richard turns and looks at it (and us). He walks forward, limping slightly, blinks a few times, and looking directly at us as begins the play's famous opening soliloquy: "Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York."

After two thirds of that speech, Richard switches to a soliloquy from the preceding play, in which he first reveals his desire for the crown. The combined soliloquy demonstrates Olivier's skillful blending of the techniques of stage and film acting. For instance, in a way that would be too subtle to be seen in a theater, he highlights lines with his eyes, lowering them as he speaks of the clouds that loured upon the House of York being buried in the ocean's deep bosom (3-4), opening them wide as he talks of frightening his adversaries' souls (11). He speaks directly, often quietly, to the camera, creating a sense of closeness with the movie viewer. As he continues to speak in this confidential manner, he leads us into another room, where he limps away from us, toward the throne. His gestures now become larger and more theatrical as he claws at invisible thorns, acting out lines from The Third Part of Henry VI:

And I—like one lost in a thorny wood,
That rends the thorns and is rent with the thorns,
Seeking a way and straying from the way,
Not knowing how to find the open air,
But toiling desperately to find it out—
Torment myself to catch the English crown.
(3.2.174-81)

In a gesture that would be seen at the back of a large theater, he makes a backhanded swing with an invisible ax as he says, " from that torment I will free myself, / Or hew my way out with a bloody axe" (181-82).

He then walks toward us, getting closer than he ever could to a theater audience as he talks of how he can smile and kill at the same time. The camera backs away, and he follows as he reveals the terrifying extent of his duplicity. The movements of actor and camera make us feel that we are trying to get out of the way of this deadly chameleon.

Olivier concludes the combined soliloquy with Richard telling us that with his deceptive skills, he will surely win the crown, the conclusion of the soliloquy from The Third Part of Henry VI. We might have expected him here to return to Richard III's opening soliloquy. Instead he has Richard lead us to the scene that best illustrates our villain's demonic skills: the seduction of Lady Anne.

In Shakespeare's play, the scene begins with the funeral procession of Henry VI, with Anne asking that her father-in-law's corpse be set down so that she can mourn the murdered king. Her laments for Henry quickly become curses for his killer, Richard. The procession begins again, Richard interrupts and woos her, and Anne goes from wanting to kill him to accepting a ring and agreeing to meet him at one of his houses. The whole scene, from Anne's laments and curses to Richard's exulting over his conquest, is only 250 lines long, one of the most compressed and dramatic seduction scene in all of English literature. (Its only rival is act three, scene three, of Othello, in which Iago seduces Othello to his worldview.)

Olivier makes the seduction of Lady Anne even more dramatic by changing its beginning and ending. He starts with Richard hearing the chants from a funeral procession, a contrast with the cheers and fanfares of the Yorks' triumphant procession a scene earlier. Richard tells us that the body belongs to Anne's husband, Prince Edward, whom he "stabb'd in [his] angry mood at Tewkesbury" (1.2.248). By making the body Anne's husband rather than her father-in-law (Ian McKellan and Richard Loncraine make the same change in their 1995 film), Olivier gives Richard a greater challenge than the one he faces in Shakespeare's play: he must woo Anne (Claire Bloom) beside the bleeding corpse of her husband. And in Olivier's version, Richard doesn't just get her to take a ring and agree to meet him later: he kisses her and follows her into a bedroom.

Notes

¹Thomas L. Erskine, James Michael Welsh, and John C. Tibbetts, Video Versions: Film Adaptations of Plays on Video (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2000), 341.
²All line numbers come from The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997).

Shakespeare-Movie Soliloquies and Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight

Directors usually handle Shakespearean soliloquies in three ways: (1) they have actors speak directly to the audience, as they would have on the Elizabethan stage; (2) they have actors speak to the air, as yammering on Bluetooth-enabled cellphones; or (3) they use a voice-over, as if we were wire-tapping the characters' brains.

Each strategy has its advantages.

Speaking directly to the audience works well for villains, who share their nasty schemes, preparing us to watch with horror as they dupe unknowing victims. The technique also allows for dark comedy: for example, Ian McKellan's Richard III and Harry J. Lennix's Aaron (in Julie Taymor's Titus) act as satanic stand-up comedians, terrifying us and making us laugh with the same speech.

Having actors talk to themselves produces a different effect, allowing us to pretend we're hearing a character's inward thoughts. This works in both comedies and tragedies. In a comedy, we laugh—or chuckle inwardly—when we hear Emma Thompson's Beatrice (in Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing) or Helena Bonham-Carter's Olivia (in Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night) describe sudden changes of heart. And we pity Imogen Stubb's Viola (in Nunn's Twelfth Night) and Calista Flockhart's Helena (in Michael Hoffman's Midsummer Night's Dream) when we hear them lament that their love is unrequited. In a tragedy, the technique gives us access to the minds of a complex protagonist, such as Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet.

Branagh can whisper and be heard by a movie audience, but he still speaks the soliloquies much as Richard Burbage did during the original performance. Speaking aloud is to some extent a holdover from the theater, since in a film we can hear an actor's voice without his lips moving, as if we've got a direct line to his brain. Though less common than the other two methods, this way of rendering soliloquies can be used to great effect, as it is in Roman Polanski's Macbeth. In that film, when we hear Macbeth and Lady Macbeth's thoughts, we feel how their crimes have isolated them, locking them in their heads and destroying their minds.

Many directors employ more than one strategy. For example, Polanski sometimes gives us part of a soliloquy as a voice-over and another part aloud, much as troubled people speak fragments of their thoughts. In Oliver Parker's Othello, Kenneth Branagh as Iago sometimes speaks as if unaware of the audience but then addresses us, startling us and implicating us in his plans.

Orson Welles uses two methods for rendering soliloquies in The Chimes at Midnight. He has John Gielgud speak Henry's "Uneasy lies the head" speech aloud (2 Henry IV 3.1.1-31 in The Norton Shakespeare), but he has Hal and Falstaff speak their soliloquies to one another—a method not used in any other Shakespeare film I've seen.

The technique allows Welles to develop what many consider the most interesting feature of the Henry plays: the relationship between Hal and Falstaff.

We see this with Welles's handing of Hal's first soliloquy, spoken in The First Part of Henry IV after Hal's companions have left the stage. Hal tells us that he hangs around these men so he will appear more impressive when he abandons them, a notorious bit of calculation that reminds some critics of the way Shakespearean villains plot their crimes in secret, revealing them only to the audience.

In Welles's film there's nothing secret about Hal's plan.

Hal, played by Keith Baxter, begins the soliloquy as he is leaving Falstaff, whom we see over his shoulder. He stops in front of some twigs and branches. Fingering the twigs, as if contemplating how he might be snared by his loose companions, he begins in a soft voice, "I know you all and will a while uphold / The unyoked humor of your idleness." He stretches out the "while," emphasizing that his time with Falstaff and company will come to an end.

When he looks up, squints, and speaks the next lines—"Yet herein will I imitate the sun . . ."—a worried look appears on Falstaff's face.

He still speaks so quietly that we can't be sure that Falstaff hears him—until a few lines later, when Falstaff gives a small, worried chuckle.

When Hal begins to reveal his plan—"So when this loose behavior I throw off . . ."—he speaks more loudly, then turns and looks directly at Falstaff as he talks of how the plan will work. In the background on the right, we see the cart upon which Falstaff's body will be wheeled away at the end of the film. Behind Hal's head is the castle, representing the court world that is his true home.

Hal speaks the final couplet, turns, and walks from Falstaff, toward the castle. Falstaff calls after him, engaging him in their usual banter, but that banter now has a sense of desperation. To believe that Hal won't reject him, Falstaff must ignore what he's heard. This is harder than ignoring the hints Hal gives throughout the plays. By having Hal speak the soliloquy directly to Falstaff, Welles highlights Falstaff's self-deception and heightens the tension between the characters.

He uses the same technique for Hal and Falstaff's other soliloquies. For example, Falstaff speaks his famous "honor" soliloquy (1 Henry IV 5.1.127-39) directly to Hal, who looks toward the battlefield but hears every word. The new context turns Falstaff's comic "catechism" into a real attempt to teach Hal his philosophy of life, an attempt we know will fail.

Welles makes Falstaff's last soliloquy, an encomium to wine (2 Henry IV 4.2.78-111), even more poignant. He does this by relocating the speech to the end of the battle of Shrewsbury and connecting it to Falstaff taking credit for killing Hotspur. In 1 Henry IV, the king doesn't hear Falstaff's story, but in Chimes he does—and gives Hal a look weighted with pain and disappointment. Hal seems on the verge of disputing Falstaff's lie, and Falstaff swallows as if ashamed of what he's doing. The king takes a last look at Hotspur's body and walks away. Falstaff has stolen Hal's chance of redeeming himself.

The silent tension between Hal and Falstaff is interrupted by Hal's brother John, who tells Falstaff that "the king hath severed you and Prince Harry." In 2 Henry IV, this line belongs to the Lord Chief Justice, and Falstaff's rejoinder—"I thank your pretty sweet wit for it"—is directed at him. In The Chimes at Midnight, Falstaff speaks the line to John and, after John walks away, begins the last "soliloquy."

In the original, the speech's opening is occasioned by John's cold mien and reluctance to speak well of Falstaff. In Chimes, Falstaff is blaming John for separating him from Hal, as if the slander of men like John would be the only reason Hal would distance himself.

The next part of the soliloquy—the praise of wine—now seems an attempt to get back into Hal's good graces. Falstaff gets Hal to drink with him and tries to entertain him with his wit, but the look on Hal's face shows us that he is not amused, unlike the men who hoist their cups whenever Falstaff says something funny. Their reaction seems like mockery when Falstaff attributes Hal's courage to his drinking.

Hal walks away before Falstaff reaches the conclusion of the speech, in which Falstaff says he would teach his sons to addict themselves to sack (white wine). Falstaff implies that he has taught this to Hal when he raises his cup in a toast to the prince, joined by the men behind him.

Hal responds by turning away, and the smile fades from Falstaff's face. Hal drops the cup and walks after the soldiers, leaving Falstaff behind.

The next time Falstaff speaks to him—"My king, my Jove, I speak to thee, my heart!—Hal will respond with the devastating "I know thee not, old man."