Your Humble Blogger has been mome for a week, visiting at the house of one who it would be accurate to call my Next Best Reader. We had what I have come to think of as the Standard Vacation with Kids, where the days are spent carting the kids to playgrounds and commenting to each other how wonderful they are, and the evenings after the kids are in bed are spent drinking red wine and commenting to each other how horrible they are. And, since both of us are Shakespeare-mad, watching films of Shakespeare. This time, we included the Shortish Scottish, a version which gets the entire cursed thing done in less than ninety minutes, with some good points and some bad points.
Another thing we watched was Looking for Richard, a sort of documentary/performance hybrid where Al Pacino and a bunch of his friends spend their off days over four years filming Highlights from Richard III. Some of the performances are quite good (others, not so much) but I found the documentary utterly annoying. It’s stated purpose was to make Richard III accessible; Mr. Pacino and his buddies spend a lot of time at the beginning talking about how confusing and complicated the plot is. Hunh?
Richard III is a very simple play. Well, there are a fair number of people to keep track of, but you don’t really need to keep track of them all if you don’t want to. You just need to keep them into three categories: People who help Richard, people who flee from Richard, and people who Richard has killed. There’s some overlap, of course, but the point is that you don’t really need to remember who Stanley, for instance, is, or that he is Richmond’s stepfather, just that in one scene he is helping Richard, and then he’s fleeing from him. And the main thrust of the play, the story of it, is very simple indeed.
So, the morning after watching Mr. Pacino’s film, I found myself with two six-year-old girls, and I decided to tell them the story, to see if they found it complicated at all. They did not. They seemed to like it. The version I told, more or less, with the style changed and the question-and-answers removed (my storytelling style with children involves a good deal of question-and-answer of the Do you think that was a good plan? or What do you think he did then? variety, along with longish pauses for the children to jump in and provide the next bit that they have cleverly figured out) went something like this:
Once upon a time, there was a civil war in England. And the best general on the winning side was named Richard. He was the younger brother of the man who became King. There were three brothers: The king was the oldest, and his name was Edward. The second brother was George, and the youngest was Richard. He was a terrific general, and a great warrior, but he didn’t look very nice. He had a crooked back, and a club foot, and an arm that was all withered and useless. And he was a wicked man, very wicked and mean.
As long as the war was going, everybody was nice to him, because he was such a good fighter. But when the war was over, the new king didn’t want to have any more fighting, just parties and dancing and things like that. And Richard wasn’t any good at those. So he decided that the thing to do was to make more fighting. And to become King himself.
Now, the King, Edward, was very sick. But if he died, Richard wouldn’t become King, because Edward had two young children, and the oldest child, the Prince, would become King. And even if the children wouldn’t become King, there was still George, who was older, and so would be before Richard in line for the throne. So Richard, who was very tricky and smart, convinced Edward that it was George who wanted to be King, and got George locked up in prison. And then, when the King wanted to let George go, Richard gave a pass into the jail to some murderers so that they could kill him, and then told Edward that it was his idea. Well, Edward was very sad, and he made everybody promise that there wouldn’t be any more fighting, and they all promised. But Richard didn’t mean it. He told a lot of lies.
He got people to help him out by promising them things that he never intended to give them. And he told a lot of people that the Princes, weren’t really the Princes at all, but were fakers. And then when the old King died, he had the Princes sent to jail, and he told everybody it was so they could be protected, but it wasn’t, really, it was just to keep them in jail. And then, he had himself made King.
But he wasn’t a very good King, because he was so mean, and he told so many lies. And nobody wanted to be his friend anymore, because he didn’t give them the things that he said he would, and because he was so mean. So they all left him. And after he had the two little Princes killed, then really nobody wanted to be his friend anymore. And they all decided that they wanted somebody else to be King, somebody who wasn’t so mean. So they joined a man named Richmond, who had been in France, and they all made a big army to fight against Richard. And Richard called all his army together, but since nobody liked him, hardly anybody came. And there was a big battle, at a place called Bosworth Field, and Richard lost, and he was killed. And Richmond became the new King. The End.
Now, the point here, well, there are two points, now that I think about it. Well, three, if you count how easy it was to leave out all the female characters; afterward, I offhanded mentioned that I had done just that, and then the girls pestered my Next Best Reader until she told them about King Richard’s mother, who was crazy but could see the future, and about Lady Anne and the other one, Edward’s wife, I guess. No, the two points were these: later that day, one of the two girls went back on a promise that had been convenient at the time but was hard to keep, and my Next Best Reader said “you wouldn’t want to be like that bad King Richard, would you, who had all his friends leave him?” So that’s all right.
And the second point, is that Haftorah Korach is First Samuel 11:14−12:22, which is when Saul is anointed, and Samuel calls the people together and says, in effect, you were very very bad, and you asked for a King, which was even worse, so the Lord has given you a King, which serves you right.
And all the people said unto Samuel, Pray for thy servants unto the LORD thy God, that we die not: for we have added unto all our sins [this] evil, to ask us a king.
1 Sa 12:19
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.