Speccie Richard the Third by 27th February
 

Well I'm sure we were all waiting for this one. A bumper entry I'll bet.

No. 2787: ghostwritten

Let’s have a Shakespearean soliloquy delivered by the ghost of Richard III reflecting on the discovery of his bones in a Leicester car park (16 lines max.). Email entries to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 27 February.

I lay beneath a parking lot,
at peace with Men and God,
when--au secours! My peace was shot
with strife sown in the sod!

Some eager academic beaver
crowned her bleakest feat.
(Though she 'll never find the cleaver
that sliced me princely meat.)

We dead are not such greedy folk.
Is it so much to ask?
To let us lie--it's not a joke!
at this most rotten task.

I heard the bones of monarchs shudder
good kings and princes all.
"They've carboned Richard!" I heard them utter,
to feed some newsy scrawl.

This seems too slight so I did a second.

Now is the bitterest moment for my bones.
Battered at Bosworth, they were lying lean,
at peace with worm and clod until the itch
for fame and gold began to goad his heart,
that clawing academic toad, the very face
of rude and callous. Yes, I hear him now,
like Madeleine of the coffin, I can
feel the chunk chunk of shovels pry into
what I had called my little world made cold.
The rattling grows, the worms and denizens
of mold and rot are fleeing from my skull!
For they can hear the tortured syllables.
And there they are! Those massive fleshy faces!
The women dressed like men! Oh, let me lie!
Let me lie at peace--by all the Holy Graces!
Too late! Too late! What use was there to die?

You’d think, the brains being out, the head might sleep
In dreamless peace. Not so! Each fretful hour
I do bethink me (though I do not weep)
Of my dear nephews, strangled in the Tower,
And how they plagued me for their pleasant sport.
By crookback and by withered arm unmanned,
I was their fool. ’Twas time to take, methought,
Their education (and their throats) in hand.

My crownless head uneasy still doth lie,
Though wholly unafflicted by remorse,
And ’tis an unkind irony that I,
Who would have giv’n my kingdom for a horse,
Should be tormented by the reek and rave
Of horseless carriages above my grave.
So now, though worms have made of me their diet,
I prithee, re-inter me somewhere quiet.

An ignominious end for a King,
more fitting for a fool or court jester.
No devil born deserves that final sting –
to end up being laid to rest in Leicester.

I'm a bad man. My life has made me tough.
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.
As for myself, I go abroad o' nights
And kill sick people, groaning under walls.
I have been one acquainted with the night
And hollow, hollow, hollow all delight.
Sometimes I go about and poison wells.
If one good deed in all my life I did
I do repent it to my very soul.
The croaking raven bellows for revenge.
I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you.
Why I can smile and murder while I smile.
And wet my cheeks with artificial tears.
Like the wild Irish, I'll ne'er count thee dead
Till I can play at football with thy head.
I am a bastard. God stand up for bastards!

Why does the curving of my spinal cord
Give curious pleasure to this scrum I see
Of busy fools all flocking round my bones
In the dull confines of the car-park buried?
I had a tomb, but other busy fools
Dispersed the monks and overturned their church
And I was left with not a stone to show
That here lay Richard, Shakespeare’s future star,
Who thrills the playhouse with his pithy wit
And ready way with axe and chopping block.
I staged my own ascent, to some applause
(Arranged by allies, nothing left to chance,)
And nearly beat that grasping Henry Tudor
Had I but found another willing horse.
Interred again in Leicester? Dismal fate!
York is the place where I should rest in state!

It’s been the custom--long before Achilles
dragged Hector’s corpse--to stab your enemies’
dead bodies, gouge their eyes, and dock their willies.
Why should I stoop to whine of tricks like these?
Nor does it fret me to have been paraded,
tied to a horse, a sword stuck in my bum,
jeered through the Leicester streets, naked, degraded.
Such are the losers’ rites till kingdom come.
The winners shape the story. I became
a villain whose deceits made groundlings chortle,
cutting a swath through all my kin to fame—
a twisted monster, witty and immortal.
But centuries have passed, and so should spite.
It seems ungenerous and downright surly
for those who found my bones to spread the slight:
“His back was crooked, and his arms were girly.”

L16: "but" changed to "and"
May I inquire of those who know The Spectator better than I do whether the language of this would be considered inappropriate?

Susan, I don't see any reason why this wouldn't qualify as "a Shakespearean soliloquy." I'm guessing that most of the winners will be 16 lines of blank verse, but I doubt that a rhyme scheme will be cause for automatic disqualification.

If your inappropriate language concerns involve non-Elizabethan diction or phrases such as "dock their willies" and "stuck in my bum," I don't think you have anything to worry about.

What Chris said - I love it. Shouldn't "but" be "and" in the last line, though?

I assumed that line was paying homage to "His sins were scarlet, but his books were read." But/and I've been wrong before.

No soliloquy yet from me, but I'm working on something along the lines of:

Housewives up above the ground
And worms below it lunch.
Who put me here? No answer's found.
And yet . . . I have a hunch.

Frank and Chris, the "but" in my last line was partly in homage to Belloc's line, as Chris picked up, but it was also there because the crooked back is what people would expect from Shakespeare's play, but they wouldn't expect "girly" arms. I am not sure, though, that the latter reason is coming through, so I may need to change the "but" to "and" to avoid puzzling the readers.

Susan

Good one, Susan. I'd go with 'and'.

Not sure I'm up to this challenge, but I wanted to share the best Valentine I read this week, courtesy of the Cleveland Shakespeare Festival.
Wars of Roses are red
Smothered nephews are blue.
I'd wait 500 years
Under a car park for you.

Susan, I don't think you have to worry about the language. (It's not like the prissy Washington Post.) The Spectator once set a competition based on Larkin's poem beginning "They fuck you up, your mum and dad".

I, too, think that "and" would be better than "but" in the last line.

A worryingly (for your fellow-competitors) good piece!

My previous post was just testing. I thought you would spot what it was but you didn't. Or if you did you kept quiet. Oh, and don't any of you say this is not a Shakespearian soliloquy. See A Midsummer Night's Dream 5.1 ( Puck), Measure for Measure 3.1 (The Duke) and The Tempest 5.1 (Prospero).



Dead and dwindled to a spectre,
I was once the Lord Protector.
Though my back was rather hunchy,
As a king my style was punchy.
Enemies? I used to whack 'em,
Choke 'em, drown 'em, carve 'em, hack 'em'.
Desperado, high and haughty,
Plot and stratagem my forte,
I was one contentious bugger.
Slaughtered, buried hugger-mugger
By malevolence disloyal,
A quietus quite unroyal,
Now I rise with kingly curses
In these rough and ready verses.
What a fate, horrific, heinous,
With a sword stuck up my anus!

John, count me among those who kept quiet, mainly because I was too busy doing other things! But your previous piece was a compendium consisting largely (or entirely? I'd have to check) of actual lines from Shakespeare. Good fun, though naturally [shudders with horror] it doesn't rhyme. But you've more than made amends with your new piece.

Top of the class, Brian. As you always are. It's called a cento. Some of the lines are actually by Marlowe and one each by Robert Frost and a songwriter whose name escapes me. A lot of effort for not much result. Very popular among late Latin writers.

Thank you for liking my other piece. Writing that was a pure pleasure. And I am proud to have filched my last pair of rhymes from the great Cole Porter.

Oh, and I confidently expect your (rhyming) verse to win something.

Thank you, John. My first version was only partly rhymed, but I couldn't leave it like that, could I? And although there are no actual lines of Shakespeare in it, your eagle eye will have spotted that there are a fair number of near-quotations or echos.

Good luck to both of us! (And the others, come to that - within reason.)

Naw, Brian. It's just thee and me. Thirty for me, twenty-five for you.

And the 'hollow. hollow, hollow' bit is Tennyson, isn't it?

John, I had recognized your earlier poem as a cento. It's clever, but I think you are better able to adapt the poem to the subject in the one with your own lines.

Susan

Quite right,George. And there's a bit of Milton too. Susan, you are so very right.

I should have learned my lesson after I predicted that all the "friendly bombs" winners would use Betjeman's rhyme and meter, then George demonstrated how wrong I was. Of course blank verse isn't the only option for a Shakespearean soliloquy. Rhymed iambic pentameter, tetrameter (iambic or trochaic), even prose -- there's no shortage of other precedents.

John, I wouldn't recognise a cento if it reared up and bit me but I do love your second piece.

Isn't L4 short a syllable somewhere though?

Thank you, Peter. It should be, and now is, 'a king', Thanks for spotting that.

That bastard Shakespeare called me bunch-backed toad,
helped Thomas More attest the attitude
deformity was proof of villainy.
My dunderheaded present-day defender
grew bedroom-eyed to see the handsome face
they plastered on a semblance of my skull.
(I’d have her, but I would not keep her long.)
She shuddered when they showed my twisted back,
refusing to believe my frame deformed,
as if it proved that all More’s words were true.
The straight-backed all are fools: a spine’s a spine.
Please keep blockhead buffoons away from mine.

Mary, this is excellent.

My favorite line to date from all the entries (not counting the lines from the cento):

(I’d have her, but I would not keep her long.)

So true.

Don

Thanks, Don! I'm worried it might be a bit cruel for the Spectator, but it was fun to write. And I agree that the best line is Shakespeare's :)

Yes, I reckon old Will could have won this competition hands down in his own words, although of course his references to car-parks are regrettably sparse.

I rather like it, though, Mary. Presumably "bunch-backed" is a typo?

Actually, "bunch-back'd" is Shakespeare's word -- at least in my Riverside. Queen Margaret says to Queen Elizabeth:

Poor painted queen, vain flourish of my fortune,
Why strew'st thou sugar on that bottled spider,
Whose deadly web ensnareth thee about?
Fool, fool, thou whet'st a knife to kill thyself.
The day will come that thou shalt wish for me
To help thee curse this poisonous bunch-back'd toad.

Good grief, Chris, you're right! Although (clutching at straws) I find "this" rather than "that" for the last line.

Later, there is also

Q. Eliz. O! thou didst prophesy the time would come
That I should wish for thee to help me curse
That bottled spider, that foul bunchback’d toad.

My apologies, Mary, for not recognizing the quotation!

Now I'd better go and drown myself in a butt of Malmsey.

Mary, your syntax in L2 is rather crabbed. You might try something like "endorsing Thomas More's assumption that" instead.

Susan

Thanks, Susan, sounds good.

False Anglican this isle, once true White Rose
Of York. September sun finds me a gnome
With a serpent’s spine to those who loathe me still.
Unfit for war my slender arms, they say?
I had unhorsed John Cheyne* in my race
To kill Welsh Henry and his dormant seed
That sprouted fat blasphemer—anti-Pope!—
And ransacked monasteries, shattered shrines,
Obliterating traces of my grave.
E’en Becket’s bones were smashed to dust and hurled.
All this Northumberland’s betrayal wrought!
No hunchback after all, no withered arm,
Last king to fight and die in battle, I.
Behold who walks above my tar-paved tomb:
Unwarlike, coddled, heretics abound!
I'd have prevented them had I my crown.

*Two syllables.

Hi Don,

I'm only knew here but it all sounds pretty authentic to me. Would probably lose the indefinite article in L3 to scan it better.

And I'm not sure about the 'Abort them would' in the last line. Doesn't sound like a stand alone phrase, even in middle English? But I am open to correction.

Hi Peter,

Thanks! I wasn't trying to capture the historic Richard III's English but that of Shakespeare's Richard, a nasty business he, but not so much so historically, not as much as the Tudor propaganda made him out to be. My aim for this exercise was to match a more historically plausible Richard, in terms of the facts presented, with the seething evil displayed in the Bard's smear campaign.

This isn't middle English and like everyone else's exercise on this tread it's really "faux Shakespeare." And fun to boot!

Don

Don, I agree with Peter that "abort them would" is an odd construction that seems to be lacking a subject.

And I agree with you that writing "faux" Shakespeare is great fun. In England (and perhaps in America?) we call it "cod Shakespeare", so I suppose it could be said that we're all writing cod-pieces.

I do think 'the bard's smear campaign' is the wrong way of looking at it. Richard the Third was ancient history. Nobody cared whether the Tudor claim to the throne had any merit. They had been there for over a hundred years and Elizabeth had done for the horrid papist Spaniards and that was that. What Shakespeare saw was a good story. Richard the villain had already had a most successful outing in Henry the Sixth Part Three. He returned, as it were, by popular request.

Th new boring Richard is a most unfortunate development. Bad kings are good box office. Was Jack the Ripper a royal prince? Oh I do hope so, don't you?

Nice work, all the same, Don.

Thanks Brian,

Actually "faux Shakespeare" was my invention but one out of ignorance of the true term "cod Shakespeare". I will use the latter from now on. Thanks.

John,

Thanks.

You're correct that "smear campaign" is a bit much. It is also true that you had better not give a nuanced picture to the Tudors when dealing with Richard III on stage. He had to be the fall guy whose end presaged the birth of England's rise as a world power. Who's to argue in favor of a bygone king long buried under what is now a parking lot?

My exercise simply dismisses the details that have somewhat "un-manned" Richard via Shakespeare, namely that he was twisted and frail (no limp, no hunchback).

Added in: Actually, the new Richard isn't boring. Now we know how high-spirited he was. The chronicles all tell of the man's bravery, but upon finding his skeletal remains it shows you what a strong mind and will can do for a man of such small and contorted stature. You have to give the man some credit for pluck.

Admittedly, though, a nuanced rehabilitation of R-III won't stand up to the tour de force of the play. So, a villain he will have to remain in our imaginations.

Don