Richard III Casebook [Sara]: I saw good strawberries in your garden there I do beseech you send for some of them...

I began my inquiry into Richard III with Hasting's Strawberries in Act III, Scene IV.

GLOUCESTER

My noble lords and cousins all, good morrow.

I have been long a sleeper; but, I hope,

My absence doth neglect no great designs,

Which by my presence might have been concluded.

BUCKINGHAM

Had not you come upon your cue, my lord

William Lord Hastings had pronounced your part,--

I mean, your voice,--for crowning of the king.

GLOUCESTER

Than my Lord Hastings no man might be bolder;

His lordship knows me well, and loves me well.

HASTINGS

I thank your grace.

GLOUCESTER

My lord of Ely!

BISHOP OF ELY

My lord?

GLOUCESTER

When I was last in Holborn,

I saw good strawberries in your garden there

I do beseech you send for some of them.

BISHOP OF ELY

Marry, and will, my lord, with all my heart.

 Exit

GLOUCESTER

Cousin of Buckingham, a word with you.

Drawing him aside

Catesby hath sounded Hastings in our business,

And finds the testy gentleman so hot,

As he will lose his head ere give consent

His master's son, as worshipful as he terms it,

Shall lose the royalty of England's throne.

BUCKINGHAM

Withdraw you hence, my lord, I'll follow you.

Exit GLOUCESTER, BUCKINGHAM following

DERBY

We have not yet set down this day of triumph.

To-morrow, in mine opinion, is too sudden;

For I myself am not so well provided

As else I would be, were the day prolong'd.

Re-enter BISHOP OF ELY

BISHOP OF ELY

Where is my lord protector? I have sent for these

strawberries.

HASTINGS

His grace looks cheerfully and smooth to-day;

There's some conceit or other likes him well,

When he doth bid good morrow with such a spirit.

I think there's never a man in Christendom

That can less hide his love or hate than he;

For by his face straight shall you know his heart.

DERBY

What of his heart perceive you in his face

By any likelihood he show'd to-day?

HASTINGS

Marry, that with no man here he is offended;

For, were he, he had shown it in his looks.

DERBY

I pray God he be not, I say.

Re-enter GLOUCESTER and BUCKINGHAM

GLOUCESTER

I pray you all, tell me what they deserve

That do conspire my death with devilish plots

Of damned witchcraft, and that have prevail'd

Upon my body with their hellish charms?

HASTINGS

The tender love I bear your grace, my lord,

Makes me most forward in this noble presence

To doom the offenders, whatsoever they be

I say, my lord, they have deserved death.

GLOUCESTER

Then be your eyes the witness of this ill:

See how I am bewitch'd; behold mine arm

Is, like a blasted sapling, wither'd up:

And this is Edward's wife, that monstrous witch,

Consorted with that harlot strumpet Shore,

That by their witchcraft thus have marked me. (3.4)

I have puzzled over this seeming non-sequitor since first re-reading Richard this year, and my interest was again piqued when I noted that the moment was cut from IU Theatre's production. It seems such a funny thing to request--a bowl of strawberries--a medieval symbol of peace and prosperity--after just announcing in a previous scene that Hastings is essentially a dead man walking if he should refuse to disenfranchise the young princes:

BUCKINGHAM

Now, my lord, what shall we do, if we perceive

Lord Hastings will not yield to our complots?

GLOUCESTER

Chop off his head, man; somewhat we will do:

And, look, when I am king, claim thou of me

The earldom of Hereford, and the moveables

Whereof the king my brother stood possess’d. (3.1)  

And then moments later, his fate is sealed when Buckingham's fears are confirmed:

CATESBY

It is a reeling world, indeed, my lord;

And I believe twill never stand upright

Til Richard wear the garland of the realm.

HASTINGS

How! wear the garland! dost thou mean the crown?

CATESBY

Ay, my good lord.

HASTINGS

I'll have this crown of mine cut from my shoulders

Ere I will see the crown so foul misplaced.

But canst thou guess that he doth aim at it? (3.2)

Scraps from a Shakespeare character card from Richard III., c. 1890; "Scraps became extremely popular in Victorian England to be cut out by adults or children and stuck into albums, on to screens, or used for decorating greetings cards. This scrap is one of a series depicting Shakespearean characters played by popular actors. Edmund Kean first starred in Richard III at London's Drury Lane Theatre, 12 February 1814."

Looking for clues to riddle out this moment, I stumbled upon a letter to the editor written by Dr. J. Swift Joly in the in the British Medical Journal from 2 Jun1956 that puzzled over the same moment:

The story, “as every schoolboy knows,” is briefly as follows. Richard, riding to a meeting of the Privy Council, sees fine strawberries growing in the Bishop of Ely’s garden in Holborn. On arrival at Westminster he asks the Bishop to send for a dish of them, and eats them before proceeding to business. A little later he pulls up his sleeve, disclosing his withered arm, accuses Hastings of bewitching him, and hustles him off to execution, swearing that he will not dine till Hastings’s head is off.

This story is derived from the history by St. Thomas More, who had been a page to Cardinal Morton, the Bishop who owned the garden, and More must have heard the story from him. But in the form that has come down to us it does not make sense. If Richard really had a withered arm (unlikely in so great a warrior) everyone in the kingdom must have known it, and he could not have persuaded the Council that it was due to witchcraft. And what was the point of his demand for strawberries ? Suppose now that Richard was allergic to strawberries and knew that he could produce an urticarial rash by eating them. The sudden appearance of the rash would be accepted as witchcraft by most fifteenth-century minds, and it would be regarded as proof positive if the rash faded away just as Hastings died. Hence Richard’s insistence on Hastings’s death before dinner-time. More took down the story from Morton’s lips many years later and mistook the nature of the change in Richard’s arm, perhaps substituting “withered” for some such word as “tettered.”

I am sure that this suggested version must have occurred to other medical men before now, but I have never heard it put forth. It will not appeal to the modem whitewashing school of historians, but it exactly fits the cynical audacity of the traditional character of Richard III as Shakespeare portrays it.

While certainly an interesting interpretation of the anecdote included in More, Joly's explanation is hardly sufficient for explaining the dramatic significance of the strawberries. Turning to the historical record, it seems that the strawberry moment has also provided a way in for historians. Retha M. Warnicke writes in a 1992 edition of The History Journal that scholars may find it useful to note that many of the anecdotes found in More's The History of Richard III (from which Shakespeare took much of the material for his play) were structured around the conventions of religious drama. "Some of its uncorroborated details, such as the withered limb and the strawberries," she writes, "have their origin in More's decision to adapt scenes from the biblical pageants to the events of Richard's succession" (778). While many scholar's have pointed to both Shakespeare's and More's Richards as analogous to the vice character in medieval morality plays, Warnicke goes further to suggest that apart from simply adopting the conventions or cognitive modelling of villains from a theatrical genre, that More consciously adapted his historical anecdotes to more closely approximate well-known scenes from medieval mystery plays, specifically those of the Corpus Cristi festivals popular in England:

"The sheer abundance and relevance of the evidence strongly supports the suggestion that in composing [The History of] Richard III More not only adapted to it the mysteries' underlying themes of tyranny and sacrifice and some of their internal dramatic conventions but also their rise-and-fall pattern. That these vernacular native plays influenced his writing is consistent with the speculation that he composed the English version first, a claim other scholars have already made, citing as their major proof that it continues on into the reign of Richard while its Latin counterpart ends with his coronation" (776).

Warnicke's analysis is complex and detailed, comparing the well known moments from Shakespeare with their antecedent's in More and then paralleling those moments with popular vignettes from the Corpus Christi cycle. 

A Eucharistic procession from an illuminated manuscript depicting the Feast of Corpus Christi.

She yields fruitful comparisons in her mapping of Richard onto Herod and the Feast of the Slaughter of the Innocents (aka Feast of the Holy Innocents or Childermas). Nevertheless, she claims, it isn't until the strawberry scene that the imagery of the cycle is made fully manifest: 

"At this stage in the history, even with his bizarre description, Richard cannot, on the basis of his personal activities at least, be explicitly identified as a demon. It could be argued, for example, that the removal of his nephew from the influence of his mother and her relatives was simply good politics. After all, both an influential duke and a respected cardinal had supported his decisions and actions. In the Tower scene, which is the turning point of the story, the focus is transferred from Richard's supporters to himself; here, amidst references to witchcraft, he is for the first time revealed as more than a sinner, in fact, as a devil-worshipper. …

On I 3 June, according to More's account, as the protector commits several deadly sins, he becomes increasingly grotesque in looks. Arriving at the Tower late, about 9 a.m., he confesses to the sin of sloth in his admission that he had been 'a slepe that day' (pp. 47-8) and thereby reveals that he has absented himself from divine service. The Hegge master has wicked souls charged at the Last Judgment with sloth for not attending 'masse nore mateynes' (376/IO9-IO), and all good Christians knew that it was the devil who made men lie too long abed. During the lengthy summer days, when the English people customarily rose with the sun and went to bed with its setting, they suspected sleepy heads of having been up all night performing mischief for the devil who loved the midnight hour, or as a Wakefield evil soul confesses: 'Bot oft tymes maide we sacrifice to sathanas when othere can slepe' (xxx, 23-4). On this holy fast day, Richard next commits the deadly sin of gluttony when he asks for a 'messe' of Morton's good strawberries (p. 47), for it was thought that even 'trivial food peccadillos endangered salvation'.22 It is interesting that in a line shortly after the strawberry request, More uses the word 'fast' although not in connection with food. This scene is filled with parodies of the mysteries, Richard's gluttony on a fast day, for example, recalling the charges that Christ had violated the Jewish sabbath (Wakefield, xxi, 85).

The strawberry request, which is revealed in three sentences, some seventy words, has hitherto lacked adequate explanation. In the Tower scene there is no reference to anyone's actually eating the fruit, which was special to Frigga,
a Germanic Goddess after whom the sixth day of the week is named. That folklore credited this Goddess with concealing deceased infants in a strawberry and smuggling them into heaven is interesting.23 By having Richard order a ' messe ' of strawberries, More could have him appear to be planning a sacrifice to Satan in a parody of the sacrament of the Christian mass or messe (as it was often spelled).

Recalling the grape, a symbol of the Eucharistic wine, the strawberry was a clever choice because a number of other berries was associated with pagan dieties and with demonology. The red berries of the rowan tree, which were sacred to the Celtic dieties, were thought to be a protection against witches; the devil was widely believed to spit on blackberries after Michaelmas Day; in folklore some berries were said to confer immortality; and a primitive taboo rested on red-coloured food which was considered proper as an offering to the dead only. It was also convenient in June, when strawberries were just ripening, that only minutes before he was to order the summary execution of Hastings, Richard could appear to be following the example of Cain the first murderer and of other pre-Christians who sacrificed first fruits to their deities.24
The Tower scene has other ironies. It is a bishop, one of Christ's flock, who is requested to obtain the fruit and specifically from his Holborn palace. The name, Holborn, a place reputed to have juries that brought in false verdicts, as More's English contemporaries would have known, 25 might well have brought to their minds memories of Pilate's claim in the Wakefield cycle that he welcomes bribery and other perversions of the law (xxii, I4-26). 

Furthermore, any English person who could have read More's work in 15I8, for example, would also have been aware that the wood strawberry, the only variety known in the kingdom at this time, was still more available in the forests where boars roamed and where witches allegedly congregated than in cultivated gardens. There is no other evidence that strawberries were actually grown at Holborn in 1483 and probably they were not, for between 1399 and 1509 little use was made in English gardens of herbs, fruits, and roots that grew plentifully in the wild. Recipes and medical books of the day warned about the dangerous qualities of the strawberry, the wild variety of which was somewhat sour, and cautioned that it should be eaten only with certain foods and at special times during meals" (770-771) 

Inspired by this image of the strawberry and a distinct moment in which the sharp collisions between Christian theology, pagan symbology, and secular drama are made manifest, I would propose a production with a pronounced medieval carnival aesthetic. Returning to a moment pre-dating Shakespeare, I would seek to highlight the overdetermined nature of the images at work throughout the text, modifying the constructs of a mansion/platea staging to render overt the influence of "pagan" or at least "extra-Christian" structures at work in Richard III's linguistic meaning-making. There are immediate rich and visceral images in the animal standards--imagine a festival atmosphere and theatre in the streets with the gush of Strawberry Wine and Smoking Boar on a spit.

Scenic rendering of the mansions used in the Valenciennes Mystery Play, 1547.

Much like the relatively recent Sam Mendes production, I feel that there are definite staging possibilities within the Heaven/Hell Mouth Dichotomy, but I would take their function beyond the mere representation of a medieval sensibility and embrace the notion of processional staging. How lovely to place Edward IV in his proper place as determined by Divine right and allow Richard to fall into the hell mouth upon defeat, yes, but why not stage the production in a civic center, among the city streets decorated with the trappings of bygone religiosity. Like the strawberry, meanings become multi-layered and temporalities collide as the medieval notion of vernacular theatre of the civic realm confronts the early modern era in which words create the world.

The mise en scene would be necessarily anachronistic, interrogating on one level the polychronic/multi-temporal components of performing a fictionalized 15th C. history written in the 16th C. and staged in the 21st C., but perhaps more importantly, it would also stage the Bakhtinian inversions of power implicit in the carnival atmosphere and made manifest in the liminal moments between peace and war, changing historical notions of self and time, and the reconstruction of religious identity.

Edited to add:
I was harkening back this morning to Ellen's comment about our Lilly Library "thing search" and thinking too about the potential to expand on the applications of the illuminations from the Books of Hours that we perused. There is already the potential within the text of Shakespeare's Richard III for a sort of tableau vivant reflecting the Office of the Dead.

Drawing inspiration from Warnicke's Reading of More's History of Richard III as a pageant play, there are moments to draw in more of these feast day illuminations, if not in full, at least as aesthetic inspiration. 

I think immediately of the aforementioned Corpus Christi and Feast of the Innocents, but there is also potential in co-opting the imagery of the Feast of the Coronation in the beginning of the play and the Annunciation near the end.