Richard III Case Study: Dorothy

I found this assignment particularly challenging, as I am generally unexposed to Shakespeare and the conventions or experiments in regards to the performance of any of his plays.In class I was struck by the arguements over whether Richard deserved or should be portrayed as deserving any sort of sympathy.

"He isn't supposed to be sympathetic. He's pure evil!"

Having no deep emotional ties to Shakespeare and  thusly no negative feelings about completely re-framing the play, I put forth the following possibility; Richard is not pure evil, rather, he does not feel the same moral pulls that you or I feel, because he is not human.

In my envisioning, Richard is portrayed as a changeling. His deformity doesn't have to be a humpback, just something uncanny and moreover, something uncanny that everyone recognizes but doesn't mention. A changeling is an strange, often deformed elvish infant that has been exchanged (without permission) for a healthful baby.
 
The supernatural, in the form of dreams, curses, and an over arching fatalism, play a major role in Richard III and I would suggest an interpretation that honors those beliefs, making curses not foreshadows but rather alternate timelines, dreams not subconscious hints but rather precognition and the need for England to have Richard III dead much more than simply to have a better ruler, but rather to have a true human Christian ruler.

The question is, how to portray this on stage without writing in some extraneous text in the beginning with some nursemaids chittering "You know, Richard is a changeling! He was born healthy and beautiful, but days before his baptism he turned into...that." Well, it would be pretty hard to portray. I would like to try it out, however, on the following excerpt:

QUEEN MARGARET Outlive thy glory, like my wretched self!
Long mayst thou live to wail thy children's loss;
And see another, as I see thee now,
Deck'd in thy rights, as thou art stall'd in mine!
Long die thy happy days before thy death;
And, after many lengthen'd hours of grief,
Die neither mother, wife, nor England's queen!
Rivers and Dorset, you were standers by,
And so wast thou, Lord Hastings, when my son
Was stabb'd with bloody daggers: God, I pray him,
That none of you may live your natural age,
But by some unlook'd accident cut off!
GLOUCESTER

Have done thy charm, thou hateful wither'd hag!

QUEEN MARGARET And leave out thee? stay, dog, for thou shalt hear me.
If heaven have any grievous plague in store
Exceeding those that I can wish upon thee,
O, let them keep it till thy sins be ripe,
And then hurl down their indignation
On thee, the troubler of the poor world's peace!
The worm of conscience still begnaw thy soul!
Thy friends suspect for traitors while thou livest,
And take deep traitors for thy dearest friends!
No sleep close up that deadly eye of thine,
Unless it be whilst some tormenting dream
Affrights thee with a hell of ugly devils!
Thou elvish-mark'd, abortive, rooting hog!
Thou that wast seal'd in thy nativity
The slave of nature and the son of hell!

Firstly, the nobles hearing Queen Margaret's screed should be scared. They are a superstitious people who are afraid of the forces the woebegone mother of a dead son might align herself with. Even more frightening, however, is Richard who is preternaturally unperturbed by this curse. Margaret is throwing all abandon to the wind, however, and introducing early in the play the secret that dare not speak its name (in this case, Richard's parentage). There are three lines in this curse that would be responded to with shame and fear by those supporters of Richard 

Thou elvish-mark'd, abortive, rooting hog!
Thou that wast seal'd in thy nativity
The slave of nature and the son of hell!

Here Margaret calls Richard out, noting his deformity is not of human making (elvish-mark'd) and that he was damned from birth, not because he was fated to be deformed, but because he was fated to not be human. To be the "slave of nature and the son of hell" is a particularly elvish fate, made even more damning by the popular superstition that elves had to pay a tithe of one child a decade to Hell and would often try to escape this fate by kidnapping a human child and sacrificing them instead. 

In conclusion to my mad envisioning of Richard III as a supernatural tale taking place amongst superstitious people who live in close quarters with the otherworldly, I have included this classic record of Lord Tambling, by Anne Briggs, a heroic ballad that clearly discusses abortion as the only option when it comes to birthing even a half-elvish child. Allowing an elf to grow up as a human, especially one with privelege of being high-born would have been quite dangerous indeed.