‘O, ‘twas the foulest deed to slay
that babe,
And the most merciless that e’er was
heard of!’
-Lord
Hastings
King Richard the Third Act
I, scene iii Line 185,186
So here we go! What do we know so far? Sounds like they’re
talking about some little kid getting killed. I don’t think they used ‘babe’
for a woman like we might use ‘babe’ today.
But we’ll read a few more lines in a minute. In the meantime, Shakespeare’s Richard III is a pretty popular play and
it gets performed all the time. If I’m not mistaken it was the role that was
being performed by Richard Dryfuss in The
Goodbye Girl, and he got an Oscar for that. To be clear, he got the Oscar
for portraying an actor who was doing Richard
III off-Broadway. He didn’t actually get the Oscar for portraying Richard
III. In fact, if memory serves, he didn’t like the role of Richard III, or at
least he didn’t like the way the director was making him play it in the movie.
But I digress. Again.
As I was saying, it’s a fairly popular play. It’s also
somewhat topical in that it’s about the British king that they found in a
parking lot a few years ago. Well, they found his hundreds year old remains
when they were excavating in a parking lot. But let’s see if we can find out
who got slain. It sounds pretty bad; foulest deed, most merciless.
Okay, so I took a quick look at Richard III (the guy, not the
play) and there’s a lot going on there. I had my printout of the British
Monarchs somewhere, but I’m going to have to reprint that. In any event,
Richard III (the monarch, not the play) was around in the mid 1400’s. Again,
Shakespeare wrote around the year 1600. So this guy was 150 years or so in the
past. As with just about all of his history plays, Shakespeare used something
called Holinshed’s Chronicles as his source for the facts. Of course, like
Hollywood today, he played a little loose with the facts. But now we have a lot
more than Holinshed for our place to get the facts. So how about if I give you
some homework and you can see if you can figure out just what babe got slain.
That would be very helpful for me and would give you something constructive to
do. Most merciless!!
3 comments:
this sounds like he's referring to the princes in the tower who were famously murdered so that richard could be king.
Very good assumption.
Wait, Hold the phone. There was a British king's remains tossed somewhere so random that they were dug up in a parking lot??
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