Nothing like an unseasonal cold to cut you down for the count in the Shakespeare recitation department. I should consider myself lucky that I didn't get sick until the week after I reached my goal of learning at least one speech from every play. At 71 lines, the crowning oration is the longest of the bunch (so far... who knows, I may embark on something even more intimidating in the future!), and has the superlative of being the longest soliloquy in all of Shakespeare. It tested my every skill and served very nicely as a kind of "thesis" to pass this class of self-imposed madness. But best of all, it's delivered by everyone's favorite car park hunchback: Richard Gloucester in King Henry VI Part III!
The first time I watched Sir Laurence of Olivier's 1955 film, I was intimately familiar with the "Winter" speech, and was quickly scandalized by the strange lines shoehorned into it. Scarcely any of the original Act I, Sc. I speech is used in the film because its main purpose is to give the audience that "Previously on War of the Roses..." spiel and Larry chose to insert the last scene of KH6 P3 up front, rendering Richard's most famous words superfluous. Oh Larry, you always were a jazz musician with Shakespeare.
Little did I realize that those extra tidbits (which are especially juicy, so I completely sympathize with Larry's wish to use them) were from an even longer speech I would later mouth with much delight. Indeed, it contains some arguably meatier and more poetic stuff than his more famous speech. There's more determination to be a villain and hating on his family. More descanting on deformity and laying of plots. A Super-Sized speech, in every way.
Of course, it's one of those soliloquies that can be read in so many ways at each of its turns that every time I say it, I find a new nuance that can be tweaked, a switch to be toggled that can affect a line down the river. If a non-actor can recognize that, I imagine it's a delirious goldmine for real performers. For example, Richard asks what pleasures he could possibly find in life:
I'll make my heaven in a lady's lap
And deck my body with gay ornaments
And witch sweet ladies with my words and looks.
O miserable thought! And more unlikely
Than to accomplish twenty golden crowns!
Personally, I prefer a Sassy Drag Queen Richard milking this as sarcastically as acting allows, but there's certainly room for a more Lugubrious Alan Rickman Richard whose words drip like black molasses from his mouth. And everything in between.
Another ambiguous section involves the torment Richard endures:
And I--like one lost in a thorny wood,
That rents the thorns, and is rent with the thorns,
Seeking a way, and straying from the way,
Not knowing how to find the open air
But toiling desperately to find it out--
Torment myself to catch the English Crown;
Is Richard being sarcastic again? The preceding lines hint at such a reading: "And yet I know not how to get the crown/For many lives stand between me and home." We know he knows what horrible things he needs to get the crown, after all. But again, this could be delivered with equally believable heart-wrenching anger at nature itself, for thrusting him into this situation in which he feels he has no other choice.
Throughout this speech, Richard's character is in that quantum Schrodinger's Cat state--vacillating between being sympathetic and monstrous. It's a playground of emotion for performance. I could go on.
And I shall. Next week, some Greek mythology! I'll also fangirl over Richard's use of imagery and figure out what the hell to do with myself now that this is over (or is it?).
