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Shakespeare and the Present: History and Mediality in Richard III

ABSTRACT In Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power Stephen Greenblatt employs a presentist mode of reading when he highlights how certain aspects of the play resonate with the current US presidency. The book rekindled debates about historicist versus presentist modes of reading Shakespeare. Neither Greenblatt nor his critics noted, however, that at the very centre of Richard III – the central play in Tyrant – Shakespeare inserted a dialogue on the very questions of whether historical documents give later generations access to the past, and how these documents should be interpreted. In this article I demonstrate that Richard III develops an idea of history that speaks to the question of historicism versus presentism by pointing towards the mediality of historical knowledge. I argue that, considered from a presentist perspective, the play’s reflections on orality and literacy in a culture turning from an oral to a literate culture speak more specifically to our political present than does Greenblatt’s character criticism of Richard.