“Dignity and honour” the authorities at Leicester Cathedral promised ad nauseam when they were allowed the privilege of burying King Richard III’s remains in 2015. Now, scant two years later, they promote a performance, only feet away from his tomb, of Shakespeare’s Richard III – the fiction that more than anything else has for centuries blackened this man’s reputation (Richard III to be staged in king’s last resting place, 8 May).
How can this by any stretch of the imagination be construed as either dignified or honourable? It would also be fascinating to be told how a play that presents a man as a child- and wife-murdering tyrant, crippled in mind as much as in body, can ever be a “sensitive” portrayal of a historical figure.
As with so many of the cathedral’s activities surrounding the discovery and reburial of this king, it smacks only of another desperate attempt at publicity and money-making.
Carol Fellingham Webb
Keighley, West Yorkshire
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