Trophies, Traces, Relics, and Props: The Untimely Objects of "Richard III"

• Published in: Shakespeare quarterly Vol. 63; no. 3; pp. 297 - 327
• Main Author: Schwyzer, Philip
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford The Johns Hopkins University Press 01.10.2012; Oxford University Press
• Subjects: Armor; British & Irish literature; Business; Ceremonial objects; Daggers; Drama; English literature; Essays; History; History plays; Holy relics; Literary criticism; Military history; Prayer; Property lines; Shakespeare, William (1564-1616); Sleep; Theater; United Kingdom > UK; England; Wales
• DOI: 10.1353/shq.2012.0048
• ISSN: 0037-3222; 1538-3555

In 1611, Henry Peacham would list "King Richard's bed-sted i' Leyster" among sights that could be seen for a penny in England and Wales (alongside such "trifles, and toyes" as "Westminster monuments," the cave of Merlin, and a cassowary which ate hot coals).3 The bedstead was but one of several Ricardian objects and artifacts which might be viewed on a tour of Leicester in the early seventeenth century, including the horse trough at the Greyhound Inn, rumored to have been Richard's sarcophagus, a monument to the fallen king erected by a prominent citizen in his garden, and the protruding stone on Bow Bridge against which Richard's head was said to have struck when his corpse was brought back from Bosworth Field, slung over the back of a horse.4 Richard's remains were the bedrock of a nascent civic tourist industry. 5 As the inclusion of "a bedsteade" in the 1597 inventory of props belonging to the Admiral's Men suggests, such large pieces of furniture were among the standard properties of theatrical companies.6 Later tradition would insist on granting Richard III a substantial bed in which to sleep his last, as in the famous portrait of Garrick's Richard starting up aghast from hellish dreams (Figure 1).