00:00:01.720 - 00:00:14.440

This Richard III was made during the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford upon Avon in 1910 and released in 1911. It was made by the Co-operative Cinematograph Company with Frank Benson's Theatre Troupe, a company he himself had founded

00:00:14.440 - 00:00:24.000

in 1883, and was shot in situ at the Shakespeare Memorial theatre. An unusual move since it was far easier to shoot in the standard, glass-roofed studios

00:00:24.000 - 00:00:33.300

of the time, where lighting conditions made possible the production of a clear photographic image. This surviving Richard III film, was just one in a cycle of Shakespeare films made

00:00:33.300 - 00:00:41.300

in the collaboration between Benson and the Co-operative Cinematograph company. Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew, and Julius Caesar were certainly part of the cycle.

00:00:41.300 - 00:00:50.330

And Twelfth Night and the Merry Wives of Windsor, both of which had been announced ahead of time as being in line for filming may or may not have been made too. Only Richard III, however, has survived.

00:00:59.960 - 00:01:14.480

This rendering of Richard III clearly owes a debt to Colley Cibber's adaptation from 1700, a version whose influence had been widely felt in stage productions well into the 19th century. And the habit of beginning stage productions of Richard III

00:01:14.480 - 00:01:25.600

with retrospective explanatory scenes lifted from Henry VI, Part 3 persisted even after other aspects of Cibber's version had fallen out of fashion, and the appearance here of a couple of scenes

00:01:25.600 - 00:02:20.950

showing the defeat and murder of Henry VI and the accession of Edward IV, testifies to the longevity of that habit. In a moment, Frank Benson will enter frame right

00:02:20.950 - 00:02:30.910

as Richard of Gloucester, the future Richard III, in order to murder Henry VI here with a grisly performative relish. Benson was one of the foremost Shakespearean actors

00:02:30.910 - 00:02:40.650

of his generation, entrepreneurial in his Company enterprises, and famously vigorous in his own acting style. He was knighted in 1916 at the Drury Lane theatre,

00:02:40.650 - 00:02:52.510

so technically this film, made in 1910, does not quite yet feature Sir Frank Benson. Since 1886, the Benson Company had regularly included Richard III in their annual programme for the Stratford upon Avon

00:02:52.510 - 00:03:03.230

Shakespeare Festival, and it was from Benson himself to the most humble spear bearer, the regular Benson Company who appear in the film. The film's cast therefore has a substantial theatrical pedigree

00:03:03.230 - 00:03:14.110

behind it. The film is shot in long takes, one per scene, from a static camera placed in mid stalls at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford.

00:03:14.110 - 00:03:24.450

Despite fun moments such as this one, it has attracted a certain amount of critical flak for its refusal to make more imaginative use of the camera, of more camera appropriate acting styles,

00:03:24.450 - 00:03:36.070

and/or of the possibilities of film editing. In fact, this film has become a bit of a critical punchbag, seeming to offer itself up as the epitome of the uncinematic British film, the film that

00:03:36.070 - 00:03:46.350

refuses to accommodate itself to the potentials of the medium within which it is now operating. It seems the more stodgy in comparison with the five-reel American Richard III

00:03:46.350 - 00:04:01.500

from 1912, which has recently resurfaced. The American film, directed by James Keene and starring Frederick B. Ward, is energetic and humorous and grandiose and full of innovative cinematic novelty in ways

00:04:01.500 - 00:04:20.300

that seem to expose the trenchant theatricality of this British film all the more. So this film has been cited as early evidence of a British cinema that is tentative

00:04:20.300 - 00:04:30.220

and wedded to the debilitating and inappropriate conventions of the stage. The film reads far more as an attempt to enshrine in lasting form a telescoped version

00:04:30.220 - 00:04:40.640

of a celebrated theatrical moment from a celebrated theatrical actor in a prestigious venue than as an engagement with the possibilities of the medium to animate and comment upon a dramatic narrative.

00:04:43.420 - 00:04:53.020

It's unproductive, however, to condemn the film for not achieving something that so clearly lay outside its brief. The film makes little pretence to be anything

00:04:53.020 - 00:05:03.980

other than a compressed recording of an acclaimed theatrical moment. Even filming in situ was a curious choice. It was, after all, a far more technically complicated task

00:05:03.980 - 00:05:13.940

to light a theatrical venue sufficiently to produce a satisfactory film image than it was to relocate the theatrical event to a film studio lit for the purpose.

00:05:13.940 - 00:05:30.280

There is, therefore, something deliberately self-authenticating about the Benson Richard III as a captured piece of theatre happening in its own legitimate performance space. The film is illuminating about Benson's emphatically,

00:05:30.280 - 00:05:42.620

sometimes frantically gestural acting style about the uses of sets, costumes, extras, properties, and blocking on Stratford's Memorial theatre stage in 1910. And, of course, about Benson's hyper physical and sometimes

00:05:42.620 - 00:05:53.140

callously humorous interpretation of Richard. As a piece of cinema, it's less than scintillating, but as a complex record both of theatrical priorities and interestingly of what in its moment

00:05:53.140 - 00:06:05.400

must have been considered potentially marketable as cinema for some sections of the market, at least, it remains of significant interest. As the film scholar John Burrows points out,

00:06:05.400 - 00:06:16.620

Benson was given the Freedom of the Borough of Stratford upon Avon in the summer of 1910 in recognition of his services organising the Shakespeare festivals there for the past 25 years, so it may be that anchoring the film in a known

00:06:16.620 - 00:06:47.980

and prestigious Stratford venue, the Memorial theatre, was part of the celebration of Benson as an adopted and favoured local. Now here we see Constance Benson, Frank Benson's wife

00:06:47.980 - 00:06:59.000

and leading lady, as Lady Ann, being brazenly wooed over the body of her dead husband, and despite herself, won over to the man who ought to be her arch enemy.

00:07:15.970 - 00:07:28.670

Unlike Shakespeare's Richard, who is able to claim that his heart is figured in his tongue, Benson's silenced Richard must here try to figure his heart falsely, not in his tongue, but in his gesture and demeanour.

00:07:34.170 - 00:07:53.410

The scene is played out against the standard street scene, backcloth, which had made its first appearance back in 1886 to enthusiastic reviews. So what we are given privileged access to here, not just

00:07:53.410 - 00:08:01.330

in the interpretation of the play or the performance style of the players, and particularly of Benson himself, but even in the detail of the dressing of the set

00:08:01.330 - 00:08:30.770

is a tradition of some long standing. Benson was a populist, not an elitist. His credentials were clearly distinct from a contemporary classical actor

00:08:30.770 - 00:08:40.850

such as Johnston Forbes-Robertson, who was often commended for the dignified containment in his acting style and naturally aristocratic air. Benson, by contrast, flung himself

00:08:40.850 - 00:08:50.850

about with a gestural extravagance when on stage, toured the country with his company in order to reach a wider audience than could be found in London or Stratford alone, and in 1910

00:08:50.850 - 00:09:00.040

chose the Shakespeare plays for performance at the Stratford festival deliberately in order to coincide with the school examination syllabus. This was both a move to make Shakespeare

00:09:00.040 - 00:09:10.360

available to audiences who were not yet themselves the purveyors or champions of high culture, and, of course, a canny marketing move which predictably resulted in large parties of schoolchildren

00:09:10.360 - 00:10:02.780

being transported to Stratford. It must have done wonders for ensuring full houses. Benson's acting style clearly divided opinions sharply. Those who objected to it did so in no uncertain terms,

00:10:02.780 - 00:10:14.000

accusing him of mannered performances, of grimacing unduly, and of excessive use of his trademark histrionic fling of the right arm. The diarist, Gordon Cross, saw Benson as Richard in 1901

00:10:14.000 - 00:10:24.640

and made this entry in his diary. "He is by no means to be blamed for not following Sir H. Irving's comic intellectual Richard, but that is at least interesting,

00:10:24.640 - 00:10:32.430

and Mr. Benson fails to supply the deficiency with anything really good. The ruling note of his performance is to be sharp and forcible."

00:10:38.160 - 00:10:48.280

In accordance with casting practises of the time, the young princes were played by women en travesti, women that is dressed as boys. Here, they're played by Kathleen York and Hetty Kenyon,

00:10:48.280 - 00:10:58.520

and a little later, we'll see the scene of their murder in the tower when they are, as Tirrell reports in the Shakespeare play, found girdling one another within their alabaster innocent arms

00:10:58.520 - 00:11:09.950

before being smothered. The acted out scene of the murder seems to have been interpolated specifically for the filming, since it is only a reported scene in the Shakespeare play,

00:11:09.950 - 00:11:19.480

and was not usually part of Benson's stage productions either. So when we talk about this film as simply a compressed record of a stage production, we need to be aware

00:11:19.480 - 00:11:29.700

that there was a little more elasticity in the system, in a willingness to adapt, than that would imply. For a rendering of the drama that was not dependent on words, scenes could, of course, be included,

00:11:29.700 - 00:11:42.520

for which there were no words scripted, and Benson seems to have taken advantage of that in the scene of the murder of the princes. The unignorable jarring dissonances

00:11:42.520 - 00:11:53.920

of Ross's music here, scored for string quartet, are intended to evoke the underlying tension in the political world of the drama. They are, of course, quite a tonal determinant of how we now

00:11:53.920 - 00:12:05.110

read the production. It would, for example, be possible to imagine a score that found and drew out the considerable humour of Benson's portrayal of Richard with a more insouciant

00:12:05.110 - 00:12:19.790

or Cavalier offhandedness. But this particular soundtrack has another project in mind for this film, and chooses to emphasise not the black comedy, but rather the lurking

00:12:19.790 - 00:12:30.870

tragedy present behind each encounter. Here are pending a sustained descanting violin line mimicking solo speech, as it were, while the jarring dissonances keep their relentless thing

00:12:30.870 - 00:12:41.940

going underneath, as an only minimally submerged reminder, I imagine, of a world in which no matter how civil or even friendly things might seem on the surface, a lot is clearly far from right.

00:12:54.030 - 00:13:19.360

And here, Richard is left to revel in the crown that is now finally to be his. There's a respectable amount of ermine and armour and multipurpose mediaeval stone arches in this production,

00:13:19.360 - 00:13:31.530

de rigueur, of course, for one of the histories in this period. Unlike Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Benson wasn't entirely wedded to the spectacular tradition. Indeed, it would, apart from anything else,

00:13:31.530 - 00:13:43.710

have been impractical for him to be so since he spent a significant amount of time touring, which, of course, militated against investing too heavily in elaborate sets and props and mechanical contrivances.

00:13:43.710 - 00:13:56.310

But nor was he of the William Poel school that sought to get back to an entirely unseen Elizabethan stage practise. Here we see him commissioning James Tyrrell to go and dispatch the two bastards in the tower, as he says in the play.

00:13:56.310 - 00:14:06.710

As it happens, he makes this particular commission gesturally clear by having run his finger across his throat, but much of the business in this production must have been utterly opaque to anyone

00:14:06.710 - 00:14:15.750

who did not the play well. And the plot summarising intertitles and snatches of quotation from the play that accompany them, often only make a token effort to elucidate

00:14:15.750 - 00:14:37.990

the action that follows. Here, in a piece of nifty choreography or more probably nifty editing, we join the action in medias res, just as the princes are being smothered

00:14:37.990 - 00:14:47.590

by probably Tirrell in the interests of streamlining the action. But whichever he is, he is clearly struck by the sight of the gentle babes and agonises

00:14:47.590 - 00:15:11.860

about the ruthless butchery on which he finds himself engaged. This scene therefore enacts what we only hear about in the play. Just as, for example, films of Hamlet are drawn to show us the image of Ophelia drowning

00:15:11.860 - 00:16:03.360

with her fantastic garlands in the weeping brook, a picture that is only poetically described for us in that play. In order to appreciate some of the accommodations,

00:16:03.360 - 00:16:11.670

however modest that this film does make to the medium in which it's now working, it might be useful to think about some of the accommodations that some other silent Shakespeare films don't make.

00:16:14.940 - 00:16:25.300

Part of the Herbert Beerbohm Tree King John films act of preservation of that extraordinary stage performance, for example, necessarily involved conspicuously alluding to the communicative form that was now missing

00:16:25.300 - 00:16:34.220

from the performance speech. Saying the words out loud was clearly integral to Tree's notion of his own performance, and he was unwilling or unable to let

00:16:34.220 - 00:16:48.980

the words go for his rendition of King John for the camera. Equally, the absence of words from the 1913 Gaumont Hepworth film of Hamlet was a source of constant frustration to its star, Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson.

00:16:48.980 - 00:16:59.730

Like Tree and his death scene in the 1899 film, Forbes-Robertson's Hamlet is clearly visible throughout the film, earnestly mouthing fairly lengthy, but entirely inaudible speeches.

00:16:59.730 - 00:17:06.280

He's even reported to have stomped through a wood during filming, shouting at the poor cameraman, lines. Damn you. Give me lines!

00:17:09.210 - 00:17:19.540

It's as if he like many other English Shakespearean actors, was anxious to signal his unerring allegiance to the value of the spoken word, even in a medium partly characterised by its absence.

00:17:25.370 - 00:17:34.410

The determination of such actors visually to signal their reverence for Shakespeare's language in this way, self subverting seems to advertise the very thing these films are not,

00:17:34.410 - 00:17:50.930

a vehicle for spoken poetry. When she was invited to California by DW Griffith in 1916 to make a Macbeth for triangle reliance, Tree, self-consciously the Shakespearean,

00:17:50.930 - 00:18:03.330

insisted on reciting large chunks of text for the camera, even though not a word he said would be audible in the film. This was evidently a bit awkward for Griffith and his crew. She was an eminent invited guest, but didn't

00:18:03.330 - 00:18:13.490

seem to understand the rules of making moving pictures. Weighing courtesy against economics, the production team eventually decided to shoot sparingly in order to save their film stock,

00:18:13.490 - 00:18:25.570

and where necessary, simply to pretend to Tree that the cameras were still rolling for the duration of his declamations. It's both a fun and a slightly sad image.

00:18:25.570 - 00:18:33.210

An eminent English classical actor delivering the whole say, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, erroneously believing that the camera in front of him

00:18:33.210 - 00:18:43.090

was attentively recording his every twitch when in fact, the production around him was working to quite another, and in fact a far pacier agenda, and was not wasting its resources

00:18:43.090 - 00:18:54.770

on such action-inhibiting moments of inaudible declamation. But we rarely get that in this film. There is little ill disciplined dwelling

00:18:54.770 - 00:19:03.130

on a for the duration of a soliloquy, as there is, for example, in the 1913 Hamlet, and as there would have been in the 1916 Macbeth, if Tree had had his way.

00:19:03.130 - 00:19:14.810

In the endeavour to compress the plot into a two reel format, there has clearly been a decision taken to keep the action moving here. And having as it were, got their heads around the need for pace.

00:19:14.810 - 00:19:25.770

It's all the more frustrating that the production so deliberately chooses not to capitalise on a whole series of other filmic opportunities, such as moving the camera placement or editing the film that could have turned this

00:19:25.770 - 00:19:39.010

film, and presumably the others in the cycle too, into something eye catching, intelligible, touching, and even funny. Even the dream sequence we're now getting,

00:19:39.010 - 00:19:48.730

which is the excuse for some eerie superimposition in the American 1912 Richard III, is dealt with in relatively theatrical ways, with the minor concessionary edition of stop motion

00:19:48.730 - 00:20:39.640

appearances and disappearances, and a little crossfading between apparitions. We know from Gordon Cross's diary that in Benson's 1901 stage production

00:20:39.640 - 00:20:51.000

of the play, as Richard emerged from his dream sequence, he offhandedly killed a sleeping sentinel outside his tent. It's a bit of business that testifies to a grimly dark and almost comically warped

00:20:51.000 - 00:21:07.160

version of Richard. And as Richard storms off to meet his death at Bosworth, I'm going to bow out now to leave you to savour the last few moments of the film without distraction.

00:21:07.160 - 00:21:10.510

[MUSIC PLAYING]