One of the great joys I get out of writing theater reviews is revisiting Shakespeare scholar and lit crit man Stephen Greenblatt. His writings are insightful, lovely, witty, human.
My latest research for my review of Post5's Richard III, echoed back to the long work I'm doing on the subject of paranoia. Richard was a paranoid dictator, whose rudely formed stamp would be revisited in more recent times with rumors of Hitler's impotence and Joe Stalin's real life withered hand and shorter arm. Greenblatt noted that many contemporary stagings place the play in Nazi Germany and while he hints at a kind of boredom there, I think the directors made a connection. The Nazi higher-ups, particularly Himmler and Göring created an obsessive, unhistoric, warped Romantic revival of the Medieval Teutonic knight. The real Richard has been a trending topic with the finding of his burial site . The pro-monarchist society which funds clearing his name has had him re-interred in an elegant Brutalist looking shrine. With Brexit, Trump and the West in general turning far right, Richard's reputation as a bloodthirsty monster is not in need of a new shine.
