“Meu Reino Por um Cavalo!”: Ricardo III e o impacto da manipulação na construção literária e suas consequências históricas

Abstract

Although he ruled for only two years – from 1483 to 1485 – Richard III stands out as one of England’s most famous and heinous kings. With a controversial claim to the throne, added to the accusations of blood in his hands, Richard Plantagenet is historically described as a tyrant and a monster by his successors. Such description has remained for centuries, supported mainly by the representation constructed by William Shakespeare in the play The Tragedy of the King Richard III – that was based on documents and reports produced throughout the Tudor era, a lineage that succeeded Richard after his death. The hypothesis of this paper is that the Tudors created a personal representation of Richard III in order to support their position as the reigning royal family in England. This representation would have been consolidated with the play written by Shakespeare, and over the years it became a literary construct imbued with malignity and despotism. The circumstances of Shakespeare’s artistic production are extremely favorable to the analysis of the patronage systems, – initially studied by Lefevere (1992) – however, what was observed was a gap in the studies about Richard III and his homonymous play. And it is in this gap that the present work fits itself in. For that, the methodology of the present work involves a systematized bibliographical research in order to elaborate analytical proposals about the subject. It is intended to employ descriptive and analytical methods of the works, as well as a comparative reading of the corpus, relating it and linking it with the problems presented in order to achieve the objective of this dissertation, that is to analyze – with the help of the historical theoretical apparatus provided by Le Goff (1992), who analyses the relationship between history and narrative; Veyne (2005), who works on the relationship between history and the fragments that compose it; Certeau (2011), who explains how history becomes myth; as well as making use of Lefevere’s (1992) translational propositions on rewriting; Hermans’ (1985) on manipulation; and Even-Zohar’s (2012) theory of polysystems – how the historical image of Richard III that inspired the Shakespearean play was constructed, based on recent studies about the monarch and assessing the impact of manipulation on literary construction and its historical consequences.