‘WOE TO THAT LAND THAT's GOVERNED BY A CHILD’

Shaw, reviewing Irving's performance of the 1880s gave as a reason for the popularity of the play ‘the world being yet little better than a mischievous school boy’. James Agate, in the 1920s, echoed the comment in calling the play a ‘boy's play – for one boy to write and another to see.’ For these commentators there is something immature about a taste for Richard III, something immature about the play itself. But the suggestion that the play belongs to childhood has a resonance that goes beyond its pejorative context here. That a play that centres on the murder of children should be seen as childish takes us into complex aspects of its celebrity. A child's enjoyment of the play would have more to do with Richard's destructive energy than with the precocity and ‘innocence’ of the princes. In the nineteenth century the play was often performed by children; Julie Hankey records a performance by ‘the two Bateman sisters, Kate and Ellen, who were then six and eight years old, as Richard and Richmond: “a nuisance by no means proportioned to the size of its perpetrators”, wrote Henry Morley sourly.’ Though the third citizen's rather ponderous citation of proverbial, biblical, wisdom – ‘Woe to that land that 's govern'd by a child’ (II.iii.11) – is in literal terms a reference to Prince Edward, it can be extended, as it was, according to Norman Rodway, in the rehearsals for the Hands production, to Richard himself.

The child who seems most directly childlike, Clarence's son, is later dismissed by Richard as simple, and so no threat (the historical Henry VII/Richmond thought differently, and had him, as the nearest to the crown but for himself, imprisoned and eventually executed). This child questions adult behaviour, rather than joining in with it; it is his directness, his lack of flirtatiousness, which marks him as ‘simple’ in the performance orientated world of the play. Though the boy is able to ask direct questions about the problem of disguise and deceit, his ‘innocence’ makes him incapable of accepting the answer he is given;