Abstract
Despite a British Rail strike, a surprisingly large audience was attracted to the 125-seat Quay Theatre in Sudbury for a staged reading directed by Robert Crighton under the auspices of the Beyond Shakespeare Podcast. Their interest was the more surprising because Bosworth Field is not a play, although its author, Sir John Beaumont, is known mainly as the brother of the more famous playwright Francis. He had already done many translations from the Latin and his work (just under 1000 lines) can best be described as a mini-epic. The influence of the Aeneid is obvious in the elaborate ‘as when’ similes of Bosworth Field, its depiction of the battle through a series of two-person encounters, and its deferential reference to the contemporary ruler. The reading was meant to be prefaced by a discussion of the numerous other Richard III retellings that preceded Beaumont's; in the end, because the rail strike had created transport problems for some of the actors, the reading preceded the discussion and neither event suffered from the change of plan. Both were hosted by Crighton with characteristic energy and humour: he encouraged us to turn away if we didn’t want to know in advance who won the Battle of Bosworth.
Those spectators who came because of Richard III, now probably the most popular of English kings, will not have been disappointed. Beaumont obviously wanted to replace the comic Vice figure of earlier retellings with something more like Virgil's depiction of the desperately brave but evil tyrant Mezentius. Though his Richard says relatively little, he dominates the poem and is given some striking lines. At the beginning, waking from a disturbed sleep, he cries, ‘Were not the smother’d children buried deep?’ I heard murmurs of appreciation when, having killed a sleeping watchman, he grimly commented (in a couplet that has in fact been anthologised on its own), ‘I leave him as I found him, fit to keep / The silent doors of everlasting sleep.’ As Richard, Simon Nader was a very strong presence throughout, evoking Shakespeare's Macbeth rather than his Richard, and miming the final unequal fight with effective restraint. His death, like the death of Turnus in the Aeneid, brings the poem to an abrupt end, with no attempt at a moralising conclusion.
The two well contrasted narrators were Pamela Flanagan (telling the story when it involved Richard's side) and Karim Kronfli (who took it up when it dealt with activity on the Tudor side); Kit McGuire briefly became a third narrator when mercenaries from France entered the battle, drawing attention to something not often mentioned in accounts of the Tudor victory. In the battle confrontations, where realistic fighting and dying would have looked ridiculous, the fighters stood on opposite sides of the stage, their restrained and stylised movements accompanying Beaumont's descriptions.
This well-directed and sustained classical style was the right embodiment of Beaumont's writing. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he wanted to be easy to follow: in another poem (‘To His Late Majesty [James VI and I] Concerning the True Form of English Poetry’) he claimed that he preferred the clear diction of ‘lawyers’ pleadings or physicians’ bills’ to that of poets (he obviously meant Donne and the like) who go in for ‘dusky clouds, their strange conceits to hide / From human eyes’. His own images, prefaced with the epic ‘as when’, are conventional rather than surprising (e.g., Richard in his last struggle is compared to a lioness ‘compassed round / With troops of men’). Thus, while it is hardly surprising that no one has thought of dramatising Beaumont's poem before, it was easier to understand at a single hearing than many plays of the period.
But the division between poetry and drama was less sharp in his day than in ours: Beaumont probably intended his poem for reading aloud, just as Virgil had once read his, and as most poems were still being read. Like most people, he knew drama, both performed and published, especially the plays of his brother Francis, who died in 1616. There is another possible influence. Since Beaumont himself died in 1627 and his allusions to both James I and Charles I seem to indicate composition around 1625–26, he might possibly have known about Claudio Monteverdi's Combat of Tancred and Clorinda, first performed in 1624. Based on one of the most popular episodes in Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, it features three singers (a narrator, Tancred, and Clorinda) who sing Tasso's words in recitative while two dancers perform a stylised version of the combat. At any rate, the nearly simultaneous appearance of the two works suggests that the zeitgeist was hospitable to the dramatisation of epic poetry. For those who wish to test out its attractiveness in the present age, a recording of the Sudbury performance can be found at https://beyondshakespeare.org/bosworth-field-by-sir-john-beaumont/.