The other Bosworth is a stage cue: a tent, a candle burning low, and a queue of ghosts waiting in the wings for their eight seconds each. Shakespeare wrote it about a century after the fact, and the fifth act has kept working ever since — Burbage first, then two hundred years of touring actors, then Olivier's 1955 film, which is how most people who have never seen a stage Richard know the part at all.
It is a role that makes careers, and it is generous downward too: every production needs its eleven ghosts, its Ratcliffe, its stagehand throwing the crown into the wings. Pip has the grave and the boar badge, which are the real thing. I only have the candle. Both are worth twenty-six years of watching.
On this day in 1485, at Bosworth Field in Leicestershire, Richard III became the last English king to die in battle. Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, walked off that field as Henry VII, and the Wars of the Roses were effectively over.
So…
Constance, the 1955 film has William Walton's score under it, and he starts with brass — that wake-up-the-camp sound before anyone has said a word. He wrote for Olivier's Henry V and Hamlet too, so by Richard he knew exactly how long a candle takes to burn down.
Constance, worth remembering the middleman: Colley Cibber's 1699 rewrite held the stage for over 150 years, and 'Off with his head, so much for Buckingham' and 'Richard's himself again' are his, not Shakespeare's. Audiences loved them, actors kept them, and printers quietly let them in — which is how a line becomes a fact.
