‘Now is the winter of our discontent’‘ is the famous opening line of Richard III. The play fictionalizes the reign of King Richard III, who lived from 1452 until 1485. He reigned over England from 1483 until his death, meaning he was in power for only two years. Shakespeare had his own particular political reasons for writing Richard III, which influenced his portrayal of the king and has subsequently had a big impact on public opinion of Richard III’s historical context.
The phrase ‘winter of our discontent,’ or more commonly, ‘the winter of discontent,’ is widely quoted to tag political and social unrest, whichever season of the year it occurs in because the word ‘winter’ is such a powerful metaphor for a bleak, discouraging period of time, and ‘discontent’ suggests restlessness and a looming threat. Richard’s brother, King Edward IV, has just put an end to the long war and assumed the throne. The winter of discontent has been transformed into a glorious summer by this son of York, Edward. Shakespeare puns on the word sun/son. Everything seems good now and England is about to embark on a wonderful era of peace, in which people can get on with the pleasures of life. Richard is sneering at his brother, though, with what is an ironic picture of a transformed England, and he is going to do his best to disrupt it.
There is not going to be any fun for this bitter young man. He bemoans the fate that has made him deformed and ugly. There is no chance for him in the sexual stakes that other young people enjoy. So what is there for him? He consciously decides that he is going to be a mischief-maker and plot and scheme to set his two brothers, Edward and Clarence, against each other and produce another war and a struggle for the throne (which he eventually succeeds in getting for himself.) The description of Richard in this passage as so ugly and deformed that dogs bark at him as he walks past them, and his decision that he is going to be a villain, is a good example of how powerful Shakespeare’s texts are. In the History and the Roman plays Shakespeare recreated real historical characters and in most cases his recreations became the accepted idea of what those historical figures were like in real life.
Shakespeare took the broad events in which those characters acted out their lives and gave them characteristics and words that suited his dramatic intentions rather than any idea of an accurate history. And so we see Julius Caesar as an overambitious, vain politician, Henry V as the perfect king but with a disreputable teenage life, Antony as a powerful emperor rendered powerless by a sexual obsession, and so on. In Richard III’s case, Shakespeare’s Richard eclipsed the reports by biographers and historians. In the play he is one of Shakespeare’s worst villains, a deformed, hunch-back with a marked limp and an ugly face, and a malevolent, scheming personality.
That was our idea of Richard for centuries. However, recently, the real Richard’s body was discovered beneath a car park in Leicester, and it was seen that although he had a slight curvature of the spine, he was not the deformed monster Shakespeare made of him. Moreover, reconstructions of his skull showed him to be a rather handsome man. The play will be performed for generations to come and we will forget the current fashion of researching the real Richard III, and Shakespeare’s version will likley prevail. And of course, ‘now is the winter of our dicontent’ is fixed in the cultural mind and will be quoted millions of times in the years to come.
