SOURCE: “Profane Icon: The Throne Scene of Shakespeare's Richard III,” in Comparative Drama 20, No. 2, Summer, 1986, pp. 115-23.

In the following essay, Endel discusses the problematic “throne scene” of Act IV where the newly crowned Richard III enacts private, conspiratorial business in the throne-room—a place that is normally treated as a highly public stage complete with an audience of courtiers.

The English drama critic John Trewin first began to review Shakespeare's plays on the London stage in 1930. In 1978, when he was seventy years old, this dean of theater critics looked back over a lifetime of what he called “going to Shakespeare” and recalled an extraordinary moment at the Old Vic in London in 1944. Remembering Laurence Olivier enthroned as Richard III in Act IV, scene ii, of Shakespeare's play, Trewin writes, “One must always judge [Olivier’s] famous portrait from its first presentation with the Old Vic company, and...