ABSTRACT
Telling as the line is, it is not clear who should say it. The heading ‘Gent[leman]’ suggests the speaker is one of the pair whom the mourning Lady Anne addresses as Tressel and Berkeley, and this attribution would give verbal substance to one of these walking shadows, whose names so mysteriously persist in programmes and even in the character lists of modern editions. The words are, however, more courageous, more a protest made on our behalf, if they come from one of the halberdiers; the generalised term, ‘the coffin’, then expresses the common man’s sense of outrage (one thinks of recent Irish incidents) at the indecency of stopping a funeral. Directors certainly prefer the line to provoke the eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation between Richard and the halberdier:
Edmund Kean struck the halberd up with his sword, Laurence Olivier (in his film version) knocked the man down and put his foot on him, and Anthony Sher went one better by felling two halberdiers with his crutches.1 Violence such as this, however, is more characteristic of the disintegrating Richard of the Messengers episode, late in the fourth act. What the encounter with the halberdier brings out is Richard’s power to dominate by mean of a dark charisma, a power best conveyed through the slow return of the halberd to an upright position and through the deferential hesitancy of the words
which, on Anne’s departure, complete this small part: Towards Chertsey, noble lord?’ (225). The effect is helped, as Shakespeare may have guessed it would be, by the small-part actor being genuinely awestruck in the presence of a star performer.2
