Individual and Collective Memory in Shakespeare’s First Tetralogy, Between Myth and National Identity

In "King Richard III", Act 3, young Prince Edward’s insistent questions about the origins of the Tower of London bring the issue of historical transmission to the foreground. Be it report or record, what we can know about the past is in no way the same as the truth. The survival of truth across time is thematised throughout the first tetralogy. References to fame recur obsessively in the three parts of "King Henry VI", while in "King Richard III" Shakespeare subtly plays with a historical and historiographical tradition that is much indebted to memorial transmission. In this play, historical distortion is materialised in the deformed body of its protagonist, who becomes the emblem of a past reinterpreted and rewritten in the light of present interests. The article will show how, on the one hand, the dramatist goes beyond what already was a “vituperative history” and brings the so-called Tudor myth to its apex, while, on the other hand, undermining this same myth.