In his famous play, William Shakespeare portrayed Britain’s King Richard lll  as the ultimate villain. During Richard’s Machiavellian rise to power and short reign, he orders the murder of his older brother, two nephews and eight other people standing in his way. Even for Shakespeare, that’s a large body count.

Shakespeare’s portrait of Richard lll has persisted through the centuries, but is it accurate? Did Shakespeare villify Richard for his own, dubious reasons?

The Richard lll Museum in York, England, asks this question. It interests them because Richard was the last king of the House of York.

The museum’s setting is cool – a gatehouse in the Medieval walls that circle the city of York.  The museum walls are lined with arguments for and against Richard. A dummy of the king sits on a mock court stand, on trial for the murder of his nephews. You listen to an audio recording of lawyers for the prosecution and denfense cross-examining Richard. At the end you’re invited to vote “yes” or “no” for Richard’s guilt. It’s fun, inexpensive and educational.

Under oath, Richard admits that he ordered the boys’ imprisonment in the Tower of London. Yes, he had motive to kill them. They were the rightful heirs to the throne and as long as they lived they could become a focus for Richard’s enemies to rally behind. And, yes Richard admits he had those nine other people killed and the boys have disappeared from the Tower. This doesn’t prove he had them killed. Someone might have done it without his knowledge. The leader doesn’t always know what his supporters are up to.

It’s possible, too, the boys died of natural causes – natural causes were common in those days and imprisonment was likely not good for their health. Richard and his supporters might have thought their enemies wouldn’t believe they weren’t responsible and whisked the bodies away. Or it was a conspiracy by Henry Tudor, who defeated Richard and established the Tudor royal line. Henry might have had the boys killed, knowing Richard would get the blame.

In the long term, Richard’s biggest enemy was Shakespeare. The bard described Richard as an ugly hunchback. There’s no evidence for this and, sadly, in Shakespeare’s day physical deformity was viewed as a sign of evil inside. Richard’s modern supporters claim Shakespeare portrayed Richard as a villain in order to suck up to his patron, Elizabeth l, a Tudor and granddaughter of Henry Vll, Richard’s conquerer. As victors always do, the Tudors re-wrote history to present the loser as evil and wrong. Shakespeare, a product of his times, believed the prevailing myth. In any event, Shakespeare wrote fiction, not history. Why let the facts stand in the way of a good and bloody story?

The Ricardians, as they call themselves, make a valid point. We shouldn’t view Shakespeare’s version as accurate history. And quite likely, to gain the crown, Henry Tudor did things every bit as nasty as Richard did, but managed to keep them hidden. Certainly his son, Henry Vlll, didn’t shy away from bloody beheadings. But that doesn’t mean Richard was innocent of the boys’ murders. To remain secure in his power, he’d have to get rid of his nephews, just as the Bolsheviks killed the entire Russian royal family so that there could be no going back. I voted “yes” for Richard’s guilt. Sorry, York.

If you think Shakespeare, not Richard, was the real villain, you can join The Richard lll Foundation and help rehablitate Richard’s name. Will the recent discovery of bones believed to be Richard’s – with a Canadian connection – resolve the question?

Will and I are both fans of writer, Daphne duMaurier. Her novel Rebecca is one of my all-time favourite books. I recently read it for the third time and, over the the years, I’ve seen several T.V. and movie versions. Even though I knew what was going to happen, the story gripped me to the end. A few aspects here and there were dated but, for the most part, I was impressed by DuMaurier’s writing skill and feel it holds up to today’s standards.

Most of DuMaurier’s novels are set in Cornwall or Devon in the U.K. Since Will and I would be spending a week in Cornwall, we brought along a copy of DuMaurier’s novel Jamaica Inn for our travel reading. Both of us had read it before, but couldn’t remember the details. I read the book on the plane going over. Will finished it the day before we visited the real-life Jamaica Inn, which inspired the story.

Click on the Jamaica Inn website and you hear a creak, creak, creak meant to put you in the mood for a creepy experience. In the novel, DuMaurier’s protagonist goes to live with her aunt, her only living relative, at Jamaica Inn. The aunt’s husband is a brute. While his loutish comrades come to the inn to drink, no one ever stays there. Is the inn is a cover for shady business? This turns out to be smuggling.

Today, people stay at the inn. I don’t know that I’d want to after reading the novel and seeing the place. A big draw is its rumoured hauntings.

At the inn, we visited the Daphne duMaurier Smugglers musuem. It presents a good history of smuggling in  Cornwall which persisted to the 1960s and, perhaps, into more recent times.  Displays show objects used to conceal drugs and other smuggled items.

The other part of the museum focusses on Daphne DuMaurier’s life. Her father was an actor who was so famous in his time that a tobacco company named their cigarette brand after him. You can see Daphne DuMaurier’s writing room and watch an interview with her son, who talks about why a Londoner like his mother felt at home in Cornwall.

After visiting Jamaica Inn and learning about smuggling in Cornwall, I understand how both would have fired the writer’s imagination. Lots of scope for drama, romance and rivetting story.

Jamaica Inn was well worth a visit, but I spent the night at an inn with no ghosts.

Does Gilbert and Sullivan qualify as part of my literary tour of England? The operettas were written and published.

I didn’t, by the way, go to Britain for the purpose of visiting the literary-related sites I’ve been blogging about this fall. It’s just that, in the U.K. you can hardly walk without tripping over a reference to a literary figure, be it a home he once lived in, a place that inspired her or a statue or plaque.

Daphne du Maurier, who is associated with Cornwall, grew up in Hampstead, an attractive suburb in northwest London. We rode the bus to Hampstead on our last day in Britain. We didn’t see DuMaurier’s former home, but there’s probably a plaque on the building, like the one that surprised us when we exited Hamstead Heath park.

We also walked by a Hampstead home once occupied by poet,  John Keats.

Back to Gilbert & Sullivan. In Cornwall, we saw a performance of their operetta, Ruddigore, at the Minack Theatre, billed as Cornwall’s theatre under the stars. The Minack is an open air amphitheatre set on a cliff on the Cornwall coast. It took a woman of vision to come up with the idea in the 1930s of building a outdoor theatre in a rainy climate at a barely accessible location, but the Minack endured and thrived. Our performance was almost sold out.

Most people had bought their tickets in advance, but we waited until the day of the event to make sure we got a clear night. But clear nights in Cornwall usually mean windy. Our  four layers of clothes plus gloves and hats kept us almost warm enough.

Ruddigore was a Gilbert & Sullivan show that I hadn’t seen before. It has the usual G & S improbable premise and plot. In Ruddigore, a baron is cursed to do an evil deed a day or die. He fakes his death, forcing his brother to take his place. Complications arise as he is found out.

The play seemed a little darker than other Gilbert & Sullivans I’d seen, although this might have been the Cambridge University performers’ interpretation. The actors did an excellent job, especially the two playing the brothers.

That night in Cornwall, there was too much ambient light to see stars in the sky, but Minack was a unique theatre experience.

Everyone wants a piece of Arthur. In the Middle Ages, when Glastonbury Abbey faced financial ruin, the monks came up with a clever scheme. They “discovered” the bones of King Arthur and  Lady Guenevere. This attracted public interest and, more importantly, money that saved the abbey. Today, tourists at Glastonbury Abbey can view the burial sites.

Arthur’s story was the stuff of much Medieval literature. It was later revived by Romantic and Victorian writers, notably, Tennyson with The Lady of Shalott and Idylls of the King. The story was re-worked for modern times in movies and plays: Disney’s The Sword in the Stone, Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Camelot.

Thanks to Camelot, I had formed a pastoral image of Arthur’s castle. It’s quite the opposite, if Tintagel was the place. This fall, Will and I stopped at Tintagel on our way from Wales to Penzance, in Cornwall. A genuine castle once existed at Tintagel. Now it’s ruins. Arthur’s castle is rumoured to have preceded it. Whether or not that’s true, the setting is gorgeous and wild, with sweeping views – well worth a visit. It’s also a rigorous hike up those cliffs.

Camelot simmered and exploded with human passion. Now that I’ve seen Tintagel, I get it.