According to Shakespeare's text of Richard III, Gloucester's famous last words are "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!" (5.4, 13). While historians now believe Richard's last words to be a somewhat less mysterious "Treason! Treason!" Shakespeare's line has nevertheless entered anglophonic cultural lexicon (searching on the Internet for sites with the line on the page, I found many links to equestrian URLs where Richard's words serve to glorify horsemanship). As in the production of any Shakespeare play, the relationship of a given line to popular culture's use of the words as a cliché must be considered so that the speech retains its freshness and vibrancy. In Richard Loncraine's film Richard III Ian McKellan voices the line in a decidedly original manner: bringing the play forward into a modern, alternate England suffering a fascistic monarchy would result in a war-horse being anachronistic, anomalous, and absurd; Richard drives a car into battle and calls for a horse only when the vehicle is stuck in the mud. The line's reinvigorated meaning notwithstanding, Loncraine's film still risks using a line that does not make sense. And with this line in particular, the risk fails.

The complete speech in the text runs
Richard: A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!
Catesby: Withdraw, my lord. I'll help you to a horse.
Richard: Slave, I have set my life upon a cast,
And I will stand the hazard of the die.
I think there be six Richards in the field;
Five have I slain today instead of him.
A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse! (5.4, 7-13).

Not only does the repeated line reiterate Richard's monomaniacal mindset, unable to free himself of his determination, but the center lines on his life's random and die-tossed trajectory deny Richard's awareness of his own manipulative capabilities. Moreover, the entire segment portrays Richard in a further determined state not to have his life determined haphazardly but instead ordained by his own will for a particular goal. "Let nothing but my own resolve rule my life," he seems to be saying, "and now I resolve to save my life by getting a horse." Such a speech reaffirms the control Richard wishes to seize, and his life's final words thereby invoke a power-hunger consistent with the precedent his character has set throughout the play.
Though there is no mention of it in the stage directions, given the importance of words and oaths throughout Richard III (e.g. "a prophecy, which states that G / Of Edward's heirs the murderer shall be" [1.1, 39-40] and Anne's "If ever [Richard] have wife, let her be made / More miserable by the life of him" [1.2, 26-27]) it seems to follow that Richard would in fact get a horse and give up his kingdom. Yet in none among the battle scenes filmed in Al Pacino's Looking for Richard, Laurence Olivier's Richard III, or Loncraine's Richard III does the king actually achieve his horse. While perhaps this indicates that his reach has finally exceeded his grasp and can no more find a horse than manipulate his inferiors, Richard's lack of a horse glares prominently as inattention paid to the power of speech within the play. More than the cut of Richard's speech after his first cry for a horse in Loncraine's production and the addition of non-Richard III lines to end the king's life, the impossibility of a horse for Richard counteracts the strength of the line when delivered in the movie.

Despite the errors of no horses for the having implicit in McKellan's performance, the line does retain vitality given the modern setting of the play. While H. R. Coursen's "Mise-en-scène" is quick to denounce the line with "The analogy is that history itself can turn on the hinge of a tiny moment within a larger war. If Richard had had a horse to pull his staff car out of the mud . . ." (142), the line may instead be seen as a conservative harping for less complicated days. Rather than hoping for a horse to tow him out of the mud, McKellan's Richard seems to be hoping for a horse to ride without danger of being stuck in the mud. While perhaps it takes interpretative liberties, this scene may then take on a nostalgic, or at least anti-modern, dream of the past's simplicity common to fascist sympathizers. But in the end, this does not work, either. Primarily, it introduces a concept wholly without precedent very late in the movie. If the fascist element of Loncraine's film were born from Richard's reminiscences in Shakespeare's text, perhaps such an interpretation of this line would save it. The truth of the matter, though, is that Richard does not dream about the past's glory (indeed, his only dream is when the past haunts him); the parallels with fascism are that Richard wants control, but it is a future-based control, irrelevant of whether Richard dreams of a utopia resembling the order of more traditional society.

Watching McKellan as Gloucester in Richard III, I wondered how the line would make sense in the last scene. Following the time-shift of the movie, I had hoped that the line itself would be as modernized as the setting. I wanted more liberty to be taken with the text-instead of cutting lines, change a word-so that Richard would shout "A tank! A tank! My kingdom for a tank!" And, to fulfill the oath, Richard would enter a tank only to roll it over a landmine, and he would have sacrificed his kingdom for achieving the tank. At least I had hoped for something to that effect. It would, certainly, be a reinvigoration of a by now catchphrase. Instead, the line itself does not live up to the Poundian make-it-new standard the rest of the movie succeeds in establishing. In a film where a monologue is delivered half into a microphone and half while standing at a urinal, the vast majority of the lines cannot escape renewed vitality free of being cliché. And yet, the few words "My kingdom for a horse" cannot obtain the same level of freshness that is requisite for any artistic success.

(c) 1999 by the author. All rights reserved.