RICHARD THE THIRD: THE STORY BECOMES THE HISTORY, Open Eye Productions, at the Greenview Arts Center. Like would-be king Richard Nixon, real-life king Richard III has been the subject of revisionist history from the moment he took power. Contemporary opinion varied greatly–one bishop said, “He contents the people where he goes best that ever a prince did,” whereas a priest remarked that “like a scorpion he combined a smooth front with a stinging tail.” But it was Shakespeare’s Richard III, drawn largely from Sir Thomas More’s History of Richard III, that established his image as a misshapen, amoral, power-hungry tyrant. In the ensuing years a number of historians and academics have sought to unblacken this black king’s name. In 1987 the creators of Jonny Quest even got into the act, sending their cartoon hero back to medieval England to exonerate Richard in the comic book “Winters of Discontent.”
