Two Richards – A hard day’s discontent

Richard III, through Shakespeare, famously complains that “Dogs bark at me as I halt by them.” A walk once in the South of France gave me a vivid and lasting feeling of empathy with him. Every house had a dog which raged at me as I walked past (even without halting) and at the end of my hour-long  walk I was so out of sorts that I could have stifled any number of princes I might have found in a tower. If I were to put on a production of Richard III, I would make sure that there were dogs barking at him every time he made a stage entrance or exit.
Below I am going to invite you to compare two versions of Richard. The first one is Laurence Olivier and the second is Peter Sellers pretending to be Laurence Olivier doing almost the same speech (actually the Lennon-McCartney version, sometimes known as “A hard day’s night”.