Richard II: A Critical Reader 9781350064553, 9781350064584, 9781350064577

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Series Introduction
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Timeline
Introduction Michael Davies and Andrew Duxfield
1 The Critical Backstory Patrick Ashby
2 Richard II: A Performance History Kate Wilkinson
3 The State of the Art Gavin Schwartz-Leeper
4 New Directions: ‘Blood and Soil’ – Richard II and the Politics of Landscape Peter J. Smith
5 New Directions: Richard II, Sermon Culture and the Language of Mockery Adrian Streete
6 New Directions: Richard Through the Looking-Glass – The Intertextual Mirror in Richard II Andrew Duxfield
7 New Directions: King Thing Nothing – Richard II and His Problems Michael Davies
8 Learning and Teaching Resources: Text, Context and Performance Esme Miskimmin
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Richard II

ARDEN EARLY MODERN DRAMA GUIDES Series Editors: Andrew Hiscock, University of Wales, Bangor, UK and Lisa Hopkins, Sheffield Hallam University, UK Arden Early Modern Drama Guides offer practical and accessible introductions to the critical and performative contexts of key Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Each guide introduces the text’s critical and performance history, but also provides students with an invaluable insight into the landscape of current scholarly research, through a keynote essay on the state of the art and newly commissioned essays of fresh research from different critical perspectives. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, edited by Regina Buccola Doctor Faustus, edited by Sarah Munson Deats King Lear, edited by Andrew Hiscock and Lisa Hopkins Henry IV, Part 1, edited by Stephen Longstaffe ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, edited by Lisa Hopkins Women Beware Women, edited by Andrew Hiscock Volpone, edited by Matthew Steggle The Duchess of Malfi, edited by Christina Luckyj The Alchemist, edited by Erin Julian and Helen Ostovich The Jew of Malta, edited by Robert A. Logan Macbeth, edited by John Drakakis and Dale Townshend Richard III, edited by Annaliese Connolly Twelfth Night, edited by Alison Findlay and Liz Oakley-Brown The Tempest, edited by Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan Romeo and Juliet, edited by Julia Reinhard Lupton Julius Caesar, edited by Andrew James Hartley The Revenger’s Tragedy, edited by Brian Walsh The White Devil, edited by Paul Frazer and Adam Hansen Edward II, edited by Kirk Melnikoff Much Ado About Nothing, edited by Deborah Cartmell and Peter J. Smith King Henry V, edited by Karen Britland and Line Cottegnies Tamburlaine, edited by David McInnis Troilus and Cressida, edited by Efterpi Mitsi Further titles are in preparation.

Richard II A Critical Reader Edited by Michael Davies and Andrew Duxfield

THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE and the Arden Shakespeare logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 This paperback edition published in 2022 Copyright © Michael Davies, Andrew Duxfield and contributors, 2021 Michael Davies and Andrew Duxfield have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Charlotte Daniels Cover image taken from the 1615 title-page of The Spanish Tragedy, by Thomas Kyd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-6455-3 PB: 978-1-3502-4668-3 ePDF: 978-1-3500-6457-7 eBook: 978-1-3500-6456-0 Series: Arden Early Modern Drama Guides Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS Series Introduction  vii Notes on Contributors  viii Acknowledgements  xi Timeline  xii

Introduction  Michael Davies and Andrew Duxfield  1 1 The Critical Backstory  Patrick Ashby  21 2 Richard II: A Performance History Kate Wilkinson  45 3 The State of the Art  Gavin Schwartz-Leeper  67 4 New Directions: ‘Blood and Soil’ – Richard II and the Politics of Landscape  Peter J. Smith  87 5 New Directions: Richard II, Sermon Culture and the Language of Mockery Adrian Streete  111 6 New Directions: Richard Through the LookingGlass – The Intertextual Mirror in Richard II Andrew Duxfield  133

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7 New Directions: King Thing Nothing – Richard II and His Problems  Michael Davies  159 8 Learning and Teaching Resources: Text, Context and Performance  Esme Miskimmin  187

Notes  212 Select Bibliography  256 Index  264

SERIES INTRODUCTION The drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries has remained at the very heart of English curricula internationally and the pedagogic needs surrounding this body of literature have grown increasingly complex as more sophisticated resources become available to scholars, tutors and students. This series aims to offer a clear picture of the critical and performative contexts of a range of chosen texts. In addition, each volume furnishes readers with invaluable insights into the landscape of current scholarly research as well as including new pieces of research by leading critics. This series is designed to respond to the clearly identified needs of scholars, tutors and students for volumes which will bridge the gap between accounts of previous critical developments and performance history and an acquaintance with new research initiatives related to the chosen plays. Thus, our ambition is to offer innovative and challenging guides that will provide practical, accessible and thoughtprovoking analyses of early modern drama. Each volume is organized according to a progressive reading strategy involving introductory discussion, critical review and cuttingedge scholarly debate. It has been an enormous pleasure to work with so many dedicated scholars of early modern drama and we are sure that this series will encourage you to read 400-year-old play texts with fresh eyes. Andrew Hiscock and Lisa Hopkins

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Patrick Ashby has taught extensively on Shakespeare and early modern literature at the University of Bristol, where he also supports the growth and development of postgraduate research. The primary focus of his research is upon Shakespeare’s engagements with history and historical thought. He is the author of ‘The Changing Faces of Virtue: Plutarch, Machiavelli and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus’ (Early Modern Literary Studies, 2016). His most recent research investigates the handling of chronicle narrative in Shakespeare’s second tetralogy of history plays. Michael Davies is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool. He has research interests in English literature of the Renaissance and Restoration periods, focusing especially on the literary and religious cultures of early modern England. He is the author of Graceful Reading: Theology and Narrative in the Works of John Bunyan (2002) and Hamlet: Character Studies (2008). He is co-editor (with Ashley Chantler and Philip Shaw) of Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900 (2011) and (with W. R. Owens) of The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan (2018). Andrew Duxfield is Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool. His research focuses on the drama of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. His monograph, entitled Christopher Marlowe and the Failure to Unify, was published in 2015. He has published articles on Marlowe in Marlowe Studies and Early Modern Literary Studies, and contributed to Arden Early Modern Drama Guides on Doctor

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Faustus and The Jew of Malta. He was the winner of the 2009 Calvin and G. Rose Hoffman prize for distinguished publication on Christopher Marlowe. He has published work on Shakespeare in Cahiers Élisabéthains and The Explicator, and is a member of the editorial team at Early Modern Literary Studies and The Journal of Marlowe Studies. Esme Miskimmin is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool. She was a member of the editorial team for both the RSC Shakespeare Complete Works (2007) and the individual RSC Shakespeare editions of the plays (2008– 11), for which she wrote the scene-by-scene analyses aimed at students and actors. Her performance-led approach to teaching and research has been informed by her role as textual consultant in rehearsals for several Shakespeare productions at the Everyman Theatre, Liverpool, and Shakespeare’s Globe, London. She maintains dual research interests in Shakespeare and crime fiction, and her current work is seeing these interests overlap. She contributed a chapter entitled ‘The Act of Murder: Renaissance Tragedy and the Crime Novel’ to the collection Reinventing the Renaissance (2013), and has published several articles on crime fiction. Gavin Schwartz-Leeper is Associate Professor and Director of Student Experience (Liberal Arts) at the University of Warwick. He is the author of From Princes to Pages: The Literary Lives of Cardinal Wolsey, Tudor England’s ‘Other King’ (2016) and has published on Shakespeare’s histories, John Foxe, John Skelton, and aspects of early modern representation, martyrdom and performance. He is working on a new monograph on the various historiographical, political, civic and cultural roles played by Richard Grafton, MP and royal printer to Edward VI. He also works on a range of issues relating to higher education and interdisciplinary pedagogy. Peter J. Smith is Professor in Renaissance Literature at Nottingham Trent University. He is the author of Social Shakespeare (1995) and Between Two Stools: Scatology and its Representations in

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English Literature, Chaucer to Swift (2012). He contributed ‘The Critical Backstory’ to the Arden Early Modern Drama Guide on Richard III, ed. Annaliese Connolly (2013) and co-edited with Deborah Cartmell the volume on Much Ado About Nothing for the same series (2018). He is one of the four Editors-in-Chief of the internationally circulating journal, Cahiers Élisabéthains. Adrian Streete is Professor of Early Modern English Literature and Religion at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Apocalypse and Anti-Catholicism in Seventeenth-Century English Drama (2017) and Protestantism and Drama in Early Modern England (2009), editor of Early Modern Drama and the Bible: Contexts and Readings, 1570–1625 (2012), and coeditor of both Filming and Performing Renaissance History (2011) and The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts (2011). His current project is ‘Polemical Laughter in English Literary Culture, c.1500–1700’, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Kate Wilkinson’s main research interest is in Shakespeare and performance and she has published articles on productions of Shakespeare’s history plays, protest in productions of Shakespeare and the history of theatre reviewing. She has contributed performance histories to the Arden Early Modern Drama Guides for ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore and Richard III. She currently works for Sheffield Theatres.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book has incurred a number of debts which we would like to acknowledge here, with sincere gratitude. We thank Andrew Hiscock and Lisa Hopkins, general editors of the Arden Early Modern Drama Guides, for inviting us to edit this Critical Reader and to contribute to such a valuable series. We also thank this volume’s authors, not only for their hard work and erudition but also for sharing with us their enthusiasm for all things Ricardian, for responding generously to our suggestions and for suffering patiently our editorial meddling. Martin Jenkins’s superb sessions on Richard II, arranged especially for us in October 2018, proved invaluable for the insights they gave us into the play’s dynamics, both on the page and in performance. We are likewise grateful for the wise advice and good conversation of a number of friends and colleagues, including: Paul Baines, Jill Rudd, Alex Broadhead, David Salter, Graham Atkin and Simon Concannon. Lara Bateman and Deborah Maloney have provided unfailing assistance as well as patience and good cheer throughout the lengthy process of seeing this book into print, for all of which we express our deep appreciation. Finally, it should not go without saying that we owe more than our thanks to Carina Vitti and Helen Duxfield. MD & AD

TIMELINE 1327  Edward II is deposed and murdered. His son, Edward III (Richard II’s grandfather), becomes king at the age of fourteen. 1330 Edward the Black Prince (father of Richard II) is born, the first of seven sons of Edward III. 1337 The Hundred Years War with France begins. 1340 John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, is born: son of Edward III, father of Henry Bolingbroke and uncle to Richard II. 1341 Edmund of Langley, Duke of York, is born: son of Edward III, uncle to both Henry Bolingbroke and Richard II and father of Edward, Duke of Aumerle. 1355  Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, is born: son of Edward III and uncle to both Henry Bolingbroke and Richard II. 1356 Edward the Black Prince achieves a brilliant victory at Poitiers, France, capturing the French king, Jean II. 1365 Edward of Angoulême, first son of the Black Prince, is born (but dies young). 1367 Richard II, second son of the Black Prince, is born at Bordeaux on 6 January; Henry Bolingbroke, son of John of Gaunt and cousin to Richard II, is born on or around 15 April. 1376  The Black Prince dies; Richard II becomes heir apparent. 1377 Edward III dies. Richard II becomes king at the age of ten. 1381 The Peasants’ Revolt erupts, prompted by popular opposition to punishing levels of taxation. Led by Wat Tyler, rebels attack the Tower of London

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and destroy John of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace; the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Treasurer of England are murdered. A young Richard II faces the rebels in person. These events would later be dramatized in the anonymous Elizabethan play The Life and Death of Jack Straw (c. 1590–93). 1382 Richard II marries Anne of Bohemia. 1386–8  Richard II faces opposition in the ‘Wonderful’ and ‘Merciless’ Parliaments and is forced to accept a controlling council. The Lords Appellant (among them his uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, Thomas Mowbray, Earl of Nottingham, and Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Derby) humiliate the king by executing or banishing his closest friends, councillors and advisors. 1389 Richard II declares himself to be of age (i.e. no longer a minor) and takes more direct control of government as king. 1394  Richard’s first queen, Anne of Bohemia, dies. Richard II undertakes his first military expedition to Ireland. 1396 Peace is negotiated with France. Richard marries Princess Isabel of France (not yet seven years old), daughter of the French king, Charles VI. 1397 The tyranny begins. Richard II takes his revenge upon the Lords Appellant for their actions in 1388. Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, is murdered and the Earl of Arundel is executed. Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, is exiled. Their lands and goods are seized by the king. The remaining Lords Appellant, Henry Bolingbroke and Thomas Mowbray, are pardoned and awarded new titles by the king: Duke of Hereford and Duke of Norfolk respectively. 1398 Having accused each other of treason, a trial by combat between Bolingbroke and Mowbray at Coventry is stopped by Richard II; he banishes both.

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1399  In February, John of Gaunt, Bolingbroke’s father and Duke of Lancaster, dies; Richard II seizes the assets and estates of the Duchy of Lancaster, rightly Bolingbroke’s. In May/June, Richard II returns to Ireland to embark upon a second war. By June/ July, Bolingbroke has returned from banishment to challenge Richard and eventually to claim the throne. On returning from Ireland in late July, Richard II is eventually captured at Conwy, North Wales, by the Earl of Northumberland and Bolingbroke, before being taken to Flint Castle, and  from there to London. Between 29 September and 1 October, Richard officially resigns the crown and his deposition is formally sanctioned by Parliament. Bolingbroke ascends the throne as King Henry IV: his coronation takes place on 13 October. 1400 Richard II is imprisoned, and in February dies in Pontefract Castle, Yorkshire: exactly how he died remains uncertain; he probably starved to death. 1413 Having faced years of civil war and rebellion, Henry IV dies; Henry V becomes king. 1422  Henry V dies; Henry VI becomes king, at nine months old. 1455–85 The Wars of the Roses ensue between the Houses of York and Lancaster over rival claims to the English crown. They result in the rise of the Yorkist King Edward IV, Henry VI’s deposition and murder (in 1471) and the reign of Richard III (1483–85). 1485 Henry Tudor defeats Richard III at the battle of Bosworth Field, and becomes King Henry VII. 1509 Henry VIII becomes king, and marries Catherine of Aragon. 1527–33  Henry VIII divorces Catherine of Aragon and marries Anne Boleyn, separating England from the Church of Rome in the process; the English Reformation begins. 1547 Henry VIII dies and is succeeded by his son, Edward VI.

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1548 Edward Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancastre and Yorke is published: a possible source for Shakespeare’s Richard II. 1553  Mary I, daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, rules as a Catholic monarch (‘Bloody Mary’), instituting a reversal of the English (Henrician and Edwardian) Reformations. 1558 Elizabeth I (daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn) ascends the throne as a Protestant monarch: the English (now Elizabethan) Reformation continues. 1559  A Mirror for Magistrates, a series of poems narrating in the de casibus tradition the fall of great ones, is published featuring an account of the reign of Richard II: a possible source for Shakespeare’s Richard II. 1564  William Shakespeare is born in Stratford-uponAvon. 1587  Shakespeare’s chief source for Richard II, Holinshed’s Chronicles (2nd edn), is published. 1589–92 Shakespeare is writing for the theatre in London, including the Henry VI plays. 1592–4 Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II is written and performed; first published in 1594. The anonymous play of Richard II’s reign, Thomas of Woodstock, may also date from this period, as does an anonymous play about the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, The Life and Death of Jack Straw (first published in 1593). 1595 Samuel Daniel’s The First Four Books of the Civil Wars, an epic poem on the Wars of the Roses, is published, including an account and assessment of Richard II: another possible influence on Shakespeare’s Richard II, probably written around this time. A  letter from Sir Edward Hoby to Sir Robert Cecil in December suggests that Shakespeare’s Richard II was being performed by this point.

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1597  Richard II is first published in quarto (Q1), The Tragedie of King Richard the Second, without what would become known as the ‘deposition scene’ (4.1.155–318). 1598  Richard II is published again, twice, in quarto (Q2 and Q3), also without the ‘deposition scene’ (4.1.155–318). 1601 On 7 February, the eve of the uprising in London led by the Earl of Essex, Shakespeare’s company (the Lord Chamberlains’ Men) is commissioned by Essex’s supporters to perform at the Globe a play (possibly Shakespeare’s) staging the deposition and murder of Richard II. The rebellion fails: Essex is swiftly tried and executed. On 4 August, Elizabeth I is alleged to have remarked to William Lambarde ‘I am Richard II, know ye not that?’, while commenting too that ‘this tragedy was played 40 times in open streets and houses’. 1603 Elizabeth I dies; James VI of Scotland is crowned James I of England. 1607 On 29 September, somewhere off the coast of Sierra Leone, William Keeling, Captain of the Dragon, records in his journal that on this day ‘my company acted Kinge Richard the Seconde’ (presumably Shakespeare’s play). 1608  Richard II is published again in quarto (Q4), but this time with a version of the ‘deposition scene’ (4.1.155–318). 1615 Richard II’s Q4 (1608) is reprinted (Q5). 1616 Shakespeare dies. 1623  The First Folio of Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies is published; it includes The Life and Death of King Richard the Second, featuring a superior version of the ‘deposition scene’ (4.1.155–318). 1632 Shakespeare’s Second Folio is published.

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1634 Another quarto of Richard II is published (Q6), based on the text of the Second Folio (1632). 1680–1 In the midst of the Exclusion Crisis and following the heat of the Popish Plot, Nahum Tate adapts Richard II: it is banned before even being performed. Tate rewrites it as The Sicilian Usurper; it too is suppressed. Tate publishes his version of The History of King Richard the Second (1681) with a prefatory ‘Vindication’. 1719  Lewis Theobald’s radically altered Richard II is performed in London; published in 1720. 1738 John Rich stages Richard II at Covent Garden for the ‘Shakespeare Ladies Club’. 1815  The actor Edmund Kean revives Richard II, taking the title role in an adaptation by Richard Wroughton. 1857  Charles Kean, son of Edmund, stages a visually spectacular but heavily cut production of Richard II, featuring replicas of historical settings, lavish costumes and hundreds of extras. 1896 Frank Benson stages Richard II at Stratford-uponAvon, reviving the play regularly over subsequent years, including during the ‘Week of Kings’ season, also at Stratford-upon-Avon, in 1901. Benson’s production is notable for its attention to historical detail as well as for the psychologically nuanced and complex portrayal of the king. 1929 John Gielgud performs the role of Richard II in a production at the Old Vic, directed by Harcourt Williams. Gielgud would direct the play himself in 1937. 1951 Anthony Quayle directs the ‘Henriad’ tetralogy in a ‘Festival of Britain’ production at Stratford-uponAvon, starring Michael Redgrave as Richard II. 1964 Peter Hall directs Richard II at the RSC for the ‘Wars of the Roses’ season, starring David Warner as the king.

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1969 The Prospect Theatre Company stages and tours the play, featuring Ian McKellen as Richard, directed by Richard Cottrell, with Richard II being performed back-to-back with Marlowe’s Edward II. 1973 For the RSC at Stratford-upon-Avon, John Barton directs a ground-breaking production, with two actors, Ian Richardson and Richard Pasco, alternating in each performance the roles of Richard and Bolingbroke. 1977 Written, directed and produced by Martin Jenkins, BBC Radio broadcasts the landmark series Vivat Rex, weaving together the works of numerous Renaissance English dramatists to tell the bloody story of the English crown, from the reign of Edward II to the birth of Elizabeth I. Derek Jacobi stars as Richard II. 1978 Derek Jacobi stars again as the king, this time in the BBC’s screen production of Richard II, directed by David Giles and featuring John Gielgud as John of Gaunt. This is the second in the BBC Television Shakespeare series. 1986–9 Michael Bogdanov directs the English Shakespeare Company’s ‘Wars of the Roses’ cycle; Michael Pennington (co-founder of the ESC) stars as Richard II. 1995  Fiona Shaw plays the title role in a production of Richard II directed by Deborah Warner at the National Theatre, London. 2000  Samuel West stars as Richard II in a Brechtian production directed by Steven Pimlott at The Other Place, in Stratford-upon-Avon: part of the RSC’s ‘This England: The Histories’ cycle. Ralph Fiennes plays Richard II for the Almeida Theatre Company at Gainsborough Film studios, London, directed by Jonathan Kent. 2003  Mark Rylance plays the king in an all-male production of Richard II at Shakespeare’s Globe,

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London, directed by Tim Carroll: part of the theatre’s ‘Regime Change’ season. 2005  Kevin Spacey plays Richard II in a production directed by Trevor Nunn at the Old Vic, London, where Spacey was also Artistic Director. 2006–8  Michael Boyd directs Shakespeare’s ‘Histories’ for the RSC at Stratford-upon-Avon: Richard II is played by Jonathan Slinger. 2011 Michael Grandage directs Richard II at the Donmar Warehouse, London, starring Eddie Redmayne as the king. 2012 In another major BBC television series, The Hollow Crown, Richard II is both adapted for the screen and directed by Rupert Goold. The cast includes Ben Whishaw (Richard), Rory Kinnear (Bolingbroke), Patrick Stewart (Gaunt), David Suchet (York) and David Morrissey (Northumberland). 2013  David Tennant stars as Richard II in the RSC production at Stratford-upon-Avon, directed by Gregory Doran, with Michael Pennington as Gaunt. 2018–19 Jo Hill-Gibbins directs The Tragedy of King Richard the Second at the Almeida Theatre, London, starring Simon Russell Beale as the king. 2019  The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London, stages Richard II with an all-women-of-colour cast, codirected by Lynette Linton and Adjoa Andoh; Andoh also takes the title role.

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Introduction Michael Davies and Andrew Duxfield This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall Or as a moat defensive to a house Against the envy of less happier lands, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England. (R2 2.1.40–50) Shakespeare’s Richard II stands in complex relation to matters of ‘reception’, ‘cultural memory’ and what might be termed the ‘popular imagination’. On one level, as historians are fond of reminding us, ‘What most people know about Richard II … comes to them from Shakespeare’.1 Despite focusing only on the final years of his reign (roughly 1397–9), and therefore avoiding one of its most famous features, the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, nevertheless it is from this play that ‘the

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popular view of Richard has been determined’, it seems, for ‘centuries’.2 Except for students of medieval English history and experts in the reigns of the Plantagenets, what most of us will have learned about the life and death of Richard II may well derive from a familiarity with Shakespeare’s drama. For this reason, historians’ scholarly accounts of Richard II, and of English medieval history more generally, will often call upon Shakespeare in some way to open their subject, usually through a title that communicates some clear Shakespearean connection: Hollow Crown – one of the play’s most memorable images – has proved especially alluring.3 Yet, on another level, Richard II is a play that we would be hard pressed to identify as having a firm foothold in popular culture. Though long the darling of literary scholars and historians, as the chapters in this volume by Patrick Ashby and Gavin Schwartz-Leeper demonstrate, and despite having a rich and at times controversial performance history, as Kate Wilkinson’s survey illustrates, the attractions of Richard II are of a different, arguably subtler, variety. Without any clashing of swords or the spilling of a single drop of blood until almost the very last scene, and with more tears shed on stage than in any other play by Shakespeare, this most lachrymose of dramas offers its audiences a very different kind of historical tragedy, and a very different theatrical experience.4 Far less gory and much more cerebral, indeed metaphysical; far less violent and much more verbal, indeed richly poetic and ceremonial, than other Shakespearean dramas, it is, as a consequence, less obviously ‘popular’. Unlike Richard III, Hamlet or Macbeth, and in spite of some superb TV adaptations, the ‘blockbuster’ film of Richard II has yet to materialize. More intense closet drama than vibrant martial epic, this profoundly intellectual play – a favourite of the contemporary philosopher Slavoj Žižek, no less – hardly seems fare for Hollywood, being altogether something more distinctive, ‘rich and strange’, and for reasons that this ‘Introduction’ will seek to explore.5 And yet again, on yet another level, the place held by Richard II in the English national imagination could not be

INTRODUCTION

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more secure or even unrivalled, we might think, in large part due to the lines with which this ‘Introduction’ opens: John of Gaunt’s famous oration on ‘this sceptred isle’, ‘this England’ – phrases which, like ‘the hollow crown’, have come to be printed in the blood almost as indelibly as ‘To be, or not to be’ or ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends’. Offering an imperishably ‘idealized conceit’, the very model of a ‘national panegyric’, this speech would prove popular almost as soon as it appeared, being sold to late-Elizabethan readers, in almost exactly the form given above, as a stand-alone poem – ‘Of Albion’ – in an anthology of 1600, Englands Parnassus.6 As ‘part of the collective cultural imagination’ it has been ‘ubiquitously’ quoted and continuously ‘appropriated’ ever since: ‘Few speeches are more iconic or more frequently employed in the service of patriotic rhetoric’, Sarah Grandage observes, leaving it open to being ‘mobilized, especially in times of war’, as Willy Maley and Margaret Tudeau-Clayton have noted, in order ‘to promote perceived “traditional” values of a mythical’ – usually ‘rural’ – ‘England’.7 While it ‘continues to dominate the canon of English literature’, this speech has also been used to sell tea.8 To the indignation of Roy Hattersley, former Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, and to the ‘genuine dismay’ too of the scholar and broadcaster Lisa Jardine, John of Gaunt’s speech came to popular prominence in November 1993 through a television advertising campaign for Typhoo.9 Set to the swelling music of Hubert Parry’s anthemic ‘Jerusalem’, and against a backdrop of bucolic images of a ‘green and pleasant land’, Gaunt’s rousing words were recited exactly as quoted above, except for one significant alteration – the concluding ‘this England’ was changed to ‘this Britain’: a well-orchestrated attempt, as Nickianne Moody has explained, to generate nostalgia for ‘a resilient British identity’ able to survive any amount of ‘chaos’ through the enduring power of the cup that cheers.10 There is, however, a darker side to this popularity. Roy Hattersley may have been affronted by the ‘crass’ attempt to increase sales of Typhoo Tea by co-opting (and rewriting)

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Shakespearean verse, but he is equally sensitive to the ‘phoney patriotism’ that the advert sought to exploit.11 As Maley and Tudeau-Clayton have shown, Gaunt’s powerful encomium to England as ‘a little world’ unto itself, ‘blessed’ and ‘precious’ in being cut off from ‘less happier lands’, has served for centuries to ‘perpetrate’ and ‘reproduce an insular vision of a total and sovereign England’: the idea of an exclusive and exceptional nation that veers sharply towards something much more nationalistic, xenophobic and, as Maley notes, ‘specifically eurosceptic’.12 Writing this ‘Introduction’ in November 2019, at arguably the most fraught point in post-1945 British social, political and constitutional history, we are especially sensitive to the ‘presentist’ significance of John of Gaunt’s words and how  they resonate with what has become the most serious crisis for the UK since the Second World War: Brexit. With Shakespeare’s ‘this sceptred isle’ speech articulating the sentiments of many anti-EU Brexit supporters, we might be forgiven for thinking that Richard II has never been so relevant, and our need to grasp its complexities never more urgent.13 Yet, forasmuch as some far-right videos to be found on YouTube might seek likewise to hijack ‘this sceptred isle’ for an openly anti-immigrant, ‘England for the English’ agenda – a populist mentality that, as Peter J. Smith’s contribution to this volume points out, is by no means unique to the UK in the current climate – it is important to remember that Richard II is no ‘pro-Brexit’ play. As Donald M. Friedman pointed out some time ago, Gaunt’s dying speech does not articulate ‘the political orthodoxy’ that the play as a whole might be ‘thought to support’.14 To acknowledge this fact is important not just for any ‘presentist’ political arguments we might wish to pursue now, but also because it allows us to appreciate just how rich and dynamic Richard II is as a drama. For anyone approaching the play for the first time, John of Gaunt’s words offer an opportunity to taste its qualities as such, and to recognize this play’s deeply sophisticated literary and conceptual construction, from its employment of historical and  literary sources to its dazzling use of language, rhetoric and stagecraft,

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dramatizing structures of thought and experience that problematize any attempt to appropriate it for convenient political purposes, especially of the nationalist kind. A number of critics have pointed out, for example, that John of Gaunt’s elegiac lament for an England blissfully selfcontained and isolated from ‘less happier lands’ presents an idealism belied by both historical and geographical fact: ‘England’ has never been an island ‘set’ alone in a ‘silver sea’, for it shares land borders with two other nations occluded from Gaunt’s vision, Wales and Scotland, as well as a long and troubled relationship with another country also within its ‘Celtic fringe’, Ireland.15 Anyone who falls for Gaunt’s rhetoric in this respect does so, like some of those in hard pursuit of a harder Brexit, in order to ‘step back’ into ‘an imagined past’ – indeed, into an imagined country – that ‘never existed’.16 If it is important to acknowledge in our reading of Richard II today the ‘Britishness’ of England rather than just the ‘Englishness’ of ‘Britain’, as Maley has suggested, then it is equally imperative to realize how profoundly Euro-facing this play is, and in more ways than one.17 A major irony, for instance, lies in the fact that the patriotic ‘this sceptred isle’ speech is delivered by John of Gaunt, or rather ‘John of Ghent’ (the city in Belgium) in order to castigate the follies of his nephew, Richard of Bordeaux. Not exactly the ‘true-born Englishman’ (R2 1.3.309), this rightful English king married Isabel of France, daughter to the French monarch, Charles VI: Isabel was Richard II’s second queen, his first, Anne of Bohemia, having died young. Such connections remind us that historically England’s political unions and international accords have typically been European in nature, and that, regardless of the way that Gaunt’s speech fuses ‘realm and regal power’ (England is specifically ‘this sceptred isle’, ‘this seat of majesty’), its monarchy has always remained ‘the most European of English institutions, just as it is the most Scottish and Welsh’.18 But the ironies and complexities run even deeper still. The key source for John of Gaunt’s ‘this sceptred isle’ speech, as J. W. Lever spotted some time ago, seems to be the 1593 English

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translation by John Eliot of a passage from La Création du Monde: La Seconde Sepmaine (1584) by the French courtier and poet Du Bartas: a poem that meditates directly, according to Ton Hoenselaars and Clara Calvo, on England’s loss of its last Continental territory, Calais, in 1558 and its triumphant repossession by the French.19 It turns out, then, that ‘[e]ven Shakespeare’s invocations of England are European’, with ‘[t]he Elizabethan source for Gaunt’s nostalgia’ being of a profoundly ‘Continental European nature’, as are likewise some of the French historical sources for Richard II that historians and literary scholars have long acknowledged as having been within Shakespeare’s reach.20 Even the theological nationalist doctrine espoused by John of Gaunt – the idea that England has always been an elect nation, a ‘blessed’ country set apart by God as another ‘Eden’ – is, as the historian John W. McKenna shows, a light-fingered appropriation of a distinctly French medieval ‘regal mythology’. Tudor assertions by both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I of a ‘national sovereignty’ that aligned itself with ‘Britannic godliness’ and new forms of ‘national piety’ had their foundations, it seems, in an English adoption of a traditionally French mode of political thought: one that facilitated God’s repatriation in the sixteenth century as ‘an Englishman’.21 John of Gaunt’s deathbed speech is, then, far more than just a signature anthem of English national exceptionalism; it remains much more complex than those who admire it as such might ever imagine, or be happy to admit. Yet, we hardly have to go to such lengths to appreciate how outward-looking, rather than insular, Richard II is as a political drama. For, as a play about ‘regime change’, written in the long and uncertain aftermath of an attempt by Catholic Spain to oust the Protestant Elizabeth I from the English throne in 1588, Richard II has always spoken, and continues to speak, to patterns of political crisis, conflict and collapse that invite global – dare we say ‘universal’ – comparison: in more recent times with the likes of Saddam Hussein in Iraq or Colonel Gaddafi in Libya, or even Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. Likewise, by examining an

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English medieval example of ‘regime change’ the far-reaching and destabilizing consequences of which are dramatized in the plays that would constitute both of Shakespeare’s English historical tetralogies, Richard II may well force us to reconsider the ‘triumphs’ of the ‘Arab Spring’ and their outcomes for the nations involved. Toppling even the most barbarous of tyrants may nevertheless result in years of civil war, bloodshed and further tragedy for the very people those despots once brutally oppressed. As the timely 2019 production of Richard II at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse has reminded us, the matters with which this ‘regime change’ play deals are far from unique to England, Britain or even Europe.

Richard II and the play of history We begin this ‘Introduction’ with such a lengthy consideration of Gaunt’s famous speech because it offers a powerful reminder of how dynamic and vital the politics of Richard II are, whether in terms of the present or the past, at home or abroad. Few plays can hold such lasting significance when it comes to questioning what political authority means, who can be permitted to wield it and under what circumstances ‘sovereignty’ can be challenged: something that Elizabethans evidently considered very carefully. But it is also important to recognize that there is much more to Richard II than just the ‘hollow crown’ or ‘this sceptred isle’. Despite the comfortable familiarity of these phrases, this is a play that brings with it a unique set of challenges as an ‘experimental’ form of drama: a drama that is an English chronicle or history play, but which is not quite like any other that Shakespeare or his contemporaries would write. It is also a tragedy, albeit one that likewise tests the limits both of the genre and of its audiences, in forcing us to ask whether its central character is deserving of our pity as a ‘tragic hero’. It is a play about brutal political conflict, the struggle for England’s crown, yet it contains no battles,

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delivering instead the fast-paced cut-and-thrust of monarchal realpolitik entirely in its stately, at times ceremonially rich, blank verse. Perhaps most challenging is its rootedness in political and dynastic matters specific both to the period in which the play is set (the late 1390s) and to that in which it was written and first performed (the mid-to-late 1590s). In spite of its capacity to meet current concerns, Richard II appears to demand or, to echo Margaret Shewring’s account of its complexities, to assume in its audience a sound working knowledge of medieval political theory and of the events that led to the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses.22 As a result, as Graham Holderness has noted, ‘no other historical drama of Shakespeare’s has proved more difficult to understand and interpret without the aid of external authorities’.23 In the latter part of Gaunt’s famous oration, for example, so often excised from patriotic appropriations of the speech, he laments that the erstwhile ‘demi-paradise’ of England is now ‘leased out … Like to a tenement or pelting farm’, and later declares that Richard is no king but merely ‘Landlord of England’ (2.1.59–60, 113). The only context that the play offers for these charges is limited to a few lines spoken by Richard to his courtiers in the previous act, as he announces his decision to pursue a military campaign in Ireland: We will ourself in person to this war, And, for our coffers with too great a court And liberal largesse are grown somewhat light, We are enforced to farm our royal realm, The revenue whereof shall furnish us For our affairs in hand. If that come short, Our substitutes at home shall have blank charters Whereto, when they shall know what men are rich, They shall subscribe them for large sums of gold, And send them after to supply our wants; For we will make for Ireland presently. (1.4.42–52)

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The play returns explicitly to the subject of ‘blank charters’ and the ‘farming’ of the realm – the ‘leasing’ of the right, that is, to raise revenues from the land, solely for personal profit – only in 2.1: first in Gaunt’s ‘lacerating sermon’, as Saenger describes it, and then, later, in the conspiratorial discussion between Northumberland, Willoughby and Ross (2.1.57–60, 110, 249–50, 256).24 The full import of this crucial aspect of the play relies, it seems, on an audience’s familiarity with either chronicle accounts of Richard’s reign or, if it had been written and performed before Shakespeare’s Richard II, with the anonymously authored play Thomas of Woodstock, which dramatized the events that occurred immediately prior to the period addressed by Shakespeare.25 In the chronicles, Elizabethan readers would have found details of a king who oversaw tremendous mismanagement of the national finances, and whose notorious excesses at court necessitated both the ‘farming’ of the realm and the implementation of punitive levels of taxation.26 In Woodstock, they would have encountered a prototypical version of Gaunt’s ‘landlord’ and ‘pelting farm’ jibes, as well as an extensive, at times tragicomic, treatment of Richard’s deployment of ‘blank charters’: so called not because they were ‘blank’ but because they gave the king carte blanche over the property and wealth of his richest subjects.27 That Shakespeare’s play is less explicit than other accounts or dramatizations in its treatment of Richard’s fiscal unscrupulousness should not be taken to mean, however, that this context is not important to the play. As Michael Davies’s chapter in this volume shows, Richard II demonstrates a clear engagement with the notion of the king’s prodigality and its role in his downfall, the deeper resonances of which, once illuminated, can help us to attend better the play’s language and dramatic structure. Audiences unacquainted with the vagaries of the historical Richard’s life and death might also be puzzled not only by some of Shakespeare’s curious omissions – as John Halverson comments, ‘It is remarkable how much history Shakespeare left out of his play’ – but also by some of the details he does

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include, at times in some potentially mystifying ways.28 The vitriol with which Bolingbroke condemns the king’s courtiers – Bushy, Bagot and Green – could, for example, be understood as part of the rebels’ depiction of them as ‘caterpillars [i.e. parasites] of the commonwealth’ (2.3.166): ‘flatterers’ who have ‘basely led’ Richard astray (2.1.241–2). Much more baffling, though, is Bolingbroke’s rather surprising accusation, put directly to Bushy and Green in 3.1, that: You have in manner with your sinful hours Made a divorce betwixt his queen and him [Richard], Broke the possession of a royal bed And stained the beauty of a fair queen’s cheeks With tears drawn from her eyes by your foul wrongs. (3.1.11–15) Given that Shakespeare elsewhere in the play, not least in their final moments together in 5.1, appears to grant the relationship between Richard and Queen Isabel a dignified mutual tenderness, and given also that we see her receiving the steadfast support of Bushy, Bagot and Green in 2.2, Bolingbroke’s charges invite dismissal as fictions cooked up in order to expedite a swift and convenient removal of three of Richard’s closest allies (allies who, as Davies notes, also control his finances). However, familiarity either with Holinshed’s Chronicles or with the history plays staged in the years preceding the first performances of Richard II provides some context for Bolingbroke’s insinuations. As Charles R. Forker has noted, Holinshed declares, at one point, that at Richard’s court ‘there reigned abundantlie the filthie sinne of leacherie and fornication, with abhominable adulterie, speciallie in the king’: a feature given dramatic emphasis too in Thomas of Woodstock, which depicts a suggestible Richard likewise misled by ambitious courtiers, also castigated as ‘caterpillars’ (Woodstock 1.3.155–7), while showing the king to be, as Forker puts it, ‘especially intimate with Green’.29 Those familiar

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with Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II may also hear in Bolingbroke’s indictment an echo of another Queen Isabella’s complaint that ‘For now my lord the king regards me not, / But dotes upon the love of Gaveston’.30 As a result, we appear to be encouraged to read into the allegations presented to Bushy, Bagot and Green the implication of a homoerotic relationship between Richard and his favourites at court.31 Anyone aware that the historical Richard saw a clear correspondence between his own beleaguered position and that of Edward II, or that Richard made an unsuccessful appeal for Edward II to be canonized, might be inclined to make this connection more forcefully.32 But the play’s relationship with the medieval history on which it draws is far from simple. Bolingbroke’s assertion that Bushy, Bagot and Green have ‘broke[n]’ Queen Isabel’s ‘possession of a royal bed’ can have little claim to authority in part because the historical Isabel was no more than ten years old during the period that the play dramatizes. Indeed, there is something playful, even metadramatic, about the way in which Bolingbroke’s allegation seems to derive from sources external to the world of the play itself. It is as if this theatrical version of a fourteenth-century nobleman and future king, Bolingbroke, has acquired these illicit rumours by reading sixteenth-century chronicles and attending performances of other Elizabethan history plays, basing his accusations upon them in a playworld that otherwise shows them to be baseless and hollow, or at least impossible to prove. It would be easy to point to other moments too that likewise appear to assume an awareness of a history only hinted at or granted a shadowy presence in the play itself. Mowbray and Bolingbroke, for example, whose mutual charges of treason open the play, were both among a small group of powerful noblemen known historically as the Lords Appellant, or just Appellants. In 1388, these Lords Appellant severely curtailed Richard’s power by instigating a political campaign that culminated in the execution or banishment of several of the king’s most prominent supporters at court: a wounding,

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because humiliating, series of events that remains unmentioned in 1.1, and indeed throughout the play.33 Although Richard pardoned both Bolingbroke and Mowbray in 1397, honouring them with the titles we hear being used at the start of the play (Bolingbroke as Duke of Hereford, Mowbray as Duke of Norfolk), the fact that there is some ‘history’ between them hangs ominously over both 1.1 and 1.3, as is communicated by Shakespeare’s subtle deployment of the word ‘appellant’: three of only five uses of this word in all of Shakespeare’s works occur, in fact, in these two scenes alone (1.1.34; 1.3.4, 52; see also 1.3.25 SD). The term ‘Lords appellants’ steps forward too, suitably enough, in 4.1, just before York enters with news of Richard’s willingness to yield his ‘sceptre’ to that former ‘Lord Appellant’, Bolingbroke (4.1.105, 108–13). Similarly unspoken in 1.1 is Richard’s role in the murder of another prominent member of the Lords Appellant: Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, uncle to both the king and Bolingbroke. Although his responsibility for this assassination is apparently made clear in 1.2, with Gaunt’s acknowledgement that God’s ‘substitute’ and ‘deputy’ ‘Hath caused his death’ (1.2.4–5, 37–9), the question of who actually killed Gloucester remains unresolved throughout the play. In 1.1, Bolingbroke confidently charges Mowbray with this crime. Yet by 4.1, he is no longer so certain. Here, we witness Bolingbroke having to broker further accusations and counter-accusations, none of which is possible to verify or to prove, and which send us spiralling into an abyss of uncertainty over whether this new king will ever be able to establish the facts and to effect justice in this case: all very ‘post-truth’, we might think. The play, as a result, has a fascinating relationship with a contemporary body of knowledge on the historical Richard II that is never quite straightforward, tending to be as elusive as it is allusive from its very first scene. In addition to an engagement with ‘truth’ and ‘history’ that is simultaneously deadly serious and expertly playful, in Richard II Shakespeare also appears to demonstrate a formidable command of medieval political doctrine. Critical

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discourse on the play since the mid-twentieth century has been preoccupied with, and to an extent dominated by, the notion of the ‘king’s two bodies’, as showcased by Ernst Kantorowicz’s highly influential 1957 study of the same name. Kantorowicz’s aim is both to explore and to explain the prevalence in medieval and early modern political and juridical discourse of the idea that the monarch inhabited both a ‘body natural’ – the mortal human form, subject to death and decay like any other – and a more mystical ‘body politic’: the immortal embodiment of the unity of king (or queen) and commonwealth which, like the throne, is occupied by a succession of incumbents, all sharing the same legal and eternal identity.34 ‘The Tragedy of King Richard II’, Kantorowicz states, ‘is the tragedy of the King’s Two Bodies’, in an analysis that traces throughout the play the separation of Richard’s body natural from the body politic: a quasi-religious drama that reaches its climax in the ‘deposition scene’ of 4.1.35 The popularity of this reading as a way of modelling an approach to the language and dramaturgy of a play allegedly rooted in the political and theological doctrines of ‘divine right’ and ‘sacred majesty’ is obvious to see in the literary criticism of Richard II that followed in its wake, from the commentary of Shakespearean scholars such as Charles R. Forker to the political and philosophical writings of Slavoj Žižek.36 Despite some trenchant criticisms of Kantorowicz and of the thinking that informs his reading of Richard II, and despite too the fact that its influence on criticism of the play appears to have been in decline for some time, the ‘king’s two bodies’ remains an important, indeed seminal, concept: a ‘critical orthodoxy’ that demands to be challenged, but one that also provides further confirmation of Shakespeare’s serious engagement with his subject’s medieval political and religious contexts, and on some sophisticated levels.37 The ‘king’s two bodies’ was, however, as much an early modern as it was a medieval hypothesis and in alluding to it in Richard II Shakespeare is not simply reviving a centuriesold theory of political theology. Inherent in the concept, and

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in Shakespeare’s treatment of it, is the idea of monarchal succession, and in the mid-1590s, when Richard II was probably both written and first performed, the childless Virgin Queen was reaching what, by the standards of the day, was a considerably advanced age, generating a distinct anxiety over who would next occupy the English throne and manifest the body politic: an Elizabethan ‘succession crisis’.38 But Elizabeth I’s body natural was also perceived to be under considerable threat in the years leading up to and following the play’s early performances. In 1594, a year before Richard II was most likely written, Roderigo Lopez, the royal physician, was executed, having been accused by the Earl of Essex of conspiring with Spanish officials to poison the queen.39 Essex would himself become embroiled in a similarly explosive intrigue: one that seems likely to have implicated Richard II directly. As several contributors to this volume note, on 7 February 1601 a performance at the Globe of a play depicting the deposition and murder of Richard II – possibly Shakespeare’s Richard II – was commissioned by allies of Essex. The following day, Essex and his followers made a catastrophically ill-judged attempt to raise the people of London in support of an armed revolt against Elizabeth’s government.40 If, indeed, it were Shakespeare’s Richard II that the conspirators paid to have performed on the eve of their rebellion  – and it is worth remaining cautious about this identification, as Blair Worden and Paul E. J. Hammer have indicated – then we would have something that could be considered the play’s earliest recorded political interpretation.41 Given his ancestral connection to Henry IV, and what Hammer terms his ‘public association’ with this regal forebear, Essex may well have read himself as Bolingbroke and the play as sympathetic to his faction and his cause.42 Crucially, such a reading, possibly informed further by John Hayward’s controversial historical account of Richard II in The Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII (published in 1599), may also have proved a fatal misreading, overlooking the

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sympathy which, for all his flaws, the play generates for its title character, Richard II. To propose that Essex identified with Bolingbroke may, then, be more than just speculation. In any case, and as several contributors to this volume likewise note, we also have the infamous report of Elizabeth I declaring to William Lambarde in 1601, just months after Essex’s execution over the failed insurrection, ‘I am Richard II, know ye not that?’.43 Long a staple feature of commentary on the play, the Lambarde anecdote demonstrates perhaps more than anything else the bi-directional relationship between the period’s drama and its power politics. It also demonstrates with urgent clarity that, howsoever invested the play may have been in the particularities of the historical Richard II’s reign and in medieval statecraft more generally, it was also a play that spoke directly of and to the concerns of its immediate cultural and political environments: those of a ‘crisis’ decade of the 1590s.44 As the contributions to this collection by Adrian Streete and Andrew Duxfield show, Richard II is a play alive with allusion to and engagement with its contemporary moment in numerous ways, some of which have hitherto escaped the attention of its critics.

Richard II and the ‘sad stories of the death of kings’ Richard II operates on multiple temporal planes: able to speak directly, that is, to medieval and Elizabethan concerns while capable too of addressing our own, well over four centuries later. Although this is something that could easily be said of other Shakespearean histories – Henry V, for example – there is something about Richard II that sets it apart from its fellow Elizabethan chronicle plays. After opening with the prospect of violence only for that possibility to be forestalled by the words of the king, the play continues to devote its attention to the rhetoric of statecraft: what the all-action Henry V might have

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dismissed as ‘ceremony’ (H5 4.1.235–6). The key moments of conflict in the play – the aborted trial by combat between Bolingbroke and Mowbray in 1.3, the admonishment of Richard by Gaunt and the subsequent seizure of the Lancastrian inheritance in 2.1, the confrontation at Flint Castle in 3.3 and the deposition scene of 4.1 – are all carried out verbally: the play in fact contains no staged violence until Richard’s death in Act 5. Rhetoric rather than rapiers, wordplay rather than swordplay, dominate and, indeed, constitute Richard II’s ‘action’. This language is, moreover, of a distinctly elevated nature, remaining in blank verse from start to finish: even the Gardeners of 3.4 speak strictly in iambic pentameter. It is also rich with elaborately poetic and finely-wrought rhetorical figures, designed to convey not just the intricacies of statecraft and majesty but also the personal grief of a king whose power and identity are slowly and surely being stripped from him. As a result, Richard’s is by far the most eloquent voice of the play, and also the most persistent. Taking over a quarter of the lines spoken in total, he has the longest speeches and delivers more of them than any other character; Bolingbroke, by contrast, is indeed an almost ‘silent King’ (4.1.290). The only characters in the Shakespearean canon who rival this domination of the text are the eponymous protagonists of Richard III and Hamlet, and if one were taking a linear view of Shakespeare’s progression as a dramatist one might place Richard II between these two plays developmentally as well as chronologically. With Richard II, Shakespeare has moved on from the garishly gruesome tyrant-king-villain that the earlier Richard III might be said to figure, and is on the way to shaping a much more complex kind of dramatic characterization for which Hamlet is regarded as such a landmark. Richard II could be seen, then, as a sign of things to come: a look forward to the rich complexity of Shakespeare’s seventeenth-century tragedies and tragical histories. Yet it might also be thought of as a play that looks back to earlier

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forms. When Richard, recently informed of the desertion of the forces which he had assumed would be coming to his aid, bids his remaining companions to ‘sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings – / How some have been deposed, some slain in war, / Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed’ (3.2.155–8), he may, as Esme Miskimmin notes in her chapter in this volume, be asking us to consider the genre of the history play itself, given as it is to dramatizing precisely these kinds of episodes. To an Elizabethan audience it would also, and perhaps more immediately, call to mind the de casibus tradition, in which poets compiled collections of short verse narrative tragedies detailing the falls of great men and women.45 This tradition, in its medieval origins, foregrounded the role of Fortune in human affairs, and derived its tragic and moral logic not from the idea that people fall as a consequence of a particular flaw or error – an in-built hamartia – but rather from the idea that Fortune catches up with us all, whether great or humble, and that we should accordingly learn to hold the transitory glories of this world in contempt. The most popular example of the genre in late Elizabethan England was A Mirror for Magistrates (first published in 1559 and regularly reprinted thereafter, including in an edition of 1587) in which key figures from history would tell their own ‘sad stories’ directly to the reader, reflecting upon and lamenting their tragic fates. Among the narratives collected in A Mirror for Magistrates is that of Richard II, in which the dead king asks ‘What moulde be Kynges made of, but carayn [i.e. carrion] clay? / Beholde his woundes, howe blew they be about / Whych whyle he lived, thought neuer to decay’.46 When Shakespeare’s Richard realizes, in what is the last of his great speeches and also his first soliloquy, that ‘I wasted time, and now doth Time waste me’ (5.5.49), he is arriving at a similar revelation. Perhaps Richard II, written entirely in verse and dominated by the voice of a single, lamentably tragic figure, might more accurately be read as a dramatized de casibus poem than a stepping-stone to Hamlet.

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Richard II: A Critical Reader However one categorizes Richard II – de casibus tragedy, Elizabethan political drama, medieval chronicle play, tragical history, historical tragedy, an essay in existentialism or a treatise in political theology – it stands apart insofar as it is more sophisticated, both philosophically and linguistically, than any other of Shakespeare’s early histories or tragedies. As arguably the ‘most admirable of all Shakespeare’s purely historical plays’, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge once described it, it is also a drama, as we have been illustrating in this ‘Introduction’, that poses serious questions about history, historical knowledge and ‘truth’, with which anyone encountering it must inevitably wrestle.47 All of this can make it a challenge for readers, audiences and students. But it also makes Richard II a play that greatly rewards careful analysis, and that continues to provoke fresh and engaging critical interpretation. It is our hope that this volume will contribute something new and significant when it comes both to opening up its poetry, language and form and to tapping into the aesthetic and intellectual resources that this remarkable drama offers. The aim of this volume is, then, to fulfil two main roles: first, that of guiding uninitiated readers through the complexities of Richard II’s critical and performance histories, equipping them with the tools necessary both to follow and to join ongoing scholarly conversations about the play. Secondly, it aims to participate in those discussions, by proposing some new directions in which criticism of this fascinatingly rich and multifaceted play might travel, now and in the future. To these ends, this Critical Reader presents chapters by Patrick Ashby and Gavin Schwartz-Leeper which between them navigate the reader through the history of critical responses to Richard II, from its early recognition by Francis Meres in 1598 through to some of the most important critical work published so far in the twenty-first century. Kate Wilkinson provides a survey charting the play’s performance history in

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Britain, noting its capacity to remain politically urgent from its possible enactment at the Globe on the eve of the Essex rebellion to the ground-breaking production by Lynette Linton and Adjoa Andoh at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in 2019. Esme Miskimmin discusses a range of resources and ideas that will prove invaluable to anyone teaching the play, casting a particularly revealing light on the connections between theatre-as-performance and kingship-as-performance, as well as on the pedagogical value of understanding the play’s textual variants (Quarto and Folio) and its historical adaptation in performance. This book also includes four ‘New Directions’ chapters. Peter J. Smith examines the play’s profound preoccupation with earth, ground and land, identifying a connection between ‘blood and soil’ that speaks directly, from the outset, to current political situations on both sides of the Atlantic. Adrian Streete and Andrew Duxfield explore, in very different ways, intertextual resonances in the play. Streete considers the relationship between Richard II and the early modern sermon, and in particular how allusions to matters addressed from the Elizabethan pulpit are deployed by Richard’s enemies and allies alike in an exploration of ‘mockery’ and religion. Duxfield focuses on Richard’s use of the mirror in the deposition scene and argues that the commonly noted allusion to Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus evident here opens up a rich network of hitherto unconsidered literary and historical connections: connections that appear both to clarify and obscure some of the more radical ramifications of Richard’s infamous moment of specular self-inspection. Finally, Michael Davies notes that this play, often associated with abstract, metaphysical conceits of kingship and identity, also places an emphasis on the material world, and specifically on money as a far-from-mystical source of sovereignty. Identifying a strain of numismatic wordplay running throughout Richard II, Davies argues that the play centres much more emphatically upon the cash that it takes for Richard to keep his crown than has previously been recognized.

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A note on the texts and editions used All quotations from Richard II refer to the Arden (third series) edition, King Richard II, edited by Charles R. Forker (London: Thomson Learning, 2002). All quotations from Shakespeare’s other works refer to The Arden Shakespeare: Complete Works, edited by Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson and David Scott Kastan, revised edition (2011; reprinted London: Bloomsbury, 2017). All pre-1800 works cited are published in London unless otherwise stated: details of their printers/publishers are not included. Throughout this book, OED refers to Oxford English Dictionary, edited by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, 2nd edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); ODNB refers to Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, 60 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004): both are available online by subscription.

1 The Critical Backstory Patrick Ashby The critical history of Shakespeare’s Richard II has been characterized from the very beginning by a sensitivity to its political controversy as a play about the deposition and murder of a rightful though unpopular monarch and by fundamental questions of dramatic genre and historiography. While fidelity to chronicle narrative remained of secondary importance to the play’s ‘improvers’ and adaptors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for whom its tragic aspects held the greatest appeal, the question of whether Richard II should be regarded as a standalone tragedy or as an instalment in an extended sequence of historical dramas would go on to excite considerable debate from the eighteenth century onwards. Likewise, the remarkable formality of Richard II has long drawn attention to matters of textual structure, language and stagecraft, while the performative dimension of political power has inspired critics, particularly in the twentieth century, to provide a more nuanced context for Shakespeare’s modes of historiography in terms of the play’s representations of authority, subversion and gender and of the conservative and revolutionary narratives operating simultaneously within it. Naturally, a brief survey of 400 years of criticism cannot hope to do justice to the many important contributors to our present understanding of Richard II. Due to the sheer range of

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viewpoints and the proliferation of interest in Shakespeare’s histories many significant voices are passed over, or given only the briefest of mentions. Nonetheless, the purpose of this critical backstory is to document the key discussions and debates that Shakespeare’s Richard II has provoked from its earliest appearances and which have continued to inform critical viewpoints until the start of the twenty-first century.

Early controversy: ‘I am Richard II’ Critics are generally agreed that Richard II was composed around 1595. Its formal lyricism marks it out as a relatively early piece and its imagery is concordant with that of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet, both dated approximately to the same period. The play is mentioned with approval by Francis Meres in his Palladis Tamia (1598), where it is given first place in a list of Shakespeare’s ‘most excellent’ tragedies.1 It was sufficiently popular to go through five quartos before its appearance in the landmark 1623 First Folio, and early performances of Richard II are known to have held the attention of audiences beyond the London theatres.2 Despite the apparent high regard in which the play was held, it is Richard II’s controversial association with the Essex uprising of 1601 which has constituted for critics the most compelling aspect of the play’s early reception. Proponents of the idea that Shakespeare and his associates were concerned about potentially seditious content in Richard II point to the fact that the most contentious scene in the play – the lines dramatizing Richard’s deposition (4.1.155–318) – was never printed in Queen Elizabeth’s lifetime.3 It is not clear that this wariness extended to performance, however, and on 7 February 1601, the eve of the Earl of Essex’s attempted coup, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were privately commissioned to stage at the Globe a play about Richard II – presumably Shakespeare’s – for allies of the Earl.

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In the wake of the botched rebellion, members of Shakespeare’s company, possibly including Shakespeare himself, were briefly imprisoned. Although they were spared further punishment, those who had commissioned the performance, notably Essex’s steward, Sir Gelly Meyrick, were put to death. Much has been made both of this performance and of the response by the Elizabethan authorities to a play which could be seen as endorsing the deposition of legitimate monarchs as an appropriate countermeasure to tyranny or injustice.4 The lawyer and historian John Hayward, whose history of The Life and Raigne of King Henry IIII (1599) was dedicated to Essex and shares its subject matter with Richard II, was also imprisoned.5 Tudor historiographical traditions frequently made of the past a storehouse of exemplary and cautionary narratives, intended to provide instructive commentary for present conditions. Elizabeth is reported to have been particularly sensitive to the transferability of history in this instance: ‘I am Richard II, know ye not that?’6 Whatever the potential implications of the play’s plot, Richard II’s language attracted admirers. With its lyrical qualities and its tendency towards a richly rhetorical and ‘conceited’ style, Richard II became a favourite of Elizabethan anthologies, including Englands Parnassus, compiled by Robert Allott, and John Bodenham’s Bel-vedére, or, The Garden of the Muses: both were published in 1600 and both quoted copiously from the play.7 Elegantly expressed excerpts could be collected, learned and paraphrased or quoted to demonstrate erudition. Charles I, whose defeat in the Civil War led, among other things, to an extended closure of the theatres, is one of those who echoed the phrasing of Richard II. In his final appearance before the Commons Commissioners on 27 January 1649, he warned that ‘Children, yet unborn’ would have cause to regret the sentence passed against him, borrowing this expression from the Bishop of Carlisle (4.1.322–3).8 Richard II had a political resonance and a linguistic power that could be appropriately transferred to alternative contexts.

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The Restoration: ‘the worst colours of history’ Following the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, plays were performed in smaller, purpose-built indoor venues for the benefit of a fashionable, polite clientele. Pre-Civil War dramatic works, including those of Shakespeare, were dusted down and reshaped in order to suit them to the more refined sensibilities of the new audiences. The Restoration revisers offer valuable insights into the reception of Shakespeare in this period, and contribute some important criticism on Richard II. The first direct critical commentary on the play is supplied by John Dryden in the preface to a 1679 reworking of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. He enthuses about York’s description of Richard’s sorry entrance into the city of London on the heels of the triumphant Bolingbroke (5.2.23–36), impressed with the evocative power of the passage: ‘so lively, and the words so moving, that I have scarce read any thing comparable to it, in any other language’.9 Soon afterwards, Nahum Tate prepared a new adaptation of Richard II for the stage. Given the course recent history had taken, there were obvious risks involved in reviving an old play whose central events included regime change and regicide. Tate took pains both to mitigate elements of the play which might have troubled the authorities and to tailor his drama to modern tastes. Like other Restoration revisers, he freely restructured the scenes, cutting, changing or reallocating lines where expedient. A significant hurdle was the degree to which Shakespeare’s Richard II followed its chronicle sources in portraying a king whose personal shortcomings are a pretext for his removal from the throne: Our Shakespear in this Tragedy, bated none of his Characters an Ace of the Chronicle; he took care to shew ’em no worse Men than They were, but represents them never a jot better.  … His King Richard Himself is painted in the

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worst colours of History, Dissolute, Unadviseable, devoted to Ease and Luxury.10 Shakespeare’s warts-and-all portrayal was a problem for two reasons. First, it disrupted the tragic aesthetic: how was an audience to be moved by Richard’s downfall? In revising the play, Tate laboured to rectify this, providing a rationale for his improvements: ‘My Design was to engage the pitty of the Audience for [Richard] in his Distresse, which I cou’d never have compass’d had I not before shewn him a Wise, Active and Just Prince.’11 In contrast with Shakespeare’s Richard, Tate’s is an accomplished warrior and lover, his downfall precipitated by a combination of the flatterers who exploit Richard’s native magnanimity and Bolingbroke’s cynical machinations. Secondly, an unflattering portrait of a monarch could be regarded as having a seditious edge. Tate’s revision was vulnerable to political anxieties comparable to those that upset the Elizabethan authorities in 1601. Despite efforts to temper the impact of staged regicide, Tate’s revival of Richard II was quickly suppressed. A second production with more radical alterations – a new setting, new character names and a new title, The Sicilian Usurper – was again prohibited. In the prefatory epistle to the printed play, Tate gives vent to his frustrations: ‘[W]hy a history of those Times shou’d be supprest as a Libel upon Ours, is past my Understanding’, he writes, ‘’Tis sure the worst Complement that ever was made to a Prince.’12 Notwithstanding its fortunes on the stage, Tate’s alterations anticipate much subsequent criticism on Richard II. His warrior king foreshadows later concerns of character criticism, frequently with a subtext relating to gender. Meanwhile, Tate’s misgivings concerning Shakespeare’s close adherence to his chronicle sources raise enduring questions about genre: is Richard II a history, in the sense of being (within limits) a faithful rendition of past events, or is it a tragedy the impact of which is qualified by historical constraints?

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The eighteenth century: ‘only interesting as they are true’ In 1719, Richard II was again revised for the stage. Like Tate, Lewis Theobald made radical alterations to the person of Richard presented by Shakespeare, cleaning him up for enhanced regality. Theobald also addresses the structural imperfections of Shakespeare’s play, whose ‘many scatter’d beauties’ are pearls inexpertly strung.13 Eager to bring ‘unity’ to the play, action is compressed to the period following Richard’s return from Ireland and the major events take place in the Tower of London. A dash of emotional piquancy is added, with the fabrication of a love interest for Aumerle, whose counter-conspiracy is amplified in importance. Aumerle and his lover, the fictitious Lady Percy, die ‘for the Cause’ at the play’s catastrophe.14 In the lengthy introduction to the printed edition of his play – mainly dry prose, the chief concern of which is to demonstrate Shakespeare’s learning in Greek (pace Ben Jonson) – Theobald justifies his ‘Innovations upon History and Shakespeare’ with no small degree of hauteur: I think there may be reserv’d a discretionary Power of Variation, either for maintaining the Unity of Action, or supporting the Dignity of the Characters. If the little Criticks will be angry at This, I have Patience to weather their Ill Nature: I shall stand excus’d among the better judges.15 For Theobald, as for Tate, the dramatic shortcomings of Shakespeare’s play are a matter of genre, historical fact getting in the way of a good tragedy. The uneasy esteem in which Shakespeare was held in this Augustan age is further evident in Alexander Pope’s 1725 edition of Shakespeare’s plays. As had others before him, Pope too saw special merit in isolated passages from Richard II. These Pope marked out with inverted commas. They include the description from the Duke of York which had captured

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Dryden’s attention, as well as other celebrated speeches, among them Richard’s famous oration on the ‘hollow crown’ (3.2.144–77) and the remarkable meditations in soliloquy that follow his incarceration (5.5.1–66). These are moments of extraordinary poetic power which Pope singles out for appreciation. This edition celebrated the editor’s favourite passages, then, but it also amputated others, less worthy of Shakespeare, from the body of the text, relegating them to footnotes. In his commentary, Pope would be scathing about the preponderance of rhyme in Richard II – the rhyming passages being ‘so much inferior to the rest of the writing’, he remarks, ‘that they appear to me of a different hand’ – and disapproving of Shakespeare’s compulsive wordplay and indecorous conceits.16 As a result, the text omits the dying John of Gaunt’s puns upon his own name (2.1.72–83) and discards Richard’s metaphor of the full and the empty buckets (4.1.184–9). Pope’s kindness in sparing his readers the chore of making independent aesthetic judgements was not universally welcomed. In fact, his edition courted controversy from the moment of its publication. While Theobald responded with his excoriating account of Pope’s editorial shortcomings in Shakespeare Restored (1726), Edward Capell would likewise take the view that Pope’s radical interference with Shakespeare’s play was ‘conducted by no principle worthy a critick’s owning or capable of defence’.17 Several of the passages cut from Pope’s edition would go on to be considered of integral importance to Shakespeare’s play.18 Before this could occur, however, the question of Richard II’s relation to chronicle history would reemerge as a central critical concern. In the surprise third instalment of her two-volume study of Shakespeare’s sources (1754), Charlotte Lennox returned critical attention to the relationship between Richard II and Holinshed’s Chronicle. Lennox observed that Shakespeare’s borrowings included approximate transcription of whole speeches. She points out, for instance, the strong resemblance borne by the Bishop of Carlisle’s speech (‘Marry, God forbid!’,

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4.1.115–50) to its equivalent in ‘Holingshed’, illustrating the similarity by printing them in sequence.19 Shakespeare’s adherence to chronicle history had posed a challenge to Tate and Theobald, both of whom had performed surgery on Shakespeare’s presentation of character and historical ‘fact’. For Lennox, Shakespeare’s dependence on chronicle was still stronger: he had purloined the very language of his sources. Having demonstrated linguistic correspondence, Lennox qualifies her thesis, drawing attention to Shakespeare’s departures from Holinshed: [I]n Richard the Second, there are some Deviations and some Omissions that throw different Lights on the Characters of his Persons, and tend greatly to mislead our Judgments in the Opinions we Form of them.20 At the centre of Lennox’s argument is the uncertainty surrounding the murder of the Duke of Gloucester, which plays such a key part in driving the action at the start of Shakespeare’s play. Holinshed, Lennox writes, depicts a Gloucester whose treasonous intrigues mitigate the culpability of the king for his death, even if the final command had come from Richard. In Shakespeare’s play, however, Richard’s complicity in Gloucester’s murder is neither repudiated nor justified: Shakespear’s silence, upon this Head, is very unfavourable to the Character of Richard, on whom, by that Means, he draws the Imputation of a Murderer and Paracide [sic]; and yet, in his Misfortunes, he proposes him as an Object of Compassion, and makes Use of all his pathetic Powers to melt the Souls of the Audience in his Favour.21 Lennox recognizes that Shakespeare’s deviation from his chronicle sources had implications for Richard’s character and notes the effect this had upon the play’s overarching emotional dynamic. In Richard II, Shakespeare does not rehearse history as found, but manipulates it, drawing audience sympathies in

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one direction and then – in a remarkable exercise of his ‘pathetic Powers’ – turning everything upside down. Shakespeare’s failure to supply a ‘true’ historical narrative awakens Lennox’s indignation. ‘The Play affords several other Instances in which Shakespear’s Inattention to the History is plainly proved’, writes Lennox: and is therefore the less pardonable, as the Subject of it is not one entire Action, wrought up with a Variety of beautiful Incidents, which at once delight and instruct the Mind; but a Dramatick Narration of Historical Facts, and a successive Series of Actions and Events which are only interesting as they are true, and only pleasing as they are gracefully told.22 Lennox’s final judgement is inextricably bound to the question of genre. If the narrative burden of historical fact prevents Richard II from functioning as a tragedy should, then its value lies in an accurate rendition of English history. Shakespeare’s demonstrable failure to stick to the story comes as a disappointment. In his 1778 edition of Shakespeare’s plays, Samuel Johnson reiterates the concerns of Lennox. Johnson’s commentary on the play is sparse. ‘This play is extracted from the Chronicle of Holinshed’, he notes, ‘in which many passages may be found which Shakespeare has, with very little alteration, transplanted into his scenes.’ He follows Lennox in singling out the Bishop of Carlisle’s speech as one of these passages, before proffering his own judgement of the play as a whole: it is, he writes, ‘not finished at last with the happy force of some other of his tragedies, nor can it be said much to affect the passions, or enlarge the understanding’.23 This is a paraphrase of Lennox’s assessment that Richard II lacks the power to ‘delight and instruct the mind’: the play, for Shakespeare, is subpar. If Johnson’s final judgement on the quality of Richard  II is terse, he nonetheless provides one observation with lasting implications: some of the material dramatized in Richard II is redundant except in its relation to a continued dramatic

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history. There is, Johnson writes, ‘a regular connection’ which binds Richard II to the two parts of Henry IV.24 For Johnson, Richard II is not a standalone tragedy, but part of a continuous narrative, designed to be situated alongside its partner histories. Although their praise remains chary of some aspects of Shakespeare’s work, the closely allied analyses of Lennox and Johnson appear at a time when the reputation of Shakespeare was rising on a wave of unqualified enthusiasm which culminated in the 1769 Shakespeare Jubilee. What came to be known in later years as bardolatry was spearheaded by the great eighteenth-century actor-manager David Garrick, whose ostentatious worship of Shakespeare extended to the construction of a temple in His name. Shakespeare’s newly acquired godhead had consequences for those who wished to produce new revisions of his plays, a fact discovered by James Goodhall, whose 1772 reworking of Richard II was rejected by Garrick on the grounds of its not being Shakespeare’s ‘Original’. Goodhall recounts his disappointment candidly, recalling that his adaptation: was given into the Hands of Mr. Garrick, by a particular Friend, who received for Answer at the return of the Book, that Mr. Garrick would play it as it was in the Original. – Now as I was conscious to myself, the Play of Richard the Second has so many necessary Alterations to be made, before it could possibly be even in the least Theatrical; I looked upon the return of the Play as a mere Excuse – though he was pleased at the same Time to say, the Author of the Alteration had certainly great Literary Merit – If so, why was it not accepted, if otherwise, why was not the real Reason of that Refusal given? – ‘That infinite Engagements,’ that a dislike to the Alteration, was the absolute Cause – I remember two Lines of Mr. Garrick’s wherein he says, ——————It is my Plan, To lose no Drop of this immortal Man.25

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Alterations to Shakespeare for performance had, of course, been commonplace, not least at the hands of Garrick whose wholesale revisions to the catastrophes of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet were infamous. There must have been some other reason, then, for Garrick’s decision to turn down Goodhall’s offer to bring the play into line with contemporary tastes and render it more ‘Theatrical’. Nevertheless, Garrick’s refusal to entertain it on radically purist grounds, however disingenuous his ‘Excuse’ may have seemed to Goodhall, certainly anticipates a sea-change in Shakespearean reception that would expose as myopic the criticisms of Tate, Theobald, Pope, Lennox and Johnson. There would still be those for whom Richard II was an inferior play, but the elevation of Shakespeare to the status of National Poet – the Bard – would make it a struggle for them to be heard.26

Romantic Richard: ‘the croaking of frogs in a ditch’ With the lectures of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shakespearean criticism, including that pertaining to Richard II, takes on a new hue. Disdainful of the writing of earlier commentators and more warmly appreciative of the play’s nuances and ambiguities, Coleridge is confident of the impact of his critical approach: ‘False criticism’, he declares, ‘is created by ignorance, light removes it; as the croaking of frogs in a ditch is silenced by a candle.’27 Coleridge challenges accepted truths of Shakespearean criticism, providing a revealing anatomy of the history play as a generic combination of epic and tragic modes informed by a spirit of patriotism: Shakespeare, in blending the Epic with the Tragic, has given the impression of the Drama to the history of his country. By this means he has bequeathed as a legacy the pure spirit of history, not that his facts are implicitly to be relied on, or

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is he to be read, as the Duke of Marlborough read him, as an historian; but as distance is destroyed by a telescope …, so by the law of impressiveness, when we read his Plays, we seem to live in the era he pourtrays.28 Coleridge’s description of Shakespearean history as a ‘blend’ of epic and tragic rests upon present enactment of a preordained narrative: events which have the inevitability of destiny are belied by the illusion of free will on the parts of the chief personae. Although not irrelevant, Shakespeare’s fidelity to the letter of history is not, for Coleridge, as important as his ability to convey through drama a spirit of immediacy to past events which is lacking in the historical sources. Readers who (like John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough) sought historical knowledge in Shakespeare, or (like Lennox) expected historical accuracy, were in error. Shakespeare’s history was experiential, not academic. The history plays brought the past into the present with the patriotic objective of making ‘Englishmen proud of being Englishmen’.29 Coleridge also defends the wordplay which had infuriated his critical forerunners. Struck by what he calls ‘the beautiful keeping of the character of the Play’, he argues a distinction between verisimilitude and constructed notions of decorum.30 The punning of the dying John of Gaunt is a case in point: Critics who argue against the use of a thing from its abuse, have taken offence to the introduction in a tragedy of that play on words which is called punning; but how stands the fact with nature? is there not a tendency in the human mind, when suffering under some great affliction, to associate everything around it with the obstrusive feeling, to connect and absorb all into the predominant sensation[?]31 This is a strong and influential justification, which ties the speech to the speaker’s emotional state: it may seem indecorous, but it resonates convincingly and that is what matters.32

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For all his revolutionary perspectives, Coleridge is reading the same play as his predecessors. He takes the flaws, inconsistencies and peculiarities recognized by them and makes virtues of them. Among the most important of his assertions is that Shakespeare’s protagonist fulfils his tragical-historical role well. He excites pity not because he is a fallen king, but because he is unsuited to his function. ‘[W]e cannot’, according to Coleridge, ‘help pitying, and wishing he had been placed in a rank where he would have been less exposed, and where he might have been happy and useful.’33 Coleridge detects in Richard a naïve sociability; vulnerable because generous: Shakespeare never meant to represent Richard as a vulgar debauchee, but a man with a wantonness of spirit in external show, a feminine friendism, an intensity of woman-like love of those immediately about him, and a mistaking of the delight of being loved by him for a love of him.34 There is a magnanimous sincerity in Coleridge’s description, but the language employed – ‘feminine’, ‘woman-like’ – invokes a certain moral prurience that the twenty-first century has not quite shaken off. The sense of Richard as lacking robust masculinity was intensified by a growing consciousness of the structural resemblance between Richard II and Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, which dramatizes the disastrous consequences of a king’s regard for male favourites.35 When William Hazlitt saw Edmund Kean playing Richard II in 1815, he was concerned that the character had been misinterpreted: ‘Mr. Kean made it a character of passion, that is, of feeling combined with energy; whereas it is a character of pathos, that is to say, of feeling combined with weakness.’36 Hazlitt saw in Richard an eloquent passivity that Kean’s performance had overlooked, and he expanded on this idea two years later, in Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817): we see him staggering under the unlooked-for blows of fortune, bewailing his loss of kingly power, not preventing

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it, sinking under the aspiring genius of Bolingbroke, his authority trampled on, his hopes failing him, and his pride crushed and broken under insults and injuries, which his own misconduct had provoked, but which he has not courage or manliness to resent.37 Richard’s want of ‘manliness’ re-emerges here as a key element of his character, defined by his absolute submission to intensely felt injuries: ‘bewailing …, not preventing’. Richard’s ‘effeminacy’, writes Hazlitt elsewhere, ‘is that of a voluptuary, proud, revengeful, impatient of contradiction, and inconsolable in his misfortunes’.38 This last comment, intended to differentiate Richard’s effeminacy from that of Shakespeare’s Henry VI, casts Richard’s temperament as tempestuous and impulsive, the polar opposite of his dramatic antagonist Bolingbroke. Hazlitt, like Coleridge, sees a disjunction between Richard’s behaviour and his function. Deprived of his crown and commenting on his own misfortunes, Richard finally succeeds in generating sympathy: ‘The sufferings of the man make us forget that he ever was a king.’39 While Coleridge was redefining Shakespearean history and Hazlitt was composing his milestone of character criticism, important developments were taking place in Germany. A. W. Schlegel, whose extraordinary translations of Shakespeare’s plays still form the basis on which they are read in Germany, offered a radical new conception of Shakespeare’s histories. According to Schlegel, all of Shakespeare’s history plays were to be regarded as constituting a unified narrative sequence: The dramas derived from the English history, ten in number, form one of the most valuable of Shakespeare’s works, and partly the fruit of his maturest age. I say advisedly one of his works, for the poet evidently intended them to form one great whole. It is, as it were, an historical heroic poem in the dramatic form, of which the separate plays constitute the rhapsodies.40

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Schlegel’s assessment is that of a reader, not a playgoer. It takes the idea of interdependence among the histories to its logical extreme and can, as such, be seen as a radical development of Johnson’s earlier observation of narrative foreshadowing in Richard II. A significant consequence of this reading is that it displaces focal interest from the individual kings and makes the nation the protagonist. Given the dates of composition, Schlegel is overbold in attributing this conceptual unity to authorial intention, but permutations of his general argument endure. These ideas were developed by Schlegel’s compatriot Hermann Ulrici, for whom Shakespeare’s histories formed a connected cycle of strife and recovery, a reading which accorded to Richard II a redemptive edge. Richard’s deposition and murder is the tragic foundation of an ultimately happy story.41

Victorian Richards: ‘weak muscles and a distaste for school games’ Judgements on the moral and aesthetic values of Richard II abound in the Victorian era. Among the most significant of critical responses to the play in this period are those by Edward Dowden and Walter Pater. In Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875), Dowden observes something similar to the cycle of transgression and redemption identified by Ulrici: ‘Evil in the historical plays is wrong-doing, which is followed by inevitable retribution.’42 Dowden is particularly struck by Shakespeare’s skilful characterization in Richard II, detecting in the protagonist an immaturity which he describes as ‘boyishness’, an excitable regard for sensation and a pronounced lack of forethought based on an inability to comprehend the realness of reality: Life is to Richard a show, a succession of images; and to put himself into accord with the aesthetic requirements of his position is Richard’s first necessity. He is equal [to]

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playing any part gracefully which he is called upon by circumstances to enact. But when he has exhausted the aesthetic satisfaction to be derived from the situations of his life, he is left with nothing further to do. He is an amateur in living; not an artist.43 Richard’s acute sensibilities make him an adept at the ceremony of kingship – at any form of ceremony – but he has no understanding of, or interest in, the practicalities of statecraft. For Dowden, Richard retains these characteristics in adversity, wallowing indulgently in the aesthetics of grief. In support of this argument, Dowden calls upon the critical assistance of the American Henry Norman Hudson, who makes no efforts to conceal his contempt for Richard: [Richard] must needs be a voluptuary even in his sorrow, and make a luxury of woe itself; pleasure has so thoroughly mastered his spirit, that he cannot think of bearing pain as a duty or an honour, but merely as a license for the pleasure of maudlin self-compassion; … a dear release from the exercise of manly thought.44 Hudson’s analysis, quoted at length by the admiring Dowden, typifies the predominant sense of Richard in the second half of the nineteenth century. Both Dowden and Hudson are enthusiastic about Bolingbroke, before whose understated and manly determination Richard offers no resistance. Dowden remarks upon Bolingbroke’s admirable gift of self-restraint, which tempers his extraordinary gifts of courage and political awareness. The one shortcoming he attributes to Bolingbroke is that ‘he is wholly lacking in genius of the heart; and therefore obtains the love of no man’.45 Again, the proximity to Hudson is strong: Bolingbroke is ‘hard and cold indeed to the feelings, but written all over with success … perfect self-command is in great part the true secret of his strange power over others’.46 Walter Pater’s analysis is very different in tone. Besides offering a markedly more sympathetic reading of Richard,

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Pater offers a new perspective on the history plays which distinguishes them from Shakespeare’s tragedies and which recalls the disjunction of character and function identified by both Coleridge and Hazlitt in their assessments of King Richard. Pater regards Shakespeare’s histories as having a shared purpose of depicting the non-heroic: The irony of kingship – average human nature, flung with a wonderfully pathetic effect into the vortex of great events; tragedy of everyday quality heightened in degree only by the conspicuous scene which does but make those who play their parts there conspicuously unfortunate; the utterance of common humanity straight from the heart, but refined like other common things for kingly uses by Shakespeare’s unfailing eloquence … It is no Henriade he writes, and no history of the English people, but the sad fortunes of some English kings as conspicuous examples of the ordinary human condition.47 Pater’s is a remarkable assessment of the histories. But for their regal glamour, these are quotidian tragedies: ‘average’, ‘everyday’, ‘common’ and ‘ordinary’. It is context alone which gives consequence to the fortunes of the key players. Their very ordinariness is what makes Shakespeare’s kings interesting. Pater also addresses the structural relationship between the histories: they do not constitute a ‘Henriade’ or a heroic poem of national history. Their pathetic power lies in their depiction of sad events which occur to people who just happen to be kings. Of Richard himself, Pater has this to say: One gracious prerogative, certainly, Shakespeare’s English kings possess: they are a very eloquent company, and Richard is the most sweet-tongued of them all … an exquisite poet if he is nothing else, from first to last, in light and gloom alike, able to see all things poetically, to give a poetic turn to his conduct of them, and refreshing with his golden language the tritest aspects of that ironic

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contrast between the pretensions of a king and the actual necessities of his destiny.48 He goes on: ‘of all those personal gifts the one which alone never altogether fails him is just that royal utterance, his appreciation of the poetry of his own hapless lot, an eloquent self-pity, infecting others in spite of themselves, till they too become irresistibly eloquent about him.’49 Pater’s assessment is not so very far removed from those of Dowden and Hudson, but it is far friendlier in tone: Richard retains a poetic awareness of his situation even in adversity and is able to give it expression through his ‘royal utterance’. Eloquent in himself and the cause of eloquence in others, Richard prompts Pater to discuss the musicality of the play as a whole: ‘Richard the Second does, like a musical composition, possess a certain concentration of all its parts, a simple continuity, an evenness in execution, which are rare in the great dramatist.’50 The play is lyrical, possessed of exceptional tonal and conceptual coherence. The last significant criticism of the Victorian age is also the first of the twentieth century. W. B. Yeats’s powerful indictment of nineteenth-century ‘utilitarian’ character criticism targets Edward Dowden in particular. Richard, Yeats complains, has been judged meanly by ‘vulgar worshipper[s] of Success’ for whom reason outweighs considerations of sympathy.51 Yeats is ferocious in the articulation of his discomfort: I have turned over many books in the library at Stratfordon-Avon, and I have found in nearly all an antithesis, which grew in clearness and violence as the century grew older, between two types, whose representatives were Richard II, ‘sentimental’, ‘weak’, ‘selfish’, ‘insincere’, and Henry V, ‘Shakespeare’s only hero’. These books took the same delight in abasing Richard II that school-boys do in persecuting some boy of fine temperament, who has weak muscles and a distaste for school games.52

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The twentieth century: ‘an inextricable tangle of right and unright’ Before the proliferation of critical interest in the histories that came during and after the Second World War, the first part of the twentieth century presented opportunities for commentators to observe the strange moral greyness of the histories. For A. C. Bradley much of the power of Richard II lay in the sense of moral disorientation it inflicted upon its audiences: [Shakespeare’s] impartiality makes us uncomfortable: we cannot bear to see him, like the sun, lighting up everything and judging nothing. And this is perhaps especially the case in his historical plays, where we are always trying to turn him into a partisan. He shows us that Richard II was unworthy to be king, and we at once conclude that he thought Bolingbroke’s usurpation justified; whereas he shows merely, what under the conditions was bound to exist, an inextricable tangle of right and unright.53 The impossibility of identifying any point of concrete moral strength in the play attracted fresh scrutiny of the question of culpability. John Masefield drew attention to the bilateral dynamics of treachery in Richard II: ‘the treachery of a king to his duty as a king, and the treachery of a subject to his duty as a subject’.54 These points of view mark a significant departure from the ‘utilitarian’ criticism of the previous century which had troubled Yeats. E. M. W. Tillyard’s Shakespeare’s History Plays (1944) renewed focus upon the relationship between Richard II and the other histories. For Tillyard, Shakespeare’s plays articulated a providential pattern through which harmonious order – constructed according to an Elizabethan doctrine of universal order whereby earthly hierarchies reflected those of

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the heavens – was disrupted and restored.55 Tillyard divides the eight plays spanning the period from the reign of Richard II to that of Richard III into two tetralogies, charting a recurrent cycle of transgression and redemption. Following the lead of Schlegel and Ulrici in the previous century, Tillyard argues strongly for overarching conceptual unity. ‘Disregarding the two isolated plays [King John and Henry VIII]’, he writes, ‘we can say … that the two tetralogies make a single unit.’56 Tillyard’s grasp of chronology was greater than that of his predecessors. He observes that the historical narrative presented in the first tetralogy habitually looks back to events in the yet-to-be-dramatized second tetralogy: narrative unity came independently of stylistic cohesion or authorial preconception. Notwithstanding the occasional frailty of Richard II’s ceremonial language, the breakdown of order represented by Richard’s murder is clearly illustrated by the distinction between this formal verse and the comparatively anarchic linguistic texture of the Henry IV plays. Tillyard’s study heralded a surge in interest in Richard II and in the history plays generally. Many critics took Tillyard’s lead in viewing Shakespeare’s history plays as reflections of broader Elizabethan perspectives. For Lily B. Campbell the histories had a topicality which directly articulated concerns of state.57 Ernst Kantorowicz saw great significance in the monarchical body as a symbol of the realm, offering an influential theo-political schematic according to which the king had ‘two bodies’ – natural (corporeal) and politic – whose health and fortunes were mutually dependent. Kantorowicz is left ‘breathless’ by Richard’s divesting himself of kingship: ‘Bit by bit he deprives his body politic of the symbols of its dignity and exposes his poor body natural to the eyes of the spectators.’58 Irving Ribner, conscious of competing historiographical modes in the history plays, charted an elaborate seven-point scheme explaining what history meant for Shakespeare’s contemporaries, separating it into two general categories: those of (Renaissance) humanism and (medieval) Christian providentialism.59 J. A. Bryant, in an essay likewise published in 1957, provided a valuable insight

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into the competing biblical analogies employed by Shakespeare in Richard II, the narratives of the Fall of Man, and the trial and crucifixion of Christ.60 Richard D. Altick’s analysis of ‘symphonic imagery’ in Richard II is one of a number of ‘New Criticism’ studies examining the peculiar texture of the play’s language. It elaborates the observations made by Walter Pater and John Dover Wilson that the play has an unusual tonal ‘unity’. Altick finds the source of this harmony in Shakespeare’s use of verbal association and recurrent imagery. Shakespeare’s language has not only a local significance, relevant to its scene, speaker and immediate context, but also resonates associatively through the structure of the play, bringing to it a sense of tonal cohesion. Shakespeare’s gift for punning, according to this view, is no mere toy: Suppose … that instead of being the occupation of a few fleeting lines of the text, certain words of multifold meanings are played upon throughout the five acts, recurring time after time like leitmotivs in music. And suppose finally that this process of repetition is applied especially to words of sensuous significance, words that evoke vivid responses in the imagination. When these things happen to certain words – when they cease to be mere vehicles for a brief indulgence of verbal fancy and, taking on a burden of serious meaning, become thematic material – the poet has crossed the borderline that separates word-play from iterative imagery. Language has become the willing servant of structure, and what was on other occasions only a source of exuberant but undisciplined wit now is converted to the higher purpose of poetic unity.61 For Altick, particular words – for example, ‘earth’, ‘blood’, ‘pale’, ‘tongue’ – embed themselves into the texture of Richard II and accumulate a range of associated meanings as the play progresses. Where Altick found tonal unity, A. P. Rossiter discovered structural incongruities. Rossiter sees in

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Richard II a variety of inconsistencies which give the impression of a play that is flawed: he provides a diagram showing similar faults in geological strata. This unevenness may be due to an unacknowledged dependence on the earlier play, Thomas of Woodstock (which Rossiter had edited) or from possible repeated revisions.62 ‘Whether you approach Richard II from the angle of the texture of the verse, the verse-styles, character, plot or theme’, Rossiter asserts, ‘you encounter what geologists call “unconformities”.’63 From the late 1970s, emergent theoretical approaches to literary criticism transformed the ways in which text was handled by critics. Although the proliferation and variety of commentary prevents sustained examination here, it is possible to provide a sense of the impact. Feminist and genderbased readings of Richard II drew into question long-standing assumptions about the marginal role of women in the play and constructed ideals of masculinity, the former overlooked and the latter prominent in the criticism of the foregoing centuries. These critical approaches frequently looked through and beyond the surface of the text to address not just what was represented there but also what was missing or absent. Juliet Dusinberre sees the female characters of Richard II as fulfilling a choric function: they ‘assess the values of the political world’, looking from the outside in.64 Coppélia Kahn’s psychoanalytic reading of the play identifies a conflict of maternal and paternal attributes of kingship in the struggle between Richard and Bolingbroke.65 Linda Bamber discusses the place of the ‘feminine Other’ in the histories.66 Meanwhile, Phyllis Rackin’s focus on Shakespeare’s plays as performative texts, characterized by ‘polyphony’, found that the history plays offered multi-perspectival renderings of the past which challenged conventional historiographical approaches.67 Other branches of theoretical criticism, including the allied ‘schools’ of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, stressed the interdependence of a text and the socio-political circumstances of its production, calling for ‘a radical contextualising of literature which eliminates the old divisions

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between literature and its “background”, text and context’.68 A key concern for these critics is power and the dialogic relationship between Richard II and the political climate from which it emerged. For many, this meant scrutiny of the role of drama in subverting or shoring up forms of authority. As a result, old questions concerning the play’s reception – in particular the controversy surrounding the Essex rebellion  – assumed a new importance in readings by critics such as Stephen Greenblatt and Jonathan Dollimore, in whose eyes Richard II becomes a historical artefact, a tool by which to understand the workings of power in early modern England.69 The opening paragraph of David Bergeron’s essay ‘Richard II and Carnival Politics’ also brings Nahum Tate’s revision into question: Why did Charles II think it necessary or desirable to suppress Richard II in the 1680s? Had Queen Elizabeth’s government similarly suppressed a portion of the text nearly a hundred years earlier? What is there about this play that may seem threatening to governments? Why did the Essex rebels in 1601 choose to have this play performed on the eve of what turned out to be their abortive rebellion against the queen? Does such an event illustrate the power of drama and the place of the theater in Elizabethan culture? Are the new historicists correct when they agree with Stephen Greenblatt that ‘Shakespeare’s plays are centrally, repeatedly concerned with the production and containment of subversion and disorder’? Was the central part of the deposition scene in Richard II omitted or censored; and if so, by whom?70 Bergeron’s list of questions illustrates the degree to which these schools of criticism are concerned with notions of control and resistance, authority and its subversion. At the close of the twentieth century, politically motivated theoretical approaches to text were pre-eminent. Graham Holderness’s Shakespeare: The Histories (2000) and Robin Headlam Wells’s Shakespeare on Masculinity (2000)

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contribute to a now-established tradition of reading the histories according to patterns of authority and resistance in terms of genre, gender and historical context.71 The tendency of theoretical approaches to promote political interest at the expense of literary appreciation did not go unchallenged. ‘Marxists, multiculturalists, feminists, nouveau historicists – the usual suspects – know their causes’, wrote Harold Bloom in 1998, ‘but not Shakespeare’s plays.’72 Bloom was lamenting what he knew was an irresistible critical tendency towards theoretical political constructions upon plays. This tendency would not, before the close of the twentieth century, be shifted.

2 Richard II: A Performance History Kate Wilkinson Richard II is an Elizabethan play about the deposition of a medieval king. As such, it is concerned with affairs that, we might assume, no longer interest or affect us: divine kingship, a feuding nobility, pomp, ceremony and ancient rites. The play’s history on both stage and screen, however, demonstrates that it speaks to the present moment of any performance, and has done so since its first appearance in the 1590s. The issues that Shakespeare dramatizes in Richard II were originally considered to be so politically sensitive that one of its key passages, the deposition scene (4.1.155–318) was not printed, and possibly not even performed, until 1608, by which time Elizabeth I had been dead for five years and the crisis surrounding the succession had passed. The politically explosive nature of the subject of Shakespeare’s drama is evident too in the performance of a play (possibly Shakespeare’s) about Richard II on the eve of the Earl of Essex’s rebellion in 1601. These historical elements make Richard II, as Margaret Shewring has argued, ‘the most difficult [of Shakespeare’s history plays] to accommodate on the [modern] stage’.1 Yet, in spite of this apparent difficulty, there is a ‘dangerous immediacy’ about it that Shewring has shown to be present throughout its performance history.2 In

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this chapter I will provide a brief survey of this performance history, mainly in Britain, from the earliest productions to the present day, focusing most closely on those of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Early performances and adaptations Although, as Jonathan Bate has remarked, ‘there is no evidence of active censorship’, it has long been assumed that the deposition scene (4.1.155–318) was excised from the early publications of Richard II (the quartos of 1597 and 1598, Q1–Q3), appearing in print for the first time in the Fourth Quarto of 1608 (Q4), advertised as a ‘new addition’.3 We do not know much about the first stage productions, but it may be the case that the scene was performed. Certainly, as David M. Bergeron has observed, Richard II was not suppressed under either Elizabeth I or James I, though the deposition scene may have been withheld from performance until the reign of James was well established.4 Janet Clare makes the persuasive case that a number of factors suggest the scene’s absence on the Elizabethan stage. Not least of these is the wording of the 1608 quarto’s title page: ‘With newe additions of the Parliament Sceane, and the deposing of King Richard. As it hath been lately acted by the Kinges Maiesties Servantes, at the Globe.’ Clare argues that: The reinstatement of the scene on the stage would seem to have taken place immediately prior to its publication  … If audiences had been familiar with the spectacle of the deposition on stage during the previous decade it seems unlikely that [publisher, Matthew] Lawe would have coupled fresh publication with its being ‘lately acted’.5 Clare goes on to observe that ‘Lawe appears to have capitalized on a relaxation in theatrical censorship to promote sales

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of an old play by giving prominence to the restoration of controversial material’.6 Richard II seems to have been popular during the early modern period. It was probably written around 1595, while the Lord Chamberlain’s men were performing at The Theatre in Shoreditch (later rebuilt on Bankside as the Globe). In his introduction to the New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of the play, Andrew Gurr gives an interesting account of the space and the properties necessary for staging the play.7 Gurr indicates that the majority of props required would have been portable, a fact that supports the notion that the play may have been performed in a number of private locations. One of the earliest such performances may have been at the home of Sir Edward Hoby for Sir Robert Cecil in December 1595. In a letter to Cecil, Hoby states that ‘I am bold to send to knowe whether Twesdaie may be anie more in your grace to visit … where as late as yt shal please yow a gate for your supper shal be open: & King Richard present himself to your vewe’.8 The first politically significant staging (that we know of) may have taken place on 7 February 1601 when a play ‘of Kyng Harry the iiiith and of the kyllung of Kyng Richard the Second’ was performed at the Globe Theatre, the day before an uprising by the Earl of Essex.9 The play in question was enacted by the Lord Chamberlain’s men – Shakespeare’s company – after a group of the Earl’s followers commissioned a performance. Blair Worden gives an excellent account of the interrogations that followed the uprising, resulting in the executions of both the Earl and some of his followers.10 Worden explains how critics have, for a number of years, taken for granted that this play was what we now know as Shakespeare’s Richard II, though with little actual evidence. The debate now surrounding this specific performance indicates the limited knowledge we have about early performances of Renaissance plays in general. As Worden states: ‘The sole reason for taking [this] play to have been Shakespeare’s is an inadequate one. His Richard II is the only surviving play of the period to represent the King’s deposition and death. Yet our knowledge

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of the theatrical repertories of the time is very incomplete.’11 Worden suggests, therefore, that it could be another, now lost, play which was performed on the eve of Essex’s rebellion in February 1601.12 The play may also have been performed on the Red Dragon, a ship of the East India Company, off the coast of Sierra Leone on 29 September 1607. According to the journal of the ship’s captain, William Keeling, on that day ‘Captain Hawkins dined with me, when my company acted Kinge Richard the Seconde’.13 Although the authenticity of this account has been called into question, if true, this would mark one of the earliest known performances of a Shakespeare play outside of Europe.14 Perhaps it is inevitable with a play about usurpation and deposition that contextual politics will, as many have found, affect attitudes to it. As with many of Shakespeare’s plays, there were a number of adaptations of Richard II during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although in the case of Richard II we may attribute some to a continuing wariness of a play involving regicide. An example of adaptation as a result of such political sensitivity at the time of the Restoration’s Exclusion Crisis is Nahum Tate’s The Sicilian Usurper (1681). Shewring asserts that ‘So contentious was any account of Richard’s reign that Nahum Tate … was compelled to distance the “dangerous matter” by changing names of the dramatis personae and setting the action in Sicily.’15 Gurr states that ‘It might be loosely claimed that in the eighteenth century [Richard II] lost favour because it portrayed a bad king, and that it returned in the nineteenth because Charles Kean and Walter Pater made a tragic poet-king out of the old story of the tyrant-king.’16 Edmund Kean’s production of 1815, which omitted the Aumerle conspiracy and increased the role of the queen after Richard’s death, would be succeeded by the ‘spectacular gothic-historical’ production of his son, Charles Kean, in 1857, described by Gurr as ‘Perhaps the most influential revival of the play’, involving dummy horses for the combat scene and 600 extras to populate the procession through London at the beginning of Act 5.17

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Richard II in the twentieth century The first significant production of the twentieth century was part of Frank Benson’s Week of Kings in 1901 at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. Benson himself took the role of Richard II in a cycle of plays which also included King John, 2 Henry IV, Henry V, 2 Henry VI and Richard III. Benson had been working on these productions for a decade and the cycle came at a significant time for Britain: the change from one century to another and the change from one, much loved, monarch to another. Richard Dutton has argued that, during the early modern period, history plays had a function in nation building, and the timing of Benson’s productions and choice of plays reveal how such plays have continued to be intricately linked to national feeling and sense of nationhood.18 This venture coincided with a spirit of ‘national fervour and pride’ expressed at Britain’s success in the Boer Wars, but also took place only a few months after the death of Queen Victoria, who had, at that point, been the country’s longest reigning monarch.19 In 1951, once again in keeping with a spirit of national pride, Richard II was staged as part of another cycle, also called A Week of Kings, at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre where Anthony Quayle directed the second tetralogy, this time to commemorate the Festival of Britain. In discussing Quayle’s production (alongside Peter Hall’s The Wars of the Roses, in 1963–4, which staged the first tetralogy), Shewring highlights how a shift in academic and theatrical attitudes, as well as audience expectations, affected performative interpretations of the play. For instance, Shewring writes that Hall’s focus on the socio-economic effects of how the leaders ruled ‘contrasted sharply with Quayle’s celebratory, patriotic 1951 tetralogy’; the result, she explains, of a cultural shift that saw influences on Hall’s production not only from academic sources such as Arthur Colby Sprague and Jan Kott, but also from Brecht’s

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Berliner Ensemble and a wider ‘trend for the questioning of accepted world-views in the spirit of contemporary politics’.20 The Prospect Theatre Company production of 1969, featuring Ian McKellen as Richard and directed by Richard Cottrell, is a good example of how reception can be influenced by political context. Prospect was a small touring company with a small budget. The production initially toured in the UK before moving to Vienna and Bratislava, then in Czechoslovakia, not long after the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968. McKellen recalls the heightened tensions in Bratislava at the time, where the promotion of Prospect’s visit and performances had been suppressed. The impact that this had on the reception of the production is clear. McKellen states that although he did not ‘make a connection between those Russian … invasions and Bolingbroke’s challenge to Richard II’s sovereignty’, the audience did, going on to describe the reaction to his performance of Richard’s lines at Barkloughly when, returning from Ireland, he kneels and caresses the ground: having expected the audience to be bored, he says the response ‘was less orthodox … when it came; the plash, the gasp, the snuffles, the mewing. I have never heard it since, an audience crying. They were grieving, I understood … because Richard’s words could have been their own, when their land was invaded so recently, when sticks and stones had been pelted at armoured cars and tanks.’ As McKellen puts it, ‘the play’s politics were so accurately explored by Shakespeare that they remained revealingly modern 350 years later’.21 One of the most famous productions of the play featured Richard Pasco and Ian Richardson at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1973. Many critics have commented on the balance between Richard and Bolingbroke, how one falls as the other rises around a central point in the play. This is often made visual in productions in the deposition scene when Richard holds out the crown to Bolingbroke saying, ‘Here, cousin, seize the crown. Here, cousin, / On this side my hand, and on that side thine’ (4.1.182–3). In the Pasco/Richardson production, directed by John Barton, the relationship between

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Richard and Bolingbroke was explored more deeply with the two actors alternating the parts. Shewring notes: ‘What the production offered was a modern understanding of the religious and political concerns expressed in the concept of the king’s two bodies, one personal and mortal, one representative, official and, hence, immortal.’22 Gurr has observed how the role-swapping ‘was a device which worked for the company better than for the audience’, and highlights how the dualism was found in other areas of the production, including the set design, which featured ‘two ladders reaching up behind the contestants in the combat scene with between them a platform on which Richard literally rose and fell’.23 The two actors playing Richard brought their own interpretations to each role. Gurr notes that ‘Pasco’s Richard was closer to the traditional tragic hero than Richardson’s’, and that Richardson’s Bolingbroke was ‘unwavering in his taciturn ambition’ while Pasco’s was ‘hesitant’.24 Thus, in the same production, different interpretations were offered for the characters and their relationships both to each other and to the world in which they existed. In 1978, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) presented the first season in a series of televised films of the complete works of William Shakespeare. Richard II was among the first, being screened on 10 December 1978. In contrast to Shewring’s comments that Richard II is difficult to stage in the modern age, the series producer, Cedric Messina, stated that Richard II ‘is … in some ways an easy television introduction to the histories, both for the audience and the producer’. Messina thought that the play ‘lends itself to television … [because] there aren’t any battles: all the confrontations are eyeball to eyeball’.25 Because of this, the action is arguably suited to a medium that can exploit the possibilities of close up in a way that a stage production cannot.26 Derek Jacobi, in the title role, focused on the historical circumstances of the play and its king. Jacobi saw Richard’s role in the death of Woodstock, an offstage event that takes place before the play begins, as pivotal to his character: ‘Shakespeare hasn’t really given any

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indication from Richard’s point of view that he actually saw that the murder was done. If you’re playing Richard you have to decide “Did I do it or didn’t I?” and inform the lines from there.’27 The design of the BBC film was to some degree dictated by the context of the television series: it had to fit the broader style of the series and therefore could not be a straightforward medieval set piece. Unlike some others of the series which were filmed outdoors, this production was filmed in a studio and the designer, Tony Abbott, utilized a number of large units over and again to create different locales ‘juxtaposed differently … rather like an enormous Leggo [sic] set’.28 The film’s director, David Giles, aimed to create a historically accurate presentation of the fourteenth century through the clothing the characters wore, but he also wanted to create an accessible film by showing something more acceptable to a modern audience than the kinds of fashions adopted by the historical king and his courtiers. The colour palette used – browns, oranges, gold and black – was thus dictated by the desire to make a famously extravagant king more everyday. The next significant production in a cycle was staged in 1988 by the English Shakespeare Company (ESC) in their The Wars of the Roses; the ESC’s first project.29 Established by director Michael Bogdanov and actor Michael Pennington, the ESC was, to some degree, a challenge to the theatrical institutions of the RSC and the National Theatre. With no theatrical base, their regional tours instead attempted to create something of a truly ‘national theatre’, taking Shakespeare to ‘short-rationed audiences’.30 The Company had a political motive at its core, wanting ‘to demonstrate the immediate relevance of Shakespeare’s plays to the present and attempting to use those plays as part of a contemporary social and political agenda’.31 In a written account of their productions, Bogdanov and Pennington describe Britain in the 1980s, employing a quotation from Richard II to do so:

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Westminster Rule. Centralisation. Censorship. Power to the City. Bleed the rest of the country dry … This land … Is now leased out … Like to a tenement or pelting farm: That [sic] England, that was wont to conquer others, Hath made a shameful conquest of itself. (Richard II, II.i)32 In this context, we might expect to find political interpretations at the heart of the ESC’s Richard II. However, this is perhaps the only production discussed in this chapter that must be understood in the immediate context of its cycle, which initially consisted of just the Henry plays (1 Henry IV to Henry VI). Bogdanov and Pennington decided that it was necessary to add Richard II, setting it in the Regency period in order to give way to the Victorian-style court of Henry IV, so that the story of the latter could be better understood by audiences unfamiliar with the plays. As a result, the interpretation of Richard II was subordinate to that of the Henriad. As Shewring comments, because ‘Bolingbroke was soon to be seen as Henry IV … it would not be appropriate to present him as the villainous usurper with Richard as the tragic victim’.33 In what was regarded in some quarters as ‘gimmick casting’, Fiona Shaw took the role of Richard at the National Theatre, London, in 1995; directed by Deborah Warner, this would be the last significant production of the play in the twentieth century.34 As in the Pasco/Richardson production of 1973, the relationship between Richard and Bolingbroke (played by Richard Bremner) was emphasized, with a focus this time on gender. Shaw and Warner were explicit in stating that gender was not an issue, either in the casting or the interpretation, but the media furore surrounding the casting choice ensured that the sex of the actor could not be overlooked.35 As Carol

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Chillington Rutter observed, ‘Shaw’s Richard was always going to be subversive’, partly because ‘the “girl” was not going to play the Richard [the critics] knew from a dozen previous productions, the wastrel, the gormless poltroon outmanoeuvred by his barons, the “girly” king’.36

Richard II in the twenty-first century: The first decade Two cycles of history plays were performed at the RSC during the opening decade of the twenty-first century, one of which, This England, was designed as a project for the millennium year and saw both tetralogies staged by four directors with two companies of actors. Steven Pimlott opened the cycle with Richard II, starring Samuel West as the king, at The Other Place in 2000. Michael Dobson referred to it as both Beckettian and a ‘fastidiously post-modern rediscovery of Brecht’.37 The production was performed in a white box, with the performance space taken back to the bare walls of the theatre. Actors remained onstage at all times, waiting for their cues while seated on simple white chairs at the back of the stage. There was no set as such, but key props included an ‘ammo box’ that doubled as a coffin, a dais, the prison and a mirror, and there was a neat mound of earth that represented both England and the grave.38 The costuming was modern, with characters in coats and jumpers, and Richard’s cronies dressed in purple suits. The production opened when West’s Richard strode across the stage to the entrance and locked the door, before speaking the lines from the prison speech, ‘I have been studying how I may compare / This prison where I live unto the world’ (5.5.1–2). These words would be repeated throughout, at different points, by Richard, Bolingbroke and Isabella, the repetition, coupled with this opening action, suggesting that the world is a prison not just for Richard but for all.39

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The set enabled this existential approach to the play to be clearly seen, unencumbered by the trappings of a conventionally theatrical set. Dobson rejected the use of the term ‘modern dress’ for this production ‘since that would imply a simple transposing of the play’s events into an illusionistic presentday setting’. Instead, he argued, Pimlott’s actors ‘scrupulously and vividly told the story … in what was avowedly the same real time as that of the audience, their frame of reference drawn from contemporary life’.40 The contemporaneity of the production was clear for West, who, in writing about his experience of playing Richard, referred to US President George W. Bush and Prince Charles, while reviewers noted in Richard and Bolingbroke (David Troughton) parallels with the relationship between Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor Gordon Brown.41 In 2003, Richard II, starring Mark Rylance and directed by Tim Carroll, was staged at Shakespeare’s Globe, London, as part of its ‘Regime Change’ season, the title of which would prove especially significant in the light of the 2003 Iraq War and Saddam Hussein’s fate. During his tenure as Artistic Director (1995–2005), Rylance’s Globe company was committed to the exploration of original practices, the intention of which was as far as possible ‘to recreate or replicate … performance practices of Shakespeare’s company who occupied the original Globe’.42 As a methodology, original practices seeks to employ the same materials and crafts used in Shakespeare’s era, and one of the approaches the Globe explored in this season involved the use of single gender casts: an all-male cast (as would have been expected on an Elizabethan stage) for Richard II and Marlowe’s Edward II, and an all-female cast for Richard III.43 This move raised a number of questions with regard to the original practices experiment. While Nicholas De Jongh queried the choice of Richard II ‘which boasts only peripheral female roles’ for an all-male cast, Lois Potter pointed out that Richard II and Edward II are ‘plays that question the masculinity of the hero’ while Richard III is ‘perhaps the most macho of the history plays’.44 Rylance’s

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Richard also marked a break from the norm: his performance was notable for its humour, rather than playing to the tragic qualities. As Georgina Brown observed, Rylance had ‘a magic touch when it comes to manipulating our sympathies through his very clever sense of humour … It’s very funny, very original, full of self-pity but also pitiful’.45 In 2005, the American film star Kevin Spacey took on the role of Richard at the Old Vic, London, having been appointed Artistic Director at the theatre in 2004. Michael Billington described the production, directed by Trevor Nunn, as ‘aggressively modern-dress’, and Quentin Letts noted an ‘eagerness to make the play relevant to a 2005 audience’.46 It is striking that Letts makes this sound forced when, as we have seen, the play can be found to have resonance with current contexts without those efforts being made. Ben Miles’s Bolingbroke in particular was aligned in reviews with Gordon Brown.47 Nevertheless, in spite of such modern parallels, it was the opposition of tradition and modernity that characterized Nunn’s production: Hildegard Bechtler’s sparse design married the old with the modern, consisting simply of white walls and dark wooden panelling. Spacey’s Richard represented the old ways (traditional lords’ robes, news from newspapers, khaki coloured military suits) while Miles’s Bolingbroke represented the new (television media and modern black combat gear). In Richard’s monarchy, Nunn foregrounded the ‘fancy-dress’ system of politics he perceived as the current style of governance in the UK, and highlighted the challenges for understanding politics in the new era of technology. Nunn’s answer to the questions he raised about Britain’s political system – ‘is it any longer valid, or just a kind of circus?’ – was clear: the old system must give way to the new, and the British political system must change as radically as it does in the play.48 Six years after Samuel West’s performance of Richard II in This England, the RSC staged another cycle of the eight history plays. This time, however, the plays were all directed by Michael Boyd using the same cast and creative team and thus

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had a single directorial vision. The unity of the cycle extended to the design by Tom Piper which was used across all the productions and could easily accommodate the different period settings of the plays: the characters of Richard II inhabited an Elizabethan world. Unlike the ESC’s cycle, in which Richard II was subordinate to Henry IV, Boyd’s production was vital in establishing themes and approaches that would dominate the eight plays: the idea of doubling members of his cast in a meaningful way, the use of ghosts and the supernatural to suggest the inescapable past, and the question of the nature of kingship. A number of productions in the opening years of the twentyfirst century began by foreshadowing the death of Richard at the end of the play: a dead hart placed centre stage opened the Rylance production; a grave was denoted by a heap of earth in the Pimlott/West production; a voice-over of the ‘death of kings’ speech introduced the BBC’s film in 2012 (as discussed below). In this tradition, Boyd’s production opened with death: the corpse of Woodstock lay in the centre of the stage. The cycle thus began by showing the assassination that essentially acts as catalyst for the Wars of the Roses, and making visible the issue that Jacobi placed at the heart of the king’s character in the 1978 BBC film. Although reference to Woodstock’s murder, which occurs before the play’s action begins, can be, and has been, cut from the text without much consequence, in Boyd’s production Woodstock’s ghost appears throughout – for example, during Gaunt’s ‘This England’ speech and in the deposition scene – either observing or taking the speaking part of other, more minor, characters. The ghostly aspect gave the words an extra level of meaning, hinting that the living characters were not in control of their own destinies. As Nicholas Grene puts it in relation to prophecies in the history plays, a sense was created that there is a ‘pre-written narrative that is England’s history’.49 Kingship was also central to Boyd’s cycle, and the Elizabethan design of Richard II visually established the idea that kingship is characterized by excess. Jonathan Slinger’s

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Richard wore bright gold and cream robes, the crown sitting on his head above orange curls, his face painted white with bright red lips and the sceptre lying in his arm. Slinger presented a Richard that looked like Elizabeth I, bringing to mind Elizabeth’s famous statement to William Lambarde, ‘I am Richard II’.50 The development of the character presented a stripping away of this artifice, and Slinger would end the play dressed in a simple white ankle-length robe, with a bald scalp. As in the earlier This England cycle at the RSC, Boyd blurred the distinctions between Richard II and Henry IV. However, where in that cycle Bolingbroke brought elements of Henry IV into Richard II, in Boyd’s it was Richard who would reappear in 2 Henry IV when, in the opening ‘Prologue’, Rumour entered dragging Richard’s coffin. Rumour, played by Forbes Masson, doubled the role with that of Bagot in Richard II, and here was dressed in the same costume he had worn in that role, suggesting that this Rumour was Bagot’s ghost. As a result, Rumour’s mission to ‘bring smooth comforts false, worse than true wrongs’ (2H4 ‘Induction’, 40) took on a sinister quality, suggesting a vengeful intention further intensified by Boyd’s decision to have the murder of Richard carried out not by Exton but by Bagot, with the assistance of Woodstock’s ghost. As Rumour spoke, he opened the coffin and kissed the hand of Richard’s corpse, which then rose, revealing the king dressed in the same long, white robe, now stained across the torso with blood. Recalling Woodstock at the beginning of Richard II, this ghosting created a level of sympathy between the characters when living (as each night the actors would return again alive to play the parts) and when dead. The memorializing aspect of the history plays was also notable in this scene, with ‘the presence of a coffin onstage’ becoming ‘a reminder of past quarrels, which impinges on the universe of the play’.51 This was exactly the significance in the Boyd production of 2 Henry IV, with Richard’s coffin and its ghostly occupant serving as ‘a reminder of past quarrels’ and an anticipation of vengeance to come.

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Richard II in the twenty-first century: The second decade As we have seen, Richard II is a play with which (artistic) directors seek to make a mark of some kind: for Kevin Spacey this play was his first Shakespearean role at the Old Vic in London, while for Michael Grandage it marked his departure from the Donmar Warehouse in 2011 after a very successful tenure. It is also true that productions of Richard II do not need to be modern dress to have resonance. With regard to Grandage’s production, Kate Bassett stated that ‘The medieval costumes actually make the modern-day reverberations more startling: the arrogant top dog Richard being toppled by a mass insurrection, having heaped taxes on the common folk and stuffed his own coffers with gold.’52 The set was of medieval design, coloured with ‘flaky gold’ and ‘tarnished gilt’ and lit by candles; the air was heavy with incense; there was a gallery dominating the rear of the stage, and ‘lancet windows and quatrefoils’.53 Eddie Redmayne’s Richard was already seated onstage as the audience entered, looking ‘so much a part of this ornate ecclesiastical architecture, so entrenched in a stately establishment that it is hard to imagine he could ever be deposed’.54 All this was suggestive of an oppressive atmosphere and a period that was running down and coming to an end, yet the stage was peopled by young actors: at twenty-nine, Redmayne was the youngest to play Richard among the actors discussed here. In 2012 the BBC aired a season of programmes about Shakespeare to complement the London 2012 Olympics and the Cultural Olympiad, titled Shakespeare Unlocked. A major component of this season was a four-programme production of the second tetralogy under the umbrella title The Hollow Crown, starring some of the biggest names in contemporary Shakespeare performance in the UK (many of whom, such as Patrick Stewart and Tom Hiddleston, also have an international reputation in film). Richard II opened the series

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and was first broadcast on BBC2 on 30 June 2012, starring Ben Whishaw as the king. Rupert Goold, the director, adapted the play with Ben Power, making some salient changes. The film opens with a voice-over whispering lines from the ‘death of kings’ speech, while the cutting of any reference to his uncle Gloucester’s murder removes any ambiguous presentation of the king resulting from his alleged involvement. Unlike other productions where sympathies and suspicions may be weighted more fairly between Richard and Bolingbroke, in this production Richard is the more sympathetic character of the two, emphasized by the costuming of Richard in white and gold and Bolingbroke (Rory Kinnear) in black. This more favourable presentation of Richard is apparent throughout the film, and he comes across as thoughtful and intelligent: his decision making during the gage scene and the lists suggest that he is trying to be a good king; his engagement with Bushy, Bagot and Green is tender rather than licentious; his behaviour after the death of Gaunt is framed as a desire to get to the war in Ireland rather than greed. Some of the minor characters have also been adjusted: substituting Bagot for the role of the Earl of Salisbury at Barkloughly Castle, for example, gives an otherwise absent strength and courage to the character. In 2013 Gregory Doran directed Richard II for the RSC, his first play at Stratford as Artistic Director, marking the beginning of his plan to stage the complete works of Shakespeare over several years. It was also part of a more immediate project to present the second tetralogy in a kind of cycle: the Henry IVs would follow in 2014 and Henry V in 2015, before all four would be performed together in sequence in 2016. Starring David Tennant as Richard and with an impressive supporting cast (including Michael Pennington as a ‘ferocious … growling’ Gaunt and Nigel Lindsay as a ‘solid-cum-gruff’ Bolingbroke), Doran emphatically retained the murder of Woodstock, opening with Jane Lapotaire as his widow, the Duchess of Gloucester, dressed in black, draped over a coffin. Described by Alan Wallcroft as a ‘traditional’ production, the play was staged in a medieval world employing a largely bare stage with

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a wall of thin chains to the rear onto which were projected a number of images, including, at the opening of the play, an interior of Westminster Abbey.55 Tennant appeared as Richard with long brown hair, which many saw as linking the character with Christ. Indeed, the Telegraph reviewer described Tennant’s Richard as combining ‘the appearance of Albrecht Dürer’s Christ-like self-portraits with the wayward, frivolous manner of Russell Brand’.56 Although one reviewer found Tennant’s Richard to be a ‘likeable, almost sympathetic figure’ who garners ‘some late sympathy’, most expressed how Tennant was prepared to make his character dislikeable: he was ‘sardonic, light-footed, unpleasant, alluring, completely free of ingratiation’, ‘excitingly unpredictable … [transforming] from a gilded tyrant to a more vulnerable character’.57 Many reviewers also commented on the effeminacy of this Richard, one even noting (somewhat homophobically) that he held his sceptre with a ‘limp wrist’ as evidence for ambiguous sexuality.58 While Richard is often considered to be a sexually ambiguous character, Doran made Richard’s ‘bi-sexuality’ explicit by having Richard kiss Aumerle fully on the lips before descending at Flint Castle in 3.3. Whether the intention was to foreground the question of the king’s sexuality or not, this moment created greater force at the end of the play when Aumerle would prove his loyalty to the new King Henry IV by murdering Richard (Doran, like Boyd, omitting the character of Exton). Daisy Bowie-Sell referred to Jo Hill-Gibbins’s production of The Tragedy of King Richard the Second, staged at the Almeida in winter 2018/19 and starring Simon Russell Beale, as a ‘filleted version of Shakespeare’s play’.59 Many reviewers commented on the length of the production, which was cut to 100 minutes without an interval. Michael Billington bemoaned the ‘reductive version’, and Quentin Letts linked the sparseness of the adaptation to its presentation on the stage (designed by Ultz), stating that the play had been ‘shrunk so it fits in a grey, metallic prison cell’.60 One effect of both the reduction of the text and the sparseness of the design was that it made the play

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hard to follow if the viewer was not already familiar with it. This may have been an intention of the project. The title itself (bucking the trend of simply naming a production Richard II) called the play a ‘Tragedy’, following the early quartos in this respect, and thus created a defamiliarizing effect, subverting what audiences accustomed to the play may have expected. This approach may perhaps be read as Brechtian. The play was performed in a grey metallic box, with buckets around the walls labelled with their contents (for example, ‘blood’ and ‘muck’) which would be thrown around the stage and characters by the performers as required. Such alienating effects were compounded by the costumes of the characters who were all dressed in modern, nondescript, grey and black clothing, which some referred to as ‘rehearsal clothes’.61 A recurrent theme of reviews was that much meaning and understanding of the play was lost in this paring down, and in the apparent anonymity of the cast of eight. Sarah Crompton noted that the portrayal of Bolingbroke as a ‘frightened child, a brawling boy’ and Richard as ‘vain and changeable makes nonsense of the play’s careful oppositions’, while Billington observed that ‘you would hardly guess at the religious force behind the Bishop of Carlisle’s condemnation of Bolingbroke’s assault on the divinity of kingship’.62 Letts stated that ‘while there are some striking performances … you feel that the breakneck pace does not give the actors much scope for nuance’.63 One of the themes of this production was the alignment of politics with the schoolyard. The production information on the theatre’s website paralleled ‘King: The male ruler of an independent state’ with ‘King of the Castle, A children’s game in which each child attempts to stand alone or on a mound, or sandcastle, by pushing other children off it’ (we might see a reference here to the Pimlott production and the mound of earth on its stage).64 The production design also played with this idea, with Russell Beale’s Richard wearing a yellow paper crown. Simon Russell Beale, who turned fifty-eight during the production’s run, is the oldest actor under discussion here to play Richard, and reviewers evidently noticed. Letts

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commented that he did ‘not have a sense of Richard as a cocksure youth’, but, because of his arrogance and vanity, he also did not seem to possess the maturity to exert leadership over the nobles who behaved as ‘squabbling children’.65 Paul Taylor, by contrast, found that Russell Beale’s age made dramatic sense of the production: ‘on one level … he is too old for the part (he reminds you more of Lear at moments) but the idea of the piece as anguished retrospect gives his seniority a haunting emotional resonance’. For Taylor, this production was ‘weirdly dreamlike’ in quality: a ‘nightmarish flashback’ from Richard’s soliloquy (‘I have been studying how I may compare / This prison where I live unto the world’, 5.5.1–2) with which the play opened.66 The last production that I will discuss in this performance history was staged only two weeks after the Almeida’s Tragedy of King Richard closed, and is also one of the most significant in the recent history of performances of any of Shakespeare’s plays in the UK. In early 2019 the company producing and performing Richard II at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse became the first all-women-of-colour company to present a Shakespeare play on a major stage. The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse is a recreation of a seventeenth-century indoor theatre, based on the Blackfriars, with lighting provided by beeswax candles. Yet, in this space, directors Lynette Linton and Adjoa Andoh (who also performed the role of Richard) created what the Globe website called ‘a post-Empire reflection on what it means to be British in the light of the Windrush anniversary and as we leave the European Union’.67 The production was performed on the night of 29 March, the date the UK had originally been due to leave the EU. As it transpired that Brexit did not take place on this day, the audience nevertheless responded to the pertinences of the play to this specific contemporary context: Gaunt’s ‘This England’ speech was noted to have received applause and laughter. The fact that the company comprised women of colour influenced Rajha Shakiry’s production design: the costumes reflected the wide range of the cast members’ heritages ‘to create

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designs inspired by Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, the Far East, and the West Indies’ and were ‘splendidly colourful  … when bathed in the signature Wanamaker candlelight’.68 The set was framed with bamboo, and photographs of the performers’ ancestors ‘[stared] down suggestively from the upper gallery’.69 Michael Billington also observed how ‘The flywhisk brandished by Andoh’s Richard evokes memories of African presidents, the frequent prostration before power has echoes of the far east, the … shruti box that is part of the musical accompaniment derives from India.’ This all led Billington to comment that ‘what really hits one is the play’s eternal relevance’, a point made by this production in a way far from forced or heavy-handed: as Billington remarked, ‘we … are allowed to make these deductions for ourselves’.70 The casting also had a direct effect on how the play was received by critics. Daniella Harrison wrote that ‘Though simply staged the play’s themes are emphasised and twisted in a new light purely through the choice of cast.’71 Henry Hitchings observed that ‘the casting raises timely questions about who controls the levers of power’, while Rosemary Waugh noted that Linton and Andoh ‘add a layer of significance by having [the play] performed by a company of women of colour’.72 Waugh particularly praised Andoh in the role of Richard, declaring it a part she was ‘born to play’, while Hitchings lauded her ‘unusually passionate take on [the role] … a more forceful sort of king – sometimes petulant but never camp … her brusqueness often [turned] into bullying’.73 This Richard ‘[spat] out words and [strutted] across the stage’ in contrast to Sarah Niles’s Bolingbroke who was ‘still and calculating’.74 Shobna Gulati as the Duke of York also garnered attention for her performance, bringing ‘laughter into the often tense scenes’ as ‘a scholarly grandmother who’s seen it all before and is disappointed (but not angry) at the ineptitude of everyone else’.75 It is worth noting that Waugh refers to Gulati as a woman here, but it is not at all clear what gender the characters were given: Gulati is written of as a grandmother but played the Duke of York, where (in the same review)

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Andoh is written of as Richard and referred to as a ‘guy’. It is refreshing, then, that this all-women cast was not greeted with the same attitudes that met Fiona Shaw’s Richard (whom Shaw said she performed as a man) twenty-four years earlier.

Conclusion If you were to ask someone to name one of Shakespeare’s history plays, they probably wouldn’t immediately think of Richard II. Yet, this play was both popular in its own era and has proven a mainstay of Shakespeare theatre throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Its performance history shows that it is a brilliant star vehicle for either an established or an up-and-coming actor: many of the performers mentioned here who have played the part of Richard II were, or became, household names. This chapter has also shown, however, that this is more than a play for actors. Time and again, regardless of whether the play has been set in the modern, Elizabethan or medieval era, in the UK, abroad or in a non-specific dream-like space, productions have been found to speak to the political situations in which they have been performed. As Ian McKellen notes, ‘ever since [performing Richard in Bratislava in 1969], I have been assured that Shakespeare’s politics, his wars and histories, always have a modern significance’.76

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3 The State of the Art Gavin Schwartz-Leeper There are two major questions that have concerned scholarship of Richard II for decades. The first is around contemporary politics, and the second is around historiography or historywriting. The first concern is neatly exemplified in the remark allegedly made by Elizabeth I to William Lambarde: ‘I am Richard II, know ye not that?’ Much of the scholarship on Richard II has focused on the relationship between this iconic female monarch and Shakespeare’s imagining of her conflicted forerunner. The second concern was epitomized by E. M. W. Tillyard’s interpretation of Richard II as part of a grand, cyclical reading of the two tetralogies. As Patrick Ashby’s chapter in this volume illustrates, much attention has been given to both of these major areas of investigation, and to why this play in particular has found it especially difficult to break away from them. In 2012, Jeremy Lopez introduced Richard II: New Critical Essays by observing that Shakespeare’s histories are among the most difficult for critics because they are hard to universalize by nature: one ‘feels obligated’ to grapple with the ‘political character’ of both the play’s historical setting and its contemporary context. Scholarship of Richard II has become unusually homogenous as a result.1 Indeed, it seems clear that the New Historicism

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of the 1980s and 1990s had a perhaps even stronger influence on criticism of this play than others in this respect. Since publication of that collection in 2012, it is becoming apparent that this homogeneity is fracturing. This may be overstating things, since the clear majority of recent scholarship on Richard II still deals with either Elizabethan politics or historiography. However, there are signs that critical interpretations of the play are becoming more diverse as the field has begun to develop methods that blend historicist criticism with other approaches. This blending is most evident in scholarship that discusses aspects of gender, temporality, space, place and ecocriticism. While historicist readings of Richard II continue to uncover new material and perspectives, recent scholarship has also opened up avenues of inquiry more concerned with the ways in which the play deals with the formation of English identity, the nature of early modern selfhood and the relationship between the self and the land. Scholarship since 2000 has focused on such key areas, detailing the psycho-textual process of Richard’s introspective fall from power (and Bolingbroke’s concurrent rise), the implications of reading the monarch as environmental steward, and how the political machinations in the play connect with wider ideas and indicators of early modern change. These points are raised not to suggest that these new approaches are inevitably more useful than more straightforward interpretations of the play in terms of political history, or that such historico-political readings should no longer be at the centre of scholarship on this play. It is evident, however, that work on Richard II has been becoming more diverse, more creative and more ambitious over the past two decades. The aim of this chapter is to provide a brief introduction to this critical diversity, addressing a selection of the scholarship – editions, essays and journal articles, monographs and collections – published since the turn of the century and which take criticism of the play into the new millennium.

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Textual scholarship and new critical editions While a number of important editions of the play have been published in the past twenty years, there has been no significant scholarly disagreement or controversy around the editing of the text, the Quarto/Folio differences of which, including the deposition scene (4.1.155–318), appear to be relatively uncontentious, even where different approaches have been taken. Both the third edition of The Norton Shakespeare (2015) and the RSC Shakespeare (2007; 2010) follow the First Folio (1623) text for Richard II, whereas other major new editions (Arden Series 3 and the Oxford Shakespeare) generally follow the 1597 Quarto (hereafter Q1) while including the First Folio’s presentation of the deposition scene in 4.1, unavailable in print during Elizabeth I’s reign. The 2002 Arden Series 3 King Richard II, edited by Charles R. Forker, has, in many ways, set the standard for current and future editions of the play. A substantial introduction and appendices provide detailed accounts of the play’s historical context (including, of course, the 1601 Essex rising); political ideology and literary characterization; language, rhetoric and style; intertextuality in general, focusing on the play’s relationship to Marlowe’s Edward II in particular; the place of the play in the second tetralogy; history-writing in the period and the play’s sources; editorial, textual and bibliographic information; and the play’s performance history.2 Forker’s focus on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century productions is particularly useful to help readers understand the contexts of the play beyond the reign of Elizabeth I. Forker’s text is based primarily on Q1, with the deposition scene in 4.1, absent from the Elizabethan quartos, being drawn from the First Folio, as is signalled by Forker on the page as well as in the notes. Stage directions are also generally drawn from Q1.

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In 2010, the Royal Shakespeare Company, in collaboration with Macmillan, produced single-volume editions of Shakespeare’s plays, drawn from its 2007 Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen.3 As Esme Miskimmin’s chapter in this volume also recognizes, the single-volume RSC Richard II (2010) provides more extensive and substantial critical materials than the Complete Works, ranging from: a scene-by-scene analysis of the play; interviews with directors Claus Peymann and Michael Boyd and actor Fiona Shaw; an overview of Shakespeare’s life and career; several chronological appendices; and notes comparing the First Folio and Q1 texts. The critical apparatus touches on the major discussions the reader should expect – Elizabethan politics, theories of early modern kingship – but introduces the play through a brief discussion about emotion and lyric in Tudor England, pitching Richard II as ‘the most poetic of Shakespeare’s history plays’.4 While the play is hardly presented as an outlier among the history plays, nonetheless the editors have made an effort to draw readers’ attention away from the historico-political readings. The text is drawn from the First Folio (following editorial practices for all the RSC editions), but readers are directed to an appendix that discusses the differences featured in Q1. The text is modernized with limited glossing, by contrast to the extensive annotation and explanatory materials of Forker’s edition. The Oxford Shakespeare Richard II was published in 2011.5 The editors, Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin, broadly follow Q1 as the copy text and the First Folio for the deposition scene, as is generally standard practice. Some variations have been made for aesthetic or stylistic reasons, but all are flagged. The first section of the introduction is concerned with politics: the politics of the Essex rising, the politics of the deposition scene (and its possible censorship), the politics of representation and historiography, the politics of the Reformation and the politics of monarchical gender. This is not a criticism: the introduction is valuable, addressing matters of language, genre and staging alongside those of ‘politics’ in

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a series of useful and illuminating sections. On the question of the Essex rising, the editors lean on Paul E. J. Hammer’s 2008 Shakespeare Quarterly article (discussed below).6 As a result, the introduction places a strangely uneasy emphasis on the 1601 Essex rebellion, discussing it not because the editors see it as essential to understanding the play itself, but because it is central to scholarly discussions of it. This edition is pitched from the beginning, therefore, as a history about history chiefly because scholars have said it is, not necessarily because Shakespeare or his audience would have seen it quite like that. The Norton Shakespeare has managed to establish itself as a staple of the undergraduate Shakespeare experience, and both the second and third editions (2008; 2015) have built on the accessibility and popularity of the first (1997). However, whereas the first and second editions were, as their titles indicate, ‘Based on the Oxford Text’ – that is, on the text of the Complete Works edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor for Oxford University Press in 1986, with a further revised edition appearing in 2005 – the third edition of The Norton Shakespeare offers readers a freshly edited, independent text, no longer based on Oxford.7 There have, then, been changes to the texts, framing materials, appendices and digital resources in this new edition. One of the primary advantages of The Norton Shakespeare’s presentation of Richard II now is that it provides not just the print edition (based on the First Folio), but also digital editions of both the First Folio and Q1. This inclusion is unobtrusive and allows for close textual comparisons with relative convenience. The prefatory materials are brief but valuable, covering – unavoidably – the Elizabethan political history that frames so much work on Richard II, historical sources for the play, identity and psychology in the play, the editing of the text, performance notes and a brief but useful bibliography of notable scholarship on the play. The text itself is presented in modernized language with limited glossing and brief explanatory footnotes to guide new readers. The New Oxford Shakespeare appeared in 2016 and 2017 as a teaching- and performance-focused series of publications

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comprising a new collected works alongside supplementary companion volumes. The latter cover editing practices and scholarly discussions of the texts (Authorship Companion) while also providing a more detailed editorial and textual apparatus and notes for the texts, printed separately with original spelling and punctuation (Critical Reference Edition).8 As with The Norton Shakespeare, The New Oxford Shakespeare is also available online, providing extensive electronic access to all of the materials in print. The first volume to appear, The Complete Works, Modern Critical Edition, is aimed at the informed general reader and the advanced student.9 It situates Shakespeare’s works chronologically (the sequencing is explained in the Authorship Companion) and frames the text with materials relating to Richard II, from Coleridge to an anonymous Iranian university student. Readers looking for further critical discussion are directed to the Authorship Companion; for further information on the editing of the text, readers are invited to consult the Critical Reference Edition. The text of the play follows Q1, and for the deposition scene the editors turn to the First Folio, the textual distinctiveness of which is made clear by having 4.1.155–318 ‘boxed’ on the page. The language is modernized, with brief glosses added for words or concepts unfamiliar to modern readers. Stage directions are often accompanied by marginal discussions, as are moments in the text that call for interactions between actors and props; something that helps readers to visualize the action.

Governance and politics One of the most common lines of analysis of Richard II is that it is a play about Elizabeth I as much as its titular king, and that it was understood by Elizabethan audiences in this sense. The play has often been interpreted, then, as a discussion of contemporary politics concerned specifically with masculinity,

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power and the monarchy. Indeed, one of the most well-known anecdotes about this play is that Elizabeth I allegedly saw herself reflected unkindly in her ill-fated forebear, telling her Keeper of the Records, William Lambarde, ‘I am Richard II, know ye not that?’. This (possibly apocryphal, potentially misapplied) story, together with the connections between the February 1601 performance and the failed Essex rising, has long provided the basis for a perceived close relationship between the play and historicist methodologies. The links between the Earl of Essex, his rebellion and this play have been among the most common features explored by scholars over the last two centuries, and are still often regarded as among the most important aspects of the play. The most substantial contribution to scholarship in this area is How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays (2016) by the historian Peter Lake.10 This is a big book in several senses: most importantly, it manages to provide both a wide scope and real utility to a range of readers, though it is ostensibly focused on Elizabethan politics of the 1590s. While it certainly does provide quite a lot on that political period, it does so by drawing in fifteen dramatic works (comprising most of Shakespeare’s histories, some of the tragedies, a comedy and Sir John Oldcastle) and a wealth of contextual conversations drawn from a range of fields to achieve something greater. Lake’s thoroughness means that he has included material ranging from plot overviews to meticulous examinations of realpolitik in the plays. These features make this book of real usefulness to students as well as more experienced researchers. Lake situates Shakespeare’s sense of political history in the Elizabethan succession crisis, drawing on his formidable knowledge of the mechanisms of early modern politics to link dramatic moments with contemporary concerns about succession, authority, governance and the social order. It is important to note that while English chronicle plays feature prominently in Lake’s analysis, Richard II among them, he also considers the importance of other dramas that deal

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with history, from the obvious candidates (Julius Caesar) to some surprisingly rewarding choices (The Merry Wives of Windsor). While this is a volume concerned with order, its own ordering is thematic and a little idiosyncratic. It is comprised of eight major sections (themselves grouping together twentyfive chapters), plus an introduction, conclusion and detailed endmatter. Readers primarily interested in Richard II will want to focus on Part I (‘Contexts and Structures’) for the theoretical and methodological framing that Lake employs, and Part IV (‘How (not) to depose a tyrant: King John and Richard II’) and Chapter Ten in particular, which focuses on Richard II and acts of resistance. One of the real virtues of Lake’s work is the way in which he sees texts speaking across genres. It would be a mistake to suggest that a reader could ignore the sections on Henry V and Sir John Oldcastle in particular, since they address aspects of Essex and court culture that are directly relevant to Richard II and its reception. How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage is clearly one of the most significant recent publications on Shakespeare’s histories, and future scholarship on Richard II will need to address Lake’s contributions. In his article ‘Shakespeare’s Richard II, the Play of 7 February 1601, and the Essex Rising’, another historian, Paul E. J. Hammer, opens by describing Richard II as among the most important of early modern works because ‘it represents the most conspicuous and famous example of a Shakespearean play transcending the confines of theatrical production to enter into real-life political drama during the playwright’s own lifetime’.11 Hammer goes on to examine the ways in which, in the Q4 and Q5 editions (1608 and 1615 respectively), ‘restorations’ of allegedly censored lines from the deposition scene speak to Elizabethan and Jacobean political sensitivities around the various domestic and foreign crises that emerged at the end of Elizabeth’s reign. Hammer explicitly tackles Blair Worden’s thesis, which revives a long-dormant argument that the play performed at the Globe on 7 February 1601 was not Shakespeare’s Richard II but another drama altogether.12 A 2010 article by Jeffrey S. Doty provides an excellent analysis

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of the politics of the 1601 rising, situating it in the context of ‘popularity’ and the development of the early modern public sphere.13 This approach is expanded in Doty’s 2017 monograph to take in a range of Shakespeare’s other plays from multiple genres alongside Richard II.14 The Essex rising and its connections to Richard II also appear regularly in more popular critical works. This may not be so surprising, considering the dramatic appeal of this famous insurrection and its contexts, and the fact that it provides an opportunity for readers to situate Shakespeare in his own time and place. Jonathan Bate’s Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare (2008) also addresses aspects of the Essex rebellion, pitching the events of February 1601 as a ‘political tragedy in five acts’.15 This structure allows Bate to narrate the Essex rising in the present tense, with more direct discussions of Shakespeare’s process and intentions being interspersed with historical anecdotes covering politics, court culture and production history. Bate notes that the Essex-instigated performance of Richard II ‘forms a brief set-piece in every biography of Shakespeare’, and makes the persuasive (if not novel) case for readers to understand this play in the context of the powerful link between theatre and politics.16 He observes that it would not have been unthinkable for Elizabeth to close the theatres after the Essex revolt, as had been the case following the 1597 production of Ben Jonson and Thomas Nashe’s seditious The Isle of Dogs, and which might have precluded Shakespeare from writing some of his most important later works. The chapter concludes with a sceptical examination of the Lambarde anecdote, an approach subsequently countered by Jason Scott-Warren in an article defending both its authenticity and its significance.17 Alex Schulman’s monograph Rethinking Shakespeare’s Political Philosophy: From Lear to Leviathan (2014) positions Richard II and the Henriad as a ‘depiction of political modernisation’.18 In this framework, Richard II serves as the basis for a progression from a failure of late

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medieval monarchism with ‘revolutionary implications’ to an anticipation of modernity.19 This analysis focuses largely on comparisons between the play and the historical figures it depicts, set against a narrative of what Schulman proposes is a medieval regression into a Hobbesian state of nature. This regression is most often voiced by (or is voiced about) Richard in the play, as the character wrestles with the difference between looking like a king and possessing the tangible aspects of a king’s authority. This ‘flirt[ation] with Lear’s materialistic reductionism’ is most clearly illustrated in 3.2, where Richard asks – rhetorically – what value is to be found in monarchical trappings of power when the king is, in his own figuring, a person like any other (3.2.171–7).20 Schulman does not imagine Richard to desire a true state of nature as Hobbes described (this is Hamlet territory), but sees Richard’s philosophizing as linked to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V’s abdication and subsequent meditations on the tumultuous first half of the sixteenth century. Schulman’s discussion of Richard’s use of a mirror to reflect on his life and times links to a brief but important section in a contribution by Bart van Es to the collection A Mirror for Magistrates in Context: Literature, History, and Politics in Early Modern England (2016), proposing a link between A Mirror for Magistrates and Richard II through the king’s call for a looking-glass – an actual mirror – in the deposition scene of 4.1.21 Using this moment as a starting point, van Es examines the figuring of Richard II in A Mirror for Magistrates as a key to decoding Shakespeare’s Richard. In particular, van Es finds a new angle for understanding the Essex rising. A Mirror for Magistrates provided a text to which Elizabethan audiences could turn when seeking Shakespeare’s Richard’s ‘book … [w]here all my sins are writ’ (4.1.274–5). In it, readers would find a Richard characterized by his ‘evil governance’. So, while Elizabeth may not have found too much to object to in Shakespeare’s play, the allusion to A Mirror for Magistrates (and the much less complimentary portrait of Richard II found within it) creates a more clearly subversive tone for

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the audience: an audience likely to be highly familiar with A Mirror for Magistrates, given that it was at the height of its popularity in the late 1590s.22 This link does not necessarily mean that Shakespeare was siding with Essex (as van Es notes, Shakespeare’s political ‘vanishing act’ is as important to his plays as anything else), but it does remind us that we should read (or see) our Shakespeare with at least an awareness of the textual allusions that his contemporaries would have noticed, especially if we are to make claims about the political importance of specific performances.23 Taken together with Scott Lucas’s essay in the same volume, we should also be reminded that A Mirror for Magistrates is likely to be more important for Shakespeare’s works than has been previously acknowledged.24 The importance of mirrors and (in a broader sense) the speculum principis trope is also explored by Kavita Mudan Finn and Lea Luecking Frost in an essay published in The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare’s Queens, Queenship and Power (2018).25 Quite a lot of previous work has focused on the nature of the relationship between Richard and Isabel, and on the parallels inherent in Richard being ‘Doubly divorced’ from both his crown and his ‘married wife’ (5.1.71–3). The authors here focus on the queer aspects of Richard and Isabel’s gendering, reading the two as speaking to aspects of Elizabeth I’s own dual aspects as both king and queen (especially in the context of anxieties over her potential marriage to Francis, Duke of Anjou). Richard’s request in 5.1 that Isabel act as the authoritative voice of the moral lessons of his fall and the narrator of his de casibus tragedy – ‘Tell thou the lamentable tale of me’ (5.1.44) – links Isabel to mirror-literature, and A Mirror for Magistrates in particular. This essay connects well, then, with van Es’s essay, and picks up on elements of reversal and mirroring that provide a useful exploration of perceptions of selfhood in the play. It also connects with other recent approaches that likewise address questions of politics, sexuality, gender and identity through queer readings of the play.26

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Moral allegory is a common focus for critical interpretations of Richard II, and Alfred Thomas’s Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages: Maimed Rights (2018) provides a chapter on the importance of medieval Arthurian romance within Richard II’s critique of Elizabethan absolutism.27 This interpretation largely hinges on close readings of the play alongside Le Morte Darthur, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae as works connected to anxieties about the Elizabethan succession and critiques of domestic policy. In many ways, these concerns are about the ‘correctness’ of the monarch as a metaphor for the ordering of society more broadly. Leon Harold Craig discusses the Hobbesian aspects of Richard II in his monograph The Philosopher’s English King: Shakespeare’s ‘Henriad’ as Political Philosophy (2015).28 The first chapter of the monograph is devoted to a discussion of Richard II as an examination of the ‘disorder’ that resulted in the Wars of the Roses. In this reading, Craig takes the play as an extended meditation on the ‘right’ to rule as a site of tension between rhetorically constructed mandate and more tangible competence. Craig locates this site as evidenced in the opening contention between Mowbray and Bolingbroke: Richard throughout speaks of himself as a king whose ruling will be obeyed as a matter of course (though cracks in his selfrepresentation are apparent from the beginning), only realizing in 1.3, immediately before the dukes’ duel, that a Bolingbroke victory would signify publicly the loss of the divine mandate to rule. The mechanisms by which Richard continually seeks to distract from the increasingly evident disconnect between the body royal and the body politic are brought to the audience’s attention by the metaphoric focus on the mouth, the breath, the tongue and the other physical producers of speech. Craig contrasts what is said in the play with what is actually done: he highlights not just Richard’s rhetoric, but the ways in which the names of the titled nobles themselves evidence a connection or separation from the land. For Craig, the play is concerned with how to demonstrate a

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right to rule: Richard’s rhetoric is insufficient evidence, and Bolingbroke’s competence is a self-fulfilling demonstration.

Histories, historiography and critical methodologies As with many of the histories, Richard II is often discussed not just as a play about a historical monarch but also as a drama concerned with history and its uses: the process by which people, ideas and events are recorded, remembered and rehearsed. Richard II: New Critical Essays (2012), the most significant collection on Richard II published since 2000, should be an early calling point for anyone looking to survey recent critical work on the play in this respect. While the scope of this volume demonstrates the ways in which new scholarship has branched out, Jeremy Lopez’s introduction makes it clear that the purpose of the volume is to investigate Shakespeare-as-historian, connecting Shakespeare-asdramatist and Shakespeare-as-commentator with developing concerns in late sixteenth-century England about the ways in which representations of the past might be put to (mis)use.29 These essays cover a range of topics, often setting out disparate (sometimes contradictory) perspectives. Lopez has paired essays in the volume, allowing them to address: the generation of meaning in the play;30 the ways in which the ‘history’ in the play interacts with contemporary political concerns around the power and fragility of the monarch(y);31 the dramatic, material and print contexts of the play;32 representations of female bodies, monarchical power and sovereignty;33 the ways in which the play complicates or unsettles notions of power and authority through the text and a broader intertextuality;34 and finally, modern stagings of the play.35 All of these chapters provide examples of how we can move beyond the comparatively well-trodden arguments about Elizabeth and Essex to think in more creative ways

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about issues like book history and material culture, gender and bodily representations, monarchism and authority, and how this particular ‘history play’ does ‘history’. In Shakespeare and the French Borders of English (2013), Michael Saenger discusses Richard II as a play largely concerned with both the use and the writing of history in national identity formation.36 Time and its passing are complex representational issues in many of Shakespeare’s plays, and this is certainly the case for Richard II: Richard is both long dead and alive (on stage); the play is rooted in the politics of the 1390s and the 1590s; and the monarch is both Richard and Elizabeth. There is a Cartesian element to this kind of cognitive process, but Saenger also invites us to extend that rationale to England itself: in this sense, the tangible England of Elizabeth is also the lost England of Richard II – or at least the not quite real England of Shakespeare’s character. If the materiality of the English past is made real through language, and if its realness is understood through that language, then English history  – and England itself – is constructed by the writing of that history. While this is not a new idea, nonetheless this study offers insight by exploring the tensions around nation- and identity-building through the language of Richard II. Saenger provokes us to think about the ways in which Shakespeare asks us to interrogate our definitions of reality, identity and community. While most recent work draws on or interacts with New Historicist methodologies for analysing Richard II, Jonathan P. Lamb’s Shakespeare in the Marketplace of Words (2017) uses the play to consider the implications of the ‘self’ in ‘selffashioning’.37 Lamb focuses on the stylistic and linguistic uses and meaning of ‘self’ in Richard II to argue that uses of ‘myself’ provide a clearer picture for understanding early modern conceptualizations of selfhood than the more widely studied first person singular pronoun ‘I’. Lamb distinguishes between reflexive (‘myself’) and possessive (‘my self’) uses of the term, arguing that in this distinction we can trace the Tudor uses of Senecan and Stoic linguistic ‘capacity’ that derived from Justus

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Lipsius and was popular in the 1580s and 1590s.38 Specifically, Lamb finds that Richard develops a new sense of self, and uses a new sense of ‘self’, in and after the deposition scene; though Richard may be losing his crown, he gains a Stoic sense of selfhood that he explores through the rest of the play. This interpretation pushes against the general view that Richard’s dramatic trajectory traces a decline towards disintegration following Richard’s musings on ‘I must nothing be’ (4.1.201) in the deposition scene. By contrast, Lamb persuasively demonstrates that Shakespeare uses Richard’s downfall to reflect not just on the ‘self’ in a philosophical sense, but also on political dispossession and conflict at the end of Elizabeth’s reign. Building on recent work on the early modern reception of Seneca by Jessica Winston, Linda Woodbridge and Gretchen Reydams-Schils, Lamb finds the roots of Shakespeare’s use of reflexive and possessive ‘myself’/‘my self’ in writers from Thomas Kyd to Samuel Daniel and Christopher Marlowe.39 In an associative sense, roots also concern Lynne Bruckner in her 2013 essay ‘“Consuming means, soon preys upon itself”: Political Expedience and Environmental Degradation in Richard II’, which reads Richard II in an ecocritical context placed firmly in twenty-first-century climate politics.40 Bruckner reads Richard II as a play about connecting to the earth: specifically, she argues that proximity to power requires emotional distance from the land (and vice versa). As Richard falls from power, he re-establishes an emotional relationship with the land that he previously embodied. At the same time, Bolingbroke’s reciprocal relationship with the land suffers as he takes the throne (and indeed, his management of the land and its nobles causes further problems in 1 and 2 Henry IV). While Bolingbroke shares the same kind of monarchical tethering to the land, the play is primarily focused on Richard’s failure to manage the ‘garden’ of England and his subsequent fall. This relationship is made clear by Gaunt in his famous ‘sceptred isle’ speech in 2.1, which concludes with Gaunt’s recriminating observation that Richard has turned something miraculous and living – ‘This nurse, this teeming womb of royal

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kings’ (2.1.51) – into something mechanistic, utilitarian and debased, ‘Like to a tenement or pelting farm’ (2.1.60). Gaunt tells Richard that he should think carefully about his actions, as they indicate a kind of terminal illness: ‘Thy death-bed is no lesser than thy land’, Gaunt proclaims (2.1.95), with Bruckner extending this metaphor to examine how Bolingbroke gives a deathbed-like farewell to England in Act 1 when he is exiled. In this way, Bruckner builds the case for a direct relationship between the monarch/steward and the land in part to bring Richard II to bear on one of the most pressing contemporary problems: climate change and ecological destruction more widely. She stops short of arguing, however, that we should interpret recent performances of the play in light of this ecocritical reading, or that future performances should be governed by it. Nonetheless, it is left implicit that Richard II can always be seen as a play about our own political crises now, as much as those of Shakespeare’s time. Bruckner’s timely essay thus centres itself within a growing and indeed urgent critical commitment to reading Shakespeare’s plays and other early modern texts in ecocritical terms.41 One of Shakespeare’s best-known mechanisms for commentary on society comes in his soliloquies, since they provide an ideal opportunity for an audience to think critically along with the character onstage. In her monograph Shakespeare’s Staged Spaces and Playgoers’ Perceptions (2014), Darlene Farabee devotes a chapter to the two soliloquies in Richard II, which come from Salisbury (2.4.18–24) and Richard (5.5.1–66).42 Farabee discusses the two soliloquies as vehicles for visual metaphors that serve to draw the audience’s attention to aspects of the characters (especially, of course, Richard). More specifically, Farabee argues that Richard II uses these visual metaphors as a way to unite the play’s dual aspects (as both history play and tragedy). This coming together is also present in the way the play deals both with visual metaphor and staging (to be understood itself as a metaphor in the history plays: the standing-in of props, scenery and imagined context for a real event or place). Farabee highlights how

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space and place function in Richard II, with onstage actions (both described in speech and in stage directions) allowing the audience to localize the literal and conceptual action in a specific physical location. An example of this can be seen in 3.2, when Richard shows his physical and emotional displacement as he returns from Ireland to England and has to ask where he is. While this kind of localization is most famously evoked by Gaunt’s ‘sceptred isle’ speech in 2.1, Farabee’s scholarship links to that of many others who work to show how the disconnecting of the king’s two bodies functions throughout the play.

Performances and audiences Richard II has been so closely associated with Elizabeth and Elizabethan politics that it can seem as if it is rarely subjected to alternative treatments. A notable exception was the 2012 Arabic language production by the Ashtar Theatre in Jericho, directed by Conall Morison and performed in Jericho, London (at the Globe) and Oxford as part of the artistic and cultural events associated with the 2012 London Olympics. With a fairly minimalist set and a mix of Palestinian, Elizabethan and modern military costumes, the production highlighted the garden/gardener trope, the mirror, and the ways in which blood literally and metaphorically signals a transition between monarchs (as anointing oil and in a more literal sense when dealing with violent dynastic conflict). For more detail, readers should look to Tamara Haddad’s review in Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global Experiment (2014).43 ‘Transition’ is the theme taken up by Margaret Shewring in her contribution on performance history to Jeremy Lopez’s collection Richard II: New Critical Essays (on which see above). As an updated supplement to her book-length study, Shakespeare in Performance: King Richard II (1996), Shewring reads the play as existing at ‘the turning point of

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four centuries’, its action being concerned with the transition from the fourteenth to the fifteenth century and the play’s contemporary audience reading that action in the context of the final years of the sixteenth century.44 Shewring argues that this in-built complexity makes the play difficult to stage in a way that speaks to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. However, she goes on to demonstrate – as Kate Wilkinson’s chapter in this volume also illustrates – that the play has received a number of treatments since the year 2000 that have provided topical and fresh interpretations, and it continues to do so. Several key productions (including those by the RSC and Berliner Ensemble in the mid-2000s) have worked to present the play as fundamentally concerned with nihilism: rather than exploring the interactions between the characters, these productions drew out the play’s potential for an obsessive concern with the way in which meaning is constructed linguistically (which in turned helped form the critical basis for some of the studies mentioned above). Shewring explores how productions since the turn of the millennium interrogated the historical and contemporary markers of change resonant with the transition between millennia and monarchs, breaking down performances into three categories: ‘the treatment of key scenes, the interpretation of Richard’s personal tragedy and the currency of the play’s political message as realized, at least in part, through design decisions taken for each production’s mise-en-scène’.45 The modern production with perhaps the widest reach has been the 2012 television adaptation for BBC’s The Hollow Crown (series 1, episode 1).46 The cast is composed of some remarkable names, including Patrick Stewart (John of Gaunt), Rory Kinnear (Bolingbroke), David Suchet (York) and David Morrissey (Northumberland). Ben Whishaw’s performance as a king caught between his status as a royal star of the magnitude of a Michael Jackson and that of a St Sebastianlike martyr, provides an exploration of the existential turn that Shewring identifies in post-2000 productions. This Richard is intensely introspective, performing a role that he knows he

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does not quite fit. In this age of gritty reboots, this production provides a rich exploration of the ways in which this play deals with issues of selfhood and power, politics and identity. In doing so, it reflects the shifting critical interest in the play that can be seen away from the stage and screen as well as upon them. Despite the continued scholarly focus on its engagement with late Elizabethan politics, then, Richard II is a play that, in the twenty-first century, continues to provoke an increasingly diverse range of critical and creative responses, both within academia and beyond it.

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4 New Directions ‘Blood and Soil’ – Richard II and the Politics of Landscape Peter J. Smith Arizona’s Republican Senator, John McCain, died of brain cancer on 25 August 2018. While widely respected in the United States for his heroic war record, his opposition to nuclear weapons and his support for Obamacare, it is arguable that he was also indirectly responsible for increasing the prominence of the Tea Party and the populist Right in American politics. In choosing Alaska’s Governor, Sarah Palin, as his running mate in the 2008 presidential campaign, McCain gave credibility to the protectionist and nationalistic position she continues to personify. While it remains too early properly to assess McCain’s political legacy, his refusal to allow President Trump as well as Palin to attend his funeral was a bracing admonishment to the illiberal American Right. Like John of Gaunt denouncing his king in 2.1 of Richard II, McCain, writing his valedictory statement on the very verge of Nature’s confine, could speak truth to power: ‘I lived and died a proud American … We are the citizens of the world’s greatest republic, a nation of ideals, not blood and soil.’1

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While McCain’s insistence that during ‘these challenging times’ the American people are more united than divided in their outlook is rather more than a little optimistic, it would be ungracious to take him too much to task either for glossing over the profundity of America’s current political and social problems or for his own role in exacerbating them. The pertinence of his remarks, however, for a discussion of Shakespeare’s Richard II demands that we return to his notion of nationhood: the United States is, he affirmed, ‘a nation of ideals, not blood and soil’. What McCain is implicitly rejecting here is the Trump administration’s joint obsession with racial purity (‘blood’) and the necessity for hard borders (‘soil’). Its determination to build a wall along the American–Mexican border, its discriminatory imposition of a travel ban on a number of arbitrarily chosen Muslim-majority countries, its championing of the frequently heavy-handed activites of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and its separation of illegal immigrants from their children and incarceration of the latter, all testify to the darker aspects of ‘America first, America first’.2 I begin this essay by addressing some of the stark realities of the forty-fifth US President’s commitment to ‘blood and soil’ in order to offer an urgently present-centred, if not presentist, reminder of the enduring relevance of Shakespeare’s Richard II to a global politics dominated by the concepts to be considered here: those of land, ground and earth, along with the blood lost in the conflicts they inspire in their acquisition and exploitation. While McCain placed his balm-like confidence in the unity of the American people – ‘we have always had so much more in common with each other than in disagreement’, he declared – Richard II returns its audiences repeatedly to the primal scene of earth itself, but in ways that complicate any complacent ‘present-centred’ reading of the play’s politics. John of Gaunt’s famous ‘sceptred isle’ speech offers an elegaic lament for a country devoured by tyranny; a lasting denunciation of a regime politically shameful and financially disastrous. But it also articulates a Trumpish version of national identity: one of

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determined isolationism and geographical solipsism, according to which Nature herself endorses the separation, superiority and (implicitly) racial purity of those who inhabit ‘This precious stone set in the silver sea, / Which serves it in the office of a wall / … Against the envy of less happier lands’ (2.1.46–9). Almost half a century ago, long before Donald Trump would strut and fret his hour upon the world’s political stage, Donald M. Friedman noted how Gaunt’s Edenic England was exclusive and exclusionary: ‘This love is commingled with a kind of inflamed miserliness, the will to hoard what is good, to keep it from being shared by greedy foreigners, or even tainted by their influence.’3 It is, then, to the political complications of land and nation, ground and earth, ‘blood and soil’ inherent to the language and drama of Richard II that this chapter directs its energies.

Land In Richard II, identity is landlocked, rooted in the soil, grounded. While many of Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies and romances are tempest-tossed by the sea, the history plays are about land: ‘Millions of acres’ (Ham 5.1.281). As the equivalence made between land and filial love in the opening scene of King Lear makes clear, land is shown to confer both influence and power: familial and social, economic and cultural, legal and political, financial and diplomatic, and even (as we shall see in Richard II) doctrinal. As James E. Berg has shown, land is legitimacy.4 King Richard is himself the first to articulate, in these legalistic terms, the correspondence between his person and his land. As he banishes the duellists, Mowbray and Bolingbroke, in 1.3 he demands that they swear an oath to him that they will never collaborate, in absentia, to plot ‘’Gainst us, our state, our subjects or our land’ (1.3.190). It is as though targeting any one of these is tantamount to attacking ‘us’, the king himself. Indeed, the treachery of Bolingbroke’s return

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from banishment to England is intensified with every pace he takes; according to Richard, ‘every stride he makes upon my land / Is dangerous treason’ (3.3.92–3). Scroop’s earlier description of Bolingbroke’s return describes how his rage is metaphorically cladding the country (and its inhabitants’ resolve) with armour, ‘covering your fearful land / With hard bright steel and hearts harder than steel’ (3.2.110–11). The land, still loyal to Richard, is itself ‘fearful’ of Bolingbroke’s swelling, shielded insurrection. By this point, the word ‘land’ has already been electrified by Gaunt’s use of it in his dying valedictory of 2.1. England, in its ideal state, is ‘This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land’ (2.1.57), and while the adjective ‘dear’ implies an emotional attachment, fondness or affection, within it also lurks the sense of the word meaning ‘expensive’ or ‘valuable’. Friedman notes how Gaunt’s ‘ambiguous use of “dear” is emphasized by its crammed repetitions’.5 In the anonymous play Thomas of Woodstock, often thought to have been written prior to Richard II and long considered one of its direct sources, Gaunt’s vague expression ‘dear’ is specifically monetarized.6 Woodstock’s Bagot and Bushy, the pound signs in their eyes, discuss their investment: bagot All rich and rare! The realm must be divided presently, and we four must farm it. The leases are a-making, and for £7,000 a month the kingdom is our own, boys. bushy ’Sfoot, let’s differ for no price, and it were £70,000 a month, we’ll make somebody pay for’t. (Woodstock 4.1.54–8) Gaunt, in Richard II, is less concerned with the financial figures and goes on to lament in more abstract terms the commodification of this ‘dear’ land which Richard is now leasing out. He doesn’t mince his words: ‘Landlord of England art thou now, not king’ (2.1.113). In Gaunt’s attack, Richard’s

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renting out his land both reduces the country’s potency and threatens the king’s physical well-being: ‘Thy death-bed is no lesser than thy land’ (2.1.95). Condemning Richard’s extravagances, he inflects the line further: ‘The waste is no whit lesser than thy land’ (2.1.103). In a poetic pirouette which runs together the words ‘shame’ and ‘land’, Gaunt delivers his final blow: ‘It were a shame to let this land by lease; / But for thy world enjoying but this land, / Is it not more than shame to shame it so?’ (2.1.110–12). This is more than Richard can take and he interrupts Gaunt’s attack with an eruption of anger, addressing him as ‘A lunatic lean-witted fool, / Presuming on an ague’s privilege!’ (2.1.115–16). The contrast between Gaunt’s poetic moralizing and Richard’s furious invective does the king no favours: rhetorically, if not politically too, Gaunt is superior here. But Gaunt’s insistence on the equivalence of land and political standing comes back to haunt Richard’s dying, for it is at the moment of his own death that Richard reiterates this insistence upon the inseparability of land and king. As Exton strikes him, fatally, Richard points out that his royal blood and England’s soil are linked, here poetically as well as ideologically: ‘Exton, thy fierce hand / Hath with the King’s blood stained the King’s own land’ (5.5.109–10). The very land ‘stained’ with royal blood is to the horrified Henry a disaster of biblical proportions: as Leonard Barkan points out, ‘Bolingbroke will be plagued to the end of his days by Richard’s death, precisely as Richard was by Gloucester’s’.7 Bolingbroke tells Exton, ‘With Cain go wander thorough shades of night, / And never show thy head by day nor light’ (5.6.43–4). At the play’s outset Bolingbroke had compared the exsanguination of the Duke of Gloucester to that of Cain’s fraternal victim: ‘Which blood [i.e. Gloucester’s], like sacrificing Abel’s, cries / Even from the tongueless caverns of the earth’ (1.1.104–5). In Genesis, God tells Cain that ‘the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground’ (Gen. 4.10, KJV). Cain’s crime is thus not only to have killed his brother, it is to have polluted the land itself: to have soaked it with blood, to have spoilt the garden.

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His transgression is so much more nefarious given that, as the Scriptures specify, ‘Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground’ (Gen. 4.2, KJV). Not only has paradise been lost but its very soil contaminated. Queen Isabel will take up the Edenic story when, in 3.4, she attacks the Gardener for his horticulturally astute diagnosis of her husband’s political flaws:   Thou, old Adam’s likeness, Set to dress this garden, how dares Thy harsh rude tongue sound this unpleasing news? What Eve, what serpent hath suggested thee To make a second fall of cursed man? (3.4.72–6) As the lapsarian parallel demonstrates, the possession and dispossession of land has, in Richard II, doctrinal implications. The discourse of land and its ownership, occupation, usurpation, letting out, selling or spoliation lies at the heart of the play’s ideological and poetic core. It is in his spectacularly miscalculated appropriation of Bolingbroke’s land that Richard rides roughshod over the very doctrine that vouchsafes his own reign. In Holinshed, it is clear that Richard snatches not only Hereford’s current possessions but also, in a supremely vindictive gesture, ‘any maner of inheritances or possessions that might from thencefoorth fall unto him … whereby it was evident, that the king meant his utter undooing’.8 In Shakespeare’s play, following Gaunt’s death, Richard declaims: ‘we seize into our hands / His plate, his goods, his money and his lands’ (2.1.209–10). The largely monosyllabic vocabulary, rhythmic regularity and the facile rhyme suggest the nonchalance, the casual and unreserved calm with which Richard upends the totalizing system of primogeniture, the very system which, as York tries to point out to him, justifies Richard’s own succession:

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Take Hereford’s rights away, and take from Time His charters and his customary rights; Let not tomorrow then ensue today; Be not thyself, for how art thou a king But by fair sequence and succession? (2.1.195–9) The logic is irrefutable. The socio-political structure which supports royal succession is identical to that which underpins Bolingbroke’s inheritance, and just as Time’s ‘charters’ turn the prince into a king, so the passing of Time and, with it, the passing of Gaunt, convert Bolingbroke into his father: ‘As I was banished, I was banished Hereford; / But as I come, I come for Lancaster’ (2.3.113–14). Note that Bolingbroke uses ‘I’ four times in two lines: there is no doubt about whom he is talking even though in the space of these same two lines his identity is utterly transformed. Previously in the same scene a waspish Bolingbroke has corrected Berkeley for addressing him by his old and now outdated title: berkeley My lord of Hereford, my message is to you – bolingbroke My lord, my answer is – to ‘Lancaster’, And I am come to seek that name in England; And I must find that title in your tongue Before I make reply to aught you say. (2.3.69–73) Again, every line of Bolingbroke’s reply contains a first-person pronoun. As heir to the title Lancaster, Bolingbroke is now metamorphosed into the Duke and so possessor of his father’s title and estate: the Duke is dead, long live the Duke. In another possible source, Sir John Bourchier’s 1523–5 translation of The Chronicle of Froissart (which was certainly used by Holinshed), Richard’s great mistake was not to summon Bolingbroke home from banishment using his

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new identity: if Richard had ‘after the dethe of the duke of Lacastre sente for the erle of Derby [i.e. Bolingbroke], and at his commynge have frendly welcomed hym home, and have called hym duke of Lancastre … than the kynge … had nat receyved the yvell fortune that fell to hym shortly after’.9 Bolingbroke’s very identity is thus dependent upon the land he now commands and so the legal grounds of his banishment have been eroded. Moreover, Richard’s failure to recognize this mutation explains his own undoing. While Hereford changes into Lancaster, gaining in political power, Richard turns into nothing, losing all of his: ‘I have no name, no title – / No, not that name was given me at the font – / … [I] know not now what name to call myself’ (4.1.255–9). Richard is now landless, titleless, powerless and finally self-less.

Ground Just as the term ‘land’ seems to have political and even doctrinal resonances in Richard II, so too does the word ‘ground’ stand in a lexical field laden with equivocal, ambiguous or even contradictory meanings, signalling not just a patch of earth but also a ‘reason’ or ‘cause’. ‘Ground’ features some dozen times in Richard II and rarely without the latter kind of causal or legal resonance. From the word’s first appearance in this play, it is linked with betrayal, duplicity, sedition, as Richard, in the play’s opening lines, seeks assurance from Gaunt that Bolingbroke’s quarrel with Mowbray is not motivated by any long-standing grudge between them but is justified by ‘some known ground of treachery’ (1.1.11). Is this, Richard asks, a valid or legally justifiable quarrel? Is it one which warrants trial by combat? In a play where the possession of land/ground is constitutive of social position and even identity itself (as illustrated above in Bolingbroke’s metamorphosis from Hereford to Lancaster), it is no accident that the word ‘ground’ is fraught with such latent implications: over cause, right, legitimacy.

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Having received assurance that the case is a genuine one – that there are, as it were, grounds enough to justify its prosecution – Richard imagines the elemental struggle that will pitch Mowbray and Bolingbroke against each other: ‘High-stomached are they both and full of ire, / In rage, deaf as the sea, hasty as fire’ (1.1.18–19).10 Two of the four elements – water (sea) and fire – here come together to express the siege of contraries which raise the stakes between them. Richard, characteristically, hyperbolizes the encounter in terms which elevate his own puissance as umpire over these warring elements. Richard’s divine omnipotence will oversee, Prosperolike, ‘This louring tempest of your home-bred hate’ (1.3.187). The elemental clash upon the tournament ground never happens, of course, and instead the combatants are banished. For Neema Parvini, the play’s interest in language rather than action means that it ‘is not surprising … that the “duel” scene at Coventry … should be so anti-climactic’.11 Audience attention is thus focused on rhetoric and as he takes his leave Bolingbroke apostrophizes the ground itself, underlining the play’s obsession with nationality and land, blood and soil: Then England’s ground, farewell! Sweet soil, adieu – My mother and my nurse that bears me yet! Where’er I wander, boast of this I can, Though banished, yet a true-born Englishman. (1.3.306–9) The speech loops back on itself to unite the ‘Englishman’ with ‘England’s ground’, eliding the ‘banished’ that appears to split them. Perhaps in an ominous way, this circling anticipates Bolingbroke’s unexpected return. Compare Mowbray’s leavetaking – not circular but linear – away into the distance: ‘Farewell, my liege. Now no way can I stray; / Save back to England, all the world’s my way’ (1.3.206–7). England here is not a place of proleptic or promised return but an origin, a place of launching off; not a destination but a point of departure.

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Bolingbroke’s lamentation for ‘England’s ground’, a powerful coupling of the national and the elemental, reappears as a term of rebuke directed at him by his own uncle. As Bolingbroke arrives before the terminal date of his banishment back in his home country, he is met by the Duke of York’s hostility: ‘Why have those banished and forbidden legs / Dared once to touch a dust of England’s ground?’ (2.3.90–1). The phrase echoes between the moment of Bolingbroke’s departure and that of his return. It is by way of explanation for his precipitate homecoming that Bolingbroke shifts his identity from Hereford to Lancaster, as we have seen above. England’s ground stays put; that of its inhabitants’ identities shifts as political expediency demands. We’ve already seen the incontrovertible logic of Bolingbroke’s justification: ‘If that my cousin king be King in England, / It must be granted I am Duke of Lancaster’ (2.3.123–4). Such grounds are being advanced for legitimizing his illegitimate return. Yet, grounds, causal and terrestrial, are capable of crumbling into dust. In 3.2, following his return from the Irish campaign, Richard receives the news of his country’s rebellion. As good and ill tidings oscillate with each other, the ground is both spurned and embraced by turns. Galvanizing his followers (as much as himself), Richard tells them, ‘Look not to the ground, / Ye favourites of a king. Are we not high?’ (3.2.87–8). Here and elsewhere, degrees of verticality symbolize political clout so that Richard’s nadir occurs as he lowers himself, in preparation for his deposition, to the ‘base court’ (3.3.176–83). At this point, though, the lowered eyes of disappointment are discouraged as his followers are urged to take courage. Almost immediately, Scroop enters with the news of the deaths of the Earl of Wiltshire, Bushy and Green. They all, he tells Richard, ‘lie full low, graved in the hollow ground’ (3.2.140). This news prompts one of Richard’s most self-indulgent and lyrical speeches: a ‘poignant language of inconsolability which is at times almost reminiscent of the psalms’.12 Note how Richard picks up and echoes Scroop’s words ‘graved’ and ‘ground’:

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Let’s talk of graves, of worms and epitaphs, Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth. Let’s choose executors and talk of wills. And yet not so, for what can we bequeath Save our deposed bodies to the ground? … For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings. (3.2.145–56) This is, in royal terms, the very ground zero to which Richard has been reduced, a mere story of his own interment. Note that the deposed body stands for both the king’s deposed political body and his de-com-posed physical one, rotting in the ground. This is a version not of Gaunt’s ‘teeming womb of royal kings’ (2.1.51) but, from just thirty lines later, his ‘hollow womb [which] inherits naught but bones’ (2.1.83). Later, Richard will reiterate this idea of emptiness linking it to the very symbol of majesty as he bewails ‘the hollow crown’ (3.2.160), a gesture which, Peter Holbrook argues, is ‘profound[ly] ideological … : an audience can be reminded that kings are, once stripped of their ceremonial glory, no better than any commoner’.13 A further, alternative connotation of ‘ground’ occurs in its employment by the Duchess of York. As she pleads for the life of her treasonous son, Aumerle, in defiance of her husband, who demands that he be condemned as a traitor, she contrasts her own sincerity with York’s disingenuousness: ‘He prays but faintly and would be denied; / We pray with heart and soul and all beside’ (5.3.102–3). She then elaborates upon this contrast with reference to their kneeling. Her husband’s ‘hypocrisy’ (5.3.106) is indicated in his (albeit unspoken) wish to stand up: ‘His weary joints would gladly rise, I know’ (5.3.104). But she, a sincere mother whose intercession demands indulgence, is so determined that Aumerle be pardoned that her own joints will root themselves into the very ground that supports them: ‘Our knees still kneel till to the ground they grow’ (5.3.105).

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Her posture is at once obeisant and organic, the justice of her plea as grounded as the ground itself. This attachment to the ground suggests dogged authenticity, a grounded earnestness to be contrasted with the superficial ostentation of Richard’s prancing horse, now ridden in arrogant triumph by Bolingbroke: ‘roan Barbary’, the Groom tells the usurped king, carried the new king ‘So proudly as if he disdained the ground’ (5.5.83).

Earth Richard D. Altick finds in the earth of Richard II an ideal of nationhood: ‘It sums up all the feeling inherent in the sense of pride in nation – of jealousy when the country is threatened by foreign incursion, of bitter anger when its health has been destroyed by mismanagement or greed.’14 Published only two years after the end of the Second World War, Altick’s analysis of what he calls the play’s ‘symphonic imagery’ is as much about the recently embattled condition of wartime England in the 1940s as the 1590s (or even the 1390s): ‘Above all’, Altick proposes, ‘earth is the symbol of the English nation.’15 However, like the terms ‘land’ and ‘ground’, ‘earth’ is not used uniformly in Richard II. Indeed, Ruth Morse and David Schalkwyk identify an asymmetry between the terms: ‘“earth” is the substance itself, indeed, the element; “land”, while overlapping that sense, is an area of earth that is measured, or assigned to a particular use … Land is thus made of earth, but not vice-versa’.16 The word ‘earth’ has a variety of meanings which were active in Shakespeare’s day and remain so. OED notes that the word (usually capitalized) signifies the planet on which we live. But OED also lists several other meanings including ‘soil as suited for cultivation’ (from c. 950); the ‘dry land, as opposed to the sea’ (c. 1000); as ‘contrasted with heaven or hell’ (c. 1000); the ‘material of which the surface of the ground is composed’ (c. 1000); and as ‘one of the so-called

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“elements”’ (c. 1300). Shakespeare, unsurprisingly, added a further definition by using the word to mean a ‘type of dull, dead matter’, also listed by OED which cites, as its authority, Richard II (3.4.78).17 There are further definitions but all of the above are activated at various points in Richard II and, just as with the words ‘land’ and ‘ground’, ‘earth’ is at once a physical object and a metaphysical idea(l). The Shakespearean coinage (in which ‘earth’ means a ‘type of dull, dead matter’), occurs in the Gardeners’ scene (3.4) when Queen Isabel is excoriating the Gardener for discussing the usurpation of Richard: ‘Why dost thou say King Richard is deposed? / Dar’st thou, thou little better thing than earth, / Divine his downfall?’ (3.4.77–9). Not only is the Gardener, in the furious queen’s opinion, as dumb as dirt (or, as OED has it, ‘dull’), but lurking behind her insult is the contrast between what is earthly and heavenly: note that verb, ‘Divine’. While her ostensible usage means ‘foretell’ or ‘predict’, in the theatre an audience would simultaneously hear the word as meaning celestial, and so ‘earth’ is (as OED puts it) ‘contrasted with heaven or hell’. The Edenic resonances of the garden as well as its associations with the hortus conclusus, as a symbol of the Virgin Mary, along with echoes of the Song of Songs, are here all thrown into high relief. Elsewhere this disparaging attitude to the earth is repeated. The earth is inert or indifferent to the problems of those that dwell on it. Richard greets Bolingbroke, who is kneeling before him, by sarcastically remarking, ‘Fair cousin, you debase your princely knee / To make the base earth proud with kissing it’ (3.3.190–1). In Holinshed’s Chronicles, the moment is described as follows: ‘as the duke got sight of the king, he shewed a reverend dutie as became him, in bowing his knee’.18 Note that the detail of the ‘base earth’ is Shakespeare’s addition: a way to underline the importance of (the) earth as a party to their exchange. Notice too the unnamed Welsh Captain, awaiting Richard’s arrival from Ireland in 2.4, who is convinced by heavenly signs that the king is dead: ‘The palefaced moon looks bloody on the earth’ (2.4.10). Following

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his exit, Salisbury laments that such omens now apply to the king himself: ‘Ah, Richard, with the eyes of heavy mind / I see thy glory like a shooting star / Fall to the base earth from the firmament’ (2.4.18–20). Employing the rhetorical figure of adynaton, Richard himself suggests that the lifeless earth will sooner become sentient than he suffer an overthrow: ‘This earth shall have a feeling, and these stones / Prove armed soldiers, ere her native king / Shall falter under foul rebellion’s arms’ (3.2.24–6). The idea of the earth itself accommodating Bolingbroke’s insurrection is remarked upon by the Queen. She tells her ladies, ‘Here let us rest, if this rebellious earth / Have any resting for her true king’s queen’ (5.1.5–6). There is, of course, an established link, in religious ritual, between earth and the decaying flesh of the interred body: as Morse and Schalkwyk observe, ‘Earth is also what our blood and bone finally are: there is an elemental connection’.19 The 1549 Book of Common Prayer contains, in ‘The Ordre for the Buriall of the Dead’, the direction that the priest cast earth upon the corpse while he says: ‘I commende thy soule to God the father almighty, and thy body to the grounde, earth to earth, asshes to asshes, dust to dust.’20 As Jean E. Feerick explains, ‘Such rituals openly acknowledged the porous boundary between body and earth, conceiving matter’s animate qualities to define both person and land.’21 In A Myrroure for Magistrates (1559), one of the sources for Richard II, Richard himself insists on this earthy fabrication: ‘What moulde be Kynges made of, but carayn [i.e. carrion] clay?’22 In Shakespeare’s play, Mowbray registers his origins with humility in precisely these terms: ‘Men are but gilded loam or painted clay’ (1.1.179). Richard also acknowledges the sympathy between flesh and earth as he laments that, stripped of his crown, he now owns nothing: Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke’s, And nothing can we call our own but death And that small model of the barren earth Which serves as paste and cover to our bones. (3.2.151–4)

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The image of the flesh as the meat in a pie covered by ‘paste’ (that is, ‘pastry’) might seem tonally indelicate, but the same speech has previously talked of ‘worms’ (3.2.145), and the image of worm-eaten carrion was one of the most ubiquitous, and earnestly didactic, memento mori motifs of the period. As Simon Palfrey and Emma Smith remind us: ‘Even survival in a history play is merely a temporary reprieve from the condition of history: to be already dead.’23 As he comforts the weeping Aumerle, Richard imagines that their tears will have ‘fretted us a pair of graves / Within the earth’ (3.3.167–8). With characteristic eloquence, Richard chooses a verb which has two opposing but relevant senses here. ‘Fret’ can mean to ‘agonize’ or ‘suffer’, but, among other connotations, the verb also means to ‘carve exquisitely or finely’.24 Richard and Aumerle’s pair of graves are enough to inculcate a fretful disposition while, at the same time, they are a suitably ornately carved resting place for the aesthetic king and his stylish courtier. This morbidly playful attitude (compare Gaunt punning on his own name at 2.1.74–83) is abandoned as, later, Richard envisages his own interment, now alone, in terms rather more stark and appalling. Surrendering his office to Bolingbroke, he underlines their contrasting places of stasis: ‘Long mayst thou live in Richard’s seat to sit, / And soon lie Richard in an earthy pit!’ (4.1.218–19). The same grave is described to Bolingbroke without the amelioration of prettiness or elegance. Clayton G. MacKenzie writes, ‘In the fallen world of both the Scripture and England, the human body is valued at no more than the dust from whence it came.’25 While such instances illustrate the ubiquity of ‘earth’ as synonymous with the ‘grave’, the play also animates the term in less fatalistic ways. With characteristic Ricardian hyperbole, the king apostrophizes the very soil that greets him on his return from Ireland:    I weep for joy To stand upon my kingdom once again. Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand,

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Though rebels wound thee with their horses’ hoofs. As a long-parted mother with her child Plays fondly with her tears and smiles in meeting, So weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth, And do thee favours with my royal hands. Feed not thy sovereign’s foe, my gentle earth. (3.2.4–12) Richard’s maternal regard for the very earth of his kingdom, his contempt for the hurtful hoofs of his enemies’ horses, reinforces an affinity between monarch and country condensed into a handful of dust. It is at once an image of concentrated adoration and an adumbration of the indifference of the speechless (because inanimate) ‘tongueless caverns of the earth’ (1.1.105). That the latter phrase is voiced by Bolingbroke, Richard’s opposite in every respect, indicates the variety of attitudes towards this terrestrial sympathy. Indeed, Richard is himself embarrassed at his being overheard addressing his earth: ‘Mock not my senseless conjuration, lords’, and he reassures them that, as we have seen above, ‘This earth shall have a feeling’ (3.2.23–4). In this earthy trust, Richard is, ironically, echoing Gaunt’s earlier admiration of ‘This earth of majesty … / This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England’ (2.1.41–50). The irony lies in the fact that Gaunt’s eulogy finishes before Richard even enters (at line 68). Richard, then, without realizing it, is espousing a view of English soil shared by his avuncular adversary. Richard’s attitudes to the earth, though varied in tone, are consistently symbolic, ceremonial, momentous. Bolingbroke’s standpoint is far less ominous. His protestation of martial superiority (demonstrating his ethical and legal prerogative) is phrased in such a way as to indicate that the earth shall be the guarantor of the justice of his contention: ‘what I speak / My body shall make good upon this earth’ (1.1.36–7). The image is of a soldier rooted to the soil of his nation, grounded (in the sense we have examined above) in the truthfulness of his mission. This is brute force: earthy violence, without the

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mystery of Richard’s post-Ireland magical incantation. In a triumph of simplicity, the earth supports Bolingbroke’s cause even as it supports his very weight. The earth’s substance literally under-stands Bolingbroke: there is no need to invoke its preternatural potency; he can take it for granted. With similar down-to-earthness, Bolingbroke addresses Gaunt (in the first printed Quarto of 1597) as ‘the earthly author of my blood’ (1.3.69). The Folio text (1623) is even more elemental, almost crude: ‘the earthy author of my blood’. Aristocratic lineage is here deep-rooted in the very earth which validates it. Even Bolingbroke’s attempt to sound Ricardian betrays this pragmatism.26 We’ve seen how Richard has compared the jousting opposites, Hereford and Norfolk, to warring elements of water and fire: ‘High-stomached are they both and full of ire, / In rage, deaf as the sea, hasty as fire’ (1.1.18–19). Bolingbroke attempts something similar when he imagines that the meeting of ‘King Richard and myself’ will occur: With no less terror than the elements Of fire and water, when their thund’ring shock At meeting tears the cloudy cheeks of heaven. Be he the fire, I’ll be the yielding water; The rage be his, whilst on the earth I rain My waters – on the earth and not on him. (3.3.54–60) But Bolingbroke betrays himself here. While attempting to deploy what he has earlier referred to as ‘the breath of kings’ (1.3.215), Bolingbroke actually illustrates his incapacity to manipulate this elemental language. Bolingbroke will be the rain to Richard’s lightning: the ‘yielding water’ to his monarch’s fire. While ‘fire precedes water in the traditional hierarchy of the natural order’, water extinguishes fire and is its eventual superior.27 In this way, Bolingbroke’s allocation of the elements to the two rivals indicates that he has already decided on the outcome; their meeting is less of a thundering shock than a storm in a teacup. Another clue

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lies in his imagined metamorphosis into rain: ‘The rage be his, whilst on the earth I rain’. But an audience would hear the homophonic ‘whilst on the earth I reign’. Earth, in Bolingbroke’s scheme of things, is thus unremarkable and secular, no longer transcendent or sublime. In this brave new world, inherited titles and estates are no longer granted by divine right or even primogeniture but merely possessions to be won by political manipulation or lost through ineptitude. As the Duke of York puts it resignedly, ‘Comfort’s in heaven, and we are on the earth’ (2.2.78). The reality of the new order is both diminutive and constrained.

Gardens, orchards and farms So far we have been considering the variety of meanings, connotations and emblematic resonances of ‘land’, ‘ground’ and ‘earth’. While each of these terms intersects in a variety of ways with the discourses of legitimacy, power, doctrine, history, politics and identity at stake in Shakespeare’s play, it is also the case that ‘land’, ‘ground’ and ‘earth’ are appropriated in a raw form from the natural world. Indeed, it is their natural state which allows them to be so ideologically efficacious. As Gaunt’s speech demonstrates, ‘Nature … herself’ (note the upper-case N) is active in the creation of ‘this earth, this realm, this England’ (2.1.43, 50) and Nature’s involvement in the creation of ‘This earth of majesty’ (2.1.41) diminishes the contingencies of history and naturalizes – that is, attempts to erase the constructedness of – the ideological formations of primogeniture, aristocratic supremacy or the racial and nationalistic ‘rightfulness’ of blood and soil. Theoretically, the terms ‘land’, ‘ground’ and ‘earth’ function, as Roland Barthes puts it, as ‘mythologies’: ‘We reach here the very principle of myth: it transforms history into nature … Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them

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a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact.’28 But Richard II also contains references to places which, unlike ‘land’, ‘ground’ and ‘earth’, do not exist in a natural state. The play’s orchards, farms and gardens are cultivated, and the mention and even appearance of humans who shape the soil (farmers and gardeners, tenants and landlords) together with horticultural activities (pruning, planting, ploughing and so on) indicate that these spaces are artificial rather than ‘built by Nature for herself’ (2.1.43). In fact, during the early modern period, there was a train of thought that postulated that Nature was merely the manifestation of the work of the Divine Gardener: as Francis Bacon avers, ‘God Almighty first planted a garden’.29 In The Winter’s Tale, Polixenes insists that ‘nature is made better by no mean / But nature makes that mean: … / The art itself is nature’ (WT 4.4.89–97). But in Richard II, there is a clearly articulated hierarchy which positions Nature as husbandry’s superior. Richard II sticks fairly closely to its sources with the exception of two complementary scenes which deal with the uneasy relationship between humankind and the natural world. The conversation between York and his sister-in-law, the Duchess of Gloucester (1.2), and the Gardeners’ scene (3.4) are entirely Shakespeare’s inventions. In the first the Duchess speaks of her husband as one of ‘seven fair branches springing from one root’ (1.2.13).30 Edward III is the patriarch whose sons have now died at various ages, in maturity (‘dried by nature’s course’) or in childhood (‘Some of those branches by the Destinies cut’); of natural causes, in either case (1.2.14–15). But with the death of Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, the Duchess bewails: One flourishing branch of his most royal root, Is cracked, and all the precious liquor spilt, Is hacked down, and his summer leaves all faded By Envy’s hand and Murder’s bloody axe. (1.2.18–21)

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This arboreal violence images Gloucester’s murder as the lopping of a branch, the heedless mutilation of the family tree, the ferocious severing of one of its boughs, depriving the leaves of sap and turning them autumnal. Macbeth, recognizing that he is past his prime, reflects on his natural decline in similar terms: ‘my way of life / Is fall’n into the sere [i.e. withered], the yellow leaf’ (Mac 5.3.22–3). But in the case of Gloucester, the ‘liquor’ has been purposefully ‘spilt’. It might seem odd to cast his assassin as a gardener – albeit one who is reckless with the shears – but the point seems to be to underline the wantonness, the calculated malice of such an action. Of course the Duchess of Gloucester’s metaphorical orchard adumbrates the setting of the Gardeners’ scene in which such brutal pruning is necessary to keep the garden in good order. Gardens and orchards in Shakespeare are often metaphorical in this way and reflect (as is the case with Macbeth’s leaf) the fallen condition of mankind. For Hamlet, life itself is ‘an unweeded garden / That grows to seed’ (Ham 1.2.135–6). But, as in Hamlet, actual orchards and gardens can also be places of momentous political events, including the murder of a rightful king (see Ham 1.5.59–60). In Richard II, the garden is both a metaphorical and a literal place.31 The political implications of the Gardener’s instructions are hardly opaque: Go thou, and, like an executioner, Cut off the heads of too fast-growing sprays That look too lofty in our commonwealth. All must be even in our government. You thus employed, I will go root away The noisome weeds, which without profit suck The soil’s fertility from wholesome flowers. (3.4.33–9) Indeed, so obvious is the political corollary that the Gardener’s assistant immediately complains that their work is unmatched by governmental horticulture:

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Why should we in the compass of a pale Keep law and form and due proportion, Showing, as in a model, our firm estate, When our sea-walled garden, the whole land, Is full of weeds … ? (3.4.40–4) In an echo of Gaunt’s imagery, the kingdom is a ‘sea-walled garden’ but, rather than enjoying Gaunt’s admiration for the garden of England, this one is ‘Swarming with caterpillars’ (3.4.47). Bolingbroke has already targeted ‘Bushy, Bagot and their complices, / The caterpillars of the commonwealth, / Which I have sworn to weed and pluck away’ (2.3.165–7). Lest we be in any doubt, the Gardener unpacks the horticultural allegory: ‘O, what pity is it / That he [Richard] had not so trimmed and dressed his land / As we this garden!’ (3.4.55–7). Of the Gardener, Bonnie Lander Johnson writes, ‘he is the one who can best manipulate that natural power which governs and destroys kings’.32 The effort that is required to discipline the growth of such a fecund garden, to keep it in trim, as it were, is here beyond Richard’s capacities. Bolingbroke wields the shears efficiently and so is the more successful gardener of the realm. In this, Bolingbroke resembles the Gardener himself, described by James R. Siemon as one who ‘articulates’ the ‘values’ of ‘a rationalized economic production concerned with profit, number, condition, and efficiency rather than with land and deference’.33 Richard, on the other hand, has gone from slashing the sacred family tree of Edward III to sparing the caterpillars which devastate his realm’s political vegetation; both extremes cast him as horticulturally as well as politically undisciplined. Expelled from Eden, Adam is cursed by God as is the soil beneath him: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;

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In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. (Gen. 3.17–19, KJV) Until the expulsion, Nature’s bounty was effortless. Until Richard visits upon his realm the curse of his corruption, Gaunt’s speech postulates, as William O. Scott puts it, ‘a fecundity, both agrarian and human, that seems to have no need for tillage, calculation, or struggles for ownership’.34 But this is a prelapsarian paradise and, following the Fall, the curse of Adamic labour explains the derogatory tone frequently associated, in early modern literature, with agriculture. Raging at the invading army of ‘Norman bastards’ (H5 3.5.10), the Duke of Britain, in an antithesis of Gaunt’s heroic image of ‘This earth of majesty’ (2.1.41), threatens to ‘sell my dukedom / To buy a slobbery and a dirty farm / In that nook-shotten isle of Albion’ (H5 3.5.12–14). Moreover, it is not only England’s enemies who refer to farming so contemptuously. Mocking his own rhetorical ineptitude in wooing the French Princess, Henry V tells her: ‘I am glad thou canst speak no better English, for if thou couldst thou wouldst find me such a plain king that thou wouldst think I had sold my farm to buy my crown’ (H55.2.122–6). In the case of Richard II, Holinshed notes how such an activity tarnished the regal reputation: ‘The common brute [rumour] ran, that the king had set to farm the realme of England.’35 While ‘to farm the realme’ has a specifically fiscal meaning – to lease the land and with it the right to raise and collect taxes for personal profit (a benefit reserved for Richard’s favourites) – the other, more basic, sense of farming as an inapposite occupation for a king also carries with it a distinctly low reputation.36 Gaunt’s allegation that Richard’s reign has reduced ‘this dear dear land / … Like to a tenement or pelting farm’ (2.1.57–60) is thus profoundly insulting. ‘Pelting’ is usually glossed as ‘paltry’ and it appears in very similar phrasing in Woodstock though spoken by Richard

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himself who, relishing his own luxuriance, describes how he has ‘to ease our wanton youth, / Become a landlord to this warlike realm, / Rent out our kingdom like a pelting farm’ (Woodstock 4.1.146–8). While Richard in Shakespeare’s play, as we have seen, reacts violently to Gaunt’s criticism, the king has already confided to his council that ‘We are enforced to farm our royal realm’ (1.4.45) and Ross reports this profligacy to the opposition, telling Northumberland that ‘The Earl of Wiltshire hath the realm in farm’ (2.1.256). This iteration of the Adamic curse signals the depths to which Richard’s land/ ground/earth has been debased and the degree to which its currency, its role as a guarantor, simultaneously, of lineal permanence and geographical integrity, is now worthless. Richard II, perhaps more insistently than any other of Shakespeare’s plays, demonstrates the imbrication, in this feudalistic setting, of blood and soil. When the former is shed, the latter is divested. When the latter is laid waste either by misappropriation or by being rented out, the former is altogether diluted. In the play’s final lines, Henry, as an act of contrition, promises to undertake ‘a voyage to the Holy Land / To wash this blood off from my guilty hand’ (5.6.49–50). But, like Senator McCain, Shakespeare’s audiences already know how ill-fated this coupling of ‘blood and soil’ promises to be, and their scepticism remains in spite of Henry’s similar aspiration for purity which opens Richard II’s sequel: ‘No more the thirsty entrance of this soil / Shall daub her lips with her own children’s blood’ (1H4 1.1.5–6). The obscene image of the maternal land eating her offspring will preside over the internecine violence of the history plays that immediately follow Richard II, in which, despite King Henry IV’s best efforts, blood and soil must remain forever indivisible.

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5 New Directions Richard II, Sermon Culture and the Language of Mockery Adrian Streete Sermons and homilies were at the centre of early modern religious life.1 In a city like London, it was possible for an individual to hear the word preached every day of the week should they wish: sermon ‘gadding’ was a popular pastime.2 Individual preachers cultivated reputations – and thus followers – for particular theological approaches, or for a distinctive performative or rhetorical style, whether plain, florid, or somewhere in between. Sermons and lectures were given in parish churches by ministers: if a fresh sermon were not available then they could preach from the official book of state-authorized homilies. Public sermons were held regularly at the outdoor pulpit at Paul’s Cross and other venues in the city, often attracting very large crowds. Monarchs did attend such sermons, although it was more usual for clergy to preach at court before the royal households.3 Momentous events  – the execution of a traitor, the birth of a royal child or the deliverance of the nation from its enemies – were marked by

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sermons. All such topics were subservient to theology, however, delivered as it was through the explanation and exposition of the Bible.4 There can be little doubt that Shakespeare attended sermons throughout his life. Hannibal Hamlin notes: ‘Whatever religious books he read, much of Shakespeare’s experience of biblical exegesis, as well as theology, came from sermons.’5 At sermons, Shakespeare heard how scripture could be used to interpret spiritual and temporal matters. He learned too that theological controversy was never far from the surface: even moderate Protestant preachers usually made a few jibes at the Roman Catholic Church in the course of their addresses. Above all, he would have understood that, in Jeanne Shami’s words, ‘A sermon – delivered or heard – was a living, dramatic experience’, one that aimed to move the bodily and spiritual passions of its auditors.6 The preacher was believed to be a conduit for the Holy Spirit, conveying through his rhetoric the grace of God. While there has been some good work done on the relationship between Shakespeare’s plays and sermons over the years, it remains one of the less explored byways for those interested in the playwright and religion.7 Largely this is because in a literary culture so steeped in biblical idioms and imagery, it can be hard to identify definite allusions from contemporary sermons in Shakespeare’s plays. Some striking similarities between sermons and passages in Shakespeare’s works have been noted by scholars, but their tendency to focus on allusion obscures half the picture.8 The early modern studia humanitatis is based on the practice of commonplacing: the ability to select, record and memorize memorable passages from one’s reading in order to engage in civil discourse, spoken or written.9 Scripture is the most well-known commonplace book of them all: a copious source of stories, figures, sententiae, prayers, wisdom and imagery.10 In Protestant England, that very copiousness had, of course, to be framed within the bounds of acceptable doctrine and exegesis. Mary Morrissey notes that this can cause a tension for preachers between their ‘deep intellectual engagement with the multiple interpretative possibilities of scripture, and an acknowledgement of the need

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to repeat the fundamentals of faith to an audience who have heard it before’.11 Preachers had to tread a thin line between repetition and innovation. Playwrights also had to be mindful of this tension when quoting the Bible on stage: censorship and legislation against blasphemy meant that writers had to tread with care. Yet skilful preachers and dramatists alike knew how to use this tension to their advantage. When a well-known scriptural verse appears in a play, a dramatist can be reasonably confident not only that many in the audience will recognize the allusion, but also that they will know how that verse is generally interpreted. This is what Tom Fulton and Kristen Poole refer to as ‘popular hermeneutics’: ‘a cultural imperative for people to become not only biblically literate, but also aware of interpretative practices and principles’.12 Biblical quotation in the theatre activates both the commonplace and the exegesis that explains the commonplace. When a preacher quotes and interprets scripture he is acting, as we have seen, as a vessel of the Holy Spirit. A character on stage quoting the Bible may have similarly godly intentions. Equally, they may not. In each case, the broader dramatic context for the engagement with scripture is crucial, as is the gloss that a character gives to a biblical quotation.13 Often in Shakespeare’s plays, characters will comment explicitly or implicitly on the verse that they have just quoted, reflecting on its meaning and applicability to their present situation. Unlike the preacher, characters are under no obligation to offer the audience an exegetically sound reading of the Bible. The ‘multiple interpretative possibilities of scripture’ noted above can be activated by playwrights, affirming, questioning or even undermining standard exegetical approaches for a wide range of dramatic ends. In this chapter, I will consider some further examples of how reading scriptural quotation and its broader exegesis opens up alternative interpretative possibilities in Richard II. I focus particularly on the place of mockery in the play. A number of the biblical allusions in this drama relate to mockery by and of the titular character. Many of these references also raise

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the broader exegetical context of repentance, salvation and damnation: a rich seam that asks the audience to consider the spiritual status of Richard and other characters. The sermons of John Calvin and Henry Smith will be my touchstone here. The French reformer, Calvin, needs little introduction: he was amongst the most widely printed and widely read Protestant theologians of the period.14 Smith was a popular preacher in London during the 1580s and early 1590s, noted for his eloquence and rhetorical skill.15 He is a striking image-maker and skilful rhetorician, often drawing on theatrical topoi even as he deprecates plays and the theatre.16 His particular brand of godly Protestantism is representative of a common exegetical approach taken by many of the preachers that Shakespeare is likely to have encountered in London during the late 1580s and 1590s. Smith’s complete sermons were first published in 1591 by Richard Field, with three more editions in print by 1594. Field was, like Shakespeare, from Stratford, and both may have attended the same grammar school. They certainly knew each other in London: Field published both Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594).17 Shakespeare could have heard Smith in person in the late 1580s, or else encountered him through the complete sermons published by his coeval Field. Peter Milward is the only scholar who has, to my knowledge, pursued the connection between this preacher and the playwright, concluding that ‘The abundance of … parallels places Henry Smith apart from the other preachers of his time in relation to the plays of Shakespeare.’18 Many of the parallels that Milward finds are indeed suggestive. Yet he remains largely focused on verbal similarities and allusions. While I will occasionally note some of these below, this chapter will use Smith’s sermons as a representative example to illuminate Shakespeare’s particular use of scripture and its commonplace exegesis in Richard II. I will argue that despite Richard’s self-identification with Christ, it is far from clear that the king can count himself amongst the elect: mockery plays a central role in Richard’s gradual realization of this possibility.

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Urbane wit and godly mockery In 2.1, the dying John of Gaunt condemns Richard for his policy and profligacy, asking York: ‘Will the King come that I may breathe my last / In wholesome counsel to his unstaid youth?’ (2.1.1–2). The king’s ‘youth’ is stressed a further three times in the scene in contrast to Gaunt’s age (2.1.69–74). This is significant when considering York’s reply: ‘Vex not yourself, nor strive not with your breath, / For all in vain comes counsel to his ear’ (2.1.3–4). This connection between youth, age and vanity reflects a long-standing sense historically that Richard’s ‘insolent misgovernance’ and eventual downfall were due to his immaturity and ‘youthfull outrage’.19 But the dialogue here may also recall these verses from Ecclesiastes (cited from the 1560 Geneva translation) spoken by Solomon: Reioyce, O yong man, in thy youth, & let thine heart chere thee in the daies of thy youth: and walke in the waies of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes: but knowe that for all these things, God wil bring thee to iudgement. Therefore take away grief out of thine heart, and cause euil to departe from thy flesh: for childholde & youth are vanitie.20 Gaunt thinks that his proximity to death and his age mean that his advice to Richard will not be ‘spent in vain’ (2.1.7), hoping that while so far the king has not listened to ‘my life’s counsel’ (2.1.15), he will now relent. His words stress the spiritual value of his advice as one about to face God: ‘He that no more must say is listened more / Than they whom youth and ease have taught to glose’ (2.1.9–10). The king’s flatterers will be silenced by ‘death’s sad tale’ (2.1.16). York remains unconvinced: No, it is stopped with other, flatt’ring sounds, As praises, of whose taste the wise are fond; Lascivious metres, to whose venom sound The open ear of youth doth always listen;

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Report of fashions in proud Italy, Whose manners still our tardy-apish nation Limps after in base imitation. Where doth the world thrust forth a vanity – So it be new, there’s no respect how vile – That is not quickly buzzed into his ears? Then all too late comes Counsel to be heard, Where Will doth mutiny with Wit’s regard. (2.1.17–28) Whereas Gaunt stresses the spiritual effects of his admonition, York focuses on the fleshly delights in which Richard is mired. The dialogue between age and youth is structured around the opposing poles of flesh and spirit.21 Indeed, the end of York’s speech draws on the kinds of personifications found in morality drama, imagining Gaunt as ‘Counsel’ and Richard as ‘Will’ under the malign influence of ‘Wit’. In 1595, when the play was likely written, this kind of drama was still being performed in London. York’s mini-morality scene places himself, Gaunt and Richard within a theatrical genre where conventionally the senex cautions youth to repent, as in Wever’s Tudor interlude Lusty Juventus (c. 1550) where Good Counsell and Knowledge advise the titular character. Whereas Lusty Juventus eventually heeds the advice of Good Counsell, in York’s morality Counsel comes too late.22 In his sermon on Ecclesiastes 11.9, Henry Smith uses a similar dramatic model. He calls the verse ‘a dialogue betwixt the flesh and the spirite, as two counsellers’.23 Here is one of Smith’s mini-morality scenes: me thinkes I see the dialogue betweene the flesh and the Spirite: the worst speaketh first, and the fleshe saith: soule take thine ease, eate, drinke, and goe braue, lye soft, what else should you doo but take your pleasure, thou knowest what a pleasant fellow I haue bene vnto thee, thou knowest what delight thou hast had by my meanes: but the Soule commeth in, burdened with that which hath bene spoken

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before, and saith, I pray thee remember Iudgement, thou must giue account for all these things, for vnles you repent, you shall surely perrish.24 This dialogue helps to contextualize the pleasures of the flesh that York criticizes, and Gaunt’s hope that Richard’s ‘rash fierce blaze of riot cannot last, / For violent fires soon burn out themselves’ (2.1.33–4). Like Good Counsell in Lusty Juventus, he has faith that his advice will be heeded eventually. When Richard enters, Gaunt chastises him: ‘The pleasure that some fathers feed upon / Is my strict fast – I mean my children’s looks, / And therein fasting hast thou made me gaunt’ (2.1.79–81). The joy that Gaunt would take from the sight of his banished child has been denied by an epicurean king. Bolingbroke’s absence has imposed a repentant fast upon the old man, one that according to the morality narrative should properly be undertaken by the youthful monarch. Unlike Wever, whose narrative structure is ultimately optimistic, Smith’s morality is more conditional: ‘The fleshe goeth laughing and singing to hell, but the spirite casteth rubs in his way, and puts him in minde of iudgement, that for all these things now endes reioyce, and heare comes in but, if this but were not, we might reioyce still.’25 Shakespeare’s morality follows a similarly conditional model: is Richard bound for perdition or salvation? Gaunt’s speech is also marked by a series of puns on his surname: ‘Gaunt am I for the grave, gaunt as a grave, / Whose hollow womb inherits naught but bones’ (2.1.82–3). This is an example of antanaclasis. Sophie Read defines this figure as a kind of pun ‘in which a word occurs and is then repeated in a different sense’.26 Read notes that to us this figure can seem obvious, overdone even: ‘The modern ear assigns to such repetition a squib-like ring of redundancy: the perception is overwhelmingly one of similarity, and the interest of difference has to be worked for.’27 Richard’s reply to Gaunt – ‘Can sick men play so nicely with their names?’ (2.1.84) – may even anticipate our modern, eye-rolling response to this kind of pun. Yet to leave it there is to miss the ‘interest of difference’

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in the king’s response. Gaunt’s antanaclasis ends with the grave as a hollow womb welcoming his bones. This rather shocking image is ignored by Richard.28 He responds lightheartedly, seeking to reduce Gaunt’s speech to mere quibbles: to nothing more than a playing ‘nicely with … names’.29 It is an attempt to remind his uncle and the audience that antanaclasis should properly convey what one rhetorical text calls ‘a most pleasant kind of ciuile mirth, which is called of the Latines Facetiae, or Vrbanitas’.30 Facetious or urbane wit is central to the cultivation of civic virtue and courtly conduct in the early modern period.31 It is easy to imagine the king’s followers – Bushy, Bagot and Green – laughing with amused detachment at the king’s witticism. Gaunt, on the other hand, activates the negative effect of antanaclasis. As the rhetorical text quoted above goes on to note, this figure ‘may fall easily into excesse, or vntimely vse, which follie and boldnesse do oft commit’.32 The old man daringly rejects Richard’s urbane wit: ‘No, misery makes sport to mock itself. / Since thou dost seek to kill my name in me, / I mock my name, great King, to flatter thee’ (2.1.85–7). Perhaps gesturing dismissively to the king’s sycophantic followers, Gaunt offers a scornful mirror image of their flattery and laughter. This bears comparison with Smith’s explanation of Solomon’s first words at Ecclesiastes 11.9, ‘Reioyce, O yong man, in thy youth.’ As he explains, these words are a kind of personification: ‘Here he [Solomon] speaketh like an Epicure, which saith, eat, drinke, and be merry: here he counselles, and here he mockes: yet after the manner of scorners, although they deserued it in shewing their foolishnes.’33 Like Solomon, Gaunt’s punning is a form of mockery that apes the courtly form of quibbling jest favoured by the king and his followers. There then follows an uneasy stichomythic exchange between the two men that alternates between urbane and mocking wit (2.1.88–94), before Gaunt breaks into all-out attack: ‘Landlord of England art thou now, not king’ (2.1.113). Richard responds angrily: ‘Darest with thy frozen admonition / Make pale our cheek, chasing the royal blood / With fury from his native residence?’ (2.1.117–19). By

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stressing the movement of anger through his body, the king’s passionate language draws attention to his fleshly values, rejecting his uncle’s attempt to admonish him.34 Gaunt hopes that his ‘words hereafter thy tormentors be’ (2.1.136), but Richard dismisses his final warning as well as those of York. He turns his attention towards Ireland and to sequestering his now late uncle’s estate, responding to York’s long speech of protest (2.1.163–85) with the dismissively louche questioncum-quip: ‘Why, uncle, what’s the matter?’ (2.1.186). Urbane wit has, for the time being at least, triumphed over godly mockery.

Richard and/as Job Once he returns from Ireland, Richard becomes more selfconscious about his urbane wit. At Barkloughly Castle, he expatiates on his kingdom as the earth: Yield stinging nettles to mine enemies; And when they from thy bosom pluck a flower, Guard it I pray thee with a lurking adder Whose double tongue may with a mortal touch Throw death upon thy sovereign’s enemies. Mock not my senseless conjuration, lords. This earth shall have a feeling, and these stones Prove armed soldiers, ere her native king Shall falter under foul rebellion’s arms. (3.2.18–26) This image of the earth and nature rising up to oppose the king’s enemies is bisected by the appeal to his followers not to mock his ‘senseless conjuration’. This striking moment contains an implied stage direction to Richard’s followers to signal their unease with the king’s rhetoric.35 This topographia of nature as ally and protector is undercut by mockery verbalized

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and personated, drawing our attention to the precariousness of Richard’s actual political support. Mockery, even if it is forestalled by Richard’s command, renders the pathos that he aims at bathetic. As far as I know, it has not been noted before that this speech also subtly reworks elements from the Old Testament book of Job: the biblical narrative of individual tribulation in which Job, though a righteous man, undergoes not only physical affliction but also profound personal loss, inviting debate about divine justice and why God allows the good to suffer. In Job 5, three of his friends come to console him as he complains to God. The thrust of the advice of Eliphaz, one of these comforters, is that God will once more come to his friend’s aid if he accepts his punishment. This is the key passage: Thou shalt be hid from the scourge of ye tongue, and thou shalt not be affraied of destruction when it cometh. But thou shalt laugh at destruction and dearth, & shalt not be afrayd of the beast [sic] of the earth. For the stones of the field shalbe in league with thee, and the beastes of the field shall be at peace with thee. (Job 5.21–3) In his speech at the beginning of 3.2, Richard conjures the animals and the stones to be ‘in league’ with him and tries to muster all his rhetorical wit against his enemies. Yet, as his mention of mockery shows, he feels vulnerable to the ‘scourge of ye tongue’. The Geneva Bible’s commentary on the line about ‘the stones of the field’ proposes that ‘When we are in Gods favour, all creatures shal serue vs.’36 Can Richard rely on God coming to his aid? Carlisle plays the role of Eliphaz, noting: ‘The means that heavens yield must be embraced / And not neglected; else heaven would, / And we will not’ (3.2.29–31). Yet, as John Calvin explains in his sermons on Job, those who ‘shalt laugh at destruction and dearth’ and who can harness the ‘beasts of the field’, as Richard hopes to do, are ‘God’s children’: the elect.37 The speech raises but fails to confirm this

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exegetical promise. Will God help Richard, or are his words mere hyperbole? The king continues to refer to Job:      knowst thou not That when the searching eye of heaven is hid Behind the globe and lights the lower world, Then thieves and robbers range abroad unseen In murders and in outrage boldly here; But when from under this terrestrial ball He fires the proud tops of the eastern pines And darts his light through every guilty hole, Then murders, treasons and detested sins, The cloak of night being plucked from off their backs, Stand bare and naked, trembling at themselves? (3.2.36–46) Richard’s eschatological vision of God bringing all sinners to account draws on Job 24.13–17: These are thei, that abhorre the light: thei knowe not the waies thereof, nor continue in the paths thereof. The murtherer riseth earely & killeth the poore and the nedie: and in the night he is as a thefe. The eye also of the adulterer waiteth for the twylight, and saith, None eye shall se me, and disguiseth his face. Thei digge through houses in the darke, which they marked for themselues in the day: they know not the light. But the morning is euen to them as the shadow of death: if one know the[m], they are in the terrours of the shadowe of death.38 In his sermon on these verses, Calvin notes that we can only appreciate the truth of these words ‘not by our mother wit’ but by ‘faith’.39 Does Richard faithfully believe that God will appear on his behalf to search out the unrighteous? Or is this yet another example of witty scriptural appropriation, performatively effective but spiritually empty?

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Calvin’s rhetorical question in the middle of his sermon – ‘what shall God do?’ – is similarly posed through Richard’s self-identification with Job.40 The king says that he will use this scriptural ‘light’ to shine on ‘this thief, this traitor, Bolingbroke’ (3.2.47) so that ‘His treasons will sit blushing in his face, / Not able to endure the sight of day, / But, self-affrighted, tremble at his sin’ (3.2.51–3). This is more than biblical ‘allusion’. It seeks to confirm Calvin’s claim that although the wicked try vainly to hide from scripture, it ‘burne[s] alwayes before them, that they maye perceyue their owne damnation by it’.41 Richard plans to confront the sinful ‘thief’ and ‘traitor’ (3.2.47), Bolingbroke, with the message of scripture like the preacher addressing his unregenerate flock. Yet the king’s self-confident claim that ‘God for His Richard hath in heavenly pay  / A glorious angel’ (3.2.60–1) is undercut by the conclusion of Calvin’s exegesis. When God does finally appear, he will come ‘eyther as oure father or as our iudge’.42 Richard can quote the Bible and identify himself with the righteous all he likes: until the final judgement comes, all such claims to scriptural authority and justification remain provisional.43 Shakespeare thereby undercuts Richard’s absolutist pretentions through biblical quotation and its hermeneutic context. The spiritual knowledge that Richard proclaims as absolute is, in fact, much more conditional. After this moment of rhetorical and spiritual hubris, Richard learns that Bolingbroke’s invasion has rapidly gained support. He alternates between assertions of divine assurance and spiritual fear: ‘All souls that will be safe, fly from my side, / For Time hath set a blot upon my pride’ (3.2.80–1). There then follows an odd exchange. Scroop has the opportunity to tell Richard that Bushy, Bagot and Green have been executed by Bolingbroke but either does not or cannot, his delay leaving Richard to condemn them as ‘Three Judases, each one thrice worse than Judas!’ (3.2.132; see also 4.1.170–2). When the truth is revealed, Scroop asks the king to ‘uncurse their souls’ (3.2.137). It is a sardonic line, and it makes Richard’s

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condemnation look somewhat ridiculous. Scroop’s withheld revelation undermines the king’s biblical self-identification with the persecuted Christ. In his sermon on Christ’s betrayal, Smith explains that while Judas could have repented, he ‘chose rather to run vnto them which would mocke him than vnto him which should succour him’.44 Alluding to Judas in error, Richard opens himself up to the laughter of his followers and the audience alike. Whereas Christ is mocked by his enemies, Richard is mocked by his allies. In this way, Shakespeare uses scriptural allusion and interpretation to emphasize the shifting political sands upon which Richard stands. At this point, Richard urges the others to ‘sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings’ (3.2.155–6). This is another echo of Job. When Job’s friends arrive to condole with him, ‘thei sate by him vpon the grounde seuen dayes, and seven nights, & none spake a worde vnto him: for they sawe, that the griefe was very great’ (Job 2.13). Calvin indicates that this verse signifies not outward, ceremonial repentance but inward, spiritual repentance.45 Fittingly, then, Richard turns his attention to the symbol of his kingship, the crown:     For within the hollow crown That rounds the mortal temples of a king Keeps Death his court; and there the antic sits, Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp, Allowing him a breath, a little scene, To monarchize, be feared and kill with looks, Infusing him with self and vain conceit, As if this flesh which walls about our life Were brass impregnable; and humoured thus, Comes at the last and with a little pin Bores through his castle wall, and farewell, king! Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood With solemn reverence. Throw away respect, Tradition, form and ceremonious duty, For you have but mistook me all this while.

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I live with bread like you, feel want, Taste grief, need friends. Subjected thus, How can you say to me I am a king? (3.2.160–77) Lines 167–8 echo Job’s question at 6.12: ‘Is my strength the strength of stones? or is my flesh of brasse?’ This recalls Richard’s earlier speech about the stones acting as soldiers: the ‘antic’ scoffs at such allusions as the result of ‘self and vain conceit’. Indeed, this ‘little scene’ is another minimorality play with mockery at its centre. As the antic mocks the wearer of the crown, so Richard begs his followers not to mock him. He is ‘flesh and blood’ and must now leave urbane wit behind. Here is Smith’s version of this scene: when iniquitie hath plaid her parte, vengeance leapes vpon the stage: the Comedye is shorte, but the Tragedie is longer: the blacke guard shall attend vpon you, you shall eate at the table of sorrowe, and the crowne of death shalbe vpon your heads, many glistring faces looking on you, and this is the feare of sinners.46 The parallels between Smith’s mini-morality and Richard’s are suggestive, as is the claim that the one who wears the crown is a sinner. Richard is temporarily roused by Carlisle’s warning that ‘your follies fight against yourself’ (3.2.182), but the revelation that York has now gone over to Bolingbroke shifts his focus to amendment: ‘He does me double wrong / That wounds me with the flatteries of his tongue’ (3.2.215–16). Richard’s rejection of flattery here, in contrast to his proneness to it as alleged elsewhere in the play, is in keeping with the exegetical tenor of the sermon literature.47 The larger question of whether or not his repentance will be spiritually effective is once more left hanging. In Laura Estill’s words, ‘Richard struggles to find meaning in a life that could end in damnation’.48

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Deposition and damnation During the deposition scene Richard resorts to quibbling wordplay in order to defer the inevitable: ‘Your cares set up do not pluck my cares down. / My care is loss of care, by old care done; / Your care is gain of care, by new care won’ (4.1.195–7). Bolingbroke’s response cuts through Richard’s performative antistasis with brutal precision: ‘Are you contented to resign the crown?’ (4.1.200). Recalling Smith’s evocation of the ‘many glistring faces looking on you’ in the court of Death, Richard warns the assembled company that they may be damned for the act of deposition, saying: Nay, all of you that stand and look upon me, Whilst that my wretchedness doth bait myself, Though some of you, with Pilate, wash your hands, Showing an outward pity, yet you Pilates Have here delivered me to my sour cross, And water cannot wash away your sin. (4.1.237–42) It is a powerful moment. Up to this point, the various biblical allusions and hermeneutic contexts that I have been considering have raised the question of Richard’s repentance and salvation. Here, he turns that question back against his opponents, like the preacher confronting his congregation: ‘they wil see him persecuted like Christ, and stand a farre off like Pilate, and wash their handes, as though they were innocent, when it is in their power and authoritie to amend it’.49 Richard identifies not one but multiple Pilates standing in judgement over him, showing mock pity or else delivering him directly to his death. Yet in doing so they also put their own salvation in peril. As he cries to Northumberland, ‘Fiend, thou torments me ere I come to hell!’ (4.1.270), casting them both as unregenerate sinners. Richard is not only unkinged; he is unnamed:

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    Alack the heavy day, That I have worn so many winters out And know not now what name to call myself. O, that I were a mockery king of snow, Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke, To melt myself away in water-drops! (4.1.257–62) Richard imagines himself prematurely aged by his trials and the apostrophe of the last three lines imagines him as a snowman melting before the sun that is Bolingbroke. This passage from age to dissolution is often noted in sermons dealing with repentance. Also using antistasis, Smith writes: Euery thing eurie day suffers some eclipse, and nothing stands at a stay, but one creature calles to another, let vs leaue this world. Our fathers summoned vs, and we shall summon our children to the graue: first wee waxe olde, then wee wax drie, then wee waxe weake, then wee waxe sicke, so wee melt away by drops.50 There may also be an echo here of Gaunt’s punning on the grave as well as of Richard’s wish for ‘A little, little grave, an obscure grave’ (3.3.154). Yet even though Richard wishes to melt away, there remains an implicit challenge to Bolingbroke in that term ‘mockery’. The apostrophe is grammatically conditional: ‘that I were’. Richard may abdicate his crown, but so long as he remains embodied – in his literal flesh or as metaphorical water – his very presence will continue to mock the usurper. Entering London to go to the tower, York recounts the progress of both Bolingbroke and Richard through the city. The former is welcomed thus: So many greedy looks of young and old Through casements darted their desiring eyes Upon his visage, and that all the walls

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With painted imagery had said at once, ‘Jesu preserve thee! Welcome Bolingbroke!’ (5.2.13–17) These lines are double-edged. Although Bolingbroke is greeted like a hero, the reference to walls with ‘painted imagery’ is disconcerting: has the populace simply found a new kingly idol? Richard, by contrast, faces scorn and derision: As in a theatre the eyes of men, After a well-graced actor leaves the stage, Are idly bent on him that enters next, Thinking his prattle to be tedious, Even so, or with much more contempt, men’s eyes Did scowl on gentle Richard. No man cried God save him! No joyful tongue gave him his welcome home, But dust was thrown upon his sacred head, Which with such gentle sorrow he shook off, His face still combating with tears and smiles, The badges of his grief and patience, That had not God for some strong purpose steeled The hearts of men, they must perforce have melted And barbarism itself have pitied him. (5.2.23–36) Although York is careful to say that God has allowed this humiliation to happen, the speech is designed to evoke pathos for the deposed king. Nevertheless, Richard is likened still to an actor, one who knows how to play his part and to manipulate the emotions of others. Neither he nor Bolingbroke is presented straightforwardly. One is an actor; the other an idol. Small difference, one might think. This passage from Henry Smith helps us to understand why this matters: While wee play our Pageants vpon this stage of short continuance, euerie man hath a part, some longer, and some shorter, and while the Actors are at it, sodainelie death steps

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vpon the stage like a hauke which separates one of the Doues from the flight, he shootes his dart, where it lights, there fals one of the Actors dead before the[m], and makes al the rest agast, they muse and mourne, and burie him, and then to the sport againe: While they sing, play, and daunce, death comes againe, & strikes another, there he lies, they mourne him, and burie him as they did the former, and play againe: so one after another, till the plaiers bee vanished like the accusers which came before Christ, and Death is the last vpon the stage, so the figure of this worlde passeth away.51 The homiletic message here is a Protestant vanitas: life is fleeting, so repent. Yet the image of the actors dying, being mourned, and then the revels continuing regardless bears a resemblance to the Henriad that Richard’s impending death inaugurates. The idol and the actor: both take their place in the pageant of kings paraded before the public for their entertainment. It is a sardonic vision of temporal history. Small wonder that Bolingbroke’s son later reduces kingship to ‘thou idol ceremony’ (H5 4.1.236). In 5.5, the king meditates in prison on his fall and on his divided thoughts:    The better sort, As thoughts of things divine, are intermixed With scruples and do set the word itself Against the word, as thus: ‘Come, little ones’; And then again: ‘It is as hard to come as for a camel To thread the postern of a small needle’s eye.’ (5.5.11–17) The first biblical verse quoted here, ‘Come, little ones’, is a paraphrase of Christ’s words at Luke 18.16 – ‘Suffre the babes to come vnto mee, & forbid them not: for of suche is the kingdome of God’ – while the second refers to Luke 18.25: ‘Surely it is easier for a camel to go through a nedles eye, then

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for a riche man to entre into the kingdome of God.’ For Richard, these two verses are incompatible, even paradoxical.52 A rich man cannot also be child-like and enter heaven. The broader exegetical context for these verses is election or reprobation: ‘And who then can be saued?’ (Lk. 18.26). Richard isn’t simply bemoaning his temporal misfortune: he is considering his spiritual destination. Is he bound for heaven or hell? In a sermon discussing Luke 18.16, Henry Smith explains how this gospel teaching applies only to the few, for ‘vnles ye haue prepared new hearts, look for no new blessings to bee powred on you’: only those who are saved may see ‘the glorious light of the Gospell’.53 In the gloom of his prison cell, the king focuses on those ‘Thoughts tending to ambition’ that ‘do plot / Unlikely wonders’, finding only to his dismay that these imaginings ‘die in their own pride’ (5.5.18–22). He is mired both in the things of the world and in the past, unable to follow the preacher’s advice: ‘you must wash and rince out the dregs of sin that are frozen in you, you must purge the leauen of maliciousness that sowreth your soules, you must cast up your couetousnes, & your pride’.54 Smith explains that those who are saved ‘must be chaunged and new fashioned in euerie part’ and ‘turned as it were … into other men’, and Richard has certainly become ‘another man’: a subject now, rather than a king.55 The difficulty is that, as one who identified himself so closely throughout the play with Christ, Richard’s debasement leads him to doubt that God is, in fact, on his side: ‘unkinged by Bolingbroke, / And straight am nothing’ (5.5.37–8).56 Richard’s biblical verses, and the context within which they are discussed here, cast him as a nullity, a potentially unregenerate sinner. It is one thing to quote Christ’s words: it is quite another to benefit spiritually from those words. Richard’s proverbial summation of his life – ‘I wasted time, and now doth Time waste me’ (5.5.49) – has a homiletic cast: Repentance is a gift, and a gift must be taken when it is offered. The time past is gone, and thou canst not recall that to repent in; the time to com is vncertaine, & thou

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canst not assure that to repent in; the present time is onely thine, and thou maiest repent in that: but anone that will be gone too.57 But instead of taking the commonplace advice offered here by the preacher, Richard prefers to make witty conceits on his subject: My thoughts are minutes, and with sighs they jar Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch, Whereto my finger, like a dial’s point, Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears. (5.5.51–4) Richard does not consider repentance directly in the final scene. He is frozen both in the past and in the present, making his audience smile and perhaps feel pity, but saying little that might pertain to his spiritual health: ‘I stand fooling here, his [Bolingbroke’s] jack o’the clock’ (5.5.60). When Richard’s assassins come for him, he personifies them like Smith in his vanitas: ‘What means Death in this rude assault?’ (5.5.105). He is prepared to assign damnation to his assailants: ‘Go thou, and fill another room in hell! / … That hand shall burn in neverquenching fire / That staggers thus my person’ (5.5.107–9; see also 5.5.115–16). Yet his own spiritual destination is, once more, ambiguous: ‘Mount, mount, my soul! Thy seat is up on high, / Whilst my gross flesh sinks downward here to die’ (5.5.111–12). These dying words are a final example of the spiritual self-assertion at which Richard excels. Yet they may be no more than just that: words. The consummate performer cedes the stage to Death, his final destination unknown either to himself or to his audience. The final scene begins with the civil strife that will mark Henry IV’s reign (5.6.1–29) and with his politique condemnation of Exton for Richard’s murder: ‘With Cain go wander thorough shades of night, / And never show thy head by day nor light’ (5.6.43–4). Reprobation proves a good tool

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for sloughing off political responsibility and Henry, no less than his predecessor, is willing to use it to condemn others. The play ends with a resonant biblical flourish. Henry says: ‘I’ll make a voyage to the Holy Land / To wash this blood off from my guilty hand’ (5.6.49–50). Of course, he never makes it to this geographical destination. His repentance is promised but never fulfilled. In this respect, it is fitting that Pilate reappears: ‘When Pilate sawe that he auailed nothing, but that more tumulte was made, he toke water and wasshed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this iust man: loke you to it’ (Mt. 27.24). The audience is also reminded of Richard’s condemnation of his accusers as Pilates (4.1.237–42). Early modern playgoers may have recalled that, for most contemporary preachers, Pilate’s washing of his hands signified one thing above all else: ‘hypocrisie’.58 Appropriating the Bible for his own end, Henry’s intention ‘To wash this blood off from my guilty hand’ is a double-edged allusion. Is the new king’s spiritual salvation any more secure than his predecessor’s?

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6 New Directions Richard Through the Looking-  Glass – The Intertextual Mirror in Richard II Andrew Duxfield There is a long-standing tradition of criticism which identifies in Richard II allusions to or echoes of other plays by Shakespeare or by contemporaries such as Marlowe. As I will discuss shortly, however, criticism that has noted these allusions and echoes has tended to do so in order to serve a purpose other than interpretation of the play itself. Typically, these observations of intertextual resonances provide the basis of a hypothesis on, say, the order in which the Henry VI plays, the anonymous Woodstock and Richard II were written, or they inform discussions of the nature of the relationship between Shakespeare and Marlowe.1 Admittedly, there are exceptions to this generalization, but there remains much to be understood, I would suggest, about the literary effect of the play’s intertextual moments, about why the play makes us think about other works at certain points, and what doing so can help to reveal about Richard II.2

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I will begin the discussion, then, not by identifying a hitherto unnoticed intertextual allusion, but rather by concentrating closely on one which has been commented upon by critics since Charles Lamb. During the famous deposition scene, Richard requests a mirror and, gazing into it, paraphrases Faustus’s famous address to Helen: ‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships … ?’ becomes ‘Was this face the face / That every day under this household roof / Did keep ten thousand men?’ (R2 4.1.281–3).3 Rather than taking Shakespeare’s echoing of Marlowe as an instance of parody, as critics have often tended to do, I take it as a starting point for reading this scene in a way that I suggest can contribute to our understanding of both it and the play as a whole. Embedded within and situated around this very direct Marlovian allusion is a complex set of further multidirectional, often contradictory, literary and cultural allusions which work to confute and confuse each other at this climactic moment of trauma for Richard. Through these allusions, the scene taps into a preoccupation with substance and shadow that is prevalent throughout the early 1590s history play; it derives meaning from competing discourses commonly encountered in theological tracts and heard from the pulpit that made use of the mirror as a symbol for both perspicuous self-examination and for misleading or superficial self-knowledge; it situates, through the shattering of the mirror, Richard and Northumberland/Bolingbroke as participants in an early English Reformation controversy regarding transubstantiation; and, finally, it recalls an Ovidian trope which reverses the direction of the gaze implied by the Marlovian allusion. Through these complicated intertextual reflections, the scene generates a kind of mise en abyme, as mutually informing associations both combine and compete to provide apparently endless interpretative possibilities, in a manner that might be read as reflecting Richard’s emotional and spiritual confusion in a profound moment of trauma, or as symbolizing Richard’s habitual refusal or inability to commit to coherent convictions.

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Richard and Faustus The episode on which I wish to focus occurs in the famous ‘deposition scene’, which did not appear in early texts of the play (it was first printed in the play’s Fourth Quarto (Q4) of 1608), becoming the focus of much discussion in terms of its possible censorship.4 In it, a defeated Richard is summoned to appear before, and publicly submit his crown to, Bolingbroke. What seems to have been intended by Bolingbroke as a piece of pageantry glorifying his initiation into a position of de jure as well as de facto power is soon co-opted by Richard, who arrives casting himself as Christ betrayed by Judases, before attempting to force Bolingbroke to seize the crown rather than benefit from the implicit legitimization of its being simply handed over. Eventually Richard is persuaded to surrender the crown, but this does not stop him from continuing to hold centre stage. Having already delivered some of the play’s most intriguing lines, he then stages an address to his own image in a mirror, which he smashes as a final dramatic set piece before being ‘conveyed’ to the tower (4.1.276–318). The scene is well known enough not to require outlining in any more detail here, but it is worth noting that there is a profound ambiguity to Richard’s contribution to the scene. In quantitative terms he dominates the exchange entirely, speaking 133 lines from his entry to his exit compared with the combined total of twentysix lines spoken by his interlocutors, but the extent to which his extravagant performance in this scene is either a calculated, self-aware attempt to upstage and undermine Bolingbroke or a genuine poetic expression of emotional trauma – or, perhaps more aptly, where it ceases to be one thing and begins to be the other – is unclear. What does seem to be evident is that in writing this scene Shakespeare was thinking about Marlowe. Shortly after handing over the crown, Richard sarcastically declares ‘“God save King Henry”, unkinged Richard says, / “And send him many years of

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sunshine days!”’ (4.1.220–1). In so doing, he recalls the words of Marlowe’s Edward II, who in the course of his own deposition scene plaintively asks ‘But what are kings, when regiment is gone, / But perfect shadows in a sunshine day?’5 Later in the scene, Richard returns to the association between kingship and sunshine, with another utterance laced with bitter irony: O, that I were a mockery king of snow, Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke, To melt myself away in water-drops! (4.1.260–2) Richard’s words here echo those of another Marlovian hero in the climactic moment of his fall. Doctor Faustus, faced with the reality of his damnation, declares a similar desire for bodily liquefaction: ‘O soul, be changed into little waterdrops,  / And fall into the ocean, ne’er to be found’ (Doctor Faustus 5.2.118–19). What is striking about these two references is that each, either directly in Richard’s speech or indirectly through the Marlovian passage to which they allude, calls to mind the distinction between the substantial and the insubstantial, and this, too, is what is at stake in the most famous Marlovian echo of the play. It occurs after Richard requests that a mirror be brought to him, ‘That it may show me what a face I have, / Since it is bankrupt of his majesty’ (4.1.266–7). As the mirror is fetched, Richard reiterates his urge to submit himself to selfexamination, answering Northumberland’s nagging to read the official documents of his deposition by saying: I’ll read enough When I do see the very book indeed Where all my sins are writ, and that’s myself.   Enter one with a glass. Give me that glass, and therein will I read. (4.1.273–6)

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The passage is well known, but for the purposes of this discussion it is worth quoting at some length what Richard says when faced with his own reflection: No deeper wrinkles yet? Hath Sorrow struck So many blows upon this face of mine And made no deeper wounds? O, flatt’ring glass, Like to my followers in prosperity, Thou dost beguile me. Was this face the face That every day under his household roof Did keep ten thousand men? Was this the face That like the sun did make beholders wink? Is this the face which faced so many follies, That was at last outfaced by Bolingbroke? (4.1.277–86) Audiences or readers familiar with Doctor Faustus will of course recognize in these rhetorical flourishes an expansive imitation of the famous lines delivered by Faustus in his address to Helen of Troy: ‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?’ (Doctor Faustus 5.1.91–2). What purpose does this unguarded instance of imitation, included at what might well be considered the pivotal moment of Richard’s experience in the play, serve? While the allusion has been spotted by critics of the play for well over a century, the theorizing of it, as noted above, has often focused less on its implications for the play and more on what it suggests about Shakespeare’s attitude to Marlowe’s work. Several critics reading the passage with the primary aim of understanding the relationship between the two dramatists have nonetheless made revealing observations about its significance for the play. In an important essay on Marlowe’s importance to Shakespeare, Nicholas Brooke notes how the three allusions in this scene contribute to its ambiguity, stating that:

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the Richard who identifies himself with Christ, identifies himself also with the damned Faustus; or rather, like Faustus in his last speech, his reflexions oscillate between the visions of Heaven and Hell, and the shadow of Helen stresses the sensuality of Richard’s narcissism.6 In a brief reading that serves as a prelude to discussion of other texts, Marjorie Garber likewise contends that Richard’s implicit comparison of his own image with that of Helen, as well as calling to mind the fall of Troy, is sufficiently absurd inadvertently to lay bare his bloated self-regard: ‘the reminder of Marlowe’s hyperbole’, she writes, ‘undercuts Richard’s self-dramatization’.7 In a more recent essay, Thomas Cartelli also sees the effect of the reference as being deflationary, but reads Richard’s deployment of it as tinged with a wry selfawareness: ‘Richard is … summoning the ghost of Faustus here as a kindred spirit of desperation and delusion while at the same time culling out for mockery his own mistakes in (and of the extreme ego-gratifying) kind.’8 These readings point in different directions, but all agree on the bathos produced by Richard’s Marlovian address to his reflection. What surprisingly few critics have noted, however, is that in the scene to which Richard alludes Faustus is not really addressing Helen of Troy at all, but rather a demonic apparition. Charles Forker, in his introduction to his edition of Edward II, notes cautiously that Faustus’s Helen is ‘probably a succuba’, and thus that ‘Faustus, like Richard, has courted his own destruction’.9 Robert M. Schuler makes the same observation, which leads him to state that ‘like both Faustus and Lucifer, Richard has been deceived by self-flattery and vanity’.10 Otherwise, readers of the deposition scene have tended to treat Richard’s allusion to Faustus’s Helen as referring uncomplicatedly to the actual Helen. To do so is to miss an analogy between Richard’s delusion and that of Faustus, but it is also to miss another way in which this scene probes a matter raised by its other two Marlovian allusions: that is, the states of shadow and substance, and the difficulty of distinguishing

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between the two. This is a matter which is brought promptly to the audience’s attention by the exchange between Richard and Bolingbroke that immediately follows the smashing of the mirror: richard Mark, silent King, the moral of this sport, How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face. bolingbroke The shadow of your sorrow hath destroyed The shadow of your face. (4.1.290–3) The distinction between the substantial body and its image or representation is something that is dwelt upon in Doctor Faustus. A couple of scenes before the address to Helen, Faustus is asked by the Holy Roman Emperor to summon Alexander the Great and his paramour ‘from the hollow vaults below’ (Doctor Faustus 4.1.36). Faustus grants the request, but with an important caveat: But if it like your Grace, it is not in my ability to present before your eyes the true substantial bodies of those two deceased princes, which long since are consumed to dust … But such spirits as can lively resemble Alexander and his paramour shall appear before your Grace in that manner that they best lived in. (Doctor Faustus 4.1.47–55) That Faustus is so acutely aware of the illusory nature of the spectacle that he is presenting only accentuates the tragic short-sightedness of his failure, only two scenes later, to recognize (or perhaps even to care about) the same illusion in his encounter with ‘Helen’. What he forgets in that moment is that the obvious answer to the famous rhetorical question ‘was this the face that launched a thousand ships’ is ‘no’. Indeed, given that the first condition of Faustus’s diabolical

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contract is that he ‘may be a spirit in form and substance’, what Richard is alluding to in this apparently earnest moment of self-reflection is a famous scene in which an insubstantial likeness addresses another insubstantial likeness (Doctor Faustus 2.1.97).

Shadow and substance in the history play In raising the uncomfortable possibility that what seems to be the substantial self might in fact be insubstantial shadow, Richard gives voice to an idea that recurs in several of the early 1590s history plays, and particularly in the three parts of Henry VI. In one notable example, Talbot, after his victory at Orleans, is supposedly lured into a trap by the Countess of Auvergne. The Countess, revelling in her own cleverness, tells him: ‘Long time thy shadow hath been thrall to me; / For in my gallery thy picture hangs. / But now the substance shall endure the like’ (1H6 2.3.35–7). Talbot’s scornful response, and the exchange which follows, bears quoting at length: talbot I laugh to see your ladyship so fond To think that you have aught but Talbot’s shadow Whereon to practise your severity. countess Why? Art not thou the man? talbot   I am indeed. countess Then have I substance too. talbot No, no, I am but shadow of myself: You are deceived, my substance is not here; For what you see is but the smallest part And least proportion of humanity.

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I tell you, madam, were the whole frame here, It is of such a spacious lofty pitch Your roof were not sufficient to contain’t. countess This is a riddling merchant, for the nonce. He will be here, and yet he is not here: How can these contrarieties agree? talbot That will I show you presently. [Winds his horn. Drums strike up. A peal of ordnance.] Enter soldiers. How say you, madam? Are you now persuaded That Talbot is but shadow of himself? These are his substance, sinews, arms, and strength, With which he yoketh your rebellious necks, Razeth your cities and subverts your towns, And in a moment makes them desolate. (1H6 2.3.44–65) Talbot is not, of course, a king, but in his position as champion of the English cause he, like the king, serves a representational role. Just as Edward II without regiment is a perfect shadow, Talbot without the forces he leads is only representation – a signifier lacking a signified; only when the forces arrive does the sign become complete, endowed with bodily ‘substance’: ‘sinews, arms, and strength’. Richard, too, is thinking about this kind of separation in the deposition scene. As Merrix and Levin have noted, ‘abdication is in many ways a kind of public death, one of the only ways of separating the king’s two bodies’, and this is a separation that we see dramatized in this scene.11 Interestingly, this separation is effectively an inversion of that performed by Talbot, as Richard becomes bare substance stripped of signification. This is most strikingly conveyed by the following lines: With mine own tears I wash away my balm, With mine own hands I give away my crown,

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With mine own tongue deny my sacred state, With mine own breath release all duteous oaths. (4.1.207–10) In each line an aspect of monarchical symbolism is surrendered by a part or function of the physical body which, as the repetition of ‘mine own’ reminds us, is the last thing remaining in Richard’s possession.12

Early modern mirrors In Richard III, the Duchess of York exploits the metaphorical richness of the mirror in her lamentation of the fate of her three sons, during which she imagines them as either fragile (in the case of Edward and George) or untrue (in the case of Richard) reflections of their father: I have bewept a worthy husband’s death, And liv’d with looking on his images: But now two mirrors of his princely semblance Are crack’d in pieces by malignant death; And I, for comfort, have but one false glass, That grieves me when I see my shame in him. (R3 2.2.49–54) There is an ambiguity at work here. Richard is a false glass insofar as he presents an imperfect reflection of his father (both in terms of character and, given the emphasis the play places on Richard’s deformity, physique), but, as far as the duchess seems to be concerned, also a truthful glass insofar as he reveals to her her own shame. The capacity of the mirror in the early histories to be at once deceitful and truthful, at once revealing and superficial, is symptomatic of the conflicting uses to which the trope was put in broader early modern discourse. There was in the period

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a strong tradition of the mirror as something one looks into for moral improvement. From this idea developed a well-worn literary convention according to which anything that provides a sound moral example – a didactic book or a historical figure of outstanding virtue – might be referred to as a mirror. The mirror was also a productive symbol for moral edification because of its disinterestedness; to look into the mirror is to be presented with one’s own flaws unmediated by flattery or self-delusion.13 Theological texts and sermons in the period made use of the mirror in exhortations imploring Christians to examine their flaws as a first step towards rectifying them. In his Sermons on Deuteronomy, published in 1583 in a translation by Arthur Golding, John Calvin uses the mirror as an analogy in a discussion of the moral necessity of God’s Law: let vs take this lookingglasse to behold our selues in. Let vs not deceiue our selues. A man may bee smeared or grimed, and euerie man shall laugh at him, and yet he himselfe shall not perceiue it a whit. But if he go to a glasse, and there spie his face all bespotted, he will shrinke away and go wash it of. Euen so wee must doe. Surely the whole Lawe of God is as a glasse to shewe vs our foulenesse, to the intent wee should bee sorie and ashamed of our lewd doings.14 A similar idea is expressed in another English translation, from 1592, of a work by another Continental theologian, Jean de L’Espine. Here the gospel provides the mirror in which the Christian man must examine his own imperfections: Man must therefore (the better to knowe his owne nature) observe these and the like sentences in reading of the scriptures, and diligently to ponder them in his minde, not for a day or two, but all his life long, and to make them serve as a glasse to beholde the face of his owne soule, and that as curiously to viewe himselfe in this glasse, as women in attiring themselves do looke in their glasses; if he doe

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thus, he will not long be in love with his owne beautie: for the more he beholdeth him selfe, the more wrinkles he shall see in his owne forhead, and shall every day see him selfe more foule then other.15 It was common, then, for theological tracts or sermons in the period to deploy the mirror as a metaphor for the power of faith and engagement with scripture to facilitate truthful and searching self-examination. But running alongside and in tension with this trope – sometimes within the pages of the same texts – was a tradition in which the mirror served to signify at best superficial, incomplete self-knowledge, or, at worst, deceit. Where the mirror carries a suggestion of self-examination in moral and spiritual terms, it also, as L’Espine’s comments subtly imply, suggests vanity, and all of the misguided investment in earthly life that it entails. It is worth noting that, according to L’Espine, what the Christian man will find when he examines himself in the mirror – ‘more wrinkles … in his owne forhead’ – is precisely what Richard expects to find, but does not: ‘No deeper wrinkles yet? Hath Sorrow struck / So many blows upon this face of mine / And made no deeper wounds?’ (4.1.277–9). This leaves open the question of whether the glass into which Richard looks is as truthful as Calvin and L’Espine suggest, or whether it is, as Richard himself concludes, a ‘flatt’ring glass’ (4.1.279). Two biblical references inform the early modern sense of the mirror as an incomplete or misleading source of knowledge. The first and most commonly cited of these is from 1 Corinthians 13, in which Paul discusses the necessarily incomplete understanding of God and heavenly things by humanity in its earthly state and opposes it to the more complete comprehension that awaits us only in the world to come: ‘for now we se through a glasse darkly: but then shall we se face to face’ (1 Cor. 13.12).16 References to this passage abound in sermons and treatises in the period, which often use it proverbially to signify spiritual confusion or misapprehension. A. P., to offer one example, declares in a work of 1582 that:

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If there were no other thing, this is sufficient to laye open our shame euen vnto the whole world, not as in a glasse or darke speaking, but face to face, whereby it may plainely bee seene that they trust more in the creature, Then in God, which is the Creator, who be blessed for euer and euer. Amen.17 The second biblical source for the mirror’s symbolic resonance is from the Epistle of James, which characterizes self-examination in the mirror as passive and fleeting, as opposed to the sustained scrutiny provided by an active life of faith: And be ye doers of the worde, and not hearers onely, deceiuing your owne selues. For if anie heare the worde, & do it not, he is like vnto a man, that beholdeth his natural face in a glasse. For when he hath considered him self, he goeth his way, & forgetteth immediately what maner of one he was. (Jas 1.22–4) Thus Calvin, in the Sermons in which we find the use of the mirror as a metaphor for true Christian self-examination, also uses the mirror as shorthand for vain, superficial and incomplete self-knowledge, asking, ‘What fareth a man the better by his seeing of himself in a glasse? As soone as he turneth away his face, his shape vanisheth away. Even so is it with vs’.18 When Richard calls for a mirror and proceeds to address his own image, then, he is accessing a complicated nexus of conflicting associations that casts his performance in an ambiguous light. The mirror’s cultural connotations, acting in combination with the implications of the Faustian allusion, may have at once encouraged audiences to read Richard’s address as a moment of spiritual self-recognition or of calculated histrionic selfprojection, as anagnorisis or as self-deception.

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The mirror in Reformation controversy Another theological deployment of the mirror bears discussion as the source of a potentially illuminating intertextual trace in the deposition scene. It originates in a fiery dispute that took place on the eve of the English Reformation, from 1531 to 1533. In 1531, the reformist theologian John Frith (1503–33) published from Antwerp a refutation of the doctrine of purgatory in which he directly challenged the ideas of Sir Thomas More, then Chancellor.19 As David Daniell puts it, ‘his answers to his opponents were powerful, and his book was popular; both facts put him in danger’, and indeed Frith found himself arrested for heresy upon More’s instruction during what he had intended to be a brief visit to England later in 1531.20 Now imprisoned in the Tower of London and soon to become a martyr for the Protestant cause, Frith continued to write privately on theological matters, including material in which he confuted the doctrine of transubstantiation. When some of this writing came into his possession via the help of a spy, More wrote a long letter challenging Frith, and received a similarly comprehensive response.21 This debate by correspondence was as much for public as private consumption. In 1533, More produced several publications containing attacks on Frith, including his letter to his adversary.22 Frith’s response to More’s letter was published in the same year and reprinted three times over the next two decades, as well as being included in a compilation of work by significant English protestant martyrs published in 1573.23 The story of Frith’s controversy with More and his subsequent martyrdom was immortalized in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments: ‘Amongest al other chaunces lamentable’, Foxe declares, ‘there hath ben none a great tyme whiche seemed vnto me more greeuous, then the lamentable death and cruel handlinge of Iohn Frith, so learned and excellent a young man.’24 By the time Shakespeare was writing, then, the story of Frith and his controversy with

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More had entered Protestant folklore, and had been recently revivified by a new edition and abridgement of Foxe’s book of martyrs in 1583 and 1589, respectively.25 The debate between More and Frith is concerned predominantly with the difference between the presence and the representation of a material body. In a Reformation context this is, of course, a highly fraught topic, since the interconfessional controversy over transubstantiation – whether Christ’s body and blood are literally in, or rather metaphorically represented by, the Eucharistic bread and wine – boils down to precisely this matter. In his letter, which he addresses to an intermediary figure rather than directly to Frith, More outlines some of Frith’s key arguments against the literalist position, the most important of which is the notion that physical bodies cannot simultaneously occupy multiple spaces: For the thynge he sayth that is ment therby, can not be trewe, that is to wytte that the very body of Chryste can not be in the sacrament, bycause the sacrament is in many dyuers places at onys, and was at the Maundy, that is to wytte in the handes of Chryste and in euery of hys apostels mouthes, and at that tyme it was not glorifyed. And than he sayth that Chrystes body not beynge gloryfyed, coulde no more be in two places at onys, than hys own can.26 More goes on to present a variety of examples which he suggests undermine Frith’s argument, one of which is particularly interesting in the context of this discussion: I wote well that many good folke haue vsed in thys mater many good frutefull examples of Goddes other workys, not onely myracles wryten in Scrypture, but also done by the comon course of nature here in erthe, and some thynges made also by mannes hand, as one face beholden in dyuers glassys, and in euery pyece of one glasse broken in to twenty.27

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While he does not comment on this instance of it, Grabes notes that the analogy employed here by More – that ‘just as the fragments of a broken mirror each furnish a complete image of an object, Christ is wholly present in each fragment of broken bread (the Host)’ – was a commonplace in medieval teaching on transubstantiation.28 More refers to the broken mirror analogy only briefly, perhaps assuming his audience’s familiarity with it, but Frith seizes upon it in his reply, expressing his ironic approval of it as he uses it against his opponent: The glase I graunt is a goode example. For euen as the glasse dothe represent the verie face of man so doth the sacrament represent the verie bodye and bloude of Christe. And like as euery pece of the glase doth represent that one face, so doth euery pece of that sacrament represent that one bodye of Christ. But euery man knoweth right well that though the glasse represent my face, yet the substance of the glasse is not my verye face, nether is my very face in the glasse. And euyn so though the sacrament do represent the bodie of Christe, yet the substance of the sacrament is not his verye bodie (no more then the glasse ys my face) nether is his verye bodye in the sacrament, no more then my verye face is in the glasse and thus this example maketh well for vs.29 Such is the symbolic flexibility of the mirror that it serves both sides in this most high-stakes of theological debates. On the one hand it provides, in its shattered form, a well-worn example of how a single body can be simultaneously present in multiple locations. On the other, it provides a salient analogy for the idea that one object can represent and take on the quality of another thing without actually being that thing itself. In what way, then, might this debate, or a distant echo of it, be at work in the deposition scene? As we have already seen, Richard’s first action when looking into the mirror is to question the truth of what it tells him. But in paraphrasing Faustus to do so, he uses terms that bring us into the territory of More and Frith’s controversy: was this the face, or merely

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some (potentially untrustworthy) representation of it? Yet despite these questions, Richard starts to sound like More: he begins to speak of the mirror image as if it were his face, and at the same moment reproduces physically upon stage the example used by More to demonstrate that a single body can be in more than one place at one time: A brittle glory shineth in this face – As brittle as the glory is the face! [Shatters glass] For there it is, cracked in an hundred shivers. Mark, silent King, the moral of this sport, How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face. (4.1.287–91) As is typical of Richard’s flights of rhetoric, this echo of a Reformation controversy is far from straightforward. While Richard does move from questioning the relationship between the mirror image and the face itself to speaking about the two as if they were the same, it seems that he does so not because he has adopted More’s literalist position, but conversely because he has recognized a metaphorical correspondence between his face and the mirror itself: the mirror and the face (and the associated notions of identity and esteem that it implies) are the same because they are both liable to be shattered. That this is a literary rather than a literal correspondence is suggested by Richard himself when he invites consideration of ‘the moral of this sport’, a line cited by the OED as an example of the use of the word ‘sport’ to refer to a ‘theatrical performance’, ‘show’ or ‘interlude’.30 Richard’s ‘sport’ of the shattered mirror also departs from More’s in a way that undercuts its usefulness as an argument for transubstantiation. More’s example relies entirely on the notion that a single complete mirror, which reflects a single image of the person who gazes into it, when shattered becomes several fragments, each of which likewise independently reflects a complete and single image of the gazer. Richard’s performance conversely depends upon the idea that the

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previously coherent face and mirror have each been ‘cracked in an hundred shivers’; the relationship between the mirror and the face here serves to demonstrate not that a body can be in many places at once, but rather that a body (or a self) can be violently obliterated. Nonetheless, when taken at face value, Richard’s use of the mirror is strikingly reminiscent of More’s, and Bolingbroke’s dismissive rejoinder – ‘The shadow of your sorrow hath destroyed / The shadow of your face’ (4.1.292–3) – bears more than a passing resemblance to Frith’s response to More: ‘euery man knoweth right well that though the glasse represent my face, yet the substance of the glasse is not my verye face, nether is my very face in the glasse’.31 Yet with characteristic slipperiness, Richard then manoeuvres himself into the Bolingbroke/Frith position: The shadow of my sorrow? Ha, let’s see. ’Tis very true, my grief lies all within; And these external manners of laments Are merely shadows to the unseen grief That swells with silence in the tortured soul. There lies the substance. (4.1.294–9) Richard’s coup de grâce is to argue that the mirror – indeed any external projection of the self – is only ever a representation of the truth or ‘substance’ of experience, which must needs always be internal and hidden. Yet even in this apparently final statement we remain on unsteady ground: substance (the stuff we are made of) is only really shadow; the real substance (emotional, spiritual truth) is, rather like shadow, intangible and unseen. We are presented, then, with a dizzying play of conflicting and transmuting ideas. In calling for the mirror, smashing it to pieces and declaring that the shattering of the glass equates to the shattering of his face, Richard calls to mind a traditional theological argument, deployed in an early Reformation context by Thomas More, for the literalness of

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transubstantiation. But embedded in Richard’s performance are aspects that undermine and even invert the Catholic side of the argument, and, in any case, within just a few lines he has switched to a position that aligns more closely with the Protestant objection. The Reformation allusion that I am suggesting exists in this passage does not, then, map onto a coherent theological reading of the play. It does, however, do two significant things. Firstly, it calls to mind a separation between the material body and the spiritual significance invested in that body in the midst of a scene that, as discussed above and as identified by numerous commentators, has already been engaging with a similar kind of separation by alluding to the concept of the king’s two bodies. It is telling that, immediately after figuring poetically the process of the physical body surrendering its spiritual significance, Richard proceeds to stage a dramatic set piece which recalls a theological controversy which divested the bread and wine of the sacrament of their literal divinity, and which on a broader level saw a shift away from the investment of earthly people and things with divine significance. All of this in a scene which begins with Richard casting his opponents as Judases and, by implication, himself as Christ. Secondly, the episode places into stark relief the quality of Richard’s character that has arguably led him to this situation in the first instance. The controversy between More and Frith provides a microcosmic example of the ardent convictions with which Reformers and their opponents adhered to their theological beliefs. Within two years of this confrontation being published, both participants would be dead as a direct result of their confessional convictions. As Richard reminds us of this controversy, however, he is in the midst of a show of argumentative legerdemain, appearing to believe one thing before turning volte-face when doing so provides an opportunity to outwit his opponent. Yet, to suggest this degree of premeditation may be to credit Richard with too much control. The interjection ‘Ha, let’s see’ which immediately precedes his change of direction, not to mention the earlier

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wordplay on ‘Ay, no; no, ay’, implies that he is in fact deciding upon his convictions in the spur of the moment (4.1.294, 201). Unlike More and Frith, Richard does not seem to know what he believes. Of course, such vacillation could be attributable to the traumatic episode that Richard is experiencing at this particular moment, but it is consistent with the kind of indecisiveness and arbitrariness of action that he has already demonstrated in other key moments in the play (his handling of the dispute between Bolingbroke and Mowbray, for example, or his rapid alternation between hubris and despair upon his return from Ireland). By gazing into the mirror Richard aims to learn something of what he is – to ‘read the book’ of himself – but by echoing a theological debate grounded upon the unshakeable convictions of the likes of More and Frith, he reminds us precisely of what he is not.

Now doth time waste me While the deposition scene is not the concluding moment of Richard’s life, it does seem to be a climax marking, as Merrix and Levin note, a kind of ‘public death’, as opposed to the very solitary one that he suffers in the following act.32 In calling for a mirror at this moment, Richard anticipates another of Shakespeare’s kings: King Lear, shortly after entering the stage carrying the dead Cordelia and fifty or so lines before his own death, says to his courtiers: ‘Lend me a looking-glass’ (KL 5.3.259). His purposes for doing so are different from Richard’s – he wishes to see whether Cordelia still has breath to ‘mist or stain’ its surface – but the request occasions remarks from Kent and Edgar that gesture towards the same issues raised by Richard’s mirror episode: ‘kent: Is this the promised end? / edgar: Or image of that horror?’ (KL 5.3.261–2). In associating the request for a looking-glass with a final end, both of these climactic scenes are engaging with one more literary application of the mirror carrying implications for the

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deposition scene. In this trope, a mirror is looked into by a figure who is either in the final stages of life or who has been sufficiently changed by experience to be able to reflect upon his or her younger self from a position of distance. Looking into the mirror offers an opportunity to consider the follies of youth, and occasions the gazer’s realization of both the brevity and the vanity of earthly life. This contemptus mundi trope can be seen at work in a two-part didactic work of 1580 by Austen Saker, named Narbonus. As its title page advertises, the text concerns itself with the ‘discommodities that insue, by following the lust of a mans will, in youth’. In it, a pensive and remorseful Narbonus reflects upon his mortality, at one point, with the following words: But who staieth the Tide, and hath not his passage? and who tarieth till the houre bee ended, and heareth not the clocke strike? O that I had a Glasse, to beholde the feature of my face, or that my picture were now drawen, and conueyed to my freendes: would they know mee? or would they saye it is his face? would they say it resembleth a picture of such a one? or would any say it is the counterfayt of Narbonus?33 In wishing for a mirror while imagining a climactic moment, in questioning the veracity of what the mirror shows, and in considering the mirror’s capacity to reveal the toll that a misspent life might take on one’s appearance, Narbonus anticipates Richard’s performance in the deposition scene. Later in the same text, Narbonus revisits the idea of the transience of youthful life in a passage that introduces another striking resonance with Richard’s mirror play. In a letter addressed to ‘the Gentlemen, his fellowes at the Emperours Court’, he asks: When the wrinckles come on thy face, who will fauour thee? and when thy Bearde wareth hoare, who will loue thy likenesse? The old horse is turned to grinde in the Mill, and the olde Dog whipped out of doores, for the seruice hee did in his youth: the young strumpet with her brauery,

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in age is glad to heare the name of a Bawde: Did not Helen weepe when looking in a Glasse, shee saw the wrinckles on her face?34 The image of Helen of Troy weeping at the sight of her aged appearance in a mirror is not Saker’s invention. He may have encountered it in a source published two years earlier and well known during the period: John Lyly’s Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, in which Euphues makes a very similar case in a letter to his friend, Philautus, the etymology of whose name suggests ‘self-lover’: Oh Philautus, doest thou lyue as thou shouldest neuer dye, and laugh as thou shouldest neuer mourne, art thou so simple as thou doste not know from whence thou camest, or so sinfull that thou carest not whether thou goest, what is in thee that shoulde make thee so secure, or what can there be in any that may cause him to glorye. Milo that great wrastler beganne to weepe when he sawe his armes brawnefallen and weake, saying, strength, strength, is but vanitie, Helen, in hir newe glasse viewing hir olde face, with a smyling countenaunce cryed. Beautie where is thy blaze? Craesus with all his wealth, Aristotle with all his wit, all men with all their wisdome haue and shall perish and tourne to dust.35 Lyly himself, it seems certain, derived the idea from a still better-known source: Ovid, who in book 15 of Metamorphoses has Pythagoras say during a strikingly similar reflection on the vanity of earthly life: fletque Milon senior, cum spectat inanes illos, qui fuerant solidorum mole tororum Herculeis similes, fluidos pendere lacertos; flet quoque, ut in speculo rugas adspexit aniles, Tyndaris et secum, cur sit bis rapta, requirit.

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tempus edax rerum, tuque, invidiosa vetustas, omnia destruitis vitiataque dentibus aevi paulatim lenta consumitis omnia morte! and Milon, grown old, weeps when he looks at those arms, which once had been like the arms of Hercules with their firm mass of muscles, and sees them now hanging weak and flabby. Helen also weeps when she sees her aged wrinkles in the looking-glass, and tearfully asks herself why she should twice have been a lover’s prey. O Time, thou great devourer, and thou, envious Age, together you destroy all things; and, slowly gnawing with your teeth, you finally consume all things in lingering death!36 These three passages demonstrate the existence of a minor tradition, dating back to classical literature with which Shakespeare was well versed, that associates the mirror and an aged Helen of Troy with the related conceits of tempus edax rerum and contemptus mundi: that time devours everything and, as a result, the glories of the terrestrial world should be held in contempt. Something interesting is happening with this tradition when Richard calls for his mirror. When he looks into the glass he evidently expects to have an experience analogous to that of the aged Helen, who, Ovid tells us, is struck by the sight of her ‘rugas’, or, as Narbonus has it, ‘the wrinkles on her face’. Richard’s response when he looks in the mirror is one of surprise, perhaps even a species of disappointment, to find that his experience differs from hers: No deeper wrinkles yet? Hath Sorrow struck So many blows upon this face of mine And made no deeper wounds? O, flatt’ring glass, Like to my followers in prosperity, Thou dost beguile me. (4.1.277–81)

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Thus the mirror becomes for Richard an inversion of what it was for Helen; rather than it being an uncompromising revealer of truth, mercilessly presenting to him his imperfections, he takes the absence of wrinkles in his image to mean that the mirror is dishonest, since it fails to show to him how he feels. In each case, the drama of the moment is provided by the disjuncture between what the gazer thinks of him/herself and what the mirror shows him/her, with the absence or presence of wrinkles being the point of disjunction. This connection would in itself be significant, but it is made considerably more so by the fact that the lines that immediately follow those quoted above are those which famously allude to Doctor Faustus’s address to the apparition of the presumably still young Helen of Troy. In its allusive complexity, Richard’s mirror play now becomes a kind of bewildering mise en abyme. Richard looks upon his own image in the mirror, making him both the producer and recipient of the gaze. He casts himself as Faustus addressing the visage of the young Helen of Troy, but in doing so, as the face he addresses is his own, he also casts himself as the young Helen being gazed upon. As we have seen, this particular allusion is further complicated by the demonic nature of the Faustian Helen, and possibly even of Faustus himself. Yet, through allusion to a tradition apparently originating in Ovid, Richard also becomes the aged Helen grieving at the realization of her mortality. This is in addition to the complex and conflicting associations already discussed in this essay: the mirror as a truthful window and as a symbol of flattering deceit; as a means of presenting a case for transubstantiation and the case against it; as a tool for moral direction and as a threat of vain distraction. Richard’s mirror, then, is such a fecund source of signification that attributing to it a coherent, singular meaning becomes impossible. Rather, its production of multiple and conflicting allusions offers a reflection of both Richard’s habitual indecisiveness and his scramble to locate meaning in the newly bereft situation in which he finds himself. Just as Richard struggles to make sense

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of what he sees in the mirror, we too struggle to make sense of the spectacle of him looking into it. In the soliloquy of 5.5, Richard himself reflects, just before his death, upon the impossibility of settling upon a unified understanding of things. Wondering how he can compare his prison cell to the world, he describes the difficulty of corralling his recalcitrant thoughts: My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul, My soul the father, and these two beget A generation of still-breeding thoughts; And these same thoughts people this little world, In humours like the people of this world, For no thought is contented. (5.5.6–11) But of all of these competing significations that the mirror produces, we see one settle into a position of prominence during these final moments. Prompted by hearing music played apparently without attention to rhythm, Richard’s final lyrical set piece focuses, like the Ovidian Helen confronted by her wrinkles in the looking-glass, on the irrevocable passage of time: ‘I wasted time, and now doth Time waste me; / For now hath Time made me his numb’ring clock’ (5.5.49–50). By this point in the play the audience has seen enough of Richard’s rhetorical slipperiness to be wary of attributing to this statement a sense of genuine self-recognition. Yet, coming as it does in the moments before his death, it is tempting to read it in this way. If one does, then the mirror scene takes on an additional tragic dimension. Embedded within and largely obscured by the multiple layers of symbolic confusion, apparently entirely undetected by Richard, is ‘the moral of this sport’: not the one that he proclaims to Bolingbroke in the mirror play of 4.1, but one that he seems to recognize only at the very last, all too late – that tempus edax rerum, and that those who agonize over worldly power waste their time.

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7 New Directions King Thing Nothing – Richard II and His Problems Michael Davies hamlet The King is a thing – guildenstern A thing, my lord? hamlet Of nothing. (Ham 4.2.27–9) ‘The King is a thing … Of nothing.’ Whatever this princely riddle may have to say about political corruption at the heart of Hamlet’s Denmark, it signals something significant too about historical tragedy (or tragical history) as Shakespeare often presents it. For Shakespeare’s regal dramas repeatedly turn on the question of what kind of a ‘thing’ a king is, and how, in one way or another, a monarch (rightful or otherwise) will fall and decay into ‘nothing’. While the arc of this tragic pattern is familiar to us through such plays as Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear, all of which meditate in different ways on kings and ‘nothing’, this formula is both inaugurated and

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exemplified by a much earlier history-cum-tragedy: Richard II. This is the play that stages in a way more spectacular than any other in the Shakespearean canon the stripping of a king’s identity, his core ‘being’, indeed his very name, leaving him an ‘alienated anonymity’, as one critic puts it: ‘an existential zero’.1 Resigning all that he has and is to Bolingbroke, Richard performs at his deposition an ‘abyssal collapse’: ‘I must nothing be’ (4.1.201).2 It is only at the very end, however, alone and dejected at Pomfret Castle, that an ‘unkinged’ King Richard is able to resign himself to a more thoroughly considered kind of nihilism: ‘Nor I nor any man that but man is / With nothing shall be pleased’, he proposes, ‘till he be eased / With being nothing’ (5.5.37, 39–41). While it would be tempting to dwell on the play’s investment in the language of ‘nothingness’ – the word ‘nothing’ appears in it no fewer than twenty-five times – this chapter aims to pursue a different route through the existential algebra of Hamlet’s ‘king-thing-nothing’ as it is worked out in Richard II. Some critics have taken Richard at his word when it comes to being ‘nothing’ and promptly dematerialized him, seeing him as an ‘exquisite’, almost ethereal poet: an unworldly, ‘contemplative’ figure of words and tears, unsuited to the brute realities of politics.3 Others have regarded him as a ruler rarefied by an invisible because ‘mystical’ or even ‘sublime’ form of kingship from which his ‘natural’ or physical person comes to be separated, releasing ‘his body politic into thin air’.4 It would be easy too to write of(f) Richard II as no more than a ‘dramatic prototype’ of Hamlet: another tragic figure who would prefer to dissolve into an extravagant ‘grief-stricken inconsolability’ seemingly ‘disproportionate to any conceivable cause’.5 Like Shakespeare’s Prince of Denmark, Richard appears to be incapable of locating in any one thing – whether the crown or himself – ‘the impossible object of his grief’: an appropriate ‘objective correlative’, as T. S. Eliot terms it, for ‘inexpressible’ emotions that threaten mental and physical dissolution ‘in excess of the facts as they appear’.6

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But if we are to understand Richard II and his problems, as Shakespeare presents them, they need to be regarded not just in the context of political theology, metaphysical meditation, or hysterical grief but also as part of what Douglas Bruster terms a ‘materialist vision’: one that addresses any ‘concern with social order’ alongside its ‘relationship to material life’.7 In this regard Bruster, among other practitioners of the ‘New Economic Criticism’, has identified in Shakespearean drama an early modern ‘social fascination’, indeed an ‘obsession’, with ‘the physical world’ of ‘concrete things’: with ‘aesthetic objects’ and ‘possessions’, traded goods and marketable commodities, all circulated and exchanged in ways that mark them with ‘human identity’, and which qualify ‘subjectivity with characteristics of and reliance upon the objective’.8 Rather than the ‘shadows’ created by the doctrine of the ‘king’s two bodies’, or by Richard’s psychological ‘hystericization’, as Slavoj Žižek reads it, this chapter aims to address the play’s concern with ‘substance’: with the more material character of power.9 Rather than dwelling on the play’s ‘nothings’, it will consider ‘things’: the hard stuff that constitutes the basis of effective rule for any king and which, from the very beginning, is central to the matter of Richard II as political tragedy. To begin to attend to the play in these terms, we can do no better than address the speech of a monarch who, at a key point in the drama of his royal dispossession, reveals a surprising weakness for the ‘things’ he possesses, and which seem to possess him.

The stuff of history Aloft the walls of Flint Castle in 3.3, awaiting the return of Northumberland, with whom he has been parleying, the king suddenly breaks down, quite conspicuously in medias res: that is, in the middle of things. The res most immediately in question – the heart of the matter, here – concerns Bolingbroke’s rebellious return from banishment, apparently to claim his

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‘inheritance of free descent’ as Duke of Lancaster: his land, property, goods and revenues, summarized by Northumberland as his ‘lineal royalties’ (2.3.119–36; 3.3.113–14). The words that Richard II utters at this point, however, introduce a very different sense of the ‘things’ at stake, at least for him. ‘What must the King do now?’, he bewails:   Must he lose The name of King? I’God’s name, let it go. I’ll give my jewels for a set of beads, My gorgeous palace for a hermitage, My gay apparel for an almsman’s gown, My figured goblets for a dish of wood, My sceptre for a palmer’s walking staff, My subjects for a pair of carved saints And my large kingdom for a little grave, A little, little grave, an obscure grave. (3.3.143–54) As Naomi Conn Liebler observes, this speech marks the first of two ‘decoronation scenes’, anticipating its counterpart in 4.1, where Richard surrenders to Bolingbroke ‘All pomp and majesty’: the ‘heavy weight’ of the crown, an ‘unwieldly sceptre’, ‘My manors, rents, revenues’, ‘My acts, decrees and statutes’, ‘all oaths’ and ‘all vows’ (4.1.201–22). Richard’s lament in 3.3 can be read as a ‘rehearsal’ for this final relinquishment of ‘the symbols’ and the ‘ritual’ that have ‘actively occupied his attention’ throughout the play and which, as ‘the outward signs of his state’, distinguish him as king ‘from any other man’.10 What becomes noticeable in both instances is the exterior quality of Richard’s concept of kingship, and indeed of the mode in which he expresses his grief. The king ‘has a habit’, Frank Kermode notes, ‘of studying himself from the outside’, offering us a subjectivity, a sense of self, shaped by its relation to material objects: from the regalia of majesty to other ‘moveables’ (2.1.161), including that great emblem of self-examination, the looking-glass.11

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This king has other habits to which his words in 3.3 draw attention. We are reminded here of the extravagance typical of Richard’s style in a speech that might be heart-breaking were it not quite so contrived and artificial, governed as it is, in this instance, by zeugma: Richard’s single ‘I’ll give … ’ holds monarchal sway over the seven lines that follow, each of which repeats the same anaphoric, balanced formula, ‘My … for …  ’. Even a critic as sympathetic to the king as Charles R. Forker finds this self-pitying performance ‘histrionic’ and ‘unkingly’.12 Critics less accommodating consider it ‘risible’.13 We also become aware here of another of Richard’s characteristic quirks: a propensity to list things. His mode throughout the play is to construct catalogues and inventories: of the means by which kings have been ‘All murdered’ (3.2.160), or of his extensive losses (as in both 3.3 and 4.1), or of the ways in which his ‘still-breeding thoughts’ can be likened to the variously ill-contented ‘people of this world’ (5.5.5–32). Elsewhere, he strings things together in a copia of catenulate incantations that stretch across the verselines: ‘us, our state, our subjects or our land’ (1.3.190); ‘plate, coin, revenues and moveables’ (2.1.161); ‘villains, vipers … Dogs … Snakes … Judases’ (3.2.129–32); ‘graves, … worms and epitaphs’ (3.2.145) – the lists could go on.14 Such a habit reinforces what we might consider ‘unkingly’ about the speech in 3.3. For it becomes impossible to avoid the fact that Richard equates the ‘name of King’ not just with the stuff of ritual and symbol – his regal identity – but also with the sensual finery he enjoys through emphatic personal ownership: ‘My jewels’, ‘My gorgeous palace’, ‘My gay apparel’, ‘My figured goblets’ (emphasis mine). This king can focus only on the possessions – the stuff – he will lose, not the ‘large kingdom’ or the ‘subjects’ for which he has responsibility. This is no speech of holy resignation either. Contrary to Alfred Thomas’s recent suggestion, there is no whiff of a ‘penitential spirit’ here, no ‘religious conversion’ in the offing.15 Rather, Richard figures his anticipated forfeitures in 3.3 as a ‘fantasy of renunciation’ framed by a series of imagined material

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exchanges.16 He will trade his worldly goods not for the truly contemplative spiritual life, but simply for a different category of things: the props of poverty that costume Catholic medieval piety – ‘a set of beads’, ‘an almsman’s gown’, ‘a dish of wood’, ‘a palmer’s walking staff’. Richard’s doubled listing of ‘things’ in 3.3 redoubles a sense signalled elsewhere that what matters to him is not the common good, or res publica: national and political concerns; the causes and interests of England. As Gaunt’s famous speech makes clear in 2.1, matters of commonwealth have been traded by Richard for a different category of res altogether: things that occupy the realm of wealth and personal ownership, including ‘real estate’ (‘real’ and its cognate terms stemming etymologically from the same Latin root: res).17 Shakespeare thus presents Richard as a king firmly committed to what is ‘real’ in a material rather than a ‘royal’ sense.18 As we are reminded in 2.1, he has employed the grossest of financial scandals – blank charters and benevolences (forced loans) – and imposed ‘grievous’ taxes on the commons, all to fund a lifestyle worthy of any modern despot (2.1.246–61). In 3.3, Richard himself accounts for his jewels, goblets, gay apparel and gorgeous palaces (he has, of course, more than one). Others in the play point to his weakness for ‘fashions in proud Italy’, and for every other ‘vanity’ that the ‘world’ might ‘thrust forth’ (2.1.17–26). Among his more trenchant opponents, he is considered a grossly wasteful and ‘degenerate King’: ‘More hath he spent in peace’, Northumberland observes bitterly, than ‘his ancestors … in wars’ (2.1.252–5). The answer to Willoughby’s telling question, ‘But what, i’God’s name, doth become of this?’ (2.1.251) – i.e. of all the money the king has squandered – is unstated, yet mathematically precise: ‘nothing’. In Richard II, then, Shakespeare places centre stage a king one of whose major problems appears to be an excessive materialism: he is a man obsessed with ‘stuff’, from hollow crowns and looking-glasses to exotic thoroughbred (‘Barbary’) horses. Why, we might ask, does Shakespeare do this? One way to consider this question is to look to historical accounts of the

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reign of Richard II, particularly during the years dramatized by Shakespeare’s play: 1397–9. Doing so can be illuminating, in part because what is reported of Richard’s extravagance in the play has long been supported not just by medieval chronicles, many compiled after Richard’s downfall, but also by more objective documentary sources.19 Some of this material was certainly available to Shakespeare through Holinshed’s Chronicles. Here, Shakespeare could not have failed to notice, for example, a famous detail that confirms how Richard was ‘in his time exceeding sumptuous in apparell’: ‘one cote’ alone, ‘which he caused to be made for him of gold and stone’, was valued ‘at 30000 marks [£20,000]’. Whether this gorgeous garment ever existed is debateable, but its presence in early accounts of Richard’s reign certainly bolsters the sense that, as Holinshed’s Chronicles summarizes it, this was famously a ‘prodigall’ monarch who, to his cost in more ways than one, ‘mainteined the most plentifull house that ever any king in England did either before his time or since’.20 Historically, Richard did indeed like to spend money, not just on sumptuous apparel and hospitality but also on acquiring an extensive range of objets de luxe typical of ‘an extravagant, luxury-loving prince’ who ‘took a delight in beautiful objects’. He personally owned ‘a large and valuable collection of goldsmiths’ work and plate’, and spent lavishly on ‘clothing, jewellery, tapestry and objets d’art generally’, including such exquisite artworks as the famous Wilton Diptych.21 Chris Given-Wilson’s careful assessment of the king’s finances likewise confirms that Richard’s reputation as a spendthrift king was by no means mythical. The last two years of his reign – the period specifically dramatized by Shakespeare  – were characterized by ‘reckless extravagance’. His domestic expenditure ‘soared’ between 1397 and 1399, and not just because he was maintaining such a large household or having to fund a war in Ireland. Rather, it was due to the king’s own ‘inordinate extravagance’: his ‘rapidly escalating acquisition of things beautiful – clothes, fur, and finery’; ‘the conspicuous consumption of luxury goods’.22

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Such opulence could be understood as part of a tactical exhibition of power from a king who appears to have valued ceremony, display and obedience to an inordinately high degree. As such, Richard II’s great expenditure may reflect some ‘political calculation’, as Nigel Saul puts it: a desire to signal supremacy in an era when, as Given-Wilson notes, royalty was expected to ‘provide a permanent spectacle of majesty’ through ‘splendour and luxury’.23 In this, Richard would have been far from unusual among medieval kings. Besides, displaying ‘magnificence’ – wealth, power, prestige – was considered a duty of all monarchs. It was a sign not only of wisdom, as had been argued in Richard’s own time, but also of manliness: of a king taking seriously his adult responsibilities, including those of maintaining a generous household and indulging in luxurious gift-giving.24 Shakespeare, though, appears to be uninterested in any such defences of Richard II’s extravagance. No one in the play, not even the king himself, speaks of ‘magnificence’ as a monarchal duty or hints at the possibility that Richard’s materialistic excesses might serve to convey a manlier mode of majesty. However much they endeared him to Walter Pater, making him a kindred spirit of late-nineteenth-century fin de siècle decadence, Richard’s love of gorgeous things and his reputation for spending profligately on them undermine rather than underwrite his regal authority in the play. No political strategy or advantage lies behind Richard’s policy of recklessly ‘consuming means’ (2.1.39) and wasting the kingdom’s resources, apparently for his own pleasure. It is, however, an object much simpler than any jewel, goblet, robe or crown that might serve best to mark historically the material character of this king’s reign: the handkerchief. Quite possibly invented by Richard II himself, his introduction to the late-fourteenth-century English court of this fashionable novelty may add significantly, we might think, to his reputation as an aesthete of delicate sensibilities and as the chief proponent of a courtly milieu renowned for its ‘opulence in dress’ and modish ‘magnificence’. Yet, as the historian George Stow

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argues, and as Shakespeare’s Othello would no doubt agree, no ‘thing’ is entirely innocent, especially a handkerchief. This object too appears to have been a sign of Richard marking ‘his reassertion of royal power in the 1390s’ in a signally textile way, alongside other forms of insignia designed to be flaunted by his loyal followers.25 It is this Richard, for whom power over subjects is expressed in a conspicuous display of objects, from gem-studded gowns to that stylish royal accessory, the handkerchief, whom Shakespeare places before us in Richard II: a king of things, destined to become a thing of nothing.

The stuff of power According to the terms in which Richard II has been framed so far, it would be tempting to see Shakespeare as having staged in his ‘degenerate King’ not just a notorious figure of medieval history but also the ‘feudal subject of jouissance’ par excellence: ‘the subject of dissipated wealth, of impetuous and unproductive consumption’, who ‘realizes himself’ only ‘in caprice, in arbitrary and bizarre whims’ and who, in pursuing ‘unbridled prodigality’ and ‘waste … recognizes himself as transient’, and his ‘wealth’ as ‘a thing’ only to be ‘annihilated’.26 One might take this description to be a pithy account of Shakespeare’s Richard II, certainly as the king’s critics and opponents in the play regard him, Gaunt and Northumberland among them. Our problem, though, is that the play refuses to show us this spectacle of luxurious ‘waste’. We hear about Richard’s prodigality but we never see it, the effect of which can be unsettling.27 When Gaunt castigates his nephew’s ‘rash fierce blaze of riot’ (2.1.33), we may well be left wondering ‘what riot’?28 Richard himself admits in 1.4 that ‘our coffers with too great a court / And liberal largesse are grown somewhat light’ (1.4.43–4), but we never see him emptying them, riotously or

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otherwise. Costume could signal a certain decadence on stage, as might the theatrical dressing of 1.4: a behind-the-scenes moment in which the king is shown actively plotting to obtain ‘large sums of gold’ (1.4.50). Beyond that, the only point at which we are permitted to imagine Richard actually handling the stuff his dreams are made on is when, immediately after Gaunt’s death has been announced, he declares ‘we do seize to us’ his late uncle’s ‘plate’ (i.e. anything wrought of precious metal, including household utensils and cutlery) along with any ‘coin, revenues and moveables’ (2.1.160–2, 210). As undignified as it would be, we could envisage Richard starting to ‘seize to us’ quite literally some of the ‘plate’ and ‘moveables’ present on stage: grabbing the swag on the spot, as it were, in a crude act of royal looting. That Shakespeare could have included more of this on-stage villainy is made all the more obvious by the closest theatrical counterpart to Shakespeare’s Richard II: the anonymously authored Thomas of Woodstock. Here, the aspects of Richard’s reign merely reported in Shakespeare’s play are openly dramatized, from the outlandish fashions adopted by the king’s favourites to the enforcement of those scandalous ‘blank charters’: empty pieces of paper – literal ‘blanks’ on which ‘there’s nothing writ’ – that become transformed in Woodstock into ‘cartloads of money’.29 Woodstock’s 4.1 opens with the Lord Chief Justice, Tresilian, surrounded by ‘bags of money’, tallying the king’s, and his own, profits from those pernicious (though actually mythical, rather than historical) ‘blank charters’.30 By the end of this scene, Richard is shown signing over to his favourites all of his regal privileges and possessions – ‘crown lands, lordships, manors, rents, taxes, subsidies’ (the list goes on), as well as the right to ‘seize the lands and goods’ of anyone they wish – all for the princely sum (paid directly to the king) of £7,000 a month (Woodstock 4.1.181–94). By his own admission, and without too much regret, this king thus becomes ‘a landlord to this warlike realm / Rent[ing] out our kingdom like a pelting farm’ (Woodstock 4.1.147–8).

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It is easy to understand why commentators have long considered Woodstock one of the potential sources of Shakespeare’s Richard II, or even its prequel or ‘Part I’. Yet, we can also see how Shakespeare’s play eschews Woodstock’s more Marlovian dramatic mode: that of combining on-stage spectacle (bags of gold, extravagant costume) with a king’s overreaching ambition to out-dazzle all with the splendour of his ‘bounty, state and royalty’ – ‘Let the records say, “Only King  Richard did it”’, he cries – while being willing in the process to ‘Let crown and kingdom waste, yea life and all’ (Woodstock 3.1.90, 93; 4.1.125). That Shakespeare chooses not to give us such a drama is telling. On the one hand, it allows him to preserve a balance of sympathies: staging Richard as visibly addicted to luxury or enthralled by gold in the mode of another Volpone or Barabas is thereby avoided. On the other, it allows Shakespeare to signal Richard’s materialism – his weakness for things – primarily through language: as a matter of psychology and ‘character’, not just action. A good example can be found at the very end of 1.4. Having decided, even before his uncle’s death, to seize Gaunt’s assets in order to fund his military expedition to Ireland (1.4.37–52), Richard announces: ‘The lining of his coffers shall make coats / To deck our soldiers for these Irish wars’ (1.4.61–2). While the sequence of this statement leaves ‘these … wars’ somewhat at the rear of the king’s thinking, at the forefront of his mind is the ‘lining’ of Gaunt’s (and, by rights, Bolingbroke’s) ‘coffers’: they are ‘lined’ (metaphorically) with valuables (i.e. coin). Yet the phrasing suggests that any textile material more literally ‘lining’ the insides of Gaunt’s ‘coffers’ will not escape his rapacious grasp either: he will have it all. Such stuff, moreover, will not simply provide ‘coats’ for Richard’s soldiers; it will ‘deck’ them. This is no neutral synonym for dress or equip. Rather, ‘deck’ implies something distinctly sumptuous and decadent: ‘To clothe in rich or ornamental garments; to cover with what beautifies; to array, attire, adorn’.31 Richard returns to this sense in 4.1, of course, when acknowledging that he has turned ‘traitor’ to himself in having ‘given here my soul’s

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consent / T’undeck the pompous body of a king’ (4.1.248–50). In 1.4, however, his thoughts are focused only on what he can grab from a soon-to-be-dead Gaunt to guarantee that his soldiers are not merely ready to ‘supplant’ those materially inferior ‘rough rug-headed kerns’ (2.1.156) – ‘rug’ being ‘coarse woollen cloth’32 – but that they are superlatively attired to do so. His mind appears to be less on the conflict ahead and more on the glorious apparel of his men: the best that (stolen) money will buy. That Shakespeare allows us to register Richard II’s materialism, first and foremost, through tricks of speech that mark some distinct habits of mind can be noted in other linguistic traits that Shakespeare engineers for him: his propensity, for instance, to quantify (‘large sums of gold’; ‘a little pin’; ‘my large kingdom’; ‘a little grave’); to double or even treble things through repetition (‘a little … little, little grave’); to throw numbers around, often inflating them in the process (twelve thousand Welsh soldiers instantly becoming twenty thousand and then (in the Folio at least) forty thousand (3.2.70, 76, 85), while ‘twelve’ and ‘one’ become ‘twelve thousand’ (and then ‘none’) in the deposition scene (4.1.171–2)); and, as we have already noted, to gather things into lists. For what are lists other than things in themselves designed to signal a ‘relationship of accumulation’ between the items they gather? As Francis Spufford posits, list-makers are ‘impresarios of matter’, ‘commanding’ all sorts of ‘things’ to ‘dance together’. Yet, because a list ‘can contain anything’, then, paradoxically, it ‘comes perilously close to being … nothing in itself’, offering ‘a brief intimation’ both of ‘everything’ and of ‘nothingness’: all very ‘Richard’, we might say.33 Such techniques for revealing the rocky inner constitution of Richard’s character are related to another dramatic point. Rather than presenting us with Woodstock’s king, whose openly corrupt gathering of wealth is matched only by his extravagant wasting of it, Shakespeare’s Richard II offers us a monarch who cannot be shown spending to excess because he is, in effect, already ‘spent’. The spectacle Shakespeare presents

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in Richard II is, in fact, that of a ruler who is, as Willoughby puts it bluntly, ‘bankrupt like a broken man’ (2.1.257): one who has had not only to employ tyrannical devices (blank charters, forced loans, unsustainable rates of taxation) and to seize property and land simply to keep afloat, but also to lease out his kingdom like a ‘landlord’, as Gaunt puts it, and farmout the realm’s taxes, all for quick access to cash (1.4.45–50; 2.1.57–60, 109–14). Given that medieval English kings (including Richard II) did indeed pawn their jewel-encrusted coronets to raise money, Northumberland’s indignant comment that England’s ‘blemished crown’ must now be redeemed from ‘broking pawn’ may not be simply rhetorical (2.1.293).34 Either way, it points to the fact that, as political drama, Shakespeare’s Richard II may be less concerned with the ‘existential nature of a de-crowned king’, or even with the question of what happens to a king ‘when he is separated from the possessions that originally seemed to sustain – even to constitute – him’, as it is with a simpler but no less profound dilemma: what is a king without money, without access to ‘large sums of gold’?35 That criticism of Richard II has too little regarded the king’s key problem as fundamentally financial may seem surprising given the emphasis Shakespeare places upon Richard’s money troubles from the very start.36 Traditionally in discussions of Richard II the major issue – the key cause or matter – deemed to be at stake from the outset is the murder of Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester. This is the play’s ‘original sin’, according to H. R. Coursen, constituting an ‘anti-sacramental crime’, a ‘defection of sovereignty’ that marks the beginning of Richard’s decline into tyranny.37 Identifying those responsible for the killing of Gloucester is the res (i.e. the legal matter, case or ‘thing’) with which the play begins, once again, conspicuously in medias res. Yet, Gloucester’s assassination is only one of a catalogue of accusations presented by Bolingbroke in 1.1, the first of which, crucially, has to do with cash: ‘Mowbray hath received eight thousand nobles’, Bolingbroke begins, ‘In name of lendings for your highness’ soldiers, / The which he hath detained for lewd employments, / Like a false traitor and

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injurious villain’ (1.1.88–91). Mowbray’s answer to this ‘lie’ is clear: he ‘Disbursed’ ‘Three parts of that receipt’ for the king’s soldiers at Calais, he explains, but ‘reserved’ the ‘other part’ for himself, ‘by consent / For that my sovereign liege was in my debt’ (1.1.126–31). The significance of both of these statements is easy to overlook given the more sensational allegation of Gloucester’s murder that follows, but they are there to be noted, quite clearly, for what they tell us about a king whom we are encountering in the play for the very first time. Given that, as Sandra K. Fischer observes, Bolingbroke’s ‘initial complaint against Mowbray is essentially economic’, we might start to wonder why it is that any monarch would be left indebted to one of his courtiers in this way.38 Can a king personally be in debt, we might ask? If so, in what state must his finances be? Royal courts always relied on loans, of course, and, as Theodore Leinwand has illustrated, some Continental regimes did go bust in Shakespeare’s time.39 Even so, we detect some unease about this particular arrangement between Richard and Mowbray that Bolingbroke, astutely, brings out into the open. This tactic is especially effective when it comes to the precise point of Bolingbroke’s initial charge: that money meant for English soldiers at Calais did not reach them. While Bolingbroke’s aim here is to indict Mowbray as an ‘injurious’ thief who has diverted into his own pocket funds intended for England’s armed forces, the real weight of his accusation rests on a word all too easily missed: ‘lendings’, being specifically an advance of money granted to military personnel when their regular wages could not be paid.40 This word allows Bolingbroke to draw attention to a more serious problem with both the king’s finances and the kingdom’s security. Instead of receiving regular pay, Richard’s soldiers, rather like the king himself it seems, are surviving on ‘lendings’. What kind of a regime, we might ask, can no longer afford to pay its army? How long can it last? While this question may have touched a nerve amongst Elizabethan audiences sensitive to the financial ‘abuse’ that

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‘lendings’ perennially represented, we can see that Bolingbroke’s aim in 1.1 is to embarrass Richard not just over any part he has played in the murder of their uncle, Gloucester, but also over problems to do with money, debt and soldiers’ wages.41 Indeed, questions of indebtedness and cash are introduced by Shakespeare at the start of 1.1 in order to underscore a simple but nevertheless fundamental point: that sovereignty, as David Glimp puts it, ‘takes money’.42 Any regime depends on money, that is, simply to function and, as such, it must be taken from subjects, usually in the fiscal process of raising and collecting taxes in order, for example, to fund wars and to ensure that soldiers are fed, equipped and paid. As the crucial grouping of 1.4, 2.1 and 2.2 shows, everyone in the play recognizes this fact – including Richard, a king supremely aware that what he needs most, as he states quite frankly in 1.4, are ‘large sums of gold’. Soldiers, after all, require not just sumptuous coats but regular pay, in hard cash. Yet, Richard’s problem lies not just in the tyrannical ways in which he is prepared to raise his ‘large sums of gold’ but also in the fact that none of the means he employs appears to solve his cash-flow troubles. Despite farming the realm, distributing agents with blank charters, seizing Bolingbroke’s land and revenues, and having ‘pilled’ the ‘commons’ (2.1.246) with punishing rates of taxation, when Richard goes to Ireland, leaving his uncle, the Duke of York, to oversee his domestic affairs, the king appears to have banked on York funding things at home at his own expense, having left him nothing by way of financial resource. In 2.2, York enters panic-stricken and exasperated by Bolingbroke’s armed rebellion precisely because he has nothing with which to raise and equip a defence force. Immediately ordering a servant ‘to my sister Gloucester’, bidding her to ‘send me presently a thousand pound’ (2.2.90–1), he discovers that such a route to ready cash has already gone: like Gaunt, she is dead – ‘bankrupt’ of life, as York puts it elsewhere (2.1.151). ‘I know not what to do’, he concludes dismally: ‘How shall we do for money for these wars?’ (2.2.100, 104)

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‘How shall we do for money for these wars?’ It is this blunt question that prepares us for Shakespeare’s remarkable staging of the king’s return from Ireland in 3.2, a scene that exemplifies Richard’s key problem: that without an army or the means of raising one – without the funds to pay for soldiers or ‘friends’ to supply them – how can he be told ‘I am a king?’ (3.2.175–7). In which case, what actually constitutes sovereignty in this play: divine right, or material power? It is this dilemma that structures 3.2 from start to finish. When first we encounter Richard in 3.2 we meet a monarch certainly wrong-footed by Bolingbroke’s rebellion but otherwise meditatively confident of the outcome. He has arrived from Ireland, after all, believing – unlike York – that he has the two things that will enable him to meet the revolt comfortably: soldiers and financial support. The kinds of fantastical thinking in which the king indulges when first appearing in 3.2 are the products of this confidence. He is indeed at leisure to articulate a ‘senseless conjuration’ that calls for venomous spiders, toads and adders to defend England’s ‘native king’ (3.2.4–26), and to declare too that ‘Not all the water in the rough rude sea / Can wash the balm off from an anointed king’ (3.2.54–5), precisely because, at this point, he thinks he has everything he needs to face down ‘this thief, this traitor, Bolingbroke’ (3.2.47): plenty of men, plenty of money. The Bishop of Carlisle, evidently alarmed by Richard’s initial display of paganism – his faith in the earth’s powers to assist him – advises him to embrace instead ‘The means that heavens yield’ for ‘succour and redress’ (3.2.27–32). But he is preaching to the choir. Richard assumes that these ‘means’ are safely in hand, and a materialistic trick of thought once again reveals how his mind is working in this respect: ‘For every man that Bolingbroke hath pressed / To lift shrewd steel against our golden crown, / God for His Richard hath in heavenly pay / A glorious angel’ (3.2.58–61). Richard can make such a claim, of course, not because he believes it, but because he believes that he does not have to believe it: having twelve thousand Welsh soldiers at his command (Bolingbroke appears to have only ‘three thousand men of war’ (2.1.286)), as well as York’s

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anticipated ‘power’ on its way (3.2.90, 143, 186, 192), why would he need an army of ‘angels’ to ‘fight’ for him (3.2.61)? But Richard appears to be doubly bent on material things at this point: not just on the land he handles as his own personal possession – ‘my kingdom … my earth … my gentle earth’ (3.2.5–12) – but also on a God whom he imagines operating, just like him, on a purely mercenary basis, having ‘in pay’ ‘A glorious angel’ for each man ‘pressed’ (i.e. forced) into action by Bolingbroke. Critics have been fooled into thinking that such language expresses ‘a theological fantasy of omnipotence’ out of touch with ‘political realities’, and that Richard is indeed ‘psychologically wedded’ to ‘a mystical concept of kingship’.43 No such thing. The only kind of ‘angel’ that matters to Richard is the gold coin (‘angel’) on which his ‘golden crown’ depends. As these numismatic puns reveal, the only ‘earthly means’ that means anything to him is money.44 All of this confidence evaporates, of course, with the sequence of announcements that follows. Salisbury brings his ‘Discomfort’ first, revealing what we already know from 2.4: that the Welsh soldiers – ‘twelve thousand fighting men!’, a number immediately inflated to ‘twenty thousand’ by a visibly staggered Richard – have either ‘gone to Bolingbroke’, or ‘dispersed and fled’ (3.2.70, 74, 76). Salisbury explains to the king that the Welshmen disbanded ‘hearing thou wert dead’ (3.2.73). Yet, as ever, the play’s language betrays what the real problem may be. The fact that the Welsh forces have ‘dispersed’ (we hear this word three times: at 2.4.4, 3.2.74 and 3.3.2) hints that they may also have been ‘dis-pursed’ – unpaid, left out of pocket – while anticipating too the unlikelihood of Richard ever being able to reimburse them for their services. Joining Bolingbroke – or just going home – would evidently prove a better bet. Any hope that the king might have placed in his closest followers, Bushy, Green and Wiltshire, also wilts fast. Assuming at first that they too have betrayed him by defecting to Bolingbroke, Richard’s outburst may seem not merely malevolent but unhinged, as he curses them suddenly to ‘Terrible hell’ as ‘villains, vipers damned without redemption!’, ‘Snakes …

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that sting my heart!’, and ‘Three Judases, each one thrice worse than Judas!’ (3.2.129–34). What seems to be an unwarranted fit of hysteria makes more sense, however, when we realize that these are the men to whom Richard has ‘farmed’ the right to raise taxes and granted sole use of those ‘blank charters’ to raise cash on his behalf (1.4.45–50). Wiltshire, moreover, has been given the additional responsibility – the ‘business’ – of seizing (and liquidating) Gaunt’s (or rather Bolingbroke’s) assets (2.1.215–17). These are the only supporters of Richard, in other words, who have the material means, as York concedes in 2.2, to ‘muster men’ (2.2.108, 118) in his defence. These are the ‘friends that flattered him’, whom the king will now (note the pun) have to ‘try’ (2.2.85): that is, approach for money, but also test as either counterfeit ‘friends’ or true.45 Any hint of their betrayal may well inspire a personal invective stemming from a wounded ‘heart’ (3.2.131), but Richard also registers his real losses here: the taking with them of all of his money, without which he is indeed lost. His description of them as ‘Judases’ becomes all the more pointed, not just because it positions Richard in the elevated role of Christ being sold for the equivalent of thirty pieces of (Bolingbroke’s) silver, as he at first assumes, but also because he was relying on them as ‘Judases’ in a quite different apostolic sense. For Judas was, of course, the keeper of the disciples’ purse: the carrier of the cash, the bearer of the bag (Jn 13.29).46 As the light of Scroop’s final announcement – that ‘Your uncle York is joined with Bolingbroke’ (3.2.200) – breaks upon the scene, Richard discharges the small ‘power’ (3.2.211) he has retained and, sensibly, retires to Flint Castle asking, quite simply, ‘What comfort have we now?’ (3.2.206). What evidently seemed impossible to him at the beginning of 3.2 has, by its conclusion, already happened: the king has (and is) lost. Richard’s problem – why he loses crown, kingdom and all – is not one of political theology or psychological breakdown. What has made ‘short work’ of ‘divine right’, to borrow one critic’s apt phrasing, is the absence of ‘comfort’.47 Repeated in one form or another at least eight times throughout 3.2,

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this word alone tips Richard’s fortunes towards tragedy. The ‘ordinary current sense’ of ‘to comfort’ is, as OED puts it, ‘To soothe in grief or trouble; to relieve of mental distress; to console, solace’: precisely what Aumerle attempts (3.2.75, 82). But the original (i.e. etymological) and also legal senses of ‘comfort’ (from the Latin confortare, to strengthen) is evidently what Richard has in mind: ‘To lend support or countenance to; to support, assist, aid; to abet, countenance, “back up”’.48 The annihilation of this type of ‘comfort’ in the practical, material form of ‘power’ – money, soldiers, friends, supporters – is what Richard faces in 3.2: hence his forlorn lament of despair and resignation, lifted straight from Holinshed’s Chronicles, ‘What comfort have we now?’ (3.2.206) – the unspoken answer to which is ‘none’, ‘zero’, ‘nothing’.49 Shakespeare has, of course, been preparing us for this discomfiting of King Richard since 2.2. York, out of his wits over how to defend a kingdom without any cash, makes the same point plaintively in the face of Bolingbroke’s armed return from banishment: ‘Comfort’s in heaven’, he states, ‘and we are on the earth, / Where nothing lives but crosses, cares and grief’ (2.2.78–9). ‘Crosses’ here means not just worldly trials and tribulations, as editors usually gloss it, but also pennies, known as ‘crosses’ in Shakespeare’s time because of the simple cruciform design impressed upon them (as on halfpennies and farthings too).50 With nothing but ‘crosses’ by which to live, York knows that ‘comfort’ really is ‘in heaven’, beyond the earthly reach of any king whom all ‘nobles’ have ‘fled’ (2.2.88): another numismatic pun, these ‘nobles’ being not just Richard’s aristocratic allies but also, once again, coins (as also at 1.1.88 and 5.5.67).51 No wonder Richard meditates so sadly in 3.2 on how the crown ‘That rounds the mortal temples’ of a king has become for him a ‘hollow’ nought, yielding neither cash nor credit, and therefore neither power nor the ‘respect, / Tradition’ and ‘ceremonious duty’ that usually accompany sovereignty (3.2.160–1,172–7). For the ‘antic’ who sits in the empty O of Richard’s ‘hollow crown’, ‘Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp’, is evidently not just ‘Death’ but debt: it

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too, it seems, can burst the inflated bubble of bankrupt majesty with a ‘little pin’ – and ‘farewell, king!’ (3.2.162–70). Having treated kingdom and crown like a purse simply to be filled and emptied at will, one of the great ironies of this play lies in Richard II’s apparent obliviousness to the link between his lack of ‘comfort’– militarily, politically and psychologically – and his evident weakness for ‘comforts’ in that other and, for us, more typical sense: material ‘things’ that produce or minister ‘to enjoyment and content’.52 Fittingly, just before Richard’s death, Shakespeare presents him in a state of ‘crushing penury’ (5.5.34), stripped of his creature comforts, ‘degraded and deprived’, in a place distinctly reminiscent of the ‘hard world’ (5.5.21) of the early modern debtors’ prison.53 Having become a living emblem of inversus mundus – transformed, that is, from ‘king’ to ‘beggar’ almost overnight – this beggar-king accepts his final humiliation in the Groom’s sad tale of the loss of his last princely possession: his horse, ‘Barbary’. Like the kingdom, Barbary too seems to have succumbed to the usurping rule of its ‘proud’ new owner, ‘jauncing Bolingbroke’ (5.5.78–94). Bolingbroke, by contrast, despite having been banished and deprived of his inheritance – his lands, goods and revenues, his ‘signories’ and ‘lineal royalties’ (3.1.22; 3.3.113) – receives from the close of 2.1 onwards all of the ‘comfort’ (soldiers, equipment, credit and support, from both the aristocracy and the common people) necessary to challenge the king not only for the property that is rightfully his, but also for a crown that is not. So King Bolingbroke, as Richard recognizes in 5.5, has it all – nobles and nobles, ryals (or royals) and royalty, sovereigns and sovereignty – while poor Richard is left with nothing: no cross, no crown.

The stuff of tragedy Of what, then, might the stuff of Richard II’s tragedy be said to be made? As Peter J. Smith’s chapter in this volume illustrates,

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real estate is usually seen as the prime ‘substance’ at stake in Richard II, with the seizing of Gaunt’s land in 2.1 often being viewed as the king’s final, unpardonable crime: ‘Richard’s tragic error’.54 For, in violating the law and custom of property inheritance, the king dismantles his own authority, indeed his regal identity: ‘Be not thyself’, York cautions Richard in 2.1, ‘for how art thou a king / But by fair sequence and succession?’ (2.1.198–9). Yet, the stuff of Richard II’s tragedy – the ‘substance’ upon which his reign depends – is defined by neither the territories nor the trappings of monarchy, but by money: the stuff into which, as James E. Berg points out, Richard II seeks to liquidate not only Bolingbroke’s inheritance but, according to Gaunt, the entire kingdom.55 When this source of power is no longer available, Richard becomes insolvent not just financially but existentially, liquidating himself into the only thing he can still coin as a bankrupt king: his own tears. If money could be regarded in the early modern period as the sinews of war and the nerves of state it could also be viewed, as Stephen Deng illustrates, as the blood of peace, in which case Richard II’s greatest crime may well lie in having threatened the healthy circulation of the very substance that enables the body politic to function, and him to survive with it as its head.56 What Richard II might exemplify in this respect is, as Rebecca Lemon reminds us, a simple lesson in economic politics: that any ‘king overcome by poverty necessarily rules badly’ not just because this leads to the oppression of subjects but also because it leaves the kingdom ‘essentially available to the highest bidder’.57 Who wields regal power thus becomes a matter of accounting: of debits and credits. As the astute Gardener puts it to Queen Isabel in 3.4, in ‘the balance of great Bolingbroke, / Besides himself, are all the English peers’, whereas in the defeated Richard’s ‘scale is nothing but himself / And some few vanities’: ‘And with that odds he [Bolingbroke] weighs King Richard down’ (3.4.82–9). Anticipating the imagery of balances and buckets that Richard himself employs in 4.1, the Gardener’s point could not be clearer: the futures of both men (their ‘fortunes’) are to be ‘weighed’ by the ‘fortunes’

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(the amassed wealth) that the one has wasted and the other has recovered, with interest (3.4.84). Nothing else, not even Richard’s divinely-appointed and ceremonially-anointed status as God’s deputy, carries any weight. In Richard II, then, there can be no escaping the fact that the crown depends on crowns, power on nobles, and divine right on angels.58 In a way that critics have been slow to appreciate by comparison to, say, Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays, Richard II becomes, in these terms, a deeply numismatic tragedy: a drama that draws attention to the language of money in ‘concentrated clusters of ambiguity’, as David Hawkes puts it, in order to foreground its intricately interwoven ‘nexus of financial and psychological processes’.59 Suitably enough, it is just before Richard’s death in 5.5 that Shakespeare returns us once again to this ‘nexus’ of numismatic signification, when a penniless Richard meets the Groom’s ‘Hail, royal Prince!’ (5.5.67) with a further, final recognition of what he now lacks: hard cash. Neither ‘royal’ nor even ‘noble’, this erstwhile king puns that he is hardly worth the ‘groats’ that constitute the difference between these two types of coin (a sum total of forty pence). Indeed, Richard’s word is no longer ‘sterling’, as he puts it (4.1.264): worth not a penny, as the term ‘sterling’ properly denotes. His authority, indeed his royal image – the face that might otherwise have been impressed upon the coin of the realm, and which he dashes into fragments in 4.1 – simply has no ‘currency’: befitting his ‘bankrupt’ majesty, it no longer possesses either ‘intrinsic’ or ‘extrinsic’ (i.e. ‘face’) ‘value’.60 Yet, in Richard II money also takes shape as that other key substance upon which the king’s regime stands and falls: debt. From the opening account of the king’s indebtedness to Mowbray to the recurrence of ‘bankrupt’ throughout the play – a word that appears in Richard II more often than in any other of Shakespeare’s works – debt stalks this drama.61 While historians have long recognized that Richard’s real problem was not extravagance as much as an inability ‘to meet his debts’ – to return the ‘great summes of monie’ he had borrowed ‘with not one penie paid’, as Holinshed’s Chronicles

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puts it – the significance of what it means for Richard to be a ‘bankrupt’ king has yet to be fully registered by the play’s critics.62 When Gaunt declares in 2.1 that England ‘is now bound in with shame, / With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds’ (2.1.63–4), this criticism is typically understood as a condemnation of Richard’s employment of his financially corrupt ‘blank charters’. More simply and more accurately, though, ‘parchment bonds’ refer to those ubiquitous instruments of early modern credit and debt – bonds – giving whoever possessed them the legal right to seize and imprison the body of the debtor if full payment were not made by the date agreed, as contracted on parchment.63 Having the power to subject a defaulting debtor, in effect, to slavery, Gaunt’s castigation of Richard’s ‘parchment bonds’ illuminates the disastrous reign of a monarch whose debts have ‘bound’ with ‘shame’ the very nation, while rendering the king himself a ‘bondslave to the law’, not just in having ‘leased out’ the realm like the ‘Landlord of England’ (2.1.59–60, 113–14) but also in having become ‘bound’ – that is, enslaved by ‘law’ – to unpaid debts: debts to which the kingdom too has become shamefully ‘bound in’ and imprisoned.64 From such a situation arises a compelling series of questions. How could a king who defaults on his debts be prosecuted? Can a creditor really imprison the king’s body by way of forfeit, as the terms of any bond would permit?65 And which of the king’s ‘bodies’ would be seized as surety: the ‘natural’ person of the monarch, or the political body of kingdom and ‘Crown’? Such dilemmas are amplified by the fact that debt involves a form of levelling that, for any monarch, could easily lead to political, indeed existential, crisis. For, as David Graeber has observed, borrowing money – signing a bond, getting into debt – can perform an almost miraculous function: it turns a nothing, an absence of funds, into a substance, as if capital were being created out of thin air.66 But as a formal, legally binding contract of exchange, debt also establishes an equivalence between the two parties involved: an equality centred not in social status, moral obligation or mutual

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trust, but in the cold business of transaction, calculation and arithmetic, all legally and indeed violently enforceable through the ‘bond’.67 For Richard II to be subject to such a contract suggests that his sovereignty has been compromised before the play even begins. For to transact or borrow money personally would abase him, not simply by lowering the glory of majesty to the level of grubbing trade but by conferring on his creditors parity and autonomy; ‘which is the reason’, as Graeber notes, ‘that kings generally dislike getting themselves entangled in any sort of exchange’, and why monarchs are traditionally said never to carry any cash.68 To address Richard II in these terms is, of course, to see in it a striking affinity with Shakespeare’s later tragedy of money, debt and betrayal, Timon of Athens (co-authored with Thomas Middleton, c. 1604–7). These two works have much more to say to each other than has yet been realized. But reading Richard II as the tragedy of a bankrupt king also compels us to return to some of the economic issues pressing Elizabethans at the time it was written. As the historian Craig Muldrew has illustrated, in the mid-1590s England faced a crisis in credit relations – an early modern credit-crunch – generated and exacerbated by a shortage of currency: a dearth of coinage. In a coin-deprived economy heavily reliant on credit, and which saw imprisonment for debt rising exponentially, putting before his audiences a figure unable to control the stuff upon which his own and others’ lives depend – money, debt – makes Shakespeare’s drama of a spendthrift king very much of and for its own time.69 For, as Leinwand asserts, the one thing ‘common to all English people in the early modern era’ was ‘debt’.70 Would an audience watching the play in the 1590s have seen Richard II, then, as a forbidding morality play, in which the crime of owing money remains an almost unpardonable sin, regardless of the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Forgiue us our dettes, as we also forgiue our detters’?71 Or, in appreciating in Richard’s situation a human crisis both ubiquitous and familiar, would the play’s early audiences have pitied him, as we might now? After all, debt is an almost universal human necessity, a basic

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requirement, as Graeber puts it, for anyone seeking ‘to achieve a life that goes in any way beyond survival’.72 Richard might also command some affinity with us not just as a beleaguered debtor but as a conspicuous consumer. As the historian Frank Trentmann has illustrated, at the point at which Shakespeare’s plays were being written and performed, the meaning of the verb ‘to consume’ was in a state of transformation. Its traditional and morally-weighted sense of to waste, exhaust and destroy – monetarily, by squandering one’s wealth, earnings or resources – was shifting to ‘something more positive and creative’, to do with enjoying materially the goods and services, fashionable luxuries and ‘domestic comfort’ that one might access as an active consumer.73 Positioning Richard II where these two alternative meanings of ‘consumption’ meet – to waste/destroy; to spend/enjoy – we can start to see Richard’s problems as a manifestation of our own ongoing negotiations with the socioeconomic facts of lifeand-debt. For the play asks of us, how are we to judge this beggar-king with a weakness for ‘consuming means’? Do we condemn him as a tyrant who subjects England to ‘Devouring pestilence’ (1.3.284)? Or do we identify with him as someone who derives a profound sense of self not from what he makes or achieves or produces, but from the things he buys, possesses, enjoys? Do we castigate Shakespeare’s Richard for pursuing a catastrophic policy of ‘waste’, or uphold him as an emblem of a thoroughly Renaissance and modern mode of conspicuous consumption: one that gives ‘shape and meaning to social life and identity’, and which makes pleasure and its goods an ‘impetus to human advancement’?74 Which side are we on?

The sovereignty of nothing As a tragedy of consumption and debt, Richard II reaches a fitting conclusion in the soliloquy that opens 5.5. Meditating in abject ‘penury’ on all that he has lost and all that he has

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become, seeing himself as no more than a mechanical object of grief – a ‘jack o’the clock’ (5.5.60) serving time at Bolingbroke’s behest  – the profound thought that Richard reaches in the middle of this speech is important to acknowledge for what it says, finally, about Shakespeare’s king as a thinking thing. For the man whose identity has been consumed throughout the play by stuff – land, money, crowns, mirrors, horses – appears, in the end, to be ‘eased’ by the thought of being released from all things in death: in finally ‘being’ (and ow(n) ing) ‘nothing’. We might follow Wilbur Sanders in reading Richard’s remarkable statement – ‘Nor I nor any man that but man is / With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased / With being nothing’ (5.5.39–41) – as expressing in its chiasmuslike completeness an all-enveloping nihilism: ‘a desire for the obliteration of consciousness’ along with an implicit rejection of any notion of an afterlife.75 ‘After Death nothing is, and nothing Death’, Richard seems to be saying: an annihilation so absolute that it leaves everything (or, rather, nothing) behind.76 Yet, we might also see in Richard’s words what the writer and philosopher Georges Bataille regards as a powerful reclamation of ‘sovereignty’: not of the ‘traditional’ type represented politically by monarchy, but rather a human ‘sovereignty’ freed from a ‘servile modality of being’ created by ‘the reign of money’ and sustained by the hollow ‘things’ that are bought and sold, exchanged and accumulated.77 ‘[N]othing sovereign’, Bataille proposes, ‘could come from things.’78 Rather, the truly ‘sovereign life’ – a life of ‘deep subjectivity’, lived ‘beyond utility’ – is available to the beggar and the king alike precisely because it is circumscribed by ‘emotional contact’, on the one hand, and by unproductive forms of consumption and expenditure – by waste – on the other: those of poetry and ritual, of laughter and festival, of tears and grief, music, jewellery and ‘sovereign moments’ of ‘senseless conjuration’.79 Though it may seem a ‘parody of affirmation’ to declare, as Richard does, ‘“I am nothing”’, nevertheless

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such an assertion serves Bataille as ‘the last word of sovereign subjectivity’: a subjectivity neither determined by nor ‘mixed with things’ but ‘freed from the dominion it wanted … to give itself over things’.80 Perhaps Richard II’s epiphany that no ‘man’ ‘shall be pleased till he be eased / With being nothing’ offers a final, redemptive glimpse into this sovereign mode of being: a consolation devoutly to be wished for an ‘alienated’ king who has become indeed a thing of nothing.81

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8 Learning and Teaching Resources: Text, Context and Performance Esme Miskimmin This chapter aims to assist both students and instructors in understanding and preparing to teach or study Richard II, exploring the text through the wider contexts of genre, history and performance. Beginning with a practical consideration of the key editions available, it will offer a series of potential exercises in close textual analysis, comparative studies and research activities. Suggestions are made for further reading available to instructors in preparing to deliver the exercises, and for students preparing for classroom discussion and assessment. Fundamental to all of this will be an awareness of the text as drama: the potential for performance inherent in the written word. There is a strong emphasis on how keeping in mind the relationship between the page and the stage can enhance both teaching and learning experiences. Here, we are considering as ‘text’ something that was a script to be heard and seen rather than read, and a consciousness of the aural nature of the language and its implied and concomitant action helps us to read in a more nuanced way.

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Which edition? Many editions of the play are available to students, and the individual volumes rather than collected works are of more use to them, providing as they do a wealth of material by way of introductions, critical essays, appendices and glosses. Of the single-play editions available, three in particular might be considered especially beneficial for instructors and students alike. The Arden (third series) edition, edited by Charles R. Forker, is the most thorough and will see students through to postgraduate study and beyond.1 The detailed introduction includes: discussion of the politics of the play in the context of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the ideology of monarchy; an extensive exploration of the play’s language; and information on its date, source materials and textual history. In relation to a performance-based focus on the play there is consideration of early venues and of staging in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the specific context of politics. The text itself is extensively annotated with glossarial material clarifying meanings of words and phrases, giving historical information, exploring past editorial choices and engaging in detailed technical analysis of Quarto/Folio discrepancies. This material, along with the longer notes and appendices, is carefully indexed for ease of use. All of this is invaluable to the student’s understanding of the play, but can also be utilized by the instructor to introduce and explore context and editing through the kinds of exercises suggested below. Instructors looking for an edition that might be more suited to students starting out on Shakespeare or in the early stages of study should consider the RSC edition, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen.2 The wider contextual material is less detailed than in the Arden edition, but it provides clear and concise information and presents the students with a very accessible introduction to the play. The glossarial material focuses solely on definition and clarification so as not to

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overwhelm an early stage student looking for assistance with Shakespeare’s language rather than an in-depth discussion of past editorial decisions or Shakespeare’s sources. Extra material includes a helpful scene-by-scene analysis, outlining events and suggesting elements of theme and characterization for the student to consider whilst reading. A fundamental premise of the RSC editions is the use of the First Folio (1623) as a copy-text, and there is therefore an accessible and useful introduction to the concepts of ‘Quarto’ and ‘Folio’ in the ‘About the Text’ section that outlines the potential impact of editorial decisions based on the play’s textual variants. As an example for the student this edition includes a list of all the changes to the oaths (‘heaven’ for ‘God’) that were made in the Folio as a result of the 1606 Act to Restrain Abuses of Players, a resource that might provoke a discussion of context or censorship in relation to the play, and also generate some close textual discussion about the nuances of meaning that the substitution achieves. As a distinctive feature of the RSC series, this edition places an emphasis on performance. As well as a concise introduction to ‘Shakespeare’s Career in the Theatre’, there is a useful consideration of the performance history of Richard II, and a ‘Director’s Cut’ interview with Claus Peymann and Michael Boyd, making this an excellent edition of the play from which to consider ‘stage’ as a focus of discussion, extending its usage to students of drama as well as literature. Finally, like the New Cambridge Shakespeare King Richard II, edited by Andrew Gurr, the Oxford Shakespeare edition by Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin might be seen as a happy medium between the two editions discussed so far in terms of depth and detail of the paratextual material.3 The introduction is wide ranging and includes an exploration of language and character, useful contextual material on the play’s politics and genre, and an explanation of the editorial procedures. This latter section sets out the various extant Quarto and Folio versions, and discusses the process by which editors make their decisions, including examples as

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a guide for ‘an interested but potentially confused reader’.4 A significant amount of introductory material is given over to ‘The Play on the Stage’, which is invaluable to students exploring a performance history of Richard II and its often contentious subject matter. The glossing in this edition is clear and not overwhelming to an early stage student, but goes beyond simply supplying explanations of words and phrases by providing useful commentary on the dramatic action. As with the Arden edition, there is a comprehensive index. Each of these editions has plenty to offer in terms of assisting close textual reading and understanding, and in generating discussion of the wider contexts of the play, such as those of genre, history, politics and performance. The editorial and paratextual material available in each also invites a consideration of how the text is composed and utilized, facilitating the discussion of the play as, variously, an adaptation of existing material, be it historical record or literary account, a composite text assembled from Quarto and Folio, and as source material in itself for later dramatic adaptations, such as Nahum Tate’s The History of King Richard the Second (1681).5 As we shall see, textual comparison based on any of these ideas can be a useful exercise for students approaching Shakespeare’s plays, and in terms of Richard II it can be particularly helpful for exploring the subjective nature of ‘history’ both as a concept and as a dramatic genre.

Richard II and performance Richard II is fundamentally concerned with spectacle and continually invites scrutiny of the concept of ‘performance’. The play opens with Richard’s summoning of Bolingbroke and Mowbray to court, where he sets ‘The accuser and the accused’ ‘Face to face / And frowning brow to brow’, making a public

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display of their antagonism (1.1.15–17). The subsequent throwing of the gages and Richard’s announcement that he will ‘see / Justice’, coupled with his instruction to the Marshall to ‘direct’ the resulting trial by combat (1.1.202–5) establishes from the outset the fundamentally dramatic nature of Richard’s court, and the king’s understanding of performance and spectacle in relation to power. Taking this as a starting point, students might consider the recurring language of theatre and performance throughout, identifying these metatheatrical instances and discussing their impact, such as Scroop’s comment that he ‘play[s] the torturer’ (3.2.198) when delivering Richard even more bad news in 3.2, or York’s description of the deposed king’s entrance into London being watched ‘idly’ but with ‘contempt’, ‘As in a theatre … / After a well-graced actor leaves the stage’ (5.2.23– 8), or Richard’s assertion in his soliloquy that ‘Thus play I in one person many people’ (5.5.31). This exercise can be achieved through the use of an electronic edition – accessible online through a number of reputable websites, as discussed below – with students looking for specific words such as ‘play’, ‘act’, ‘shadow’ – which for Shakespeare also denoted actor or player (as in MND 5.1.209, 417) – and ‘theatre’. It might be better practice in terms of getting to know the play’s structure and language, however, to closely read the text for such instances, so that the student achieves a sense of context and the nuances of the imagery. Identification and discussion of the language of theatre can focus attention on falsehood and identity, the relationship between public and private, and the nature of kingship and power as potentially performed. It also provides a useful tool for exploring the characterization of Richard, as the language of the stage is predominantly used by and about him: his acknowledgement that he ‘plays’ many people or parts so late in the play, for example, makes explicit his awareness of performance and perhaps causes us to re-evaluate the sincerity behind the various identities he has presented so far, especially in the ‘deposition scene’ (4.1.155–318).

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Thinking about original staging Focused, text-based explorations are at the heart of learning and teaching Richard II and are key to developing student understanding of context, editing history, source materials and their adaptation, and genre. They also help to address questions of staging. Although we cannot access the same sorts of accounts of specific performances given in Shakespeare’s time as we can of later performances, nonetheless we can establish details that suggest both the play’s popularity and its politically charged nature. The play was probably first performed around 1595 and was entered into the Stationers’ Register on 29 August 1597.6 Among records of its early performance is that on board the Red Dragon in 1607 (on which, see further Kate Wilkinson’s chapter in this volume). Students could undertake to research the most famous contemporary performance of 1601, when the Earl of Essex commissioned a performance at the Globe on the eve of his failed uprising against Elizabeth I, demonstrating the ways in which the play’s exploration of monarchy and treachery in medieval England resonated with a Tudor audience towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign. This episode is widely discussed: accounts can be found in all of the editions of the play listed above, with further, more detailed perspectives offered by historians such as Blair Worden, Paul E. J. Hammer and Peter Lake.7 Francis Edwards’s chapter on ‘Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex’ in his Plots and Plotters in the Reign of Elizabeth I likewise gives a wider historical context to the politics behind the event.8 An understanding of original staging practices and circumstances is also useful. Renaissance plays were, after all, written for specific stages that are quite unlike today’s theatres. For a very brief but informative summary, as mentioned above, the RSC Shakespeare edition’s ‘Shakespeare’s Career in the Theatre’ section includes a description of the playhouses. For more in-depth research,

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students will find several of Andrew Gurr’s works useful, with the extensive and informative The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642 being an excellent starting point for an understanding of the physical theatres, the staging of the plays, the companies and the resources available to them.9 Gurr’s Staging in Shakespeare’s Theatres, part of the ‘Oxford Shakespeare Topics’ series and co-written with Mariko Ichikawa, also provides a succinct introduction to the conditions and practices of original Shakespearean staging, drawing on the texts and other materials for their evidence.10 Arthur F. Kinney and Thomas Warren Hopper’s A New Companion to Renaissance Drama is equally useful: Part II of the volume, ‘Theater History’, has several essays which students will find invaluable, including David Kathman on ‘Playhouses’ and S. P. Cerasano on ‘Performance: Audience, Actors, Stage Business’.11 In terms of making clear the connections between the practices and circumstances of staging, Tiffany Stern has written several key texts, of which Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page is the best starting point for students making connections between Shakespeare in performance and in print.12 While this wider research is always of use to the student, more focused exercises utilizing the material might be employed by the instructor in helping them to apply this research to the play. One way to do this is by selecting specific critical material or information, in the form of a complete critical essay, or even a particular ‘sound bite’, and presenting it as a framing device for reading and discussing the text. Take as an example Douglas Bruster’s essay ‘The Dramatic Life of Objects in the Early Modern Theatre’, in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama.13 The essay in its entirety is hugely interesting, establishing as it does the significance of the handheld prop in early modern drama: their ‘open potential’, he argues, lies in their capacity to ‘relate characters to each other, and to larger elements in their dramatic worlds, as well as to qualify those relations, more fluidly than can such larger properties as costumes and scenic devices’.14 The focus on such props seems

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a fruitful way to approach a play with a clear awareness of performance, and students can easily put together a list of these items in Richard II: gages, letters, swords, the crown and the looking-glass, to name but a few. With specific reference to key episodes in the play, the students can then consider Bruster’s assertion that while, in drama, ‘Actors transport objects, and objects are placed in relation to actors’, nevertheless objects also ‘imitate and refer for humans, and are fabricated, used and evaluated by them’ in ways that ‘help to define human subjects’.15 In the throwing and taking up of the gages in 1.1, for example, the props used by the actors (usually gloves) become signs of Mowbray’s and Bolingbroke’s antagonism and an explicit representation of their ‘selves’, in as much as a glove is the casing and symbol of the hand. On a further level, however, the gage is a prop not just used by the actors but also by the characters in a power play performed before the king, implicating him directly at the point at which both Mowbray and Bolingbroke refuse to obey Richard’s royal command to ‘be ruled by me’ and resign each other’s pledges (1.1.152–205). This notion of a prop-as-a-prop highlights again the play’s awareness of theatricality elsewhere, and is exploited as such more significantly in 4.1 when Richard dramatically ‘unkings’ himself when offering the crown for Bolingbroke to ‘seize’, revealing his understanding of both the power of props theatrically and politically, especially in their transference between individuals and their visual impact on the audience (4.1.201–22). Within this scene are also the sceptre, the looking-glass, and Northumberland’s ‘paper’ summarizing Richard’s ‘grievous crimes’ (4.1.223), making it a particularly good focus for this exercise.16 A similar exercise might be to consider evidence of the comparative limitations of the early stage and the methods employed to evoke time, space and atmosphere. As an example, the RSC edition of Richard II summarizes that: ‘Shakespeare  … wrote for a bare platform stage with a standing audience gathered around it in a courtyard in full

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daylight. The audience were always conscious of themselves and of their fellow spectators, and they shared the same “room” as the actors.’17 This statement gives students two points for discussion of Richard II: the bare stage, and the presence and role of ‘audience’. If considered alongside the opening of Richard’s soliloquy in 5.5, which begins ‘I have been studying how I may compare / This prison where I live unto the world’ (5.5.1–2), the play’s discourse on performance is again made apparent, and the student can consider the movement from performance space to performed space. Just as Shakespeare makes his audience compare the bare stage to the ‘hard world’ of a ‘prison’, evoked by the ‘flinty ribs’ of its ‘ragged prison walls’, so too does his Richard, all alone, attempt to make that prison a peopled world: ‘for because the world is populous / And here is not a creature but myself’ (5.5.3–4, 20–1). Here, Richard articulates the imaginative process required to move from the one state of space to the other, and it is here that the presence and role of the audience is established, as they are simultaneously the co-creators of his mental world, sharing the thoughts that ‘people’ it, but also its inhabitants as they become, potentially, the figures that Richard conjures for himself, occupying the same ‘room’ as the actor/character. To begin to recognize the sophistication and the complexity involved in this kind of ‘play’, which is as philosophical as it is metatheatrical, will assist the student in understanding and further exploring the role of the audience in not just watching but also participating in Richard II, a concept present from Act  1. When Richard instructs his attendants to bring Bolingbroke and Mowbray ‘to our presence’ (1.1.15), he is arguably involving the theatre audience as part of the court, so that we too anticipate ‘see[ing] / Justice’ (1.1.202–3). Richard’s denial of the audience’s expectations by cancelling the chivalric trial by combat due to take place in 1.3 further emphasizes the potential power he has as king not just to manipulate spectacle but also to frustrate theatrical action, in this instance an eagerly awaited fight to the death.

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Exploring quarto and folio Students can take their understanding both of the play and of the relationship between the stage and the page a step further by exploring the development of the text they are reading as a composite of different versions and the result of careful editorial processes. To this end, comparative exercises between Quarto and Folio, variable in depth and detail according to the level of study, are valuable for students beginning to consider the processes of characterization and plot structure, and also for more advanced scholars getting to grips with detailed textual analysis. Instructors wishing to prepare such an exercise for students could take advantage of a number of online resources. The database Early English Books Online (EEBO) offers one way to access (typically through a subscribing academic library) the early Quarto (1597–1615) and First Folio (1623) printings of the play in facsimile, as well as later adaptations of the play, such as Tate’s The Sicilian Usurper.18 The free-to-read Internet Shakespeare Editions website also supplies links to photographic facsimiles of the early printed texts and provides a modernized version of the play (based on the 1597 First Quarto but incorporating the First Folio text’s ‘deposition’ scene) alongside complete old-spelling transcriptions of the First Quarto and the First Folio texts of Richard II, both of which may be compared to one another very easily.19 Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare is also available to subscribing libraries and institutions: another database presenting online access to transcriptions of the 1597 (Q1) and 1608 (Q4) texts of Richard II, alongside the play as it appears not just in the 1623 Folio but also in selected adaptations and editions of Shakespeare’s plays published throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.20 Among other free-to-access sites that provide online (usually searchable) versions of the play alongside selected early (Quarto/Folio) variants and other extensive resources worth exploring, the best is the Folger

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Shakespeare Library. This site includes the Folger Digital Texts edition of Shakespeare’s works and the EMED (Early Modern English Drama) ‘digital anthology’, both of which are accompanied by links to detailed information on the printing and performance of early modern plays, Shakespeare’s in particular.21 Of course, instructors may choose instead simply to consult the Arden edition, the extensive footnotes of which highlight where Quarto/Folio comparisons are to be made and provide in-depth discussion of the choices facing the editor, along with an appendix which provides a detailed history and assessment of the various early texts and a list of the occasions where Forker, basing his edition on Q1, adopts Folio readings of the play.22 Similarly, the RSC edition prints in full the Q1 passages that do not appear in the Folio.23 In terms of approaching the question of textual variants and their significance, a simple starting point for students might be a consideration of the omission or inclusion of larger sections of the play and the impact that either might have on plot, characterization and performance. The most obvious example would be the absence of the ‘deposition scene’ (4.1.155–318) from Q1 (1597), a version of which was first printed only in 1608 (Q4), so that by comparison to the scene as it appears in the Folio text, Carlisle’s defence of ‘noble’ Richard’s divine right to rule as God’s ‘captain, steward, deputy elect’ (4.1.115–50) and his prophecy of future civil war, bloodshed and woe are followed first by his arrest for ‘capital treason’ (4.1.152) and then by Bolingbroke’s declaration that ‘On Wednesday next we solemnly set down / Our coronation’ (4.1.319–20). The clearest issue for students here is the impact of omitting Richard from the deposition scene and with him his histrionic, but also politically problematic, ‘resignation’ of the crown, along with his theatrically and psychologically electrifying smashing of the mirror. How does the play change in terms of both the characterization of Richard, and indeed its overall dramatic and political import, if the audience witness neither his struggle to give up the crown nor his confrontation

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with his own reflection? How do we ‘read’ Bolingbroke and his legitimacy if he declares himself king in Richard’s absence? And how does this crucial scene, missing from Q1 and only printed long after Elizabeth I’s death, fuel speculation about the play’s relationship to politics and censorship? More detailed textual exercises are possible where students consider specific words and phrases that differ from version to version, evaluating the choices available to the editor of Richard II and the impact that the final decision has on aspects of character, scene dynamic, tone and reception by the audience. Both the Arden and Oxford editions provide details of Quarto/Folio discrepancies in their footnotes, making preparing such an exercise comparatively straightforward for the instructor. For less experienced students it may be enough to think about the titles given to the play in its different early printings: in Quartos 1–5 (1597–1615) the play appears as The Tragedie of King Richard the Second, whereas in the Folio the title is The Life and Death of King Richard the Second. Students might consider the implications of either describing or categorizing the play as a ‘tragedy’ when it comes not just to establishing its genre and tone but also in guiding audience expectations. By contrast, ‘the life and death of’ carries very different connotations of a factual, historical, perhaps even biographical, account. Comparing the play’s alternative titles offers a helpful and immediate way of highlighting the play’s balance between historical account and dramatized entertainment, and the creative tension between factual prose history and imaginative verse drama. Students thinking about the editing process in greater depth might also note more minor discrepancies in spelling, punctuation or word choice as a tool for understanding the evolution of the text. Is a textual variant between Q1 and First Folio the result of authorial revision, a printer’s error or a mishearing at a performance which is then recorded in the text as written/printed? To pose such questions can also be useful in helping students to understand the role of the editor

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in producing a ‘readable’ copy. An example of this occurs in 1.1, where Bolingbroke invokes ‘all the rites of knighthood else’ (1.1.75) in his challenge to Mowbray. We learn that, as opposed to Q1 or F, the Second Folio (1632) has ‘rights’ rather than ‘rites’. Both alternatives make sense, but the implications of Bolingbroke’s words change accordingly when fixed in print (a point made clear in the Arden editor’s footnote). An aural reception of the line delivered in performance, however, allows for both meanings to be registered simultaneously. An awareness of performance is important here, then, as hearing rather than seeing the word allows its ambiguity to be established more fully. For a listening audience, Bolingbroke’s chivalric ‘rites’ become, from the outset, inseparable from his ‘rights’, a key term that foreshadows here crucial events to come to do with Bolingbroke’s rights of inheritance, as York makes clear (2.1.195–201) when they are violated by Richard in 2.1; arguably the turning point in the play and in the king’s fate. Understanding that there is a process of selection and composition to most modern editions of the play generates understanding of the subjective nature of the texts and in turn an awareness of performance, as the staging of the play necessitates a similar process of subjective ‘editing’, either of a script or through the filter of director and actor in their interpretation of a character or a scene. Students wishing to learn more about the processes of editing Shakespeare in general could consult In Arden: Editing Shakespeare and Shakespeare and Textual Studies, both of which present a series of essays exploring the history and theory of editing practice as well as more specific subjects such as editing and feminism or editing and theatre practice.24 Equally useful are A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text edited by Andrew Murphy, John Jowett’s Shakespeare and Text in the ‘Oxford Shakespeare Topics’ series and volume 59 of Shakespeare Survey, dedicated to ‘Editing Shakespeare’, which also offers an extensive range of focuses including on editing in translation and gender and editing.25

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Thinking about Shakespeare’s sources As a play first performed over 400 years ago about events that took place in English history over six centuries ago, students will no doubt benefit from considering Richard  II alongside some of the sources consulted by Shakespeare when writing it. There are many good general introductions to Shakespeare’s source materials, and Kenneth Muir’s The Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays (1977; reissued in 2005) still remains one of the best.26 A more recent publication is John Kerrigan’s Shakespeare’s Originality, whose excellent introduction would help establish for students the issues surrounding Shakespeare’s identity as an adaptor rather than an originator: a concept which can surprise those starting out in Shakespeare studies.27 In terms of the specific sources for Richard II, Forker’s Arden edition provides a detailed introduction to the most significant: Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1587), Edward Hall’s Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York (1548), A Mirror for Magistrates (1559), Samuel Daniel’s First Four Books of the Civil Wars (1595), Woodstock (an anonymous play, possibly dating from around 1591–5), Lord Berners’ translation of Jean Froissart’s Chronicles (1523–5), a French Manuscript Chronicque de la Traïson et Mort de Richart Deux Roy Dengleterre dated around 1400 and Creton’s Histoire du Roy d’Angleterre Richard (1399?). Substantial extracts from all of these works are provided by Geoffrey Bullough’s Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare.28 Forker also gives several minor sources and cites Marlowe’s Edward II as a ‘dramatic model’. Although there is no room to give a lengthy discussion of it here, students studying Richard II in the wider context of Renaissance drama could benefit from considering Richard II and Edward II as paired texts, comparing their treatment of kingship, betrayal and personal versus public identities and responsibilities.29

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The sheer number of sources is in itself worth consideration in terms of thinking about history as something retold many times with many different agendas, and also when considering shifts in genre, such as the move from narrative poetry to drama, or from historical prose to blank verse. Of the significant sources, the most readily accessible to instructors and students is probably Holinshed’s Chronicles, now available in a variety of online formats.30 The text can prove challenging to students and it can help to have a resource to direct students to points of comparison between source and play. Once again, the Arden edition is invaluable here with its notes illuminating the text at significant points. The first note on 1.1, for example, establishes when the play’s events begin in relation to those in Holinshed’s account, and notes Holinshed’s description of the ‘great scaffold … for the king to sit with the lords and prelats of his realm’.31 The student can note, then, that the performative aspects to Shakespeare’s Richard and his preference for extravagant display were already present in the main historical source for his character. While The Holinshed Project website provides the full text of both the 1577 and the 1587 editions of Holinshed’s Chronicles, it also conveniently offers a separate ‘sample’ of both texts’ versions of ‘The deposition of King Richard II’ in parallel, a resource which might be utilized in conjunction with Quarto/Folio comparisons by making the deposition scene the main focus for various activities through which to explore the play as a whole.32 In addition to considering the processes of adapting a prose history into one which is essentially narrated through verse dialogue, students could consider where in the Chronicles’ account of the deposition we can identify elements of character or plot that are echoed by Shakespeare, such as Holinshed’s description of Richard’s ‘redoubling’ of grief in his recollection of ‘how in former times he was acknowledged & taken for their liege lord and sovereign, who now (whether in contempt or in malice, God knoweth) to his face foresware him to be their king’.33 The tenor of this detail can be found in lines such as ‘Did they not sometime cry “All hail” to me?’

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(4.1.170) and Richard’s declaration that ‘For when I was a king, my flatterers / Were then but subjects’ (4.1.306–7). In the Chronicles, as in the Quarto 1–4 texts, Richard is absent from the moment of his deposition and Henry’s accession, as he is in the Tower of London. This gives greater emphasis to Shakespeare’s decision, evident in the Folio’s deposition scene, for Richard to be active in his own dethroning, and allows Shakespeare to present him to the audience with much greater pathos, not just in 4.1 but also in 5.1 when, just before being taken to Pomfret, he bids his wife, Isabel, farewell; a scene which also gives further voice and depth to the queen, who goes unmentioned in the historical account of the deposition (and indeed was only ten years old at the time of Richard’s death).

Considering genre: Richard II as ‘history play’ Thinking about Holinshed’s Chronicles as a source for Richard II, and exploring the ways in which Shakespeare develops elements of his historical character and potentially generates sympathy by representing him as a man as well as a king, can also help students to engage with the context of genre and the play’s identity as a history. There are several very good introductory texts that can be recommended to students requiring an introduction to the history plays in terms of generic expectations of style and content, as well as their popularity with late-Elizabethan audiences. A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works: The Histories is an extensive and thorough collection of essays, as is The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s History Plays, and both have dedicated chapters on Richard II.34 Less-experienced students might prefer the very accessible The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s History Plays, which starts with genre background and assists with close textual reading.35

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Part of reading and understanding the history plays is developing an awareness of the ways in which Shakespeare makes use of events from the past and represents them in dramatic form: the process of making story from history. One way for students to explore the relationship between history and story in Richard II would be to consider the play’s own awareness of the relationship between past events and the telling of them. A starting exercise might be a search for the language of ‘stories’ in the play (theatre is, after all, the dramatic telling of a narrative), such as the Queen’s attendant suggesting that they pass the time by ‘tell[ing] tales’ (3.4.10), or Aumerle’s demand in Act 5 that ‘no man enter till my tale be done’ (5.3.36). This focus on narration or storytelling can help the student to consider the relationship between ‘history’ and ‘story’ and the ways in which Richard II and the history play as a genre consciously approach the concept of time. In Act 2, Gaunt articulates his hope that ‘[his] death’s sad tale may yet undeaf [Richard’s] ear’ (2.1.16), referring to the solemn speech that he is about to make, but the implication is also that Gaunt’s death itself will become a ‘sad tale’ to be narrated in the future: he envisages his death as a past event, which, outside the world of the play, it is. This coexistence of past, present and future in terms of the world of the play and the world of its audiences highlights the temporal complexity of the history plays, a concept that is recurrent in Richard II and which, as with the awareness of performance, is explored largely through the character of the king. Upon learning of Bolingbroke’s increasing power and his own likely defeat in Act 3, Richard’s response is to ‘sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings’ and he continues to catalogue ‘How some have been deposed, some slain in war’ and so on (3.2.155–7); much as Lysander lists the various possible plots of troubled true love in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (MND 1.1.132–49). This direct evocation of genre – the history plays, are, after all, stories of the death of kings – once again forces us to consider the relationship between historical fact and the dramatic retelling of it,

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especially in relation to the subjectivity of telling history. This is made explicit as Richard parts from the Queen in 5.1 and envisages her ‘sit[ting] by the fire / With good old folks’ telling tales ‘Of woeful ages long ago betid’, before urging her to tell ‘the lamentable tale of me’ (5.1.40–4). Here, the domestic evocation of fireside storytelling by ‘old folks’ establishes the recounting of history orally as a nostalgic pastime, one that turns Richard’s ‘lamentable’ fall into a subjective, to some degree even fictive, winter’s tale: a ‘sad tale’ being ‘best for winter’, as Shakespeare elsewhere puts it (WT 2.1.25). One potential exercise might be for students to do some preliminary research of their own into the life and reign of King Richard II, perhaps establishing a timeline of key events, similar to the one included in this volume. Two works of use to the literature student making the crossover into historical studies are Nigel Saul’s biography, Richard II, which has a chapter on Shakespeare’s treatment of the monarch, and Laura Ashe’s concise Richard II: A Brittle Glory, which places emphasis on the cultural legacy of historical events.36 Revisiting the play with factual material to hand makes clear several points about the way in which Shakespeare balances what happened in the past with both what may have happened and what could not have happened, as he makes use of imagined events and characters alongside historical figures to enhance the story (the introduction of the near-allegorical gardeners in 3.4 and the calling for a mirror in 4.1 being excellent examples of this). We can see how Shakespeare manipulates chronology in a highly selective representation of events, compressing the history of 1397–99 into a matter of hours on stage. We also learn how he develops historical figures into ‘characters’, exaggerating or newly attributing aspects of personality to encourage an audience to respond. Holinshed’s Chronicles describes Richard as ‘seemlie of shape and favour, & of nature good inough, if the wickednesse & naughtie demeanor of such as were about him had not altered it’, potentially forming the basis for Shakespeare’s exploration of the extent to which Richard’s ‘flatterers’ are to blame for his downfall.37

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Exploring Richard II in adaptation: Nahum Tate All of these exercises should enable the student to understand the ways in which Richard II responds to the medieval past through the filter of Tudor thinking, and the ways in which drama can manipulate history for both entertainment and political purposes, a consideration sustained in the later performance history of the play. Nahum Tate’s 1680 adaptation of Richard II, for example, is useful material both for considering the politically contentious nature of the play and also as the basis for another ‘compare and contrast’ close textual exercise. The late seventeenth century saw similar political crises to those at the end of the sixteenth, with plots to overthrow the monarch and concerns about Charles II’s indulgent inclinations and potentially poor governance, making Richard II once again pertinent and problematic. Tate’s experience of this context is revealed in his renaming of his adaptation of the play The Sicilian Usurper. In 1681 he published his original adaptation ‘With a Prefatory Epistle in Vindication of the Author, Occasioned by the Prohibition of this Play on the Stage’.38 This ‘Prefatory Epistle’ is an excellent resource for students, outlining as it does the political nature of the play through Tate’s refutation (‘why a History of those Times shou’d be supprest as a Libel upon Ours, is past my Understanding’) and in his discussion of his rewriting of Richard’s character as a man who acts ‘with Resolution and Justice’ and who is ‘Prudent’, ‘Wise, Active and Just’.39 Moreover, Tate’s preface outlines some of the alterations he has made in terms of action and dialogue, directing us to potential points of comparison and their impact on characterization. For example, Tate describes how Gaunt’s wealth is now ‘Borrow’d onely’ by Richard rather than ‘Extorted’ so as ‘to engage the pitty of the Audience for him in his distresses’. He also outlines the insertion of a new scene involving Richard and the Queen to

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highlight ‘the Malignancy of his Fortune, which argues indeed Extremity of Distress, but Nothing of Weakness’, an addition that might prompt students to consider the changes in Tate’s presentation of the play’s female characters, especially in the light of the fact that the parts of the Duchesses of Gloucester and of York, the Queen and her ladies-in-waiting would be being played in Restoration theatres by women for the first time.40 In terms of a close textual exercise, it makes sense to return once again to the deposition scene and consider in detail the changes made by Tate. Several of his alterations make us consider more carefully how Shakespeare uses language in characterization: Richard’s original image of two buckets – ‘The emptier ever dancing in the air, / The other down, unseen and full of water’ (4.1.186–7) – becomes ‘The emptier ever dancing in the Air / Th’opprest one down, unseen and sunk’.41 Students here could consider not only Tate’s usage of ‘opprest’ as part of his attempt to garner more sympathy for the character of Richard, but also his exchange of ‘sunk’ for ‘full of water’, an alteration that arguably highlights Shakespeare’s powerfully evocative metaphor for tears as well as his focus on Richard’s emotional response to his circumstances rather than on the circumstances themselves, as is otherwise suggested by Tate’s more heavy-handed ‘opprest’ and ‘sunk’. Following closely upon this is Tate’s emendation of ‘Ay, no. No, ay’ (4.1.201) to merely ‘Yes— No— ’, which not only diminishes Richard’s indecision, but also erases the aural wordplay of ‘I’ for ‘ay’ and ‘know’ for ‘no’ (i.e. ‘I know no ay’, or even ‘I know no I’), and therefore obscures Richard’s profound negation of his own identity and self-knowledge. ‘Bullingbroke’ barely speaks in Tate’s scene, rendering him both aloof and all the more the ‘silent King’ (4.1.290): part of Tate’s intention, perhaps, to give less stage space and audience sympathy to those who threaten the monarchy, thereby hoping to avoid further political censure.

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Thinking about Richard II for a modern audience The staging and direction of Richard II, indeed of any Shakespeare play, will be linked to the zeitgeist, whether this is the 1601 performance commanded by the Earl of Essex (discussed above), Tate’s ill-fated adaptation of 1680–1, or the performances of the 1980s that Margaret Shewring argues were ‘the theatre’s response to the visual possibilities of television and film as well as the West End musical stage’.42 As we move further from the original political and social contexts of the play, it is interesting to consider what more modern directors have made of the text. Shewring opens Shakespeare in Performance: King Richard II with the assertion that ‘Of all Shakespeare’s history plays, Richard II is arguably the most difficult to accommodate on the twentieth-century stage’ due to its ‘Elizabethan topicality’ and its rootedness in the ‘political and cultural moment of the 1590s’.43 Despite this, as Kate Wilkinson’s chapter in this volume illustrates, Richard II has been repeatedly performed since the early twentieth century, and a final focus for teaching and learning the play might be in assessing the challenges of performing Richard II for a modern audience, with a consideration of some specific decisions made in productions in terms of staging choices. Along with Shewring’s comprehensive assessment of the play on stage and screen, Malcolm Page’s Richard II: Text and Performance, still generally available, provides details of four different productions of the play staged between 1973 and 1982.44 Page details the specific treatment of the text, listing cuts, additions and reallocations of lines and commenting briefly on the impact these had, as well as giving notes on specifics of set and direction. It is worth noting too Shewring’s chapter, ‘Staging Richard II for a New Millennium’ in Richard II: New Critical Essays, edited by Jeremy Lopez, which serves as an excellent extension and development of her original study.45

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Jeremy Lopez’s Richard II: A Guide to the Text and the Play in Performance, part of Palgrave Macmillan’s ‘Shakespeare Handbooks’ series, will also prove valuable to students and teachers interested in the play’s recent history on stage and screen, providing a concise yet detailed account of the latter along with a scene-by-scene commentary that addresses the play’s language and action, with ‘performance’ very much in focus, particularly at key moments such as the ‘deposition scene’.46 Other resources also assess past productions, most of which address the whole oeuvre of Shakespeare in performance, but also provide detailed descriptions of one or two key performances of individual plays, particularly when exploring specific matters of, for instance, scenography or the audience. Dennis Kennedy’s Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of Twentieth-Century Performance is a good example. In the process of discussing the new spaces and new audiences of Shakespeare in performance in the later twentieth century, Kennedy looks closely at the 1973 Stratford production of Richard II, directed by John Barton and designed by Timothy O’Brien and Tanzeena Firth.47 Kennedy discusses the centring of ‘ritual motifs’ in this version, and considers the ‘two giant escalators’ positioned ‘at the right and left of the stage. Across [which] a bridge carrying the king silently traveled, making visual the rise and fall imagery of the text.’48 This might be used to explore further the ‘rise and fall imagery’ in the play: Bolingbroke’s description of Richard on the walls of Flint Castle being like ‘the blushing discontented sun’ rising ‘From out the fiery portal of the east’ (3.3.63–4), for example, or Richard’s comparison of the crown to a ‘deep well / That owes two buckets, filling one another’, figuring himself as the one that is ‘down and full of tears’ whilst Bolingbroke’s ‘mount[s] up on high’ (4.1.184–9). In terms of making use of the staging choices of past productions to stimulate further understanding and insight, a useful and fascinating resource for the instructor is A Directory of Shakespeare in Performance 1970–2005:

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Volume 1 Great Britain, with companion volumes covering productions in North America (USA and Canada) from both 1970–90 and since 1991.49 The Directory provides mainly factual information about past performances on stage and screen, including dates and venues of productions as well as cast and crew lists. It also includes extracts from key reviews of these performances, enabling us to access choices made by directors and designers that can be used to generate discussion of theme and character. In Irvin Wardle’s review of the 1973 Pasco/Richardson production at Stratford (discussed above), for example, he describes how ‘The parts of Richard and Bolingbroke are being alternated between Richard Pasco and Ian Richardson. This is not a directorial gimmick, but a recognition of the two characters as fatal twins.’50 Such a statement could be used to generate discussion about both character interchangeability and the theatrical practice of doubling. The assertion that Richard and Bolingbroke are ‘fatal twins’ could also invite consideration of the role of destiny and inevitability in this and other history plays. A further potential printed resource here is the RSC edition of the play and its interviews with Claus Peymann and Michael Boyd, in which they discuss the reasoning behind and the impact of their various directorial choices, offering the student insight into the processes of translating page onto stage. In considering past performances as an aid to textual understanding and discussion we are chiefly limited to accounts of staging such as those referred to above, rather than witnessing the performance itself. Until the twentieth century, the direct experience of Richard II in performance would have been relatively ephemeral, ending with the final lines of the play as delivered at the close of any production attended by audiences perhaps only once. With the advent of film, however, and especially of video and DVD recordings as well as online access, we now have a more permanent record of performance available through various cinematic and televised versions as well as ‘live theatre’ broadcasts and recordings from the National Theatre, RSC and the Globe, many of

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which are available to buy, stream or download through an online (subscription-only) resource, such as Drama Online, the BBC Shakespeare Archive, or BoB [Box of Broadcasts]: On Demand TV and Radio for Education.51 Recorded versions of live performances as well as screen adaptations have their own pros and cons, both as teaching aids and as ways into the text: the play might become immortalized in one particular version, for example, and there is a danger that following the play on screen may render its rich language and poetry subordinate to the visual action and spectacle. What they do allow the student and instructor, however, is an easily accessible performance that can be watched and re-watched alongside the text, allowing for in-depth discussion of the relationship between the play on the page and on stage or screen. Two readily accessible screen versions of the play (available on DVD and also to stream or download from various online providers) are the 1978 production, directed by Davis Giles for the BBC as part of ‘The Shakespeare Collection’ series, with Derek Jacobi as Richard, and the 2012 television film (the first episode in the BBC’s Hollow Crown, series 1), with Ben Whishaw in the title role.52 The 1978 version clearly has the context of a stage performance at its heart: the studio is arguably envisaged as a ‘set’ and for the most part the background is carefully static and subdued, suggesting environment but foregrounding the language and its role in generating an audience’s understanding of space. There is also very little extraneous action: the focus is on the key actors and the delivery of their lines. In all respects it is a useful version for students to watch, as the play and its language remain central. Inevitably, changes have been made that affect the text and a discussion of these, as with those of the performances discussed above, can be fruitful. Students can quite easily identify where cuts have been introduced and assess the impact of these directorial decisions, such as the shortening of 3.4 (the Gardeners’ scene), which removes this female-dominated moment from the otherwise overtly military and masculine narrative of Richard’s decline.

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Similarly, the 2012 Hollow Crown production effects some alterations and additions the impact of which might again be analysed by students. For example, less emphasis is placed in this version on language to establish setting and mood, as the filming takes place in a series of real and immediately obvious locations, and the action is accompanied by a notably cinematic musical score. Students can also consider the production’s approach to the play’s female characters in an era in which the representations and rights of women are still a significant consideration, encouraging once again an understanding of how the zeitgeist can, even in very subtle ways, influence a production and change the play. Ben Whishaw’s Richard clearly demonstrates the performative element of the king, and there is arguably a different engaging of sympathies from the 1978 version in relation to audience response to the characters of Richard and Bolingbroke. A comparative exercise between this production and that of 1978, or indeed with any others now available online, with reference to editorial and directorial choices in specific scenes – the deposition being the obvious example – should generate profitable discussion, especially if this is in conjunction with the kinds of close textual reading outlined in this chapter.

NOTES Introduction   1 George Osborne Sayles, ‘King Richard II of England: A Fresh Look’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 115 (1971): 28.   2 John Taylor, ‘Richard II in the Chronicles’, in Richard II: The Art of Kingship, ed. Anthony Goodman and James Gillespie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 15.   3 Recent examples include Miri Rubin, The Hollow Crown: A History of Britain in the Late Middle Ages (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2005) and Laura Ashe, Richard II: A Brittle Glory (London: Penguin, 2016). See also Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 1–5, 465–7.   4 ‘In no other history play is the idea of tears and weeping so insistently presented’: Richard D. Altick, ‘Symphonic Imagery in Richard II’, PMLA 62 (1947): 348. See also Jonathan Culpeper, Alison Findlay, Beth Cortese and Mike Thelwall, ‘Measuring Emotional Temperatures in Shakespeare’s Drama’, English Text Construction 11 (2018): 23.   5 See ‘Slavoj Žižek on His Favourite Plays’: an interview by Liza Thompson for Five Books, 3 October 2016. Available online: https://fivebooks.com/best-books/slavoj-zizek-favourite-plays/ [accessed 14 February 2020].   6 Sarah Grandage, ‘Imagining England: Contemporary Encodings of “this sceptred isle”’, in This England, That Shakespeare: New Angles on Englishness and the Bard, ed. Willy Maley and Margaret Tudeau-Clayton (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 127; Donald M. Friedman, ‘John of Gaunt and the Rhetoric of Frustration’, ELH 43 (1976): 279; Robert Allott, Englands Parnassus, or, The Choysest Flowers of Our Moderne Poets (1600) [STC (2nd edn)/379.5], 348. For analysis of the speech’s

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rhetorical strategies see George D. Gopen, ‘Private Grief into Public Action: The Rhetoric of John of Gaunt in Richard II’, Studies in Philology 84 (1987): 344–56.   7 Michael Saenger, Shakespeare and the French Borders of English (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 96; Grandage, ‘Imagining England’, 127; Willy Maley and Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Introduction: “To England send him”: Repatriating Shakespeare’, in This England, That Shakespeare, ed. Maley and Tudeau-Clayton, 10.   8 Willy Maley, ‘“This sceptred isle”: Shakespeare and the British Problem’, in Shakespeare and National Culture, ed. John J. Joughin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 105.   9 Roy Hattersley, ‘Strange brew of old English leaves a sour taste’, The Guardian, 8 November 1993, 21; Lisa Jardine, Another Point of View: A Little Book of Big Ideas (London: Preface, 2009), 56–7. See also Grandage, ‘Imagining England’, 135–6; Saenger, Shakespeare and the French Borders of English, 96, 201 n. 39. 10 Nickianne Moody, ‘Nation and Nostalgia: The Place of Advertising in Popular Fictions’, in Advertising and Identity in Europe: The I of the Beholder, ed. Jackie Cannon, Patricia Anne Odber de Baubeta and Robin Warner (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2000), 112, 117. 11 Hattersley, ‘Strange brew’, 21. 12 Maley and Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Introduction’, 10; Friedman, ‘John of Gaunt and the Rhetoric of Frustration’, 288–9. 13 On ‘presentist’ approaches to Shakespeare, see further Shakespeare and the Urgency of Now: Criticism and Theory in the 21st Century, ed. Cary DiPietro and Hugh Grady (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 1–37. 14 Friedman, ‘John of Gaunt and the Rhetoric of Frustration’, 284. 15 Lisa Hopkins, ‘The King’s Melting Body: Richard II’, in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works: Volume II, The Histories, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 407–8; Maley, ‘“This sceptred isle”: Shakespeare and the British Problem’.

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16 Will Hutton and Andrew Adonis, Saving Britain: How We Must Change to Prosper in Europe (London: Abacus, 2018), 89. 17 Maley, ‘“This sceptred isle”: Shakespeare and the British Problem’, 102–5. 18 Friedman, ‘John of Gaunt and the Rhetoric of Frustration’, 287; Hutton and Adonis, Saving Britain, 91. 19 J. W. Lever, ‘Shakespeare’s French Fruits’, Shakespeare Survey 6 (1953): 89–90 n. 11; Ton Hoenselaars and Clara Calvo, ‘Shakespeare Eurostar: Calais, the Continent, and the Operatic Fortunes of Ambroise Thomas’, in This England, That Shakespeare, ed. Maley and Tudeau-Clayton, 152. 20 Hoenselaars and Calvo, ‘Shakespeare Eurostar’, 152. See Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, 8 vols (London and New York: Routledge, 1960), III, 367–72, 423–34. 21 John W. McKenna, ‘How God Became an Englishman’, in Tudor Rule and Revolution, ed. Delloyd J. Guth and John W. McKenna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 26–7. 22 Margaret Shewring, Shakespeare in Performance: King Richard II (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 2. 23 Graham Holderness, ‘Shakespeare’s History: Richard II’, Literature and History 7 (1981): 2. 24 Saenger, Shakespeare and the French Borders of English, 96. 25 On the question of how much historical knowledge Shakespeare assumes his original audiences to have had of Richard II, one answer to which is ‘Perhaps not much at all’, see Paul Budra, ‘Writing the Tragic Self: Richard II’s Sad Stories’, Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme 18 (1994): 8. For different views of the date of Thomas of Woodstock’s composition and its status as a possible source for Richard II, see Thomas of Woodstock or King Richard the Second, Part One, ed. Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 1–8, 21–2; and MacDonald P. Jackson, ‘Shakespeare’s Richard II and the Anonymous Thomas of Woodstock’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 14 (2001): 17–65.

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26 See Holinshed, Chronicles (1587), in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Bullough, III, 387–415; Chronicles of the Revolution 1397–1400: The Reign of Richard II, trans. and ed. Chris Given-Wilson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993); and George B. Stow, ‘Chronicles Versus Records: The Character of Richard II’, in Documenting the Past, ed. J. S. Hamilton and Patricia J. Bradley (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1989), 158–60, 163–9. See also Anthony Tuck, ‘Richard II (1367–1400)’, ODNB. 27 Blank charters feature in Woodstock at 3.1.6–23, 136–74; 3.2.51–81; and 3.3; the ‘landlord’ and ‘pelting farm’ references (articulated by Richard II himself in this play) can be found at 4.1.147–8. On the historical, rather than the mythical, nature of Richard II’s ‘blank charters’, see Caroline M. Barron, ‘The Tyranny of Richard II’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 41 (1968): 1–18. On the implications of Gaunt’s ‘landlord’ accusation, see Donna B. Hamilton, ‘The State of Law in Richard II’, Shakespeare Quarterly 34 (1983): 5–17; W. F. Bolton, ‘Ricardian Law Reports and Richard II’, Shakespeare Studies 20 (1988): 53–65; James R. Siemon, ‘Landlord Not King: Agrarian Change and Interarticulation’, in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 17–33; Dennis R. Klinck, ‘Shakespeare’s Richard II as Landlord and Wasting Tenant’, College Literature 25 (1998): 21–34; William O. Scott, ‘Landholding, Leasing, and Inheritance in Richard II’, SEL 42 (2002): 275–92; and Katharine Eisaman Maus, Being and Having in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 16–27, 42–3. 28 John Halverson, ‘The Lamentable Comedy of Richard II’, English Literary Renaissance 24 (1994): 362. 29 See Holinshed, Chronicles (1587), in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Bullough, III, 409; and William Shakespeare, King Richard II, ed. Charles R. Forker (London: Thomson Learning, 2002), 491–2 (‘Long Note’ to 3.1.11–15). For examples in Woodstock, see 2.1.8–10; 2.2.211–20; 4.1.64–259; 5.4.3, 24–35.

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30 Christopher Marlowe, Edward II, ed. Charles R. Forker (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 1.2.49–50. 31 See further Kavita Mudan Finn and Lea Luecking Frost, ‘“Nothing hath begot my something grief”: Invisible Queenship in Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare’s Queens, ed. Kavita Mudan Finn and Valerie Schutte (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018), 231–5; Madhavi Menon, ‘Richard II and the Taint of Metonymy’, ELH 70 (2003): 665–70; and Derrick Higginbotham, ‘The Construction of a King: Waste, Effeminacy and Queerness in Shakespeare’s Richard II’, Shakespeare in South Africa 26 (2014): 67–8. 32 Saul, Richard II, 323; and see further 430–4; Ashe, Richard II, 4, 19, 84. 33 See Saul, Richard II, 4, 176–204. Along with Bolingbroke and Mowbray (then earls of Derby and Nottingham respectively), the other Appellants were the earls of Arundel and Warwick, and Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester. 34 Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (1957; repr. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). 35 Ibid., 26, 35. 36 See, for example, Charles R. Forker ‘Unstable Identity in Shakespeare’s Richard II’, Renascence 54 (2001): 3–22; and Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 2nd edn (London: Verso, 2008), 163; For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, 2nd edn (London: Verso, 2008), 253–73; and Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 9. 37 The most incisive critical rebuttal of Kantorowicz and his reading of Richard II in The King’s Two Bodies remains David Norbrook, ‘The Emperor’s New Body? Richard II, Ernst Kantorowicz, and the Politics of Shakespeare Criticism’, Textual Practice 10 (1996): 329–57. See also Samuel Schoenbaum, ‘Richard II and the Realities of Power’, Shakespeare Survey 28 (1975): 1–13; and Mark Netzloff, ‘Insurgent Time: Richard II and the Periodization of Sovereignty’, in Richard II: New Critical Essays, ed. Jeremy Lopez (London and New York:

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Routledge, 2012), 213–15. For a further assessment of the legacy of Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies, see ‘Fifty Years of The King’s Two Bodies’, ed. Lorna Hutson, a ‘Special Forum’ issue of Representations 106 (2009): 63–142. 38 See Peter Lake, How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 236–87. 39 See Edgar Samuel, ‘Lopez [Lopes], Roderigo [Ruy, Roger] (c. 1517–1594)’, ODNB. 40 For recent accounts of the Essex rebellion and its possible connections to Shakespeare’s Richard II, see Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare (London: Penguin, 2008), 249–86; and Paul E. J. Hammer, ‘Shakespeare’s Richard II, the Play of 7 February 1601, and the Essex Rising’, Shakespeare Quarterly 59 (2008): 1–35. See also Blair Worden, ‘Which Play Was Performed at the Globe Theatre on 7 February 1601?’, London Review of Books 25, no. 13 (2003): 22–4. 41 See Worden, ‘Which Play Was Performed …?’; Hammer, ‘Shakespeare’s Richard II’. 42 Hammer, ‘Shakespeare’s Richard II’, 22, 28–9; and ‘The Smiling Crocodile: The Earl of Essex and Late-Elizabethan “Popularity”’, in The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England, ed. Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 95–115. 43 John Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, 2nd edn, 3 vols (London: John Nichols & Son, 1823), III, 552. On the authenticity of this anecdote see Jason Scott-Warren, ‘Was Elizabeth Richard II? The Authenticity of Lambarde’s “Conversation”’, Review of English Studies 64 (2013): 208–30. 44 See The European Crisis of the 1590s: Essays in Comparative History, ed. Peter Clark (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985); and The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade, ed. John Guy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 45 On the history of the de casibus tradition, and its sustained currency in the Elizabethan period, see especially Paul Vincent

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Budra, A Mirror for Magistrates and the De Casibus Tradition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000); A Mirror for Magistrates in Context: Literature, History, and Politics in Early Modern England, ed. Harriet Archer and Andrew Hadfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); and Harriet Archer, Unperfect Histories: The Mirror for Magistrates, 1559–1610 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 46 The Mirror for Magistrates, ed. Lily B. Campbell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), 112, ll. 19–20. 47 The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge, 4 vols (London: William Pickering, 1836– 39), II, 164, repr. in The Critical Tradition: Richard II, ed. Charles R. Forker (London: Athlone, 1998), 128.

Chapter 1   1 Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (1598) [STC (2nd edn)/17834], 282.   2 See, for example, Shakespeare: The Critical Tradition: Richard II, ed. Charles R. Forker (London: Athlone, 1998), 1. Alongside Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, ed. Brian Vickers, 6 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974–81), Forker’s anthology provides an important reference point for this study. Also of value are Richard II: A Casebook, ed. Nicholas Brooke (London: Macmillan, 1973) and Richard II: Critical Essays, ed. Jeanne T. Newlin (1984; repr. London: Routledge, 2015).   3 The deposition scene was omitted from quarto editions of the play published in 1597 and 1598 (Q1–Q3), appearing in print for the first time in 1608 (Q4). On its possible censorship, see Janet Clare, ‘The Censorship of the Deposition Scene in Richard II’, Review of English Studies 41 (1990): 89–94; Cyndia Susan Clegg, ‘“By the choise and inuitation of al the realme”: Richard II and Elizabethan Press Censorship’, Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (1997): 432–48; and King Richard II, ed. Charles R. Forker (London: Thomson Learning, 2002), 506–7, 515–17.

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  4 Leeds Barroll has contested the degree of political risk involved in performing the play and the significance of its connection to the Essex rebellion: see ‘A New History for Shakespeare and His Time’, Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 441–64. See also Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare (London: Penguin, 2008), 249–86, and Paul E. J. Hammer, ‘Shakespeare’s Richard II, the Play of 7 February 1601, and the Essex Rising’, Shakespeare Quarterly 59 (2008): 1–35.   5 John Hayward, The Life and Raigne of King Henry IIII, ed. John J. Manning (London: Royal Historical Society, 1992).   6 This remark was apparently directed to William Lambarde, the antiquarian and Elizabeth’s Keeper of the Rolls, on 4 August 1601 and has become a favourite quotation for critics discussing the political sensitivity of the Richard II story in light of the Essex rebellion. See John Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, 2nd edn, 3 vols (London: John Nichols & Son, 1823), III, 552. On the authenticity of this anecdote see Jason Scott-Warren, ‘Was Elizabeth Richard II? The Authenticity of Lambarde’s “Conversation”’, Review of English Studies 64 (2013): 208–30; on its contested significance see Hammer, ‘Shakespeare’s Richard II’, 23–5.   7 See The Critical Tradition, ed. Forker, 1.   8 Isaac De Larrey, The History of the Reign of King Charles I, 2 vols (1716), II, 369. See also Robert Tombs, The English and Their History (London: Penguin, 2014), 238.   9 John Dryden, ‘Preface’ to Troilus and Cressida, or Truth Found Too Late (1679), sig. b3. 10 Nahum Tate, The History of King Richard the Second (1681), sig. A2 ͮ. 11 Ibid., sig. A2. 12 Ibid., sig. A–A2 ͮ. On the political and censorship contexts of Tate’s adaptation see Emma Depledge, Shakespeare’s Rise to Cultural Prominence: Politics, Print and Alteration, 1642–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 70–1, 82, 100–3, 141–7, 200 n. 84. 13 Lewis Theobald, The Tragedy of King Richard the II (1720), sig. Aa.

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14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 The Works of Mr. William Shakespear, ed. Alexander Pope, 6 vols (1725), III, 96, n. 17 Edward Capell, Notes and Various Readings to Shakespeare, 3 vols (1779–80), in The Critical Tradition, ed. Forker, 65. 18 See, for instance, the analyses of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Richard D. Altick, discussed later in this chapter. 19 Charlotte Lennox, Shakespear Illustrated: or the Novels and Histories on which the Plays of Shakespear are Founded, Collected and Translated from the Original Authors. With Critical Remarks, 3 vols (1754), III, 103. 20 Ibid., 106. 21 Ibid., 106–7. 22 Ibid., 108–9. 23 The Plays of William Shakespeare, ed. Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, 10 vols (1778), V, 248, n. 24 Ibid., 251, n. 25 James Goodhall, ‘Preface’ to King Richard II. A Tragedy. Alter’d from Shakespear, and the Stile Imitated (1772), i. 26 Charles Dibdin, for instance, in 1890, describes the play as inferior: probably ‘written in a hurry’ and ‘unworthy of [Shakespeare’s] reputation’. See The Critical Tradition, ed. Forker, 90. Later critical voices include A. C. Swinburne (see The Critical Tradition, ed. Forker, 255–7, 393–9), and E. M. W. Tillyard and A. P. Rossiter (both discussed later in this chapter). 27 This and the subsequent quotations come from an anonymous report published in the Bristol Gazette on 18 November 1813 of a lecture delivered by Coleridge in Bristol on 11 November 1813, in The Critical Tradition, ed. Forker, 95–101 (98). See further, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1808– 1819: On Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes, 2 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), I, 562–7, and Lectures and Notes on Shakspere and Other English Poets by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. T. Ashe (London: George Bell, 1897), 255–67.

NOTES

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28 Coleridge, in The Critical Tradition, ed. Forker, 97. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 98. 31 Ibid. 32 Coleridge continues, finding the perfect riposte to earlier critics in Shakespeare’s own text: ‘Shakespeare, as if he anticipated the hollow sneers of the critics, makes Richard reply – “Can sick men play so nicely with their names?” To which the answer of Gaunt presents a confutation of this idle criticism, “No, misery makes sport to mock itself”’: ibid., 98. 33 Ibid., 99. 34 Coleridge, Lectures and Notes, ed. Ashe, 264. 35 Charles Lamb observes this connection in Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, Who Lived About the Time of Shakspeare: With Notes (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808), in The Critical Tradition, ed. Forker, 94. 36 William Hazlitt, ‘Mr. Kean’s Richard II’, The Examiner, 19 March 1815, in The Critical Tradition, ed. Forker, 104. 37 Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (London: C.H. Reynell, for R. Hunter [etc.] 1817), in The Critical Tradition, ed. Forker, 114. 38 Ibid., 117. 39 Ibid., 115. 40 A. W. Schlegel, Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black (1846; repr. New York: AMS Press, 1965), 419. 41 Hermann Ulrici, Shakspeare’s Dramatic Art: And His Relation to Calderon and Goethe, trans. A. J. W. M. (London: Chapman Brothers, 1846), 342–78. 42 Edward Dowden, Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875; repr. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1897), 167. 43 Ibid., 194–5. 44 Henry Norman Hudson, Shakespeare: His Life, Art and Character, 2 vols (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1872), II, 55, and see Dowden, Shakspere, 203.

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45 Dowden, Shakspere, 205. 46 Henry Norman Hudson, The Works of Shakespeare: The Text Carefully Restored According to the First Editions, rev. edn, 12 vols (Boston: Estes & Lauriat, 1881), V, 18. 47 Walter Pater, ‘Shakespeare’s English Kings’, in Appreciations: With an Essay on Style (London: Macmillan & Co., 1889), in The Critical Tradition, ed. Forker, 294. 48 Ibid., 296. 49 Ibid., 297. 50 Ibid., 299. 51 W. B. Yeats, ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’, in The Speaker, The Liberal Review (May 1901), in The Critical Tradition, ed. Forker, 374. 52 Ibid., 374–5. 53 A. C. Bradley, ‘The Rejection of Falstaff’, in Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1909; repr. London: Macmillan, 1965), 255. 54 John Masefield, William Shakespeare (London: Williams and Norgate, 1911), in The Critical Tradition, ed. Forker, 463. 55 E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1944). See also E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto & Windus, 1943). 56 Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays, 153. 57 Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare’s ‘Histories’: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (1947; repr. London: Methuen, 1964). 58 Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (1957; repr. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 35–6. 59 Irving Ribner, History and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (1957; repr. London: Methuen, 1965), 24. 60 J. A. Bryant, ‘The Linked Analogies of Richard II’, The Sewanee Review 65 (1957): 420–33. 61 Richard D. Altick, ‘Symphonic Imagery in Richard II’, PMLA 62 (1947): 339–40. 62 See further, Woodstock: A Moral History, ed. A. P. Rossiter (London: Chatto & Windus, 1946). 63 A. P. Rossiter, ‘Richard II’, in Angel with Horns: Fifteen Lectures on Shakespeare, ed. Graham Storey (1961; repr. London: Longman, 1989), 23–4.

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64 Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (1975; repr. London: Macmillan, 1996), 297. 65 Coppélia Kahn, Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). 66 Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1982). 67 Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). 68 Jonathan Dollimore, ‘Introduction: Shakespeare, Cultural Materialism and the New Historicism’, in Political Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 4. 69 See Dollimore, ‘Introduction’, 8–9, and The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1982), 3–6. For a key critique see Barroll, ‘A New History’, 441–54; see also Hammer, ‘Shakespeare’s Richard II’. 70 David M. Bergeron, ‘Richard II and Carnival Politics’, Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 33. 71 Graham Holderness, Shakespeare: The Histories (London: Macmillan, 2000); Robin Headlam Wells, Shakespeare on Masculinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 72 Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (London: Fourth Estate, 1998), 662; see also Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (London: Macmillan, 1995), 1–41.

Chapter 2   1 Margaret Shewring, Shakespeare in Performance: King Richard II (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 2.   2 Ibid., 180. See also Margaret Shewring, ‘Staging Richard II for a New Millennium’, in Richard II: New Critical Essays, ed. Jeremy Lopez (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 135–62; and Charles R. Forker, ‘Richard II on the Screen’, Shakespeare Survey 61 (2008): 57–73.

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  3 Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare (London: Penguin, 2008), 257.   4 David M. Bergeron, ‘Richard II and Carnival Politics’, Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 34.   5 Janet Clare, ‘The Censorship of the Deposition Scene in Richard II’, Review of English Studies 41 (1990): 90.   6 Ibid. On the question of the play’s censorship, in print and on stage, see further Cyndia Susan Clegg, ‘“By the choise and inuitation of al the realme”: Richard II and Elizabethan Press Censorship’, Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (1997): 432–48; and King Richard II, ed. Charles R. Forker (London: Thomson Learning, 2002), 506–7, 515–17.   7 ‘Introduction’ to William Shakespeare, King Richard II, ed. Andrew Gurr, updated edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 35–43.   8 Letter from Sir Edward Hoby to Robert Cecil, 7 December 1595. Available online: https://shakespearedocumented.folger. edu/exhibition/document/sir-edward-hobys-letter-robert-cecilincluding-reference-richard-ii [accessed 14 February 2020].   9 National Archives, Kew: SP 12/278, no. 78, fol. 130r, cited in Paul E. J. Hammer, ‘Shakespeare’s Richard II, the Play of 7 February 1601, and the Essex Rising’, Shakespeare Quarterly 59 (2008): 1. 10 See Blair Worden, ‘Which Play Was Performed at the Globe Theatre on 7 February 1601?’, London Review of Books 25, no. 13 (2003): 22–4, and ‘Shakespeare in Life and Art: Biography and Richard II’, in Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson: New Directions in Biography, ed. Takashi Kozuka and J. R. Mulryne (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 23–42. 11 Worden, ‘Which Play Was Performed … ?’, 22. 12 For responses to Worden, see Bate, Soul of the Age, 249–86, and Hammer, ‘Shakespeare’s Richard II’, 1–35. 13 William Keeling, ‘Dragon: Fragment of journal’. Available online: https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/exhibition/ document/fragment-captain-william-keelings-journal-hamletand-richard-ii-possibly [accessed 14 February 2020].

NOTES

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14 On the debates surrounding the authenticity of Keeling’s journal and its accounts of maritime performances of Richard II and Hamlet in 1607–8, see Graham Holderness, Tales from Shakespeare: Creative Collisions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 23–6; and Richmond Barbour and Bernhard Klein, ‘Drama at Sea: A New Look at Shakespeare on the Dragon, 1607–8’, in Travel and Drama in Early Modern England: The Journeying Play, ed. Claire Jowitt and David McInnis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 150–68. 15 Shewring, Shakespeare in Performance, 31. 16 Gurr, ‘Introduction’, 45. 17 Ibid., 46; and see further Shewring, Shakespeare in Performance, 38–40, 48–58. 18 Richard Dutton, ‘“Methinks the truth should live from age to age”: The Dating and Contexts of Henry V’, Huntington Library Quarterly 68 (2005): 175. 19 Shewring, Shakespeare in Performance, 91. 20 Ibid., 102–3. 21 Ian McKellen, ‘1982 | Tears in Bratislava’, in Ian McKellen: Writings. Available online: http://www.mckellen.com/writings/ bratislava.htm [accessed 14 February 2020]. 22 Shewring, Shakespeare in Performance, 121. 23 Gurr, ‘Introduction’, 48. 24 Ibid., 49–50. 25 Quoted in Henry Fenwick, ‘The Production’, in The BBC TV Shakespeare: Richard II (London: BBC, 1978), 19. 26 On the use of close-up in Richard II on screen, see also Erin Sullivan, ‘Richard II Performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company’, Shakespeare Bulletin 32, no. 2 (2014): 272–5. 27 Quoted in Fenwick, ‘The Production’, 22. 28 Ibid., 20. 29 Reference to the RSC cycle of the same name was probably intended as a challenge to ‘the RSC’s ownership of those plays and their link to the narratives of national culture’: Stuart Hampton-Reeves and Carol Chillington Rutter,

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Shakespeare in Performance: The Henry VI Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 135. 30 Michael Bogdanov and Michael Pennington, The English Shakespeare Company: The Story of the Wars of the Roses, 1986–89 (London: Nick Hern Books, 1990), 4. 31 Shewring, Shakespeare in Performance, 106. 32 Bogdanov and Pennington, The English Shakespeare Company, 24. 33 Shewring, Shakespeare in Performance, 112. 34 See Andrew Temple, ‘To play the king (and be a woman)’, The Independent, 21 May 1995. 35 Elizabeth Klett, ‘Many Bodies, Many Voices: Performing Androgyny in Fiona Shaw and Deborah Warner’s Richard II’, Theatre Journal 58 (2006): 176. 36 Carol Chillington Rutter, ‘Fiona Shaw’s Richard II: The Girl as Player-King as Comic’, Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (1997): 314–15. 37 Michael Dobson, ‘Shakespeare Performances in England 2000’, Shakespeare Survey 54 (2001): 275. 38 Samuel West, ‘King Richard II’, in Players of Shakespeare 6, ed. Robert Smallwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 87. For a discussion of the significance of earth in the play, see Peter J. Smith’s chapter in this volume. 39 Richard Edmonds, ‘Impoverished staging, rich performances’, Birmingham Post, 31 March 2000. For reviews critical of this production, see Susannah Clapp, ‘Caught in the act’, The Observer, 2 April 2000, and Robert Butler, ‘Even Banquo’s Ghost can’t make this work’, The Independent, 2 April 2000. 40 Dobson, ‘Shakespeare Performances in England’, 276. 41 See Sam West, ‘To play the kings’, The Observer, 8 April 2001, and Butler, ‘Even Banquo’s Ghost can’t make this work’. 42 Farah Karim Cooper, ‘Twelfth Night: Original Practice’, Shakespeare’s Globe. Available online: https://teach. shakespearesglobe.com/twelfth-night-original-practice [accessed 14 February 2020]. 43 See Kate Wilkinson, ‘Richard III On Stage’, in Richard III: A Critical Reader, ed. Annaliese Connolly (London: Bloomsbury,

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2013), 64–6 for a discussion of Kathryn Hunter as Richard III and the single gender cast for this production. 44 Nicholas De Jongh, ‘A queen of a king’, The Evening Standard, 15 May 2003; Lois Potter, ‘English and American Richards, Edwards, and Henries’, Shakespeare Quarterly 55 (2004): 451. See also Lloyd Evans, ‘Facile histrionics’, The Spectator, 17 May 2003, and Susannah Clapp, ‘Agincourt, near Basra’, The Observer, 18 May 2003. 45 Georgina Brown, ‘Hot gossip and a very cool king’, Mail on Sunday, 25 May 2003. 46 Michael Billington, ‘Sparks fly as Kevin Spacey finally takes on Shakespeare’, The Guardian, 6 October 2005, and Quentin Letts, ‘A bit of a flap in the court of King Kev’, Daily Mail, 7 October 2005. See also Mark Shenton, ‘A powerful Spacey is king at last’, Sunday Express, 9 October 2005. 47 Michael Coveney, ‘A king with a PM’s problems’, The Independent, 6 October 2005. 48 Trevor Nunn, Programme for Richard II at the Old Vic, London (2005), 5. 49 Nicholas Grene, Shakespeare’s Serial History Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 140. 50 To underline this point, this quotation was also the title of an essay in the production programme. 51 Jean Christophe Mayer, Shakespeare’s Hybrid Faith: History, Religion and the Stage (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 41. 52 Kate Bassett, ‘Richard II’, The Independent, 11 December 2011. 53 Christopher Hart, ‘This (un)happy breed’, The Sunday Times, 11 December 2011, and Susannah Clapp, ‘No wonder the peasants revolted’, The Observer, 11 December 2011. 54 Clapp, ‘No wonder the peasants revolted’. 55 Susannah Clapp, ‘King of all he surveys’, The Observer, 20 October 2013; Carol Chillington Rutter, ‘Shakespeare Performances in England 2013’, Shakespeare Survey 67 (2014): 422; Alan Wallcroft, ‘Richard II’, Kidderminster Shuttle, 25 October 2013.

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56 Jane Shilling, ‘King and country’, The Telegraph, 15 January 2016. 57 Wallcroft, ‘Richard II’; Clapp, ‘King of all he surveys’; Henry Hitchings, ‘Tennant’s crowning glory as doomed king’, The Evening Standard, 18 October 2013. 58 Sarah Probert, ‘Richard II’, Birmingham Post, 24 October 2013. 59 Daisy Bowie-Sell, ‘Did Simon Russell Beale reign supreme in the Almeida’s Richard II?’, WhatsOnStage, 19 December 2018. Available online: https://www.whatsonstage.com/londontheatre/news/simon-russell-beale-tragedy-richard-round-upreview_48211.html [accessed 14 February 2020]. 60 Billington, ‘The Tragedy of King Richard the Second review – Simon Russell Beale’s king sold short’, The Guardian, 19 December 2018; Letts, ‘Quick twist on wretched King Richard … in 100mins’, Daily Mail, 19 December 2019. 61 See Billington, ‘Simon Russell Beale’s king sold short’ and Letts, ‘Quick twist on wretched King Richard’. 62 Sarah Crompton, ‘Review: The Tragedy of King Richard the Second’, WhatsOnStage, 18 December 2018. Available online: https://www.whatsonstage.com/london-theatre/reviews/richardii-russell-beale-almeida_48206.html [accessed 14 February 2020]; Billington, ‘Simon Russell Beale’s king sold short’. 63 Letts, ‘Quick twist on wretched King Richard’. 64 ‘Production Information’, The Tragedy of King Richard the Second. Available online: https://almeida.co.uk/whats-on/thetragedy-of-king-richard-the-second/10-dec-2018-2-feb-2019 [accessed 14 February 2020]. 65 Billington, ‘Simon Russell Beale’s king sold short’. 66 Paul Taylor, ‘The Tragedy of King Richard the Second review, Almeida, London: A fresh and challenging evening’, The Independent, 19 December 2019. Letts also noted that the play was being told ‘in flashback, this wretched Richard reviewing his mistakes as though in a nightmare’: Letts, ‘Quick twist on wretched King Richard’. 67 ‘Richard II’, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. Available online: https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/whats-on/richard-ii-2019/ [accessed 14 February 2020].

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68 Daniella Harrison, ‘Review: Richard II (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)’, WhatsOnStage, 7 March 2019. Available online: https://www.whatsonstage.com/london-theatre/reviews/richardii-shakespeares-globe_48651.html [accessed 14 February 2020]. 69 Henry Hitchings, ‘Richard II review: Passionate and courageous take questions who is in control’, The Evening Standard, 7 March 2019. 70 Billington, ‘Richard II review – women of colour’s blazing show reflects our current chaos’, The Guardian, 7 March 2019. 71 Harrison, ‘Review: Richard II’. 72 Hitchings, ‘Passionate and courageous take’; Rosemary Waugh, ‘Richard II review: A quietly brilliant take on Shakespeare’s play’, Time Out, 7 March 2019. 73 Waugh, ‘Richard II review’; Hitchings, ‘Passionate and courageous take’. 74 Harrison, ‘Review: Richard II’. 75 Ibid.; Waugh, ‘Richard II review’. 76 McKellen, ‘1982 | Tears in Bratislava’.

Chapter 3   1 Jeremy Lopez, ‘Introduction’, in Richard II: New Critical Essays, ed. Jeremy Lopez (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 1–50.   2 William Shakespeare, King Richard II, ed. Charles R. Forker (London: Thomson Learning, 2002).   3 William Shakespeare, The RSC Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2007).   4 ‘Introduction’, in William Shakespeare, Richard II, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2010), 2.   5 William Shakespeare, Richard II, ed. Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

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  6 Paul E. J. Hammer, ‘Shakespeare’s Richard II, the Play of 7 February 1601, and the Essex Rising’, Shakespeare Quarterly 59 (2008): 1–35.   7 The Norton Shakespeare: Third International Student Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Suzanne Gossett, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus and Gordon McMullan (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2015).   8 The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion, ed. Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); The New Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, Critical Reference Edition, ed. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus and Gabriel Egan, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).   9 The New Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, Modern Critical Edition, ed. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus and Gabriel Egan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 10 Peter Lake, How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016). 11 Hammer, ‘Shakespeare’s Richard II’, 1. 12 See Blair Worden, ‘Which Play Was Performed at the Globe Theatre on 7 February 1601?’, London Review of Books 25, no. 13 (2003): 22–4. 13 Jeffrey S. Doty, ‘Shakespeare’s Richard II, “Popularity,” and the Early Modern Public Sphere’, Shakespeare Quarterly 61 (2010): 183–205. 14 Jeffrey S. Doty, Shakespeare, Popularity and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 15 Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare (London: Viking, 2008), 249–86. 16 Ibid., 255. 17 See ibid., 281–6; and Jason Scott-Warren, ‘Was Elizabeth Richard II? The Authenticity of Lambarde’s “Conversation”’, Review of English Studies 64 (2013): 208–30. 18 Alex Schulman, Rethinking Shakespeare’s Political Philosophy: From Lear to Leviathan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 126. 19 Ibid., 129.

NOTES

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20 Ibid., 136. 21 Bart van Es, ‘“They do it with mirrors”: Spenser, Shakespeare, Baldwin’s Mirror, and Elizabethan Literature’s Political Vanishing Act’, in A Mirror for Magistrates in Context: Literature, History, and Politics in Early Modern England, ed. Harriet Archer and Andrew Hadfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 216–30. 22 Ibid., 227. 23 Ibid., 228. 24 Scott C. Lucas, ‘A Renaissance Man and His “Medieval” Text’, in A Mirror for Magistrates in Context, ed. Archer and Hadfield, 17–34. 25 Kavita Mudan Finn and Lea Luecking Frost, ‘“Nothing hath begot my something grief”: Invisible Queenship in Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare’s Queens, Queenship and Power, ed. Kavita Mudan Finn and Valerie Schutte (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018), 231–5. 26 See, for example, Madhavi Menon, ‘Richard II and the Taint of Metonymy’, ELH 70 (2003): 653–75; Judith Brown, ‘Pretty Richard (in Three Parts)’, in Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Madhavi Menon (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 286–93; Lea Luecking Frost, ‘“A Kyng that ruled all by lust”: Richard II in Elizabethan Literature’, Literature Compass 9 (2012): 183–98; and Derrick Higginbotham, ‘The Construction of a King: Waste, Effeminacy and Queerness in Shakespeare’s Richard II’, Shakespeare in South Africa 26 (2014): 59–73. 27 Alfred Thomas, Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages: Maimed Rights (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 29–74. 28 Leon Harold Craig, The Philosopher’s English King: Shakespeare’s ‘Henriad’ as Political Philosophy (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2015), 1–45. 29 Lopez, ‘Introduction’. 30 See ibid., and Genevieve Love, ‘Going Back to That Well: Richard II’s “Deposition Scene”’, in Richard II: New Critical Essays, ed. Lopez, 1–50 and 265–76.

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31 See James Siemon, ‘Dead Men Talking: Elegiac Utterance, Monarchical Republicanism and Richard II’, and Rebecca Lemon, ‘Shakespeare’s Richard II and Elizabethan Politics’, both in Richard II: New Critical Essays, ed. Lopez, 51–73 and 245–64. 32 See Roslyn L. Knutson, ‘The History Play, Richard II, and Repertorial Commerce’, and Holger Schott Syme, ‘“But, what euer you do, buy”: Richard II as Popular Commodity’, both in Richard II: New Critical Essays, ed. Lopez, 74–94 and 223–44. 33 See Melissa E. Sanchez, ‘Bodies That Matter in Richard II’, and Mark Netzloff, ‘Insurgent Time: Richard II and the Periodization of Sovereignty’, both in Richard II: New Critical Essays, ed. Lopez, 95–116 and 202–22. 34 See Paul Menzer, ‘c.f. Marlowe’, and Bryan Walsh, ‘The Dramaturgy of Discomfort in Richard II’, both in Richard II: New Critical Essays, ed. Lopez, 117–34 and 181–201. 35 See Margaret Shewring, ‘Staging Richard II for a New Millennium’, and Bridget Escolme, ‘Gendered Neurosis on Stage and Screen: Fiona Shaw’s Richard II’, both in Richard II: New Critical Essays, ed. Lopez, 135–62 and 163–80. 36 Michael Saenger, Shakespeare and the French Borders of English (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 77–100. 37 Jonathan P. Lamb, Shakespeare in the Marketplace of Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 33–61. 38 Ibid., 36. 39 See Jessica Winston, ‘Seneca in Early Elizabethan England’, Shakespeare Quarterly 59 (2006): 29–59; Linda Woodbridge, ‘Resistance Theory Meets Drama’, Renaissance Drama 38 (2010): 115–39; and Gretchen Reydams-Schils, The Roman Stoics: Self, Responsibility, and Affection (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 40 Lynne Bruckner, ‘“Consuming means, soon preys upon itself”: Political Expedience and Environmental Degradation in Richard II’, in Shakespeare and the Urgency of Now: Criticism and Theory in the 21st Century, ed. Cary DiPietro and Hugh Grady (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), 126–47.

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41 For some key studies see Ecocritical Shakespeare, ed. Lynne Bruckner and Dan Brayton (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011); Gabriel Egan, Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), and Shakespeare and Ecocritical Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); Simon C. Estok, Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); and Randall Martin, Shakespeare and Ecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). See also a ‘special cluster’ of essays, introduced by Simon Estok, in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 12, no. 2 (2005): 109–78. 42 Darlene Farabee, Shakespeare’s Staged Spaces and Playgoers’ Perceptions (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), 42–69. 43 Tamara Haddad, ‘“We want Bolingbroke”: Ashtar’s Palestinian Richard II’, in Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global Experiment, ed. Susan Bennett and Christie Carson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 126–8. 44 Shewring, ‘Staging Richard II for a New Millennium’, 135; Shakespeare in Performance: King Richard II (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996). 45 Shewring, ‘Staging Richard II for a New Millennium’, 137. 46 The Hollow Crown: William Shakespeare’s Richard II, dir. Rupert Goold (UK: BBC, 2012).

Chapter 4   1 ‘Hear John McCain’s final written words to the public’, CNN, 27 August 2018. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=OgIZQZwx3vo [accessed 14 February 2020].   2 ‘Donald Trump: “America first, America first”’, BBC News, 20 January 2017. Available online: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ av/world-us-canada-38698654/donald-trump-america-firstamerica-first [accessed 14 February 2020].   3 Donald M. Friedman, ‘John of Gaunt and the Rhetoric of Frustration’, ELH 43 (1976): 288.

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 4 James E. Berg, ‘“This dear, dear land”: “Dearth” and the Fantasy of the Land-Grab in Richard II and Henry IV’, ELR 29 (1999): 225–45.  5 Friedman, ‘John of Gaunt and the Rhetoric of Frustration’, 290.  6 On the date of Woodstock’s composition and its status as a source for Richard II, see Thomas of Woodstock or King Richard the Second, Part One, ed. Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 1–8, 21–2. See also MacDonald P. Jackson, ‘Shakespeare’s Richard II and the Anonymous Thomas of Woodstock’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 14 (2001): 17–65.  7 Leonard Barkan, ‘The Theatrical Consistency of Richard II’, Shakespeare Quarterly 29 (1978): 19.  8 R. Holinshed, Chronicles (1587), in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, 8 vols (London and New York: Routledge, 1960), III, 395. Another of the play’s sources, A Myrroure for Magistrates (1559), makes it clear that, following his banishment, Norfolk’s lands were seized as well: Narrative and Dramatic Sources, ed. Bullough, III, 418.  9 Narrative and Dramatic Sources, ed. Bullough, III, 426–7. 10 On the elemental imagery in the play, see S. K. Heninger, ‘The Sun-King Analogy in Richard II’, Shakespeare Quarterly 11 (1960): 319–27, and Kathryn Montgomery Harris, ‘Sun and Water Imagery in Richard II: Its Dramatic Function’, Shakespeare Quarterly 21 (1970): 157–65. 11 Neema Parvini, Shakespeare’s History Plays (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 185. 12 John J. Joughin, ‘Richard II and the Performance of Grief’, in Shakespeare’s Histories and Counter-Histories, ed. Dermot Cavanagh, Stuart Hampton-Reeves and Stephen Longstaffe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 17–18. 13 Peter Holbrook, English Renaissance Tragedy: Ideas of Freedom (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 56. 14 Richard D. Altick, ‘Symphonic Imagery in Richard II’, PMLA 62 (1947): 341.

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15 Ibid. (emphasis in the original). 16 Ruth Morse and David Schalkwyk, ‘This earth, this land, this island …’, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 167 (2015): 298. 17 See OED, ‘earth, n. 1’. 18 Narrative and Dramatic Sources, ed. Bullough, III, 404. 19 Morse and Schalkwyk, ‘This earth, this land, this island …’, 299. 20 The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662, ed. Brian Cummings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 82–3. 21 Jean E. Feerick, ‘Groveling with the Earth in Kyd and Shakespeare’s Historical Tragedies’, in The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, ed. Jean E. Feerick and Vin Nardizzi (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), 233. 22 Narrative and Dramatic Sources, ed. Bullough, III, 420. 23 Simon Palfrey and Emma Smith, Shakespeare’s Dead (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2016), 116. See also Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), and Ben Haworth’s online exhibition, ‘Not to Be: Death in the Collections’ at https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/blogs/ shakespeare-connected-not-be-death-collections/ [accessed 14 February 2020]. 24 Both senses can be found respectively in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: ‘fret till your proud heart break’ (JC 4.3.42), and ‘yon grey lines / That fret the clouds are messengers of day’ (JC 2.1.102–3). 25 Clayton G. MacKenzie, ‘Paradise and Paradise Lost in Richard II’, Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 327. 26 While Bolingbroke fails to master Ricardian rhetoric here, I agree with Dorothy C. Hockey that ‘it is difficult to conclude that Richard II is written in two styles to suggest two warring worlds’: see ‘A World of Rhetoric in Richard II’, Shakespeare Quarterly 15 (1964): 189. 27 See note to 3.3.58–60 in William Shakespeare, King Richard II, ed. Charles R. Forker (London: Thomson Learning, 2002).

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28 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Paladin, 1973), 129, 143 (my emphases). Raymond Williams considers ‘Nature’ ‘perhaps the most complex word in the language’: Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976; London: Fontana Press, 1988), 219, and see further 219–24. 29 Francis Bacon, ‘Of Gardens’, in Essays, intro. Michael J. Hawkins (London: Dent & Sons, 1992), 137. 30 On the Duchess as embodying the powerlessness of women in the masculine world of the history play, see Graham Holderness, ‘“A woman’s war”: A Feminist Reading of Richard II’, in Shakespeare Left and Right, ed. Ivo Kamps (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 167–83. 31 Caroline Spurgeon describes the garden scene as ‘a kind of allegory … for no human gardeners ever discoursed like this’. For her, it displays ‘a heaviness of touch rare in Shakespeare’: Shakespeare’s Imagery and What it Tells Us (1935; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 222. 32 Bonnie Lander Johnson, ‘Visions of Soil and Body Management: The Almanac in Richard II’, in Ground-Work: English Renaissance Literature and Soil Science, ed. Hillary Caroline Eklund (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2017), 68. 33 James R. Siemon, ‘Landlord Not King: Agrarian Change and Interarticulation’, in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 27. 34 William O. Scott, ‘Landholding, Leasing and Inheritance in Richard II’, SEL 42 (2002): 280. 35 Narrative and Dramatic Sources, ed. Bullough, III, 395. 36 See note to ‘farm our royal realm’ (1.4.45) in Richard II, ed. Forker.

Chapter 5   1 On sermons and early modern culture, see Bryan Crockett, The Play of Paradox: Stage and Sermon in Renaissance England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press,

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1995); Peter McCullough, Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Mary Morrissey, Politics and the Paul’s Cross Sermon, 1558–1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon, ed. Peter McCullough, Hugh Adlington and Emma Rhatigan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).   2 Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 243–5, 249–50, 257–64; Thomas Fulton and Kristen Poole, ‘Introduction: Popular Hermeneutics in Shakespeare’s London’, in The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage: Cultures of Interpretation in Reformation England, ed. Thomas Fulton and Kristen Poole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 6–7.   3 See further McCullough, Sermons at Court.   4 On the formal and rhetorical structure and divisions of a sermon, see Morrissey, Politics and the Paul’s Cross Sermon, 57–9.   5 Hannibal Hamlin, The Bible in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 36; and see more generally 36–42. Exegesis refers to the interpretation of scripture. Although sermons were printed for individuals to read, auditors would often take notes at sermons, or even commit passages to memory. On the ars memoriae, see Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (1966; repr., London: Pimlico, 1992), and Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).   6 Jeanne Shami, ‘The Sermon’, in The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern English Literature and Culture, ed. Andrew Hiscock and Helen Wilcox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 195.   7 See Hamlin, Bible in Shakespeare, 149–50. See also Peter Milward, Shakespeare’s Religious Background (Chicago, IL: Loyola University Press, 1973), 126–43; Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays (London: Associated

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University Presses, 1999), 51–66; Bryan Crockett, ‘Shakespeare, Playfere, and the Pirates’, Shakespeare Quarterly 66 (2015): 252–85; Tom Rutter, ‘Hamlet, Pirates, and Purgatory’, Renaissance and Reformation 38 (2015): 117–40; Peter Iver Kaufman, Religion Around Shakespeare (Pennsylvania, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), 59–77; and Daniel Swift, Shakespeare’s Common Prayers: The Book of Common Prayer and the Elizabethan Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).   8 On allusion and Shakespeare’s biblical borrowings, see Hamlin, Bible in Shakespeare, 77–123.   9 Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 44–5. 10 See Mary Morrissey, ‘Ornament and Repetition’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c. 1530–1700, ed. Kevin Killeen, Helen Smith and Rachel Willie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 312. 11 Ibid., 303. 12 Fulton and Poole, ‘Introduction’, 1–2. 13 For a broader consideration of this point, see my ‘Introduction’ to Early Modern Drama and the Bible: Contexts and Readings, 1570–1625, ed. Adrian Streete (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 5–7. 14 On Calvin’s popularity in early modern England, see R. T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 143–213; and John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 15 Smith was born c. 1560 and died in 1591. He was largely conformist although he did occasionally have run-ins with the ecclesiastical authorities over the prayer book and clerical vestments, sources of controversy for many godly Elizabethan clergy. His theology remained firmly Calvinist and mainstream for the late-Elizabethan period. See R. B. Jenkins, Henry Smith: England’s Silver-Tongued Preacher

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(Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1982), and Gary W. Jenkins, ‘Smith, Henry (c. 1560–1591)’, ODNB. 16 See for example Henry Smith, The Sermons of Maister Henry Smith (1593) [STC (2nd edn)/22719], 840–1. 17 Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 172–9. 18 Milward, Shakespeare’s Religious Background, 133. 19 R. Holinshed, Chronicles (1587), in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, 8 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957–75), III, 408. On 30 September 1399, the day following Richard II’s official resignation of the crown, Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, preached a sermon before Parliament on ‘Vir dominabitur populo’ (‘A man will rule the people’, after 1 Sam. 9.17), in which Richard was portrayed as a boy and the new king, Bolingbroke, as a man, despite both being around the same age (thirty-two). See Christopher Fletcher, Richard II: Manhood, Youth, and Politics, 1377–99 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 1–4. 20 The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969): Eccl. 11.9–10. In this chapter, all quotations from the Bible refer to this edition. 21 Another possible biblical intertext is the Pauline contrast between the sinful old man and the regenerate new man: see 2 Cor. 5.16–17. 22 See R. Wever, Lusty Juventus, ed. J. M. Nosworthy (Oxford: Malone Society Reprints, 1966). 23 Henry Smith, The Trvmpet of the Soule, Sounding to Iudgement (1591) [STC (2nd edn)/22706], sig. A7v. 24 Ibid. sig. A6v. Smith also draws on the tradition of psychomachia where in drama a bad angel is opposed by a good (as in Marlowe’s Faustus), or the Devil opposes sage counsel (as in Lusty Juventus). 25 Smith, The Trvmpet, sigs A7v–A8r. 26 Sophie Read, ‘Puns: Serious Wordplay’, in Renaissance Figures of Speech, ed. Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander and Katrin Ettenhuber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 83.

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27 Ibid., 84. 28 In Smith’s dialogue, the flesh responds to the Spirit’s warnings about death and judgement with a resonant pun – ‘talk not of such graue matters’: The Trvmpet, sig. A6v. Compare the dying Mercutio’s ‘Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man’ (RJ 3.1.98–9). 29 On Richard’s use of wit and mockery, see Jeffrey S. Doty, ‘Shakespeare’s Richard II, “Popularity,” and the Early Modern Public Sphere’, Shakespeare Quarterly 61 (2010): 194–5. 30 Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloqvence (1593) [STC (2nd edn)/19498], 57. 31 See Indira Ghose, Shakespeare and Laughter: A Cultural History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 19–20, 59–60. 32 Peacham, Garden of Eloqvence, 57. 33 Smith, The Trvmpet, sig. A3v. 34 As the flesh says to the spirit in their dialogue in Smith’s The Trvmpet, ‘I doo not like of your telling me of Iudgement’: sig. A7r. 35 There is a similar moment in 3.3 when Richard resigns himself to Bolingbroke: ‘Well, well, I see / I talk but idly, and you laugh at me’ (3.3.170–1). 36 See the 1560 Geneva Bible’s marginal note (‘u’) to Job 5.23. 37 John Calvin, Sermons of Maister Iohn Caluin, vpon the Booke of Iob, trans. Arthur Golding (1574) [STC (2nd edn)/4445], 101, 107–8. 38 See Shaheen, Biblical References, 372–3. 39 Calvin, Sermons, 472. 40 Ibid., 473. 41 Ibid., 474. 42 Ibid. 43 For a complementary discussion, see Laura Estill, ‘Richard II and the Book of Life’, SEL 51 (2011): 283–303. 44 Smith, Sermons, 896. 45 Calvin, Sermons, 46–51. 46 Smith, The Trvmpet, sig. A5r. 47 See Smith, Sermons, 433.

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48 Estill, ‘Richard II and the Book of Life’, 291. 49 Smith, Sermons, 917. 50 Ibid., 554. 51 Ibid., 815–16. 52 Shakespeare may have taken this idea of setting scripture against scripture to evoke election and reprobation from Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus, who does something similar in the opening soliloquy of 1.1 with Romans 6.23 and 1 John 1.8. Richard alludes to Faustus’s Helen of Troy speech at 4.1.281–6, on which see further Andrew Duxfield’s chapter in this volume. 53 Smith, Sermons, 1006–7. 54 Ibid., 1007. 55 Ibid., 1009. 56 See Adrian Streete, Protestantism and Drama in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 162–99. 57 Smith, Sermons, 471–2. 58 Ibid., 692.

Chapter 6   1 See, for example, the ‘Preface’ to Woodstock: A Moral History, ed. A. P. Rossiter (London: Chatto and Windus, 1946), 47–71; ‘Introduction’ to Christopher Marlowe, Edward II, ed. Charles R. Forker (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 17–40; Nicholas Brooke, ‘Marlowe as Provocative Agent in Shakespeare’s Early Plays’, Shakespeare Survey 14 (1961): 34–44; Marjorie Garber, ‘Marlovian Vision/Shakespearean Re-vision’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 22 (1979): 3–9; Maurice Charney, ‘Marlowe’s Edward II as Model for Shakespeare’s Richard II’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 33 (1994): 31–41; Robert A. Logan, Shakespeare’s Marlowe: The Influence of Christopher Marlowe on Shakespeare’s Artistry (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 83–116; and Roy Eriksen, ‘Working with Marlowe: Shakespeare’s

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Early Engagement with Marlowe’s Poetics’, Marlowe Studies 5 (2015): 21–36. For a provocative response to such readings, see Paul Menzer, ‘c.f. Marlowe’, in Richard II: New Critical Essays, ed. Jeremy Lopez (London: Routledge, 2012), 117–34.  2 For examples of those exceptions, see Robert P. Merrix and Carole Levin, ‘Richard II and Edward II: The Structure of Deposition’, The Shakespeare Yearbook 1 (1990): 1–13, and Thomas Cartelli, ‘Marlowe and Shakespeare Revisited’, in Christopher Marlowe at 450, ed. Sara Munson Deats and Robert A. Logan (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015), 285–95.  3 Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus: A- and B-texts (1604, 1616), ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 5.1.91–2. All further quotations from the play are taken from this edition and refer to the A-text.  4 See further Patrick Ashby’s chapter in this volume for a discussion of the deposition scene and its putative censorship. See also Gavin Schwartz-Leeper’s chapter, which outlines the way recent editors of the play have approached this problem.  5 Christopher Marlowe, Edward II, ed. Martin Wiggins and Robert Lindsey (London: A & C Black, 1997), 20.26–7.  6 Brooke, ‘Marlowe as Provocative Agent’, 40.  7 Garber, ‘Marlovian Vision/Shakespearean Re-vision’, 3–4.  8 Cartelli, ‘Marlowe and Shakespeare Revisited’, 292.  9 ‘Introduction’ to Edward II, ed. Forker, 40. 10 Robert M. Schuler, ‘Magic Mirrors in Richard II’, Comparative Drama 38 (2004): 162. 11 Merrix and Levin, ‘The Structure of Deposition’, 2. See also Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (1957; repr. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 24–41. 12 See Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 36–7. 13 For an extensive study of the various symbolic uses of the mirror in the literature of the period, see Herbert Grabes, The Mutable Glass: Mirror-Imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and English Renaissance, trans. Gordon Collier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). See

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also Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror: A History, trans. Katherine H. Jewett (London: Routledge, 2001). 14 John Calvin, The Sermons of M. John Calvin vpon the Fifth Book of Moses Called Deuteronomie, trans. Arthur Golding (1583) [STC (2nd edn)/4442], 246. 15 Jean de L’Espine, A Very Excellent and Learned Discourse Touching the Tranquilitie and Contentation of the Minde, trans. E. Smyth (Cambridge: 1592) [STC (2nd edn)/15516], 38–38v. 16 The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). All further biblical quotations refer to this edition. 17 A. P., A Compasse of a Christian Directing Them that be Tossed in the Waues of this World vnto Christ Iesus (1582) [STC (2nd edn)/19054], 4. 18 Calvin, Sermons vpon Deuteronomie, 474. 19 John Frith, A Disputacion of Purgatorye Made by Iohan Frith (Antwerp: 1531) [STC (2nd edn)/11386.5]. 20 See David Daniell, ‘Frith, John (1503–1533)’, ODNB. 21 Daniell, ‘Frith, John’. 22 More’s letter was published as A Letter of Syr Tho. More Knyght Impugynge the Erronyouse Wrytyng of Iohn Fryth agaynst the Blessed Sacrament of the Aultare (1533) [STC (2nd edn)/18090]. See also The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More, ed. Elizabeth Frances Rogers (1947; New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), 439–64. In 1533 More challenged Frith in the following: The Answere to the Fyrst Parte of the Poysened Booke (1533) [STC (2nd edn)/18077]; The Apologye of Syr Thomas More Knyght (1533) [STC (2nd edn)/18078]; and The Second Parte of the Confutation of Tyndals Answere (1533) [STC (2nd edn)/18080]. 23 John Frith, A Boke Made by Iohn Frith Prisoner in the Tower of London Answeringe vnto M Mores Lettur (Antwerp: 1533) [STC (2nd edn)/11381]. Reprinted with the same title in 1546 (Antwerp) [STC (2nd edn)/11382]; 1548 [STC (2nd edn)/11383]; and 1548 [STC (2nd edn)/11384]. See also The Whole Workes of W. Tyndall, Iohn Frith, and Doct. Barnes,

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Three Worthy Martyrs, and Principall Teachers of this Churche of England (1573) [STC (2nd edn)/24436]. 24 John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), [STC (2nd edn)/ 11225], 1031. 25 Ibid., and An Abridgement of the Booke of Acts and Monumentes (1589) [STC (2nd edn)/11229]. 26 The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More, ed. Rogers, 449. 27 Ibid., 454. 28 Grabes, The Mutable Glass, 107. 29 Frith, A Boke Made by John Frith, sig. G4v. 30 See OED, ‘sport n. 1’, I.2.b. 31 Frith, A Boke Made by John Frith, sig. G4v. 32 Merrix and Levin, ‘The Structure of Deposition’, 2. 33 Austen Saker, Narbonus: The Laberynth of Libertie; Second Parte, of the Lust of Libertie (1580) [STC (2nd edn)/21593], 10. 34 Ibid., 108. 35 John Lyly, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wyt (1578) [STC (2nd edn)/17051], 77v–78 [sigs Riv–Rii]. 36 Ovid, Metamorphoses, Volume II: Books 9–15 (Loeb Classical Library 43), 2nd edn, trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), Book XV, ll. 229–36. Both the Latin verse and the prose translation are from this edition. In the Latin text Helen is referred to by the name Tyndaris, which reflects her status as daughter of Tyndareus. Grabes makes a passing reference to this trope without considering its importance to Shakespeare in particular or early modern drama more generally: see The Mutable Glass, 119.

Chapter 7   1 Graham Holderness, Shakespeare: The Histories (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 203.

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 2 John J. Joughin, ‘Richard II and the Performance of Grief’, in Shakespeare’s Histories and Counter-Histories, ed. Dermot Cavanagh, Stuart Hampton-Reeves and Stephen Longstaffe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 26.  3 See Charles R. Forker, Shakespeare: The Critical Tradition: Richard II (London: Athlone, 1998), 21–3, 293–300, 372–8.  4 Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (1957; repr. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 35; For Slavoj Žižek They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, 2nd edn (London: Verso, 2008), 253–73; Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 9.  5 Joughin, ‘Richard II and the Performance of Grief’, 21; Wilbur Sanders, The Dramatist and the Received Idea: Studies in the Plays of Marlowe & Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 177–8.  6 Joughin, ‘Richard II and the Performance of Grief’, 21; T. S. Eliot, ‘Hamlet and His Problems’, in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920; repr. London: Methuen, 1960), 100–1.  7 Douglas Bruster, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 38.  8 Ibid., 41, 63, 65; see further 38–46, 63–80, 96. On the ‘New Economic Criticism’ in Shakespeare studies, see Peter F. Grav, ‘Taking Stock of Shakespeare and the New Economic Criticism’, Shakespeare 8 (2012): 111–36; and David Hawkes, Shakespeare and Economic Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 67–88.  9 Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Minimal Event: Subjective Destitution in Shakespeare and Beckett’, in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Literature but Were Afraid to Ask Žižek, ed. Russell Sbriglia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 294–9; How to Read Lacan (London: Granta Books, 2006), 35; Looking Awry, 9–10. 10 Naomi Conn Liebler, ‘The Mockery King of Snow: Richard II and the Sacrifice of Ritual’, in True Rites and Maimed Rites: Ritual and Anti-Ritual in Shakespeare and His Age, ed. Linda Woodbridge and Edward Berry (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 229–30.

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11 Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language (London: Allen Lane/ Penguin, 2000), 43. 12 Charles R. Forker, ‘Unstable Identity in Shakespeare’s Richard II’, Renascence 54 (2001): 8. 13 John Halverson, ‘The Lamentable Comedy of Richard II’, English Literary Renaissance 24 (1994): 355–6. 14 On the effects of this kind of listing, see Robert Belknap, ‘The Literary List: A Survey of its Uses and Deployments’, Literary Imagination 2 (2000): 35–54. See also ‘Lists in Literature: From the Middle Ages to Postmodernism’, ed. Eva von Contzen, a special issue of Style 50 (2016): 241–358. 15 Alfred Thomas, Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages: Maimed Rights (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 69–71. 16 Holderness, Shakespeare: The Histories, 199–200. 17 See OED, ‘res, n. 1’; and ‘real, adj. 2’, 4 and 7; James E. Berg, ‘“This dear, dear land”: “Dearth” and the Fantasy of the Land-Grab in Richard II and Henry IV’, English Literary Renaissance 29 (1999): 228–9. 18 See OED, ‘real, adj. 1 and n. 1’, A1–3. 19 See Chronicles of the Revolution 1397–1400: The Reign of Richard II, trans. and ed. Chris Given-Wilson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993); and Chris Given-Wilson, The Royal Household and the King’s Affinity: Service, Politics and Finance in England 1360–1413 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986). 20 R. Holinshed, Chronicles (1587) [STC (2nd edn)/13569], 3 vols, III, 501, 508. On whether Richard’s ‘cote’ existed, see Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 355 n. 101; and Kay Staniland, ‘Extravagance or Regal Necessity? The Clothing of Richard II’, in The Regal Image of Richard II and the Wilton Diptych, ed. Dillian Gordon, Lisa Monnas and Caroline Elam (London: Harvey Miller, 1997), 85–6, 92–3. 21 Gervase Mathew, The Court of Richard II (London: John Murray, 1968), 39–40; Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 354–5, and see further 327–65. For details of Richard II’s treasures, see https://archives.history.

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ac.uk/richardII/index.html [accessed 14 February 2020], and Marian Campbell, ‘White Harts and Coronets: The Jewellery and Plate of Richard II’, in The Regal Image of Richard II, ed. Gordon, Monnas and Elam, 95–114. On the Wilton Diptych, see Dillian Gordon, The Wilton Diptych: Making and Meaning (London: National Gallery, 1994), and The Regal Image of Richard II, ed. Gordon, Monnas and Elam. 22 Given-Wilson, The Royal Household, 90, 25, 79, 83; and see further 23–6, 76–92, 139–40. 23 Saul, Richard II, 355; Given-Wilson, The Royal Household, 258. 24 Saul, Richard II, 355–8; Christopher Fletcher, Richard II: Manhood, Youth, and Politics, 1377–99 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 45–59, 192–201, 245–8, 278–80. 25 George B. Stow, ‘Richard II and the Invention of the Pocket Handkerchief’, Albion 27 (1995): 227–8, 229, 232. 26 Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 203. 27 On Renaissance dramas in which ‘prodigality’ does take centre stage, see Ezra Horbury, Prodigality in Early Modern Drama (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019). 28 Lois Potter, ‘The Antic Disposition of Richard II’, Shakespeare Survey 27 (1974): 34. 29 Thomas of Woodstock or King Richard the Second, Part One, ed. Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 3.1.6–23; see further 3.1.136–74, 3.2.51–81 and 3.3. 30 On the historical reality of ‘blank charters’ – so called because they ‘gave the king carte blanche over the lives and possessions of his subjects’ – see Caroline M. Barron, ‘The Tyranny of Richard II’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 41 (1968): 10–14, 16–17. 31 OED, ‘deck, v.’, 2.a. 32 See OED, ‘rug, n. 3’, I.1.a, b. 33 The Chatto Book of Cabbages and Kings: Lists in Literature, ed. Francis Spufford (London: Chatto & Windus, 1989), 1, 2, 5–7; see also Belknap, ‘The Literary List’.

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34 See Campbell, ‘White Harts and Coronets’, 96, 100. 35 Holderness, Shakespeare: The Histories, 202–3; Katharine Eisaman Maus, Being and Having in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 28. 36 For exceptions, see H. R. Coursen, The Leasing Out of England: Shakespeare’s Second Henriad (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982), 15–33, 48–51; and Rebecca Lemon, Treason By Words: Literature, Law, and Rebellion in Shakespeare’s England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 60–71. 37 See Coursen, The Leasing Out of England, 50, 15–19, 36–8. 38 Sandra K. Fischer, ‘“He means to pay”: Value and Metaphor in the Lancastrian Tetralogy’, Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 155–6. 39 Theodore B. Leinwand, Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 19–22, 32. 40 See OED, ‘lending, n. 2’, 2.b.; Charles Edelman, Shakespeare’s Military Language: A Dictionary (London: Continuum, 2004), 325–8. 41 Edelman, Shakespeare’s Military Language, 327. 42 David Glimp, ‘Sovereignty after Taxes in Shakespeare’s History Plays’, SEL 58 (2018): 25. 43 Sanders, The Dramatist and the Received Idea, 188; Forker, ‘Unstable Identity’, 5. 44 Harry Berger, Jr., Imaginary Audition: Shakespeare on Stage and Page (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), 92. On ‘angel’ (as coin), see D. F. Allen and W. R. Dunstan, ‘Crosses and Crowns: A Study of Coinage in the Elizabethan Dramatists’, British Numismatic Journal 23 (1938–41): 287–99; Sandra K. Fischer, Econolingua: A Glossary of Coins and Economic Language in Renaissance Drama (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 41; Stephen Deng, Coinage and State Formation in Early Modern English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 139–51; and David Landreth, The Face of Mammon: The Matter of Money in English Renaissance Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 187–91.

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45 See Fischer, Econolingua, 132. 46 See further Landreth, The Face of Mammon, 10, 245 n. 10. 47 M. M. Mahood, Shakespeare’s Wordplay (London: Methuen, 1957), 84. 48 OED, ‘comfort, v.’, 7.a.; 2. 49 Richard II was ‘left desolate, void, and in despaire of all hope and comfort’; ‘utterlie despairing of all comfort’: Holinshed, Chronicles, 499, 503. 50 See Allen and Dunstan, ‘Crosses and Crowns’; Fischer, Econolingua, 62–3. 51 Fischer, Econolingua, 98. 52 OED, ‘comfort, n.’, 7. 53 Leinwand, Theatre, Finance and Society, 78, and on the early modern experience of debtors’ prisons, see further 6, 10, 43–4, 50–2, 69–80. See also Amanda Bailey, Of Bondage: Debt, Property, and Personhood in Early Modern England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 23–4, 30–1, 53–4, 117–44. 54 Berg, ‘“This dear, dear land”’, 235; Maus, Being and Having in Shakespeare, 1–43. 55 Berg, ‘“This dear, dear land”’, 237–8. 56 Deng, Coinage and State Formation, 156–7. 57 Lemon, Treason By Words, 65, 67. 58 For the full sense of these numismatic puns, see Fischer, Econolingua. 59 Hawkes, Shakespeare and Economic Theory, 168. On coins, credit and debt in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, see Fischer, ‘“He means to pay”’, 159–63; and Jesse M. Lander, ‘“Crack’d Crowns” and Counterfeit Sovereigns: The Crisis of Value in 1 Henry IV’, Shakespeare Studies 30 (2002): 137–61. 60 See further Deng, Coinage and State Formation, 1–2, 9–16, 52–3, 144–51; Landreth, The Face of Mammon, 5–7, 8–20, 52–5, 101, 130–1; and David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, rev. edn (London: Melville House, 2014), 73–5, 245–7. 61 On the language of ‘bankruptcy’ in Richard II, see Richard D. Altick, ‘Symphonic Imagery in Richard II’, PMLA 62 (1947): 362–6.

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62 Fletcher, Richard II, 12–13; Holinshed’s Chronicles, 496, 502; Chronicles of the Revolution, ed. Given-Wilson, 177. 63 Bailey, Of Bondage, 5–9, 18, 52–4; Leinwand, Theatre, Finance and Society, 42–84; B. J. Sokol and Mary Sokol, Shakespeare’s Legal Language: A Dictionary (London: Continuum, 2000), 36–41. 64 Bailey, Of Bondage, 3–19, 24–5; Graeber, Debt, 332–5. 65 Bailey, Of Bondage, 5–9, 17, 30–1. 66 Graeber, Debt, 344, 379; Bailey, Of Bondage, 16–17. 67 On debt demanding contractual equality, see Graeber, Debt, 86–7, 102–9, 120–2, 191, 209–10, 386; on the cold arithmetic and violence of debt, see 14, 158–62, 238–9, 386–7. 68 Ibid., 108, 209. 69 See Craig Muldrew, ‘“Hard food for Midas”: Cash and its Social Value in Early Modern England’, Past & Present 170 (2000): 78–120, and The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998); Bailey, Of Bondage, 2–4, 11. 70 Leinwand, Theatre, Finance and Society, 80; and see further 42–4, 77–80. 71 The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), Matthew 6.12. See also Graeber, Debt, 84, 330, 411 n. 25. 72 Graeber, Debt, 379. 73 See Frank Trentmann, Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the 15th Century to the 21st (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2016), 2–3, 30, and see further 1–77, 95–105; OED, ‘consume, v.’, 1–6.b., 7–9 and 6.c. 74 Trentmann, Empire of Things, 3, 54. 75 Sanders, The Dramatist and the Received Idea, 181. 76 ‘A Translation from Seneca’s Troades, Act II, Chorus’, in The Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Harold Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 45–6. 77 Georges Bataille, Sovereignty, in The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volumes II and III, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1993), 197, 202, 239, 255, 345.

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78 Ibid., 392. 79 Ibid., 197–8, 199–200, 230–1, 237, 242, 321; Georges Bataille, ‘The Notion of Expenditure’, in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1929–1939, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 118–20; see also The Accursed Share, Volume I, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991). 80 Bataille, Sovereignty, 360, 421. 81 Ibid., 214, 238, 256.

Chapter 8   1 William Shakespeare, King Richard II, ed. Charles R. Forker (London: Thomson Learning, 2002).   2 William Shakespeare, The RSC Shakespeare: Richard II, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2010).   3 William Shakespeare, King Richard II, ed. Andrew Gurr, updated edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Richard II, ed. Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).   4 Richard II, ed. Dawson and Yachnin, 120–1.   5 Nahum Tate, The History of King Richard the Second. Acted at the Theatre Royal under the Name of The Sicilian Usurper (1681).   6 The Stationers’ Register entry for Richard II can be accessed online: https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/exhibition/ document/stationers-register-entry-richard-ii [accessed 14 February 2020].   7 See Blair Worden, ‘Which Play Was Performed at the Globe Theatre on 7 February 1601?’, London Review of Books 25, no. 13 (2003): 22–4; Paul E. J. Hammer, ‘Shakespeare’s Richard II, the Play of 7 February 1601, and the Essex Rising’, Shakespeare Quarterly 59 (2008): 1–35; and Peter Lake, How

252

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Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 237.   8 Francis Edwards, Plots and Plotters in the Reign of Elizabeth I (Dublin: Four Courts, 2002).   9 Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642, 4th edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 10 Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa, Staging in Shakespeare’s Theatres (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 11 S. P. Cerasano, ‘Performance: Audiences, Actors, Stage Business’, and David Kathman, ‘Playhouses’, in A New Companion to Renaissance Drama, ed. Arthur F. Kinney and Thomas Warren Hopper (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2017). 12 Tiffany Stern, Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). 13 Douglas Bruster, ‘The Dramatic Life of Objects in the Early Modern Theatre’, in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 67–96. 14 Ibid., 71. 15 Ibid., 70. 16 On the symbolic significance of the mirror in the deposition scene, see Andrew Duxfield’s chapter in this volume. 17 Richard II, ed. Bate and Rasmussen, 154. 18 Early English Books Online [database] (Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest LLC, 2019). Available online by subscription [accessed 14 February 2020]. 19 Richard II, ed. Catherine Lisak, in Internet Shakespeare Editions. Available online: https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/ Library/Texts/R2/ [accessed 14 February 2020]. 20 Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare [database] (Ann Arbor, MI: Chadwyck-Healey/ProQuest LLC, 2019). Available online by subscription [accessed 14 February 2020]. 21 See the Folger Shakespeare Library, available online: https:// www.folger.edu/shakespeare [accessed 14 February 2020]. Other free-to-access resources include PlayShakespeare,

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available online: https://www.playshakespeare.com/; and Open Source Shakespeare, available online: http://www. opensourceshakespeare.org/ [both accessed 14 February 2020]. 22 Richard II, ed. Forker, 506–41. 23 Richard II, ed. Bate and Rasmussen, 109–10. 24 In Arden: Editing Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of Richard Proudfoot, ed. Ann Thompson and Gordon McMullan (London: Bloomsbury, 2002); Shakespeare and Textual Studies, ed. Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 25 A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text, ed. Andrew Murphy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007); John Jowett, Shakespeare and Text, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Shakespeare Survey 59 (2006). 26 Kenneth Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays (1977; repr. London: Routledge, 2005). 27 John Kerrigan, Shakespeare’s Originality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 28 Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, 8 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957– 75), III, 353–491. 29 Richard II, ed. Forker, 124. 30 The Holinshed Project, for example, offers free online access to searchable transcriptions of the 1577 and 1587 editions of Holinshed’s Chronicles, allowing the reader to compare passages in parallel. See The Holinshed Project, ed. Paulina Kewes, Ian Archer, Felicity Heale and Henry Summerson (2008–13). Available online: http://www.cems.ox.ac.uk/ holinshed/ [accessed 14 February 2020]. 31 Richard II, ed. Forker, 179. 32 The Holinshed Project: ‘The deposition of King Richard II, 1399’. Available online: http://www.cems.ox.ac.uk/holinshed/ extracts4.shtml [accessed 14 February 2020]. 33 Ibid. 34 A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works: The Histories, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Oxford: Blackwell,

254

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2003) and The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s History Plays, ed. Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 35 Warren Chernaik, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s History Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 36 Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), and Laura Ashe, Richard II: A Brittle Glory (London: Penguin, 2016). 37 ‘The deposition of King Richard II, 1399’. 38 Tate, The History of King Richard the Second, ‘Title Page’. On the play’s censorship, see further Patrick Ashby’s chapter in this volume. 39 Tate, The History of King Richard the Second, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, sigs. A–Av, A2. 40 Ibid., sigs. A2–A2v. 41 Ibid., 42. 42 Margaret Shewring, Shakespeare in Performance: King Richard II (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 58. 43 Ibid., 2. 44 Malcolm Page, Richard II: Text and Performance (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987). 45 Margaret Shewring, ‘Staging Richard II for a New Millennium’, in Richard II: New Critical Essays, ed. Jeremy Lopez (London and New York: Routledge, 2012). 46 Jeremy Lopez, The Shakespeare Handbooks: Richard II – A Guide to the Text and the Play in Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 47 Dennis Kennedy, Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of Twentieth-Century Performance, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 48 Ibid., 242. 49 John O’Connor and Katharine Goodland, A Directory of Shakespeare in Performance 1970–2005: Volume 1 Great Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 50 Ibid., 1131.

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51 Drama Online [database] (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013); BBC Shakespeare Archive Resource [database] (London: BBC, 2019); BoB [Box of Broadcasts]: On Demand TV and Radio for Education [database] (London: Learning on Screen/British Universities and Colleges Film and Video Council, 2019). All available online by subscription [accessed 14 February 2020]. 52 Richard II [film], dir. Derek Giles (UK: BBC, 1978) and The Hollow Crown: Richard II [film], dir. Rupert Goold (UK: BBC, 2012).

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Thomas of Woodstock or King Richard the Second, Part One, edited by Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Tillyard, E. M. W. The Elizabethan World Picture. London: Chatto & Windus, 1943. Tillyard, E. M. W. Shakespeare’s History Plays. London: Chatto & Windus, 1944. Woodstock: A Moral History, edited by A. P. Rossiter. London: Chatto & Windus, 1946. Worden, Blair. ‘Which Play Was Performed at the Globe Theatre on 7 February 1601?’. London Review of Books 25, no. 13 (2003): 22–4. Yeats, W. B. ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’. The Speaker, The Liberal Review (11 and 18 May 1901), 158–9, 185–7. Reprinted in Forker, ed. Shakespeare: The Critical Tradition: Richard II, 372–8. London: Athlone, 1998. Žižek, Slavoj. ‘The Minimal Event: Subjective Destitution in Shakespeare and Beckett’. In Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Literature but Were Afraid to Ask Žižek, edited by Russell Sbriglia, 290–315. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.

INDEX Note: Performances listed in chronological order. Abbott, Tony 52 Actes and Monuments (Foxe) 146–7 Act to Restrain Abuses of Players (1606) 189 adaptations 21, 48, 190, 192, 196, 210 Tate (1681) xvii, 24–5, 28, 48, 190, 196, 205–6, 207 Theobald (1719) xvii, 26, 28 Goodhall (1772) 30–1 Wroughton (1815, Edmund Kean’s production) xvii, 48 Kean (Charles) production (1857) xvii The Hollow Crown (BBC, 2012) xix, 60, 84–5, 210–11 allusion see intertextual allusion all-women-of-colour production (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, 2019) xix, 7, 19, 63–5 Almeida Theatre xix, 61–3 Altick, Richard D. 41, 98, 212n. Andoh, Adjoa xix, 19, 63, 64, 65 Anne of Bohemia xiii, 5 Appellants see Lords Appellant

appropriation (of Richard II) 3–5, 8, 23 Arab Spring 7 Arden Shakespeare (third series) 20, 69, 188, 190, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201 Arundel, Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury xiii, 239n. Ashe, Laura 204 Ashtar Theatre (Jericho) 83 Aumerle, Duke of (character) see York, Edward of, Earl of Rutland, Duke of Aumerle (character) Aumerle, Edward, Duke of (historical figure) xii Bacon, Francis 105 Bagot (character) 10, 11, 58, 60, 107, 118, 122 Bagot (character, Thomas of Woodstock) 90 Bamber, Linda 42 bardolatry 30–1 Barkan, Leonard 91 Barthes, Roland 104 Barton, John xviii, 50, 208 Bassett, Kate 59 Bataille, Georges 184–5 Bate, Jonathan 46, 70, 75, 188 BBC productions xviii, xix, 51–2, 57, 59–60, 84–5, 210–11

INDEX

Beale, Simon Russell xix, 61, 62, 63 Bechtler, Hildegard 56 Benson, Frank xvii, 49 Bergeron, David 43, 46 Berg, James E. 89, 179 Bible 41, 112, 113 Genesis 3.17–19 107–8; 4.2 92; 4.10 91 1 Samuel 9.17 239n. Job 2.13 123; 5.21–3 120–1, 240n.; 6.12 124; 24.13–17 121 Ecclesiastes 11.9–10 115, 116–17, 118, 239n. Matthew 6.12 250n.; 27.24 131 Luke 18.16 128, 129; 18.25 128–9; 18.26 129 John 13.29 176 Romans 6.23 241n. 1 Corinthians 13.12 144 2 Corinthians 5.16–17 239n. James 1.22 4 145 1 John 1.8 241n. Billington, Michael 56, 61, 62, 64 blank charters 8, 9, 164, 168, 171, 173, 176, 181 blank verse 8, 16, 201 blood (and soil) 19, 87, 88, 89, 91, 95, 99, 100, 103, 104, 109 Bloom, Harold 44 Bodenham, John 23 Bogdanov, Michael xviii, 52–3 Bolingbroke, Henry, Earl of Derby, Duke of Hereford, Duke of Lancaster, afterwards Henry IV (character)

265

allegations against Bushy, Bagot and Green 10, 11 banishment 16, 78, 89 challenge to Mowbray 94–5, 171–3, 190–1, 194, 195, 199 deposition scene 125, 126, 135, 137, 139, 150, 160, 162, 194, 197–8 and the earth 99, 100, 102, 103–4 and (Eng)land 81, 82, 89–90, 93, 94, 95–6, 107 entrance into London with the captive Richard 24, 126–7 Essex’s identification with 14–15 on Gloucester’s murder 12, 173 Lords Appellant references 12 in performance Pasco/Richardson production (RSC, 1973, dir. Barton) xviii, 50–1, 53, 208, 209 ESC’s The Wars of the Roses (1988) 53 Pimlott/West production, (David Troughton, The Other Place, 2000) 54, 55 Nunn/Spacey production (Ben Miles, Old Vic, 2005) 56 The Hollow Crown (Rory Kinnear, BBC, 2012) xix, 60, 84, 211

266

INDEX

Doran/Tennant production (Nigel Lindsay, RSC, 2013) 60 Hill-Gibbins/Beale production (Leo Bill, Almeida, 2018/19) 62 Linton/Andoh production (Sarah Niles, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, 2019) 64 Richard II’s murder 91–2, 109, 131 and right to rule 39, 78–9, 102, 104, 174 in Tate’s adaptation 25, 206 Bolingbroke, Henry, Earl of Derby, Duke of Hereford, Duke of Lancaster, afterwards Henry IV (historical figure) xii, xiii, xiv, 11–12 Bosworth, Battle of xiv Bowie-Sell, Daisy 61 Boyd, Michael xix, 56–7, 61, 70, 189, 209 Bradley, A. C. 39 Brexit 4, 5, 63 Brooke, Nicholas 137–8 Brown, Georgina 56 Bruckner, Lynne 81–2 Bruster, Douglas 161, 193–4 Bryant, J. A. 40–1 Budra, Paul 214n. Bushy (character) 10, 11, 60, 96, 107, 122, 175–6 Bushy (character, Thomas of Woodstock) 90

Calvin, John 114, 120, 121–2, 123, 143, 145 Calvo, Clara 6 Campbell, Lily B. 40 Capell, Edward 27 Carlisle, Bishop of (character) 23, 28–9, 62, 124, 174, 197 Carroll, Tim xix, 55 Cartelli, Thomas 138 Cecil, Sir Robert xv, 47 Charles I 23 Charles II 43, 205 Chronicle of Froissart (trans. Bourchier) 93–4 chronicle/history plays about land 89 and Bolingbroke’s accusations against Bushy, Bagot and Green 11 as a continuous narrative 21, 29–30, 34–5, 37, 39–40, 53, 56–7, 58, 67 depicting the non-heroic 37 Lake’s historicist analysis 73–4 language rather than action in Richard II 2, 7–8, 15–16, 95 national identity 49, 80 sources for xv, 93–4, 200 see also Holinshed, Raphael (Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland) teaching Richard II 202–4 and the tragic aesthetic in Richard II 21, 24–5, 26, 28–9, 31–2, 33

INDEX

understanding Richard II 8, 9, 214n. Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (Holinshed) see Holinshed, Raphael (Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland) Clare, Janet 46 coinage 99, 175, 177, 180, 182 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 18, 31–3, 34, 37, 72, 221n. commonplacing 23, 112 contemptus mundi 134, 153 Cottrell, Richard xviii, 50 Coursen, H. R. 171 Craig, Leon Harold 78 Creton, Jean 200 Crompton, Sarah 62 Cultural Materialism 42 Daniell, David 146 Daniel, Samuel (The First Four Books of the Civil Wars) xv, 200 Dawson, Anthony B. 70, 189 debt 172–3, 177–8, 180–3 de casibus tradition xv, 17, 77 De Jongh, Nicholas 55 Deng, Stephen 179 deposition scene buckets metaphor 27, 179, 206, 208 climactic marking 152–3 Holinshed’s Chronicles 201–2 and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus 19, 134, 136–40, 148, 156, 241n.

267

materiality of kingship 76, 162, 163, 169–70, 179, 180 publication of xvi, 22, 43, 45, 135, 196, 197–8 Reformation controversy 134, 148–52 and Richard’s reduced selfhood 81, 141–2, 160 Tate’s Restoration adaptations 206 and tempus edax rerum and contemptus mundi traditions 153, 155–7 theatricality 191, 194 and theological texts and sermons 125–6, 144, 145 Devereux, Robert, 2nd Earl of Essex 14 see also Essex rebellion Dibdin, Charles 220n. digital texts 71, 72, 196, 201, 253n. Directory of Shakespeare in Performance 1970–2005 208–9 divine right 13, 78, 104, 174, 176, 197 Dobson, Michael 54, 55 Doctor Faustus (Marlowe) 19, 134, 136, 137–40, 148, 156, 239n., 241n. Dollimore, Jonathan 43 Donmar Warehouse xix, 59 Doran, Gregory xix, 60, 61 Doty, Jeffrey S. 74–5 Dowden, Edward 35–6, 38 Dryden, John 24 Dusinberre, Juliet 42

268

INDEX

Early English Books Online (EEBO) 196 earth 41, 98–104, 119 see also ground; land ecocriticism 81–2 see also nature Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare 196 Edmund of Langley, Duke of York (historical figure) xii Edward of Angoulême xii Edward, the Black Prince xii Edward II xii, 11 Edward III xii, 105 Edward II (Marlowe) xv, xviii, 11, 33, 55, 69, 136, 138, 200 Edward IV xiv Edwards, Francis 192 EEBO see Early English Books Online (EEBO) Eliot, T. S. 160 Elizabethan period contemporary reaction to Richard II’s fiscal unscrupulousness 8–9, 172–3, 182 de casibus tradition 17 doctrine of universal order 39 English identity 6, 80 literary anthologies 3, 23 original staging practices 55 publication of the ‘deposition’ scene 22, 43, 45, 46, 69, 198 sermon culture 19, 111–12 succession crisis 14, 73, 78 topicality and modern staging 207

twenty-first-century focus 68, 70, 71, 72–9, 80, 81, 83, 85 see also Essex rebellion Elizabeth I xv, xvi, 6, 14–15, 22–3, 58, 67, 73, 75, 80 Englands Parnassus (Allott) 3, 23 ESC (English Shakespeare Company) xviii, 52–3 Essex rebellion aftermath 23 early reception of Richard II 22–3 Essex as Bolingbroke 14–15 historicist methodologies 43, 73, 74–5 and Mirror for Magistrates 76 performance (Globe Theatre, 1601) xvi, 14, 19, 22–3, 43, 45, 47–8, 73, 192 prefatory material (in editions of Richard II) 69, 70–1, 192 teaching Richard II 192 twentieth-century criticism xvi, 43 Estill, Laura 124 Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (Lyly) 154 Europe 4, 5–6 Exton (character) 58, 61, 91, 130 Farabee, Darlene 82–3 ‘farming the realm’ 8–9, 53, 82, 90, 108–9, 168, 171, 173, 176 Feerick, Jean E. 100

INDEX

feminist criticism 42, 44 Field, Richard 114 Fiennes, Ralph xviii Finn, Kavita Mudan 77 First Folio (1623) elemental language 103 new critical editions 69, 70, 71, 72, 188, 189, 190, 197 online access 71, 196 pedagogical value 19, 196–9, 201, 202 publication xvi, 22 Richard II’s inflation of figures 170 First Four Books of the Civil Wars, The (Daniel) xv, 200 Firth, Tanzeena 208 Fischer, Sandra K. 172 Folger Shakespeare Library 196–7 Forker, Charles R. 10, 13, 69, 138, 163, 188, 197 Foxe, John 146–7 Friedman, Donald M. 4, 89 Frith, John 146–8, 150, 151, 152 Froissart, Jean (Chronicles) 93–4, 200 Frost, Lea Luecking 77 Fulton, Tom 113 Garber, Marjorie 138 Gardener (character) 16, 92, 99, 105, 106, 107, 179–80 garden/gardener 81, 83, 91–2, 99, 105–8 Garrick, David 30, 31

269

Gaunt, John of, Duke of Lancaster (character) eulogy for England 3–6, 63, 88–9, 102, 107, 108 ground as womb 81, 97 John McCain comparison 87 landscape politics 81–2, 91, 92, 93, 103, 104 in performance xviii, xix, 60, 84 punning on his name 27, 32, 101, 117–18, 126 and Richard II’s material bankruptcy 8, 9, 81–2, 90–1, 108–9, 164, 167, 171, 179, 181 Richard II’s seizure of his wealth 60, 92, 168, 169, 170, 176, 179, 205 sermon culture and the language of mockery 115, 116, 117, 118–19 storytelling 203 Gaunt, John of, Duke of Lancaster (historical figure) xii, xiv, 5, 84 gender 53–4 see also all-women-ofcolour production (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, 2019) gender-based criticism 42, 77 genre 17, 82 teaching Richard II 189, 190, 192, 198, 202–4 see also chronicle/history plays; tragedy ghosts 57, 58 Gielgud, John xvii, xviii

270

INDEX

Giles, David xviii, 52, 210 Given-Wilson, Chris 165, 166 Glimp, David 173 Globe theatre xvi, 14, 19, 22, 46, 47, 74, 192 see also Shakespeare’s Globe Gloucester see Woodstock, Thomas of, Duke of Gloucester (character) Gloucester, Duchess (character) 60, 105–6, 173, 206 Goodhall, James 30, 31 Goold, Rupert xix, 60 Grabes, Herbert 148 Graeber, David 181, 182, 183 Grandage, Michael xix, 59 Grandage, Sarah 3 Greenblatt, Stephen 43 Green (character) 10, 11, 60, 96, 107, 122, 175–6 Grene, Nicholas 57 ground 19, 88, 94–8, 99, 104 see also earth; land Gurr, Andrew 47, 48, 51, 189, 193 Haddad, Tamara 83 Hall, Edward xv, 200 Hall, Peter xvii, 49 Halverson, John 9 Hamlet (character) 159, 160 Hamlin, Hannibal 112 Hammer, Paul E. J. 14, 71, 74, 192 Harrison, Daniella 64 Hattersley, Roy 3 Hawkes, David 180 Hayward, John 14, 23 Hazlitt, William 33–4, 37 Henry V (character) 15–16 Henry V (historical figure) xiv

Henry VI (character) 34 Henry VI (historical figure) xiv Henry VII xiv Henry VIII xiv, 6 Hiddleston, Tom 59 Hill-Gibbins, Jo xix, 61–3 history plays see chronicle/ history plays Hitchings, Henry 64 Hoby, Sir Edward xv, 47 Hockey, Dorothy C. 235n. Hoenselaars, Ton 6 Holbrook, Peter 97 Holderness, Graham 8, 43 Holinshed Project, The website 201, 253n. Holinshed, Raphael (Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland) on Bolingbroke’s return from exile 99 confiscation of Bolingbroke’s land 92 on court flattery 204 deposition scene 201–2 ‘farming the realm’ 108 homoeroticism at court 10 Lennox’s critical commentary 27–9 online access 201 publication (1587) xv on Richard II’s debts 180–1 on Richard II’s material extravagance 165 on Richard’s lack of ’comfort’ 177 on the sermon preached following Richard’s official resignation of the crown 239n.

INDEX

Hollow Crown, The (BBC, 2012) xix, 59–60, 84–5, 210–11 homoeroticism 10–11 Hopper, Thomas Warren 193 Hudson, Norman 36 Ichikawa, Mariko 193 inheritance rights 92–3, 104, 179 Internet Shakespeare Editions 196 intertextual allusion Doctor Faustus (Marlowe) 19, 134, 136–40, 148, 156, 241n. King Lear 152 Mirror for Magistrates, A (A Myrroure for Magistrates) 17, 76–7, 100 Narbonus (Saker) 153–4, 155 Reformation controversy and transubstantiation 134, 146–52 tempus edax rerum and contemptus mundi traditions 153, 155–7 see also Bible; sermons Irish wars xiii, xiv, 8, 60, 119, 165, 169, 173 Isabel of France (historical figure) xiii, 5, 11 Isabel, Queen (character) 10, 11, 77, 92, 99, 100, 202, 204 Isle of Dogs, The (Jonson and Nashe) 75

271

Jacobi, Derek xviii, 51–2, 57, 210 James VI and I xvi Jardine, Lisa 3 Jenkins, Martin xviii Johnson, Samuel 29–30, 31, 35 Jonson, Ben (The Isle of Dogs) 75 Jowett, John 199 Kahn, Coppélia 42 Kantorowicz, Ernst 13, 40 Kean, Charles xvii, 48 Kean, Edmund xvii, 33, 48 Keeling, William xvi, 48 Kennedy, Dennis 208 Kent, Jonathan xviii Kermode, Frank 162 Kerrigan, John 200 ‘king’s two bodies’ and debt 181 disconnection between them 13, 40, 78, 83, 97, 126, 141, 142, 151, 160, 170 and Elizabeth I 13–14 Pasco/Richardson production (RSC, 1973, dir. Barton) 51 Reformation allusion 151 Kinnear, Rory xix, 60, 84 Kinney, Arthur F. 193 Lake, Peter 73–4, 192 Lambarde, William xvi, 15, 58, 67, 73, 75, 219n. Lamb, Charles 221n. Lamb, Jonathan P. 80–1 land 19, 78, 81–2, 88, 89–94, 98, 104 see also earth; ground

272

INDEX

Lander Johnson, Bonnie 107 Langley, Edmund of, Duke of York (character) on Bolingbroke and Richard’s entrance into London 126–7, 191 and the Duchess of Gloucester 105 on inheritance rights 92–3, 104, 179, 199 lack of funds to counter Bolingbroke’s rebellion 173, 177 in performance xix, 12, 64, 84 sermon culture and the language of mockery 115–16, 117, 119 on the treachery of Aumerle 97 Lapotaire, Jane 60 Leinwand, Theodore 172, 182 Lemon, Rebecca 179 Lennox, Charlotte 27–9, 30 L’Espine, Jean de 143–4 Letts, Quentin 56, 61, 62–3, 228n. Lever, J. W. 5 Levin, Carole 141, 152 Liebler, Naomi Conn 162 Life and Death of Jack Straw, The xiii, xv Lindsay, Nigel 60 Linton, Lynette xix, 19, 63, 64 Lopez, Jeremy 67, 79, 83, 207, 208 Lopez, Roderigo 14 Lord Chamberlain’s Men xvi, 47 Lords Appellant xiii, 11–12

Lusty Juventus (Wever) 116, 117 Lyly, John (Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit) 154 lyricism 22, 23, 38, 70, 96, 157 Macbeth (character) 106 McCain, John 87–8 McKellen, Ian xviii, 50, 65 McKenna, John W. 6 MacKenzie, Clayton G. 101 Maley, Willy 3, 4, 5 Marlowe, Christopher 133, 137 Doctor Faustus 19, 134, 136–40, 148, 156, 239n., 241n. Edward II xv, xviii, 11, 33, 55, 69, 136, 138, 200 Mary I xv masculinity 33, 34, 42, 55, 61, 72, 166, 210 Masefield, John 39 materiality disconnection between the ‘king’s two bodies’ 13, 40, 78, 83, 97, 126, 141, 142, 151, 160, 170 Richard II’s material bankruptcy 8, 9, 81–2, 90–1, 108–9, 164, 167, 171, 179, 181 and shadow (allusion to Doctor Faustus) 134, 136, 138–40 shadow and substance (1 Henry VI) 140–1 transubstantiation 134, 146, 147–8, 149, 151 see also money Meres, Francis 18, 22

INDEX

Merrix, Robert P. 141, 152 Messina, Cedric 51 Metamorphoses (Ovid) 154–5, 156 Meyrick, Sir Gelly 23 Miles, Ben 56 Milward, Peter 114 Mirror for Magistrates, A (A Myrroure for Magistrates) xv, 17, 76, 77, 100, 200, 234n. mirrors A Mirror for Magistrates allusion 76, 77 biblical allusion 144–5 Faustus’ address to Helen 19, 134, 136–40, 148, 156 King Lear allusion 152 Reformation controversy 134, 146–52 Richard III 142 in sermons 143–4, 145 tempus edax rerum and contemptus mundi traditions 153, 155–7 mockery 19, 113, 114, 118, 119–20, 123–4, 126, 138 money blank charters and the commodification of England 8, 9, 90, 164, 168, 171, 173, 176, 181 power and financial solvency 19, 170–8, 180–3 profligacy and excessive materialism 9, 163–7, 169–70 Richard II’s seizure of Lancastrian wealth 60,

273

92, 168, 169, 170, 176, 179, 205 Moody, Nickianne 3 moral allegory 78 More, Sir Thomas 146–8, 149, 150, 151, 152 Morison, Conall 83 Morrissey, David xix, 84 Morrissey, Mary 112–13 Morse, Ruth 98, 100 Mowbray, Thomas, Duke of Norfolk (character) banishment of 16, 78, 89, 95 Bolingbroke’s accusations against 94, 171–3, 190–1, 194, 195, 199 earth motif 100 Gloucester’s murder 12 ground motif 94–5 historical allusion 11–12 Richard II’s debt 172, 173, 180 Mowbray, Thomas, Duke of Norfolk (historical figure) xiii, 11 Muir, Kenneth 200 Muldrew, Craig 182 Murphy, Andrew 199 Narbonus (Saker) 153–4, 155 Nashe, Thomas, The Isle of Dogs 75 National Theatre xviii, 52, 53–4, 65 nationhood America 87–8 and chronicle narrative 31–2, 34–5, 37, 49 critical interest in 37, 49, 68, 80

274

INDEX

and earth 98, 102 Gaunt’s ‘sceptred isle’ 3–6, 63, 81–2, 88–9, 104, 108–9 and ground 95, 96 nature 119–20 and cultivation 105 elemental language 103–4 and mythology 104–5 sun 126, 136, 137, 208 see also earth; ground; land New Economic Criticism 161, 167 see also money New Historicism 42, 43, 44, 67–8, 73, 74–5, 80 New Oxford Shakespeare, The 71–2 Niles, Sarah 64 Northumberland, Earl of (character) see Percy, Sir Henry, Earl of Northumberland (character) Norton Shakespeare, The (2015) 69, 71, 72 nothingness and death 100, 160 and financial materiality 161, 164, 167, 170, 173, 177, 179–80, 181, 183–5 God’s favour 129 and tragedy 159–60 Nunn, Trevor xix, 56 O’Brien, Timothy 208 Old Vic theatre xvii, xix, 56, 59 original practices experiment (Globe theatre) 55 The Other Place xviii, 54

Ovid (Metamorphoses) 154–5, 156 Oxford Shakespeare 69, 70–1, 189–90, 198 Page, Malcolm 207 Palfrey, Simon 101 Palin, Sarah 87 Parvini, Neema 95 Pasco, Richard xviii, 50, 51, 209 Pater, Walter 35, 36–8, 41, 48, 166 Peasants’ Revolt xii, xv, 1 Pennington, Michael xviii, xix, 52–3, 60 Percy, Sir Henry, Earl of Northumberland (character) xix, 9, 84, 134, 136, 162, 164, 171, 194 Percy, Sir Henry, Earl of Northumberland (historical figure) xiv performance history xv, xvi, xvii–xix, 22, 83–4, 188, 189, 207–11 Essex rebellion (Globe Theatre, 1601) xvi, 14, 19, 22–3, 43, 45, 47–8, 73, 192 Red Dragon (1607) xvii, 48, 192 Kean, Edmund (1815) xvii, 33, 48 Kean, Charles (1857) xvii, 48 Benson (Week of Kings, Stratford-Upon-Avon, 1901) xvii, 49

INDEX

Williams/Gielgud (Old Vic, 1929) xvii Quayle’s Week of Kings (Shakespeare memorial Theatre, 1951) xvii, 49–50 Cottrell/McKellen (Prospect Theatre Company, 1969) xviii, 50 Pasco/Richardson production (RSC, 1973, dir. Barton) xviii, 50–1, 53, 208, 209 Jenkins/Jacobi Vivat Rex (BBC Radio, 1977) xviii Giles/Jacobi (BBC, 1978) xviii, 51–2, 57, 210 ESC’s The Wars of the Roses (1988, dir. Bogdanov) xviii, 52–3 Warner/Shaw (National Theatre, 1995) xviii, 53–4, 65 Pimlott/West (The Other Place, 2000) xviii, 54–5, 57, 62 Carroll/Rylance allmale production (Shakespeare’s Globe, 2003) xviii–xix, 55–6, 57 Nunn/Spacey (Old Vic, 2005) xix, 56, 59 Boyd/Slinger (RSC, 2006–8) xix, 56–7, 57–8, 61 Grandage/Redmayne (Donmar Warehouse, 2011) xix The Hollow Crown (BBC, 2012, dir. Goold) xix, 59–60, 84–5, 210–11

275

Doran/Tennant (RSC, 2013) xix, 60–1 Hill-Gibbins/Beale production (Almeida Theatre, 2018/19) xix, 61–3 Linton/Andoh production (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, 2019) xix, 7, 19, 63–5 Peymann, Claus 70, 189, 209 Pimlott, Steven xviii, 54–5, 57, 62 Piper, Tom 56 Poole, Kristen 113 Pope, Alexander 26–7, 31 populism 4, 87 Power, Ben 60 primogeniture 92–3, 104, 179 props 48, 54, 57, 62, 76, 193–4, 204 Prospect Theatre Company xviii, 50 psychoanalytic criticism 42 puns 27, 32, 41, 101, 117–18, 126, 175 Quayle, Anthony xvii, 49 queer theory 77 Rackin, Phyllis 42 Rasmussen, Eric 70, 188 Read, Sophie 117 Redgrave, Michael xvii Redmayne, Eddie xix, 59 regicide 23, 24, 48, 130 regime change 6–7, 24, 55 religion ‘The Ordre for the Buriall of the Dead’ 100

276

INDEX

Reformation controversy (transubstantiation) 134, 146, 147–8, 149, 151 Richard II as Christ 114, 122–3, 125, 129, 135, 138, 176 see also Bible; sermons; theology revisions see adaptations Reydams-Schils, Gretchen 81 Ribner, Irving 40 Richard II (character) and Bushy, Bagot and Green 10, 11, 33, 60, 122, 175–6 as Christ 114, 122–3, 125, 129, 135, 138, 151, 176 decadence 37, 116, 166, 167–70 Elizabeth I’s identification with 15, 58, 67, 73, 75 entrance into London as a prisoner 24, 48, 126–8, 191 ‘farming the realm’ 8–9, 53, 82, 90, 108–9, 168, 171, 173, 176 and Gloucester’s murder 12, 28, 60, 91, 171, 173 in Thomas of Woodstock 9, 10, 108–9, 168, 169, 170 and/as Job 120–4 and the language of landscape 81, 89–90, 91, 94, 95, 96, 97, 100–1, 102, 107 on the loss of his forces 17, 96, 122–4, 174–8, 203 manliness 25, 33, 34, 36, 61 material accessories of kingship 162–7

money problems 170–1, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177–8, 179, 180–3 in performance xvii, xviii, xix Kean, Edmund (1815) xvii, 33, 48 Pasco/Richardson production (RSC, 1973, dir. Barton) xviii, 50–1, 53, 208, 209 ESC’s The Wars of the Roses (Michael Pennington, 1988) xvii, 53 Pimlott/West production, (Samuel West, The Other Place, 2000) xviii, 54, 55 Nunn/Spacey production (Kevin Spacey, Old Vic, 2005) xix, 56, 59 Boyd/Slinger (Jonathan Slinger, RSC, 2006–8) xix, 57–8 The Hollow Crown (Ben Whishaw, BBC, 2012) xix, 60, 84, 210, 211 Doran/Tennant production (David Tennant, RSC, 2013) xix, 60, 61 Hill-Gibbins production (Simon Russell Beale, Almeida, 2018/19) xix, 61, 62, 63 Linton/Andoh production (Adjoa Andoh, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, 2019) xix, 19, 63, 64, 65

INDEX

as poet king 16, 27, 35–6, 37–8, 48, 70, 95, 135, 151, 160 in prison 27, 63, 128–30, 157, 160, 178, 183–5, 195 seizure of Lancastrian wealth 60, 92, 168, 169, 170, 176, 179, 205 sermon culture and Gaunt’s admonishments 115–19 sexual ambiguity 11, 33, 61 and Shakespeare’s other royal characters 16, 17, 159–60 in Tate’s Restoration adaptations 25, 205–6 as a tragic hero 7, 25, 33, 48, 53, 159–60, 179 see also deposition scene; ‘king’s two bodies’ Richard II (historical figure) xii, xiii, xiv, xv, 1–2, 5, 10–11, 165–6, 167 Richard III xiv Richardson, Ian xviii, 50, 51, 209 Rich, John xvii Ross (character) 9, 109 Rossiter, A. P. 41–2 Royal Shakespeare Company 52 Pasco/Richardson production (1973, dir. Barton) xviii, 50–1, 53, 208, 209 Pimlott/West (The Other Place, 2000) xviii, 54–5, 57, 62 Boyd/Slinger (RSC, 2006–8) xix, 56–7, 57–8, 61

277

Doran/Tennant (RSC, 2013) xix, 60–1 RSC see Royal Shakespeare Company RSC Shakespeare edition (2010) 69, 70, 188–9, 192, 194–5, 197, 209 Rumour (character) 58 Rutter, Carol Chillington 54 Rylance, Mark xviii, 55–6, 57 Saenger, Michael 9, 80 Saker, Austen 153–4, 155 Salisbury, Earl of (character) 60, 82, 100, 175 Sam Wanamaker Playhouse xix, 7, 19, 63–5 Sanders, Wilbur 184 Saul, Nigel 166, 204 Schalkwyk, David 98, 100 Schlegel, A. W. 34–5 Schuler, Robert M. 138 Schulman, Alex 75–6 Scott-Warren, Jason 75 Scott, William O. 108 Second Folio (1632) xvi, 199 selfhood BBC’s The Hollow Crown (2012) 85 critical interest in 68 as material wealth 94, 162, 167, 183, 184 mirrors as tools of selfexamination 77, 134, 136, 138–40, 143–4, 145, 152, 153, 156 ‘myself’/‘my self’ 80–1 Richard II in Tate’s adaptation 206

278

INDEX

Richard’s prison soliloquy 157, 160 sermons 19, 111–14 deposition and damnation 114, 125–31 mirrors 134, 143–4 Richard II as Job 119–24 urbane wit and godly mockery 115–19 Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (Stratford-Upon-Avon) xvii, 49 Shakespeare’s Globe xviii–xix, 55–6, 57, 83 see also Sam Wanamaker Playhouse Shakespeare, William xv, xvi, 23, 31, 112, 114, 133, 137 Hamlet 16, 31, 89, 106, 159, 160 Henry IV, Part 1 30, 40, 53, 57, 58, 60, 81, 109 Henry IV, Part 2 30, 40, 49, 53, 57, 58, 60, 81 Henry V 15–16, 45, 49, 60, 74, 108, 128 Henry VI, Part 1 53, 133, 140–1 Henry VI, Part 2 45, 53, 133, 140 Henry VI, Part 3 53, 133, 140 Henry VIII 40 Julius Caesar 74, 235n. King John 40, 49, 74 King Lear 63, 76, 89, 152, 159 Macbeth 106, 159

The Merry Wives of Windsor 74 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 22, 191, 203 The Rape of Lucrece 114 Richard III 16, 49, 55, 142 Romeo and Juliet 22, 31 Timon of Athens 182 Venus and Adonis 114 The Winter’s Tale 105, 204 Shakiry, Rajha 63 Shami, Jeanne 112 Shaw, Fiona xviii, 53–4, 65, 70 Shewring, Margaret 8, 45, 48, 49, 51, 53, 83–4, 207 Sicilian Usurper, The (Tate) xvii, 25, 48, 196, 205 Siemon, James R. 107 Sir John Oldcastle 73, 74 Slinger, Jonathan xix, 57–8 Smith, Emma 101 Smith, Henry 114, 116–17, 118, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127–8, 129–30, 238n., 240n. soliloquies 82 Richard II 17, 27, 63, 82, 128–30, 157, 183–5, 191, 195 Salisbury 82 Spacey, Kevin xix, 56, 59 Spufford, Francis 170 Spurgeon, Caroline 236n. Stewart, Patrick xix, 59, 84 Stoicism 80–1 storytelling 203–4 Stow, George 166–7 studia humanitatis 112 substance see materiality Suchet, David xix, 84

INDEX

Tate, Nahum xvii, 24–5, 28, 31, 48, 190, 196, 205–6, 207 taxation xii, 9, 59, 108, 164, 168, 171, 173, 176 Taylor, Paul 63 tempus edax rerum tradition 153–6 Tennant, David xix, 60, 61 The Theatre (Shoreditch) 47 Theobald, Lewis xvii, 26, 27, 28, 31 theology divine right to rule 13, 78, 104, 174, 176, 197 English nationalism 6, 89 transubstantiation 134, 146–52 see also Bible; religion; sermons Thomas, Alfred 78, 163 Thomas of Woodstock xv, 9, 10, 42, 90, 108–9, 133, 168–9, 170, 200, 214n., 234n. Tillyard, E. M. W. 39–40, 67 tragedy blended with the epic 31–2 de casibus tradition xv, 17, 77 of the everyday 37 history and the tragic aesthetic in Richard II 21, 24–5, 26, 28–9, 33 materiality of in Richard II 161, 177, 178–83 Richard II as a tragic hero 7, 17, 25, 48, 51, 53, 77, 159–60, 179 titles of Richard II 62, 192 transubstantiation 134, 146, 147–8, 149, 151

279

Trentmann, Frank 183 Troughton, David 55 Trump, Donald 87, 88, 89 Tudeau-Clayton, Margaret 3, 4 Tyler, Wat xii Typhoo tea 3 Ulrici, Hermann 35, 40 Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancastre and Yorke, The (Hall) xv, 200 urbane wit 116–19, 120, 121, 124 van Es, Bart 76, 77 Vivat Rex xviii Wallcroft, Alan 60 Wardle, Irvin 209 Warner, David xvii Warner, Deborah xviii, 53 Wars of the Roses xiv, xv, 8, 57, 78 ‘Wars of the Roses’ cycle (1986–9) xviii, 52, 57 ‘Wars of the Roses’ season (1963–4) xvii, 49 Waugh, Rosemary 64 West, Samuel xviii, 54, 55, 57 Whishaw, Ben xix, 60, 84, 210, 211 Williams, Harcourt xvii Williams, Raymond 236n. Willoughby (character) 9 Wilton Diptych 165 Wiltshire, Earl of (character) 96, 175–6 Winston, Jessica 81 wit 116–19, 120, 121, 124

280

INDEX

Woodbridge, Linda 81 Woodstock, Thomas of, Duke of Gloucester (character) 12, 28, 51, 57, 58, 60, 91, 105–6, 171, 173 Woodstock, Thomas of, Duke of Gloucester (historical figure) xii, xiii, 12, 28, 171, 216n. Worden, Blair 14, 47–8, 74, 192 Wroughton, Richard xvii Yachnin, Paul 70, 189 Yeats, W. B. 38, 39

York, Duchess of (character) 97 York, Duke of see Langley, Edmund of, Duke of York (character) York, Edward of, Earl of Rutland, Duke of Aumerle (character) 26, 48, 61, 97, 101, 177, 203 York, Edward of, Earl of Rutland, Duke of Aumerle (historical figure) xii Žižek, Slavoj 2, 13, 161

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