William Shakespeare : Richard II 9781847600349

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General Editor: Charles Moseley

William Shakespeare

King Richard II Michael Hattaway

“…there the antic sits, Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp, Allowing him a breath, a little scene, To monarchize…”

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Copyright © Michael Hattaway, 2008 The Author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published by Humanities-Ebooks, LLP, Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE

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ISBN 978-1-84760-034-9

William Shakespeare: King Richard II Michael Hattaway

Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2008

‘Hans Holbein, “Death and the Emperor”, from his Dance of Death (1538)’

Reproduced by permission of the British Library.

…there the antic sits, Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp, Allowing him a breath, a little scene, To monarchize…

Contents The Author Preface 1. The Education of a Player and Playwright 2. Richard II in Context 3. Alignments and Allegiances 4. Theatrical Conventions 4.1. Scenic Structure 4.2. Texture 4.3. Verse and Personality (or Inwardness) 5. Close reading 5.1. The Duel and Bolingbroke’s Banishment (1.1–4) 5.2 The Death of Gaunt, Richard in Ireland, and Bolingbroke’s Return (2.1–3.1) 5.3. Richard’s Return (3.2) 5.4. Confrontation and Abdication (3.3–4.1) 5.5. Richard to Prison and Aumerle’s Conspiracy (5.1–3) 5.6. Richard’s Passion and Death and Bolingbroke’s Reaction (5.4–5.6) 6. Critical accounts 6.1. Lyricism and the elegiac 6.2. Historical and Political 6.3. Feminist Readings 6.4. Theatrical Readings 7. Select annotated Bibliography

The Author Michael Hattaway is Professor Emeritus of English Literature at the University of Sheffield, and now teaches at New York University in London. He was educated in New Zealand and in Cambridge and previously worked at Victoria University of Wellington and at the Universities of Kent, British Columbia, and Massachusetts (Amherst). His publications include: (as author) Elizabethan Popular Theatre (1982); Hamlet: The Critics Debate (1987); Renaissance and Reformations: An Introduction to Early Modern English Literature (2005); (as editor) As You Like It and 1–3 Henry VI for the New Cambridge Shakespeare; plays by Jonson and Beaumont; A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture (2000); The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s History Plays (2002); (as co-editor) The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama (1990 and 2003) and Shakespeare in the New Europe (1994).

Preface All quotations from King Richard II are taken from King Richard II, The Arden Shakespeare, ed. Charles R. Forker (London: Thomson Learning, 2002). Quotations from other Shakespeare plays are taken from volumes in the New Cambridge Shakespeare series, and quotations from Shakespeare’s sources for Richard II, the chronicles of Hall and Holinshed, are generally taken from W.G. Boswell-Stone, (ed.), Shakespeare’s Holinshed: The Chronicle and the Historical Plays Compared [1896] (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1966 edn), which conveniently provides extracts from these two writers under the headings of the scenes in which Shakespeare included material from them. All quotations from other early modern texts have been silently modernised, and hyperlinks have been provided to as many contemporary texts alluded to in this book as possible.

1. The Education of a Player and Playwright It is difficult to know exactly when Shakespeare began his career as a dramatist. He had been born in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire in 1564 and may have been composing plays for professional companies as early as 1586 when he was only twenty-two. By the time he was thirty, he had composed four comedies (The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, The Comedy of Errors, and Love Labour’s Lost), a tragedy (Titus Andronicus), two long romance narratives in verse (Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece), and, almost certainly, a number of his sonnets. In addition, by the time he came to write his play about Richard II (reigned 1377 to 1399), he had already written four plays dealing with the troubled reigns of monarchs who came later: three plays chronicling the fortunes of Henry VI (reigned 1422–61 and 1470–71) and a moral tragedy about Richard III (reigned 1483–85). Unlike his fellow dramatists, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and Robert Greene, for example, Shakespeare never went to university. However, he obviously had received an excellent education at the ‘King’s New School’, the grammar school in Stratford, which he probably attended from the age of seven until he was fifteen or sixteen. Those years would have been largely devoted to the study of the first three of the ‘liberal arts’. (The word ‘liberal’ in its Latin form meant ‘suitable for free men’—as opposed to slaves.) These constituted the trivium (‘three paths’) of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Students progressed later to the quadrivium (‘four paths’) of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. ‘Grammar’ at this time was largely Latin grammar with some Greek: schoolboys did not study English texts formally, but concentrated on texts from the ancient world. Schoolmasters used the Roman   The best recent biography is Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Shakespeare: Richard II   comic dramatists Plautus and Terence to train pupils to speak in Latin, and studying their plays must have given the young Shakespeare not only a keen awareness of language (see below) but also a preliminary sense of plots and dramatic structures. Reading poets and historians, Ovid and Virgil, ‘Tully’ (Cicero) and Livy, as well as Latin texts written in the Renaissance, would have introduced him to fine phrases and elegant sentence structure in verse and prose, as well as to many texts about history, politics, statecraft, and civil life that underlie western society. The Garden scene, 3.4, in which gardening is used as an analogue of statecraft, shows its indebtedness to texts like Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Virgil’s Georgics. The study of rhetoric as a key subject in school curricula has now fallen out of fashion but, without those years of rhetorical practice in Stratford, Shakespeare could never have written his poems and plays. Rhetoric had originated in courts of law as a professional art of persuasion. Developed as an educational discipline in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it became a sophisticated method for the description of language in use, both spoken and written. As a means of absorbing ways in which authors of the past had put words to work, students used handbooks of verbal patterns, such as the great collections of adages, the Adagia compiled (and many times reissued in expanded editions) by the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus (1466? –1536), and were encouraged to follow the example of Petrarch (1304–1374) and keep their own commonplace books. These were quarries of useful phrases that could be ‘commonly’ used in a variety of contexts. ‘Forgive and forget’, for example, appears at 1.1.156. Many of these phrases became proverbial: there are at least seventy-two proverbs or allusions to proverbs embedded in Richard II. Pupils also wrote ‘imitations‘—variations upon and sometimes modernisations of antique texts. (Writing in the style of a great writer might be more profitable than our educational practice of writing essays about his works.) It was certainly the best kind of exercise for a fledgling writer. Early in his career Shakespeare like many of   Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1950), 806.

10  Shakespeare: Richard II his contemporaries published an imitation, Venus and Adonis, a short erotic epic or ‘epyllion’, that derives largely from Ovid’s Heroides and Book X of his Metamorphoses . Rhetorical handbooks arranged the discipline into five ‘faculties’ or ‘canons’, the first three of which were ‘invention’, ‘disposition’ or arrangement, and ‘elocution’ or style. ‘Invention’ meant not so much the ‘discovery’ of subject matter or knowledge, but its retrieval or uncovering, from the memory or from other texts. ‘Disposition’ was the art of arranging to best effect what had been uncovered. It took account of the whole pattern of a text, as well as the best ways to shape the response of auditors to an oration. The third faculty, ‘elocution’ had to do with dressing out the material in an appropriate style. Principles of decorum guided writers towards styles answerable to the subject in hand or to a chosen genre. Roman rhetoricians had identified three levels of style, high, middle, and low. These accorded both to the purpose of the discourse (high style was held to be best for moving auditors) and to the rank of the speaker. In the case of Elizabethan drama, courtiers and other traders in fine sentiments generally spoke in blank verse. This rhymeless form, developed by sixteenth century Italian humanists, acknowledged the absence of rhyme in Latin poetry, particularly epic, the ‘highest’ literary genre. ‘Mechanicals’ (the lowly born) spoke in prose—Richard II is unusual among Shakespeare’s plays in that it contains no prose, although there are significant passages in rhyming couplets. Switching between blank verse and rhyming couplets draws attention to the distinctive qualities of each form. The art of elocution also had to do with the ornamentation of a text or speech with figures of speech, so making text or speech pleasurable. In his Rhetoric Aristotle had noted that ‘good style’ must deploy clear and appropriate language, but might also use unfamiliar or foreign words that audiences or readers might find striking (Rhetoric, 1404b). Shakespeare delighted in the unfamiliar and in the forging of new words: about 1700 English words are first recorded in his texts. Sometimes he fashioned them out of Latin roots, sometimes he made them by transferring them from one linguistic function to another— using nouns or adjectives as verbs, for example. The participial adjec-

Shakespeare: Richard II   11 tives ‘accused’ (1.1.17) ‘amazing’ (1.3.81) and ‘blushing’ (3.3.63) were, according to The Oxford English Dictionary, first used in his Richard II. Like all of his contemporaries, he enjoyed setting words into unusual or pleasing patterns (‘schemes’) and into ‘tropes’ or figures of speech (such as metaphors) in which the sense of the words is changed. When Richard uncrowns himself, Shakespeare uses simple rhetorical figures of repetition (both of words and of clause-length) and of opposition (the verbs ‘broke’ and ‘unbroke’ and, in the final couplet, the pronouns ‘me’ and ‘thou’): Now, mark me, how I will undo myself: I give this heavy weight from off my head, [Gives crown to Bolingbroke] And this unwieldy sceptre from my hand, [Takes up sceptre and gives it to Bolingbroke.] The pride of kingly sway from out my heart; With mine own tears I wash away my balm, With mine own hands I give away my crown, With mine own tongue deny my sacred state, With mine own breath release all duteous oaths. All pomp and majesty I do forswear; My manors, rents, revenues I forego; My acts, decrees, and statutes I deny. God pardon all oaths that are broke to me; God keep all vows unbroke that swear to thee; Make me, that nothing have, with nothing grieved, And thou with all pleased, that hast all achieved!     (4.1.203–216) The patterned forms of this speech offer pleasure to educated and uneducated alike, and are entirely appropriate to a ritual of state played out in public. Like most Elizabethans, Shakespeare enjoyed puns (the rhetorical figure of paronomasia). This is a little exchange between the king and his dying uncle: King Richard  What comfort, man? How is’t with aged Gaunt?

12  Shakespeare: Richard II Gaunt  O, how that name befits my composition! Old Gaunt indeed, and gaunt in being old. (2.1.72–4) We tend to associate puns with laborious jokes: here the puns structure the old man’s musings, his contradictory feelings of self-pity and a desire to rebuke his nephew. Coleridge, in a discussion of this passage, defended punning on psychological grounds against those who, like Dr Johnson (see below), had taken offence at the importation of word-play into tragedy: Is there not a tendency in the human mind, when suffering under some great affliction, to associate everything around it with the obtrusive feeling, to connect and absorb all into the predominant sensation? Puns are one of the means by which Shakespeare focuses on the relationships between thoughts and experiences on the one hand and words and speech on the other. Devices like these turn language from a ‘medium’ to a theme, and, throughout his career, language was to remain one of Shakespeare’s major preoccupations. A couple of generations earlier, the Italian humanist Castiglione in his widely read courtesy book, The Book of the Courtier (1528), had written of the need for writing to be possessed of ‘grace’ or naturalness, for a work to display sprezzatura. What is important for a good style is to eschew as much as a man may, and as a sharp and dangerous rock, too much curiousness [inquisitiveness, strangeness], and (to speak a new word) to use in everything a certain ‘disgracing’ [disfiguring or imperfection] to cover art withal, and seem whatsoever he doth and saith to do it without pain and (as it were) not minding it. Over-profuse displays of copiousness or over-ingenious imagery on the one hand or studied perfection on the other offend against the   ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge, on Richard II and the history play’, in Charles R. Forker, ed. ‘Richard II’: Shakespeare: The Critical Tradition (London: The Athlone Press, 1998) 98.   Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby, ed. W. H. D. Rouse. (London: Dent, 1928) 46.

Shakespeare: Richard II   13 criterion of this kind of liveliness or grace. In 3.3, after has descended from the walls of Flint Castle, Richard delivers a plangent and ‘curious’ inventory: 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; Or I’ll be buried in the king’s highway, Some way of common trade, where subjects’ feet May hourly trample on their sovereign’s head; For on my heart they tread now whilst I live; And buried once, why not upon my head? (3.3.146–59) This defies the widespread classical and Renaissance assumption, invoked by Castiglione, that a crucial function of art was to conceal art – Richard’s mannerism and over-long enumeration defeats the purposes of the speech, which was to create pathos in the King’s listeners. Shakespeare did not make a career as a logician or philosopher. It may be, however, that some of Richard’s dialectical musings are built upon memories of formal logic, the third component of the trivium: Bolingbroke  Are you contented to resign the crown? King Richard  Ay, no. No, ay; for I must nothing be. Therefore, no ‘no’, for I resign to thee. (4.1.200–02, emphasis added) The ‘therefore’ stakes a claim for logic in jingle. And, at the end of his life:

… whate’er I be,

  The tag ars est celare artem (‘art consists in concealing art’) is often quoted, but its exact origin is unknown.

14  Shakespeare: Richard II Nor I nor any man that but man is With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased With being nothing. (5.5.38–41) These quibbling speculations are complicated by puns, by focussed thoughts about words that sound the same, ‘ay’ and ‘I’, and ‘nothing’ (pronounced at the time ‘noting’) and ‘noting’ (the hearing of musical notes). Elsewhere, those parodic sequences of ‘chop-logic’, generally put into the mouths of clowns (the interchange between the grave-digging clowns in Hamlet 5.1 is the best known), indicate that Shakespeare had mastered the use of the discipline sufficiently to exemplify its abuses. One of the features of Richard II is the number of ‘passions’ or long emotional speeches put into the mouth of the king. This has led some commentators to attribute to Richard the attributes of a ‘poet’ and to imply that this is an unmanly quality. It might be more profitable to think of Richard as a skilled rhetorician, one who understands the relationships between the persuasive powers of language and the production of political power. When he is tactically out-manoeuvred by Bolingbroke he speaks in the hope that his eloquence might yet save the day; alone in Pontefract Castle at the end of the play (see below) his rhetoric serves not only to hammer out verbal instruments for self-consolation but to persuade the playhouse audience to ascribe to him a kind of nobility. It is certain that at school Shakespeare not only studied but also acted in classical plays and read texts like Erasmus’ Colloquies. Like the philosophical works of Plato, these are dialogues: they are almost playlets, designed to teach students how to speak lively Latin and analyse a philosophic or moral topic. They would have also offered students models for the formal disputations or debates that formed part of their syllabus, and which drew upon both logical and rhetorical skills. When participating in these, students had to be prepared to argue on either side of the debate (in utramque partem), an admirable training for a dramatist who has not simply to set out what he thinks about particular matters but also show how characters holding radically different opinions might confront each other. In the case of a play like Richard II this technique may have gener-

Shakespeare: Richard II   15 ated a typically Shakespearean even-handedness. The sixteenth century witnessed a growth towards, or a growing awareness of, monarchical absolutism, generated in part by changes in the aristocracy. In many ways Richard II is a problem play that explores both the advantages (stability, an obvious source of authority) and the disadvantages (the dangers of tyranny) of a hereditary and sacral monarchy. As we shall see, the play implicitly contrasts this with a contractual model of kingship. A king must be under and not above the law, a maxim that has roots in medieval political theory. On a personal level, moreover, there is no reason why audiences should sympathise more with one of its two antagonists than the other. It is probable that this debating skill aided the development of Renaissance drama—drama tends to be based on conflict or debate. This is important, because for a long time there was a tendency to present drama of the period as moral, if not moralistic, as supportive of the ‘order’ desired by those in authority. If we remind ourselves of these rhetorical structures of opposition, the rules of this play of mind, we may be more able to see how the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries were as deliberative or interrogative of causes and institutions of the period as they were supportive of them. There are no certain records of how Shakespeare was employed after he left school at the age of fifteen or sixteen. It pleased previous generations of critics to create romantic narratives for the young ‘genius’: travelling in Italy, holding horses outside the London playhouses. Milton cultivated the myth that Shakespeare had been uncontaminated by advanced education: Then to the well-trod stage anon, If Jonson’s learnèd sock be on,   Derek Cohen, ‘History and the Nation in Richard II and Henry IV’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 42 (2002): 293–315.   A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007) 140–3; Michael Hattaway, ‘Tragedy and Political Authority’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy, ed. Claire McEachern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 103–22.   See Phyllis Rackin, ‘The Role of the Audience in Shakespeare’s Richard II’, Shakespeare Quarterly, (1985): 262–81.   Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).

16  Shakespeare: Richard II Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child, Warble his native wood-notes wild.   (L’Allegro, 131–34) More recently, scholars have revived arguments that Shakespeare was born into a recusant (covertly Roman Catholic) family as well as suggestions that the Hoghtons, noble recusants in Lancashire, may have hired the young Shakespeare as a tutor and musician at Hoghton Tower for a year or so during what have been called his ‘lost years’. (Much of Lancashire was comparatively untouched by the Protestant Reformations of the sixteenth century.) There he might well have consorted with learned priests and scholars, so enhancing his acquaintance with important texts. An early comedy, Love’s Labour’s Lost, is a satire on the life of learning and celibacy but is astonishingly full of arcane references to iconological mysteries. Shakespeare’s studies of grammar, logic, and rhetoric obviously served him well as a writer. When, in about 1586, he joined his first professional London troupe, possibly Lord Strange’s Men, where he worked as a ‘hireling’ player as well as a writer, he must have drawn upon what he had learned from the fourth and fifth of the faculties of rhetoric, memory and delivery. A basic technique for memory involved building in the mind a ‘virtual’ house or building, in each room of which the orator laid topics prepared for a speech. When making the speech the orator imagined himself moving through the house, methodically retrieving the material for his oration. Renaissance players worked what we would now call a repertory system, often performing a different play every day and adding a new dramatic work every two weeks or so during the playing season, so it is likely that either their schoolboy training or this art of recall supported them in what would seem to us to be almost impossible feats of memorising. This of course did not prevent them from ‘drying’ or forgetting their lines (in Elizabethan English, being ‘out’), and they often improvised their way out of trouble. Clowns particularly were given to improvising, speaking ‘more than is set down for them’ as Hamlet (3.2.32) complained.   E. A. J. Honigman, Shakespeare: The ‘Lost Years’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 1985.

Shakespeare: Richard II   17 Techniques for delivery involved learning a number of conventional hand gestures. We can deduce what some of these may have been from books of hand gestures like John Bulwer’s Chirologia of 1644. For the prince’s advice to the players in the rehearsal scene (3.2) of Hamlet, it is legitimate to conjecture that Shakespeare drew upon his experience of bad actors who bellowed their lines merely for sensational effects and strutted the stage as they mechanically deployed a whole battery of gestures: Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier had spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, the whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. Oh, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious, periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise. I would have such a fellow whipped for o’erdoing Termagant – it out-Herods Herod. Pray you avoid it … Be not too tame, neither; but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end both at the first and now, was and is to hold as ’twere the mirror up to Nature; to show Virtue her own feature, Scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. (3.2.1–20.) The key words here are ‘temperance’ and ‘modesty’, kinds of moderation that will conceal the necessary art of author and player and, for the most part, eschew Castiglione’s ‘curiousness’. (It is also notable that in Hamlet’s mirror are to be seen the images of Virtue and Scorn: these are personifications, abstractions, and not particular personalities. He who plays Richard II has to be attentive to the demands of both role and personality.)

18  Shakespeare: Richard II But Shakespeare must also have learned about acting from attending plays himself. The medieval cycle of Biblical plays that originated from Coventry (about twenty miles from Stratford) was last performed there in 1579: amateurs from the city’s guilds would have made up the cast. He would also have been able to see touring productions by professionals: an example is the morality play The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom, a performance of which is incorporated in the collaborative play of Sir Thomas More in which Shakespeare had a hand (see below). In 1639, one R. Willis, who was then in his seventy-fifth year (which means that he was almost an exact contemporary of Shakespeare), wrote an account of a play he had seen as a young boy in Gloucester. Gloucester is only about forty miles from Stratford, so it is conceivable that the same play was performed in both towns and seen by the young Shakespeare: In the city of Gloucester the manner is (as I think it is in other like corporations) that when players of interludes come to town, they first attend the mayor to inform him what nobleman’s servants they are, and so to get licence for the public playing. And if the mayor like the actors, or would show respect to their lord and master [i.e. their patron], he appoints them to play their first play before himself and the aldermen and common council of the city: and that is called ‘The Mayor’s Play’, where everyone that will comes in without money, the mayor giving the players a reward as he thinks to show respect unto them. At such a play my father took me with him and made me stand between his legs as he sat upon one of the benches and [I] heard very well. The play was called The Cradle of Security, wherein was personated a king or some great prince with his courtiers of several kinds, amongst which three ladies were in special grace with him, and they, keeping him in delights and pleasures, drew him from his graver counsellors, hearing of sermons, and listening to good counsel and admonitions, that in the end they got him to lie down in a cradle upon the stage, where these three ladies, joining in a sweet song, rocked him

Shakespeare: Richard II   19 asleep that he snorted again and, in the meantime, closely conveyed under the cloths where withal he was covered, a vizard like a swine’s snout upon his face, with three wire chains fastened thereunto, the other end whereof being holden severally by those three ladies, who fall to singing again and then discovered [uncovered] his face that the spectators might see how they had transformed him, going on with their singing. Whilst all this was acting, there came forth of another door at the farthest end of the stage, two old men, the one in blue with a sergeant at arms [armed knight], his mace on his shoulder, the other in red with a drawn sword in his hand, and learning with the other hand upon the other’s shoulder, and so they two went along in a soft pace round about by the skirt of the stage, till at last they came to the cradle, when all the court was in greatest jollity; and then the foremost old man, with his mace, struck a fearful blow upon the cradle, whereat all the courtiers with the three ladies and the vizard all vanished, and the desolate prince, staring up bare-faced and finding himself thus sent for to judgment, made a lamentable complaint of his miserable case, and so was carried away by wicked sprits. This prince did personate in the moral the wicked of the world, the three ladies, Pride, Covetousness, and Luxury, the two old men the end of the world and the Last Judgment. Although this play contains far more in the way of religious allegory than does Richard II, it is intriguing to consider the ways in which residual themes are to be found in Shakespeare’s play. Like the nameless king, Richard is drawn into luxury by Bushy, Bagot, and Green, away from proper concern for the commonweal. Part of the play’s political charge is encapsulated in the garden scene (3.4), analogous to the cradle sequence, and both protagonists deliver a ‘lamentable complaint’ at the end of their lives. The passage also reminds us of how important was the visual language of the production. Characters are recognised by virtue of the properties they carry on, and non-portable properties are equally important: in The Cradle of Security a cradle, in Richard II the throne (which may have stood   R. Willis, Mount Tabor (London, 1639), 110–13 (emphasis added).

20  Shakespeare: Richard II on stage throughout the performance—or, alternatively, have been thrust out from the discovery space in the tiring house.

2. Richard II in Context In 1595, when Shakespeare wrote Richard II, he had already acted professionally for about nine years and written, beside the comedies, poems, and tragedy listed above, four plays that depicted chapters in the political fortunes of England in the fifteenth century—the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III. These have often been considered to constitute a ‘tetralogy’, by analogy with the ‘cycles’, generally of three plays, that formed part of the religious rituals of ancient Athens. However, this concept should be deployed with caution— performances of Shakespeare’s dramas were not part of religious rituals. Certainly there is narrative continuity, but there is also a radical change between the dramaturgy of the Henry VI plays and that of Richard III. This means that instead of stressing narrative it may be more profitable to consider each play on an essay on particular themes. The first three plays constitute a chronicle of the surges of political change that affected the English monarchy and commonweal as a consequence of both the ‘Hundred Years War’ with France and the battles, between members of Yorkist and Lancastrian armies, caused by aristocratic factionalism and known as the ‘Wars of the Roses’. These plays contain very few scenes that show supernatural or divine intervention in human affairs: their underlying historiography is basically secular. As the classical historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus and the sixteenth century political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli had done, Shakespeare showed men making their own history. The winning and losing of battles is seen to depend upon men, money, and the forging of tactical alliances. (Richard II too shows no sign of divine control of the action, and Bolingbroke is much better at strategic thinking than Richard.) However, in Richard III Shakespeare had experimented—very successfully—with a different kind of dramatic structure, one that derived from Senecan revenge tragedy. Here we find a narrative that

22  Shakespeare: Richard II is shaped around one isolated character and, at the end of the play, progressions of ghosts appear to the sleeping enemies, Richard III of York, and Henry Tudor, who was to become Henry VII. His ancestry was both Yorkist and Lancastrian, and his badge, the red and white Tudor rose, betokened the union of the two houses. His role of God’s champion seems to empower him to defeat and kill Richard at the battle of Bosworth in 1485. These scenes do suggest supernatural intervention or at least a providential pattern in English history. Seeing those plays as a tetralogy also encourages us to assume that their meaning is released by the plays’ conclusion, as a theodicy, as, in Milton’s formula, a justification of the ways of God to Man (see Paradise Lost, I.26). If we approach them from an alternative direction, we might follow Brecht and argue that their endings are not ‘conclusions’ and reason that the plays’ meanings are as much generated by attention to their course as to their conclusion. Moreover, there is a temptation to infer that Shakespeare ‘believed in’ this providentialist construction of history. Rather, I would submit, Shakespeare uses these two forms, secularising chronicle and providentialist parable, as a means of exploring events and the constructions put upon them, often by characters involved in the dramatic action. The fact that, in Richard II, the Bishop of Carlisle delivers a prophecy about the consequences of Richard’s deposition (4.1.137–50) does not mean that Shakespeare believed that the book of history had been written by God. An alternative overview might focus on the fact that the dramatist was merely following his sources, the chronicles written by Edward Hall (died 1547) and Raphael Holinshed (died ca. 1580) who mingle secular and providential models of history. In their life of Richard III, the chroniclers include the prose narrative History of Richard III written by Sir Thomas More, Lord Chancellor to Henry VIII, which can be seen as a piece of Tudor propaganda (although More was no time-server and refused ever to work for Henry Tudor) written in order to consolidate that monarch’s hold upon the throne by vindicating the actions of his father (Henry VII). Following Richard II, which, judging by the number of times it was reprinted in the years after it was first performed, was very popular, Shakespeare wrote the two parts of Henry IV and also Henry V.

Shakespeare: Richard II   23 (The second Quarto of Richard II [1598] was the first published play of Shakespeare’s to carry his name on the title-page.) There is some narrative continuity in this ‘second tetralogy’ but, again, the structures of the plays are very different—they differ far more, one from another, than 1–3 Henry VI. Richard II hovers between history and tragedy; the Henry IV plays portray not only the court and battles for power, but comic scenes of tavern and country life. They are about the properties and difficulties of government, particularly after usurpation. Henry V dramatises and celebrates an epic victory over the French at Agincourt. Because all of these plays along with King John were grouped among the ‘histories’ by the editors of the Folio collection of Shakespeare’s works that appeared in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, it has become habitual to categorise the whole group as ‘Shakespeare’s history plays’. However, this may be misleading. During Shakespeare’s lifetime most were published in single volume (Quarto) formats: many of these early editions were entitled ‘tragedies’. Debates about whether these plays are ‘really’ histories or tragedies are arid: all have aspects and qualities of both. Like the plays that are listed among the tragedies, these are really tragedies of groups—the assumption that Elizabethan tragedies are concerned basically with individual lives and interior experience is anachronistic. These plays anatomise cases of honour and justice that ravaged the courts of England’s monarchs and are most profitably considered as being concerned with reigns rather than with personalities. The long title headings to Folio ‘Histories’ include The Life and Death of King Richard the Second, and The Life and Death of King John, The Tragedy of Richard the Third: with the Landing of Earl Richmond, and the Battle at Bosworth Field. (Forms of these titles in the volume’s ‘catalogue’ often vary from the above.) The Quarto title of the first of these is The Tragedy of King Richard the Second (1597 etc.), while the third has a running title ‘The Life and Death of Richard the Third’. Only the Henry VI plays offer a ‘life’ from the king’s childhood to his death: the others, like tragedies, take up the   Shakespeare, arguably, was the ‘inventor’ of the Elizabethan history play: see A. J. Hoenselaars, ‘Shakespeare and the Early Modern History Play’’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s History Plays, ed. Michael Hattaway (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002) 25–40.

24  Shakespeare: Richard II story of the king’s reign when his career is tilting towards crisis. Moreover, as even this abbreviated account of their genesis demonstrates, it might be more profitable to consider these texts as ‘political’ rather than ‘history’ plays, being focussed on the ways in which power and authority are generated and transmitted. The fact that the outlines of his histories would have been widely known enabled Shakespeare to turn from the ‘what’ of his stories to the ‘how’. He cheerfully espoused anachronism: his images of a populist insurgency, the Jack Cade sequences of 2 Henry VI, derive from the chroniclers’ accounts of the Wat Tyler rebellion, which in fact took place under Richard II. The fact that these scenes are ‘unhistorical’ does not take away from their function or effect. If we concentrate on the secularising aspects of the plays, we might read them as sceptical of one of the most often quoted biblical texts of the period, the observation of St Paul that power is divine in origin: ‘Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers, for there is no power but of God, and the powers that be are ordained of God’ (Romans 13.1, Geneva Version). Renaissance princes repeatedly quoted this text: the experience of seeing the analysis of political cause and social effect in these political dramas would, for many spectators, have been challenging. In Richard II Bolingbroke ‘creates’ his own power and uses it to ascend the throne of England – the play contrasts his strategic planning with Richard’s self-pitying passivity. We might also remember that the meaning and effect of the plays was in part shaped by the economics of the playing company. At the beginning of his career Shakespeare had written two long poems for aristocratic patrons and possibly hoped that his future might lie as a poet rather than a dramatist. However, economic necessity may have driven him to London where, as a ‘common player’, he was attached to various groups of players—Strange’s Men, Pembroke’s Men, Sussex’s Men, and possibly the Queen’s Men—whose companies bore the name of their patrons. All the companies were required to take service under an aristocratic patron to avoid being harassed by city authorities under statutes designed to control rogues, vagabonds, and ‘masterless men’. It was for this reason that most playhouses were erected beyond the limits of the City, in the suburbs or ‘liber-

Shakespeare: Richard II   25 ties’ (areas where the writ of the Lord Mayor and Corporation did not run.) In 1593, however, it happened that both the Earl of Sussex and Lord Strange, Earl of Derby had died and, to ensure a supply of court performances, a decision was taken in 1594, with the support of the Privy Council if not the Queen, to support the foundation of two prestigious new companies that were to work under the patronage of the Lord Chamberlain (Lord Hunsdon, Elizabeth’s cousin) and the Lord Admiral (Lord Howard). Shakespeare was attached to the former group; Edward Alleyn, the player who had taken the lead in Marlowe’s plays, was a member of the latter. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men played at an amphitheatre playhouse named ‘The Theatre’ in Shoreditch (north-east pf the City) where Richard II probably had its first performance, while the Admiral’s Men played at the Rose on Bankside, south of the river. This system of patronage meant that players could easily become enmeshed in court factionalism: plays, unlike music, poetry, or the visual arts, had to be licensed by the Master of the Queen’s Revels. History plays contained dangerous matter, and it seems that Shakespeare’s close associations with the Earls of Southampton and Essex may well have coloured the politics of his plays. Becoming a sharer in the Chamberlain’s Men might have marked the end of Shakespeare’s hopes for personal patronage and preferment of the kind the dedications to Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece suggest he would have liked. Instead he had to work as both as dramatist and player, although it is equally possible that he valued the possibilities of being so closely associated with the court. The several scenes based in court rituals in Richard II must have emerged in part from Shakespeare’s own experience. On the other hand he may have resented this commitment to a group dedicated to purveying entertainments to the court as well as the amphitheatre groundlings and allowed his feelings to emerge in a general scepticism about court values and behaviour. (If Hamlet is in any way his spokesman he seems to have been intolerant of illiterate groundlings too.) Previous generations of critics and readers tended to underscore lines that imply respect for hierarchy and monarchical stability. This is Richard when he hears of the powers that Bolingbroke is amassing

26  Shakespeare: Richard II against him: Not all the water in the rough rude sea Can wash the balm off from an anointed king (3.2.54–5) The lines contain Biblical echoes, but Richard’s proclamatory tone may generate more scepticism than assent. More recently it has been argued that Shakespeare allows popular voices, advocates of the values of the commonweal, to be heard: he himself possibly doubled the roles of John of Gaunt and the Gardener in Richard II, both stern critics of the regime of King Richard. Such sentiments may have appealed to London’s merchants and some of the young men preparing for legal careers at the Inns of Court. Many scenes in his histories and tragedies are built around ceremonies: see for example the scene in Richard III when Richard of Gloucester waylays the funeral procession of Henry VI, the moment when the Ghost interrupts the ceremony of the changing of the guard in 1.1 of Hamlet, the moment when King Richard smashes the mirror in 4.1 of Richard II. The number of times these ceremonies are interrupted suggests that Shakespeare was not in the business of idealising the court milieu inhabited by his patrons, but rather concerned to demonstrate how the reach of Plantagenet and Tudor regimes alike exceeded their grasp. Shakespeare was busy in 1595, writing, it is conjectured with some certainty, not only Richard II but also A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and possibly part of Sir Thomas More— the sequence where More quells London rioters with a plea for peace. We do not know whether he intended Richard II as the opening part of a second ‘tetralogy’ (see above) or whether its popularity, registered by the high number of publications of the text in single volume Quarto editions, prompted him to continue with these plays about Richard’s successors. Unlike the three parts of Henry VI, there are few narrative or textual links between the plays, and the four plays span three consecutive reigns; they are also very different in form and texture. Certainly it seems to be a mistake to read Richard II as chronicling not just the fall of one man but also the fall from grace of English monarchy itself, precipitated by Henry of Lancaster’s ascent   Honan, Shakespeare, 205.

Shakespeare: Richard II   27 of the English throne as Henry IV. Some commentators interpreted this as drawing down a curse upon the country that beset the country through the troubled reigns of Henry IV and Henry VI (although lifted by the famous victories of Henry V), and which was removed only with the victory at the Battle of Bosworth of Henry Tudor over Richard III. (Henry Tudor was crowned Henry VII and was grandfather to Queen Elizabeth.) It is more profitable, I would submit, to read them as linked but self-sufficient and sceptical investigations upon the properties of government that happen to deal with three consecutive reigns. In setting out contexts for his tales of woe or wonder Shakespeare reveals himself to have been as curious about the make-up of courts and kingdoms as he was about the psychology of individuals—an assumption that will inform the remainder of this study.

3. Alignments and Allegiances

‘… Tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral …’: these are but two of the hybrid forms pedantically catalogued by Polonius in Hamlet (2.2.364–65). As we have seen, early editions labelled Richard II variously as history and tragedy. Throughout his career Shakespeare showed little concern for the classical generic prescriptions set out by critics like Sir Philip Sidney in his Defence of Poesie, and cheerfully mingled classical dramatic forms with native theatrical modes. Richard II is obviously not only a historical chronicle with a political dimension but also a tragedy that follows the basic medieval pattern of a man who falls from high degree to beggary (see 5.3 and 5.5) and death. However, if we are classically inclined, we might emphasize two of the prominent features of tragedy highlighted by Aristotle in his Poetics: peripeteia (‘reversal of situation’), arguably centred on the abdication scene (4.1) when Richard and Bolingbroke exchange roles, and anagnorisis (‘recognition’), registered perhaps in both the abdication scene and the prison scene (5.5) just before the king’s death. But Richard II would not please a neo-classical purist: the play also contains elements of pastoral and comedy or farce—in the garden scene (3.4) and the rhyming play-within-the-play (5.3) respectively. Generic categorising is therefore not going to take us very far: ‘tragical-comical-historical-pastoral’ indeed! What is significant is the critic’s positioning of genres. Post-Renaissance criticism of tragedy, derived ultimately from Aristotle, tended to concentrate on heroes and paid little attention to contexts. In recent years the convergence of history and tragedy in Shakespearean texts has been a starting point for critical analysis. Tragedy has been characterised not just by conflict between a man and his destiny, or read as a tale of a ‘flawed’ protagonist, but has been seen to evolve from social tensions

Shakespeare: Richard II   29 and political change. Attention has been paid not only to larger patterns of action but to values, ideologies, and institutions, as well as to the material, the accidental, and the contingent. We might explain Richard II’s death not simply by pointing to personality faults (‘tragic flaws’) that made him unsuited for kingship, but by pointing out that, like Elizabeth, he had no agreed way of raising revenues for government. Having emptied his coffers by what Gaunt terms his ‘rash fierce blaze of riot’ (2.1.33), his prodigal largesse, he improvises a way of refilling them in order to meet the costs of putting down rebellion in Ireland: his officers are issued with ‘blank charters’ (1.4.48) by means of which they could extract large sums of gold from the rich. The ensuing resentment weakened him. In theory Richard’s power was as great as that of any English monarch. His right to rule was undisputed. However, Richard faced political difficulties caused by the shadow of Woodstock’s death (see below) as well as by a degree of prodigality and the costs of suppressing rebellion in Ireland. He compounded these by a particular action (not necessarily indicative of a flawed character), throwing away both power and authority by delaying his return from Ireland (see 2.4). This allowed Bolingbroke, having returned from exile, to muster a large army. As Holinshed summed it up: ‘the King’s lingering of time before his coming over gave opportunity to the Duke to bring things to pass as he could have wished, and took from the King all occasion to recover afterwards any forces to resist him.’ Although the play’s title seems to position Richard II as hero, Bolingbroke is at least as interesting and, as the King makes clear, his rise is the obverse of Richard’s fall: Now is this golden crown like a deep well That owes [owns] two buckets, filling one another, The emptier ever dancing in the air, The other down, unseen and full of water.   See Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare’s Political Drama: The History Plays and the Roman Plays (London; Routledge, 1988); Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (London: Routledge, 1990); A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).   W. G. Boswell-Stone, ed., Shakespeare’s Holinshed: The Chronicle and the Historical Plays Compared (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1966 edn), 103.

30  Shakespeare: Richard II That bucket down, and full of tears, am I, Drinking my griefs whilst you mount up on high.     (4.1.184–89) Richard was born to be king, but lacked the abilities; Bolingbroke seemingly wanted to be king, and expertly managed his ascent to the throne. Shakespeare scarcely encourages us to rejoice in the rise of Bolingbroke, but we are certainly invited to analyse and possibly judge Richard’s mistakes—the play encourages us to scrutinise his decline and fall, as all students of rhetoric were encouraged to do, from both sides. The play is radically ambiguous. So, rather than seeing politics emerge from history, it may be more profitable to think of history emerging from politics: historical narratives are shaped by the politics of the writers of those narratives. Although Shakespeare relied mainly upon the English chroniclers Edward Hall and Raphael Holinshed, who often attribute men’s fortunes to Fortune or divine providence, the 1590’s saw a surge of interest in historiography that centred on critical rereading of the Roman historian Tacitus. These years define a moment of ‘politic history’ that can be located about the time of the composition of Marlowe’s translation of the first book of Lucan’s Pharsalia and the publication of Sir Henry Savile’s translation of Tacitus’ Histories in 1591, printed with an epistle that, according to Ben Jonson, was written by the Earl of Essex himself. In the Pharsalia we find a very sceptical view of Julius Caesar’s imperial ambitions. Tacitus’ view of history was also quizzical and, unlike that of the chroniclers, generally secular: his great themes were ancient liberty, and what his translator, almost certainly invoking Tamburlaine, called ‘higher aspiring minds’, corruption, and modern servitude. In the epistle to the translation of Tacitus’ Annals we encounter a perfunctory gesture towards the divine mission of Queen Elizabeth, but equally strong signals that the interest of readers of Tacitus would be in politics rather than providence:   See David Womersley, ‘Sir Henry Savile’s Translation of Tacitus and the Political Interpretation of Elizabethan Texts’, RES 42 (1991): 313–42; Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p.105.   Tacitus, The Annals of Cornelius Tacitus, trans. R. Greneway [London], 1598, 7.

Shakespeare: Richard II   31 In these four books ... thou shalt see all the miseries of a torn and declining state: the empire [political authority] usurped, the princes murdered, the people wavering, the soldiers tumultuous, nothing unlawful to him that hath power, and nothing so unsafe as to be securely innocent ... If thou dost detest their anarchy, acknowledge our own happy government, and thank God for her, under whom England enjoys as many benefits as ever Rome did suffer miseries under the greatest tyrant. Schoolboys, or course, studied not just Latin ‘literature’ but Roman history, and a few years after Richard II Shakespeare would have been able to draw upon this knowledge when he wrote a play about the dangers to the Roman state posed by Julius Caesar’s ambition. There is in fact a passing reference in Richard II to the ‘miseries’ inflicted by the invasion of England by Julius Caesar. The Queen positions herself to see her husband being led to the Tower of London: This way the king will come. This is the way To Julius Caesar’s ill-erected [‘built for evil purposes’]   tower, To whose flint bosom my condemnèd lord Is doomed a prisoner by proud Bolingbroke. (5.1.1–4) The Tower of London had, of course, been constructed not by Caesar but by William the Conqueror, but we read in John Stow’s Survey of London that it was the ‘common opinion’ that it had been at least founded by Caesar. In Shakespeare’s text it stands as an ambivalent emblem of tyranny, the tyranny of both Richard and Bolingbroke. (Bolingbroke soon countermands his own order and despatches Richard to Pomfret (Pontefract) Castle in Yorkshire.) A play about the reign of Richard II during which a subject deposed a king was dangerous matter. Childless like Richard II and with no successor appointed, Queen Elizabeth was almost certain to have seen this play fairly soon after it was first performed. Not only would   Tacitus, The End of Nero and Beginning of Galba. Four Books of the Histories of Cornelius Tacitus. Trans. Sir Henry Savile (London, 1591), sig. ¶3 r–v.   Stow, John. The Survey of London. Ed. Henry B. Wheatley. (London: Everyman, 1912), 42.

32  Shakespeare: Richard II uncomfortable parallels between the assassination of Woodstock and the execution in 1587 of Elizabeth’s rival, Mary Queen of Scots (a Roman Catholic) have come to mind, but also the Queen may have been presented with a play that conspicuously fails to exhibit any divine punishment meted out to a usurper and regicide. (Shakespeare in fact leaves the matter of whether Bolingbroke ordered Richard’s death ambiguous, so preventing us delivering a simple moral verdict on Bolingbroke) The play remained dangerous: Nahum Tate later adapted it in 1680. His version has variant titles, The Sicilian Usurper and The Tyrant of Sicily, but its implication that Charles II, King of England at the time, should abdicate led to its suppression after two performances. A few years after its first performances and following the publication in 1599 of his Life and Reign of King Henry IV, the historian Sir John Hayward was almost indicted for treason, although much of his text was drawn from the writings of Tacitus. Hayward’s totally secular arguments scathingly conclude that Richard II had brought his deposition upon himself by imprudent conduct, and present Henry Bolingbroke as a heroic saviour of the kingdom. Hayward had dedicated his work to the Earl of Essex—he was descended from Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester. After Essex’s rebellion against the Queen in 1601 it was to be alleged that that the Earl had often been present at performances of Richard II, presumably in 1595–6, and that, on the day before the uprising, what is generally taken to be Shakespeare’s play was performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men at the instigation of some of Essex’s followers. The performance went ahead, even though one of Shakespeare’s   Odai Johnson, ‘Empty Houses: The Suppression of Tate’s Richard II’, Theatre Journal 47 (1995): 503–16.   Patrick Collinson, ‘History’, in A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed., Michael Hattaway (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 58–70.   For the connection with Essex, see S. Schoenbaum, ‘Richard II and the Realities of Power’, Shakespeare Survey 28 (1975): 1–13; Richard II, ed. Forker, 9–16; Blair Worden, ‘Which Play Was Performed at the Globe Theatre on 7 February 1601?’ London Review of Books, 10 July (2003): 22–4; Chris Fitter, ‘Historicising Shakespeare’s Richard II: Current Events, Dating, and the Sabotage of Essex’, Early Modern Literary Studies 11 (2005): 1–47. ; 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.

Shakespeare: Richard II   33 colleagues, Augustine Phillipps, had protested that the play was ‘so old and so long out of use that they should have small or no company at it.’ Elizabeth obviously remembered both Hayward (he was not released from prison until after her death) and the play: in August 1601 she was being shown some records by William Lambard. ‘Her Majesty fell upon the reign of King Richard II, saying, ‘I am Richard II. Know ye not that?”’ and she complained of a large number of public performances of the play. It was not until 1608 that the deposition scene (4.1.154–317) was printed in Quarto versions of Richard II, although it may well have been included in performances. In an excellent production for the RSC in 2008, Michael Boyd had his Richard (Jonathan Slinger) wear a red wig with a whitened face, making him look like portraits of Elizabeth during the first sequences of the play, to remind the audience of the link between the two monarchs. As Sir Walter Ralegh had written at the end of his Preface to his History of the World (1614), ‘Whosoever is writing a modern history, [and] shall follow Truth too near the heels, it may happily strike out his teeth’. (He may well have been thinking of Hayward.) We do not know whether any verbal inflections, costumes, heraldic badges, or even verbal insertions were made in early performances with an eye to tempting audiences to apply Shakespeare’s play to court intrigues of the time. We know that players sometimes bought up court costumes from the servants of the great who had been given them upon the death of their masters. ‘History’ plays were customarily done in modern dress: Richard and Bolingbroke therefore would have worn Tudor rather than Plantagenet costumes. Charles and Joclyn Percy, younger brothers of the ninth Earl of Northumberland, whose ancestor we see supporting Bolingbroke in the play, had supported Essex, and any glimpse of the family crest on stage could well have been explosive. However, we must pause before concluding that Shakespeare’s   Honan, Shakespeare, 217.   Honan, Shakespeare, 216–17.   Sir Walter Ralegh, The History of the World, ed. C.A. Patrides (London: Macmillan, 1971).   Michael Hattaway, Elizabethan Popular Theatre: Plays in Performance (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), 1982, 86.

34  Shakespeare: Richard II historiography is unequivocally secular and materialist. Although Holinshed claims to have been concerned with ‘matters of state and policy’, Shakespeare inserts an important little scene where a Welsh captain expands upon an account of the withering of bay trees, ‘a strange sight and supposed to import some unknown event’, as Holinshed construes it, that probably happened just before Richard returned from Ireland: ’Tis thought the king is dead. We will not stay. The bay trees in our country are all withered, And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven; The pale-faced moon looks bloody on the earth, And lean-looked prophets whisper fearful change; Rich men look sad, and ruffians dance and leap, The one in fear to lose what they enjoy, The other to enjoy by rage and war. These signs forerun the death or fall of kings. (2.4.7–15) As with all such ruminations on the stage we cannot tell whether to take them as choric, in this case suggesting that Bolingbroke’s actions actually caused some sort of cosmic reaction, or as indicative of the Welshman’s character. If the latter, we might surmise that Shakespeare was indicating the credulity of those at the margins of power. Another intimation of providentialism comes in 4.1 when the Bishop of Carlisle both denies that a subject might judge a king and also delivers a prophecy (see below): My Lord of Hereford here, whom you call king, Is a foul traitor to proud Hereford’s king: And if you crown him, let me prophesy The blood of English shall manure the ground, And future ages groan for this foul act. Peace shall go sleep with Turks and infidels, And in this seat of peace tumultuous wars   Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England Scotland, and Ireland [1587], 2nd ed. 6 vols. (London: J. Johnson et al), 1808, II, 419.   Boswell-Stone, 104.

Shakespeare: Richard II   35 Shall kin with kin and kind with kind confound. Disorder, horror, fear and mutiny Shall here inhabit, and this land be called The field of Golgotha and dead men’s skulls. (4.1.135–45) Shakespeare had, of course, already dramatised the wounds inflicted upon both nation and individuals by the baronial Wars of the Roses, but in those earlier plays showed, for the most part, men forging their own history and not merely playing out roles in a divinely fashioned historical process. It was not simply a question of political resonances: then, as now, playtexts contained merely sketches of the personalities that filled the play: these were filled out and coloured by the players who took part. So we do not know, for example, whether there was any suggestion of eroticised friendship between the King and his favourites, or how bravely or vigorously Richard defended himself against those sent to kill him. (Holinshed notes that he killed four of Exton’s men before succumbing himself.) Many relationships between characters are unclear and nowadays, and probably in Shakespeare times, these are created by production decisions—authorial intention is irrecoverable. A key to Deborah Warner’s National Theatre production of 1995, in which Fiona Shaw took the title role, was that the ‘King’ was devastated that ‘his’ much-loved cousin Bolingbroke should have betrayed him. In a notable Berliner Ensemble production of 2002, directed by Claus Peymann, Isabel doted on her uncle by marriage, John of Gaunt: she had been on stage in several scenes before her appearance is first indicated in the text. But the play’s topicality was not focused simply on the application of particular characters to contemporary politicians. Throughout his career Shakespeare studded his plays with metatheatrical moments, reminders to his spectators that they were in a playhouse. (The term ‘metatheatre’ designates performances that are about drama or theatre.) In A Midsummer Night’s Dream he pilloried the mechanicals who believed that their play of Pyramus and Thisbe would create an   Boswell-Stone, Shakespeare’s Holinshed, 126.   Carol Chillington Rutter, ‘Fiona Shaw’s Richard II: The Girl as Player-King as Comic’, Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (1997): 314–24.

36  Shakespeare: Richard II illusion of reality. Two examples in Richard II are the recurring plays on the word ‘shadow’ in 2.2 and 4.1 and the playlet that is found in 5.3. The first occurs when Bushy counsels the Queen to assuage the grief she feels at her husband’s departure for Ireland: Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows, Which shows like grief itself, but is not so; For Sorrow’s eye, glazed with blinding tears, Divides one thing entire to many objects, Like perspectives, which, rightly gazed upon Show nothing but confusion; eyed awry Distinguish form: so your sweet majesty, Looking awry upon your lord’s departure, Find shapes of grief more than himself to wail, Which, looked on as it is, is nought but shadows Of what it is not. Then, thrice-gracious Queen, More than your lord’s departure weep not. More is not seen, Or if it be, ’tis with false Sorrow’s eye, Which for things true weeps things imaginary.   (2.2.14–27, emphases added) Wordplay upon the dichotomy between ‘substance’ and ‘shadow’ is common: in the first few lines the word ‘shadow’ invokes the familiar Platonic concept that the realities we think we perceive are but the shadows of entities of a higher order of being (Plato’s ‘ideas’). Shakespeare then plays with the image of anamorphic pictures, those virtuoso Renaissance images that appear to be formless until viewed from the side when their special perspective creates the expected lifelikeness. (The skull at the bottom of Holbein’s ‘The Ambassadors’ in London’s National Gallery is one of the most famous examples.) Of this speech Frank Kermode writes: Bushy is thinking: he has hit upon a difficult analogy and is working it out as cleanly as he can. The poet who wrote this speech is the poet of many difficult sonnets and, in time to come, of The Phoenix and the Turtle.   Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 41.

Shakespeare: Richard II   37 This capacity to capture the process of transition between sentiment and words is one of Shakespeare’s greatest accomplishments. It is also a topic of fascination for King Richard. In fact Bushy is riddlingly referring to two kinds of ‘perspectives’: multiplying-glasses that seemed to turn one object into many, and anamorphic pictures. He is, moreover, elaborately hinting that the Queen’s grief may be inauthentic. However, when we remember that the word ‘shadow’ was rhetorically applied to a portrait or an actor, we might consider that Shakespeare is also encouraging his spectators to imagine seeing what is represented from a variety of vantage points, so creating a variety of ‘meanings’ for particular scenes or sequences. One of the most important sequences in the play, when Richard resigns the crown to Bolingbroke, is book-ended by short exchanges (4.1.155–8 and 4.1.321–33), which encourage spectators to see it from opposing ideological positions. The second sequence comes in the abdication scene where Richard addresses his own image, with allusions to Isaiah 14.16 (‘Is this the man that made the earth to tremble and that did shake the kingdoms [Geneva Version]’ and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium’ [5.1.93–4]): Was this the face that faced so many follies, And was at last out-faced by Bolingbroke? A brittle glory shineth in this face – As brittle as the glory is the face! He had called for a mirror, and now smashes it upon the ground: For there it is, cracked in a hundred shivers. 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. King Richard      Say that again! The shadow of my sorrow? Ha, let’s see. ’Tis very true, my grief lies all within;

38  Shakespeare: Richard II 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. And I thank thee, King, For thy great bounty, that not only giv’st Me cause to wail, but teachest me the way How to lament the cause. (4.1.285–302, emphasis added) Whenever Shakespeare deploys the rhetorical figure of ploce or repetition, he seems concerned to defamiliarise a word, to prise apart and display its possible meanings. Dr Johnson famously took exception to Shakespeare’s love of wordplay: A quibble is to Shakespeare what luminous vapours are to the traveller; he follows it at all adventures, it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to engulf him in the mire. It has some malignant power over his mind, and its fascinations are irresistible … A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it. But wordplay is essential to Shakespeare’s literary strategies. Here he suggests that Richard is but a player: the king’s theatrical gesture was intended to invoke inflated feelings, but he also shows that Richard had been engaging in that kind of falsity for so long that his countenance had lost its iconic status and was now almost destroyed. And yet, Shakespeare implies, all kings are player kings (Machiavelli had suggested much the same thing). Upon his return from Ireland Richard muses … 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,   Samuel Johnson, Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. H. R. Woodhuysen (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books), 1989, 13.

Shakespeare: Richard II   39 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! (3.2.160–70) ‘Monarchize’ is first recorded in the OED in 1592: it obviously means to rule absolutely, but also to ‘king it up’, play out the role like a huffing player on a stage. This is another kind of metatheatricality: Shakespeare used the theatre to probe and investigate the nature of the human self. Like the French thinker Michel de Montaigne (1533– 92) whose Essays he seems to have known, he often detected a distinctive self-division, a kind of doubleness in a single life, a reminder to contemporaries of how the multiple roles women and men might play dictated both their ‘natures’ and the rules of conduct that governed their lives. Montaigne, in ‘Of the Inconstancy of Our Actions’, observes that this might be especially true of kings: Those which exercise themselves in controlling human actions, find no such let in any one part as to piece them together and to bring them to one same lustre. For they commonly contradict one another so strangely as it seemeth impossible they should be parcels of one warehouse. We cannot expect ‘character’ to issue in action consistently when we are observing a king upon a stage, and must also realise that it is not simply the burden of office that creates division but that, as Richard found when he realised that in one person he played many people (5.5.31), that any one person may be possessed of a plurality of ‘selves’ or identities: We are all framed of flaps and patches and of so shapeless   Robert Ellrodt, ‘Self-Consciousness in Montaigne and Shakespeare.’ Shakespeare Survey 28 (1975): 37–50. John Florio’s English translation of the Essays was published only in 1603, but it is quite possible that Shakespeare read them in French.   Michel de Montaigne, The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne. Trans. John Florio. 3 vols. (London: Everyman, 1910), II, 7.

40  Shakespeare: Richard II and diverse a contexture that every piece and every moment playeth his part. And there is as much difference between us and our selves as there is between our selves and other. Magnam rem puta, unum hominem agere: esteem it a great matter to play but one man. Montaigne, like Shakespeare, draws upon the language of theatricality to make his point. The stage, moreover, both magnifies and diminishes: it can recreate what is great at court, using blank verse, which, as we have seen was associated with Roman epic poetry. It also turns kings to ‘subjects’: the subjects or themes chosen by authors and the objects of the gaze of spectators. This kind of doubleness was famously caught in a letter of 2 July 1613. A few days before, Sir Henry Wotton had witnessed the burning down of the Globe playhouse during a performance of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII. The play, he wrote, ‘was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty, even to the matting of the stage; the Knights of the Order, with their Georges and Garters … sufficient in truth within a while to make greatness very familiar, if not ridiculous’. Theatrical images also identify ways of ruling well: 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 … (5.2.23–28) How was that ‘grace’ to be achieved? At first Bolingbroke succeeded brilliantly by fashioning himself as a modernising ruler. He forged a strategic alliance with the Percies and maintained his authority by executing his predecessor’s counsellors with ruthless efficiency. But, as it turns out in 1 and 2 Henry IV, he did not manage   Montaigne, Essayes, II, 14. The Latin quotation is from Seneca (Epistle 150).   David Scott Kastan, ‘“Proud Majesty Made a Subject”: Shakespeare and the Spectacle of Rule’,. Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 459–75..   Honan, Shakespeare, 376.

Shakespeare: Richard II   41 to reconcile his supporters’ expectations of reward with his responsibilities to the commonweal.

4. Theatrical Conventions As we have seen, much of the effect of early performances must have come from rich costumes that may even have been recognised as ‘real’ court costumes, so encouraging those in the know to apply the action to topical court politics. The accounts of Philip Henslowe who managed the Admiral’s Men reveal how his company might spend on a single costume ‘three or four times what a tradesman expected to earn in a year’. However, these elements of visual spectacle were not matched by any sort of elaborate scenery designed to create illusion. (In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare uses the play within the play to pillory those who thought spectators would confuse theatrical sequences with real events.) This does not mean that we should think of Shakespeare as having written for the kinds of bare stage that are still common today. Elizabethan playhouses were brightly decorated: sermons preached at Paul’s Cross in 1577 and 1578 by Thomas White and John Stockwood respectively refer to the Theatre and Curtain as ‘sumptuous theatre houses’ and the Theatre as ‘the gorgeous playing palace’, and in 1583 Philip Stubbes designated the Theatre and Curtain as ‘Venus’ palaces’. The painted and carved facades of the tiring houses, placed behind the stages of Elizabethan playhouses, resembled the elaborate screens found in the halls of Elizabethan palaces and great houses, and offered playing spaces aloft as well as on the stage, as well as impressive openings through which entrances could be made or, when appropriate, where emblematic tableau scenes were ‘discovered’ or revealed. Richard almost certainly appeared ‘aloft’ in the Flint Castle scene (3.3). From   Carol Chillington Rutter, ed., Documents of the Rose Playhouse (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 1984, 44.   E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1923), iv, 197; Glynne Wickham, Herbert Berry, and William Ingram, eds., English Professional Theatre, 1530–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 339 and 408.

Shakespeare: Richard II   43 there he descended by stairs within the tiring house to reappear on the stage below (3.3.183–5). The garden scene (3.4) may have been played with the Queen and her attendants and the Gardener and his servants on different sides of one of the stage entrances, although it may equally have been played with both parties ‘invisible’ to each other on adjacent parts of the main stage. Properties could be as important as costumes. We have already seen how Richard smashed a mirror, one of the most memorable actions in the play. Henslowe’s list of properties lists weapons of the sort that were required for most histories—in fact Richard II does not depict any fighting except for Richard’s struggle with his murderers at the end of the play. It would, however, have been necessary for Bolingbroke and his followers to be armed when they appeared before Flint Castle. The most important property, of course, was the crown. In 1598 Henslowe owned ‘three imperial crowns, one plain crown, one ghost’s crown, [and] one crown with a sun’. These, in fact, belonged to a rival company, but it would have been appropriate for Richard’s crown to be ornamented with a sun, although it may not be the case that such a property would have been ‘impressive’: spectators would have realised that this was not the ‘real thing’. They may well have wondered whether kings were truly different from other men when they were seen to gain their authority simply by investing themselves with a costume and crowning themselves with an object, both of which could be taken up and worn by others. An important thing to note is that there was very little attempt to localise the action—the efforts of those editors who designate ‘settings’ for each scene, ‘The lists at Windsor’ for 1.1, ‘The Castle of Plashy’ for 1.2 etc., are misguided and may encourage readers to imagine and spectators to expect, for example, realist modes of characterisation which are associated with continuous narratives. Rather, Shakespeare gained his effects by discontinuity and montage (see below) and did not seek the kind of verisimilitude that translates playing spaces into representations of places. In his Defence of Poesie Sir Philip Sidney scorned the way common players ignored neo-classical claims for ‘unity of place:   Rutter, Rose Playhouse, 137.

44  Shakespeare: Richard II You shall have Asia of the one side [of the stage], and Afric of the other, and so many other under-kingdoms that the player, when he cometh in, must ever begin with telling where he is, or else the tale will not be conceived.  Indeed, Shakespeare does just that: Drums. Flourish and Colours. Enter King Richard, Aumerle, [Bishop of] Carlisle, and Soldiers King Richard  Barkloughly Castle call they this at hand? Aumerle  Yea, my lord. How brooks your grace the air, After your late tossing on the breaking seas? (3.2.1–3) 4.1. Scenic Structure We saw in the first section how Richard II might profitably be considered both as a tragedy and as a ‘history’. It is not in any sense a literary biography: Shakespeare follows Horace’s prescription in the Art of Poetry for an epic poet: jumping over the King’s early life (he had come to the throne at the age of eleven), he draws his spectators in medias res (‘into the middle of things’), dramatising formal challenges that precede the duel between Bolingbroke and Mowbray. These took place in April 1398: Richard was to die in February 1400. When the duel comes to be staged in the third scene of the play, Shakespeare, as he often did, builds the scene around an interrupted ceremony—the king’s decision not to allow the ritual trial to be played out. This may be read in two ways, as an attempt by Richard to demonstrate an absolute power, or as a lack of confidence on his part that God would bring about a victory favourable to him. The moment when Richard throws down his warder (judge’s baton) creates what Bertolt Brecht was to call a Gestus, an action in which the gist or central meaning of a scene is encapsulated in a gesture performed by an actor. Another kind of formality is found in the parliament scene   Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), 134.   Art of Poetry, lines 147–148.   See Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, trans. John Willett (London: Methuen,

Shakespeare: Richard II   45 (4.1), which quotes the Gestus of 1.3 as Bagot, Fitzwater and others challenge Aumerle, accusing him of having had a hand in the assassination of Thomas of Woodstock. This time it is Bolingbroke who is presiding over the challenges: the fact that the previous scene is now subject to a kind of parody effectively demythologises the authority of the English monarchy, perpetually confronted by a quarrelsome and unruly nobility, and says something about what Brecht called ‘the conditions of life’ under Richard. We should not look to find narrative continuity or ‘flow’ in Shakespearean drama. Rather we find meaning created not by what is called in French la liaison des scènes but by the juxtaposition of scenes or sequences. Before the duel that had been set up in Act 1 begins, Shakespeare inserts a short scene that illustrates the consequences of aristocratic factionalism. Here another uncle of the blood royal, John of Gaunt, pays a visit to his sister-in-law, the widowed Duchess of Gloucester, wife of Woodstock. The juxtaposition is typical of Shakespeare’s art, serving to add resonance to motifs or themes found elsewhere in the text. It opens with some tortured, perhaps over-wrought, lines that yoke images of vials and saplings together—the imagery of growing plants is to figure large in the play: Edward’s seven sons, whereof thyself art one, Were as seven vials of his sacred blood, Or seven fair branches springing from one root, Some of those seven are dried by nature’s course, Some of those branches by the Destinies cut … (1.2.11–15) The basic image probably derives from the Tree of Jesse, a common motif in medieval wall-paintings: it does not sit particularly well with the reference to the Classical Fates. The scene contrasts Gaunt’s combination of timidity and 1964), passim; Hattaway, Elizabethan Popular Theatre, 57–9.   See Walter Benjamin, ‘What Is Epic Theater?’ trans. Harry Zohn, Illuminations (London: Fontana Books), 1973. 149–56 at 152–3.   See R. V. LeClercq, ‘Corneille and [Dryden’s] an Essay of Dramatic Poesy’ Comparative Literature 22 (1970): 319–27.

46  Shakespeare: Richard II patience—he is unwilling to raise arms against those responsible for the murder—with the widow’s fiery yearning for revenge. Her loneliness compounds her impotence: Shakespeare offers a vignette of her home at Plashy in Essex, a place of … empty lodgings and unfurnished walls, Unpeopled offices, untrodden stones. (1.2.67–8) The modulation from the abstract ‘unpeopled offices’ (unperformed duties) to the tangible image of ‘untrodden stones’ offers a heartrending glimpse of household desolation. 4.2. Texture Another kind of juxtaposition is stylistic: we have already noted how in 5.3 blank verse changes to rhymed couplets. In the garden scene, 3.4, the play modulates from theatrical narrative into allegory as the Queen overhears an allegorical rumination between the Gardener and his servants couched in terms of the proper ‘government’ of an orchard. It develops Bolingbroke’s conceit of the king’s minions as ‘caterpillars of the commonwealth’, suggesting that Richard should not only have ‘bound up’ his favourites but also topped political overreachers—like Bolingbroke. In other words it tells us that, at least in the view of the common man, Richard brought his misfortunes upon himself by failing to recognise the natures of those about his court and acting to restrain their desires and ambitions. This allegorical inset scene is not completely different in kind from the mode of the scenes that surround it. All verse drama serves not just to show us an action, a story, a set of characters, but to tell us about these matters. Repeating (or ‘iterating’) images like those of sun and earth, as Shakespeare does in Richard II, invites us to link passages in the play that are unconnected by the narrative, to see how, out of a range of natural phenomena, men are pleased to create a ‘natural’ order.   See Richard B. Altick, ‘Symphonic Imagery in Richard II’, PMLA 62 (1947): 339–65.

Shakespeare: Richard II   47 4.3. Verse and Personality (or Inwardness) In the garden scene the Queen breaks out in fury at the news of her husband’s deposition: 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 [tempted] thee To make a second fall of cursèd man? (3.4.72–6) The allusion to the Genesis story not only creates a greater resonance for the moment in the previous scene when we saw the King ‘fall’, come down from the walls of Flint Castle, which we might read as an abdication of majesty, but also hints at the way the Queen wishes to make sense of a tawdry political intrigue by magnifying it to mythic status. The passage, in other words, not only shows her regal hauteur, but suggests some kind of inwardness, a compounding of her despair at the loss of her married life by her absorption and application of religious dogma, in this case an (anachronistic) Calvinist insistence on the utter depravity of men unredeemed by heavenly grace. One of the clichés that adheres to criticism of the play is that Richard was unfit to be king by virtue of his ‘poetic’ nature. This does not make much sense in that all the characters speak in verse, and Bolingbroke’s eloquence matches Richard’s in effect and intensity. When Richard returns to England he casts himself in the role of a loving parent to his country: I weep for joy To stand upon my kingdom once again. Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand, 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. (3.2.4–11) But, as he thinks of Bolingbroke’s return his tenderness and care turn

48  Shakespeare: Richard II to impotent petulance: … let thy spiders, that suck up thy venom And heavy-gaited toads lie in their way, Doing annoyance to the treacherous feet Which with usurping steps do trample thee. Yield stinging nettles to mine enemies… (3.2.14–18) The mental energy he expends in discovering images would be better employed in strategic thinking—toads will not stop an army. A few lines later he switches tack and this same rhetorical virtuosity is sustained by religiose insistence: Not all the water in the rough rude sea Can wash the balm off from an anointed king; The breath of worldly men cannot depose The deputy elected by the Lord. 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. Then, if angels fight, Weak men must fall, for heaven still guards the right. Enter Salisbury Welcome, my lord. How far off lies your power? Salisbury  Nor near nor farther off, my gracious lord, Than this weak arm: discomfort guides my tongue And bids me speak of nothing but despair. One day too late, I fear me, noble lord, Hath clouded all thy happy days on earth: O, call back yesterday, bid time return, And thou shalt have twelve thousand fighting men!   (3.2.55–70) Salisbury’s appearance reminds the audience that battles of men are won or lost not by good angels competing with warriors, but by those that command greater material resources. When we remember that, at the time, an ‘angel’ was also a coin (an ‘angel-noble’, worth 6s 8d), and that what Richard is desperately short of was money, the line

Shakespeare: Richard II   49 creates a sense of both poignancy and self-delusion. The sequence is full of cosmological imagery, suggesting that the King takes comfort from an ongoing perception of heavenly order, even as his power crumbles around him. Richard sounds fine and confident, but the sequence tells us that here is a man uncertain of his command and with a tendency not to see things as they are. In contrast, when Bolingbroke wants to make a claim to power, he too uses ‘poetry’, working, through word-play, to another stratum of discourse: … I’ll use the advantage of my power And lay the summer’s dust with showers of blood Rained from the wounds of slaughtered Englishmen – The which how far off from the mind of Bolingbroke It is such crimson tempest should bedrench The fresh green lap of fair King Richard’s land My stooping duty tenderly shall show … Methinks King Richard and myself should meet With no less terror than the elements Of fire and water, when their thundering 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.   (3.3.42–60, emphases added) The word-play on rain/reign, and the conceit of the slaughtering of Englishmen constituting a rape upon the ‘lap’ of England suggest a consciousness driven by a lust for power, and a Protean capacity to appropriate occasionally the ‘feminine’ attributes of yielding and healing, like the gentle rain from heaven. The passage is notable for a high level of enjambement, perhaps suggesting pent-up energy. Bolingbroke rounds off the sequence with a bravura negation of his real intention to piss on his king. That said, Bolingbroke’s wit might not match Richard’s mellif  I owe this point to Charles Moseley.  ‘Lap’ could mean vagina (OED, lap, n1, 2b).

50  Shakespeare: Richard II luousness, and Warren Chernaik notes that two Stratford directors, John Barton in 1973 and Steven Pimlott in 2000, added soliloquies to ‘fatten’ Bolingbroke’s part: the first, the lines on his sleeplessness from 2 Henry IV, 3.1.4–14, the second, lines from Richard’s final soliloquy (5.5.1–2). This device, of having Bolingbroke speak lines that are not set down for him, simply reinforces our awareness that, like his antagonist, he is a player king.

  Warren Chernaik, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s History Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 98,

5. Close reading 5.1. The Duel and Bolingbroke’s Banishment (1.1–4) Shakespeare’s previous ‘history’, Richard III, had opened with a soliloquy, befitting a play centred on one personality, that of a homicidal tyrant. Richard II, however, opens out from concentration on one character to an inspection of the strategies and tactics of the play’s two antagonists and to an anatomisation of institutions. The first act defines the scope of the play, and sets a pattern of alternating sequences, of ‘showing’ scenes that render political action (1.1. and 1.3) and ‘telling’ scenes that offer glimpses of consequences and contexts (1.2 and 1.4). First, a formal challenge and petition in preparation for a duel, in this instance a form of trial in which, it might be supposed, God would reveal His justice. There follows a scene of domestic desolation at Plashy, the consequence of feuding at court. The third scene portrays the opening of the duel, which is first interrupted and then vetoed by the King. We encounter reality a second time when the fourth scene reveals that the coffers of this seemingly all-powerful king are in fact empty. Judicial duels or trials by combat had been introduced to England by William the Conqueror and were regarded as ways of resolving cases of justice or honour—both of which sustained not only monarchical authority but also political hierarchy—by placing the outcome in the hands of ‘God, who only knoweth the secret thoughts of all men, [and who] would give victory to him that justly adventured his life, for truth, honour, and justice’. As Richard sums up the situation at the end of the scene:   Diane Bornstein, ‘Trial by Combat and Official Irresponsibility in Richard II’, Shakespeare Studies, ed., J. Leeds Barroll, vol. 8 (New York: Burt Franklin & Co., Inc., 1976), 131–42.   William Segar, The Booke of Honor and Armes (London, 1590), sig. A2r–v.

52  Shakespeare: Richard II Since we cannot atone [reconcile] you, we shall see Justice design the victor’s chivalry.   (1.1.202–3). Elizabethan audiences would have been familiar with this kind of spectacle, for every year, on the anniversary of the Queen’s Accession (17 November, 1558), courtiers staged ritual tilts for all to see. These constituted a kind of political theatre, designed to demonstrate, by means of the carefully stage-managed victories of her champions, Elizabeth’s authority and divine right to rule. The duels themselves were embedded in pageantry, and panegyrics in verse and prose, including some by Shakespeare’s fellow dramatist George Peele, were delivered. These occasions were steeped in nostalgia for a lost (and imagined) medieval world where, it was felt, human lives had been safe in the hands of divine providence. William Segar, in a work published five years before the play, as well as setting out the rituals to be followed in ‘real’ duels, offers a subtle account of the way public and private ends were often combined: A combat is a single fight of one man against another, for trial of truth… to fight on horseback or foot without advantage in number of persons or disequality of weapons. These kind of fights seem to be first used of great princes who, desiring to end public contention and war, did mutually consent to determine the same by their own private virtue and adventure of life… who fighting only in person, for the public cause, thereby saved the effusion of much blood and the lives of many most worthy captains and valiant soldiers. And albeit the cause and occasion of these combats was public respect, yet each particular gentleman or other person professing honour and arms ought sufficiently be moved thereunto for defence of his own particular reputation.   Frances A. Yates, ‘Elizabethan Chivalry: The Romance of the Elizabethan Accession Day Tilts’, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1975), 88–111.   Segar, Honor and Armes, 1–2.

Shakespeare: Richard II   53 This mingling of the public and the private accounts for the sense of equivocation detectable in the speeches of both protagonists: are they preparing to fight for honour and justice or for dignity and reputation? At the scene’s opening, Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford, enters to ‘appeal’ (accuse) Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk. He begins with a general accusation that Mowbray is a traitor and a miscreant, Too good to be so, and too bad to live. Since the more fair and crystal is the sky, The uglier seem the clouds that in it fly. Once more, the more to aggravate the note, With a foul traitor’s name stuff I thy throat. (1.1.39–44) The high astounding terms of the ritual challenge modulate into rhyming couplets, a signal from Shakespeare to players and spectators that the lines might be spoken as though they have inverted commas around them, that the speaker might be disowning them even as he speaks them, reading from a prepared statement, as it were. The lines stigmatise Mowbray’s character but strangely name no precise charges. Does Bolingbroke’s rhetoric in reality draw its power from another spring? Mowbray robustly rejects the slander laid upon his knighthood, and Bolingbroke proceeds to his gravest accusation, casting himself in the role of a minister or scourge of God, one sent to cleanse depravity from the world: Further I say, and further will maintain Upon his bad life to make all this good, That he did plot the Duke of Gloucester’s death, Suggest his soon-believing adversaries, And consequently, like a traitor coward, Sluiced out his innocent soul through streams of blood – Which blood, like sacrificing Abel’s, cries   Roy W. Battenhouse, ‘Tamburlaine, The “Scourge of God”‘, PMLA 56 (1941): 337–48.

54  Shakespeare: Richard II Even from the tongueless caverns of the earth To me for justice and rough chastisement. And by the glorious worth of my descent, This arm shall do it, or this life be spent!   (1.1.98–108) His magniloquence draws attention to itself: either he is hunting for a motive to justify his hatred of a rival, or the lines indicate, from the beginning of the play, that he is ambitious, that his real adversary is not Mowbray, and that his target is Richard himself. (The King was immune from trial by virtue of his royal prerogative.) This, for both players and spectators, is one of the most interesting facets of the play: is Bolingbroke a good and just man, concerned like so many others about Richard’s profligacy and favouritism, or is he simply jealous or ambitious? The assassinated Duke of Gloucester (Thomas of Woodstock) was the seventh (but fifth surviving) son of Edward III who had appointed him Protector of England during Richard’s minority. Woodstock became a critic of Richard’s foreign policies: the King had him arrested and taken to Calais where, in 1397, he died in mysterious circumstances. Holinshed narrates that he was indeed killed by Mowbray, and certainly at the King’s behest. Woodstock was renowned for his plain speaking and his enmity to the king’s favourites. In Samuel Daniel’s epic poem, The Civil Wars between the Two Houses of Lancaster and York, which appeared in the same year as Shakespeare’s play, he is described as fiery and difficult: … one most violent, Impatient of command, of peace, of rest, Whose brow would show that which his heart had meant; His open malice and repugnant [refractory] breast Procured much mischief by his discontent. He is the central character in an anonymous play, Thomas of Woodstock where he plays a very different role. (It used to be thought   Boswell-Stone, Shakespeare’s Holinshed, 82.   Samuel Daniel, The Civil Wars, London, 1595, sig. C2r; Daniel does not have Mowbray play any part in Gloucester’s murder.

Shakespeare: Richard II   55 that this predated Richard II: recently it has been argued that the text dates from 1608.). In that play, Woodstock’s emblematic costume contrasts with the new fashions of those Shakespeare called the ‘caterpillars of the commonwealth’: ‘Let others jet in silk and gold’, says he, ‘A coat of English frieze [coarse woollen cloth] best     pleaseth me’. (1.1.108–9) In 5.1 the anonymous author follows Holinshed and shows him being murdered by the command of the King. Had Shakespeare followed that line, he would have created a simple moral tale: this would have made Richard an immoral tyrant, against whom, it was beginning to be argued, subjects might legitimately rebel. (See, for example, the anonymous Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos of 1581, to be translated in 1689 as ‘A Defence of Liberty against Tyrants’.)  The following scene, 1.2, as well as indicating the consequences of Gloucester’s assassination, sheds a little more light on what happened in that Gaunt expresses his regret for the part he took in the in the shedding of Gloucester’s blood. However, and pointedly perhaps, he does not name the King as the instigator: doing so might have attracted the attention of the Master of the Revels, who on occasion demanded cuts in playtexts—each one of which had to be ‘seen [i.e. read] and allowed’ by him before performance. So although Shakespeare leaves Richard’s involvement in Gloucester’s murder ambiguous, he does demonstrate how the death of the Protector destabilised the kingdom, a point made economically in the 2002 Berliner Ensemble production which opened with Gloucester’s body lying on the stage. In his 2008 RSC production, Michael Boyd had a figure in black, the ‘ghost’ of Woodstock, stalk across the stage in the opening scene.   Macd. P. Jackson, ‘Shakespeare’s Richard II and the Anonymous Thomas of Woodstock’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 14 (2001): 17–65.   See the account of this work in George H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory, (London: Harrap, 1951 edn.) 322–7; the ms. of Thomas of Woodstock bears the marks of careful censorship: see Janet Clare, ‘Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority’: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 43–6.

56  Shakespeare: Richard II Duels might reveal a process of divine justice: equally, as Shakespeare’s Richard was to decide, they might harm the royal interest. Sir Edward Coke, the great defender of the royal prerogative, who was Elizabeth’s Attorney General at the time of the play’s composition, was to assemble maxims of jurisprudence against duels. Among them we find, ‘God, who gives life, is the sole lord of life, nor can any justly take it away except God, or a person possessing his authority, as a judge’. But Richard who, surprisingly, intervenes to prevent the duel, might have been thinking politically or pragmatically rather than theologically. Certainly Segar did not approve: Two gentlemen determined to fight for life upon an accusation of treason, whether is it lawful for the Judge to depart [separate] them, before the combat be performed and fully ended? Whereunto may be answered that, forsomuch as the office of a judge is to give sentence according to allegations and proofs, it seemeth that the judge ought in no wise to stay the fight, but permit the combat to proceed till the one or the other of the fighters be either yielded or slain, especially in quarrels of so heinous weight as is the cause of treason. For Frederick the Emperor, who cassed [quashed] and disannulled all particular battles and combats used by the Lombards, did, notwithstanding, allow that, upon quarrel for treason and secret murder, the combat should be permitted and granted by all princes, because the one was offensive to God, the other to prince and country. The moment is impressive: Mowbray and Bolingbroke, defendant and appellant, enter in full armour, and the scene is magnified by ritual exchange of juridical formulae and the music of trumpets. The text indicates that the combatants wore helmets and carried spears (1.3.118), the accoutrements of knights fighting on horseback. It is highly unlikely that horses would have been brought into the play  Alan Rogers, ‘Parliamentary Appeals of Treason in the Reign of Richard II’, The American Journal of Legal History 8 (1964): 95–124.   For the debate see Sir Edward Coke, The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England London, 1681, Chap. 72; Waggoner, G. R. ‘Timon of Athens and the Jacobean Duel.’ Shakespeare Quarterly 16 (1965): 303–11.   Segar, Honor and Armes, 62–3.

Shakespeare: Richard II   57 houses—although certain modern productions have used hobbyhorses. Whether these were used in Shakespeare’s time and whether they served to diminish the dignity of the occasion, reducing affairs of state to a childlike game, we do not know. But no sooner has the ‘charge’ that signals the opening of the duel been sounded than the marshal, attentive to both the combatants and the King (who was probably seated on a ‘state’ or throne on the middle of the stage), proclaims, ‘Stay, the king has thrown his warder down’ (1.3.117), and the duel is halted. This might be read as an index of an impulsive tenderness on Richard’s part: Bolingbroke was Richard’s cousin, and Fiona Shaw, one of the best actors to play the king in recent years, grounded her performance on love between the two. Richard offers a long justification of his verdict, which serves, he asserts, to preserve the peace. But this speech is preceded by a stage direction, ‘A long flourish’ (1.3.122 SD), which is found in the Folio version of the play (slightly revised) but not in the Quartos. It would seem that the length of the flourish signals a rapidly convened emergency meeting of the King’s council—Holinshed reported it lasted ‘two long hours’. Although we cannot tell whether this action was premeditated or spontaneous, the outcome would have commended itself to Machiavelli: Richard, at the risk of making enemies of both men by impugning their honour, rids himself and the kingdom of both antagonists. Mowbray is dangerous, it is implied, because he might know too much, Bolingbroke because he wants too much. Richard certainly speaks for theatrical effect: the speech in which he pronounces sentence has a long imageladen build up, before the King brutally pronounces ‘Therefore, we banish you our territories’ (1.3.139). Then, in another theatrical intervention, Richard asserts his power again: in a show of mercy, he throws a sop to Bolingbroke by remitting four years of his sentence of ten year’s banishment. The Lancasters were too powerful to be humiliated. For once we see Richard acting as a sagacious ‘politician’. At the   See http://www.salon.com/11/features/shaw2.html (accessed 30 November, 2007); see also Rutter, ‘Fiona Shaw’s Richard II’.   Boswell-Stone, Shakespeare’s Holinshed, 88.

58  Shakespeare: Richard II time the word carried negative connotations, and one of the most notorious stage politicians was Shakespeare’s Richard of Gloucester. It has become a critical commonplace to see this figure, later King Richard III, simply as a ‘Machiavel’, a stock evil bogey-man of a kind found in many plays of the English Renaissance who let no moral scruple stand in the way of his self-advancement. Such Machiavels, however, did not really descend from the writings of the Florentine statesman Niccolò Machiavelli but from anti-Catholic or anti-Italian sentiments. In fact Richard II was written by an author who ‘exposed this bovarysme, the human will to see things as they are not, more clearly than [any other writer]’. And this sums up the ‘true’ Machiavelli. We need only quote the titles of some of the later chapters of The Prince (written in 1513 but published only in 1532)—those that are built around maxims pertinent to Richard II—to realise how both Shakespeare and Machiavelli wrote out a kind politic realism: 15  ‘Of the things for which … princes are praised or blamed’ 16  ‘Of liberality and niggardliness’ 17  ‘Of cruelty and clemency, and whether it is better to be loved or feared’ 18  ‘In what ways princes must keep faith’ 19 ‘That we must avoid being despised and hated’ … 21  ‘How a prince must act in order to gain reputation’ 22  ‘Of the secretaries of princes’ 23  ‘How flatterers must be shunned’  (This, however, is the last time we see Richard thinking strategically.) Richard’s intervention in the duel signal to the audience that this will not resemble all the other histories: there is no on-stage fighting. Nor do we see the commoners, although their opinions are often reported. Rather this is a play of wills and a play of language: the contest between Richard and Bolingbroke is a contest between two   T. S. Eliot, ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’, Selected Essays (London: Faber, 1951 edn) 131.   From Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince and the Discourses, ed. Max Lerner (New York: Modern Library College Editions, 1950).

Shakespeare: Richard II   59 player kings whose power depends not upon the accidents of battle but upon who can create the better reputation and who can best win the loyalties of courtiers and commoners alike. Richard is happy to follow his imagination into theatrical utterances and actions and plays for immediate effect; Bolingbroke takes pride in facing experience directly: O, who can hold a fire in his hand By thinking on the frosty Caucasus? Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite By bare imagination of a feast? Or wallow naked in December snow By thinking on fantastic summer’s heat? O, no, the apprehension of the good Gives but the greater feeling to the worse. Fell Sorrow’s tooth doth never rankle more Than when he bites, but lanceth not the sore.     (1.3.294–303) Lancing the boil might be Bolingbroke’s guiding principle, but, as he finds out, it does not always cure the ills infecting the body politic. Just as a more intimate scene between the Duchess of Gloucester and the Duke of Lancaster was placed after the public ceremony in 1.1, so the depiction of the interrupted duel is followed by a choric sequence that tells us more about the ways of Richard’s courtiers. At the opening of this scene we see Richard with his favourites. It is one of the few moments when a director has the opportunity of showing the ‘riot’ of which Richard is accused. Although, in 1 Henry IV, Shakespeare describes the court as a place of folly, being filled ‘With shallow jesters, and rash bavin [quickly burned out] wits’ (3.2.61), there has been a long tradition of imposing a homoerotic representation on the sequence. Holinshed had interspersed his chronicle with observations upon the principal personages. Of Richard, he wrote: He was seemly of shape and favour, and of nature good enough, if the wickedness and naughty demeanour of such as were about him … He was prodigal, ambitious, and much given to the pleasure of the body … Furthermore, there reigned abun-

60  Shakespeare: Richard II dantly the filthy sin of lechery and fornication, with abominable adultery, specially in the king, but more chiefly in the prelacy. It would, in fact, be unusual in a text from this time to find Richard being labelled as a lover of men: many argue that in the period particular sexual acts were not held to be indexes of a distinctive sexual identity. Yet in 3.1 Bolingbroke accuses Bushy and Green, implying that they have sexually enticed Richard from Isabella: You have in manner [as in were] with your sinful hours Made a divorce betwixt his queen and him, 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) Perhaps these lines derive from memories of Marlowe’s Edward II where the Queen accuses Gaveston of having robbed her of her husband (1.4.150–60). There appears, however, to be no enmity between Richard’s Isabel and these favourites. Coleridge thought that Shakespeare did not wish to make Richard simply dissolute, but found him ‘weak and womanish’, exhibiting ‘a wantonness in feminine show, feminine friendism, intensely woman-like love of those immediately about him’. In the 1978 BBC tele-film of the play, with Derek Jacobi in the lead, in this scene favourites surrounded Richard in an atmosphere of sexually charged Epicureanism. The King lay under a masseur’s towel while Green kneaded his back and Bagot sat, presumably naked, in a wooden bathtub. The English Shakespeare Company’s production of 1989 starring Michael Pennington, on the other hand, eschewed any suggestions of homosexuality. It might well be that the labelling of   Boswell-Stone, Shakespeare’s Holinshed, 129   James Knowles, ‘Sexuality: A Renaissance Category’, A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Hattaway (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). 674–89.   Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Coleridge’s Criticism of Shakespeare’, ed. R.A. Foakes (London: Athlone Press, 1989), 119, 134.   See Michael Hattaway, ‘Politics and Mise-en-Scène in Television Versions of King

Shakespeare: Richard II   61 Richard as homosexual derives from genderism, from an unthinking branding of emotional openness as effeminate. Richard had politic reasons for not allowing God’s verdict to influence the course of English history. Bolingbroke too seems to have studied the politic historians. Machiavelli had pointed out that a prince might enhance his power if he was loved – as well as feared. As Richard icily reports to Aumerle and the King’s minions, Bushy, Bagot and Green, as Bolingbroke departed he wooed the common people: What reverence he did throw away on slaves, Wooing poor craftsmen with the craft of smiles And patient underbearing of his fortune, As ’twere to banish their affects with him. Off goes his bonnet to an oyster-wench. A brace of draymen bid God speed him well, And had the tribute of his supple knee, With ‘Thanks, my countrymen, my loving friends’, As were our England in reversion his, And he our subjects’ next degree in hope.   (1.4.27–36) The specificity of the occupations of these commoners is typically Shakespearean, but although, in contrast with most of the other histories, the ‘base-born’ scarcely appear on stage in this play, their political power is often inferred. Edward Hall, whom Shakespeare seems to have been reading here, gives a much less pointed and specific account, but he makes Bolingbroke less of a politic and more of a charismatic leader: Wonderful it is to write … what number of people ran in every town and street, lamenting and bewailing his departure. As who say that, when he departed, the only shield, defence, and comfort of the common people was vaded [decayed] and gone, Richard II’, Television Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of Michèle Willems, edd. Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin (Mont-Saint-Aignan: Publications des Universités de Rouen et du Havre, 2008), 91–106.   Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (London: Routledge, 1997), 142–3.

62  Shakespeare: Richard II as though the sun had fallen out of the sphere or the moon had lapsed from her proper epicycle. Bolingbroke has not yet revealed his desire for the crown: Richard reveals how much he has to fear from this sharp politician. The King has economic as well as political problems: the quelling of rebellion in Ireland requires funds for expeditionary forces as well as an appearance by the King himself as commander of his troops. Richard, like his grandfather Edward III and like Queen Elizabeth, had no agreed method of raising taxes. Moneys that might have gone to soldiers were spent upon his army, as he boasts, of 10,000 retainers (see 4.1.283) and, again like the Queen, he was expected to display ‘largesse’ (1.4.44). 5.2 The Death of Gaunt, Richard in Ireland, and Bolingbroke’s Return (2.1–3.1) Act 2 opens with a scene that serves to remind us that this play is about England as much as about the chronicling of who was in or out at court. How patriotic was Shakespeare? In Gaunt’s dying speech, a vision of the kind conventionally accorded to the dying, we hear a lyrical passage that celebrates the land of England as a demi-paradise, a place that resembled a medieval hortus conclusus (walled garden), a country fit for chivalric and heroic masculinity. Not surprisingly, those opening lines were emblazoned on railway-carriage propaganda posters during the Second World War. But of course the speech goes on—and its idealising is thereby exposed as a rhetorical ploy. England is now leased (rented) out to raise revenue as a consequence of Richard’s ‘rash fierce blaze of riot’ (2.1.33) and ill-governance: … England, that was wont to conquer others, Hath made a shameful conquest of itself. (2.1.65–6)   Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 7 vols (London, 1957–73) III, 386.   James Bothwell, ‘Edward III and The “New Nobility”: Largesse and Limitation in Fourteenth-Century England’, The English Historical Review 112 (1997): 1111–40; M. J. Braddick, The Nerves of State: Taxation and the Financing of the English State, 1558–1714 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996).

Shakespeare: Richard II   63 Earlier Gaunt had accused the King of a taste for lewd poems and luxurious Italian fashions: Italy was a byword for wickedness and sexual deviance. Moreover, Richard, by attempting to redress this prodigal expenditure by the use of blank charters to extract money from the aristocracy, appears to Gaunt to have demolished the whole symbolic structure of his regal authority. His rebuke stings the King into vilely insulting his uncle: Landlord of England art thou now, not king. Thy state of law is bondslave to the law, And thou – King Richard  A lunatic lean-witted fool, Presuming on an ague’s privilege!   (2.1.113–16 emphases added) The word ‘landlord’ was picked up by the anonymous author of Woodstock (5.3.106): it was shocking because it made the point that the mystic bond between prince and subject, inscribed in both the conceit of the body politic and the fiction that the king was the image of God, had been replaced by a cash nexus. Like an absentee landlord, King Richard had pillaged his estate to please himself and had neglected both his responsibility to his tenants and the ancient virtue of hospitality. The next line, meaning that the King, as a legal entity, is subject to the law, runs head-on against the doctrine of the divine right of kings, a concept that was becoming increasingly attractive to the English monarchy at the time of the play’s composition. Kings, it was claimed, derived their right top rule from the will of God rather that from any system of natural law, and neither depended upon the assent of their subjects nor could be held accountable to them. However, in the year of the play a work published over the name of ‘R. Doleman’ and others, wrote out the central tenets of Catholic resistance theory: it immediately attracted urgent government atten  See William O. Scott, ‘Landholding, Leasing and Inheritance in Richard II’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 42 (2002): 275–92.   See Glenn Burgess, ‘The Divine Right of Kings Reconsidered’, The English Historical Review, 107 (1992), 837–61.   ‘R. Doleman’, [Robert Persons, R. Rowland, et al.], A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crown of England [Antwerp], 1594 [1595].

64  Shakespeare: Richard II tion. No wonder that Richard protests so much. Richard is not only behaving illegally but is no political tactician: he alienates two of England’s greatest magnates, York and Northumberland, whose criticism of Richard mingles an evocation of the virtue and wisdom of Richard’s father, the Black Prince, with warnings of the imprudence of alienating the house of Lancaster. The lines merely to sting Richard into further rashness: Think what you will, we seize into our hands His plate, his goods, his money and his lands.   (1.1.209–10) The rhyming couplet marks this as a precipitating moment in the play’s action, a moment of tyranny and supreme folly. Just as Richard had impugned Bolingbroke’s honour in 1.3, now, by depriving him of possessions, he now not only wrongs his kinsman but also assails the very principles of succession and inheritance that were the bases of his own claim to the throne. In the year of the play we find in one of George Peele’s Accession Day poems a celebration of Elizabeth’s accession and right to rule: … that day whereon this Queen Inaugured was and holily installed, Anointed of the highest King of kings, In her hereditary royal right Successively to sit enthronizèd.   (Anglorum Feriae, emphasis added) The scene ends with further reflection upon the King’s bankruptcy and news that Bolingbroke has already assembled forces that he will lead back to England to remove a king who has placed himself above the   Cyndia Susan Clegg, ‘“By the Choise and Inuitation of Al the Realme”: Richard II and Elizabethan Press Censorship’, Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (1997): 432–48; also V. Houliston, ‘The Hare and the Drum: Robert Persons’s Writings on the English Succession, 1593–6’, Renaissance Studies 14 (2000): 235–50.   See how York is disturbed and confused by his divided allegiance (2.2.109 ff.).   Robert Greene and George Peele, Dramatic and Poetical Works, ed. Alexander Dyce (London, 1861), 596; for the marriage of poetry and statecraft in Peele’s Accession Day poems see A. R. Braunműller, George Peele (Boston: Twayne, 1983), 12–22.

Shakespeare: Richard II   65 law and to cast off the ‘slavish yoke’ (2.1.291) of Richard’s rule. Shakespeare gathers up all that might be said about Richard’s rule into the scene that follows (2.2) in which, as in 1.2, notes of woe and warning are first sounded by a woman. In 1399 Queen Isabel (of Valois), Richard’s second wife, was historically only ten years old, but Shakespeare invested her with the attributes of his first wife, Anne of Bohemia, the happiness of whose marriage to Richard was legendary. Isabel here plays the role of tragic prophetess, using a poignant image of pregnancy: Some unborn sorrow, ripe in Fortune’s womb, Is coming towards me, and my inward soul With nothing trembles. At something it grieves, More than with parting from my lord the King.     (2.2.10–13) Her fears are well-founded: we hear from both York and from Richard’s favourites, busy making plans for escape, that the King has thrown away the allegiance of both nobles and commoners. Shakespeare juxtaposes this sequence of political collapse against a depiction of Bolingbroke’s resolution: we first see the Duke building up his allegiance with the Percies and then, with more than a little sophistry (‘As I was banished, I was banished Hereford; / But as I come, I come for Lancaster’), winning over the King’s uncle, the Duke of York. Although Bolingbroke claims to stand for the ‘commonwealth’ (2.3.166), York suspects he might be ‘his own carver’ (2.3.144). However, perhaps because his own forces are weak, he reluctantly welcomes him to his Berkeley Castle. The scene offers a nice production choice, whether to present York as a man touched by his awareness of Richard’s failings, or someone stoically submitting to a virtual arrest. After the Welsh Captain scene already discussed (see Chapter 3 above), this movement of the play, a prelude to confrontation between the antagonists, ends with Bolingbroke despatching Bushy and Green to execution. Another nice decision: is Bolingbroke a representative of justice, properly punishing those   Donna B. Hamilton, ‘The State of Law in Richard II’, Shakespeare Quarterly 34 (1983): 5–17.

66  Shakespeare: Richard II who had misled the King (lines 8–21), or rather a cruel avenger, ruthlessly killing those who, when he was banished, had helped themselves to his estate and badges of gentility (lines 22–27)? 5.3. Richard’s Return (3.2) When Richard appears in the following scene, having returned from Ireland, he has become the type of everything that Bolingbroke is not. Whereas we have just seen Bolingbroke forming strategic alliances, Richard indulges in a salutation of the earth of England that might suggest that his royal touch might heal the wounds imposed on it by the hoofs of the rebels’ horses. Shakespeare’s demonstrative skills mean that, when Richard resorts to political theologising, his auditors are likely to conclude that he is merely cheering himself up: Not all the water in the rough rude sea Can wash the balm off from an anointed king; The breath of worldly men cannot depose The deputy elected by the Lord. (3.2.54-7) Lines like this, along with Richard’s comparison of himself to Christ (4.1.171) have suggested to some critics that Richard is endowed with the ‘divine right of kings’ (see above). Certainly, in the period, it was common to follow St Paul and point out that monarchical power derived from God: ‘Let every soul [person] be subject unto the higher powers; for there is no power but of God, and the powers that be are ordained of God’ (Romans, 13.1). However, ‘early modern Englishmen were more used to thinking in terms of duties than of rights’, and few Elizabethans would have believed that a monarch had an absolute right to do whatever he or she liked. While popular maxims such as ‘The king can do no wrong’ and ‘What the king wills, that the law wills’ are recorded from the 1530’s, throughout the period ‘ancient rights’ of subjects and parliament (often unspecified) were often invoked: authority needed to be legitimated, and the king   See Forker ed., Richard II, 492–3.   Kevin Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 54.   Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth

Shakespeare: Richard II   67 was subject to the law. As we shall see, Bolingbroke seeks the backing of Parliament when he proceeds against Richard. Salisbury compounds the King’s misery by reminding him that his delayed return had cost him his Welsh forces, and the screw is turned further by Scroop’s catalogue of those who have turned to Bolingbroke and those among his favourites who have been executed: White-beards have armed their thin and hairless scalps Against thy majesty; boys, with women’s voices Strive to speak big, and clap their female joints In stiff unwieldy arms against thy crown; The very beadsmen [pensioners] learn to bend their bows Of double-fatal yew against thy state; Yea, distaff-women manage rusty bills Against thy seat. Both young and old rebel, And all goes worse than I have power to tell.   (3.2.112–20, emphasis added) This passage, like the description of Bolingbroke’s welcome to London by the commoners (1.4.24–36), offers a vision of modernity: Richard’s authority is patrimonial, deriving from his descent, Bolingbroke’s is charismatic, drawing from popular acclamation. Salisbury drives the point home by his use of the word ‘majesty’: the historical Richard deliberately encouraged the use of inflated titles of address, specifically the use of the lofty ‘your majesty’, and Salisbury’s use of the word generates a hollow echo here. Richard characteristically does not take the point but reacts with a and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1950), K61 and 72; see Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 47–102.   J. P. Sommerville, ‘James I and the Divine Right of Kings: English Politics and Continental Theory’, The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 55–70; Michael Hattaway, ‘Tragedy and Political Authority’, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy, ed. Claire McEachern (Cambridge, 2002), 103–22.   The categories of the patrimonial and charismatic derive from Max Weber: see David Little, Religion, Order and Law: A Study in Pre-Revolutionary England (London: Harper & Row, 1969), 20–1.   See Nigel Saul, ‘Richard II and the Vocabulary of Kingship’, The English Historical Review 110 (1995): 854–77.

68  Shakespeare: Richard II fine flow of eloquence: For God’s sake, let us 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, Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed – All murdered. 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!   (3.2.155–70) The whole of this scene of lamentation is punctuated by Richard’s asides to his on-stage audience. This reminds us that this is a performance and, as always, a range of possibilities present themselves, ranging from a sense that here the King is, as Gaunt had said of himself, ‘a prophet new inspired’ or, alternatively a pullulating sentimentalist whose copious exclamations both reveal his weakness and also generate the scene’s closing couplet, a desperate and unexpected order to his followers to transfer to Bolingbroke: Discharge my followers. Let them hence away, From Richard’s night to Bolingbroke’s fair day.     (3.2.217–18) 5.4. Confrontation and Abdication (3.3–4.1) The next movement of the play comprises three scenes: two major confrontations between Richard and Bolingbroke that probe the rela-

Shakespeare: Richard II   69 tionship between the authority and the power of a monarch. In the first of these (3.3) Richard seems to throw away his authority by descending from the playhouse gallery to stage level—the scene enacts the Moscow Arts Theatre dictum: ‘One does not play a king. Kings are played by their surroundings.’ The transfer of status is completed in the second scene (4.1) in which Richard hands over the emblems of power to his rival. Between them is placed an important allegorical inset, the garden scene (3.4). In 3.3 what an audience see is almost important as what they hear. To begin with we should note that Elizabethan staging conventions meant that changes of location could be rendered without awkward rearrangements of what was on the stage. At the beginning of this scene, Bolingbroke and his followers are to be imagined approaching the outside of Flint Castle. At line 61 Richard appears ‘on the walls’, i.e. the upper stage level, and occupies centre attention until he descends to what the text designates as the ‘base court’ (line 176). The setting for the action has artfully been translated from outside to inside the castle. Also notable are differences between the stage directions in the Quarto (Q) and Folio (F) versions that suggest different renderings of the theatrical action. Q’s opening stage direction reads ‘Enter Bolingbroke, York, Northumberland’; F’s is ‘Enter, with [Trumpeter,] Drum, and Colours, Bolingbroke, York, Northumberland, Attendants [and Soldiers]’. Q’s version derives from Shakespeare’s own manuscript (or perhaps a scribal copy of it). The author was often careless with entrances and exits, which would have had to be regularised for performance, and which were sometimes recorded in the text held by the company’s book-holder who combined the roles of prompter and stage-manager. The amplified stage directions in F seem to have been derived from some sort of collation between Q and a playhouse manuscript: this may mean that they represent Shakespeare’s full conception of the scene’s opening—he, after all, was an actor in the company and was presumably asked for advice as performances were devised or revived. However, it is possible that F records some kind of revi  Grigori Kozintsev, Shakespeare: Time and Conscience, trans. Joyce Vining (London: Denis Dobson, 1966), 26.

70  Shakespeare: Richard II sion: soldiers appear alongside the principals at the scene’s opening and later, at Richard’s appearance, entrances are added for Carlisle, Aumerle, Scroop, and Salisbury (see 3.3.61 SD). Q’s stage directions therefore suggest that Bolingbroke outfaces Richard without the threat of a stage-army. In the second instance F’s version implies that Richard’s descent may not have been an unexpected and seemingly spontaneous act, but a grand ritual gesture staged after consultation with important members of his Council. Either way, Richard’s descent creates a striking Gestus (as defined above), and is a key moment in any production. Bolingbroke’s long instruction to Northumberland near the beginning of the scene is composed of two parts. In the first, we might think simply of an iron fist in a velvet glove: Henry Bolingbroke On both his knees doth kiss King Richard’s hand And sends allegiance and true faith of heart To his most royal person, hither come Even at his feet to lay my arms and power, Provided that my banishment repealed And lands restored again be freely granted.   (3.3.35–41, emphasis added) But the speech has a greater resonance: it implicitly asserts a new kind of contractual monarchy. Richard might claim a divine right, but Bolingbroke’s allegiance is conditional upon the King’s adherence to the law (a provision is specifically a stipulation in a legal document [OED, s.v. 5]). Then, as we have already seen, he uses word-play decorously to threaten the King and also to indicate what is going on in his mind. When Richard actually appears, his tone modulates once more: See, see, King Richard doth himself appear, As doth the blushing discontented sun From out the fiery portal of the east, When he perceives the envious clouds are bent To dim his glory and to stain the track

Shakespeare: Richard II   71 Of his bright passage to the Occident. (3.3.62–7) We cannot tell whether he speaks these lines in awe of a Richard who has turned from half-crazed and impotent cursing to adopt a pose of true majesty, or whether his rhetoric mocks the crestfallen appearance of one who had associated himself with the sun itself. A kind of verbal duel unfolds until Richard loses any advantage granted him by his position above his adversary by retreating into fatalist, self-pitying ‘fustian’ (a word used to describe inflated language or bombast): What must the King do now? Must he submit? The King shall do it. Must he be deposed? The King shall be contented. Must he lose The name of King? I’God’s name, let it go. … I’ll be buried in the King’s highway, Some way of common trade, where subjects’ feet May hourly trample on their sovereign’s head.     (3.3.143–55) Dr Johnson did not like these last two lines: ‘Shakespeare is very apt to deviate from the pathetic to the ridiculous’. However, the critic may be answered by pointing out that these are ‘Richard’s lines’ and not Shakespeare’s: ‘character is style’, and Richard cannot stop himself speaking for affect, perhaps ironically mocking his own proclivity to religiosity and rhetorical copiousness. This self-consciousness – if that is what it is—makes Richard more than simply a foppish but honest king, weakened by his love of poeticising. We might draw analogies with the ‘antic disposition’ that Hamlet adopts (Hamlet, 1.5.172). The word ‘antic’ evokes both foolishness and wit, and has connotations of the old-fashioned (‘antique’), the fantastic, and of the monstrous—Richard referred to Death as an   Samuel Johnson, Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. H. R. Woodhuysen (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1989), 196.   Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon [1707–88], ‘Discours sur le style’ Oeuvres complètes. Paris: 1844), I, p.30.   Lois Potter, ‘The Antic Disposition of Richard II’, Shakespeare Survey 27 (1974): 33–41; also David M. Bergeron, ‘Richard II and Carnival Politics’, Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 33–43.

72  Shakespeare: Richard II ‘antic’ (3.2.162). By forcing his on-stage auditors to attend to his ‘passions’ (long speeches, or, in this context, ‘routines’), Richard can gain the licence of a fool or clown, and mock his hearers even as he mocks himself. As Montaigne wrote, ‘I wot [know] not how, we are double in ourselves, which is the cause that what we believe, we believe it not, and cannot rid ourselves of that which we condemn.’ However, these lines do signal both psychological and political resignation. This after all is the only Shakespearean play about the Plantagenets that does not contain any battle sequence. It is Richard rather than Bolingbroke who declares that the game is up—but, yet again, directors and players face a decision: has Richard impulsively given up more than was being demanded, or is he capitulating under threat? Either way, he decides to descend from the stage balcony to the accompaniment of lines that are not only self-dramatising but which also enact the image of the Welsh Captain’s ‘shooting star’ (2.4.19) and which fashion him in the mould of the son of Apollo, god of the sun in ancient mythology: Down, down I come; like glist’ring Phaëton, Wanting the manage of unruly jades. In the base court? Base court, where kings grow base, To come at traitors’ calls and do them grace. In the base court? Come down? Down, court, down, king! For night-owls shriek where mounting larks should sing.     (3.3.178–84) It is not known whether there was a visible staircase at the Theatre— Henslowe, at the Rose, was to list ‘one pair of stairs for Phaëton’ (a lost play of 1598 by Thomas Dekker). If Richard’s actions as he descended could match the flamboyance of his words he would, in modern parlance, for that moment at least, gloriously upstage Bolingbroke. However, if he had to disappear into the tiring-house before entering again below, the effect might turn greatness to ridicu  Montaigne, ‘Of Glory’, Essayes, II, 342.   Carol Chillington Rutter, ed., Documents of the Rose Playhouse (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 136.

Shakespeare: Richard II   73 lousness, and his lofty declarations, centred on play upon the word ‘base’, might appear mere petulance. Moreover, we wonder whether this was a conscious and deliberate action, acting in the sense of ‘doing’, or whether it was acting in the sense of ‘pretending’. If the former, do we consider, to use a formula that has inspired countless essays on tragedy, that this action is ‘thoroughly expressive of the doer’ and agree that ‘the centre of [Shakespearean] tragedy may be said with equal truth to lie in action issuing from character, or in character issuing in action’? If we agree, we might conclude that, in the simplest terms, Richard is essentially fatalistic. If we tend to the second meaning of ‘acting’, we might consider the moment to be self-dramatising or so theatrically overheated as to be unworthy of a truly great king. We might also recall those authorities, including Montaigne (see above), who were sceptical about a consistent ‘character’ or unified self. More ambivalent action follows, when Bolingbroke kneels to his King: if we accept the stage direction ‘Raises Bolingbroke’ (3.3.194 SD) that editors derive from Holinshed, Richard might appear as he does this either surprisingly magnanimous or a victim of some psychological compulsion. The ambivalence of ‘acting’ was foregrounded in a wonderful production by John Barton for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1973. Two of the leading actors of the time, Ian Richardson and Richard Pasco, alternated as Richard and Bolingbroke. Before the lights dimmed the audience saw a robed scarecrow figure on stage wearing the King’s robe as well as a mask and a crown. The production had opened with the cast processing in rehearsal costumes onto the stage, in two lines, led by Richardson and Pasco, and preceded by a figure carrying a book and made up to look like Shakespeare. He bowed to one of the two player-kings, he who was to live and die during that performance; the player donned the crown and the scarecrow revealed was revealed to be masked as Death while the cast donned their costumes in full view of the audience.   A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy [1904] (London: Macmillan, 1957 edn), 7.   Stanley Wells, Royal Shakespeare (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977), 75–6.

74  Shakespeare: Richard II The garden scene, 3.4, is another scene in which Shakespeare mingles political observation upon ‘God-given and law-made kingship’ with personal feeling. Accompanied by her ladies, the Queen enters the garden where their intention is to devise sports to purge her melancholy, but their conversations are interrupted by the entrance of the royal Gardener and his men—their superior station is registered by the fact that they speak in blank verse, unlike the grave-digging and clownish rustics that we encounter, for example, in Hamlet. This kind of allegorising, which draws upon traditions laid down in the book of Genesis as well as in classical texts like Virgil’s Georgics, was common in Tudor times. The Georgics, pastoral poems about agriculture, create implicit analogies with a well-ordered state, and the Queen addresses the Gardener as ‘old Adam’s likeness’. A double perspective on England is thus created, at once Gaunt’s ‘demi-paradise’ (2.1.42) and a garden made fruitless by neglect. In William Baldwin’s, Treatise of Moral Philosophy, (London, 1547) we read: Even as a good gardener is very diligent about his garden, watering the good and profitable herbs and rooting out the unprofitable weeds, so should a king attend to his commonweal, cherishing his good and true subjects and punishing such as are false and unprofitable. As the cutting of vines and all other trees is cause of better and more plentiful fruit, so the punishment of the bad causeth the good to flourish. The women probably withdrew behind one of the stage pillars, and the Queen overhears first a compassionate account of her husband’s upbringing: He that hath suffered this disordered spring Hath now himself met with the fall of leaf. The weeds which his broad-spreading leaves did shelter, That seemed in eating him to hold him up, Are plucked up, root and all, by Bolingbroke (3.4.48–52)   Hamilton, ‘The State of Law’, 14.   C. W. R. D. Moseley, Shakespeare’s History Plays: Richard II to Henry V: The Making of a King.(London: Penguin Books, 1988), 106–111.   Baldwin, Moral Philosophy, 72, cit, R. Levitsky, ‘Another “Germ” Of the Garden Scene in Richard II?’ Shakespeare Quarterly 24 (1973): 466–67.

Shakespeare: Richard II   75 But then comes a damning denunciation of her husband’s misrule, of a man who had failed to ‘Keep law and form and due proportion’, and to prune ‘too fast-growing sprays’ and pluck up ‘weeds’. These images seem to refer principally to the King’s favourites, although Bolingbroke himself may be included in the catalogue. The Queen remonstrates with the Gardener and, in her anguish, curses his graftings: he vows to set a bank of rue in her remembrance. Several productions have had him, at the scene’s end, actually plant the rue in a pot of earth, standing at the front of the stage throughout the performance, so symbolising the ‘blessed plot’ (2.1.50) of England. In Steven Pimlott’s RSC modern-dress production of 2000 at the Other Place in Stratford a mound of earth, Gloucester’s Grave, remained on stage throughout the performance. In many ways the first scene of Act 4 is the true centre of the play. It contains three sequences—which interestingly rearrange historical events, compressing them into a continuous theatrical action. In Holinshed Richard voluntarily abdicated at the Tower on 29 September 1399 and Parliament was informed the next day. Bolingbroke was crowned a fortnight later—the coronation is announced, but not shown in the play (lines 319–20). A few days after that Bagot and Fitzwater charged that Aumerle was complicit in the murder of Gloucester. The plot to depose Henry IV led by the Abbot of Westminster was not initiated until the end of the year. In the scene’s first sequence, we find Bolingbroke, in his first moments of a kind of de facto rule, presiding over a confusing dispute over responsibility for Gloucester’s death. This was what lay behind the play’s first three scenes: this eruption of unfinished business exposes the chronic factionalism that infects the nobility of England. No fewer than seven ‘gages’ (here, as in the first scene, almost certainly gloves or gauntlets) are thrown down, but like Richard in the first sequence, Bolingbroke is too canny to allow the cases to proceed to trial by combat. First, Aumerle son of the Duke of York, challenges Bagot, one of Richard’s favourites, who has implicated him in the murder. Fitzwater, Harry Percy (Hotspur), and an anonymous lord enter counter-charges against Aumerle. Surrey challenges Fitzwater, and Aumerle lays down a charge on behalf of Thomas Mowbray

76  Shakespeare: Richard II whom we saw banished in 1.3. The sequence shows Bolingbroke competently wielding the power that Richard has lost, and perhaps winning moral authority by magnanimously announcing the restoration of his old adversary Mowbray’s estates. Fortune aids him further in that he is saved from further action by the Bishop of Carlisle’s poignant announcement that in fact Mowbray has died in exile. The trials can be indefinitely deferred. This dark news makes even more ominous York’s entrance with news that ‘plume-plucked Richard’ (4.1.109) has in effect abdicated. This marks the beginning of the second sequence in the scene. Bolingbroke’s response is stark and decisive: ‘In God’s name I’ll ascend the regal throne’ (4.1.114). Should this be played with ‘sudden baldness’, as Forker describes the moment, or is Bolingbroke himself surprised by the precipitation of events—which could encourage a player to speak the line with due diffidence? There is no general shout of acclamation. Does he actually make it to the throne before Carlisle lambastes him with a charge that he, a subject, is guilty of an act of foul treachery against King Richard, ‘the figure of God’s majesty’ (4.1.126)? Moreover, the Bishop continues, such an act will draw down the wrath of God. England will be laid waste by civil wars, become like Golgotha (i.e. Calvary where Christ was crucified), and be called ‘The field of … dead men’s skulls’ (4.1.145). Now this, of course, is precisely what did happen, and Shakespeare had already dramatised the appalling confusion and slaughter that took place during the Wars of the Roses that laid England waste during the reigns of Henry VI, Edward IV, and Richard III. His next plays, 1 and 2 Henry IV, would chronicle the mayhem caused by the revolt of the Percies, led by the Earl of Northumberland and Harry Percy, both of whom are supporting Bolingbroke in this scene. However, this does not mean that Carlisle’s account of the course of English history is endorsed by Shakespeare—whose dramatic strategies in the earlier plays indicate that England’s nobles made their own history and brought woe upon themselves as well as upon the commonwealth. Certainly Northumberland is totally unwilling to concede any choric authority to Carlisle: Well have you argued, sir; and for your pains,

Shakespeare: Richard II   77 Of capital treason we arrest you here. (4.1.151–2) The Bishop faced death because prophesying was recognised as a powerful tool for destabilising a regime, particularly by Catholic clergy, and was treated as a capital offence.  The third sequence in this scene was the one that was for thirteen years regarded as too provocative to be printable—lines 155–318 could be read for the first time only in the fourth Quarto of 1608, possibly as a result of censorship, by the Master of the Revels or the Bishop of London or, possibly, as an act of self-protection by the players. This part of the play is generally, somewhat tendentiously, referred to as ‘the deposition scene’—from another perspective it could (and should) be labelled ‘the Parliament scene’ or ‘the abdication scene’. The two points of view are established in a short prologue and an epilogue. In the former Northumberland and Bolingbroke make it plain that Richard is to be brought to face his accusers in Parliament (lines 155–8). This is at the behest of the commoners, who thus make another important intervention in the action, but without appearing on stage. (It is significant that in the sources the scene takes place in the Tower rather than the Palace of Westminster.) In the latter, men of the church, the Abbot of Westminster and the Bishop of Carlisle, lament the ‘woeful pageant’ they have witnessed, and begin to hatch a plot that will be discovered only in 5.2 when York finds out that his son Aumerle is carrying treasonous papers. This scene is like a final set of wit between Richard and Bolingbroke. Richard opens strongly with a complaint that he is not ready to adopt the role of a fawning courtier. Implicit stage directions indicate that he has, not once but twice, to dare Bolingbroke to actually lay his hand upon the crown: Here, cousin, seize the crown. Here cousin,   Coke, Third Part of the Institutes, chap 55; Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973 edn), 466–86; for an examination of prophetic modes of language throughout the play, see Henry E. Jacobs, ‘Prophecy and Ideology in Shakespeare’s Richard II’, South Atlantic Review 51 (1986): 3–17.   See Clegg, ‘Richard II and Elizabethan Press Censorship’.   See Forker ed. Richard II, 4.1 n.

78  Shakespeare: Richard II On this side my hand, and on that side thine. (4.1.182–3) However, he then characteristically throws away his advantage by lurching into self-pity and maudlin couplets that play upon the word ‘care’. Bolingbroke interrupts with the stark question, ‘Are you contented to resign the crown?’ More word-play follows (‘ay’ meaning ‘I’ and ‘yes’, and puns on ‘no’ and ‘know’ and on ‘nothing’ and ‘noting’): Ay, no. No, ay; for I must nothing be. Therefore no ‘no’, for I resign to thee. (4.1.201–2) Sometimes in production Richard again out-smarts Bolingbroke here, by deftly twitching the crown out of his reach, or by causing him to lurch to grab it, so displaying his ambition, and then controlling the action by improvising a ritual a kind of anti-coronation or ‘degradation’. He methodically undecks himself of his badges of office and revenues, and repeals all of his acts, decrees, and statutes. As Charles Moseley writes: ‘His very existence forces the other characters to a definition of their moral selves and an understanding of their roles.’ Northumberland then attempts on three occasions to get Richard to sign an act of confession, intended to ratify the deposition—on the third occasion, after Bolingbroke intervenes, Northumberland desists, as Richard calls for a mirror in which, he claims, he will ‘read’ himself. ‘The instrument of female vanity becomes the means of theatrical empowerment, for it demands that all eyes in the playhouse, including Richard’s own, will be fixed on Richard’s face.’ Narcissus-like, he proceeds to celebrate his own sorrows, before, in one of the play’s central Gestus (see above), smashing the glass: Mark, silent King, the moral of this sport, How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face. (4.1.290–1) This action is both poignant and ritually significant. It could remind the audience of York’s observation that Richard bore the face of his father, the heroic Black Prince (2.1.176–9). The action could mark   Moseley, Shakespeare’s History Plays, 117.   Howard and Rackin, Engendering a Nation, 155.

Shakespeare: Richard II   79 the end of that dynasty. In a complex and influential study E. H. Kantorowicz argued that this moment marked a kind of suicide, the breaking apart of the King’s ‘two bodies’, his ‘body natural’ or his person, and his ‘body politic, a mystical fiction of immortal kingship incorporated in his subjects and nation. Charles Forker implies something similar when he implies, with the aid of a quotation from John Donne’s ‘Eighth Meditation’, that the moment marks the end of Richard’s sacred state: ‘A glass is not the less brittle because a king’s face is represented in it, nor a king the less brittle because God in represented in him.’ Practical Bolingbroke characteristically resists Richard’s metaphor, but responds with a terse riddle of his own: The shadow of your sorrow hath destroyed The shadow of your face. (4.1.292–3) He rebukes his rival for his hyperbole and for yet again resorting to theatrical play when he ought to be concentrating on action (‘shadow’ can mean ‘image’, ‘remnant’, ‘actor’). Whatever construction we put upon the moment, we witness a kind of victory for the King in that Richard’s little pageant has frustrated the suit of the commons (line 155). Bolingbroke may have been acclaimed as king by the oyster-wenches and draymen (1.4.31–2) but, because Northumberland’s paper seems to remain unsigned, the deposition may not be legal. Richard has upstaged or seized advantage from Bolingbroke, who tersely and resolutely orders him to be conveyed to the Tower of London, the capital’s principal prison for traitors, but also, as we have already seen in Chapter 3, an emblem of tyranny. 5.5. Richard to Prison and Aumerle’s Conspiracy (5.1–3) Act 5 contains the last movement of the play as the King moves towards his death. In this elegiac farewell to Richard the public figure,   Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957).   Forker, Richard II, 409 n.

80  Shakespeare: Richard II the Queen enters to salute her husband as he is led to prison. His passivity inflames his wife (she remains nameless throughout the text) who is attempting to restore some kind of authority to him: The lion, dying, thrusteth forth his paw And wounds the earth, if nothing else, with rage To be o’erpowered; and wilt thou, pupil-like, Take thy correction mildly, kiss the rod, And fawn on rage with base humility, Which art a lion and a king of beasts? (5.1.29–34) Although she weeps in every scene in which she appears, her lines relate her to a group of fierce women, including the Duchess of Gloucester (1.2.9–25), Lady Macbeth, and Volumnia in Coriolanus, for whom manhood seems to consist essentially in valour, but Richard yet again casts himself in the role of a player or fictive character: Tell thou the lamentable tale of me And send the hearers weeping to their beds. (5.1.44–5) Northumberland interrupts their parting, brusquely announcing that Richard is to be taken not to the Tower but to Pomfret in Yorkshire (modern Pontefract), and that he Queen is to be dispatched back to France. Richard chooses the moment to prophesy that ‘Northumberland … [the ladder] wherewithal / The mounting Bolingbroke ascends … [the] throne’, will in time decide that the rewards for his aid are too little and will rebel against the new King’s rule—precisely what happens in Henry IV. Moreover, Northumberland’s retort, ‘My guilt be on my head’ (5.1.69) unwittingly casts himself as Pilate to Richard’s Christ: after Pilate had washed his hands the Jews responded, ‘His blood be on us and on our children’. The scene ends with two kisses, which the pair gloss as an exchange of hearts (a commonplace in Elizabethan poetry), ‘thus paradoxically enacting a second marriage in parting.’   See D. W. Harding, ‘Woman’s Fantasy of Manhood’, Shakespeare Quarterly 20 (1969): 245–54.   Matthew, 27.25 (Geneva version).   Forker, Richard II, 426 n.

Shakespeare: Richard II   81 5.2 and 5.3 are the scenes that are most frequently cut in productions, and yet they prevent a melodramatic switch from Richard’s farewell to his wife and Exton’s move towards killing the ex-king. They are also in part attentive to one of Shakespeare’s recurrent themes, the relationships between sons and their fathers—Richard seems even more alone in the final sequence by virtue of having no children. The motif emerges as a structural pattern in the next two political plays, 1 and 2 Henry IV and, of course, is dominant in Hamlet. As well as being largely devoted to narrative, 5.2, like 1.2, the scene with the Duchess of Gloucester, and 3.4, the Garden scene, includes affecting glimpses of domestic reality. York had had to break off his lamentable tale to his wife of how their two nephews, the cousins Richard II and the soon-to-be Henry IV, had ridden together through London. Bolingbroke was proudly mounted on a steed, whose ‘slow but stately pace’ (5.2.10) took him through the narrow streets of London where yet again the commoners acclaimed him. It is now the aspiring Bolingbroke who is the ‘well-graced actor’ (5.2.24) while Richard, whose star is now fallen, has ‘dust … thrown upon his sacred head’ (5.2.30)— ‘dust’ included not only ashes but also any kind of decayed matter. In perhaps the most notable production of the nineteenth century, in 1857 Charles Kean, who had cut forty-four per cent of the lines, turned this narrative report into a theatrical interlude and made it the highpoint of his production by inserting, at the end of Act 3, a long and ‘historically accurate’ pageant of Bolingbroke’s triumph with his king held captive. Michael Boyd in 2008 had a stream of fine white powder or sand stream protractedly down upon the King’s head, turning him from monarch to abject sufferer. The Duke’s son Edward of Norwich, Duke of Aumerle, one who had supported Richard, appears. Presumably in his dejection he had not properly buttoned his tunic, and from it appears a seal placed on .

  See Sheldon P. Zitner, ‘Aumerle’s Conspiracy’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 14 (1974): 239–57.   Jonathan Bate and Russell Jackson, Shakespeare: An Illustrated Stage History, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) 116; see also M. Glen Wilson, ‘Charles Kean’s Production of Richard II’, Educational Theatre Journal 19 (1967): 41–51 (contains reproductions of the set designs).

82  Shakespeare: Richard II papers that have to do with the plot led by the religious (see 4.1.334). Upon reading their contents, his father races off to court to turn in his own son (there is an amusing tussle as the Duchess urges her son to strike the bemused servant who is bringing York his boots). York’s urgency may be a function of his uncertain loyalty to the new king— he had been a reluctant convert (see 2.3.168–71). Shakespeare then inserts a seemingly farcical playlet written in doggerel verse into 5.3 in which York and his Duchess respectively contend for the death and life of Aumerle. The occasion is a comic scene of the sort Shakespeare often inserts towards the end of a tragedy. This scene is the first in which Henry appears after coronation: in speech prefixes in Q he is henceforward designated as ‘King’. Bolingbroke too finds himself monarchizing, his greatness made ridiculous. However, the scene opens with a thematic quotation of what came before: just as, at the beginning of his rule, King Henry IV in his political rule had to cope with the aftermath of Gloucester’s murder, the same problem that confronted Richard at the beginning of the play, so in his private capacity it turns out that the new King, like York, has an ‘unthrifty’ (‘prodigal’) son whose escapades with Falstaff in the stews of London will occupy a large part of 1 Henry IV. His patriarchal authority is shaken: if he has no control over his son, what kind of control might he have over the kingdom? Bolingbroke’s wife and Prince Hal’s mother, as is so often the case with mothers in Shakespeare, makes no appearance in either Richard II or the Henry IV plays; however, in Richard II the Duchess of York will not be silenced and so prevails. In this play within a play, all except Aumerle start speaking in rhyming couplets, which provokes a metatheatrical observation from King Henry: Our scene is altered from a serious thing, And now changed to ‘The Beggar and the King’ (5.3.78–9) The high decorum of the scenes at the court of King Richard has col  F, however, retains ‘Bul[lingbrook]’, a spelling that presumably indicates how the name was pronounced in Shakespeare’s time.

Shakespeare: Richard II   83 lapsed into doggerel. The scene goes on: Duchess of York … I never longed to hear a word till now; Say ‘Pardon,’ King; let pity teach thee how. The word is short, but not so short as sweet; No word like ‘Pardon’ for kings’ mouths so meet. York   Speak it in French, King; say, ‘pardonne-moi.’ Duchess of York Dost thou teach Pardon pardon to destroy? Ah, my sour husband, my hard-hearted lord, That sets the word itself against the word! [to King Henry] Speak ‘Pardon’ as ‘tis current in our land; The chopping French we do not understand.   (5.3.114–23, emphases added) If this is comedy, it is laboured, but oddly so, in that Shakespeare seems to have wished to put into play the two phrases italicized above: he picks up on them in a much more serious vein in Richard’s great tragic soliloquy before his death (see below). Aumerle is pardoned, but King Henry’s intentions towards the rest of the of the traitors reveal an amusing combination of tenacity and impotence: They shall not live within this world, I swear, But I will have them, if I once know where.   (5.3.141–2) Boyd, however, always insightful, had the scene played against the grain as another poignant vision of the painful effects of politics upon family life. 5.6. Richard’s Passion and Death and Bolingbroke’s Reaction (5.4–5.6) 5.4 is the shortest, but one of the most important scenes in the play. The discovery of the Abbot’s plot has kindled Bolingbroke’s fears. Holinshed reported that he wondered aloud whether he had a friend to relieve him of the burden caused by Richard remaining alive.

84  Shakespeare: Richard II Shakespeare, after some deliberation, seems to have decided not to dramatize that moment when the new King ‘wishtly looked’ (5.4.7) upon Piers Exton, so making our reading of the Bolingbroke’s intentions even more ambiguous. He simply has the courtier obsessively recall it to his servant, before deciding to hasten north to kill the King at Pomfret. The suspense created by the juxtaposition of this scene with the sight of Richard alone at the opening of 5.5 is like that created by cinematic montage. Shakespeare then deploys another convention when, some forty lines into a long soliloquy, music is played. This is no mere melodrama, the use of music to enhance emotional intensity, but, because the proportions of the musical scale had long been held to emblematize cosmological order, it serves to evoke the lost stability of the kingdom and, when the rhythm or harmony ‘breaks’ or becomes disordered, it suggests something of what might be happening within the consciousness of this broken man. In his The Book of the Courtier (1528), Baldassare Castiglione had written: Music … hath always been … counted a holy matter; and … it hath been the opinion of most wise philosophers that the world is made of music, and the heavens in their moving make a melody, and our soul is framed after the very same sort, and therefore lifteth up itself and (as it were) reviveth the virtues and forces of it with music.   Wherefore it is written that Alexander was sometime so fervently stirred with it that (in a manner) against his will he was forced to arise from banquets and run to weapon, afterward the musician, changing the stroke and his manner of tune, pacified himself again and returned from weapon to banqueting. His thoughts run on to consider the musical chimes of a clock, and he addresses an imaginary presence, perhaps his own alter ego: Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is   It is possible that the interchange between King Henry and Exton was originally part of the play, as Q’s version of this scene begins with the stage direction ‘Manet Sir Piers Exton’ (‘Sir Piers Exton remains on stage).   Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby, ed. W. H. D Rouse (London: Dent, 1928) 75.

Shakespeare: Richard II   85 Are clamorous groans which strike upon my heart, Which is the bell. So sighs, and tears, and groans Show minutes, times, and hours. But my time Runs posting on in Bolingbroke’s proud joy, While I stand fooling here, his jack o’the clock.     (5.5.55–60) A jack o’the clock was a small mechanical figure that struck a clock’s bell to mark the hours, but Richard is being self-deprecating. He may, in earlier sequences of the play, have played the fool, but in this speech it as though he remembers a training in logic and rhetoric as he attempts to ‘hammer out’ (5.5.5) a sense of what is happening in his mind. In his great final soliloquy Richard conducts a kind of formal dispute with himself. He opens with an extended conceit: his prison cell is like the world, peopled with ever-breeding thoughts. I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And, for because the world is populous And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I’ll hammer it out. 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. 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.’ Thoughts tending to ambition, they do plot Unlikely wonders – how these vain weak nails May tear a passage through the flinty ribs

86  Shakespeare: Richard II Of this hard world, my ragged prison walls, And, for they cannot, die in their own pride.   (5.5.1–22, emphases added) Childless himself, he poignantly tries to forge a progeny of thoughts, but the first group of these turn out to be sceptical of enlightenment. He ‘invents’ (see above, Chapter 1) two Biblical texts: ‘Jesus said, “Suffer the little children, and forbid them not to come to me”’ and ‘I say unto you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God’ (Matt. 19.14 and 24, Geneva Version). He then sets the ‘word against the word’, opposes the two texts, as he strives to pound out a spiritual pathway towards heaven. The phrase both designates the rhetorical figure of ploce or repetition (see above, Chapter 1) and quotes uncannily from one of the Duchess of York’s doggerel couplets in 5.3: Ah, my sour husband, my hard-hearted lord, That set’st the word itself against the word!   (5.3.120–1) Like all at court, Richard’s mind plays on the opposition between the unforgiving sentences of the judge (the role played by King Henry in the earlier scene) and the forgiving word of Christ. The second group of thoughts, ‘tending to ambition’, are defeated by prison walls of the world—perhaps this short riff suggests another tragic affinity with Bolingbroke whose kingly career is, it turns out, not marked by peace or success. There are further recollections of the earlier scene of ‘The Beggar and the King’ (5.3.79) as his mind swerves between recollections of his kingly and beggarly roles. It all works towards a conclusion: Thus play I in one person many people, And none contented. Sometimes am I king; Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar, And so I am. Then crushing penury Persuades me I was better when a king; Then am I kinged again, and by and by Think that I am unkinged by Bolingbroke,

Shakespeare: Richard II   87 And straight am nothing. But whate’er I be, Nor I nor any man that but man is With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased With being nothing. (5.5.31–41) The meaning of the last three lines, that no mortal can be satisfied with anything until released by death, is at the centre of Richard’s tragic recognition. It relates both to political aspiration and the progress of the soul, and may, like France’s description of Cordelia in King Lear (1.1.245–6), derive ultimately from paradoxes set out by St Paul in 2 Corinthians, 6.8–10: [We are regarded] as deceivers, and yet [are] true; as unknown, and yet known; as dying, and, behold, we live; as chastened, and yet not killed; as sorrowing, and yet alway rejoicing; as poor, and yet [making] many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things (Geneva version). If Nicholas Brooke is correct, Richard had earlier exhibited himself as a ‘cold politician with atheistic tendencies’. He had used religious phraseology to hoodwink his auditors: now it may be that his rhetoric has guided him to insight into our shared mortality. (In a production for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2000 the director, having set the play in a white featureless box, had Samuel West use the opening of this speech as a prologue to the whole play, and later the lines were spoken by Queen Isabel.) If we do not want to reduce recognition to such a formula, we might agree with Walter Pater, who wrote that Richard ‘experiences something of the royal prerogative of poetry to obscure, or at least to attune and soften men’s griefs.’ Dr Johnson seems to pick up on this Christian fortitude when he sums up the pattern of the play: ‘In his prosperity we saw [Richard] imperious and oppressive but in his distress he is wise, patient and pious’. Yet he later issues a powerful critical challenge: ‘This play … is not finished at last with the happy force of some other of his tragedies, nor can be said much to affect the passions or enlarge the   Nicholas Brooke, ed. Shakespeare, Richard II: A Casebook (London: Methuen, 1973), 119.   Forker, Critical Tradition, 298–9.

88  Shakespeare: Richard II understanding’. An answer to this could be that Johnson concludes his reading with and on this moment: the play has some distance still to run, and that any formulaic tragic structure may be destabilized by the action of the final prison sequence. Three enter to Richard in sequence, his Groom, then the prison Keeper bringing Richard a dish of food, and finally Exton with his henchmen. Molly Mahood notes that, in many productions, it is revealed that it was the Groom who had played the music and that he came to Richard a couple of lines before the direction that marks his entrance, still wearing Richard’s emblem of a white hart as rich badge on his hat—a cue for Richard’s For [music is] a sign of love; and love to Richard Is a strange brooch in this all-hating world. (5.5.65–6) Shakespeare with a touch of genius delays this moment to tell his audience something about Henry IV’s coronation: the Groom has just seen Bolingbroke riding upon the horse he had tended. ‘Bolingbroke has mounted Roan Barbary as he has mounted the throne, with an easy, authoritative assumption of power, and the nation is content to have him on its back.’ His report that the horse walked ‘So proudly as if he disdained the ground’ (5.5.83) provokes Richard into another of his petulant rages as he at first rails upon and then forgives the horse. Although his temper is raised, he manages to suppress it as, with a degree of kindliness and, knowing the danger that surrounds them both, he bids the Groom be gone. In this way, Mahood suggests, Shakespeare is able to ‘rehabilitate Richard in the spectator’s eyes, without calling upon them to relinquish the acceptance of the inevitable which the thought of Bolingbroke in the saddle evokes.’ But then his passions break through and he attacks the Keeper who refuses to taste the meal for poison—he has been ordered to desist by Exton. In his 1973 production (see above) John Barton introduced an ingenious piece of business into this scene. The actor who played   Johnson, Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare, 195–8.   M. M. Mahood, Playing Bit Parts in Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1998), 86–7.   Mahood, Bit Parts, 87.   Mahood, Bit Parts, 88.

Shakespeare: Richard II   89 the Groom was the actor who at that performance was playing Bolingbroke. He came in muffled, removed the food from the tray, and used that to conceal his face. Richard punched through the tray, which was exactly the size and shape of the mirror used in the deposition scene. The two player kings faced each other through the frame: Richard and Bolingbroke were mirror images. (Alternatively we might interpret the moment as a metatheatrical one, a moment when the actor playing Bolingbroke sneaked in to check on how his rival was coping with the great last scene.) It is tempting to think of Richard declining into resigned passivity before his death but, often to the surprise of audiences, he goes out fighting. Holinshed reported that eight servants accompanied Exton— four would be the necessary minimum. Although there are no stage directions to confirm that this is done, it is implicit in Richard’s final speech that he seizes a weapon from the hands of one of the servants and kills two men before Exton strikes him down. His final lines conclude with two couplets: That hand shall burn in never-quenching fire That staggers thus my person. Exton, thy fierce hand Hath with the King’s blood stained the King’s own land. Mount, mount, my soul! Thy seat is up on high; Whilst my gross flesh sinks downward, here to die.   (5.5108–12, emphasis added) At the end he does assert himself in lines that, pace Dr Johnson, do ‘affect [our] passions’. ‘Person’ has a range of meanings: it refers to an actor’s persona, his mask or role as well as the unique nature of the king, twin-born with greatness, possessed of two bodies, his humanity and the sacral body politic. Richard III in the earlier play found that his self-created roles had taken over his essential self. In his final soliloquy he hears himself declaiming: ‘Richard loves Richard, that is, I am I’ (Richard III, 5.3.186). Richard II too had become his own image. According to the OED, Shakespeare was the first to use ‘stagger’ as a transitive verb. Perhaps there is a subtext here: Richard has in   See Forker, Richard II, 473 n.

90  Shakespeare: Richard II mind the proud gait of Barbary. Without his horse he had to create his own dignity, and resents that Exton has taken away even that. The position of his body immediately after death creates yet another production decision. He often appears with arms outstretched in the position of the crucified Christ. Richard may have completed a spiritual pilgrimage, but he was neither a martyr—as Henry IV’s enemies were later to imply—nor a good king, and that temptation is probably best resisted. The play’s last scene shows Henry proudly ‘monarchizing’ as he receives news of the executions of the rebels and the death of their ‘grand conspirator’, the Abbot of Westminster, before he commits the Bishop of Carlisle not to the hangman but to some religious retreat. The business is interrupted by the entrance of Exton with the coffin of Richard: a director has to decide whether to make the entrance ceremonious as would befit the dead King (‘covered with lead, all save the face’, according to Holinshed), or bring in a simple box, perhaps balanced on a wheel-barrow. Henry seems furious and appalled (was he really?), likens Exton to Cain, and banishes him from court. As an act of penance he vows to expiate the crime by leading a crusade to the Holy Land to recover Jerusalem from the infidel Turks. His last image is really rather grotesque: Lords, I protest, my soul is full of woe, That blood should sprinkle me to make me grow     (5.6.46–7) It is as though he has in mind his vow to ‘weed’ the commonwealth (2.3.167), but the lines could suggest a man racked with a guilty realisation that, if it has taken blood to make him a great man, it cannot have made him a good man. His ‘attempt to cobble together a proper ceremony for the casually produced coffin … (“March sadly after, grace my mournings here, / In weeping after this untimely bier” [5.6.51–2]) perfectly enacts his need to restore those very forms of sequence and succession which his own hand has destroyed.’   See 1 Henry IV, 1.3.170–6, 2 Henry IV, 1.1.200–5; Karl F. Thompson, ‘Richard II, Martyr’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 8 (1957): 159–66.   Boswell-Stone, Shakespeare’s Holinshed, 128.   Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in the Drama of Shakespeare

Shakespeare: Richard II   91 Henry never did make it to Jerusalem although his plans for a crusade are mentioned regularly throughout 1 and 2 Henry IV. He died, however, in the Jerusalem Chamber of his palace in Westminster.

and His Contemporaries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 294.   See 2 Henry IV, 4.2.359–67; Boswell-Stone, Shakespeare’s Holinshed, 160.

6. Critical accounts 6.1. Lyricism and the elegiac Before the age of Romanticism, writers about Richard II tended to treat it as a political rather than literary text. However, in his pioneering ‘Lectures on the Characteristics of Shakespeare’, Samuel Taylor Coleridge offered important observations not only on the nature of historic drama, but also an account of the kind of historical realism to expect and influential observations of the ‘characters’ of the central personages. Shakespeare’s histories, he argues, are epic tragedies that imaginatively create a complex vision of historical realities. Epic is under the control of Destiny or, among Christians, an overruling Providence … In the Tragic, the free will of man is the first cause …   Shakespeare, in blending the Epic with the Tragic has given an 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 … [but] by the law of impressiveness [not explained], when we read his plays, we seem to live in the era he portrays. This verisimilitude, however, was best seen in the mind’s eye and not in a playhouse. For, like his contemporaries, Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt, Coleridge was not happy with the demands that were made by the large ‘patent’ theatres that alone, until the repeal of a licensing act in 1843, were permitted to stage drama in England: The representing of the very finest of [Shakespeare’s plays] on the stage, even by the best actors, is … an abuse of the   Jonathan Bate, ed. The Romantics on Shakespeare (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 139.

Shakespeare: Richard II   93 genius of the poet … the quantity of sentiment and imagery [i.e. painted scenery] greatly outweighs the immediate impression of the situation and story. For both Coleridge and Hazlitt, Richard II was essentially a drama of character—they have practically nothing to say about situation— and these characters were in many respects ‘true to life’. As we have seen, Coleridge thought, unlike Johnson, that Shakespeare’s wordplay was perfectly acceptable, illustrating ‘a tendency in the human mind, to associate everything around it with the obtrusive feeling’. Richard, he considered, was basically a flawed individual. After quoting the King’s boast that Bolingbroke might command men but that he was protected by angels (3.2.58–60), Coleridge finds Richard morally wanting: Who, after this, would not have supposed great energy of action? No! All was spent and, upon the first ill-tidings, nothing but despondency takes place, with alternatives of unmanly despair and unfounded hopes; great activity of mind without any strength of moral feeling to rouse to action, presenting an awful lesson in the education of princes. He saw York, like Gaunt, as a figure of ‘a man giving up all energy under a feeling of despair’ and argued that ‘In Bolingbroke is defined the struggle of inward determination with outward show of humility.’ The review that William Hazlitt wrote of a performance by Edmund Kean at the Drury Lane theatre in 1815 implicitly turns our attention to the way that a notion of consistency of character may not match the styles of discourse at play within Shakespeare’s works. Although Edmund Kean, along with Mrs Siddons, was one of the few actors Hazlitt admired, he considered the interpretation of the role was misconceived, so that his critique stands as a negative definition of what he considered central to the play:   Forker, Critical Tradition, 102–3.   Bate, Romantics, 141.   Bate, Romantics, 144; Coleridge described the character of Hamlet in very similar terms (157).   Bate, Romantics, 142.

94  Shakespeare: Richard II There are only one or two electrical shocks given in it … 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. This … is the fault of Mr Kean’s acting, that it is always energetic or nothing … If Mr Kean would look into some passages in this play … in particular, ‘Oh that I were a mockery king of snow, to melt away before the sun of Bolingbroke’ [misquoted from 4.1.260–2] he would find a clue to this character, and to human nature in general, which he seems to have missed—how far feeling is connected with the sense of weakness as well as of strength, or the power of imbecility [weakness], and the force of passiveness. We observe Hazlitt ignoring the politics of the play—strangely for a critic who elsewhere showed himself very alive to the radicalism of, say, Coriolanus—and assuming that the reactions of spectators are based on feelings alone, looking for touchstones only in the play’s lyrical passages. This admiration for the lyricism of Richard II was much developed by Walter Pater in his account of the play contained in his Appreciations of 1889. He applauded the ‘average human nature’ of Shakespeare’s kings, flung with a wonderfully pathetic effect into the vortex of great events … As in a children’s story, all princes are in extremes. Delightful in the sunshine above the wall into which chance lifts the flower for a season, they can but plead somewhat more touchingly than others their everyday weakness in the storm. His account of Richard II is itself a poetic rhapsody: Richard … 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   Forker, Critical Tradition, 104; Hazlitt gives a fuller and more political account of the play in his Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1817), which is fuelled by a reluctant admiration for the ‘aspiring genius’ of Bolingbroke and his pity for Richard (Critical Tradition, 114–18).

Shakespeare: Richard II   95 his golden language the tritest aspects of that ironic contrast between the pretensions of a king and the actual necessities of his destiny. What a garden of words! With him, blank verse, infinitely graceful, deliberate, musical in inflexion, becomes indeed a true ‘verse royal’ … His eloquence blends with that fatal beauty, of which he was so frankly aware, so amiable to his friends, to his wife … As happens with sensitive natures, it attunes him to a congruous suavity of manners, by which anger itself became flattering: it blends with his merely youthful hopefulness and high spirits, his sympathetic love for gay [cheerful] people, things … as also with those real amiabilities that made people forget the darker touches of his character, but never tire of the pathetic rehearsal of his fall, the meekness of which would have seemed merely abject in a less graceful performer. There are some useful insights and formulations buried in all of that, but Pater shows himself not sufficiently attentive to Richard’s rhetoric, his desire to manipulate the opinions of those about him, and ignores those moments when Richard acts as a steely politician or, most surprising, when he reveals he is a doughty fighter at the moment of his death. This sympathy towards a Richard who was ‘lovable and full of capricious fancy’ was shared by W.B. Yeats who, in Ideas of Good and Evil (1903), saw his passivity as somehow representative of a change of a cultural tone to which he looked back with nostalgia. For him, Richard was a ‘vessel of porcelain’ that he contrasted with ‘the vessel of clay Henry V’: The courtly and saintly ideals of the middle age[s] were fading, and the practical ideals of the modern age had begun to threaten the unuseful dome of the sky; Merry England was fading, and yet it was not so faded that the Poets could not watch the procession of the world with that untroubled sympathy for men as they are, as apart from all they do and seem,   Forker, Critical Tradition, 296; for Coleridge, see Bate, Romantics, 140.   Forker, Critical Tradition, 375–7.

96  Shakespeare: Richard II which is the substance of tragic irony. This sort of thing comes more from contemplating an iconic image of the King than attention to the text. Richard II, as we have seen, is scarcely ‘medieval’. Rather it is attentive to debates that were important and alive to Shakespeare and his contemporaries: what happens to a king who may have inherited power but who lacks authority, the need for a system of taxation to support an emergent modern state, and whether history is simply the unfolding of a pattern of life created by God or the chronicle of men who were attentive to the new political science of the sixteenth century, and who made their own history. 6.2. Historical and Political The most influential twentieth century reading (now largely disputed) of Shakespeare’s histories was that by E. M. W. Tillyard. Tillyard assumed that the Richard II, 1 and 2 Henry IV, and Henry V constituted Shakespeare’s ‘Second Tetralogy’. He repeated the Yeatsian claim that Richard II was archaic and charged with ‘medieval refinement’, but argued that the differing styles of the plays formed ‘a great symphonic scheme’. Although most critics now would stress Shakespeare’s scepticism, his even-handedness in dealing with personal or political disputes, Tillyard thought that he could detect the author’s voice within the texts, that Shakespeare preached a providentialism that matched that of contemporary historians who wrote to support the Tudor dynasty, as well as the ‘Homily against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion’ (1570), one of a set of official sermons that were supposed to be regularly preached in every church in the land. The author, like so many of his contemporaries, starts from 13.1 of St Paul’s epistle to the Romans: There is no power but of God, and the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God, and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. For princes are not to be feared for good works, but for evil. Wilt thou then be without

Shakespeare: Richard II   97 fear of the power? Do well, so shalt thou have praise of the same. For he is the minister of God for thy wealth. But if thou doe evil, fear: for he beareth not the sword for nought, for he is the minister of God to take vengeance upon him that doth evil. Wherefore ye must be subject, not because of wrath only, but also for conscience sake. For, for this cause ye pay also tribute, for they are God’s ministers, serving for the same purpose. Give to every man therefore his duty; tribute, to whom tribute belongeth; custom, to whom custom is due; fear, to whom fear belongeth; honour, to whom ye owe honour. Aligning Richard II with texts like this, enabled Tillyard to claim that Shakespeare was ‘truly the voice of his own age first and only through being that the voice of humanity’. He could therefore conclude that ‘Shakespeare’s history plays endorsed ‘the Tudor myth [which] presented a scheme fundamentally religious, by which events evolve under a law of justice and under the ruling of God’s providence, and of which Elizabeth’s England was the acknowledged outcome’. In order to reach this conclusion he argued that the deposition and murder of Richard II was a kind of original sin, which, as in Greek tragedy, polluted the realm and drew down God’s displeasure; this, as the Bishop of Carlisle had prophesied, brought about a ‘distortion of prosperity’ and was assuaged only in 1485 when Henry Tudor defeated Richard III at Bosworth, uniting the white rose and the red and becoming Henry VII (grandfather to Queen Elizabeth). This kind of reading entails particular perspectives on particular plays, and meant that Tillyard was bound to disapprove of Bolingbroke and overlook the tyrannical aspects of Richard’s rule. He praises the splendour and glamour of Richard’s court, overlooking the way that Richard and the ‘caterpillars of the commonwealth’ (2.3.166) are regarded by the commons. Nor can this reading be supported by the opinions of the chroniclers: both Hall and Holinshed offer balanced   What may be interesting in this passage is the concession that princes may be guilty of evil works.   E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1944), 236–7, 259.   Tillyard, History Plays, 320–1.

98  Shakespeare: Richard II judgements on both Richard and Bolingbroke. Tillyard became a whipping-boy for a multitude of critics in the second half of the twentieth century. We have already seen how the play stakes a claim for law-centred kingship, which means that we might read the deposition of Richard not as a vile sin but as an attempt to restore legality to the realm, even a revolution led by Bolingbroke. Nigel Saul has argued that the historical Richard II was author of his own downfall, and Shakespeare maintains his awareness of the debate about the relationship between king and law in the following plays: when Bolingbroke’s prodigal son, Prince Hal, becomes King he renounces Falstaff and promises the Lord Chief Justice that he will defer to him as a new father-figure (2 Henry IV, 5.2.118–21). An understanding of the politico-legal context of the play will affect our reading of Bolingbroke, even though we may feel that his professions of regret for the assassination of Richard are disingenuous in the extreme. One important kind of critique comes from recognising that in any age there will be not one but a variety of ideologies: Raymond Williams offered three useful categories: the emergent, the dominant, and the residual. Phyllis Rackin, in a major book length study of all Shakespeare’s histories that has, properly, supplanted Tillyard’s, writes: Subjecting conflicting propositions about historical truth and historical causation to the tests of dramatic action, Shakespeare’s history plays to the tests of dramatic action, Shakespeare’s history plays can be seen as versions of trial by combat. In Richard II the ideological conflict between providential legitimacy and Machiavellian power is directly projected into the dramatic conflict between Richard and Bullingbrook. The ideological conflict forms the basis for   Boswell-Stone, Shakespeare’s Holinshed, 128–9, 164,   Hamilton, ‘The State of Law in Richard II’; and Debora Shuger, Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 54–71.   Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven, Conn.; London: Yale University Press), 1997.   Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1977, 121–7.

Shakespeare: Richard II   99 opposed rhetorical appeals (and opposed modern interpretations) as Richard’s theoretical claim to the throne as divinely appointed legitimate heir is supported by providential theory and poetic eloquence but opposed by Machiavellian logic and the hard evidence of Richard’s personal and political failings and Bullingbrook’s political and military superiority. Although there is an argument that Richard is sagacious in interrupting the trial by combat, Rackin reminds us that he demolishes the very ideology that sustains his legitimacy: When Richard stops the trial by combat he interferes with a symbolic embodiment of his own authority. Trial by combat is a ritual based upon the assumption that right makes might, an assumption that underlies the authority of the whole feudal system, including the authority of God’s anointed king. In preventing the symbolic ritual of chivalry, Richard attacks the source of the only authority that makes him king. 6.3. Feminist Readings Although Shakespeare’s histories seem to be almost exclusively androcentric, tales of great men and stories of the death of kings, and although they contain few really important roles for women, contemporary feminism does much more than prise seemingly marginalised female characters out of the play’s fabric and analyse their success in the world or their moral standing. Rather it is concerned with Shakespeare’s construction of femininity—which implies a simultaneous analysis of masculinity and male values as well. Feminist criticism might also create responses to the value systems inscribed in critical accounts of the play as well as on performance history and possibilities. Yet there are some simple but important things to say about the play’s principal women, the Duchesses of Gloucester and York and   Rackin, Stages of History, 46–7.   Rackin, Stages of History, 49.   An example is Coleridge’s gendering of Richard’s capacity for emotional show (see above).

100  Shakespeare: Richard II Queen Isabel. Although all three speak little for themselves, all speak much for the play, reminding the audience that the jostling and intriguing for position that constitutes public life generates much private desolation. All are associated with the claustrophobic protected spaces of home or garden (not really manifest on the non-illusionistic stages of Elizabethan London), but both the Queen and the Duchess of York venture out of these sanctuaries to express love for, respectively, a disgraced husband and a disgraced son. Their marginality is demonstrated by the sad fact that no one thought to tell the Queen that her husband has been deposed—she learns the news from the Gardener (3.4.68–91). For the men in the play, lineage counts for everything; for the women ‘private affective bonds of family loyalty’ are more important. Gaunt visits his sister-in law, Woodstock’s widow, and finds himself, despite his remorse, unable to avenge the Duke of Gloucester’s murder—on the grounds that only God can take vengeance on his ‘substitute’ (1.2.37), the King. This is exactly what is urged in the ‘Homily Against Disobedience’ (see above, 84). But, as always in this play, the scene is no mere debate since it allows the Duchess to speak feelingly about her misery and loneliness and also the audience to realise how, three scenes later in 2.1, Gaunt was to be converted from king’s advocate to critic by the nefariousness of Richard’s deeds. But that conversion is yet to come: when the Duchess exits from the scene it seems she is creeping out to die of grief. The Queen’s function is to enhance the pathos of Richard’s end— but also to remind him of his descent from Aeneas (‘Ah, thou, the model where old Troy did stand’ [5.1.11])’, of his inalienable patrilinear right to the English crown. Richard’s only response is to seek to kindle pity, urging her to divert his story from the political to the personal: Tell thou the lamentable tale of me And send the hearers weeping to their beds. For why the senseless brands will sympathize The heavy accent of thy moving tongue   Howard and Rackin, Engendering a Nation, 140.

Shakespeare: Richard II   101 And in compassion weep the fire out; And some will mourn in ashes, some coal-black, For the deposing of a rightful king. (5.1.44–50) ‘Richard consigns his history to the female genre of domestic oral narrative’—and was successful, judging by the number of critical readings of the play that ignore its politics. When the Duchess of York arrives post-haste to plead for Aumerle she has to speak in couplets like her king and her husband, adopt an unnatural language-mask (5.3.75–145). In the previous scene, she had had to rebut the insult, made so often on occasions like this, that marital infidelity is the cause of Aumerle’s treachery, to write herself out of her son’s genealogy: But now I know thy mind. Thou dost suspect That I have been disloyal to thy bed, And that he is a bastard, not thy son. Sweet York, sweet husband, be not of that mind: He is as like thee as a man may be, Not like to me, or any of my kin, And yet I love him. (5.2.104–10) It works, though: Aumerle is pardoned—although it would be open to an actor playing the Duchess to display as much contempt as gratitude to the new King in her defiant half-line, ‘A god on earth thou art!’ (5.3.135). Yet it is a man, Mowbray, who establishes a Leitmotif of femininity near the beginning of the play: Let not my cold words here accuse my zeal. ’Tis not the trial of a woman’s war, The bitter clamour of two eager tongues, Can arbitrate this cause betwixt us twain; The blood is hot that must be cooled for this. (1.1.47–51)   Howard and Rackin, Engendering the Nation, 158.   In fact this Duchess was the Duke’s much younger second wife. Shakespeare would seem to have ignored this fact, although the last two lines may hint that he was aware of it. However, the final half-line offers an actor the chance for a powerful assertion of maternity.

102  Shakespeare: Richard II He opposes talk to action but ironies abound. Speech is identified with ineffectual women’s scolding, but the passage is a prelude to a long tirade, which is little different from the ‘woman’s’ mode that he disowns (‘I do defy him, and I spit at him’ [1.1.160]). We are deftly reminded of hierarchy: womanliness is usurping manliness, a threat to the constituted ‘order’ of the commonwealth. The only kind of action Mowbray can imagine involves the spilling of blood, and ‘blood’ is always a complex word in the period. Primarily it here designates the life-blood of his enemy, but blood was also an index of rank (as in ‘a man of blood’). In addition, hot blood was associated with sexual desire (semen was believed to be a concentrate of blood): Mowbray, it would seem, would like to emasculate his rival. (Later Ross regards Bolingbroke as ‘Bereft and gelded of his patrimony’ [2.1.237] when Richard seizes his wealth.) These are alphamales, conspicuously displaying their manhood: in 2000, in a production at Stratford-upon-Avon, Bolingbroke and Mowbray were given axes with which to fight, suggesting that brutish rivalry underlay the courtly ceremony. Like that of Henry V, Bolingbroke’s conception of his valour is linked to the spilling of blood and to images of sexual violence (3.3.42–8, and see above, p.00). The Duchess of York’s desire for mercy might prevail over her husband’s desire for judgment in 5.3, but she has internalized the masculine assumption that a woman’s worth is diminished when her ‘teeming date is drunk up with time’ (5.2.92), and in 5.3 ‘York opposes her attempt to plead for her son’s life by vilely reminding her how preposterous it would be if her “old dugs” should “once more a traitor rear” (5.3.89).’ 6.4. Theatrical Readings Just as this chapter demonstrates that there are many ways of reading a text as complex as Richard II, the history of productions demonstrates that the text can be viewed from a multiplicity of perspec  Gordon A. Williams, Glossary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Language (London: Athlone Press, 1997), 44.   Howard and Rackin, Engendering a Nation, 138.

Shakespeare: Richard II   103 tives before being recreated for stage performance. The task of a critic of Shakespeare’s plays may be to define questions: answers are to be found more in the rehearsal studio and on the stage than in the seminar room. These ‘answers’ of course are provisional: they will be shaped by casting, by the nature of the performance space (if a stage lacks an upper level, 3.3 will have a different meaning), and by decisions about mise en scène that are necessarily made before the work of production begin. They will also be shaped by the forms and pressures of the time, the political and social climate that obtain when the play is performed. All productions are in fact translations, from verbal to theatrical texts, and the nature and economics of a theatrical production will mean that there can be no categorical difference between a ‘version’ and an ‘adaptation’ of a Shakespearean play. The ‘truth’ of any performance will depend more upon its internal coherence than upon any imagined congruence with Shakespeare’s ‘original’ text. Richard II is a particularly interesting text to examine in performance because, as we have seen, Shakespeare uses theatrical metaphors as a way of analysing political process. (He was scarcely the first to do this: Plato disparagingly applied the designation ‘theatocracy’ to the Athens of his time, [Laws, 701].) It may be that the divided identity that so many critics have perceived in the King derives not from an immature tendency towards irresponsible play-acting at moments of crisis, but from an awareness that Richard inhabits an ideological field where what he likes to think of as the divine origins of his power and authority are being confronted by emergent powers manifested in popular actions and sentiments. Space allows only short accounts of two fine and contrasting productions, one ‘literary’ in its orientation, the other, which used a mise en scène that owed a lot to Bertolt Brecht, political and attentive to the cultural currents that obtained at the time it was mounted.   For a comprehensive survey, see Margaret Shewring, Shakespeare in Performance: King Richard II, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996).   See Jonathan Miller, Subsequent Performances, (London: Faber, 1986); for critiques of stage-centred criticism, see Harry Berger Jr., ‘Richard II 3.2: An Exercise in Imaginary Audition.’ ELH 55: 755–96 and Lukas Erne. Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)

104  Shakespeare: Richard II No production did more to foreground the way in which Richard II not only contains plays-within-the-play (the duel, the farcical playlet in 5.3) but also is about playing than that by John Barton for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1973–4. In it Richard Pasco and Ian Richardson alternated the roles of the antagonists. Stanley Wells described it as ‘in some respects the most strongly interpretative production of a Shakespeare play I have ever seen’. It was played upon a bare stage with, in early performances, two escalators on each side of the stage that ascended to a bridge spanning its width. In 3.3 the bridge descended, bearing Richard as Phaeton down to the base court. However, this device was not used in later performances, properly in my view, as the moment must not be seen as a demonstration of, say, a historical movement or moment, but rather as an action on Richard’s, both impulsive and studiously affected, that has the direst of consequences. Instead, a large silken gold cloak that hung above the stage, an obvious symbol of the sunking, fluttered down after Richard had left the stage, a marker rather than an agent of change. The King’s iconic status had earlier been registered by having him return from Ireland on a full-sized mythical horse with a unicorn’s horn, moved onto the stage on skis. Having him stalk about the stage on stilts, concealed by a long black cloak, proclaimed the power exercised by Northumberland. It had been intended that all players except the King should wear masks, but the idea was abandoned at the request of the actors who felt that their principal means of expression was thus removed. However, they came to value the insights that rehearsing in masks had given them, and were able to cope with the director’s request to foreground their choric functions, delivering many lines directly to the audience. The Welsh Captain’s speech in 2.4 was divided among eight actors. The Gardeners formed a chorus of learned monks, a directorial decision that prevented the audience being surprised by the fact that char  Wells, Royal Shakespeare, 66; the play incorporated many ideas to be found in Anne Barton, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977).   For an illustration, see Dennis Kennedy, Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of Twentieth-Century Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 242.

Shakespeare: Richard II   105 acters they might assume to be menials should be given blank verse. Another gesture towards classical tragedy came from the decision (later amended) to have, in 1.2, the Duchess of Gloucester emerge from a stage trapdoor, ‘holding a skull above her head and crying, “Blood!” to John of Gaunt in tones that were electronically echoed.’ In order to enhance the tragic affinity between the antagonists, Barton inserted a soliloquy for Bolingbroke, his description of his inability to sleep that occurs in 2 Henry IV, 3.1.4–14. The English Shakespeare Company’s production of Richard II opened at the Old Vic in London on 27 January 1989, as part of a season of plays that included both tetralogies and was presented under the title of The Wars of the Roses. Richard was played by Michael Pennington, Bolingbroke by Michael Cronin, and Michael Bogdanov directed the production with settings by Chris Dyer. (A very successful television version was made during a live performance and released on video in 1990.) The productions were designed to tour the whole of the United Kingdom, and there was a commensurate range of regional accents within the performances. This was a production that proclaimed its engagement with the politics of the time, the end of the Thatcher era. The director saw an opposition not just between two men but also between two regimes: ‘The one artistic, insouciant, profligate—the other devious, austere, philistine. Thatcher after the 60s, suits instead of flares.’ Accordingly, Richard was a Regency dandy—the periods of the costumes were to advance as the tetralogy unfolded—and Pennington adopted an extravagant aristocratic drawl. Yet, in the first half of the play there seemed to be a steely political will under that foppish exterior. Swordplay between the adversaries had already begun before Richard took his decision—not impulsively—to confer with courtiers   Wells, Royal Shakespeare, 69; see also Peter Thomson, ‘Shakespeare Straight and Crooked: A Review of the 1973 Season at Stratford’, Shakespeare Survey 27 (1974): 143–54.   A Portman Classics Production in association with Contracts International and Windmill Lane Productions; see David Fuller, ‘The Bogdanov Version: The English Shakespeare Company Wars of the Roses’, Literature Film Quarterly (2005): 118–41.   Michael Bogdanov, Shakespeare: The Director’s Cut (The Histories), Vol. 2 of 2 vols (Edinburgh, Capercaillie Books, 2005), 43.

106  Shakespeare: Richard II and stop the duel. Throughout the performance one was aware of power struggles and schisms at this elegant court. The caterpillars, Bushy, Bagot and Green, were suave, flattering politicians, not minions—there was no hint of homoeroticism. Isabel (Francesca Ryan) was on stage in the first scene gazing lovingly at her husband. They hugged each other with desperate fondness in their farewell scene (5.1). A constructivist set and eclectic costuming, properties, and music (recorded and generally classical) were suited to the agit-prop tone of the season. Bogdanov wrote: We would free our, and the audience’s, imaginations by allowing an eclectic mix of costumes and props, choosing a time and a place that was most appropriate for a character or scene … The means of transformation from one scene to the next would remain visible. A large cross of St George hung as the back of the stage. In context this turned out to be a paradoxical sign, signifying both the mystical order that was being violated by Richard’s ‘leasing out’ of England and a determination to move on from bland reverence for England’s sacred bard—an irreverent tone suited the company’s anti-establishment agenda. In the television version the lighting actually ensured that for the most part the set was invisible behind the actors, so that, unobtrusively, theatre became television. This could generate interesting effects: when Bolingbroke and his allies were approaching Flint Castle, they made a circuit of the stage, something akin to ‘passing over the stage’ in the playhouses of early modern London. When close-ups resumed, this eminently theatrical convention was replaced by the cross-cutting of screen technique. The production, in a Brechtian manner, refused to take sides: As with many of Shakespeare’s protagonists, we lament the passing of colour and greet the era of conformity with suspicion … [Killing Richard] was [Bolingbroke’s] only route to becoming unequivocally king. But the guilt is now a monkey on his shoulder and the battle lines are drawn. For the next hun  Bogdanov, Director’s Cut, 16,

Shakespeare: Richard II   107 dred years, far from healing England’s wounds, Bolingbroke his set in motion a train of events that will lead to a surfeit of civil and internecine butchery as the ambition of two families turns Britain into the killing fields.’ As we might expect from a production that served as prologue to the plays that followed, Bolingbroke’s couplets in the final scene were spoken as if we were reading from an auto-cue. He stepped forward towards Richard’s coffin as though he was preparing to raise and embrace the body within, but, as his mind raced over the advantages that Exton had procured for him, Michael Cronin who was to play Henry IV, paused with a grim but thoughtful expression. He was a man who, unlike his predecessor, would give nothing away.

  Bogdanov, Director’s Cut, 33, 53.

7. Select annotated Bibliography An online performance bibliography of Richard II: http://shakespeare.berkeley.edu/index. php?option=com_content&task=view&id=85&Itemid=227 Bolam, Robyn. ‘Richard II: Shakespeare and the Languages of the Stage.’ The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s History Plays. Ed. Michael Hattaway. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 141–57. The essay unites analyses of both verbal and non-verbal languages. Clegg, Cyndia Susan. ‘“By the Choise and Inuitation of Al the Realme”: Richard II and Elizabethan Press Censorship.’ Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (1997): 432–48. A full review of and judgement upon theories concerning state censorship of the play. Ellrodt, Robert. ‘Self-Consciousness in Montaigne and Shakespeare.’ Shakespeare Survey 28 (1975): 37–50. A groundbreaking study of the common motif of the divided self in Renaissance literature. Hamilton, Donna B. ‘The State of Law in Richard II.’ Shakespeare Quarterly 34 (1983): 5–17. An essay that definitively establishes that it was not Elizabethan orthodoxy to assume that a king was above the law. Howard, Jean E., and Phyllis Rackin. Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories. (London: Routledge, 1997). Intelligent and focused on the subtleties of this theme. Nuttall, A.D. Shakespeare the Thinker. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Summarises or contributes to the best contemporary critical writings about the nature and orientation of Shakespeare’s thought. Pye, Christopher. ‘The Betrayal of the Gaze: Theatricality and Power

Shakespeare: Richard II   109 in Shakespeare’s Richard II.’ ELH 55 (1988): 575–98. A New Historicist study that analyses the ways in which Richard fails to control the subversive forces, forces that can be invoked in order to legitimate his rule, which he himself unleashes. Rackin, Phyllis. Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles. (London: Routledge, 1990). The best book-length study of Shakespeare’s political plays. Rutter, Carol Chillington. ‘Fiona Shaw’s Richard II: The Girl as Player-King as Comic.’ Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (1997): 314– 24. A full and subtle analysis of one of the best modern productions of the play in which Fiona Shaw took the principal role.

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Shakespeare: Richard III Shakespeare: The Tempest Shakespeare: Troilus and Cressida Shelley: Frankenstein Wordsworth: Lyrical Ballads Fields of Agony: English Poetry and the First World War

Philosophy Insights American Pragmatism Contemporary Epistemology Critical Thinking Ethics Existentialism Formal Logic Meta-Ethics Contemporary Philosophy of Religion Philosophy of Sport Plato Wittgenstein

Some Titles in Preparation The New Deal  Lord Palmerston World War II: the North Africa Campaign, 1940–43 Aesthetics  Business Ethics Foucault  Heidegger Islamic Philosophy  Lacan Marxism  Mental Causation Philosophy of History Philosophy of Language Philosophy of Mind Plato’s Republic  Žižek Renaissance Philosophy Sartre: Existentialism and Humanism Austen: Pride and Prejudice Blake: Songs of Innocence & Experience Chatwin: In Patagonia Eliot, George: Silas Marner Eliot: Four Quartets Fielding: Tom Jones Heaney: Selected Poems Lawrence: Selected Poems Lawrence: The Rainbow Shakespeare: Macbeth Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet