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to Dr. Regan's Home PageIntroduction.
1. Richard II begins Shakespeare's second tetralogy, and tells the beginning of the story that he concluded in Richard III several years earlier. Where Richard III saw history as God's hand in human affairs, however, Richard II has a more political view of history. Shakespeare begins here to investigate the science of rule in a sense we can recognize as modern, history as past politics rather than divine intervention. This is not to say that Machiavelli had not prefigured modern political thinking, but that Shakespeare used a caricature of the Machiavellian politician in Richard III, and now moves to a more subtle vision.
2. Characters are initially divided by generations in Act 1, with Richard's uncles (Gaunt and York) standing for the traditional value of complete obedience to the King as God's regent on earth, but younger politicians like Richard's cousin Bolingbroke (aka Hereford) acting out their own vision of the ruler and the state. An equally important division is quickly apparent, when Richard is exposed as an incompetent politician despite his royal blood, while his cousin has a deadly grasp of the practice of power.
3. Richard himself is distracted from practical matters. Sometimes called a poet-king or an actor-king, he is a narcissistic personality, in love with the ceremony of kingship and with his own image. During his forced abdication in Act 4, he even calls for a mirror so he can study his own reactions. His disorientation focuses for us the challenge to his rule. Indeed, in Shakespeare's own day Queen Elizabeth was accused of weakness and distraction, and in 1601 followers of the Earl of Essex paid Shakespeare's company to put on a revival of Richard II to set the stage for their coup attempt. They were not as successful as Bolingbroke, who becomes Henry IV after disposing of his cousin Richard.
Interpretation: performance and the text.
4. The first scene shows Richard more interested in the excitement of a confrontation than mindful of the danger to himself. Mowbray was Richard's agent in the assassination of Woodstock, Richard's uncle, in Calais. Bolingbroke levels charges of corruption at Mowbray, but his real target is Richard. Instead of disposing of the issue quickly, Richard endures the confrontation, even relishes it, then proves himself incompetent when he cannot control the adversaries. He commands them to fight in a formal trial by combat, which they are insisting on from the beginning.
When the combat is about to begin, Richard impulsively halts it and issues sentences of exile, Bolingbroke for ten years and Mowbray for life. Mowbray shows that he understands that he is being muzzled, as the imagery of musical speech and imprisonment indicates:
The language
I have learnt these forty years,
My native English, now I must forego,
And now my tongue's use is to me no more
Than an unstringèd viol or a harp,
Or like a cunning instrument cased up,
Or being open, put into his hands
That knows no touch to tune the harmony.
Within my mouth you have enjailed my tongue,
Doubly portcullised with my teeth and lips,
And dull unfeeling barren ignorance
Is made my gaoler to attend on me.
I am too old to fawn upon a nurse,
Too far in years to be a pupil now;
What is thy sentence then but speechless death,
Which robs my tongue from breathing native breath? (1.3.159-173)
The King impulsively reduces the sentence of Bolingbroke to six years, and his cousin gathers himself for a future attack, despite Richard's warnings.
5. The conservative older generation, represented by Gaunt and York, try one last time to curb Richard's abuses of power at the beginning of Act 2. Gaunt had already declared his loyalty to Richard, even if it meant the death of his own brother, Woodstock, as he told his grieving sister-in-law:
God's is the quarrel; for God's substitute,
His deputy anointed in His sight,
Hath caused his death, the which if wrongfully,
Let heaven revenge, for I may never lift
An angry arm against His minister. (!1.2.37-41)
Now in 2.1 he warns Richard against his abuse of power, but the King sweeps away his protests, and those of York, and moves to confiscate the dying Gaunt's estate. This will provide Bolingbroke with sympathy and support for his challenge, but Richard as usual is politically tone deaf. York's warning is prophetic :
Take Hereford's
rights away, and take from time
His charters and his customary rights,
Let not tomorrow then ensue to-day;
Be not thyself; for how art thou a king
But by fair sequence and succession?
Now, afore God—God forbid I say true—
If you do wrongfully seize Hereford's rights,
Call in the letters patent that he hath
By his attorneys-general to sue
His livery, and deny his off'red homage,
You pluck a thousand dangers on your head,
You lose a thousand well-disposèd hearts
And prick my tender patience to those thoughts
Which honor and allegiance cannot think. (2.1.195-208)
6. Bolingbroke seizes the advantage when Richard leads his army in Ireland, a useless expedition against the perpetual rebellion there, financed with the dead Gaunt's estate. He returns from exile with a small force which will grow with the support of other noblemen chafing at Richard's rule, notably Northumberland and his son, Harry Percy (Hotspur). He is careful to frame his arrival as an appeal to justice, pursuing his lawful claim to his inheritance. Challenged by his uncle York, he defines his claim narrowly and his followers endorse him:
Northumberland. The noble duke hath sworn his coming is
But for his own; and for the right of that
We all have strongly sworn to give him aid:
And let him ne'er see joy that breaks that oath. (2.3.147-150)
7. Beneath the facade, however, Bolingbroke is moving rapidly to undermine Richard. He will arrest and execute Bushy and Greene, "The caterpillars of the commonwealth,/ Which I have sworn to weed and pluck away" (2.3.165-66). This imagery of England as garden, "This other Eden, demi-paradise" (2.1.42), becomes central to the poetic texture of the play. Bolingbroke accuses Bushy and Greene:
you have fed upon my signories,
Disparked my parks and fell'd my forest woods (3.1.22-23)
He will become the new and efficient gardener of England:
8. Richard returns from Ireland in 3.2, and the flow of image patterns in the scene charts his inevitable decline. This chart suggests Shakespeare's use of Apollonian and Dionysian imagery in the later history plays, showing the variance from his use in comedy. Richard's language explores his descent from Apollonian king of order, fighting against the disorderly Bolingbroke, to the broken man who speaks of the land as mere earth, or dust, which will hold his grave:
Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand,
Though rebels wound thee with their horses' hoofs. (6-7)
This earth shall have a feeling and these stones
Prove armèd soldiers, ere her native king
Shall falter under foul rebellion's arms. (24-26)
So when this thief, this traitor, Bolingbroke,
Who all this while hath revelled in the night
Whilst we were wand'ring with the Antipodes,
Shall see us rising in our throne, the east,
His treasons will sit blushing in his face,
Not able to endure the sight of day,
But self-affrighted tremble at his sin. (47-53)
Let's talk
of graves, of worms, and epitaphs,
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.
Let's choose executors and talk of wills:
And yet not so, for what can we bequeath
Save our deposèd bodies to the ground?
Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke's,
And nothing can we call our own but death
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones. (145-154)
Discharge
my followers, let them hence away,
From Richard's night to Bolingbroke's fair day.
(217-18)
9. The crisis moment occurs in 3.3, as Bolingbroke essentially bluffs Richard off the throne. Does he know his cousin so well that he can provoke him into abdication? He publicly claims that he wants only his lands, and professes allegiance to the King, but he does so with a show of force that wounds Richard's vanity:
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;
If not, 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. (34-47)
Richard's posture is rooted in his self-image. Earlier, he had challenged Gaunt's right to upset the royal visage: "Darest with thy frozen admonition/ Make pale our cheek, chasing the royal blood/ With fury from his native residence" (2.1.117-19). Now he projects his complexion onto the land. and prefigures the War of the Roses to come as well, with the image patterns of red and white, and of blood on the green land:
He is come
to open
The purple testament of bleeding war;
But ere the crown he looks for live in peace
Ten thousand bloody crowns of mothers' sons
Shall ill become the flower of England's face,
Change the complexion of her maid-pale peace
To scarlet indignation, and bedew
Her pastor's {pastures'} grass with faithful
English blood. (92-99)
Richard nearly forces Bolingbroke's hand by accepting his "fair demands" (122), but his vanity will not allow him to relent. For the rest of the scene, he wallows in self-pity and images of martyrdom. He inverts the images of kingly Apollonian power and Dionysian treason, and elevates Bolingbroke:
Down, down I come; like glistering Phaethon,
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. (177-182)
10. Perhaps the most controversial scene Shakespeare ever wrote shows Richard's abdication. Censored at the time, and not printed until the First Folio in 1623, it may have been the reason the followers of the Earl of Essex arranged for a special showing in 1601. Queen Elizabeth in her waning years was criticized for her sycophantic entourage, like Richard. Like him, she pursued futile and wasteful wars in Ireland. Unlike him, however, she survived Essex's somewhat desultory coup attempt.
The danger of the scene is that it shows a monarch forced off the throne. Bolingbroke has maneuvered Richard into giving up the throne, but the King has trouble letting go at the critical moment. Shakespeare also has the Bishop of Carlisle prophesy the War of the Roses, the climax of a century of political upset from 1399 to 1485 (the death of Richard III), all following Richard's coerced abdication and subsequent murder.
11. All that remains is the murder of Richard and the coverup. King Henry IV's first few acts as a new monarch include putting down fresh conspiracies, and he finds that unruly noblemen are not so easy to deal with, as he himself had not been. In 5.2 and 5.3 he adjudicates charges of treason against his cousin Aumerle, turned in by his father York but saved by his mother's entreaties to the new King. In 5.4 a scene worthy of the Watergate scandal of a later era, Pierce Exton takes the hint from the King and resolves to make his political fortune by murdering Richard, whose self-dramatizing in 5.5. is the coda to Shakespeare's portrait of a disturbed personality.
12. When Exton calls for his sovereign's approval of the murder, Bolingbroke washes his hands of the matter and exiles Exton, an ironic parallel to Richard's exile of Mowbray for doing his bidding in the assassination of Woodstock. The last image of blood on the land is succeeded by the glorious mirage of a voyage to Jerusalem, which as we will see in Henry IV, Part One provides religious cover for the power politics of the new king:
Lords, I
protest, my soul is full of woe,
That blood should sprinkle me to make me grow.
Come, mourn with me for that I do lament,
And put on sullen black incontinent.
I'll make a voyage to the Holy Land,
To wash this blood off from my guilty hand.
March sadly after; grace my mournings here,
In weeping after this untimely bier. (5.6.45-52)
Responses.
Richard II is fertile ground for studying Shakespeare's language or his sense of political personalities. Richard Altick's article on "Symphonic Imagery" in the Signet Classic edition is an education in Shakespeare's mature poetic style. The "Introduction" by Kenneth Muir and other articles by Derek Traversi, Samuel Schoenbaum, and Graham Holderness explore the politics of the play. Henry IV appears in fourteen acts over three plays, a detailed study of the Machiavellian ruler without the lurid dramatic flourishes of Richard III.
The Rylance production was done with an all-male cast at the New Globe in London. Here's a look at male actors playing female parts, as was the custom in Shakespeare's theater.
The scene is 3.4, and is an allegory of the state as a garden untended by Richard, and now being violently pruned by Bolingbroke.
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