This discussion aims to facilitate your basic reading and understanding of Shakespeare’s Richard II. It offers guidance on online performances, structure, historical contexts and sources. A final section addresses Richard’s characterisation in relation to the play’s ethics and politics. References are to William Shakespeare. Richard II, ed. Stanley Wells, intro. Paul Edmondson  (London: Penguin, 2008).

PERFORMANCES OF RICHARD II

Viewing these, or excerpts from them, will help you understand the play’s characterisation and relationships and enjoy its theatricality. Male and female performers offer contrasting interpretations of Richard’s sexuality.

Ian McKellen 1970 BBC.

Derek Jacobi 1978 BBC TV; this is an excellent, traditional production.

The Irish actress Fiona Shaw played Richard in a controversial performance at the National Theatre London in 1995, directed by Deborah Warner; this became the basis of a BBC2 television version in 1997.

Steven Pimlott staged Richard II at Stratford-upon-Avon’s The Other Place in 2000 in modern dress on a stark white stage, starring Sam West. A DVD of the BBC radio production is available.

Also in 2000, Jonathan Kent revived Richard II at the Gainsborough Studios in London, before taking the production on tour to New York’s Harvey Theatre. This production emphasised the medieval setting and cast Ralph Fiennes in the title role. See review of this production: http://www.curtainup.com/richard2lond.html

Tim Carroll’s all-male Elizabethan production of Richard II at London’s newly reconstructed Globe Theatre in 2003 featured Mark Rylance in the title role. Rylance’s is an absorbing and original interpretation; he performs Richard as slightly “dislocated,” as a man always unsuited for his role, and struggling under the burden of kingship. He is sadder but freer and more himself after Bolingbroke has removed this burden, making Richard’s tragedy more poignant. The many excerpts of the Globe production on the net provide authentic insights into the Elizabethan Globe: the upper and apron stages, gilded and brightly painted surfaces, and costuming: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfVcqswZmDw&feature=related

Finally, watch an excerpt from Ben Whishaw’s stellar performance in the title role in a 2012 TV production under the title, The Hollow Crown.

THE RENAISSANCE AND HISTORY

The number of histories written, translated and printed under the Tudor monarchs (1485-1603) is amazing. The rise of a drama using the materials and serving the purposes of history was inevitable, since the stage has never failed to mirror the interests of the world about it. To understand this phenomenal flood of historical works, it must be remembered that history written as a continuous narrative and integrated by creative minds was in the modern world a development of the Renaissance. (Lily B. Campbell. Shakespeare’s “Histories”: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy. London: Methuen, 1963: 18).

Campbell goes on to trace the phenomena of Renaissance history-writing and historiography to Machiavelli’s idea of using history for the exposition of political theory: “he who would foresee what is to happen should look to what has happened: for all that is has its counterpart in time past” (28).

Shakespeare’s English history plays express the Renaissance passion for history. They also seek to come to terms with the urgent political issues of the 1590s, when the reign of the last Tudor monarch, Elizabeth I, was in decline (the old Queen died in 1603). Like Machiavelli, whom he may or may not have read, Shakespeare was concerned above all with how to maintain a stable society. In England, the maintenance of civic order hinged on the monarch’s role, responsibilities and privileges, and especially on deciding the limits of his power. These are the political issues to which Shakespeare’s English history plays, including Richard II, repeatedly turn.

The proper extent of a monarch’s power was a crucial, and unresolved, political issue in sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century England, when first the Tudors and then the Stuarts struggled to extend their traditional prerogatives. (Katharine Eisaman Maus. “Richard II”: 943).

Richard II became dangerously enmeshed in Elizabethan politics when the Earl of Essex launched an uprising against Elizabeth that led soon after to his beheading for treason. The day before the revolt, on February 7, 1601, Essex’s followers paid the Chamberlain’s Men, Shakespeare’s acting company, 40 shillings to perform at the Globe theatre a play about the deposition and killing of Richard II. This was almost certainly Shakespeare’s Richard II, which by 1601 was an old play, written in 1595. Essex’s followers seem to have hoped that reviving Richard’s story would inspire support. After their rebellion failed, the Queen’s officers questioned the actors about the performance, but seem to have been satisfied about their intentions. However, the Queen herself later asserted angrily: “I am Richard II, know ye not that?” (See Paul Edmondson’s account, Penguin Introduction, lvii-lviii.)

Even so, the scene of Richard’s forced abdication (“the deposition scene”) in Act 4, Scene 1, did not appear in any version of the play printed in the Queen’s lifetime. Read “An Account of the Text,” Penguin 109-110, for more information.

SHAKESPEARE’S ENGLISH HISTORY PLAYS, 1591-1599

FIRST TETRALOGY (group of four literary works), covering the fifteenth-century kings, Wars of the Roses, 1422-1485:

• Henry VI , Parts 1, 2 and 3, written 1591-92
• Richard III, written 1592-93

SECOND TETRALOGY, covering 1397-c. 1417

• Richard II, written c. 1595, the only play of this tetralogy entirely in verse
• Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 (the usurper Bolingbroke’s career as king), written 1596-98
• Henry V (Bolingbroke’s son, referred to in Richard II, Act V, Scene 3),written 1599

The two tetralogies make a single unit. Throughout the three Henry VI plays and Richard III Shakespeare links the present happenings with the past. He never allows his audiences to forget, as the chronicler Hall said in his preface, “King Henry IV was the beginning and root of great discord and division.” (E. M. W. Tillyard. Shakespeare’s History Plays. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969: 153). Tillyard goes on to argue from textual evidence that all the disasters and tragedies of both tetralogies originated from the acts of usurpation and regicide by Bolingbroke, later Henry IV, as dramatised in Richard II. Written midway through the decade, Richard II was a pivotal work in Shakespeare’s dramatic reconstruction of late medieval English history.

STUDY EXERCISE I: SHAKESPEARE’S LANGUAGE

Reread:

• Richard II Act 4.1: 134-144—Bishop of Carlisle’s prophecy;
• Richard II Act 5.1: 55-68— Richard’s warning to Northumberland.

1. Find examples of metaphors, alliteration, repetition and rhyme in the above speeches and explain their functions and effects.
2. What is the point of Carlisle’s reference to “[t]he field of Golgotha and dead men’s skulls”?

Carlisle’s speech foretells the horrors of the Wars of the Roses, the subject of Shakespeare’s first tetralogy. Richard’s speech looks forward to Henry IV’s struggles in the second tetralogy to maintain his throne against the Percys, father and son, who in Richard II are Henry’s allies. In Henry V, the last play in the second tetralogy, the king prays on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt that God will not remember his father’s sin against Richard.

Shakespeare and his contemporaries took seriously the idea that the king is appointed by God, and that his kingship is an earthly copy of God’s kingship in heaven. However, Richard II also explores the following political questions:

• What should subjects do when a king is inept and morally corrupt?
• How far should subjects tolerate waste and injustice for the sake of order and stability?
• Can the benefits provided by an efficient ruler outweigh the moral and military dangers of usurpation?

Richard II dramatises the difficulty of these questions, which have confronted many societies throughout history. Even so, it is much more than a political play. The insights it offers on human character and feeling, and on suffering and action, are as profound as any we might expect to find in a play by Shakespeare.

THE FOURTEENTH-CENTURY BACKGROUND

STUDY EXERCISE II

Trace family relationships among leading characters in the “Genealogical Table” in Wells, ed. Richard II: 125.

Politically and economically Richard’s reign (1377-1399) was marred by conflicts at all levels of society. Though his deposition in 1399 brought royal prospects and privileges into question, in itself it may not have surprised his subjects very much.

THE PLANTAGENET KINGS

During the fifty-year reign of Richard’s predecessor, Edward III, English armies had rampaged through France, winning famous victories and much territory. Edward III led at the Battle of Crécy in 1346, and Edward the Black Prince, the eldest of Edward’s seven sons (only five of whom survived infancy), won the Battle of Poitiers in 1356. Further campaigns in France and Spain followed, but the Black Prince died, aged 45, in 1376. When Edward III died too in the following year, the Black Prince’s ten-year-old son succeeded to the throne as Richard II. The Duke of Lancaster John of Gaunt, King Edward’s fourth son, was regent during Richard’s minority, and wielded what some called excessive power until his death in 1399. Like his father and brother, Gaunt was a soldier. During Richard’s reign he led an expensive campaign into Spain, where he tried but failed to establish his dynasty as Spanish kings.

THE REIGN OF RICHARD II

Richard maintained the military traditions of his Plantagenet family when, aged fourteen, he faced down the peasant rebels who had marched on London in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Overall, however, from the perspective of the warlike older generation of nobles led by his uncles, Richard was a disappointment who made peace with France. Tall and handsome, he gathered around him a luxury-loving group of young men with artistic interests that matched his own. He was a patron of Chaucer and other poets and craftsmen. The Richard of history was no fool, but like Shakespeare’s Richard he sometimes went too far in upholding royal privileges and prerogatives. The Wilton Diptych, a beautiful two-leaved altar piece which Richard probably used in his private devotions, associated him with royal saints and the kingdom of heaven. View the diptych at http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/english-or-french-the-wilton-diptych. It embodies Richard’s belief in kingship, which exceeded that of any other medieval English king. Richard committed monumental blunders, and his tragic reign became a magnet for chroniclers, artists and dramatists of his own time and later.

In 1384 a clique of older aristocrats in the English Parliament challenged the huge sums that Richard was spending on his friends and court. Tensions mounted, until the older nobles prevailed over Richard during a confrontation at Radcot Bridge near Oxford. In 1388 the five “Lords Appellant,” among them the king’s uncle Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, and Henry Bolingbroke, caused the so-called Merciless Parliament to convict Richard’s intimate friends of treason. Two were executed, but the rest fled overseas. Richard deeply resented his humiliation and the loss of his friends. From 1388 he gathered around him a strong royalist party which Bolingbroke supported. Richard’s much loved Queen, Anne of Bohemia, died in 1394. Two years later he cemented an alliance between England and France by marrying the seven-year-old Isabella of Valois, daughter of the French king. John of Gaunt’s prestige and loyalty to the crown kept the peace for a time, but in 1397 Richard forced Parliament to sentence three of the Lords Appellant to death. According to the distinguished historian M. H. Keen, “This was not just a purge; it was an effort to force English government into conformity with doctrinaire principles of regality” (England in the Later Middle Ages, p. 265). While in the custody of Thomas Mowbray, Gloucester was murdered in prison at Calais, almost certainly by Richard’s orders. Act 1, Scene 2 of Richard II, in which the widowed Duchess of Gloucester seeks retribution from her brother-in-law John of Gaunt, assumes that Shakespeare’s Richard was guilty of Gloucester’s murder.

Subsequent events were much as Shakespeare’s play recreates them. In January 1398, Bolingbroke alleged before the king that Thomas Mowbray had approached him with treasonable plots. This was a way of challenging Mowbray over Gloucester’s murder, since the king himself was legally out of reach. Parliament decided that the matter should be settled by a judicial duel, but Richard aborted the duel just as it was being staged at Coventry. He sentenced Mowbray to life-long banishment and Bolingbroke to ten years. When Gaunt died four months later, Richard and his advisers set about appropriating the Lancastrian inheritance. They increased Bolingbroke’s sentence to lifelong exile. In 1399, immediately after he had thus alienated everyone in England who hoped to inherit a noble estate, Richard set out on a military expedition to Ireland.

Supported by the powerful northern family of the Percys—Henry, Earl of Northumberland and his son Harry Hotspur—Bolingbroke gathered an army. The Duke of York, another son of Edward III, who was in charge of the kingdom in his nephew Richard’s absence, joined Bolingbroke at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire. At Bristol, Bolingbroke executed Richard’s friends, Wiltshire, Bushy and Green. Richard at last landed in Wales where he had expected the Earl of Salisbury to raise a royalist army, but the Welsh forces deserted in panic, as did Aumerle, the Duke of York’s son. With only a remnant of his forces, Richard marched along the Welsh coast to Conway Castle. Here Henry Percy brought him messages from Bolingbroke similar to those delivered in Shakespeare’s Richard II, Act 3, Scene 2. (Because of a mistake in his source, Holinshed’s Chronicle, Shakespeare locates this scene at Flint Castle.) Having no choice, Richard agreed to Bolingbroke’s demands and went with Northumberland to meet Bolingbroke at Chester. Imprisoned in the Tower of London, he was forced to abdicate on 29 September 1399. He was murdered soon after, perhaps by starvation or winter hardships, while imprisoned in Pontefract Castle in Yorkshire—Pomfret in Shakespeare’s play. In 1413, by the order of Bolingbroke’s son, Henry V, Richard’s body was reburied in Westminster Abbey beside his first wife, Anne.

SHAKESPEARE’S SOURCES FOR RICHARD II

Shakespeare’s main source for all his English history plays and for his legendary tragedies King Lear and Macbeth was Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland. This was first published in 1577, and republished in 1587 in the edition that Shakespeare used. Holinshed was a compiler of information from sources, not an interpretative historian in the modern sense.

Shakespeare’s second major source for Richard II was Samuel Daniel’s long narrative poem, The Civil Wars between the Houses of York and Lancaster. He may also have drawn on an anonymous play about Thomas Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, written shortly before Richard II, and also, but infrequently, on French and other English chroniclers.

Shakespeare’s main departures from and additions to his sources are:

• He added all the female roles, including the Duchesses of Gloucester and York, and the moving scenes involving Queen Isabel—especially the Garden Scene of Act III, Scene 4, and the tender parting of Isabel and Richard in Act V, Scene 1. (Richard’s marriage to the historical child Queen Isabel was never consummated.)
• He idealised the character of John of Gaunt, in a depiction that deviates radically from both Holinshed and the historical Gaunt.
• He created the character and behaviour of Richard, especially in the last two acts.
• He embroidered and extended Northumberland’s part in Richard’s tragedy.

In expanding the historical roles of Isabel, the Duchesses, and John of Gaunt, Shakespeare may have given his audiences and readers characters that they could like. According to Harold Bloom, “we are not meant to like Richard, and no one could like the usurper Bolingbroke” (Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. London: Fourth Estate, 1999: 253).

STRUCTURE OF RICHARD II

Shakespeare has turned the raw material of history and chronicle into a drama that holds an audience’s attention over five acts. Richard II offers tense and exciting incidents at the rate of at least one per Act; riveting poetry; fascinating characters, some of whom develop in response to changing circumstances; and a profound exploration of political ideas. The following analysis of structure may help consolidate your reading of the play:

Act I:  Richard’s Ascendancy and Bolingbroke’s Banishment

Act II: Richard’s Departure to Ireland and Bolingbroke’s Return

Act III: Richard’s Fall and Bolingbroke’s Rise

Act IV: Richard’s Abdication

Act V:  Richard’s Murder

The play’s turning point is Act 3, Scene 3, line 184, when Richard descends at Bolingbroke’s bidding from the wall of Flint Castle. To this point Images of rising and falling abound; they relate to the turning of blind Fortune’s wheel.

Richard II specialises in balanced pairs of opposites:

• Dialogue is full of antitheses, (e.g. Things sweet to taste prove in digestion sour (Act 1, Scene 3, line 36); O loyal father of a treacherous son (Act 5, Scene 3, line 59)—there are many more examples.
• Characters are paired so as to invite contrasts and comparisons: Mowbray and Bolingbroke; Richard and Bolingbroke (the central contrasting pair); and contrasting father and son pairs: Gaunt and Bolingbroke; Northumberland and Hotspur; York and Aumerle; Henry IV (Bolingbroke) and Prince Hal.

RICHARD AS PROTAGONIST

A. LANGUAGE

STUDY EXERCISE III

1.Comment on Richard II Act 4, Scene 1, lines 162-318 (the Deposition Scene) in the light of the following analysis:

“Richard II has a special way of talking….Alone of the Shakespeare kings, he has a habit of studying himself from the outside, as it were, a habit emblematised in the scene where he sends for a looking glass. When he smashes his reflection, his “shadow,” it is as if he was destroying his substance. In a sense he is always calling for a mirror….” Frank Kermode. Shakespeare’s Language (London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 2000): 43.

2.Read Richard II Act 5, Scene 5, lines 1-66 (Death Soliloquy). How far do you agree with the following evaluation by Kermode?

“The wonderful long soliloquy of the king in prison is truly transitional, for the occasion of such a lament resembles others in the earlier plays, until it becomes clear that something else is happening, that the elaborations of figure are not simply prefabricated and laid out neatly before us but hammered out.” (Shakespeare’s Language: 43).

3.Critics have disagreed in their evaluations of Richard’s language: Walter Pater claimed that Richard was “an exquisite poet,” but A. P. Rossiter thought him “surely a very bad poet” (Bloom. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human: 252). Are these opinions helpful? What is your own view? Suggest an approach that you believe illuminates Richard’s language.

4.Bloom’s comment on language, following, challenges us to read the whole play attentively and with perception: “Ironies of syntax and of metaphor abound in Richard II, and Shakespeare seems intentionally to make us uneasy with not less than everything that is said by everyone in the play. (252; my emphases)

5. “Many years of happy days befall/ My gracious sovereign, my most loving liege!” (Act 1, Scene 1, lines 20-21). In the light of subsequent events, explain the ironies of Bolingbroke’s first speech in Richard II.

B. ETHICS

Critics have commented repeatedly on Richard’s self-absorption and narcissism. Some have argued that he is too concerned with how he appears to others and to himself. In fact an important balanced contrast in Richard II, beyond those outlined above in Section 2.2, is between Richard’s public and private selves.

In his public appearances, we may suspect that we are watching an actor playing a king, who in turn is playing a king. Richard was born, educated and anointed to kingship, but the role does not seem natural to him. In the early ceremonial scenes it is almost as if Richard’s courtiers act the parts of flattering subjects, and thus constrain him to act the role of king. The unfolding plot reveals a disjunction between outward actions and inner feelings, in both the king and (most of) his subjects.

Private scenes occurring around the edges of public events in Acts 1 and 2 confirm that Richard is ethically unfit to reign.

• The Duchess of Gloucester’s plea to Gaunt confirms Richard as Gloucester’s murderer: Gaunt: “…correction lieth in those hands/ Which made the fault that we cannot correct” (Act 1, Scene 2, lines 4-5).
• In Act 1, Scene 4, Richard and Aumerle gloat nastily over Bolingbroke’s banishment from England. Contrast their jealousy and fear with Richard’s hypocrisy in descending from his throne to embrace Bolingbroke in a display of cousinly affection before the planned joust with Mowbray (Act 1, Scene 3, line 54).
• In the closing lines of Act 1, Scene 4, we see Richard’s true attitude to Gaunt, who has been loyal to him, even overlooking the murder of a brother and the exile of a son:

Now put it, God, in the physician’s mind
To help him to his grave immediately!
The lining of his coffers shall make coats
To deck our soldiers for these Irish wars.
Come, gentlemen, let’s all go visit him.
Pray God we may make haste and come too late! (Act 1, Scene 4, lines 59-64)

These lines reveal that Richard’s cancelling of four years of Bolingbroke’s exile, to assuage, he says, his uncle Gaunt’s grief (Act 1, Scene 3, lines 208-212), was just play-acting and politics.

• In Act 2, Scene 1, Richard’s private feelings erupt into a public display of petulant anger when the dying Gaunt, ever loyal, tries to alert him to his unwise actions as king. Richard’s blind selfishness contrasts with Gaunt’s statesmanlike love for “this blessèd plot, this earth, this realm, this England.” Richard later responds callously to the report of Gaunt’s death: “So much for that” (2. 1.153-55).

Two Key Questions

1. If Richard is so unlikable in the first few acts because of his lack of private ethics, why do most members of an audience later come to empathise with his sufferings, at least to some degree?
2. A closely related question is: how far does Richard develop as a character in the course of the play? How far do his sufferings change him for the better?

You might like to consider these questions for yourself. You might also consider how far you agree with the following attempt to address them:

Because Richard speaks much moving poetry after his return from Ireland, the audience acquires a minute-by-minute understanding of his sufferings and thoughts. Speeches and soliloquies are the chief means by which Shakespeare asserts Richard’s complex feelings and therefore his humanity. These demand respect, in spite of the crimes, selfishness, failings, abuses of power, and follies of Richard’s fortunate early days. Shakespeare’s focus on Richard’s humanity distinguishes his play as a Renaissance work. It does not belong to the theocentric Middle Ages where it is set.

For as long as Richard is surrounded by friends and foes, in combination or separately, we may feel sorry for his humiliations, but we feel that he is playing to an audience, the most important member of which is himself. The speeches associated with Richard’s descent from Flint Castle and his deposition maintain this stance. The turning point in Richard’s development as a character, if any, must be his soliloquy opening Act 5, Scene 5, which Kermode (above) regards as “wonderful.” By this point Shakespeare has charted Richard’s isolation through a number of scenes—his friends and courtiers have deserted or been slain; his Queen, whom he loves as she loves him, has been sent away to France; finally he has been imprisoned in Pomfret Castle, many miles from his former court and capital. Here he is alone except for the gaoler, “that sad dog who brings me food” (Act 5, Scene 5, line 70). He opens his soliloquy by contrasting his aloneness in prison with the populous world outside: “here is not a creature but myself” (Act 5, Scene 5, line 4).

When his audience has shrunk to the audience in the theatre, Richard seems to achieve more integration than before. By recognising the diversity of his thoughts, some tending to salvation, others to ambition, and yet others to contentment, he is able to contain them within his single consciousness. This applies also to the roles of king and beggar that he imagines himself as playing alternately. Some audience members will also identify with Richard’s anxiety at the rapid passing of time, which he acknowledges he has misspent: “I have wasted time, and now doth time waste me” (Act 5, Scene 5, line 49).

Finally, when Richard strikes back at his keeper and murderers just before his death, this is his first manly and direct, integrated and spontaneous action in the play. This indicates that he has matured through suffering, beyond the play-actor and complicated dissembler of the early scenes.

C. RICHARD AS KING

Shakespeare dramatises Richard’s failures as a king, often by contrast with Bolingbroke’s abilities and astute military and political tactics. Here is a list of Richard’s mistakes as a ruler. Perhaps you can think of more?

1. Richard fails to cultivate order in the state; he creates jealousies and tensions among the nobles by favouring flatterers like Bushy, Bagot and Green (Gaunt’s analysis, Act 2, Scene 1, lines 95-103). Bolingbroke, by contrast, cultivates an advantageous if ultimately unstable alliance with the Duke of Northumberland and his son Harry Hotspur.
2. Richard’s part in Gloucester’s murder shows that is willing to kill for political expediency. Yet he fails to neutralise what he recognises as Bolingbroke’s dangerous ambition. He prolongs antagonisms by aborting the Mowbray-Bolingbroke battle before its resolution. He makes himself unpopular by imposing unjust sentences of banishment on Mowbray and Bolingbroke. Conversely, Bolingbroke ruthlessly disposes of dissenters: he executes Bushy, Green and the Earl of Wiltshire, and chops off the heads that have conspired against him at Oxford—Salisbury, Spencer, Blunt, Kent, Brocas, Sir Bennet Seely and their leader the Abbot of Westminster (Act 5, Scene 6, lines 8-14). Bolingbroke allows only three of the conspirators to live: his cousin Aumerle, who has surrendered to him; Bagot, who has betrayed Richard and testified against Aumerle; and the Bishop of Carlisle, who is brave and honourable. Finally, Sir Piers of Exton reports how Bolingbroke arranges Richard’s death with Machiavellian obliqueness (Act 5, Scene 4). Bolingbroke later admits: “I did wish him dead” (Act 5, scene 6, line 39), but he does nothing overtly–he just hints. When Exton brings in the coffin containing Richard’s body, Bolingbroke professes regret and plans to go on a pilgrimage of repentance to the Holy Land. His response is good politics and, on the level of dramatic art, a fitting end to the tragedy.
3. Richard is extravagant and luxury-loving. Unlike Bolingbroke, he does not maintain an outward appearance of rectitude. (Read York’s analysis, Act 2, Scene 1, lines 17-28).
4. Richard is a poor financial manager; he has run his country into humiliating debt (Gaunt 2.1.59-66).
5. He sneers at Bolingbroke for courting commoners: “Off goes his bonnet to an oyster-wench” (Act 1, Scene 4, lines 20-36), but the upshot of Bolingbroke’s humility and Richard’s snobbery is that the people join Bolingbroke against Richard. Scroop vividly describes what happens (Act 3, Scene 2, lines 112-20).
6. At Gaunt’s death, despite the Duke of York’s warning (Act 2, Scene 1, lines 195-210), Richard seizes Bolingbroke’s inheritance, the vast Lancastrian estates. By this single, openly unjust act, he alienates everyone in England—most importantly the gentry and aristocracy, since all eldest sons expected to inherit lands and titles from their fathers.
7. Finally, after thus creating enmity and instability, Richard absents himself to fight a badly timed war in Ireland. He leaves behind a power vacuum that Bolingbroke expeditiously fills. When Richard finally returns, landing with a small force in Wales, the strategic moment for fighting Bolingbroke has passed. The only cards that Richard has left to play are his command of words and his belief in his divine kingship: “Not all the water in the rough rude sea/ Can wash the balm off from an anointed king” (Act 3, Scene 2, lines 54-55). Richard’s self-deception multiplies the ironies that attend his defeat.

Shakespeare is historically correct in emphasising Richard’s belief in his rights and privileges as God’s representative on earth: the Wilton diptych links Richard (the crowned and kneeling figure) both with former saintly kings and with the kingdom of heaven. However, in dramatising Richard’s deposition and Bolingbroke’s triumph, Richard II captures a crucial historical transition from the medieval ideology of the king as God’s anointed, to the Renaissance view expounded by Machiavelli, that the prince’s power depends on his political and military astuteness and ruthlessness.

STUDY EXERCISE IV

1. Consider the proposition that Richard always hesitates when he should act, and acts when he should hesitate.
2. List any wise or effective decisions that Richard makes as king. Is there anything that redeems his kingship?
3. How likable or trustworthy a character is Bolingbroke, later Henry IV? How far does he possess the qualities of courage, patriotism, and filial piety?
4. Consider the following questions about the “Garden Scene” (Act 3, Scene 4). Keep in mind that this scene is entirely Shakespeare’s invention, and that it is a private scene of reflection, following the restless movements of armies and the spectacle of King Richard’s descent and Bolingbroke’s rise.

• What are the scene’s thematic and theatrical functions?
• Explain the analogies: king/gardener; garden/commonwealth.
• What pieces of advice does the Gardener offer to kings?
• How principled do you consider this advice to be?
• How practical do you consider this advice to be?
• What is the Gardener’s attitude to King Richard?
• What is his attitude to Queen Isabel?
• Compare the Gardener’s attitude to of Richard with that of the Groom in Act 5, Scene 5, lines 67-97.
• How far does this change over two acts in two commoners’ judgment of the king reflect your own developing ideas?