Richard II

Overview

Richard II is around twenty-six hundred lines and it is written entirely in verse. There is no prose in it anywhere, which is true of no other Shakespeare play, and about a fifth of it is rhymed. The effect is formal, ceremonial and slightly airless, and it is deliberate: this is a play about a king who believes the world runs on ritual, and the language behaves accordingly until the ritual fails.

It opens the second tetralogy, the sequence running through the two parts of Henry IV to Henry V, and it is set earliest although written later than the Henry VI plays. Shakespeare assumes no prior knowledge.

The political charge was immediate. The scene in which Richard hands over the crown was omitted from the quartos of 1597 and 1598 and printed only after Elizabeth’s death. In February 1601 supporters of the Earl of Essex paid the Lord Chamberlain’s Men forty shillings to stage the play on the eve of their rising, evidently wanting London to see a monarch deposed. The company was questioned and not punished. Elizabeth, in a conversation recorded by the antiquary William Lambarde, is said to have remarked that she was Richard II.

Do not expect a villain. Richard is frivolous, vain and unjust; he is also the only character who says anything worth remembering. Bolingbroke is efficient, plausible and silent about his own motives.

What happens

The play opens with a formal challenge. Bolingbroke accuses Mowbray of treason and of the murder of the Duke of Gloucester, the king’s uncle. What everyone on stage knows and nobody says is that Richard ordered that murder himself. The two are to fight a judicial combat at Coventry, and at the last possible moment, lances raised, Richard stops it and banishes them both, Mowbray for life and Bolingbroke for ten years, then reduces it to six on seeing his uncle’s grief.

John of Gaunt, Bolingbroke’s father, dies, and delivers first the sceptred isle speech, which is usually quoted as patriotism and is in fact an accusation: this England, he says, is now leased out like a farm, and the king has made himself a landlord instead of a king. Richard, unmoved, seizes the entire Lancaster estate to pay for a war in Ireland. His uncle York warns him plainly that if he takes Bolingbroke’s inheritance by force he destroys the principle of inheritance by which he himself is king. He goes to Ireland anyway.

Bolingbroke returns while the king is away, claiming only that he has come for his own. Nobles join him, York, left as regent, wavers and gives in, and the country falls to him without a battle.

Richard lands in Wales and the third act is his collapse in stages. He greets the soil of his kingdom like a returning lover, insists that angels fight for an anointed king and that the sea cannot wash the balm off, is told his Welsh army has dispersed, and swings within a hundred lines to the speech about sitting on the ground and telling sad stories of the death of kings. From here he is never again in control of anything except the description of it.

At Flint Castle he comes down to the courtyard to meet Bolingbroke, who kneels. Richard tells him to stand, because his knee is proud enough already, and the transfer is effectively complete.

The deposition in Act IV is the play’s centre. Richard is made to hand over the crown in public and turns the ceremony into a performance: he holds the crown between them and compares it to a well with two buckets; he undoes his own coronation piece by piece, washing the balm off with his own tears; he refuses to read the list of his crimes and asks for a mirror instead, studies the face that commanded ten thousand men, and throws it down, asking how soon sorrow has destroyed it, and is told by Bolingbroke that the shadow of his sorrow has destroyed the shadow of his face.

The fifth act is quick. Richard is sent to Pomfret, where he delivers the long soliloquy comparing his cell to the world, and is visited by a groom who tells him his own horse carried Bolingbroke at the coronation. Exton, taking a hint from the new king, kills him, and is repudiated for it. Henry IV closes the play announcing a voyage to the Holy Land to wash the blood from his hand, which he will still be planning at the start of the next play.

How to read it

Read Gaunt’s speech in full rather than in the anthologised half. The patriotic passage is the setup for an indictment, and cutting it at the famous line reverses its meaning.

Track Richard’s language against his power. As his authority falls his eloquence rises, and by the deposition he is the best speaker in the play and has nothing left to command. Whether that is tragic depth or the final form of his self-regard is the play’s central question.

Notice how little Bolingbroke says about what he wants. He claims his inheritance, accepts what is offered, and never once states an intention to take the crown. Shakespeare leaves the ambiguity intact, and it is the reason the Henry IV plays are possible.

Read the ceremonies. Challenges, banishments, kneelings, a coronation run backwards: the play is a sequence of formal acts, and its subject is what happens when people stop believing that forms do anything.

Read it before Henry IV Part 1. The guilt, the unpaid Percys, the crusade that is never taken and Hal’s absence from his father’s coronation are all set up here.

Questions it raises

• Richard is a bad king and a legitimate one. Does the play think legitimacy survives incompetence?
• If Richard can be deposed, what secures Bolingbroke? York’s warning is the sharpest political argument in the play and nobody answers it.
• Does Bolingbroke intend the crown from the start? What would change if he did?
• Richard becomes eloquent as he becomes powerless. Is that a discovery of his real self, or a man who only ever had an act?
• Exton kills on a hint and is disowned. What does that scene say about how such orders are given?
• Essex’s supporters paid to have this staged the night before a rising. What did they expect an audience to take from it?