Richard II

by William Shakespeare

  At supper after the show, rumors began to fly, and the next morning the Essex men armed themselves and headed for the palace, vainly hoping to gather popular support along the way. It didn’t come. They were roundly defeated and the ringleaders tried for high treason. Augustine Phillips, the actor who served as business manager of Shakespeare’s theater company, was immediately brought in for interrogation. His story about their reluctance to perform such an old play as Richard II, together with the fact that Essex himself was not present at the performance, provided an escape route. The tribunal was persuaded that they had only revived the show for the sake of the money.

  To judge from the choices that Shakespeare made in dramatizing his historical source materials, he seems to have been more interested in the human story of Richard’s fall than the politics of rebellion. It is likely that the Essex faction commissioned the special performance not so much for its actual content—we cannot be sure that the full deposition scene was actually staged at this time in the play’s life—as for the broad association between the rise of Henry Bullingbrook and the career of the charismatic earl. Essex’s men were probably remembering a book originally dedicated to their master, Sir John Hayward’s The First Part of the Life and Reign of King Henry IV. Published in 1599, it had caused much controversy as a result of its detailed treatment of Richard’s removal from the throne. It was almost certainly Hayward’s book rather than Shakespeare’s play that led Queen Elizabeth to say, some time later, “I am Richard the Second. Know ye not that?”

  Following the rebellion of 1601, Essex was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. That meant having his privy members cut off and draped around his neck. His sangfroid did not desert him. On hearing his sentence, he joked that since he had served Her Majesty in the four corners of the world, it was fitting that his body should be cut in quarters and driven through the four corners of London. The Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s sometime patron, was consigned to the Tower. Given their connections with him, it was a very close run thing for the players. Hayward the historian took the rap and Shakespeare was saved by the cool performance of his friend Phillips under interrogation.

  THE KING’S TWO BODIES

  Richard II was very attractive to Essex and his followers not only because it seemed to give good reasons for taking action against an ineffective, vacillating monarch, but also because it appeared to lament the decline of chivalric England. One of Essex’s chief strategies during his rise to prominence at court in the 1590s was to portray himself as a hero from a nobler age that had gone. He invoked the code of “honour” and made himself synonymous with such displays as the Accession Day tilts, in which courtiers would joust like knights of old.

  The beginning of the play, so redolent of medieval rites of knighthood, would have been very much to Essex’s taste. Mowbray and Bullingbrook throw down their gages and prepare for single combat with sword and lance. They are concerned above all with “spotless reputation”: “Mine honour is my life; both grow in one,” says Mowbray, “Take honour from me, and my life is done.” Honor is seen as the hallmark of the “trueborn Englishman.” The feuding dukes regard themselves as true patriots, appealing to “English earth” and lamenting that in exile they must forgo their “native English” language. Richard’s native language, by contrast, was French (which was also the nationality of his wife) and his court is implicitly seen as a place of French affectation. One of the most cultured of English kings, Richard was a munificent patron of poetry and the arts; Shakespeare does not exploit this, but he may imply it through the way in which he gives such eloquent and rhetorically elaborate poetry to the king, whereas Bullingbrook speaks a blunter English idiom, albeit still in finely honed verse. Near the end of the play, when the Yorks kneel before the new King Henry and ask pardon for their son Aumerle, the duke suggests that he should take on the French manners associated with the court and say “pardonnez-moi,” but the duchess, a better judge of character, is the one who wins the pardon because she knows that Bullingbrook will stick to English (“Speak ‘pardon’ as ’tis current in our land: / The chopping French we do not understand”).

  King Richard stands accused of wasting the patrimony of the English nation. He has been fleeced by his flatterers, and costly Irish wars have required him to “lease out” the land. Given that Queen Elizabeth’s exchequer was also heavily overdrawn as a result of the Irish problem, Shakespeare was probably being diplomatic as well as practical in not attempting to stage Richard’s military campaign in Ireland, which is described at great length in his source, Holinshed’s Chronicles. The focus remains firmly on the English land, imagined metaphorically as a sea-walled garden “full of weeds, her fairest flowers choked up.”

  Within two years of the play appearing in print, John of Gaunt’s “this sceptred isle” speech was ripped from its context and included in an anthology called England’s Parnassus as an exemplar of patriotic writing. It appears there as an unfinished sentence, lacking the sting in the tail: “this England … Is now leased out … That England, that was wont to conquer others, / Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.” True patriotism, the original context reveals, involves fierce criticism of bad government as well as rhetorical praise of the land.

  But if the bad governor is sacredly endowed as God’s anointed deputy on earth, then is it permissible to remove him, even in the name of England and “true chivalry”? If the king is synonymous with the law, then to turn the law against him may seem a contradiction in terms: “What subject can give sentence on his king?” The monarch was traditionally imagined to have two bodies: as body politic, the king was the incarnation of the nation; as body natural, he was a mortal like anyone else. This was what made possible the paradoxical words “The king is dead, long live the king.” When Richard stages his own unthroning, he inverts the words of the coronation service, shatters a mirror and gives up one of his two bodies.

  What is left for the private self when the public persona is stripped away? Without “honour,” according to the contentious dukes, “Men are but gilded loam or painted clay.” But what would a king be without his crown, without a name and a title? Once Richard has broken the mirror, he turns from his image to his inner self. Whereas monarchy depends on exterior show, inwardness is explored through the medium of words. Richard is by far the most inward-looking of Shakespeare’s kings. By focusing on the individual consciousness, considering Richard’s fate in psychological terms, Shakespeare neatly sidesteps the alarmingly destabilizing political consequences of the moment when a subject gives sentence on a king.

  “I had forgot myself. Am I not king?” In the very act of asking this question, Richard reveals that the answer is “no”: since a king has two bodies, he has the right to speak in the royal “we,” but here Richard is no more than an “I.” In speaking of himself he veers between “I,” “we,” and “he” (“What must the king do now? Must he submit?”). Inconsistent pronouns are the surest sign of the instability of his self.

  Richard speaks between a quarter and a third of the text; he soliloquizes frequently and at length. One of the key respects in which he and Bullingbrook function as dramatic opposites is that Bullingbrook never reveals his motivation and feelings in soliloquy: he is symbolically the man of action, whereas Richard is the man of feeling. Bullingbrook is defined by what he does; Richard anticipates Hamlet in defining himself through his obsessive talking about, and to, himself. “The play throughout is a history of the human mind,” observed Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a self-confessed Hamlet of real life. The American poet Robert Lowell developed the analogy between Coleridge and Richard II in a taut sonnet exploring “the constant overflow of imagination / proportioned to his dwindling will to act.”

  Soliloquy and rhetorical elaboration are forms of self-dramatization. Richard sustains himself through a bravura linguistic performance: “Let’s talk of graves …” He makes himself the object of his subjective musings: “ … Must he lose / The name of king?” He watches him
self losing his grip on his role: “Ay, no; no, ay, for I must nothing be.” And he becomes more and more aware that to be is also to act, that we are all role-players: “Thus play I in one prison many people, / And none contented” (“one prison” is the Folio text’s interesting variant on the original Quarto’s “one person”—“prison” nicely suggests both Richard’s confined location and the traditional idea of the body as prison of the soul, which is then released to eternity in death). He leaves the stage in the manner of “a well-graced actor.”

  Though the Folio text is entitled The Life and Death of King Richard the Second, the earlier Quarto edition was called The Tragedy of King Richard the Second. The structure of the drama answers to a very traditional idea of tragedy as a story in which a powerful figure falls from earthly prosperity and in so doing rises to greatness of soul. Pity for Richard is the prevailing tragic emotion in the closing scenes. “It seems to be the design of the poet to raise Richard to esteem in his fall, and consequently to interest the reader in his favour,” wrote Dr. Johnson. Note “the reader” there, not the spectator—this is a play that has been more admired on page than stage. Johnson continues: “He gives him only passive fortitude, the virtue of a confessor, rather than of a king. In his prosperity we saw him imperious and oppressive; but in his distress he is wise, patient, and pious.”

  By concentrating on the inner life of Richard, Shakespeare diminishes some of the major elements of the play that was his structural model, Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II. The flatterers Bushy, Bagot, and Green are given very small roles and the exclusion of the queen from the king’s affections is not fully developed. In Marlowe’s dramatization of the fall of a weak king and the rise of his rival, the minions—first Gaveston and then Spencer—are central not only to the politics but also to the sexuality of the play. They are explicitly the king’s lovers. The abused queen becomes a lead player in the rebellion against the king. Shakespeare’s Richard by contrast seems too self-absorbed to be powerfully driven by sexual desire. Coleridge spoke intriguingly of the character’s feminine friendism, but that is not quite a euphemism for homoerotic feeling.

  As the man who rises when Richard falls, Bullingbrook’s story remains unfinished. But Shakespeare anticipates the civil war that will wrack his reign. The role of Northumberland, who cooperates with Bullingbrook but will eventually turn against him, is greatly expanded from its seed in Holinshed’s Chronicles. Richard delivers a prophecy that “The time shall not be many hours of age / More than it is ere foul sin, gathering head, / Shall break into corruption” and predicts rightly that Northumberland will seek to pluck King Henry IV from his usurped throne. As he wrote these words, Shakespeare must have been thinking of how he was going to continue the story in another play. He was getting ready for a sequel: Henry IV Part I.

  ABOUT THE TEXT

  Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare’s classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can’t).

  But because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, editors also have to make decisions about the relative authority of the early printed editions. Half of the sum of his plays only appeared posthumously, in the elaborately produced First Folio text of 1623, the original “Complete Works” prepared for the press by Shakespeare’s fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else. The other half had appeared in print in his lifetime, in the more compact and cheaper form of “Quarto” editions, some of which reproduced good quality texts, others of which were to a greater or lesser degree garbled and error-strewn. In the case of a few plays there are hundreds of differences between the Quarto and Folio editions, some of them far from trivial.

  If you look at printers’ handbooks from the age of Shakespeare, you quickly discover that one of the first rules was that, whenever possible, compositors were recommended to set their type from existing printed books rather than manuscripts. This was the age before mechanical typesetting, where each individual letter had to be picked out by hand from the compositor’s case and placed on a stick (upside down and back to front) before being laid on the press. It was an age of murky rushlight and of manuscripts written in a secretary hand that had dozens of different, hard-to-decipher forms. Printers’ lives were a lot easier when they were reprinting existing books rather than struggling with handwritten copy. Easily the quickest way to have created the First Folio would have been simply to reprint those eighteen plays that had already appeared in Quarto and only work from manuscript on the other eighteen.

  But that is not what happened. Whenever Quartos were used, playhouse “promptbooks” were also consulted and stage directions copied in from them. And in the case of several major plays where a reasonably well-printed Quarto was available, the Folio printers were instructed to work from an alternative, playhouse-derived manuscript. This meant that the whole process of producing the first complete Shakespeare took months, even years, longer than it might have done. But for the men overseeing the project, John Hemings and Henry Condell, friends and fellow actors who had been remembered in Shakespeare’s will, the additional labor and cost were worth the effort for the sake of producing an edition that was close to the practice of the theater. They wanted all the plays in print so that people could, as they wrote in their prefatory address to the reader, “read him and again and again,” but they also wanted “the great variety of readers” to work from texts that were close to the theater life for which Shakespeare originally intended them. For this reason, the RSC Shakespeare, in both Complete Works and individual volumes, uses the Folio as base text wherever possible. Significant Quarto variants are, however, noted in the Textual Notes.

  Written and first performed in 1595 or 1596, Richard II was published in Quarto format in 1597 and reprinted twice in 1598. The printed text excluded a sequence of about 160 lines in which King Richard formally hands over his throne, inverting the sacred language of the coronation ceremony and smashing a mirror. Scholars usually assume that this omission was because the scene was too politically sensitive for print, but there is no evidence of active censorship. The idea that it must have been censored is an enduring misapprehension even among some distinguished Shakespeareans. The scene appeared as a “new addition” in the 1608 reprinting of the quarto and again, in a better quality text, deriving from the theater promptbook, in the 1623 Folio version of the play. Arguably, the sequence in which King Richard says, “With mine own tears I wash away my balm, / With mine own hands I give away my crown …” makes the play less subversive, turning a deposition into an abdication.

  This raises the possibility, generally neglected by scholars, that Shakespeare may have written it as an addition after the real-life drama of February 1601, in order to give the impression of a formal, stately handing over of power, as opposed to the presumption and hugger-mugger of the original version that was now tarred by association with the trial of Essex and his accomplices. Nor can we wholly rule out the possibility that, to freshen up the play and as a little treat for Sir Charles Percy and his friends in return for their forty shillings above the ordinary, Shakespeare dashed off the addition on the Friday and gave it to his actors to learn overnight, allowing them to rehearse it in the morning run-through before including it in the afternoon performance.

  Richard II, then, is a play that nearly all modern editors print in a hybrid text that never appeared in print in Shakespeare’s lifetime. They base the text
on the First Quarto of 1597, but insert into it the deposition (or abdication) scene that first appeared in print many years later. The Folio-based policy of the RSC edition means that we do not have to conflate different source texts in this way. The price for this choice is that our text prints the Folio’s watered-down oaths (typically “Heaven” instead of “God”) that were the result of a parliamentary act passed in 1606, whereby players were fined for blaspheming (i.e. mentioning the name of God) on stage. Modern producers wishing to restore the more robust oaths of the Quarto may reinsert them by consulting the list of variants that we include after the textual notes that follow the text.

  The following observations highlight various aspects of the editorial process and indicate conventions used in the text of this edition:

  Lists of Parts are supplied in the First Folio for only six plays, not including Richard II, so the list here is editorially supplied. Capitals indicate that part of the name which is used for speech headings in the script (thus “John of GAUNT, Duke of Lancaster, Richard’s uncle”).

  Locations are provided by the Folio for only two plays, not including Richard II. Eighteenth-century editors, working in an age of elaborately realistic stage sets, were the first to provide detailed locations. Given that Shakespeare wrote for a bare stage and often an imprecise sense of place, we have relegated locations to the explanatory notes at the foot of the page, where they are given at the beginning of each scene where the imaginary location is different from the one before.