Richard II

by William Shakespeare

  ACT 5 SCENE 3

  Bullingbrook is worrying about his own dissolute, “unthrifty son,” Prince Henry, when he is interrupted by Aumerle. He begs to see Bullingbrook alone, kneels, and demands to be pardoned before he will either rise or speak. York arrives, shouting to Bullingbrook that he has “a traitor” in his presence. Aumerle assures Bullingbrook that he has nothing to fear, but York gives him the letter incriminating his son. Emphasizing the rising thematic importance of father–son relationships, Bullingbrook comments that York is a “loyal father of a treacherous son,” whose lineage is tainted like a “muddy” stream from an “immaculate” fountain. The Duchess of York arrives, calling for admission to the king’s presence. She kneels and begs for her son’s life, but is mirrored by York, who kneels and pleads against her. Eventually, Bullingbrook pardons Aumerle, but orders the execution of his fellow conspirators.

  ACT 5 SCENE 4

  Believing that Bullingbrook wishes him to kill Richard, Exton heads to Pomfret.

  ACT 5 SCENE 5

  Alone in prison, Richard delivers a metaphysical soliloquy as he seeks to counter his loneliness by creating thoughts with which to “people the world,” imagining them as the “children” of his brain and soul. He perceives that his body is the “prison” for his soul and acknowledges the fragmented nature of his identity, commenting that “Thus play I in one prison many people.” A former groom, still loyal, visits him and tells Richard how Bullingbrook rode his favorite horse to his coronation, a final image of betrayal. The keeper brings Richard’s food, but under Exton’s orders, refuses to taste it for him. Richard beats the keeper and Exton and his servants rush in, armed. Richard kills both servants but is struck down by Exton. Commending his soul to heaven, he dies. Exton recognizes Richard’s “valour” and, already regretting his actions, goes to tell Bullingbrook.

  ACT 5 SCENE 6

  The new king learns of the fate of the various conspirators. Carlisle is brought before him and is ordered to “Choose out some secret place” and remain there. Exton arrives, bearing the coffin of Richard and claiming that he acted on Bullingbrook’s instructions. In ambiguous language, which echoes that surrounding Gloucester’s death at the beginning of the play, Bullingbrook admits that he wished Richard dead, but neither denies nor confirms that he ordered his death: “I hate the murd’rer, love him murderèd.” He banishes Exton, comparing him to “Cain,” reflecting his own references to Abel in Act 1 Scene 1 and reinforcing the sense of the cyclical nature of historical events. He vows to mourn for Richard and to undertake a penitential “voyage to the Holy Land,” and the play ends with this image of the future, reminding the audience of its place within a wider historical narrative.

  RICHARD II IN PERFORMANCE:

  THE RSC AND BEYOND

  The best way to understand a Shakespeare play is to see it or ideally to participate in it. By examining a range of productions, we may gain a sense of the extraordinary variety of approaches and interpretations that are possible—a variety that gives Shakespeare his unique capacity to be reinvented and made “our contemporary” four centuries after his death.

  We begin with a brief overview of the play’s theatrical and cinematic life, offering historical perspectives on how it has been performed. We then analyze in more detail a series of productions staged over the last half-century by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The sense of dialogue between productions that can only occur when a company is dedicated to the revival and investigation of the Shakespeare canon over a long period, together with the uniquely comprehensive archival resource of promptbooks, program notes, reviews, and interviews held on behalf of the RSC at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, allows an “RSC stage history” to become a crucible in which the chemistry of the play can be explored.

  We then go to the horse’s mouth. Modern theater is dominated by the figure of the director. He or she must hold together the whole play, whereas the actor must concentrate on his or her part. The director’s viewpoint is therefore especially valuable. Shakespeare’s plasticity is wonderfully revealed when we hear the directors of two highly successful productions answering the same questions in very different ways. And in a play where the central character so dominates the dialogue, it is fitting that we also hear the voice of an actor who has played him. We offer the especially interesting angle of that actor being Fiona Shaw, a woman playing a man (an inversion of the condition of the original Shakespearean stage upon which men played women).

  FOUR CENTURIES OF RICHARD II: AN OVERVIEW

  Tim Carroll describes a moment during his 2003 original-practices production (i.e. an attempt to reproduce the techniques of the Elizabethan theater) of Richard II at Shakespeare’s Globe in which, as John of Gaunt “talked about the betrayal of the country he loved, he made the audience for a while the whole of England. It was not a very comfortable experience.”1 Questioning, provoking, accusing: Richard II has, for four centuries, been confronting its audiences with difficult questions and challenges that, even in its own time, led to its becoming perhaps the most dangerous of all Shakespeare’s plays to reach the stage, as shown by the performance specially commissioned by the followers of the Earl of Essex in February 1601, discussed in the introduction, above.

  Significantly, the scene depicting Richard’s deposition was not included in any printed version of the play until the Fourth Quarto of 1608, implying that this scene may not have been performed during Elizabeth’s reign.

  The play would first have been performed at The Theatre, with the 1601 revival taking place at the Globe. The play itself presents staging requirements that suggest full use of the different levels of these large open-air amphitheaters, such as the entrance of Richard and his attendants on the walls of Flint Castle (Act 3 Scene 3). Richard Burbage undoubtedly played the title character, though other casting details are only conjectural. There is no obvious part for the company clown, although a long-standing stage tradition turns the sober gardener of Act 3 Scene 4 into a comic part.

  While there may have been some continuity of casting into Henry IV Part I, there are no records of the history plays being performed in sequence until Frank Benson’s “Week of Kings” at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1901. Perhaps more interestingly, the play with the earliest connection to Richard II is Hamlet: records of the East India Company ship Dragon show that the ship’s crew performed the play off the coast of Sierra Leone on September 30, 1607 for an audience of Portuguese visitors, a few days after one of the first recorded performances of Hamlet.

  Unsurprisingly, in the immediate wake of the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, it would have been dangerously inappropriate to attempt a revival of Richard II in its Shakespearean form, the political climate still being too sensitive to tolerate even a distant depiction of regicide. Nahum Tate attempted to get around the problem through geography, resituating the play in Sicily with the title The Sicilian Usurper in December 1680. The play lasted for two performances before being banned, and an attempt the following month to revive the play as The Tyrant of Sicily met a similar fate. Despite Tate’s claims that “My Design was to engage the pitty of the Audience for him in his Distresses” and that he shows his King Oswald “Preferring the Good of his Subjects to his own private Pleasure,”2 the plot still resonated too nearly with recent events. The political power of Richard II, even in adapted form, continued to render the play dangerous.

  This bias against the play continued into the eighteenth century. Only two productions of Richard II are recorded in London during the century:3 an adaptation by Lewis Theobald in 1719 and John Rich’s production of the original at Covent Garden in 1738–39. Theobald’s Preface to this “Orphan Child of Shakespear” sets out his agenda:

  The many scatter’d Beauties, which I have long admir’d in His Life and Death of K. Richard the II, induced me to think they would have stronger Charms, if they were interwoven in a regular Fable.4

  Interestingly, Theobald’s most powerful intervention was to bolster the
character of Aumerle, turning him into a sentimental tragic hero who ultimately dies for his king. The play’s finale becomes a bloodbath in which Richard is killed by Exton but survives long enough to tell Bullingbrook that “all thy Fears with me ly bury’d: / Unrival’d, wear the crown”5 before crying out for Isabella, who witnesses his death. Lady Piercy, another of Theobald’s additions, commits suicide for Aumerle’s sake, and even York dies of a broken heart upon seeing Richard’s body. The buildup of tragic pathos is symptomatic of the period’s tastes, and the play was evidently briefly popular: a 1720 promptbook survives for performances at Dublin’s Smock Alley Theatre.

  Rich’s production was the first since the Restoration to revive Shakespeare’s text in something nearing a complete form. The testimony of Thomas Davies suggests political intent behind the production, with one particular addition greeted rapturously by the audience,

  who applied almost every line that was spoken to the occurrences of the time, and to the measures and character of the ministry … when Ross said “The earl of Wiltshire hath the state in farm” it was immediately applied to Walpole, with the loudest shouts and huzzas I ever heard.6

  During the previous decade, the prime minister, Robert Walpole, had been attacked viciously on stage and in the press for perceived attempts to censor both. The London audience, experienced in recognizing satirical portraits, evidently responded well to the employment of Shakespeare’s text in the continuing war of words. Over a century after the Essex rebellion, Richard II continued to be read by spectators as a commentary on the ruling classes.

  While failing to establish the play as a regular repertory piece in their own century, both Theobald’s and Rich’s versions of the play laid the groundwork for future revivals. Most influentially, Rich’s production foregrounded spectacle. Sketches from the promptbook show highly formal compositions for the lists and deposition scenes, supporting Davies’ assertion that “the ancient ceremony which belonged to the single combat was very accurately observed.”7 This tendency toward spectacle and historical accuracy would continue into the next century.

  The first major production of the nineteenth century was an adaptation by Richard Wroughton conceived as a star vehicle for Edmund Kean, performed at Drury Lane in 1814–15, and which later served as the basis for the first North American production of the play in 1819.8 Kean’s performance, predictably, was the center of attention, and William Hazlitt notes the general consensus that “It has been supposed that this is his finest part,” though he goes on to give his personal opinion that this is “a total misrepresentation.”9 A natural successor to Theobald’s adaptation, Wroughton aimed for similar sentimental and pathetic effect, but chose to do so through increased focus on Richard himself; thus, where Theobald had expanded the Aumerle conspiracy, here it is cut altogether. In editing his play, Wroughton “makes his hero more decisive, less prone to lament his condition, less culpable and less pettily vicious.”10 Isabella is again present in the final scene, and her death concludes the action, with King Lear’s dying speeches transferred to her lips.

  The success of Kean’s production established the play’s potential as a star vehicle, and the move toward pathos and spectacle additionally served to distance it from the troubling political appropriations of previous centuries. The stage was set for a full-blown Victorian spectacular, which Kean’s son Charles provided in 1857 at London’s Princess’s Theatre. Theodor Fontane’s description of one moment shows the production’s scale:

  Between the third and fourth acts is an interlude devised by Kean: Bolingbroke is treated like a god as he enters London. Behind him is Richard, greeted by the people first with silence, then with muttering and curses … the representation (for good or ill) is a masterpiece. It is no exaggeration to say that the whole effect is that of a part of a street brought onstage, with the genuine London life and bustle.11

  Kean’s interest in antiquarianism and full-scale reproduction led to jokes that even the playbills were printed on “fly-leaves from old folio editions of the History of England.”12 In 1902, Herbert Beerbohm Tree followed in Kean’s footsteps with the inclusion of a triumphant entry into London for Richard on a real horse.

  Following Kean, the play fell again into obscurity until Frank Benson’s revival in 1896 for the Stratford-upon-Avon festival. While the sets of Benson’s production followed in the grand tradition of the Victorian spectacular, the production was more notable for remaking Richard II himself as a star part:

  1. Charles Kean’s large-scale antiquarian production at the London Princess’s Theatre, 1857.

  Mr Benson’s Richard is a figure not to be looked upon without commiseration and pity. The Nemesis of his own folly has brought him so utterly low, his fantastic nature is so acutely sensitive, his will so impotent, his dejection so complete, that sympathy turns against the more manly Bolingbroke, and perhaps does him wrong.13

  As well as establishing the role of Richard II as a key showcase for major actors, the production’s revival in 1901 as part of Stratford’s “Week of Kings” reestablished the play as part of a historical sequence. Benson’s performances in the role continued until 1915.

  John Gielgud dominated both role and play on the early twentieth-century London stage. From his first performance, directed by Harcourt Williams at the Old Vic in 1929, “Gielgud focused on superb delivery of verse, perhaps emphasising Richard as pathetic, and certainly a man unfitted for the demanding duties of a ruler.”14 However, other aspects of the production impressed less. The Times remarked that “many of the parts, and many far above the rank of the grooms and servants, are played badly and, what is worse, listlessly,” singling out Brember Wills’ Gaunt: “let us have stillness sometimes: let us have firmness and splendour, not the nervous, bubbling senility of a dotard.”15 Gielgud performed and directed at the Queen’s in 1937, and in 1953 directed Paul Scofield at the Lyric Hammersmith, in a performance “strangely different from the others we have seen … the actor presents to us a mask of celestial composure in which two half-closed eyes glitter with inscrutable menace.”16

  If Gielgud dominated the play in London, in Stratford-upon-Avon it was the property of W. Bridges Adams. Between 1920 and 1930 Adams moved through a succession of Richards, culminating in George Hayes (1929). Adams’ medieval costumes were singled out for praise, and the combination of modest historical spectacle with strong ensemble performances contributed to the growing appreciation of the play. Hayes continued to play Richard for Tyrone Guthrie (1933, “an inherently dull play”17), B. Iden Payne (1941, with Richard’s “uncanny dignity”18 foremost) and Robert Atkins (1944), in which a “vision scene”19 at Richard’s death was particularly praised, the dungeon wall dissolving behind the body as a choir sang to reveal Bullingbrook as the new king.

  Hal Burton’s direction of Robert Harris in 1947 was praised for reviving the quality of the artist in Richard that Benson had emphasized, although some reviewers still worked from Victorian criteria: “It achieves distinction because of its dignity, its pageantry, its beauty of outline and of detail and its admirably controlled lighting.”20 Far more influential was Michael Redgrave’s performance in 1951 under the direction of Anthony Quayle, who directed the entire second tetralogy as part of Stratford’s contribution to the Festival of Britain. Redgrave’s performance in the role, remembered by Laurence Olivier as an “out-and-out pussy queer,”21 was greeted with mixed reviews by critics unable—or unwilling—to acknowledge the character’s homosexuality, and confused by a mixture of lyricism and cruelty. Alan Dent suggested that “we found ourselves watching the excellent Bolingbroke (Harry Andrews), instead of the King, for in this Bolingbroke’s eyes lurked an infinity of contemptuous patience while he heeded Richard’s elaborately fanciful speeches.”22 The challenges of Richard II here shifted from the politics of state to the politics of sexuality, with lasting effect; by the time Ian McKellen performed both Richard II and Edward II to great acclaim for the Prospect Theatre Company in 1968–69, critics read
a homosexual agenda into the play even though, as Margaret Shewring suggests, this was not actually intended by the company.23

  2. A queenly king? Michael Redgrave (left) with Harry Andrews as Bullingbrook in Anthony Quayle’s 1951 production.

  Despite its early African performance, Richard II is not among the most successful international exports in the Shakespearean canon. An exception is Germany, where the play was first staged in the 1770s, and where its potential as political commentary has been fully utilized. The fiercely anti-Nazi Jürgen Fehling directed the play in 1939 at Berlin’s Staatstheater, using abstract sets that acted to separate the profligate Richard and his court from the distant problems of their people. Claus Peymann directed a “death-obsessed”24 Beckettian production in Braunschweig in 1969, which emphasized “Richard’s reflections on man’s existential exposure and separateness.”25 Three decades later, Peymann directed a far more political interpretation of the play for the Berliner Ensemble, which toured to the RSC Complete Works Festival in 2006. Achim Freyer’s starkly white abstract set became a blank canvas on which history wrote its impact in dirt and blood, most strikingly as invisible hands hurled piles of mud at Richard upon his return to London. While Michael Maertens’ “charismatic” Richard was praised, the production allowed other parts to shine: Bullingbrook was a “repressed bureaucrat [who] was more comfortable with his bowler hat than with the crown,” while Northumberland became “the true Machiavel of this piece.”26