Richard II

by William Shakespeare

  Peymann: Richard’s sexuality is not in the foreground in Shakespeare’s play—in contrast to Marlowe’s Edward II, which is specifically focused on the emancipation of and discrimination against a homosexual. The struggle for the realization of his love for men is a central theme in Marlowe, whereas the supposed homosexuality of Shakespeare’s King Richard II is rather an invention of literary criticism. Of course sexual ambivalence is an underlying theme in the Shakespearean human cosmos—evident also in his Sonnets. And it is obvious that King Richard feels happier in the male company of his courtiers than in the daily routine of his marriage. And—there is no heir to the throne. But gay?—No! Incidentally, there is also a tradition—similar to that in Hamlet—of casting a female actor in the title role. Fiona Shaw did a fantastic job of this a couple of years ago at the National Theatre in London. Although this is a tempting interpretation, it doesn’t interest me as a director. The sad goodbye kisses between King Richard and his wife Isabel—he on his way to the Tower, she fleeing back to France—those show intimacy and love.

  Boyd: Jonathan Slinger’s Richard loved the camp splendor of court ceremony and “dressing up” and at times resembled Elizabeth I in her prime.

  There was an implied hierarchy in his harem of supporters whereby Nick Asbury’s Bushy was reconciled to being sexually sidelined, Forbes Masson’s Bagot was not, and Anthony Schuster’s Green was the young man of the moment. Isabella eventually won his deepest affection by loving him unconditionally through both her humiliation and his.

  And his kingliness? He has a strong investment in the idea of the sacredness of monarchy and of the king having two bodies, one representing his personal self and the other his kingly embodiment of the state. Is it hard to put these very medieval ideas across to a modern audience?

  Peymann: Richard has two souls: his personal ego and the divinely appointed body of the King of England. Here the individual—there the politician. That represents a very contemporary phenomenon, doesn’t it? Today’s politicians also distinguish between person and office. And their credibility suffers from this schizophrenia.

  Boyd: The king’s body is closely associated with the land, and our stage had two arms, two legs, a huge helmeted head, and a torso which was ripped open often in our Histories’ cycle.

  Richard began our production at the head of an elaborate body of court ritual which rendered vivid his “unearthly” status. Paradoxically, this was when he was at his most “worldly” in the play: modern, Machiavellian, and sensualist. Only when he shed the trappings of divine right did he discover his true divinity as a human and therefore as a king. Richard’s spiritual authority dated in our production from the “cleansing” shower of dust or sand thrown upon him by the crowd. No makeup, no wig, no magnificent gown, just a man mortified under God’s gaze and ours.

  Jonathan Slinger began our production stepping gracefully over the body of the murdered Duke of Gloucester, played by Chuk Iwuji. Jonathan, playing Richard III, had murdered Chuk three and a half hours earlier as the sainted Henry VI; a character modeled consciously on Edward the Confessor, to whom people still pray at his shrine at the heart of Westminster Abbey. Jonathan ended Richard II with his blood spread over the stage in the same arc as Chuk’s had been spread by him in Henry VI Part III.

  The central scene, when the crown passes from Richard to Bullingbrook, is usually referred to as the “deposition” scene, but doesn’t it in some respects seem more like an abdication?

  Peymann: Bullingbrook forces Richard to abdicate. But Richard exploits this situation. He acts out a scene in front of the entire Parliament. He becomes an actor, using refinement and wit to turn his tragedy into a public victory over Bullingbrook. In the “mirror scene” he casts himself as the victim and publicly scorns Bullingbrook, leaving him speechless.

  7. Michael Boyd production: “Richard’s spiritual authority dated in our production from the ‘cleansing’ shower of dust or sand thrown upon him.”

  Boyd: Richard states publicly and clearly that he is being not just deposed, but “usurped,” and responds to Bullingbrook’s direct question “Are you contented to resign the crown?” with the ferocious ambiguity of “Ay, no; no, ay, for I must nothing be: / Therefore no ‘no,’ for I resign to thee.” Given that “I,” “Ay,” “eye,” and “aye” (for ever) all sound identical, this reply could be read as “No.” To the last, he calls himself “a true king.”

  And what about the development of Richard’s language: the poetry is very formal at moments such as the one where he inverts the language of the coronation ceremony, but at other times—especially toward the end—it’s much more personal and fragmented, isn’t it?

  Peymann: Richard II plays with all linguistic devices. He deftly juggles with courtly rituals and thereby questions their validity. He scorns all linguistic clichés. In the course of his political swansong his mental and linguistic ability to differentiate is increased. As so often in Shakespeare, he becomes more and more human. In the catastrophe he gains our sympathy. The translation—and the version used in our production—is by the significant German dramatist, poet, and translator Thomas Brasch (1945–2001). It sticks closely to the original and thereby stands in strong contrast to the Shakespeare image of the brothers Schlegel/Tieck and of Baudissin, which was heavily influenced by German Romanticism of the eighteenth century. Brasch’s language is very poetic, full of comedy, direct and obscene. It is very “Shakespearean.”

  The language throughout is highly lyrical, heightened, poetic, isn’t it? There’s no prose at all: even the gardeners speak in elevated (and quite allegorical) verse! That’s a far cry from the world of Eastcheap and Falstaff that will follow in the Henry IV plays, and indeed from the rough-edged commoner’s voice of Jack Cade in Henry VI. Does this make Richard II somehow stand apart from the other history plays?

  Peymann: Similar to the gravedigger scene in Hamlet, the gardener scene in Richard II fuses comedy, grandeur, and political polemics. The linguistic unity of Shakespeare’s Richard II distinguishes it from the other history plays. It is in fact closer to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. To put it bluntly: Richard II is a Hamlet come to power. That is an essential characteristic of this masterwork—which is unfortunately performed far too rarely. Similar to Hamlet, Shakespeare’s Richard II is way ahead of its time. He endows the title characters with a psychological modernity that the contemporary modern psychodrama would only be able to show several centuries later.

  Boyd: The language of Richard II is more refined and “exquisite” than the other history plays. This is partly a question of milieu: we barely ever leave the world of the court, and even the gardeners are gardeners to the Duke of York and Queen Isabella.

  This is also a particular court and a play that is dominated by an intelligent and witty man who has cultivated a conscious courtly high style in those around him. The language of Richard II is designed to rise to metaphysics, to capture fine distinctions of thought on time, divinity, optics, music, and constitutional law.

  It is even more potently a language of exquisite equivocation, with the refined vocabulary and subtle grammar that are necessary to tread the highwire over danger, to conceal one’s true intentions, and avoid being condemned for perjury. It’s a language equipped to walk on thin ice, or tiptoe through a minefield.

  The first half of Act 4 Scene 1 is such a wonderful release for the audience as the language turns to direct abuse and mines explode all round the place.

  Could we even say that it is a tragedy (the downfall of one man) more than a history play (the story of a nation)?

  Peymann: In no other Shakespeare play are there more characters who cry or grow pale than in Richard II. The psychological richness of the characters—even going as far as self-analysis—gives this play such a modern character. Richard II is much more the tragedy of an individual than merely a station in the great carousel of power of the English kings.

  Boyd: Richard II the character does earn tragic status, and we are privy to his ins
ight and revelations as he falls.

  Shakespeare’s history plays are not just the story, but the tragedy (or downfall) of the nation, felt every bit as presently by the author and the audience, as the fate of Richard himself.

  How much sympathy can we have for Bullingbrook?

  Peymann: Through the injustice Bullingbrook experiences—banishment, emigration, and loss of his birthright—he evokes sympathy and understanding in an audience. Over the course of the play our perspective of Bullingbrook becomes more critical. Like so many fighters for justice and protesters against arbitrary rule, Bullingbrook leads a personal war, which becomes a civil war and eventually turns him into a criminal. It’s the eternal struggle for power! Bullingbrook, too, must kill to stay at the top.

  Boyd: If Shakespeare characterized the slaying of Richard II as the original Plantagenet “fratricide” in the Henry VI/Richard III quartet, he has become more circumspect by the time he writes his next cycle: Bullingbrook is no straightforward Cain, and Richard sure as hell is no Abel.

  The “original sin” of the histories is revealed in Richard II as pre-dating Richard’s death. Now it has become Richard’s sanctioned murder of his uncle, Gloucester. There are echoes of Elizabeth’s equivocation over her sanctioning of Mary Stuart’s execution.

  Henry has our strong sympathy as a vigorous and unjustly exiled seeker-of-the-truth. He loses this sympathy when he, as Richard had done before him, makes an offstage request for the assassination of his chief threat. Shakespeare has a long, slow punishment in store for Bullingbrook in the two Henry IV plays. God will only seem to be appeased at Agincourt, and even then the Chorus has to warn us (remind us) that worse is yet to come.

  And York, the turncoat?

  Peymann: York is an opportunist, turning to whoever happens to be the most powerful person at any given moment. Beginning as a follower and supporter of Richard, he becomes one of Bullingbrook’s men. In our production York even takes on the task of murdering the king. He carries out this job eagerly himself. Our production ends in a pitiless slaughtering of all of Richard’s followers and Richard himself. York becomes an accomplice of the new King Henry IV, alias Bullingbrook. That is the logical career progression from opportunist to henchman of the new dictatorship. A butcher from a family of Nazi-killers in a white-tiled, bloody slaughterhouse.

  Boyd: If any one character encompasses the “story of a nation,” it is Edmund, Duke of York. He is shown tormented on the rack between a deep loyalty to the old dynastic certainties, and an equal repugnance toward the destructive tyranny of Richard. The closing movement of the play, where Edmund’s attempts to maintain his old belief system in the new world of Bullingbrook lead him to betray his own son against his nature, is a brilliant portrait of the human cost of the Reformation on buckled English lives in Shakespeare’s time.

  What’s going on in that very curious scene with Aumerle near the end?

  Peymann: The central thought of this scene, in which Aumerle begs forgiveness, is “grace.” The absurdity of this scene is more akin to the farces of Eugene Ionesco and Feydeau than to Shakespeare’s history plays. Forgiveness and grace—the highest virtues of regal power which Bullingbrook, the new King Henry IV, must now learn. Grace and forgiveness: does this perhaps hint at the recurring speculation that Shakespeare was a Jesuit scholar and a secret Catholic? We don’t know.

  So, finally, how much does Richard change in the course of his journey?

  Peymann: Through his fall the human side of Richard becomes visible—there was someone living in the crown who hid behind the mask of king. And as we come to see this person, he gains our sympathy. Henry IV’s eulogy next to the bloody corpse of the king moves us: “March sadly after: grace my mourning here, / In weeping after this untimely bier.”

  Boyd: Richard never quite loses his arrogance. Shakespeare is rarely judgmental but does reserve a special room in purgatory for those who think themselves “wise” as Richard refers to himself as late as 5.5.63. He has perforce learned humility in other respects, and the self-knowledge that he has “wasted time.” The humanity and the simplicity of his parting with Isabella: “hand from hand, my love, and heart from heart,” are the most convincing symptoms of real change.

  PLAYING RICHARD: AN INTERVIEW WITH FIONA SHAW

  Fiona Shaw was born in Cork, Ireland, in 1958. She studied at RADA and has extensive experience with the National Theatre, as well as credits for a diverse range of films including My Left Foot (1989) and more recently a recurring role in the Harry Potter series. In the theater she has regularly collaborated with the director Deborah Warner, achieving great success in a variety of roles. Recently the pair revived their highly acclaimed production of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, first performed in New York in 1996. Fiona has won numerous awards for her acting and was awarded an Officier des Arts et Lettres in France in 2000 and an honorary CBE in the 2001 New Year’s Honors. She talks her about her performance as Richard II at the National Theatre in London in 1995, in a production again directed by Warner, which was also filmed for the BBC.

  Richard is traditionally described as a “weak” king, but that doesn’t seem a very rewarding place for an actor to start, does it?

  At the beginning of the play Richard seems more of a spoiled king than a weak king. He uses his power to banish Bullingbrook in the first act, which results in the world tumbling down on his head. His weakness lies in his abuse of power. He has none of the evenness that John of Gaunt describes in the beautiful “sceptred isle” speech. The play is about his journey to wisdom.

  The play is closely related to Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, in which the king has explicitly gay relationships. And the great critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw in Richard what he called “a kind of feminine friendism,” whatever that means. Did you explore questions of the king’s sexuality and effeminacy?

  Well, certainly the gender of the actress playing Richard meant that in our case we were obliquely sideswiping the thorny issue of Richard’s sexuality. In historical terms Richard is said to have written the first cookbook, and he was also a king who prided himself on an England full of peace. As we know to our detriment, strong governments prefer war. My playing Richard did mean that I was free from using energy on the issue of effeminacy. And certainly I played the passionate affection for Bullingbrook, which was freed by the fact I was female so I could indulge the physicality of their affection; though it may have heightened the homoeroticism in the minds of the audience. What interested us was the way in which an intimate childhood friendship like Bullingbrook’s and Richard’s turned into a power battle later where neither party can win because both are fundamentally sympathetic to the other. I always felt Richard was both released in handing Bullingbrook the crown, the power reverting to the stronger member of the duo, as well as furious with himself in his famous “Ay, no; no, ay, for I must nothing be.” There are very complex feelings at play in this section where love and revulsion meet.

  And his kingliness? He has a strong investment in the idea of the sacredness of monarchy and of the king having two bodies, one representing his personal self and the other his kingly embodiment of the state. Is it hard to put these very medieval ideas across to a modern audience?

  Again, being female meant that there was an iconoclastic element in tiptoeing into the area of “kingship” as opposed to “queenship.” Richard speaks from the battlements with great fluency about the divine right of kings, which became his only protection against an insurgent group. His vulnerability and need to name God as the top of the pyramid in which he was second says a lot about how frail these notions are. The king is the servant of the will of the people as much as the people serve the king. There was a spectacular reply to this moment implicitly when the royal family reluctantly gathered for Princess Diana’s funeral. The gift of kingship does lie with the people.

  The central scene, when the crown passes from Richard to Bullingbrook, is usually referred to as the “deposition” scene, but, in the playing, d
id it seem more like an abdication?

  The deposition scene is one of the greatest scenes ever written. Theatrically the audience has begun to turn its allegiance to Richard as he appears poor and a prisoner, broken from the previous “Down, down I come, like glist’ring Phaethon.” He doesn’t really abdicate because he asks Bullingbrook first to take up the crown and, finally, with his intellectually accurate contortions, he crowns the thieving cousin. But always on the edge of a dialectical ambiguity: “ ‘God save King Henry,’ unkinged Richard says.”

  And what about the development of Richard’s language: the poetry is very formal at moments such as the one where he inverts the language of the coronation ceremony, but at other times—especially toward the end—it’s much more personal and fragmented, isn’t it?

  The whole play is entirely in verse, which gives the impression that the world of the play is held in a more formal and perhaps more innocent time. There is no free prose, no breakages of line; it has a metronome, as if it is one long poem. Richard’s language improves from the moment he returns from Ireland with the beautiful speech, “let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings.” It is as if, when his wit meets sorrow, something beautiful is minted. By the time we meet him in the prison he has the gentle “aria”: “I have been studying how to compare / This prison where I live unto the world.” His fluency has the motor of a search rather than triumph, he uses his phenomenal mind to say something about the state of being; far too late for him, but not for us hearing it. We are privileged because we learn his lesson:

  … But whate’er I am,

  Nor I nor any man that but man is

  With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased

  With being nothing.…

  A very particular language question: what did you make of his shifts between the royal “we” and the personal “I”?