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, t
his 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 Jurgen 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
On the late twentieth century stage, a fascination with Richard's performativity was emerging. David William's production of 1972 marked the first performance of any of Shakespeare's history plays by the new National Theatre Company. Despite one view that "this Richard was not only unmoving, he was fatally uninteresting,"27 others found Ronald Pickup's performance enlightening: "Surrounded by ceremonies and flattery he has complete belief in his authority. But as soon as the externals start crumbling, so does his inner conviction."28
Increasingly, the play was produced as part of a sequence. David Giles' 1978 televised Richard II, one of the strongest productions in the BBC Shakespeare series, featured Derek Jacobi in the title role supported by Jon Finch (Bullingbrook) and John Gielgud (Gaunt), while the casting of Charles Gray and Dame Wendy Hiller as the Yorks "brings alive a whole subplot"29 often previously cut in performance. The camerawork prioritized actors over spectacle, exploiting the possibilities of television for Richard's soliloquy of Act 5 Scene 5, which was shot in several sections, drawing out his ruminations over an extended period of incarceration. The English Shakespeare Company's The Wars of the Roses (1986-89), a seven-play adaptation of the two tetralogies which was also later filmed for television, began with a Richard II which adapted a "Regency style, Beau Brummell dandyism"30 that director Michael Bogdanov confessed would probably not have been their first choice for a stand-alone production. In such a large context, "the victim of production was invariably Richard II ... the guinea pig that opened the sequence,"31 and both Bogdanov and his Richard, Michael Pennington, expressed disappointment in the result.
Internationally, interest in the formal aspects of the play and its pageantry have continued to stimulate directorial interest, though often unsuccessfully. At the Stratford Ontario Festival in Canada, Stuart Burge's 1964 production ran over four hours when it debuted, losing the favor of many critics. However, it continued a twentieth-century trend to paint Northumberland as the piece's key mover, with Leo Cicery's Bullingbrook "a genuinely bewildered man caught up in a situation which he could not comprehend."32 Zoe Caldwell's 1979 production was felt by many to be overly gimmick-led, with three different actors for both Richard and Bullingbrook, no doubt in an attempt to replicate the success of the RSC's Pasco/Richardson pairing six years earlier. Critics were bored, however, by the pageant-like blocking of all three versions, with a central staircase creating "a rigid formality on the playing space that is reflected, with a vengeance, in the performances."33 More successful was Ariane Mnouchkine's production in 1982 for Theatre du Soleil in Vincennes. Inspired by Japanese kabuki theater, the production ran for over five hours, and drew critical praise for its precise choreography through which "the formality of the play's constructions is revealed. The argument develops like a terrific algebra."34
In the last two decades, two major London productions have shown that the play has lost none of its power to cause controversy. In 1995, Deborah Warner's production for the National Theatre caused a stir with its casting of Fiona Shaw in the title role. Shaw's performance deeply divided critics, prompting Paul Taylor to mount a defense in the Independent:
Fiona Shaw's dazzlingly discomforting impersonation of Richard is so integral to the thinking behind Deborah Warner's gripping, lucidly felt production that it would only make sense to like neither or both ... her portrayal of the monarch as an anguishedly insecure, clowningly exhibitionist man-child--mirrors more than subliminally the psychological confusions caused by the identity crisis of a King's dual nature.35
As Shewring argues, "it is not the fact that the King is played by a woman that is significant; it is that the presentation of kingship is, in itself, an elaborate theatrical charade."36
Trevor Nunn's 2005 production for the Old Vic brought the play right up to date in a modern-dress production that used video to display footage of the decline of Britain, emphasizing both the impact of Richard's ineffectual rule and his isolation from those effects, "the split between inner and outer, public and private."37 Starring Kevin Spacey in the lead role, combining authority with "a really terrifying temper,"38 it was nevertheless the play's contemporary resonances that once again commanded critical attention. The play's cynical commentary on the interaction between the public and the ruling classes was made uncomfortably clear in Genevieve O'Reilly's Queen Isabel, "interrupted in the middle of a Diana-style photo session,"39 and Charles Spencer compared Spacey's "self-dramatising" Richard and Ben Miles' "humourless, sharp-suited Bolingbroke" to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.40 While perhaps not as directly dangerous as the Star Chamber of 1601 once deemed it to be, it is clear that Richard II remains a timelessly political tool for directors wishing to hold up Richard's own mirror to today's leaders.
AT THE RSC
Shakespeare's history is always about the "now" of Elizabethan England.41
Queen Elizabeth I: "I am Richard II, know ye not that?"42
Richard II is a play that can stand alone, but directors also position it first in an epic cycle, as the catalyst for the bloody action that Shakespeare unfolds in his dramatic sweep of English history. In an interesting departure, Michael Boyd's The Histories (2008) produced Richard II, not only as first in a chronological ordering of history but in a distinctly separate cycle, based on the order of their composition. The first cycle begins with Shakespeare's earlier (written) plays, Henry VI Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, and Richard III, and charts the playwright's developing relationship with the politics of Elizabethan England, culminating in his dissection of kingship in Richard II, the strategies of king-making in Henry IV Part 1 and Part 2, and the disturbingly modern account of Henry V's decision to wage war with France through an appeal to the value of an English "nation." The second complete cycle of eight plays charts "over a century of turbulent English history, from the usurpation of Richard II and Henry V's glorious battle at Agincourt, to the bloody chaos of the Wars of the Roses and their brutal climax on Bosworth Field."43
For actors and directors there are distinct challenges in what Stuart Hampton-Reeves refers to as "the totalising notions of 'tetralogy thinking,' " or seeing the plays as episodes in a national epic.44 The yoking together of four or eight plays can exert a particular pressure on the chronologically first play, Richard II, to begin a political history of England, worked through the performed cycle. Anthony Quayle's The Cycle of the Historical Plays 1951 at the Memorial Theatre in Stratford marked the Festival of Britain by treating the four plays, beginning with Richard II, as "one great play."45 Richard (Michael Redgrave) was to be viewed as "the last of the old line of mediaeval kings, the last ruler by hereditary right, unbroken, undisputed since
the Conqueror," but the "true hero" of "the whole play" was to be King Henry V, "the ideal King: brave, warlike, generous, just" (played by Richard Burton). Michael Hattaway argues that Tanya Moiseiwitsch's sets, fashioned in an "Elizabethan style," created "a kind of illusion that turned politics back into romanticized history."46 This "history" owed much to the spirit of E. M. W. Tillyard's Shakespeare's History Plays (1944), which offers an account of the working through of divine providence, from the sinful deposition of Richard II to the expiation of a curse on the House of Lancaster. Such an approach in the theater risks idealizing Richard and pushing the play's politics back into an older world of medieval kingship to be contrasted with the more modern and secular kingship, portrayed in Henry V. This treatment downplays the modern political resonance of Richard II for Shakespeare and his Elizabethan theatergoers in the context of an impending succession crisis.
It is possible to perform the plays as a historical cycle but to attend carefully to the differences within each play in order to resist the temptation of trying to make seamless connections that totalize the experience for an audience. Where the play is performed on its own, there may be an opportunity to place more emphasis on personal aspects of kingship, particularly the idea of the Divine Right of Kings, rather than political history. However, the political realities of the Elizabethan context are clearly illustrated in the Queen's comment, "I am Richard II, know ye not that?" She was apparently responding some months later to an attempt by the Essex conspirators to stage a play, about King Richard's deposition, on the eve of their rebellion in 1601.
Peter Hall, John Barton, and Clifford Williams (1964)
Modern power politics lies at the heart of the landmark production of seven plays in 1964, directed by Peter Hall, John Barton, and Clifford Williams. The production celebrated the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare's birth at a moment of political uncertainties just two years after the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Jan Kott wrote in Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964) that "the great abdication scene in Richard II, the scene omitted in all editions published in the Queen Elizabeth's lifetime," revealed "the working of the Grand Mechanism."47 He explained this was "the very moment when power was changing hands."
Richard II (Folger Shakespeare Library) Page 14
