Richard II

Critical Essays

Jeanne T. Newlin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317532347
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

Originally published in 1984. The four parts of this collection of articles, from 1601 to the 1970s, look at the historical and political dynamics of the play, the play in the theatre, the psychology of its characters, and its poetry and rhetoric. Bringing together the best that was written about Richard II, this volume represents the collective wisdom of Shakespeare scholars and provides the most insightful criticism in one place. An unpopular play for many years due to the perceived weak main character and the theme of deposition, the play later gained popularity and interest in its psychology and political investigation. The poetry in particular has garnered enthusiastic response and is mentioned in most of the pieces included here.

PART I

RICHARD II

The Historical and Political Dynamics

Queen Elizabeth I

Remarks to William Lambarde (1601)

I am Richard II, know ye not that?

. . . . . . . .

He that will forget God, will also forget his benefactors; this tragedy was played 40^tie times in open streets and houses.

John Dover Wilson

Introduction to Richard II (1939)

“The significance of Richard’s fall to the contemporaries of Shakespeare”

To the contemporaries of Shakespeare Richard was no ordinary man; and it is by failing to realize this that modern criticism, despite all its penetrating, and for the most part just, analysis of his human qualities, leaves every thoughtful reader and spectator of the drama baffled and dissatisfied. Richard was a king, and a good deal more. First of all he stood in the eyes of the later middle ages as the type and exemplar of royal martyrdom; of a king not slain in battle, not defeated and killed by a foreign adversary, not even deposed owing to weakness or tyranny in favor of his heir, but thrust from the throne in his may of youth by a mere usurper, under color of a process at law utterly illegal, and then foully murdered. One may catch something of this aspect of his tragedy by turning to the “form of prayer with fasting,” for “the day of the martyrdom of the Blessed King Charles I,” which was printed in the Book of Common Prayer until half-way through the nineteenth century,¹ or by remembering the passionate devotion which the memory of Mary Queen of Scots inspired until an even later date. Richard combined the personal attractiveness of Mary with the wrongs of Charles, and moreover belonged to a period when men were far more swayed by the glamor of kingship and the tendency to canonize those they admired than they have been during the last three centuries. Not that the admiration was universal; there were, as ever in such cases, two parties, the idolaters and the defamers. As long as the house of Lancaster, which triumphed in Richard’s fall, ruled the country, it was of course treasonable for Englishmen to take his side. But from the first on the Continent, where thought was free, the reading public, already rejoicing in Boccaccio’s most popular book, De Casibus Illustrium Virorum (1360–74), which Shakespeare’s Richard seems to be describing in the well-known lines:

For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground,

And tell sad stories of the death of kings—

How some have been deposed, some slain in war,

Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,

Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed;

All murdered, …

had found in Richard’s own “casus” a peculiar appeal; so much so indeed that no fewer than three different contemporary accounts of it, favorable to Richard, have come down to us in the French tongue, while yet a fourth of similar sympathies, though in Latin not French, reposes in the library of Gray’s Inn.² One of the French chronicles exists in some twenty or more MS. copies to be found in various continental libraries.

This widespread interest may, it is suggested, have been due in part to anti-English feeling among French patriots during the latter half of the Hundred Years’ War.³ But that the “sad story” was also valued for its own sake is proved by the persistence of its popularity, which, when the accession of the Tudors healed the dynastic breach, found voice in England itself, so that the tragedy of Richard appears, not it is true very sympathetically told, in The Mirror for Magistrates, 1559–63.⁴ This well-known book, an immense corpus of such “casus,” was a continuation and enlargement of Lydgate’s Falls of Princes, which in turn was itself an adaptation of Boccaccio’s original collection. Moreover, the most remarkable fact about the four original pro-Richard chronicles is that they already, as we shall see later, give utterance to that mystical conception of the martyred king which we find in Shakespeare, and compare his betrayal with that of Christ and his enemies with Pilate and Judas, much as the play itself does. Nor is it certain that they are not in this nearer the truth than the orthodox modern historian who has on the whole accepted the Lancastrian version of the revolution of 1399. The official story, embodied in the Parliament Roll, was being denounced by a scholar in 1824 as “a gross fabrication of Henry IV for purposes of state”;⁵ and a recent study of the evidence by Professor Galbraith and Miss Clarke comes to very much the same conclusion.⁶

Yet the fall of Richard fascinated the late medieval and Elizabethan world as much by its magnitude and its unaccountableness as by its pathos and the sacrilege that brought it to pass.

Down, down I come, like glist’ring Phaethon:

Wanting the manage of unruly jades,

are words which Shakespeare places in his mouth, and some critics have taken them as the keynote of the play. But though in their sun-imagery they express the splendor of the catastrophe, like that of Lucifer from the empyrean, they do not touch its mystery, of which all at that period who studied the young king’s career were conscious, and which is one of the main impressions that Shakespeare’s play still leaves upon our minds. This mystery was closely associated with the supposed workings of Fortune, a Roman deity which continued to exercise under Providence a potent influence over men’s thought during the middle ages, and was conceived of by Elizabethan England far more concretely than by the England of our own day, despite its daily race-meetings, its football pools and its almost universal habit of gambling. The symbol and attribute of Fortune was, of course, her wheel, which is hardly ever absent from any of the countless pictures and references to her in medieval art and literature. Shakespeare makes no mention of the wheel in Richard II, though he employs the less familiar figure of Fortune’s buckets in the deposition scene.⁷

His reticence, however, is part of his subtlety. For the wheel is constantly in his mind throughout the play. Indeed, it determines the play’s shape and structure, which gives us a complete inversion.⁸ The first act begins immediately after the death of the Duke of Gloucester, when, as Froissart notes, Richard was “hygh uppon the whele,”⁹ and exhibiting all the hybris and tyranny expected of persons in that position, while, at the same time, his opponent, Bolingbroke, is shown at the lowest point of his fortune, at the bottom. But from the beginning of Act II the wheel begins to turn mysteriously of itself, or rather by the action of Fortune. The will of the King seems paralyzed; he becomes an almost passive agent. Bolingbroke acts, and acts forcibly; yet he too appears to be borne upward by a power beyond his volition.

This last is an important point, since it rules out those indications of deep design which some subtle critics, following Coleridge, think they discover in the character of the usurper from the very beginning, but which I feel sure were not intended by Shakespeare. Circumstance drives Bolingbroke on from point to point: he takes what Fortune and Richard throw in his path. The attitude of the nobles toward him in II.iii shows that they regard him as a claimant to the throne, and by that time the larger horizon has begun to open out before him. But this is quite a different thing from entertaining deep designs. Bolingbroke is an opportunist, not a schemer.¹⁰ And when, the hand of Death upon him, he looks back over the events that had led to his accession, and solemnly declares:

Though then, God knows, I had no such intent,

But that necessity so bowed the state

That I and greatness were compelled to kiss,¹¹

the deep note of contrition proves the sincerity of the words. In fact Shakespeare followed Daniel, who himself accepted the judgment of the historians of his time upon this matter. As we shall see, Daniel considered that Bolingbroke

Was with occasion thrust into the crime,

for which Fortune was more responsible than the criminal, while the relations between the two cousins throughout the play are already defined, as a recent scholar has noted, in the following passage from Holinshed, which is itself borrowed from Hall:¹²

This suerlie is a verie notable example, and not vnwoorthie of all princes to be well weied, and diligentlie marked, that this Henrie duke of Lancaster should be thus called to the kingdome, and haue the helpe and assistance (almost) of all the whole realme, which perchance neuer thereof thought or yet dreamed; and that king Richard should thus be left desolate, void, and in despaire of all hope and comfort, in whom if there were anie offense, it ought rather to be imputed to the frailtie of wanton youth, than to the malice of his hart: but such is the deceiuable judgement of man, which not regarding things present with due consideration, thinketh euer that things to come shall haue good successe, with a pleasant & delitefull end. But in this deiecting of the one, & aduancing of the other, the prouidence of God is to be respected, & his secret will to be woondered at.¹³

The second great attraction, then, of the story of Richard of Bordeaux and Henry, Duke of Lancaster, for the men of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was that it afforded, in its spectacle of the “dejecting of the one and advancing of the other,” a perfect example of the mysterious action of Fortune, working of course under the inscrutable “providence of God,” according to the quasi-mechanical symbolism under which they conceived that action. And this in turn constituted one of the main appeals of Richard II for the spectators who first witnessed it. For, though the operations of Fortune were most evident and potent in the lives of the great, everything human was subject to them. It is a point which did not escape Pater, who has seen so much in this play. “His grief,” he writes of Richard, “becomes nothing less than a central expression of all that in the revolutions of Fortune’s wheel goes down in the world.”¹⁴ Shakespeare’s play was a mirror, not only for magistrates, but for every son of woman; and when on Shakespeare’s stage the “dejected” king gazed into the glass—incomparable symbol for that age!—what he saw there was the brittleness both of his own glory and of all earthly happiness.

In the third place, the reign of Richard II possessed a peculiar significance in the history of England, as the Elizabethans understood that history. In itself, and for the two protagonists who brought it to an end, a striking example of a turn of Fortune’s wheel, it marked the beginning of a much greater revolution in the story of the nation’s fortunes. Shakespeare and his contemporaries, rejoicing in the Tudor peace and looking back with horror to the period of civil strife, known as the Wars of the Roses, which preceded the accession of Henry VII, were haunted by fears of a return of such anarchy, and found its origin in the events of the last few years of Richard II’s reign. And rightly so; for the deposition and murder of Richard not only shocked the conscience of Christendom, they struck at the legal basis of the monarchical, that is to say the whole constitutional, system of England. As Professor Galbraith puts it, “The procedure of deposition as well as the act itself was a cause of the ‘disorder, horror, fear, and mutiny’ of the fifteenth century.”¹⁵

In King John Shakespeare had dealt, for the one and only time, with the question of the relations between this country and the Papacy, which was one of the two main problems of Tudor England. In Richard II, which I think followed immediately after, he now handles the other and, in Tudor eyes, still more important problem, the problem of government, or rather of the Governor or Prince. Writing on “the nature of Tudor despotism,” Neville Figgis, our chief authority on the history of the idea of kingship in England, remarks:

The exaltation of the royal authority was due to the need of a strong government. The crime of the Lancastrian dynasty had been, not that it was capricious o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Editor's Preface
• Introduction
• Bibliography
• Part I. Richard II: The Historical and Political Dynamics
• Part II. Richard II: The Theatre
• Part III. Richard II: The Psychology of its Characters
• Part IV. Richard II: Poetry and Rhetoric