Richard II: A Critical Reader

Michael Davies, Andrew Duxfield, Andrew Duxfield, Michael Davies

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350064560
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Arte dramático shakespeariano

Arden Early Modern Drama Guides offer students and academics practical and accessible introductions to the critical and performance contexts of key Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Contributions from leading international scholars give invaluable insight into the text by presenting a range of critical perspectives, making these books ideal companions for study and research. Key features include:
Essays on the play's critical and performance histories
A keynote chapter reviewing current research and recent criticism of the play
A selection of new essays by leading scholars
A survey of learning and teaching resources for both instructors and students This volume offers a thought-provoking guide to Shakespeare's Richard II, surveying its critical heritage and the ways in which scholars, critics, and historians have approached the play, from the 17th to the 21st century. It provides a detailed, up-to-date account of the play's rich performance history on stage and screen, looking closely at some major British productions, as well as a guide to learning and teaching resources and how these might be integrated into effective pedagogic strategies in the classroom. Presenting four new critical essays, this collection opens up fresh perspectives on this much-studied drama, including explorations of: the play's profound preoccupation with earth, ground and land; Shakespeare's engagement with early modern sermon culture, 'mockery' and religion; a complex network of intertextual and cultural references activated by Richard's famous address to the looking-glass; and the long-overlooked importance to this profoundly philosophical drama of that most material of things: money.

1

The Critical Backstory

Patrick Ashby

The critical history of Shakespeare’s Richard II has been characterized from the very beginning by a sensitivity to its political controversy as a play about the deposition and murder of a rightful though unpopular monarch and by fundamental questions of dramatic genre and historiography. While fidelity to chronicle narrative remained of secondary importance to the play’s ‘improvers’ and adaptors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for whom its tragic aspects held the greatest appeal, the question of whether Richard II should be regarded as a standalone tragedy or as an instalment in an extended sequence of historical dramas would go on to excite considerable debate from the eighteenth century onwards. Likewise, the remarkable formality of Richard II has long drawn attention to matters of textual structure, language and stagecraft, while the performative dimension of political power has inspired critics, particularly in the twentieth century, to provide a more nuanced context for Shakespeare’s modes of historiography in terms of the play’s representations of authority, subversion and gender and of the conservative and revolutionary narratives operating simultaneously within it.

Naturally, a brief survey of 400 years of criticism cannot hope to do justice to the many important contributors to our present understanding of Richard II. Due to the sheer range of viewpoints and the proliferation of interest in Shakespeare’s histories many significant voices are passed over, or given only the briefest of mentions. Nonetheless, the purpose of this critical backstory is to document the key discussions and debates that Shakespeare’s Richard II has provoked from its earliest appearances and which have continued to inform critical viewpoints until the start of the twenty-first century.

Early controversy: ‘I am Richard II’

Critics are generally agreed that Richard II was composed around 1595. Its formal lyricism marks it out as a relatively early piece and its imagery is concordant with that of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet, both dated approximately to the same period. The play is mentioned with approval by Francis Meres in his Palladis Tamia (1598), where it is given first place in a list of Shakespeare’s ‘most excellent’ tragedies.¹ It was sufficiently popular to go through five quartos before its appearance in the landmark 1623 First Folio, and early performances of Richard II are known to have held the attention of audiences beyond the London theatres.² Despite the apparent high regard in which the play was held, it is Richard II’s controversial association with the Essex uprising of 1601 which has constituted for critics the most compelling aspect of the play’s early reception. Proponents of the idea that Shakespeare and his associates were concerned about potentially seditious content in Richard II point to the fact that the most contentious scene in the play – the lines dramatizing Richard’s deposition (4.1.155–318) – was never printed in Queen Elizabeth’s lifetime.³

It is not clear that this wariness extended to performance, however, and on 7 February 1601, the eve of the Earl of Essex’s attempted coup, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were privately commissioned to stage at the Globe a play about Richard II – presumably Shakespeare’s – for allies of the Earl. In the wake of the botched rebellion, members of Shakespeare’s company, possibly including Shakespeare himself, were briefly imprisoned. Although they were spared further punishment, those who had commissioned the performance, notably Essex’s steward, Sir Gelly Meyrick, were put to death. Much has been made both of this performance and of the response by the Elizabethan authorities to a play which could be seen as endorsing the deposition of legitimate monarchs as an appropriate countermeasure to tyranny or injustice.⁴ The lawyer and historian John Hayward, whose history of The Life and Raigne of King Henry IIII (1599) was dedicated to Essex and shares its subject matter with Richard II, was also imprisoned.⁵ Tudor historiographical traditions frequently made of the past a storehouse of exemplary and cautionary narratives, intended to provide instructive commentary for present conditions. Elizabeth is reported to have been particularly sensitive to the transferability of history in this instance: ‘I am Richard II, know ye not that?’⁶

Whatever the potential implications of the play’s plot, Richard II’s language attracted admirers. With its lyrical qualities and its tendency towards a richly rhetorical and ‘conceited’ style, Richard II became a favourite of Elizabethan anthologies, including Englands Parnassus, compiled by Robert Allott, and John Bodenham’s Bel-vedére, or, The Garden of the Muses: both were published in 1600 and both quoted copiously from the play.⁷ Elegantly expressed excerpts could be collected, learned and paraphrased or quoted to demonstrate erudition. Charles I, whose defeat in the Civil War led, among other things, to an extended closure of the theatres, is one of those who echoed the phrasing of Richard II. In his final appearance before the Commons Commissioners on 27 January 1649, he warned that ‘Children, yet unborn’ would have cause to regret the sentence passed against him, borrowing this expression from the Bishop of Carlisle (4.1.322–3).⁸ Richard II had a political resonance and a linguistic power that could be appropriately transferred to alternative contexts.

The Restoration: ‘the worst colours of history’

Following the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, plays were performed in smaller, purpose-built indoor venues for the benefit of a fashionable, polite clientele. Pre-Civil War dramatic works, including those of Shakespeare, were dusted down and reshaped in order to suit them to the more refined sensibilities of the new audiences. The Restoration revisers offer valuable insights into the reception of Shakespeare in this period, and contribute some important criticism on Richard II.

The first direct critical commentary on the play is supplied by John Dryden in the preface to a 1679 reworking of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. He enthuses about York’s description of Richard’s sorry entrance into the city of London on the heels of the triumphant Bolingbroke (5.2.23–36), impressed with the evocative power of the passage: ‘so lively, and the words so moving, that I have scarce read any thing comparable to it, in any other language’.⁹ Soon afterwards, Nahum Tate prepared a new adaptation of Richard II for the stage. Given the course recent history had taken, there were obvious risks involved in reviving an old play whose central events included regime change and regicide. Tate took pains both to mitigate elements of the play which might have troubled the authorities and to tailor his drama to modern tastes. Like other Restoration revisers, he freely restructured the scenes, cutting, changing or reallocating lines where expedient. A significant hurdle was the degree to which Shakespeare’s Richard II followed its chronicle sources in portraying a king whose personal shortcomings are a pretext for his removal from the throne:

Our Shakespear in this Tragedy, bated none of his Characters an Ace of the Chronicle; he took care to shew ’em no worse Men than They were, but represents them never a jot better. … His King Richard Himself is painted in the worst colours of History, Dissolute, Unadviseable, devoted to Ease and Luxury.¹⁰

Shakespeare’s warts-and-all portrayal was a problem for two reasons. First, it disrupted the tragic aesthetic: how was an audience to be moved by Richard’s downfall? In revising the play, Tate laboured to rectify this, providing a rationale for his improvements: ‘My Design was to engage the pitty of the Audience for [Richard] in his Distresse, which I cou’d never have compass’d had I not before shewn him a Wise, Active and Just Prince.’¹¹ In contrast with Shakespeare’s Richard, Tate’s is an accomplished warrior and lover, his downfall precipitated by a combination of the flatterers who exploit Richard’s native magnanimity and Bolingbroke’s cynical machinations. Secondly, an unflattering portrait of a monarch could be regarded as having a seditious edge. Tate’s revision was vulnerable to political anxieties comparable to those that upset the Elizabethan authorities in 1601. Despite efforts to temper the impact of staged regicide, Tate’s revival of Richard II was quickly suppressed. A second production with more radical alterations – a new setting, new character names and a new title, The Sicilian Usurper – was again prohibited. In the prefatory epistle to the printed play, Tate gives vent to his frustrations: ‘[W]hy a history of those Times shou’d be supprest as a Libel upon Ours, is past my Understanding’, he writes, ‘’Tis sure the worst Complement that ever was made to a Prince.’¹²

Notwithstanding its fortunes on the stage, Tate’s alterations anticipate much subsequent criticism on Richard II. His warrior king foreshadows later concerns of character criticism, frequently with a subtext relating to gender. Meanwhile, Tate’s misgivings concerning Shakespeare’s close adherence to his chronicle sources raise enduring questions about genre: is Richard II a history, in the sense of being (within limits) a faithful rendition of past events, or is it a tragedy the impact of which is qualified by historical constraints?

The eighteenth century: ‘only interesting as they are true’

In 1719, Richard II was again revised for the stage. Like Tate, Lewis Theobald made radical alterations to the person of Richard presented by Shakespeare, cleaning him up for enhanced regality. Theobald also addresses the structural imperfections of Shakespeare’s play, whose ‘many scatter’d beauties’ are pearls inexpertly strung.¹³ Eager to bring ‘unity’ to the play, action is compressed to the period following Richard’s return from Ireland and the major events take place in the Tower of London. A dash of emotional piquancy is added, with the fabrication of a love interest for Aumerle, whose counter-conspiracy is amplified in importance. Aumerle and his lover, the fictitious Lady Percy, die ‘for the Cause’ at the play’s catastrophe.¹⁴ In the lengthy introduction to the printed edition of his play – mainly dry prose, the chief concern of which is to demonstrate Shakespeare’s learning in Greek (pace Ben Jonson) – Theobald justifies his ‘Innovations upon History and Shakespeare’ with no small degree of hauteur:

I think there may be reserv’d a discretionary Power of Variation, either for maintaining the Unity of Action, or supporting the Dignity of the Characters. If the little Criticks will be angry at This, I have Patience to weather their Ill Nature: I shall stand excus’d among the better judges.¹⁵

For Theobald, as for Tate, the dramatic shortcomings of Shakespeare’s play are a matter of genre, historical fact getting in the way of a good tragedy.

The uneasy esteem in which Shakespeare was held in this Augustan age is further evident in Alexander Pope’s 1725 edition of Shakespeare’s plays. As had others before him, Pope too saw special merit in isolated passages from Richard II. These Pope marked out with inverted commas. They include the description from the Duke of York which had captured Dryden’s attention, as well as other celebrated speeches, among them Richard’s famous oration on the ‘hollow crown’ (3.2.144–77) and the remarkable meditations in soliloquy that follow his incarceration (5.5.1–66). These are moments of extraordinary poetic power which Pope singles out for appreciation. This edition celebrated the editor’s favourite passages, then, but it also amputated others, less worthy of Shakespeare, from the body of the text, relegating them to footnotes. In his commentary, Pope would be scathing about the preponderance of rhyme in Richard II – the rhyming passages being ‘so much inferior to the rest of the writing’, he remarks, ‘that they appear to me of a different hand’ – and disapproving of Shakespeare’s compulsive wordplay and indecorous conceits.¹⁶ As a result, the text omits the dying John of Gaunt’s puns upon his own name (2.1.72–83) and discards Richard’s metaphor of the full and the empty buckets (4.1.184–9).

Pope’s kindness in sparing his readers the chore of making independent aesthetic judgements was not universally welcomed. In fact, his edition courted controversy from the moment of its publication. While Theobald responded with his excoriating account of Pope’s editorial shortcomings in Shakespeare Restored (1726), Edward Capell would likewise take the view that Pope’s radical interference with Shakespeare’s play was ‘conducted by no principle worthy a critick’s owning or capable of defence’.¹⁷ Several of the passages cut from Pope’s edition would go on to be considered of integral importance to Shakespeare’s play.¹⁸ Before this could occur, however, the question of Richard II’s relation to chronicle history would re-emerge as a central critical concern.

In the surprise third instalment of her two-volume study of Shakespeare’s sources (1754), Charlotte Lennox returned critical attention to the relationship between Richard II and Holinshed’s Chronicle. Lennox observed that Shakespeare’s borrowings included approximate transcription of whole speeches. She points out, for instance, the strong resemblance borne by the Bishop of Carlisle’s speech (‘Marry, God forbid!’, 4.1.115–50) to its equivalent in ‘Holingshed’, illustrating the similarity by printing them...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Series Introduction
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Timeline
• Introduction
• 1 The Critical Backstory
• 2 Richard II: A Performance History
• 3 The State of the Art
• 4 New Directions: ‘Blood and Soil’ – Richard II and the Politics of Landscape
• 5 New Directions: Richard II, Sermon Culture and the Language of Mockery
• 6 New Directions: Richard Through the Looking-Glass – The Intertextual Mirror in Richard II
• 7 New Directions: King Thing Nothing – Richard II and His Problems
• 8 Learning and Teaching Resources: Text, Context and Performance
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint