First, Richard II was Chaucer’s king for nearly all of that poet’s career(s), and Richard’s uncle, John of Gaunt, was Chaucer’s patron, friend, and brother-in-law. Shakespeare loves Chaucer (how can one not?), and this play is filled with the … absence of Chaucer. Although Chaucer is never mentioned even, it seems, obliquely, Shakespeare infuses this play with his spirit (and the word “pilgrimage”). For the real story of Richard II and his deposition by the Henry IV regime, read Terry Jones’ Who Murdered Chaucer?
Richard II is a stylized tragedy of a young eloquent king, perhaps “hopelessly miscast for the role of king” (Goddard, I 149), betrayed by supporters, compelled into resigning the crown, humiliated, imprisoned, and murdered. It would have been awkwardly topical at the time, concerned with issues of what it means to be king and the plight of a country weakly governed. Queen “Elizabeth was sometimes accused of being over-influenced by favourites, and for this reason was compared with Richard II” (Wells 134). Richard’s haughtiness and involvement in the dark dealings may also relate to Elizabeth: “Her own complicity in the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1587 was masked by a show of political indifference” (Garber 239). When Elizabeth passed the age of breeding, the succession became an even more tense concern. And in any case, Elizabeth was the great-great-great-great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt (Asimov 262).
Tellingly, the abdication (or deposition) scene does not appear in the first several quarto editions, so the touchy bit is not in print during Elizabeth’s lifetime. Perhaps this play is most famous for being performed on the eve of the Essex “Rebellion” in February 1601. And it is the one referred to when Elizabeth exasperatedly remarked to William Lambarde, “I am Richard the Second, know ye not that?” (Ogburn and Ogburn 429; Garber 239; Anderson 331; Farina 111). But if originating much earlier, as is likely, the play may have functioned as a more pointed warning to Elizabeth than the Henry VI plays had been (Ogburn and Ogburn 429).
After an anonymous 1597 quarto edition came a 1598 edition designated as “By William Shake-speare” — with the hyphen (Farina 110). E.T. Clark dates the composition at 1582 (Clark 491), during a period in which Oxford felt compelled to warn Elizabeth of the conspiracy of the Howards (her kinsmen) and that anti-Protestant faction (Clark 493), “lest she, too, might lose her throne and, perhaps, her life” (Clark 501): this despite his own banishment from her court at the time. Shakespeare leaves out any mention of Robert de Vere, the 9th Earl of Oxford, who, banished by Parliament, “was King Richard’s best friend and worst influence” (Farina 112; cf. Ogburn and Ogburn 438-439).
“It is a play in which remarkably little happens; there are no battle scenes, no severed heads, only one scene of violence” (Wells 133); a tournament is called off, and it’s said that one cannot even pinpoint the moment of Richard’s yielding the crown to Bolingbroke. So even though action and place are compressed ahistorically, very little happens in terms of drama. Instead the focus is on the poetry. This is the most lyrical of the history plays (like Romeo and Juliet in the tragedies and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the comedies). This play sports the highest average length of speech and is probably the last to be written entirely in verse. Richard is eloquent — but what does that have to do with being king?
Richard is tragically passive. He’s better at being a metaphysical poet, “so that his kingship diminishes even as his poetry improves” (Bloom 249). But even his poetry lacks range, typically addressing only his own miseries. Richard is an inadequate human being who probably never really wins our sympathy entirely. He is unforgivably callous about his uncle’s death, so we have trouble suffering with him later, but he may win our reluctant aesthetic admiration. Late in the play when he can no longer give public speeches, he meditates on his true self and becomes a bit of a tragic hero with a new toughness emerging from his identity having been stripped away.
Richard the Second, Act by Act
Richard the Second Intro
Further Resources
Filmography
Richard II. Starring Ian McKellan. Prospect Theatre Company, 1971. The entire play is here.
Richard II. Starring Derek Jacobi, John Gielgud. BBC, 1978.
The Hollow Crown. Starring Ben Whishaw, Patrick Stewart, David Suchet. Neal Street Productions, 2012. John of Gaunt’s famous speech is here.
Best Editions
Bevington, David, ed. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. 6th ed. Pearson Education Inc., 2009. 740-783.
Forker, Charles R., eds. Richard the Second. The Arden Shakespeare. 3rd Series. 2002.
Furness, Horace Howard, ed. The Life and Death of Richard the Second. A New Variorum Edition. Vol. 27. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1955.
Oxfordian Resources
Clark, Eva Turner. Hidden Allusions in Shakespeare’s Plays. 3rd ed. by Ruth Loyd Miller. Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1974. 491-507.
Farina, William. De Vere as Shakespeare: An Oxfordian Reading of the Canon. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2006. 110-114.
Gilvary, Kevin. Dating Shakespeare’s Play’s. Tunbridge Wells, UK: Parapress, 2010. 211-222.
Ogburn, Charlton. The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Myth & The Reality. 2nd ed. McLean, VA: EPM Publications, Inc., 1992.
Ogburn, Dorothy and Charlton Ogburn. This Star of England. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, Pub., 1952. Esp. 428-443.
And Other General Resources
Goddard, Harold C. The Meaning of Shakespeare. Vol. 1. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1951. 148-160.
Jones, Terry. Who Murdered Chaucer? NY: Thomas Dunne Books, 2003. The Monty Python alum is a medieval expert with a disturbing and dark theory as to what happened to Chaucer, the supreme Ricardian poet whom Shakespeare weirdly never mentions.
Smidt, Kristian. Unconformities in Shakespeare’s History Plays. NJ: Humanities Press, 1982. 86-102. Smidt finds numerous time discrepancies suggesting significant revision, compression, and rearrangement of scenes.
Shakespeare Authorship Organizations
The Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship. Browse, get hooked, become a member.
The De Vere Society. Our Oxfordian friends and collaborators across the pond.
The Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable. We consider all possible authors behind the “Shakespeare” name.