Richard II (18 page)

Lines 1–156:
Bullingbrook summons Bagot for questioning about the Duke of Gloucester’s death. Bagot accuses Aumerle of involvement, but he denies it and throws down his gage. Bullingbrook refuses to allow Bagot to accept the challenge, but Fitzwaters and Percy also accuse Aumerle and throw their gages down. Aumerle damns Fitzwaters, but takes up Percy’s gage. Surrey then steps in, accusing Fitzwaters of complicity with Aumerle, and challenges him. Fitzwaters throws down a gage in return, claiming that the banished Mowbray implicated Aumerle in the plot. Aumerle is forced to borrow a gage to throw down in response to this. This sequence reflects
the complicated nature of the court’s politics. Bullingbrook commands that Mowbray be returned from banishment, but learns that he is dead.

York arrives from “plume-plucked” Richard with the message that he is yielding his throne to Bullingbrook, who accepts, but Carlisle intervenes, insisting that Richard is king by divine right, and that if Bullingbrook accepts the crown, there will be civil war, and that the “blood of English shall manure the ground / And future ages groan for his foul act,” echoing Gaunt’s prophecies against Richard in Act 2 Scene 1. Northumberland arrests Carlisle for treason and Bullingbrook summons Richard to come and surrender publicly. Bullingbrook’s desire to “proceed / Without suspicion” contrasts with the secrecy that surrounded Richard’s court.

Lines 157–330:
Richard arrives, comparing himself to Christ betrayed by Judas. His declaration, “God save the king, although I be not he. / And yet, amen, if heaven do think him me,” emphasizes the confusion over the nature of kingship: whether “king” is merely a title, or an innate, God-given identity. This question of what denotes a “king” is emphasized as Richard offers his crown (the external symbol of his role) to Bullingbrook. As he does so, he uses the image of a mirror, saying: “on this side my hand, on that side thine.” Bullingbrook asks if Richard is “contented” to “resign the crown.” Richard’s uncertainty is clear, but he eventually formally relinquishes the crown and scepter as well as all “pomp and majesty” together with his “manors, rents” and “revenues,” in a reverse ceremony of coronation. Richard presents a pitiful figure, but when Northumberland demands that he read a confession of his “grievous crimes” against his country, and thus acknowledge that he is “worthily deposed,” he refuses, arguing that none of them are innocent. He asks for a mirror and, when it is brought, examines his own face. He claims that the glass “flatters” him like his followers, and throws it to the ground, where it is “cracked in an hundred shivers,” symbolizing the fragmentation of his identity. He asks to be allowed to leave, and Bullingbrook has him “conveyed” to the Tower, before designating the following Wednesday for his own coronation. The Abbot, Carlisle, and Aumerle begin to plot against Bullingbrook.

The queen waits on the route to the Tower, so that she may see Richard. Resigned to “grim Necessity,” he urges her to join a convent in France. The queen hates to see him “Transformed and weakened” and reminds him that even “the lion dying … wounds the earth,” an ironic echo of Richard’s own image of himself in Act 1 Scene 1. Northumberland brings news that Bullingbrook has changed his mind: Richard is to go to Pomfret Castle. The queen is to be sent to France. Richard warns Northumberland that he and Bullingbrook will eventually turn against each other. His says goodbye to the queen in a tender, personal exchange that reveals a different, more sympathetic, side to his character.

Distressed, York tells his duchess about the contrast between the arrival in London of Richard and Bullingbrook. He describes how the crowds “Threw dust and rubbish” on Richard’s head. Bullingbrook, however, rode on a “fiery steed” while crowds cheered him. In a moment of meta-theater, York compares the two men to actors, one leaving the stage while the audience are “idly bent on him that enters next.” Aumerle arrives and York reminds the duchess that their son is now called “Rutland,” having been stripped of his title for loyalty to Richard, although York himself has pledged Aumerle’s “fealty to the new-made king.” However, he finds a letter concealed by his son that shows he is involved in a conspiracy to kill Bullingbrook. He prepares to ride to tell the new king, despite his wife’s pleas that Aumerle is their only son. York leaves, and the duchess tells Aumerle that he must reach the king first and beg for pardon.

Bullingbrook is worrying about his own dissolute, “unthrifty son,” Prince Henry, when he is interrupted by Aumerle. He begs to see Bullingbrook alone, kneels, and demands to be pardoned before he will either rise or speak. York arrives, shouting to Bullingbrook that
he has “a traitor” in his presence. Aumerle assures Bullingbrook that he has nothing to fear, but York gives him the letter incriminating his son. Emphasizing the rising thematic importance of father–son relationships, Bullingbrook comments that York is a “loyal father of a treacherous son,” whose lineage is tainted like a “muddy” stream from an “immaculate” fountain. The Duchess of York arrives, calling for admission to the king’s presence. She kneels and begs for her son’s life, but is mirrored by York, who kneels and pleads against her. Eventually, Bullingbrook pardons Aumerle, but orders the execution of his fellow conspirators.

Believing that Bullingbrook wishes him to kill Richard, Exton heads to Pomfret.

Alone in prison, Richard delivers a metaphysical soliloquy as he seeks to counter his loneliness by creating thoughts with which to “people the world,” imagining them as the “children” of his brain and soul. He perceives that his body is the “prison” for his soul and acknowledges the fragmented nature of his identity, commenting that “Thus play I in one prison many people.” A former groom, still loyal, visits him and tells Richard how Bullingbrook rode his favorite horse to his coronation, a final image of betrayal. The keeper brings Richard’s food, but under Exton’s orders, refuses to taste it for him. Richard beats the keeper and Exton and his servants rush in, armed. Richard kills both servants but is struck down by Exton. Commending his soul to heaven, he dies. Exton recognizes Richard’s “valour” and, already regretting his actions, goes to tell Bullingbrook.

The new king learns of the fate of the various conspirators. Carlisle is brought before him and is ordered to “Choose out some secret place” and remain there. Exton arrives, bearing the coffin of Richard
and claiming that he acted on Bullingbrook’s instructions. In ambiguous language, which echoes that surrounding Gloucester’s death at the beginning of the play, Bullingbrook admits that he wished Richard dead, but neither denies nor confirms that he ordered his death: “I hate the murd’rer, love him murderèd.” He banishes Exton, comparing him to “Cain,” reflecting his own references to Abel in Act 1 Scene 1 and reinforcing the sense of the cyclical nature of historical events. He vows to mourn for Richard and to undertake a penitential “voyage to the Holy Land,” and the play ends with this image of the future, reminding the audience of its place within a wider historical narrative.

The best way to understand a Shakespeare play is to see it or ideally to participate in it. By examining a range of productions, we may gain a sense of the extraordinary variety of approaches and interpretations that are possible—a variety that gives Shakespeare his unique capacity to be reinvented and made “our contemporary” four centuries after his death.

We begin with a brief overview of the play’s theatrical and cinematic life, offering historical perspectives on how it has been performed. We then analyze in more detail a series of productions staged over the last half-century by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The sense of dialogue between productions that can only occur when a company is dedicated to the revival and investigation of the Shakespeare canon over a long period, together with the uniquely comprehensive archival resource of promptbooks, program notes, reviews, and interviews held on behalf of the RSC at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, allows an “RSC stage history” to become a crucible in which the chemistry of the play can be explored.

We then go to the horse’s mouth. Modern theater is dominated by the figure of the director. He or she must hold together the whole play, whereas the actor must concentrate on his or her part. The director’s viewpoint is therefore especially valuable. Shakespeare’s plasticity is wonderfully revealed when we hear the directors of two highly successful productions answering the same questions in very different ways. And in a play where the central character so dominates the dialogue, it is fitting that we also hear the voice of an actor who has played him. We offer the especially interesting angle of that actor being Fiona Shaw, a woman playing a man (an inversion of the condition of the original Shakespearean stage upon which men played women).

Tim Carroll describes a moment during his 2003 original-practices production (i.e. an attempt to reproduce the techniques of the Elizabethan theater) of
Richard II
at Shakespeare’s Globe in which, as John of Gaunt “talked about the betrayal of the country he loved, he made the audience for a while the whole of England. It was not a very comfortable experience.”
¹
Questioning, provoking, accusing:
Richard II
has, for four centuries, been confronting its audiences with difficult questions and challenges that, even in its own time, led to its becoming perhaps the most dangerous of all Shakespeare’s plays to reach the stage, as shown by the performance specially commissioned by the followers of the Earl of Essex in February 1601, discussed in the introduction, above.

Significantly, the scene depicting Richard’s deposition was not included in any printed version of the play until the Fourth Quarto of 1608, implying that this scene may not have been performed during Elizabeth’s reign.

The play would first have been performed at The Theatre, with the 1601 revival taking place at the Globe. The play itself presents staging requirements that suggest full use of the different levels of these large open-air amphitheaters, such as the entrance of Richard and his attendants on the walls of Flint Castle (Act 3 Scene 3). Richard Burbage undoubtedly played the title character, though other casting details are only conjectural. There is no obvious part for the company clown, although a long-standing stage tradition turns the sober gardener of Act 3 Scene 4 into a comic part.

While there may have been some continuity of casting into
Henry IV Part I
, there are no records of the history plays being performed in sequence until Frank Benson’s “Week of Kings” at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1901. Perhaps more interestingly, the play with the earliest connection to
Richard II
is
Hamlet
: records of the East India Company ship
Dragon
show that the ship’s crew performed the play off the coast of Sierra Leone on September 30, 1607 for an audience of Portuguese visitors, a few days after one of the first recorded performances of
Hamlet
.

Unsurprisingly, in the immediate wake of the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, it would have been dangerously inappropriate to attempt a revival of
Richard II
in its Shakespearean form, the political climate still being too sensitive to tolerate even a distant depiction of regicide. Nahum Tate attempted to get around the problem through geography, resituating the play in Sicily with the title
The Sicilian Usurper
in December 1680. The play lasted for two performances before being banned, and an attempt the following month to revive the play as
The Tyrant of Sicily
met a similar fate. Despite Tate’s claims that “My Design was to engage the pitty of the Audience for him in his Distresses” and that he shows his King Oswald “Preferring the Good of his Subjects to his own private Pleasure,”
²
the plot still resonated too nearly with recent events. The political power of
Richard II
, even in adapted form, continued to render the play dangerous.

This bias against the play continued into the eighteenth century. Only two productions of
Richard II
are recorded in London during the century:
³
an adaptation by Lewis Theobald in 1719 and John Rich’s production of the original at Covent Garden in 1738–39. Theobald’s Preface to this “Orphan Child of
Shakespear
” sets out his agenda:

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,