Richard II (play)

• 1. Introduction

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  Richard II, Shakespeare's play about the last two years of a king's life, opens with a moment of supreme royal authority that contains within it the seeds of its own undoing. King Richard sits on his throne in full state, asked to settle a quarrel between two of his most powerful nobles. By the time that quarrel is resolved, Richard will have made a series of choices so fatally miscalculated that one of his own enemies correctly predicts his eventual ruin right there on stage. What kind of king destroys himself so completely, and why does Shakespeare make him so hard to stop watching? The play raises questions that go beyond the throne of medieval England: what separates a legitimate ruler from a usurper? And what happens when a king believes himself chosen by God but governs as though accountable to no one?

• 2. A Play Born in 1595

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  The earliest recorded performance of Richard II took place privately on the 9th of December 1595, at Canon Row, the house of Sir Edward Hoby. It was entered into the Register of the Stationers Company on the 29th of August 1597 by the bookseller Andrew Wise, who published the first quarto that same year, printed by Valentine Simmes. The second and third quartos both followed in 1598 - the only time a Shakespeare play was printed in three editions within two years. Further quartos appeared in 1608 and 1615, and the play was eventually collected into the First Folio in 1623. That 1623 Folio classified it as a history play, but the earlier 1597 quarto called it a tragedy, under the title The Tragedie of King Richard the Second. The question of genre was not merely academic: the first three quartos, printed in 1597 and 1598, all lack the deposition scene entirely. The fourth quarto, published in 1608, includes a shortened version of that scene. The fuller text appears only in the Folio. The traditional explanation is censorship, perhaps by the playhouse itself or by the Master of the Revels, Edmund Tylney, since depicting a sitting monarch being stripped of the crown was politically charged. No external evidence confirms this, though the 1608 title page claims the play was presented "as it hath been publicly acted", which might suggest earlier censorship had by then relaxed.

• 3. Borrowed History

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  Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande was Shakespeare's primary source for Richard II, as it was for most of his chronicle histories. The publication of the second edition of Holinshed in 1587 provides the earliest possible date for the play's composition. Shakespeare appears to have also consulted Edward Hall's The Union of the Two Illustrious Families of Lancaster and York, and scholars have supposed he was familiar with Samuel Daniel's poem on the civil wars. Jean Froissart's Chroniques, a fourteenth-century account of the Hundred Years' War translated into English by John Bouchier around 1524, includes a sympathetic account of Richard's deposition and was likely another source. An anonymous play called Thomas of Woodstock, treating the events immediately before Shakespeare's play begins, exists in a single incomplete manuscript at the British Museum. Its closeness to Shakespeare's text, along with its anonymity, has led some scholars to attribute all or part of it to Shakespeare himself, though many critics view it instead as a secondary influence. Shakespeare may also have drawn on Christopher Marlowe's Edward II. Critics have noted structural similarities and parallel themes between the two plays, particularly the tension between a king's theoretical absolute power and the practical restraints imposed on him by his subjects. Charles Lamb wrote that the reluctant anguish of abdication in Edward II "furnished hints which Shakespeare scarce improved in his Richard the Second".

• 4. One Language, Two Kings

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  Richard II is written entirely in verse, one of only four Shakespeare plays to contain no prose at all. The others are King John and the first and third parts of Henry VI. This formal constraint is not incidental. Shakespeare normally signals social class by having upper-class characters speak in poetry and lower-class characters in prose; in Richard II that distinction is unavailable, so the contrast between the two rival kings is carried by the style of their verse. Richard speaks in elaborate, flowery, metaphorical language, using the sun as a recurring symbol of his own kingly status. Bolingbroke, equally noble, uses a plain and direct idiom. The play contains an extended comparison of England with a garden in Act III, Scene iv, and compares the reigning king to a lion or to the sun in Act IV. Literary critic Hugh M. Richmond noted that Richard's beliefs about divine kingship align with a medieval worldview, while Bolingbroke represents a more modern idea of statecraft - one in which intellect and political skill, not bloodline alone, qualify a man to rule. Critic John R. Elliott Jr. argued that this play is unusual among the history plays because it carries an explicit political purpose: the dramatisation of two competing theories of what kingship actually is. Richard's obsession with symbols - his crown, his anointing balm, his sceptre - stands in direct contrast to his neglect of actual governance, and it is this gap between ritual and reality that Elliott saw as the engine of Richard's fall.

• 5. The King's Two Bodies

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  Ernst Kantorowicz, in his analysis of medieval political theology The King's Two Bodies, describes a concept central to understanding Richard II: medieval kings were understood to contain two distinct bodies, a body natural and a body politic. The body natural is mortal and subject to ordinary human weakness. The body politic is a spiritual entity that cannot be diminished by disease or age. These two bodies form one indivisible unit, with the body politic dominant. Many critics agree that Richard II traces the disintegration of this unity across three key scenes. At the coast of Wales, Richard returns from Ireland and kisses the soil of England, a gesture of kingly attachment that still holds symbolic weight. By the time the action reaches Flint Castle, his military position has collapsed, his followers have joined Bolingbroke's army, and he has surrendered his jewels. The unity of the two bodies begins to fracture here, and Richard shifts into increasingly poetic and symbolic language - as though rhetoric can compensate for power he no longer possesses. At Westminster, it is the Bishop of Carlisle, not Richard himself, who defends the divine theory of kingship. Richard, by now mentally unstable, strips himself of his crown, sceptre, and anointing balm in a public ceremony. The mirror scene is the final rupture: Richard examines his face in a mirror, then shatters it, severing himself from both his past and his present as king. Critic J. Dover Wilson observed that Richard's double nature as man and martyr runs through the entire play, and that because royal blood was spilled, England suffers civil war for two generations after his death.

• 6. Essex, Elizabeth, and a Dangerous Play

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  On the 7th of February 1601, supporters of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, paid the Chamberlain's Men forty shillings above their ordinary rate to stage Richard II at the Globe Theatre, the eve of their planned armed rebellion. Among them were Charles and Joscelyn Percy, younger brothers of the Earl of Northumberland. The actor Augustine Phillips reported this arrangement at Essex's trial. The players had considered the play too old and "out of use" to draw a paying audience on its own; eleven of Essex's supporters attended the Saturday performance. This was not the first time the play had attracted official attention. John Hayward had dedicated his historical work The First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie IV to Essex, and when Essex was arrested, Hayward was already imprisoned. His book was suspected of inciting the deposition of Queen Elizabeth. Lawyers investigating Hayward made the connection between his text and Shakespeare's play, reading the weak Richard II as an analogue for Elizabeth and Bolingbroke's seizure of the throne as a template for Essex's ambitions. Samuel Schoenbaum later noted dryly that Hayward claimed to have written his work before Shakespeare's play existed - describing his defence as dependent on "a hypothetical manuscript to resolve an awkwardness of chronology". Elizabeth herself was aware of the political charge. A well-known anecdote, recorded though its accuracy is disputed, holds that in August 1601 she told her archivist William Lambarde, "I am Richard II, know ye not that?" The Chamberlain's Men do not appear to have been punished for performing the play. They were commanded to perform it for the Queen on Shrove Tuesday in 1601, the day before Essex's execution.

• 7. Four Centuries on Stage

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  In 1680, Nahum Tate adapted the play at Drury Lane, renaming it The Sicilian Usurper and relocating the action to mask what were perceived as pointed political implications for the Stuart court. Tate tried to temper the critique by highlighting Richard's noble qualities and downplaying his failings. Neither change saved it: the production was "silenc'd on the third day", as Tate wrote in his own preface. Lewis Theobald staged a more successful adaptation in 1719 at Lincoln's Inn Fields, and Shakespeare's original text was revived at Covent Garden in 1738. The role of Richard was transformed in the twentieth century by John Gielgud, who first played it at the Old Vic Theatre in 1929, then returned to it in 1937 and again in 1953 in a performance eventually considered the definitive interpretation. Maurice Evans first played Richard at the Old Vic in 1934, caused a sensation on Broadway in 1937, revived the role in New York in 1940, and then filmed it for the Hallmark Hall of Fame in 1954. Paul Scofield, who played the role at the Old Vic in 1952, was considered the defining Richard of more modern times in England. In the 1968-1970 seasons of the Prospect Theatre Company, Ian McKellen made a breakthrough as Richard opposite Timothy West as Bolingbroke; the production toured Britain and Europe, appeared at the Edinburgh Festival in 1969, and was broadcast on BBC TV in 1970. In 1973 at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Ian Richardson and Richard Pasco alternated the roles of Richard and Bolingbroke in a John Barton production that was still being cited as a benchmark nearly fifty years later. The 1978 BBC television version starring Derek Jacobi as Richard - with Gielgud appearing as John of Gaunt - remains available on DVD. David Tennant played the lead for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2013, reprising the role at BAM in April 2016 for his U.S. stage debut. In June 2024, it was announced that Jonathan Bailey would play the lead at the Bridge Theatre in London beginning in February 2025 for a thirteen-week run.