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I: Introduction

With Richard II, we begin to study Shakespeare's history plays. The histories comprise between a third and a quarter of Shakespeare's dramatic canon, depending upon whether or not one elects to include such plays as Macbeth, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and even King Lear as "history" plays. Generally, though, when we speak of Shakespeare's history plays, we usually refer to the ten plays that depict the (very often sad) stories of English kings: King John, Henry VIII, the Yorkist tetralogy (of which more later), and the Bolingbroke tetralogy. The Bolingbroke plays begin with our current play, and then move through the two parts of Henry IV before culminating in the English victory over the French in Henry V. In 3190A we are only studying Richard II and 1 Henry IV, but I do encourage any of you with the time, energy, and curiosity to read through 2 Henry IV and Henry V if only to learn where the plays, metaphorically speaking, go, and how they get there. But, as we approach the history plays, we need to put a few basic issues into context, particularly in relation to Shakespeare's dramatic history and his uses of history. This discussion, then, will attempt to provide a general framework for considering Shakespeare's history plays, before making some equally general introductory remarks about Richard II, a play that I would suggest is more problematic than one might initially expect. Indeed, I would further dare to suggest that Richard II reads us as much as we read it. What this means will, hopefully, become more apparent by the close of this discussion.

II: The Sad Waste Before and After: The Lancaster Plays

Before approaching the Bolingbroke plays, it is worthwhile to note that, early in his career as a playwright, Shakespeare wrote a series of plays chronicling -- and I use that word guardedly -- the civil strife that resulted in the Wars of the Roses (c. 1455-1485). These plays are the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III, all of them written during the early 1590s, which together comprise what I will call the Yorkist tetralogy. The term "Yorkist tetralogy" is my own, and not one in common Shakespearean currency, but I use it to emphasize the shift in political power that happens over the course of the plays, as the Lancaster line suffers the nefarious victories of the Yorkist line. These plays are, essentially, describable as representing the dynastic battles for the English throne, and they are generally agreed to be "immature" works in Shakespeare's canon. Indeed, 1 Henry VI was so generally disdained that many critics refused to believe Shakespeare to be its author. Even today, though, the Yorkist plays are very seldom performed, save for Richard III which is regularly performed, dismembered from the Henry VI plays, as a study of individual evil in which the title character efficiently and mercilessly dispatches all those who stand between he and the throne. The Yorkist plays, though, borrow more directly from the voyeuristic "blood-and-guts" tradition of revenge tragedy and political melodrama than, say, Hamlet, Lear, or the Bolingbroke plays, and they look for their dramatic power in death and violence, like the infamous Titus Andronicus does. In these plays, Shakespeare is more like his follower John Webster,⁽²⁾ who, in T. S. Eliot's words, "was much possessed by death / And saw the skull beneath the skin" ("Whispers of Immortality," Collected Poems 55). The plays begin with a typical struggle for the throne, but they end with that struggle carried to its most logical extreme, a systematic hunting expedition of all those in the royal line, until Richard III is defeated at the Battle of Bosworth by the-man-who-next-would-be king, the Earl of Richmond, later Henry VII, Elizabeth I's grandfather. The significance of this I will address in a future discussion, but suffice it to say for now that the Yorkist plays, interesting as they are, are of a very different ilk than the plays we will be studying.

I mention all of this also because Shakespeare, as he matured as a playwright, seems to have decided, in George Lucas-like fashion, to write the "prequels" to those plays, what we call the Bolingbroke tetralogy, or what Alvin Kernan has called, borrowing from Homer, "the Henriad." In doing so, he began with Richard II, and then wrote the remaining Henry IV and V plays. As such, we have eight plays that can be seen as forming the following line of historical continuity, what we might call the Lancaster plays:

(Henriad) R2 -> 1H4 -> 2H4 -> H5 -> | -> 1H6 -> 2H6 -> 3H6 -> R3 (Yorkist)

(Please note the caesura {|} mark I've placed between the tetralogies: I will return to significance of this shortly.)

As with the Star Wars films, the final work to be produced in real time is not the "end" of the narrative arc. Just as we know what happens to Annakin Skywalker in the end, we also know what happens to England in the Lancaster plays, because the end has already been written in the form of Richard III. But just as each play has its own "feel,"so does each tetralogy, linked as they are in a larger chain of historical events. The Yorkist plays might be described as the plays of a dying community (like Lear and Hamlet). The Bolingbroke plays, however, might be described as the plays of a cursed community attempting to redeem itself: it begins with the forced abdication and murder of Richard II, and then follows through to what seems to be a state of redemption as Henry V solidifies royal authority and reasserts England's presence on the continental mainland.

But when we consider all eight plays together, a larger narrative emerges. Elizabethan audiences would likely have been more aware than most people today that Henry V died seven years after the victory at Agincourt-- the climactic battle of Henry V and the Bolingbroke plays-- and left a child heir to the throne (Henry VI). Henry V's premature death vaulted England back into internal and external strife, strife would not only see England's presence on the continental mainland lost forever, but with the annihilation of the almost all of the Lancaster line. For Shakespearean purposes, all of this in-fighting culminates in the rise of Richard III, who murders his way to the top, until his eventual defeat at Bosworth and the Earl of Richmond comes to claim that England's "civil wounds are stopp'd, peace lives again" (R3 5.4.53). The House of Lancaster is, ultimately, the central subject of the plays, beginning with the ascent of Henry Bolingbroke in Richard II, following through the struggles to assert the legitimacy of the Bolingbroke reign in Henry IV and Henry V, until the line is practically undone by the Wars of the Roses in the Yorkist plays. On the dramatic timeline above, though, I placed a caesura mark between Henry V and 1 Henry VI to indicate both an ellipsis and a break. It indicates a break in the sense that the victory at Agincourt in Henry V is the apex of the Lancastrian reign, with the authority of Henry V consolidated and almost unquestioned, and the English nation almost politically restored. This allows the Bolingbroke plays to end on a kind of Homeric high-note, with the future, colloquially put, looking so bright one ought to wear shades. After that, though, in Yeats' phrase, "Things fall apart." It also indicates silence in the sense that, for the broad scope of the eight plays, one of the most significant events, the death of Henry V, is left unrepresented. To a very great degree, Henry V is an accomplishment in irony: it ends the Henriad on a note of victory, with the undescribed "what happened after" suggesting the play, and the Henriad itself, is a tragedy by ellipsis.⁽³⁾ Why? Because, and I think this is a conclusion the plays tempt us to believe, Henry provided a chance to redeem England from the curse of civil and foreign wars initiated by the deposition of Richard II. With his premature death, the Wars of the Roses engulfed England in a kind of national tragedy that was only redeemed with the coming of the Tudors. The "blood-and-guts" events of the Yorkist plays are not so much simple acts of violence but the direct results of a kingdom cursed with division and condemned to a legacy of disorder and death. And in this historical kafuffel, Richard II provides us with the "start of it all," as if to create a historical myth, or a mythicized history, of the fall of England and its long and problematic struggle -- one might say fumbling-- towards social redemption.

III: Shakespeare: The Playwright as Historian

All of this "history" may to many of you seem dull or confusing: the plays assumes a basic knowledge of a complex array of characters and of the basic events of a time period long past, and, the proliferation of political rhetoric within the play may seem to render the history plays inaccessible. Suffice it to say, however, that most in Shakespeare's audiences would not have had the same difficulties in "keeping track of things," and so I'd posit that our problems are really the result of our temporal and geographical distance from the plays' events. After all, books, films, and television continue to make good coin on more recent historical premises, from the assassination of John F. Kennedy to the Vietnam War-- will Oliver Stone ever move on? -- to the perpetual, one might say pathological, obsession with cultural icons like Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, O.J. Simpson, and Bill Clinton. There is an ancient Chinese curse that reads, "May you live in interesting times." Interesting times usually make for lousy living, as most of you well understand after our own recent events, but they make for great history and great drama. In this light, Shakespeare's adaptation of historical events and personages to the stage is really not far removed from the task of an Oliver Stone movie, or from the procession of Biography episodes that clutter up the A&E television schedule. Humans-- and humans, after all, are the owners of the bums to be gotten into any theatre's seats-- maintain a resident memory for recent or semi-recent social, cultural, and political events, and that memory tends to survive longer than one might initially expect. Moreover, that memory calls out to be refreshed, reconsidered, challenged, rediscovered. The recent regurgitation of John Lennon and Beatles nostalgia happened because they have not been forgotten: they remain somewhat spectral in the memories of many people, and so there remains a popular desire for cultural material from and about them. So, imagine the interest in Shakespeare's time in a then relatively-recent period of internal and external strife, a period that must have seemed to proffer lessons for how to deal with foreign opponents (Spain especially) and the persistent threats to Elizabeth's reign from within and without.

History, then, for Shakespeare is not some dry subject ridden with obscure facts and details, but a source for high drama, and for significant events from the past that would provide new ways for people to consider what was then the present. Elizabeth I, for example, famously identified herself with Richard II with her famous remark, "I am Richard II, know ye not that?" (qtd. in Coyle 6). The remark may have been ironic, but one can see Richard II as a study in the problems of royal legitimacy that Elizabeth herself faced. Our study of Richard II, though, is I think serendipitously timed after the 2000 American presidential election, with questions of political legitimacy, and questions about the tactics used to assert the right to lead, very much in the forefront of people's minds. History, as a dramatic subject, is more than an effort to recall what has passed, but to find corollaries from the past to reconsider the present. History itself, in dramatic treatment, very often becomes a kind of allegorical precedent, even though the past may not, as in a moral allegory, provide answers. In this sense, history, especially when dramatized and rendered in a memorable verbal and visual form, can become relevant beyond its original context.

As such, for Shakespeare, history is more a place to start than an end in itself. This is to make a point that should be obvious, but which often gets forgotten: Shakespeare was not a historian per se, and far less was he an academic one; he was, first and foremost, a dramatist, and thus his concerns were always primarily dramatic. John Dryden, a poet and playwright, writing almost a century after Shakespeare, argues in his Preface to Fables Ancient and Modern that an author, in making any sort of literary adaptation,

is mistaken in his account, and reckons short of the expense he first intended. He alters his mind as the work proceeds, and will have this or that convenience, of which he had not thought when he began. (160)

This process is what Dryden elsewhere called "poetic [or dramatic] license," whereby an author takes "liberties" with his source material, what, in Shakespeare's case, we would more self-assuredly call "history." History, then, becomes the writer's servant and not the other way around. Sometimes, Shakespeare depicts so-called history with an abandon that borders on recklessness, and one can easily imagine history professors clucking with disapproval at many of the liberties Shakespeare takes. In King John, for example, John threatens to use cannon against his opponents (1.1.26), even though cannon did not exist in John's time; moreover, the gesture for which John is most remembered, his reluctant signing of the Magna Charta, does not even warrant a mention. In 1 Henry IV, we are presented with a Hotspur who is roughly the same age as Hal, though, in fact, Hotspur was twenty years old than the prince. And in Macbeth, a play based loosely on Holinshed's Chronicles, we are confronted with witches that literally disappear before the very eyes of Macbeth and Banquo (1.3.78-9). Shakespeare writes history like I perform calculus, at best creatively, but seldom faithfully to any of the principles of the discipline. Sometimes, the structure and events of a history play will be "factual," or historically accurate, but very often there will be errors, some of them innocent boo-boos, some of them deliberate manipulations, and some will flights of imaginative fancy.

With all that in mind, let me turn at long last to Richard II. It's important to realize that, wonderfully constructed as the play is, it does take a number of liberties with history, so I'd ask you to consider why Shakespeare takes such liberties and what the ultimate effects are upon the play. The play, for example, picks up only on the last year of Richard's twenty-two (22) year reign, and thus it neglects Richard's historical record, including, very significantly, the Peasants' Revolt. It also misleadingly figures Richard as something of a political naïf. The play casually overlooks Richard's powers of political persuasion, especially considering that, at the ripe old age of 14, Richard apparently "faced a murderous crowd during the great peasants' rebellion of 1381 and convinced them to disperse" (Boyce 536). In the play, Richard has a wonderful sense of poetic language, but his political language is spectacularly unsuccessful, and he seems more like a dilettante king than so-called "factual" history tends to allow. Although there is some disagreement about the extent to which Shakespeare's Richard corresponds to the historical Richard, there seems to be a general consensus that "[t]he political events of the play are roughly accurate... but the emphasis on Richard's incompetence is overdrawn" (536).

Indeed, Shakespeare's figuration of Richard may be based less on historical fact than on a series of then-current assumptions about Richard as the last of the "medieval" kings of England. E.M.W. Tillyard has argued, not altogether convincingly, that Shakespeare's understanding of Richard's reign may have been influenced, or even co-opted, by the chronicles of people like Sir John Froissart (252-5). These chronicles tend to present Richard as a noble but self-involved left-over from a period-- and way of thinking-- that was no longer understandable, or at least politically functional, in Shakespeare's time. Richard II thus tends to depict the king as ineffectual, effete, self-indulgent, injudicious, overly-ceremonial, and removed from both his people and a shift in political thinking. Nonetheless, he is presented somewhat sympathetically, in this sense like Lear, as an already anachronistic symbol of an age quickly nearing its end. Tillyard claims that

in Richard's reign there was the glamour of a still intact nobility [of the Middle Ages]: a very powerful glamour in an age still devoted to heraldry and yet possessing an aristocracy who, compared with the great men of Richard's day [like John of Gaunt, perhaps], were upstarts. (255)

In a sense, characters like Bolingbroke and Northumberland are not just usurpers of the crown, but usurpers of an age, an age in which kings no longer reign de jure but de facto, not by virtue of who they are but what they do and represent; they no longer reign primarily by virtue of their blood, but by virtue of how they lead. The king, in this new age, is more vulnerable to criticism and attack than he was before, and so he is more dependent on the active political support of his followers. Thus a king becomes subject to his subjects, thus a king must not simply be king but act the part as others would have him act it.⁽⁴⁾

IV: Some Overwhelming Questions

We need, then, to consider a number of important, and rather overwhelming, questions as we approach Richard II. Perhaps the primary questions have to with royal authority and its legitimacy. We have it questioned, first of all, in the form of Richard: the play seems to go out of its way to depict Richard as capable of great political mistakes, from his ill-begotten war with the Irish to his self-serving confiscation of John of Gaunt's lands, from his unwise intercession in the duel between Mowbray and Bolingbroke to his even objectionable selection of the likes of Bushy, Bagot and Green as royal favourites. Moreover, Richard was suspected to have been involved in the murder of the Duke of Gloucester (Thomas of Woodstock), of whose killing Bolingbroke accuses Mowbray in the opening scenes of the play, because Richard did nothing directly to punish Mowbray for the murder. This, by the way, is one of the unspoken suggestions of John of Gaunt's discussion with the Duchess of Gloucester in 1.2, because when he claims that "correction lieth in those hands / Which made the fault" (1.2.4-5), the hands of correction are implicitly Richard's. Richard's hands may or may not be clean, but his capacity to govern wisely and to administer justice expeditiously are questionable at best. When he intervenes in the duel between Mowbray and Bolingbroke, supposedly to prevent "the dire aspect / Of civil wounds ploughed up with neighbors' sword" (1.3.127-8), he gets in the way of a traditional form of justice; in merely banishing the two men, he leaves them to live and possibly to pose threats later; and, perhaps more curiously, his intervention may be seen as a refusal to let Mowbray face death for his part in the death of Gloucester. In fact, Richard's rather arbitrary intervention may be considered an act of political suicide not all that different from Lear's division of his kingdom.

But it is, after all, Richard's kingdom, theoretically: he is, by birth, the heir to the throne, an anointed king. He may be a bad king, but his right to the throne is predetermined not by what he does as king, but by who he is. By Shakespeare's time the idea of royal lineage was a problematic one, but it was still held, somewhat controversially, as a crucial principle of royal legitimacy, to the point that James I, Elizabeth I's successor, proclaimed The Divine Right of Kings. In ways that many of us can no longer quite appreciate, a king was not just the representative of his state, but a living metaphor of it: so the forced abdication may be seen as a breaking of a sacred metaphor, as the idea of the king and the "body" of the king are separated. Consider in this regard the hesitancy of both John of Gaunt and York are reluctant to oppose Richard openly, despite their questions of him. Northrop Frye describes the matter nicely: "The function of the king is primarily to represent, for his subjects, the unity of their society in an individual form" (The Great Code 87). To overthrow or to challenge a king is to risk fracturing society unity by opposing the symbol of the kingdom. Hence John of Gaunt's reluctance to intervene in the duel in 1.3, and York's willingness to sacrifice Aumerle's life rather than cross the new King Henry IV in 5.3, are not just acts of loyalty or devotion to a leader, but gestures to maintain social unity. So, one has to wonder, what does one do when the kingdom is represented by an ineffectual king?

The options are narrow, and the repercussions even more problematic. Can one be justified in removing an "anointed" king for the sake of some alternative idea of order, as Bolingbroke and his company evidently believe? Or can one justify standing behind a lawful king, even though his reign may jeopardize the kingdom, to say nothing of an individual's own property rights, as Carlisle does? Carlisle at least has the rule of law on his side when he defends Richard: his subsequent arrest by Bolingbroke is clearly illegal, and his eventual "doom" (5.4.24) is a sugar-coated banishment from the corridors of power (what, in modern corporate terms, might be called a "golden parachute"). For the usurping forces, they have the law on their side only in terms of having a legitimate claim to own their own properties. However "right" Bolingbroke and his company may be in removing Richard as king, their gesture is paradoxical: in attempting to reclaim the kingdom, they must risk dividing it, and the legacy of their actions is, as Carlisle puts it, "Disorder, horror, fear, and mutiny" (4.1.142). Bolingbroke tries to dodge this bullet by having Richard abdicate rather than formally "usurp" him: by having the king publically transfer power, Bolingbroke, at least theoretically escapes the charges of "treason," just as he escapes the charge of "regicide" by virtue of something very much like a legal technicality. Rather, the forced abdication is more like blackmail: admit your crimes, so to speak, and consider yourself removed from the throne, or we'll remove you by force (c.f. 4.1.223-227). Ironically, shortly after his ascension the throne, Henry IV is effectively guilty of all the same crimes as his predecessor: he ends the play vowing a pilgrimage for the sake of distracting people's attentions (5.6.49-50), in a move very much like Richard's war with the Irish; he claims lands illegally, as suggested in his claiming of the throne; he may be guilty by association in the murder of a family member; and he rejects, somewhat sympathetically, the voice of an elder statesman, the Duke of York, just as Richard rejected the words of John of Gaunt. By the end of the play, Henry has become a more politically-cunning version of his predecessor. One might even see put Bolingbroke into a similar class as Macbeth or Claudius from Hamlet, as murderers of kings, though in their respective plays Macbeth and Claudius are figured in considerably darker hues. But between Richard and Bolingbroke, the forementioned problems become fearful symmetries indeed. These symmetries beg yet further questions. To name just a few: What are the expectations of a king, as depicted in Richard II? Is there really a discernable difference between a good king and a bad king, in the grand scheme of things? At what point does royal authority become legitimate or illegitimate? Can any royal or political authority ever truly be beyond question? And, ultimately, what are the actual political motivations of any of the characters within the play? All of these are deeply problematic questions, and they challenge us to look at the play with a kind of emotional discomfort. At the very least, in Richard II, we're in very murky ethical, legal, moral, and political waters, waters muddied as much by the making of a king as by the death of another.

V: Think Sadly After: Richard II as Mousetrap?

I mention all of this not so much to "get history straight," but to identify some of the basic liberties taken by Shakespeare in his depiction of the usurpation of Richard II, and to make clear that Shakespeare's primary concerns are less with the factual representation of historical events and figures than with locating (and then depicting) viable dramatic themes. These themes cannot be summed up as arguments or "messages." Richard II, like so many of Shakespeare's history plays, carefully avoids making declarations of what is right and what is wrong. One of the commonest tendencies among readers of Richard II is to overlook the nuances of the play and read it too simply as either the tragic tale of a king brought down, or as a Machiavellian study⁽⁵⁾ of the necessary removal of an incompetent king. You are, of course, still free to see the play in such terms, but I'd suggest that you question your immediate reactions to the play so you don't end up simplifying the play, or its subjects, too quickly or too easily. Indeed, one could argue that Richard II, like King John, is more a political play than a historical one, so much so that reactions to it may reveal one's own political leanings more than they may reveal any so-called arguments the play may or may not be making. How much sympathy one accords either Richard or Bolingbroke may accidentally reveals one's own concerns in relation to issues of authority and governance. The events of the play, and the issues surrounding those events, are, ultimately, as complex and slippery as Floridian election results.

This leads me to a final question, one I hinted at earlier, but never quite made explicit: that is, what is the attitude of the play itself to the characters it represents? Does the play attempt to justify the actions of Bolingbroke and the usurpers, or does it attempt to represent Richard as a kind of tragic hero? Or does the play equivocate, or hedge its political bets by portraying both sides as equally unacceptable yet equally sympathetic? There are no concrete answers to any of the questions, and this may have an unsettling effect on readers and audiences of the play. But I would dare to posit that Richard II may be a kind of Mousetrap play. In Hamlet, Hamlet arranges for the Players to perform a play - The Murder of Gonzago, which Hamlet calls The Mouse-trap -- for Claudius, the point being to test Claudio's reaction to the murder of Gonzago. His reaction, Hamlet believes, will "catch the conscience of the king" (Hamlet 2.2.607). I'm inclined to think that Richard II is testing our reactions to it, reading us as much as we read it. If we align our sympathies with one side or the other, we risk being identified for our own political leanings and preferences, or where we locate matters as right or wrong, or in whatever degrees thereto. Indeed, if we see all of the characters as more or less reprehensible, we risk admitting a general disdain for systems of order and claims for law and justice. And, indeed, if we dismiss the play for its "talkiness," we may identify ourselves as people of action rather than people of thoughts and words. Richard II, I would argue, is itself a kind of Mousetrap play, trying not so much to catch the conscience of a king, but of the members of its audience, who may be caught in the trap of revealing their own political beliefs, beliefs which are pretty thoroughly interrogated for their legitimacy within the course of the play. So, what sort of reaction are we to have to the scenario of Richard II? I think our reaction should be a problematic, unsettled, and uncomfortable one, and perhaps we should respond to the play as the Abbot of Westminster does to Richard's abdication: "A woeful pageant have we here beheld" (4.1.321). A woeful pageant, indeed.

I'm dismembering John's words from his original context, though: he later charges Richard with having "leased out" England "Like to a tenement or pelting farm" (2.1.59, 60). But the gist of Gaunt's speech (a very long and significant one) is that the blessed England has been loaned out, to be debased or betrayed by Richard's injudicious leadership, and that England will cease to be an "other Eden." Gaunt, thinking himself "a prophet new inspired" (2.1.31), in his critique of Richard, uses a very traditional series of metaphors, all of them roughly based on idealizing England and figuring it as a kind of new promised land.⁽³⁾