As usual, I have relied on the Cambridge edition to prepare these notes. The new Cambridge edition has an especially good introduction for Richard II.
Richard II was written in 1595. The Chamberlain’s Men had been formed in 1594, and Shakespeare would have been contracted to write one tragedy and one comedy a year. He followed it with the two parts of Henry IV and Henry V, as well as Julius Caesar, in the following years.
In December 1595, a letter to Sir Robert Cecil asked if he will want to watch a play about “K. Richard”. This is thought to refer to Richard II, which was a popular play.
In 1597, the first Quarto was published. Two more Quartos were published in 1598. This was the first play popular enough to have three printings in two years. There were five Quartos before the Folio in 1623.
The second Quarto (i.e. the first one printed in 1598) was the first time Shakespeare’s name appeared on a printing of one of his plays.
In 1600, six passages were anthologised in England’s Parnassus.
Read more about Shakespeare and anthologies here
According to an account of Elizabeth I speaking to the Keeper of the Tower of London, Good Queen Bess called herself Richard II, in reference to this play, which she said had been performed “40tie times in open streets and houses.”
The Earl of Essex commissioned a performance of Richard II shortly before his failed rebellion attempt in 1601.
Before 1594, there was much uncertainty in the market. Plague kept theatres closed. Now Shakespeare seems to be starting on a sequence of plays, something to bring reliable audiences. The poems he printed during the plague closures foretell the highly lyrical style of Richard II, and other plays written at this time.
Read more about this phase of Shakespeare’s career
Shakespeare kept ownership of the plays he had written before 1594. Most playwrights did not do this. They may have been the capital he used to join The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, who now performed his Henry VI trilogy.
Pilgrimage to Jerusalem is a motif that runs from the start of Richard II to the end of Henry V.
Although Shakespeare is, as always, heavily indebted to his sources, including Holinshed and Samuel Daniel, he made much more of this motif than anyone else. His account is centred on an expansion of the old prophecy that Henry IV would die in Jerusalem.
The plays are also about power: who controls an over-mighty king? There are three kings in English history who were usurped—John, Henry VI, and Richard II. Shakespeare dramatised all three. (If you enjoy history trivia, you can also think about the three years in English history in which two kings ascended the throne.)
Both pilgrimage and crusade are established as motifs. Gaunt talks of crusading ancestors and Richard I. Richard II is told to behave more like a palmer, i.e. someone on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Mowbray and Bolingbroke make a pilgrimage to death. Henry ends the play wishing to go on pilgrimage to atone for Richard’s death.
Richard II was more politically troublesome than the other history plays. It is about an heirless monarch who has bad advisors, a subject a little too close to home for the ageing Elizabeth.
Essex was descended from one of Edward III’s sons, like all the participants in the Wars of the Roses. Richard II and Henry IV were both descended from sons of Edward III. Various other plays in the 1590s were dedicated to Essex and made more of his ancestor’s role in history.
One Parliamentarian had been imprisoned for writing a pamphlet suggesting James VI of Scotland was Elizabeth’s legitimate heir. A book about Henry IV, dedicated to Essex and boosting his ancestor, was censored. The book was used as evidence against Essex later on, and the author was put in the Tower. Although the Chamberlain’s Men are thought to have performed Richard II for Essex and his men, they were not punished.
The deposition scene in IV.i was removed from printed editions in Elizabeth’s lifetime. When we talk about Richard II having contemporary political resonance, we must remember that the play itself makes no comparison to Essex and is hardly “on the side of” Bolingbroke. The deposition scene was first published in the fourth Quarto of 1608. We don’t know if it was performed earlier than that.
Other sources include a play called Woodstock and a translation of Froissart. He may have used other histories of the Wars of the Roses too, and perhaps A Mirror for Magistrates. There are multiple verbal parallels between Samuel Daniel’s book The Civil Wars and speeches in Richard II by Carlisle and Richard. The garden and mirror scenes have no known source. He makes more of the issue of divine right than any of his sources.
The current Cambridge editor, Claire McEachern, sees the choices Shakespeare made as to do with play structure, not political outlook. Shakespeare had a “precise idea of structure” and choices are more to do with “the principle of balance” than ideology.
Some of you may have heard me talk about Shakespeare as a pragmatist. The garden scene at III.iv is a crucial scene for this idea. Right in the middle of this play which is about two competing ideals of kingship—the divine right and the material right—is a pragmatic speech about the need for a king to do a good job. McEachern writes that the scene is “poised between the political realism of the confrontation at Flint Castle and the attempted legalisms of the Parliament scene. It expresses “the realistic political need for the man to fit the office. There is no divine right… only good husbandry.” A good king, in other words, does a good job.
Bolingbroke makes a series of legal challenges to Richard, about the distribution of property and the investigation of murder. Gaunt accuses Richard of side-stepping the law. But Gaunt also sees it is for God to judge the duel. He advocates patience. In III.iii Richard asserts this view and is opposed by Northumberland.
Shakespeare endorses neither. This is a play of personality. Woodstock, one of the source plays, blames Richard’s flatterers. Richard II makes Richard the author of his own fall. McEachern says, “he words himself into abdication.”
Richard II is written entirely in verse. It is full of speeches and rhetorical devices. Much of the verse is formal, i.e. not trying to sound like ordinary speech. Confrontation scenes (Mowbray and Bolingbroke, Gaunt and the Duchess) contain many rhyming couplets, which express controlled anger, frustration, “imposing a ceremonious formality on a tense confrontation”.
Gaunt speaks more couplets than anyone else. They suit his sense of certainty and his conventional wisdom.
Richard II would have been performed at The Theatre. (The company moved to the Globe around 1600.) It was built in Shoreditch in 1576. In 1596-7, the lease expired, and they performed at the Swan while the Theatre was re-built as the Globe.
It requires very little staging. This is a talking play, not a moving play. It took two hours to perform, probably at two in the afternoon, when the daylight was best.
Richard II remained popular and controversial. It was performed to a packed theatre in 1631. It was censored before being banned in 1680, even though Nahum Tate had removed all the misdeeds of the king. It was unpopular in the eighteenth century, perhaps because it portrayed a “bad king”. Johnson thought it was dull!
Edmund Kean saw Richard’s potential as a tragic hero and revived the play in 1815, removing the conspiracy at the end. His version stayed on stage for years and went to New York in the 1820s.
In the 1850s, Charles Kean staged a pared down, highly gothic version, with dozens of people on stage, some of whom climbed lamp-posts while church bells rang. Pater loved the production and praised the play for its musical language and structure. Richard became less of a “bad king” and more a sympathetic figure.
Pater compared Richard to a poet or actor, overwhelmed by his love of words. Politics no longer mattered to the play so it became a tragedy. In 1903, Beerbohm Tree staged the duel with real horses. Politics has never really taken over from Richard’s character again in modern production.
Starting in the 1980s with Stephen Greenblatt, many scholars have tried to make connections between Richard II and Elizabethan politics. This is largely speculation and always begins and ends with ideas that fit modern politics perhaps too neatly. If you want the theatre to be a subversive place, you do not need much evidence to spin such a tale. More recent work has suggested that Essex may not have planned a full rebellion, merely a replacement of the Queen’s advisors. Watching Richard II was not, then, a subversive act, but more of “dinner and a show” before a difficult challenge was made to the Queen about her court.
