Essay for the Shakespeare's Theatre's "Guide to the Seasons's Plays," 2000-2001, by Cary M. Mazer.

 

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Alack the heavy day!

That I have worn so many winter’s out,

And know not now what name to call myself!

 

A weak and impetuous king overplays his political hand and, in the face of an armed rebellion, abdicates his throne.

 

That is the relatively simple action of Shakespeare’s Richard II. But these events are intertwined with larger actions and events of British history, events which had already been dramatized by Shakespeare. When Shakespeare wrote Richard II (probably in 1595), he had already written a sequence of four history plays that dramatized several decades of historical events beginning 23 years after the events of Richard II. These four plays (the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III) tell the story of England losing its continental empire, lapsing into the dynastic chaos of the Wars of the Roses, and unleashing a monstrous tyrant-King.

 

There are two strands of the story that Shakespeare needed to fill in if the new tetralogy he was now embarking upon were to serve as a “prequel” to the Henry VI plays: the beginnings of the dynastic squabbles among the descendants of the different sons of Edward III, after the premature death of Edward’s eldest son, Edward the Black Prince (Richard II’s father); and the successful conquest of France by the young King Henry V, whose death from dysentery at age of 35 initiates the action of the first part of Henry VI. British legend--and an earlier anonymous play, The Famous Victories of Henry V--had depicted Henry V as a prodigal son, a wastrel who regains his father’s favor and redeems himself in the eyes of the world. Shakespeare used this prodigal son motif when he came to dramatize the story of this king in his two parts of Henry IV and Henry V, and so those three plays teem with the life of the streets, brothels and ale-houses of Prince Hal’s misspent youth as well as of the court and battlefield of his glorious kingship, and show war (both civil and international) from the point of view of the foot soldiers as well as that of the generals.

 

How strange is it, then, that Shakespeare prefaces this trilogy with Richard II, a play that principally inhabits the more rarefied plane of royal politics. There are down-and-dirty aspects to the story of King Richard, as it had come down to Shakespeare and his contemporaries through folklore and through historical chronicles: Richard’s suppression of a peasant’s rebellion when he was only 14 years old; and his probable complicity in the murder of his uncle, Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester. These episodes had already been dramatized in other plays that survive from the period. But Shakespeare chooses instead to start his story much later--when Richard’s cousin Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Hereford (and son and heir to John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster), publicly blames another nobleman, Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, for Woodstock’s death. The action of Shakespeare’s Richard II takes place almost exclusively in public places, in the chambers and throne rooms of the court, and often in official public ceremonies: one nobleman publicly accuses another of murder and treason; the two participate an elaborately ceremonial trial by combat, which is interrupted before it even begins by the King, who banishes both combatants in a set of public pronouncements; the King, returning from a military campaign in Ireland, stages a show of force on his homecoming, when he learns, all too publicly, that his armies have deserted him; the beleaguered King appears on the walls of Flint Castle before the assembled rebel armies and stages his own very public descent from power; rival nobles once again accuse each other of treason, until the floor of Westminster Hall is littered with the gloves they have hurled at one another; the newly deposed King participates in a ceremonial divestment of power, and is asked to read his crimes aloud for all to hear. There are no clowns in the play, and there are very few characters drawn from the lower ranks to give another perspective on events. And the play, unusually, is written completely in verse--much of it in rhyming couplets--without a single line of prose. Even the few more lowly characters--the Queen’s gardener, who reflects on politics as though it were horticulture, and the deposed King’s former groom, who tells him what has become of his favorite horse--speak in exquisite iambic pentameter.

 

With all of these scenes of public ceremonials, trials, debates, and contentions, it’s easy to lose sight of the very human tragedy taking place beneath the military maneuvers and the political shifts of power. For although the play is rightly grouped with the other Histories in the first published edition of the complete plays, the First Folio of 1623, the title page of its first single edition in 1597 calls the play a tragedy. But what is Richard’s tragedy, and what is Richard like as a tragic character?

 

Because the role of Richard II is so public, so demonstrative, so rhetorical, and so self-presentational, the role is often interpreted--by scholars, and by actors and directors--through the evidence of Richard’s own words, taking at face value the imagery that Richard uses to describe himself. For example, Richard invokes the “divine right of kings,” exclaiming confidently that “Not all the waters in the rough rude sea / Can wash the balm off from an anointed king; / The breath of worldly men cannot depose / The deputy elected by the Lord”; and so the play is viewed by some as an essay on divine right, with Richard as a quasi-divine being. Similarly, Richard, as he ceremonially renounces his throne, compares himself to Christ and his enemies to Judas, and rails at the silent witnesses of his agony, “Though some of you, with Pilate, wash your hands, / Showing an outward pity, yet you Pilates/ Have here delivered me to my sour cross, / And water cannot wash away your sin”; and so some view Richard as a stand-in for Christ. Richard quibbles with words (“My care is loss of care, by old care done; / Your care is gain of care, by new care won.”), and weaves poetic images around himself (“O, that I were a mockery king of snow, / Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke, / To melt myself away in water drops!”); and so the character is seen as a poet’s soul trapped in the person of a king. Richard talks about his role-playing and refers to himself as an actor; and his uncle the Duke of York compares the deposed Richard’s entry into London a few moments after the newly-crowned King Henry IV’s royal entry to a moment when, “As in a theatre the eyes of men, / After a well-graced actor leaves the stage, / Are idly bent on him that enters next”; and so the play is interpreted as a metatheatrical game of theatrical self-referentiality.

 

Other interpretations of Richard’s character in the theatre take their cue from Richard’s womanly tears, and from the fact that Richard surrounds himself with favorites who are later accused of “mak[ing] divorce betwixt his queen and him, / [Breaking] the possession of a royal bed”; and so several twentieth-century productions use the play to explore issues of gender identity and sexual preference. Significantly, some of the most noteworthy performances of Richard in the twentieth century have featured actors (John Gielgud, Maurice Evans, Michael Redgrave, Ian McKellan, Derek Jacobi, Jeremy Irons, Alex Jennings) known for their ethereal poeticism, who were not afraid to explore the boundaries of traditional gender categories. And more recently the role was even played by an actress, Fiona Shaw, in a production directed by Deborah Warner at the Royal National Theatre.

 

But one mustn’t forget that this play is, above all, a play set in a world of politics. And plays in performance take on political meanings in ways that change radically from one audience and from one era to the next. Even in Shakespeare’s own time, the play was appropriated to serve the particular political agendas of particular audiences. The supporters of the Earl of Essex commissioned a performance of the play (or another play of the same title) in 1601, on the afternoon before their unsuccessful uprising against Queen Elizabeth. Elizabeth, who had written a homily on rebellion designed to be read by the Protestant clergy from their pulpits as a Sunday sermon, famously compared herself to Richard (the king, if not the character Shakespeare play). And when the play was first published in 1597, the edition omitted the magnificent scene of Richard’s deposition, because of either official censorship or editorial caution.

 

The play has taken on different political meanings in the centuries since then. The play was rewritten in the later seventeenth century to reflect the various contemporary crises of royal succession. In late nineteenth-century America, Edwin Booth found that audiences responded to the play differently in the North and in the South. And when John Barton’s Royal Shakespeare Company production (with Richard Pasco and Ian Richardson alternating in the roles of Richard and Bolingbroke) toured the United States in the spring 1974, there were unexpected gasps from the audience during the first scene of the play, when Bolingbroke accuses Mowbray, and by extension Richard, of a cover-up in the murder of Woodstock; the actors had evidently not anticipated how closely the American public was following the unfolding news of Watergate.

 

Just as Richard, in the deposition scene, looks at himself in the mirror to be able to understand his own story, the play can be a mirror that can enable the artists and audiences of each era to understand their own age. And like an anamorphic painting, or “perspective,” which, Bushy explains to the Queen, “rightly gazed upon, / Shows nothing but confusion; eyed awry; / Distinguish form,” the play’s central character comes into focus and the play takes on political meanings that are affected by the point of view of the actors, directors, theatre artists, and audiences who look at it. And so the play speaks to us in new and different ways, across the centuries, in theatrical performance.

 

But there may be at least one constant about the play that endures through all these changes in our understandings of the character and of the play’s politics, and that constant is the play’s exploration of the relation of character to politics, the dynamic tension between a character (especially one with such an imagination, a heightened set of emotions, and a poetic soul) and the political world he inhabits. In this regard, the fact that so much of the play unfolds in the public and not the private sphere may very well be its most significant feature. Richard has many magnificent speeches throughout the play; but he doesn’t have a soliloquy, and he is never even alone on stage, until we see him in his prison cell in the penultimate scene of the play, only a few moments before he is assassinated. Richard has no memory of ever not being a king. As a person defined, from the age of 10, entirely according to his political function, he effectively never has a way of being alone, for he doesn’t have a private personal identity to be alone with. Perhaps this is why he surrenders his crown so quickly when his political power base evaporates, and, perhaps, why he makes such a spectacle of himself at his deposition: robbed of his kingship, the only way he can convince himself that he is somebody is to perform it. “I have no name, no title, / No, not that name was given me at the font, / But ‘tis usurped. Alack the heavy day! / That I have worn so many winter’s out, / And know not now what name to call myself,” he laments. He looks at himself in the mirror, not only to see the effects of his grief upon his face, but perhaps also to see if there is anybody there looking back at him. And in prison, stripped of his power and identity, he plays a theatrical game in which he alternately assumes the roles of beggar and king.

 

Surely we are no strangers to this phenomenon now, at the turn of the twenty-first century: a world in which politics is a game of showmanship and image-making; in which power is created and ratified by opinion polls and spin-masters; in which politicians speak of themselves during well-rehearsed debates and impeccably staged town-hall meetings in the third person; in which political players run the risk of losing all sense of their private selves, and start to believe the images they project to the world, despite (or perhaps because of) their awareness of the fictions they know are used to create these images; and where political figures never have the occasion to question who they are until their public personae have been stripped from them.

 

The late twentieth century taught us that “the personal is political.” In Richard II, the political is personal. Richard II is the story of a man whose only personal identity is the one that comes from his political power and his role in a political world. And that condition, the play demonstrates, is ultimately very tragic indeed.