Richard II has been one of my favourite plays for more than fifty years – when I first heard Gielgud in the lead.  The reasons are set out in the note below, which I wrote more than ten years ago for a book on Shakespeare. 

After listening to the play for the nth time, I ordered a book The Reign of Richard II.  It is a collection of papers given at the University of York on subjects like A Personal Portrait, The Chivalry, His Sense of English History, and His Reputation.

Two things struck me about the papers.  First, many commentators, who are historians, felt happy about looking at the psychological or psychoanalytic aspects of this medieval king and evaluating the evidence and conclusions. 

Secondly, and much more remarkably, no one saw fit to mention how Shakespeare saw this character.  This unmatched genius could see inside us and our history, but no one at this conference thought Shakespeare was worth mentioning. 

What about Divine Right?  How do you square that with the barons putting their king under contract in 1215?  Were the references to Pilate and Judas justified?  What other aspects of the passion play do we have here?  Opinions may differ on whether Shakespeare painted Bolingbroke as shifty – I think he did – but is clear that Shakespeare saw this usurpation as an infection that would culminate in the Wars of the Roses.  Did Shakespeare get it right or was he just wrong?

This silence is at the university very odd.  But there is an upside.  Here is an extract of the psychoanalysis.

The most plausible way of reconciling the opposites in the king’s character is to see Richard’s character as essentially narcissistic – a condition in which only the person himself – his own body, his own needs and feelings – are experienced as fully real.   Generally, a narcissistic person achieves a sense of security in his own subjective conviction of his perfection.  This is a condition characteristic of rulers with a high sense of mission, and having an obsessive interest in the trappings of power.  Its sufferers have ‘an appetite for self-worship.’  It finally detaches its victims from reality so that they become cocooned from the outside world by groups of yes-men and by physical isolation, which was Richard’s eventual fate.  By the final years of his reign, there can be little doubt that Richard’s grasp on reality was becoming weaker.

The author of the paper from which that quote is taken went on to say that Richard was ‘vengeful’ and ‘reacted very badly and very aggressively, to any criticism made of him’.  ‘The general attitude [of low confidence] is…. domineering, attacking, hostile, blaming, mistrustful, status-seeking, and punitive.’

Well, we now have the AI model of that narcissist in Donald Trump.  One difference is that he would never abdicate.  Rather, he would not accept being deposed – even when done with due process of law.

Otherwise, as the book says, there is nothing new under the sun.  Which make the omission of reference to Shakespeare even more remarkable.

The play is called ‘The Tragedy of Richard II.’  It is certainly a tragedy, and it is in my view the most operatic play ever written.  Of course, Churchill reveled in it.  It is a rolling twenty-one-gun salute to the majesty of the English language and history.

(Set out below is my earlier note of more than ten years ago.  Since then, Opus Arte has released its version at the Globe, which is not as mangled as many are there now, and the RSC has released the version with David Tennant directed by Greg Doran.  Sadly, they sent Tennant out as a rampant hairy queen desperate to be debagged, and in so doing trashed the whole play.)

RICHARD II
AN EFFEMINATE ROYAL IN A PASSION PLAY

In this man’s reign began this fatal strife

The bloody argument whereof we treat
That dearly costs so many a prince’s life

And spoil’d the weak and ev’n consumed the great

(Daniel, Civil Wars)

Jussi Bjoerling is frequently said to have been the most popular tenor of the last century.  He had a clear, high, lyric tone that still sounds as pure as silver. (Caruso was more golden and chiaroscuro.)  Some have the same sensation listening to Richard II, of a clear, high lyric tone that sounds as pure as silver.

This play evokes our sense of opera in another way.  Most composers like to load up their operas with big arias for their big singers.  Puccini did it so that his guns could really unleash themselves in a way that highbrows think is shameless, but that the rest of us enjoy shamelessly.  A few people know Vissi d’Arte; many have heard Un Bel Di; but everyone knows Nessun Dorma.  

Shakespeare loaded this play up with set pieces for the big guns of the stage, so that listening to the recording featuring John Gielgud as Richard and Leo McKern as John of Gaunt has for some about the same impact as coming to terms with an ’86 Grange.

Richard was the last of the Plantagenets.  He took by succession and Divine Right.  His misrule and weakness led to his being deposed, and so to generations of civil strife.
A medieval king was the fountain of justice.  At the beginning of this play, this King breaches his obligations in that position fundamentally– twice.

The King failed to follow the established legal process to rule on a dispute between two of his barons.  They were entitled to and did seek under the common law of England trial by battle of the issue between them.  One of the parties, Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV, says:

Look what I speak, my life shall prove it true. (1.1.87)
He has another charge:
… and I will in battle prove. (1.1.92)

The second charge related to the murder of a duke. This was a sensitive charge since the King, the judge if you like, had given orders for the murder.  Well, for whatever reason, Richard intervened after a massive display of chivalry, and stopped the combat, a form of judicial duel.  He banished both of the litigants, but Bolingbroke and his family for a lesser time.  The King had therefore made enemies of two families by interfering with the due process of the law.  Bolingbroke laments his exile:

How long a time lies in one little word.
Four lagging winters and four wanton springs
End in a word – such is the breath of kings. (1.3.212-214)

As the second scene of the play shows, the supporters of the King include those who are under a duty to avenge the death of the murdered duke.  How do you fight a judicial duel with the substitute of God?  How can the King try a case that involves one of his political assassinations?

The second mistake of Richard was to confiscate the property that had belonged to the father of Bolingbroke, John of Gaunt, after his death.  This was illegal.  (Richard needed funds for a foreign war – this has long been an incentive to illegality.)  In doing this, Richard was breaking the laws of inheritance– but these laws are the source of his own title.  York says just this:

Take Hereford’s rights away, and take from time
His charters and his customary rights,
Let not tomorrow then ensue today;
Be not thyself. For how art thou not a King
But by fair sequence and succession. (2.1.195-199)

As a result of these two great fallings off by the King, Bolingbroke returns to England.  He says he does so just to claim his own private rights and not to claim the crown, but Bolingbroke– who does not show us his mind by a soliloquy– is as evasive about his intention as a modern politician is when thinking of challenging for the leadership of the party. After he had become King, he was to say:

Though then, God knows, I had no such intent

But that necessity so bowed the state,
That I and greatness were compelled to kiss. (2 Henry IV, 3.1.72-74)
From the time when Richard returns to Ireland, it is all downhill. As Tony Tanner remarked:
Perhaps … he can already see the writing on the wall; but to a certain, quite distinct extent, he himself is doing the writing.

Here is some of the high poetry of this failed king.
… I weep for joy
To stand upon my kingdom once again.
Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand;
Though rebels wound thee with their horses’ hoofs. (3.2.4-7)

So when this thief, this traitor, Bolingbroke,
Who all this while hath revelled in the night
Whilst we were wand’ring with the Antipodes
Shall see us rising in our throne, the east,
His treasons will sit blushing in his face,
Not able to endure the sight of day,
But self-affrighted tremble at his sin.
Not all the water 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.
For every man that Bolingbroke hath pressed
To shift shrewd steel against our golden crown,
God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay
A glorious angel; then, if angels fight,
Weak men must fall, for Heaven still guards the right. (3.2.47-62)

 No matter where– of comfort no man speaks.
Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs.
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow in the bosom of the earth.
Let’s choose executors and talk of wills:
And yet not so, for what can be bequeath
Save our deposèd bodies to the ground?
Our lands, our lives, and all are Bolingbroke’s;
And nothing can we call our own, but death
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been deposed, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed
All murdered – for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keep Death his court, and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchise, be feared, and kill with looks
Infusing him with self and vain conceit
As if this flesh that walls about our life
Were brass impregnable;, and, humoured thus,
Comes at the last, and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell King! (3.2.144-170)

He is very up and down. He rallies and then he falls.  Here is a rally:
Yet know, my master, God omnipotent,
Is mustering in his clouds on our behalf
Armies of pestilence, and they shall strike
Your children yet unborn and unbegot
That lift your vassal hands against my head,
And threat the glory of my precious Crown.
Tell Bolingbroke– for yon methinks he stands –
That every stride he takes upon my land
Is dangerous treason.  He has come to open
The purple testament of bleeding war … (3.3.84-93)

But he gives in. Here is a real down.
What must the King do now? Must he submit?
The King shall do it. Must he be deposed?
The King shall be contented. Must he lose
The name of King? A God’s name, let it go.
I’ll give my jewels for a set of beads;
My gorgeous palace for a hermitage;
My gay apparel for an almsman’s gown;
My figured goblets for a dish of wood;
My sceptre for a palmer’s walking staff;
My subjects for a pair of carved saints;
And my large kingdom for a little grave,
A little, little grave, an obscure grave … (3.3.142-153)

Has the theatre – the theatre– ever known language of such silver grace?  When in Act 4, Richard formally surrenders the Crown, his disillusion takes him to a different tone.

Now, mark me how I will undo myself.
I give this heavy weight from off my head,
And this unwieldy sceptre from my hand,
The pride of kingly sway from out my heart;
With mine own tears I wash away my balm,
With my own hands I give away my crown,
With my own tongue deny my sacred state,
With mine own breath release all duteous oaths;
All pomp and majesty I do forswear … (4.1.202-210)

He calls for a mirror:
… Was this the face
That, like the sun, did make beholders wink?
Was this the face that faced so many follies,
And was at last outfaced by Bolingbroke?
A brittle glory shineth in this face,
As brittle as the glory is the face,
[Throws glass down]
For there it is, cracked in a hundred shivers.
Mark, silent King, the moral of this sport:
How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face. (4.1.283-290)

Richard, the actor, starts to comment on his own performance:
… Say that again.
‘The shadow of my sorrow’? Ha, let’s see.
‘Tis very true, my grief lies all within … (4.1.292-294)

Richard is now the very picture of self-centred self-pity, but his subsequent murder haunts Henry IV and the nation as a whole for the rest of this series of plays.

It is not surprising that Elizabeth did not like this play being performed.  Dethroning a king is a not a good precedent. (Verdi had to convert the murdered king of The Masked Ball to a Governor of Boston to get it performed.)  Medieval kings were the Lord’s Anointed, and it was almost inevitable that Richard would see himself as some Christ-like figure betrayed by Judas and arraigned by Pilate.  Indeed, some see in this play Richard enduring the Stations of the Cross.

He loses it completely, as we now say, at times, as shown by his shift in pronouns in:
I had forgot myself: am I not King?
Awake, thou coward majesty! Thou sleepest.
Is not the King’s name twenty thousand names?
Arm my name!  A puny subject strikes
At thy great glory.  Look not to the ground,
Ye favourites of a king, are we not high?
High be our thoughts. (3.2.83-9)

Bolingbroke has shown his intention to take control by executing his opponents before he was crowned. He said that ‘to wash your blood / From off my hands’ (3.1.5-7) he will say why they die. Richard refers to:

… some of you, with Pilate, wash your hands. (4.1.238)

And right at the end, Bolingbroke, now the King, says:
I’ll make a voyage to the Holy Land,
To wash this blood from off my guilty hand. (5.6.49-50)

Going on a Crusade was a way of doing penance and getting remission from sins for those who subscribed to the medieval church, which was everyone in the Middle Ages.  This was all still real to Elizabethan audiences.  For us, Richard is a shallow man not up to his job – 10 for noblesse; 0 for oblige.  Richard had a weak, effeminate, showman side.  Coleridge said Shakespeare did not mean to represent Richard as ‘a vulgar debauchee, but merely as a wantonness in feminine shew, feminine friendism, intensely woman-like love of those immediately about him, mistaking the delight of being loved by him for love for him.’

Coleridge also said that Richard endeavoured to ‘shelter himself from that which is around him by a cloud of his own thoughts’ and went on:

Throughout his whole career may be noticed the most rapid transitions – from the highest insolence to the lowest humility – from hope to despair, from the extravagance of love to the agonies of resentment, and from pretended resignation to the bitterest reproaches.  The whole is joined with the utmost richness and copiousness of thought, and were there an actor capable of representing Richard, the part would delight us more than any other of Shakespeare’s masterpieces – with perhaps, the single exception of King Lear.

We may agree with Coleridge, especially since we found the actor capable of representing Richard.  For people who love language and care for history, Richard II is the play. The best way to take this play is with the Gielgud recording.  Derek Jacobi did not under-camp the role in the BBC production.

We should not leave this play without referring to some of its most famous lines:
This royal throne of kings, this scept’red isle,
This earth of majesty, the seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise
This fortress built by nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happy lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, This nurse, this teaming womb of royal kings … (2.1.40 – 51)

It is by such things that nations are formed and history is made. The author has as good a title as any to be called the greatest historian of his own nation.