Richard II – William Shakespeare, c. 1595 ★★★★

Bad King Makes Bad Choices

Kicking off the second and more famous of William Shakespeare’s “Henriad” history plays, The Tragedy Of Richard II makes the most sense when read after the three plays which chronologically follow it: Henry IV, Part 1; Henry IV, Part 2; and Henry V.

That’s because while this play is concerned with the same basic question, how to be a good king, it does by presenting a type of worst-case scenario the kings of the later plays take pains to avoid.

That is after the first of these Henrys caused the problem leading to that scenario. Or did he? Welcome to the conundrum that is Richard II.

It is 1399. Richard II has been on the throne for decades but is still a young man. To the manner born, as Hamlet would say. A spendthrift who disdains the common people, Richard knows he will always be king, because that’s the way God planned it.

KING RICHARD

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. [Act III, scene ii, lines 55-58]

This portrait of Richard II in Westminster Abbey, made near the end of his reign, suggests the imperiousness of the character we meet in the play. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_II_(play). 

When two of his most important dukes, Mowbray and Bolingbroke (later to become Henry IV), get into a heated argument over the murder of a fellow noble, Richard II intervenes by exiling both, even though he knows Bolingbroke’s charge is right. This is because Mowbray carried out the king’s order when he did the killing, something everyone knows but is careful not to say.

If The Tragedy Of Richard II was merely a list of grievances against the title character, it would be very interesting but not exactly Shakespearean. What makes it great is how the Bard flips the play halfway through, transforming it into an examination of the ruin that can happen when even a bad monarch is deposed.

This may be Shakespeare’s most conservative work for its openly anachronistic devotion to law and order. Richard II is a wretched monarch with an outdated view of the world, it is made clear early and often. But once he’s deposed, consequences are sudden and severe:

CARLISLE

What subject can give sentence on his king?
And who sits here that is not Richard’s subject?
Thieves are not judg’d but they are by to hear,
Although apparent guilt be seen in them…

O! if you raise this house against this house,
It will the woefullest division prove
That ever fell upon this cursed earth. [IV, i, l. 127-130; 151-153]

What the Bishop of Carlisle is anticipating here is the War of the Roses, a direct result of the rebellion against Richard and the subject of Shakespeare’s three Henry VI plays, written earlier but set later.

A king at 11, Richard earned his crown facing down Wat Tyler and the Peasants’ Revolt many years before this play begins. This may have made him more autocratic thereafter. He disinherited and disregarded his nobles fairly brazenly, and had a reputation for high taxation even though his reign was largely one of peace.

Richard II (in blue) faces Wat Tyler and angry peasants in 1381. Tyler did not survive the encounter, and Richard's reign lasted another 19 years. Image from https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/Wat-Tyler-the-Peasants-Revolt/.

He also reportedly made his nobles sit around all day in court waiting to bow to him whenever he looked their way, though Shakespeare doesn’t work this element into his play. Shakespeare’s Richard is bad enough. His court consists of “a thousand flatterers” who feed upon the country’s purse like gluttonous insects. When one of his dukes, Gaunt, points this out on his deathbed, Richard sneers and confiscates Gaunt’s duchy. This upsets Gaunt’s son, Bolingbroke, who defies Richard by returning from exile to claim what is his.

And perhaps a throne, too, as long as he’s in the neighborhood.

Bolingbroke starts the play more sinned against, but as things develop, he emerges as Richard II’s most complicated character. He’s a schemer and an angler, not exactly a brute but not too concerned about those like Northumberland who are as long as they are serving his ends.

Bolingbroke’s response when told he is in violation of Richard’s exile order is classic. When exiled, he was Duke of Hereford, but now as the inheritor of his father’s estate, he is rightly Duke of Lancaster. He exiled Hereford, but now I’m Lancaster, he shrugs. Even Falstaff, famed corruptor of Bolingbroke’s son, wouldn’t try that line.

Yet Bolingbroke gets the agreement of the other nobles, if only because Richard is so ripe for overthrow.

Though it has never had a theatrical film adaptation, Richard II has been staged many times. John Gielgud (seen above as Richard) won early fame playing the part. Paul Scofield, Derek Jacobi, Mark Rylance, and David Tennant have all played him, too. Image from https://shakespeare.berkeley.edu/images/king-richard-ii-played-by-john-gielgud.

How great a play is Richard II? I love it, but I can see why it doesn’t quite connect like other Shakespeare works do. Crammed with great lines and characters, but not a lot of dramatic conflict, the play unfolds more than it moves. Richard’s downfall is almost a non-event. Returning from an expedition to Ireland, he discovers his rule already at an end. Seeing how things stand, he quickly bows to Bolingbroke’s will:

KING RICHARD

What you will have, I’ll give, and willing too;
For do we must what force will have us do.
Set on towards London. Cousin, is it so?

BOLINGBROKE
Yea, my good lord.

KING RICHARD
Then I must not say no. [III, iii, l. 216-220]

What makes this tyrannical king so pliable when confronted? Is he just a typical bully, or a crafty Machiavellian who realizes he was played?

In my Folger edition of this play, an essay by Harry Berger Jr. posits that Shakespeare’s Richard II sets out to manage his own downfall by creating an intolerable situation for his nobles and then pushing Bolingbroke to rebel. He wants to be destroyed. I think that’s clearly wrong given how much Richard whines over his fate. Richard is just simply an awful king, morally and strategically.

Richard surrenders his crown to Bolingbroke, or as he will now be known, Henry IV, in this illustration from the Chronicles of Jean Froissart. Image from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Richard-II-king-of-England/Tyranny-and-fall

When we first meet him, he is in a precarious situation with Mowbray and Bolingbroke. Both dukes insist on mortal combat as the only way to resolve their dispute. Richard agrees but then pulls back his permission, ordering their exile instead, which satisfies no one.

It’s possible he fears Mowbray dying would reflect badly on him, given Mowbray was his executioner. Or he may just like being sadistic to his allies. Mowbray claims innocence, declaring himself “true to King Richard’s throne” and no murderer. That is technically true; he did what his king ordered. But when he appeals the king’s judgment that sentences him to a harsher sentence than Bolingbroke (life as opposed to a few years), Richard tells him, rather rudely, to get lost. No gold watch or thank you for keeping that little murder hush-hush.

Then he makes both dukes vow not to make peace with one another, or to rebel against their king. I get the Berger death-wish theory, but I think what we have here is a ruler outsmarting himself.

The subtlety of Richard II is one of the play’s great strengths. Watching how the various nobles interact reveals their varied, mostly selfish designs. York talks about loyalty but has it only for himself; while Northumberland is like a vulture on Bolingbroke’s elbow, seeking opportunities for his own advancement. Richard calls him out on this:

KING RICHARD

Thou shalt think,
Though he divide the realm and give thee half
It is too little, helping him to all;
And he shall think that thou, which know’st the way
To plant unrightful kings, wilt know again,
Being ne’er so little urg’d, another way
To pluck him headlong from the usurped throne. [V, i, l. 60-66]

We see this very thing happen in the next play, Henry IV, Part 1.

The Death Of King Richard II, by 18th-century painter Francis Wheatley, is based on Shakespeare's scenario for the monarch's mysterious end. Bolingbroke in the play is not complicit in Richard's slaying, but thinks him better off dead. "I hate the murderer, love him murdered," he says. Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Death_of_King_Richard_II.jpg. 

It’s funny about the second half of this play. Richard, while never wise to himself, emerges as a voice of larger truth. His self-pity is constant, and deliberately grating: “I’ll be buried in the king’s highway,/Some way of common trade, where subjects’ feet/May hourly trample on their sovereign’s head” [III, iii, l. 160-162]. But his vision of the damage his overthrow will cause Great Britain proves on the money.

This is brought out not only dramatically, but comedically. One angry confrontation between feuding nobles turns into a flurry of gauntlet-throwing, until hot-headed Aumerle finds himself needing to borrow one because he’s out of gloves himself.

Not everything about Richard II works to perfection. The second act plays rather perfunctorily, the female characters are mostly afterthoughts, and the Bard really trusts his audience to know the story of Richard’s fall inside and out, something I don’t recall him doing in Richard III. Read them or don’t, but you do need familiarity with those later Henriad plays before getting into this.

Yet the way Shakespeare flips his story, and deepens Richard in the process, is quite affecting, and pulls me into the play. “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me…” [V, v, l. 50] he notes late in the fifth act, by which time he takes on a tragic nobility. He seems to gain by losing.

Richard II is a play of ideas, but also of people, vibrant characters who fly off the page even when not seen on stage. It’s not an easy play to summarize, but in its own stately way it edifies and entertains us as well as any of his histories.