Richard II (Vol. 39) | Robert C. Jones (essay date 1991)
Robert C. Jones (essay date 1991)
SOURCE: "Richard II: 'Let Not Tomorrow Then Ensue Today'," in These Valiant Dead: Renewing the Past in Shakespeare's Histories, University of Iowa Press, 1991, pp. 69-94.
[In the essay below, Jones discusses how Richard's neglect of the heroic past of his father contributes to his failure as king.]
Like the three parts of Henry VI, Richard II dramatizes the forcible replacement of an ineffectual king, son to a heroic father, by an apparently more able leader and ends by emphasizing the unstable condition of the new ruler's regime. In both cases, for those who do remember, the son's shortcomings are all the more sharply outlined by the recollected light of the father's virtues. But, as we have seen, the progressively deteriorating situation through the earlier trilogy is marked by growing "neglection" of the heroic past. And in Richard II, as the "skipping king" gives way to "grim...
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