Richard II (Vol. 91) | Ralph Berry (essay date 1999)
Ralph Berry (essay date 1999)
SOURCE: Berry, Ralph. “The Tragedy of Richard II.” In Tragic Instance: The Sequence of Shakespeare's Tragedies, pp. 73-9. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999.
[In the following essay, Berry comments on role-playing in Richard II, noting that Richard embraces the role of martyr-king while Bolingbroke accepts the complementary role of guilty usurper.]
Tragedy seeks explanations. Always they are withheld. The dark collusion between protagonist and fate has a core which the dramatist may gesture toward, but not reveal. Some kind of account is given, often a mere recoil into banality. “For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo” doesn't tell us much we didn't know. The protagonist needs intelligence and self-awareness even to go near an explanation. Possessing both, like Hamlet, he may prefer to keep quiet. Coriolanus, who has neither, can find nothing better...
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