SOURCE: “The Antic Disposition of Richard II,” in Shakespeare Survey, Vol. 27, 1974, pp. 33-41.

[In the following essay, Potter contends that Richard is much less virtuous, and thus a more interesting dramatic character, than has been previously thought. Potter further states that Richard’s elaborate language, although powerful, signifies weakness because it replaces action.]

Many critical studies of Richard II, and a surprising number of productions, start from a curious assumption: that Shakespeare wrote, and asked his leading actor to star in, a long play dominated by a character whose main effect on the audience was to be one of boredom, embarrassment, or at best contemptuous pity. If Richard's part is not a good one, the play is simply not worth seeing; and ‘good’, in theatrical terms, means not necessarily virtuous but interesting. I want to argue that Richard is in fact rather less virtuous than has often been thought, and, just for that reason, a ‘better’ dramatic character.

Much of our difficulty with the play is a difficulty of knowing what moral connotations to attach to its highly rhetorical language. It is useful to be reminded by R. F. Hill that ‘apparently self-conscious control of language does not, of itself, indicate dispassion and triviality in character’, especially since he goes on to show that self-conscious language is by no means confined to Richard.¹ Yet there is no doubt that elaborate language is used as a substitute for action and, to that extent, is a symbol of weakness. ‘Give losers leave to talk’ is an Elizabethan proverb, and in the first two acts of the play the long speeches do in fact belong to the ‘losers’—Mowbray, Gaunt, York, the Duchess of Gloucester, and Bolingbroke. They all talk too much, seldom content with one simile where three or four will do (even Bolingbroke's rejection of the consolations of language is itself couched in a series of rhetorical repetitions); they all become despondent in adversity, rejecting all attempts to comfort them; and three of them (the Duchess of Gloucester, Mowbray, Gaunt) prophesy, correctly, that they are soon to die. This is the style which, in the second half of the play, is associated with the defeated king and his supporters. It is foreshadowed, even before Richard's return from Ireland, by the fanciful dialogue of the Queen and the favourites as well as by the Welshmen's prophecies of death and disaster.

Yet, though such language may be a sign of weakness in those who speak it, it is itself extremely powerful. This is largely because of its evocation of patriotic and religious sentiments, on which most of the emotional and poetic force of the first two acts depends. It may be disregarded by the other characters but it works on the audience, and the same is true when Richard starts speaking this language halfway through the play.

The other kind of power, later associated with the ‘silent king’ Bolingbroke, is at first displayed only by Richard. He declares in the opening scene that ‘We are not born to sue but to command’ (I, i, 196),² and his reactions to the eloquence of others are either impatient—‘It boots thee not to be compassionate’ (I, iii, 174); ‘Can sick men play so nicely with their names?’ (II, i, 84)—or deflationary, as when he asks ‘Why, uncle, what's the matter?’ after York has spent twenty-two lines trying to tell him (II, i, 186). His few long speeches, such as the description of Bolingbroke's behaviour to the common people and the formal banishment of the two appellants, are almost the only ones in this part of the play that do not make the director reach for his blue pencil. The banishment speech, indeed, may look at first as if it needs shortening, but in performance its rhetoric has an obvious dramatic effect; Richard keeps the two men in suspense during fifteen lines of sonorous clauses—‘For that’, ‘and for’, ‘and for’—and then drops his bombshell in the simple phrase ‘Therefore we banish you our territories’ (I, iii, 139). His shorter utterances, too, are very like the language which, when it appears in connection with Bolingbroke, we associate with confidence, efficiency and power. His reception of Gaunt's death—

The ripest fruit first falls, and so doth he;
His time is spent, our pilgrimage must be;
So much for that

(II, i, 153-5)

—can be compared with Bolingbroke's reaction to Mowbray's, when, as Kenneth Muir has pointed out, he also ‘changes the subject in the middle of a line’.³ Similarly, Richard's flippant-sounding jingle,

Think what you will, we seize into our hands
His plate, his goods, his money and his lands,

(II, i, 209-10)

falls into the same rhythm as Northumberland's couplet in the final scene:

The next news is, I have to London sent
The heads of Salisbury, Spencer, Blunt, and Kent.(4)

(V, vi, 7-8)

The change which Richard undergoes in the second half of the play may be explained in terms of language and decorum, but this is not much help to the actor who has somehow to reconcile the two halves. The commonest solution is to play the first two acts in the light of the other three. A foppish or wicked Richard may spend the first scene eating sweetmeats, talking with his favourites, or making clear that he is the real murderer of Gloucester,⁵ while a more pathetically conceived Richard may appear in Christ-like make-up, looking frail and helpless among the brawny peers who will obviously be making mincemeat of him within the hour.⁶ It has even been argued that such interpretations are necessary: as one reviewer of the 1964 Stratford production put it, in the first part of the play ‘Shakespeare only does half the job, and, unless he is helped, we listen amazed at old Gaunt's dying protest about the king's “rash, fierce blaze of riot”. What riot?’⁷

Nicholas Brooke has rightly objected to actors trying too hard to establish Richard's personality before Shakespeare lets it emerge in I, iv. His description of this personality—‘a cold politician with atheistic tendencies … cheap however witty’—⁸ seems to me fair enough, except perhaps that it underrates the effectiveness of cheap wit in a formal setting and audience readiness to sympathise with the character who uses it (compare Shakespeare's other King Richard). Professor Brooke feels that our awareness of the real Richard confuses our response to the cosmic and political themes which he embodies and expresses;⁹ I should prefer to say that the interest of Richard's character lies in his ability to use, and not simply to embody, the emotional associations of these themes. This use only gradually becomes conscious and, like Hamlet's antic disposition, co-exists with a capacity for emotional involvement. But irony and a suggestion of duplicity are present in Richard throughout the play.

For the point about Richard's terse style in the opening scenes is that it is also enigmatic; his carefully balanced speeches to Mowbray and Bolingbroke do not, unless slanted by the production, help the audience to decide which of the challengers is right (indeed, we never know). Hence, the difference in their punishments seems not retributive but arbitrary, especially when, simply because Gaunt looks unhappy, four years are casually lopped off Bolingbroke's exile. The latter's response,

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,

(I, iii, 213-15)

introduces the themes, which Gaunt will take up at more length, of time, breath, and the destructive power of kings. But, taken on its own, it suggests rather oddly that Richard has not restored but killed four years of life. A darker purpose is in fact confirmed by the next scene, where the king's first ‘private’, words express a doubt,

When time shall call him home from banishment,
Whether our kinsman come to see his friends.

(I, iv, 21-2)

In other words, he may never repeal Bolingbroke after all. Perhaps the ‘hopeless word of “never to return”’, which Richard breathes against Mowbray (I, iii, 152), is likewise only a word, another sign that the breath of kings can blow hot and cold.

Evidence of duplicity in Richard's character could have been provided for Shakespeare by Holinshed, who lists among the thirty-three articles alleged against him the charge that his letters were written in a style ‘so subtill and darke that none other prince once beléeued him, nor yet his owne subiects’.¹⁰ Equivocation—setting the word against the word—is a common practice of the Machiavellian ruler in drama (compare Mortimer's use of the ‘unpointed’ message in Edward II), and in the later scenes of the play Bolingbroke himself is not free from a suspicion of it. Hence his almost comic difficulty in finding a form of words which will convince the Duchess of York that he really has pardoned Aumerle. Her nervousness is understandable, since her husband has just made the helpful suggestion, ‘Speak it in French, king, say “pardonne moy”’ (V, iii, 117). But in fact I get the impression throughout the play that Bolingbroke is genuinely trying to say what he means. There is, for instance, a vast difference between his sharp words to his peers,

Little are we beholding to your love,
And little look'd for at your helping hands,

(IV, i, 160-1)

and Richard's way of putting the same thing, when York has insisted that both Gaunt and Herford love him well:

Right, you say true; as Herford's love, so his;
As theirs, so mine; and all be as it is.

(II, i, 145-6)

This kind of irony reveals rather than conceals the speaker's emotions, which is why it is often taken as a sign of weakness. But it also enables him to avoid stating his intentions, and thus, as we shall see, to give a great deal of trouble to Bolingbroke.

The transitional scene at Barkloughly Castle is unusual in its lack of this irony. Richard not only takes over the emotionally charged rhetoric which has hitherto been associated chiefly with his opponents, he also takes on their role as spokesman for England and the Church. From the moment when he greets the English earth, it is he alone who embodies the spirit of Mowbray's lament for his native tongue, Bolingbroke's ‘English ground, farewell’, and Gaunt's famous purple passage. At the same time the presence of Carlisle reminds us that Richard consistently has the support of the Church, something which his successor never gets. This is unhistorical—Holinshed describes the prominent part taken by the Archbishop of Canterbury on Bolingbroke's behalf—and seems to be deliberate. In the early part of the play the values of Church and State are united in frequent evocations of the figure of the Crusader in the Holy Land and the warrior upholding the truth in single combat. Our last vision of this kind of harmony, now already in the past, comes in Carlisle's account of the death of Mowbray who has fought under the colours of ‘his captain Christ’ (IV, i, 99). Henry IV will never make his intended Crusade, churchmen are frequently involved in rebellions against him, and it is not until the reign of Henry V that Shakespeare again shows Church and State reconciled.

But their values cannot be reconciled in any case. Richard's behaviour at Barkloughly Castle is often taken as an undignified oscillation between two equally reprehensible states of mind, futile rage and morbid despair. It seems to me rather a bringing out into the open of a conflict between the equally valid but contradictory roles of king and Christian. Richard's moods of defeatism, though Carlisle condemns them, can be interpreted as an attempt to achieve that Christian resignation which, in the Mirror for Magistrates view, is the only refuge for the victim of Fortune's wheel. Reviewing the ‘sad stories of the death of kings', he describes them as ‘all murthered’ (III, ii, 155-60), because no death can ever be ‘natural’ for men who have been led to think of themselves as immortal. The failure to bear in mind their own mortality is the chief crime of which the speakers in the Mirror accuse themselves; it is also the only sin which Richard lays to his own charge. Hence the special sense given to ‘flattery’ in the play: Bolingbroke actually receives much grosser adulation than Richard (especially in II, iii), but the latter says that he is being flattered even when the mirror shows him a beauty that is really his, because it fails to show the ultimate truth about the transitoriness of that beauty. Similarly, at the end of the Barkloughly scene, he seems to equate all forms of comfort with flattery. As York said earlier, ‘Comfort's in heaven, and we are on the earth’ (II, ii, 78), and ‘that sweet way I was in to despair’ (III, ii, 205) may be sweet because, in one sense, it is the way to salvation.

On the other hand, as the exchanges of defiances, gages, and insults throughout the play remind us, the concepts of nobility and kingliness are not necessarily Christian. Mowbray and Bolingbroke refuse to accept counsels of patience in I, i, while Gaunt, in the scene that follows, opposes Christian patience to his sister-in-law's exhortations to think of family honour and revenge. Her response—

Call it not patience, Gaunt, it is despair …
That which in mean men we intitle patience
Is pale cold cowardice in noble breasts.

(I, ii, 29-34)

—is similar to what the Queen says to Richard at their parting:

The lion dying thrusteth forth his paw
And wounds the earth, if nothing else, with rage
To be o'erpow'r'd, and wilt thou, pupil-like,
Take the correction mildly, kiss the rod,
And fawn on rage with base humility,
Which art a lion and the king of beasts?

(V, i, 29-34)

The Barkloughly castle scene is difficult to play because the Lion King and the Christian are juxtaposed too often and too abruptly. But this is not to say that the roles are not sincerely played. They have to be, if the scene is to work at all. The reason why Richard is un-ironic here is that he believes, although we know otherwise, that effective action is still possible; his responses are real responses. To say that Richard is an actor giving a performance is irrelevant: all good dramatic parts allow actors to behave like actors. But to ask an actor to play the part of an actor giving an unconvincing performance is theatrical suicide. No one can possibly take any interest in the future history of a character shown to be as hollow as his crown. Fops are minor figures in drama, and rightly so.

It is when Richard is completely cut off from the possibility of effective action that he begins to make use of the roles of king and Christian for his own purposes; their contradictions no longer matter, because he is concerned only with their effect. The Lion King makes his last gesture when he asks,

Shall we call back Northumberland and send
Defiance to the traitor, and so die?

(III, iii, 129-30)

But he chooses instead to follow the advice of Aumerle:

No, good my lord, let's fight with gentle words,
Till time lend friends, and friends their helpful
                                                                                                                                                                                    swords.

(III, iii, 131-2)

As has been pointed out, this is ‘an intention of plain duplicity’.¹¹ Words are a weapon for Richard, as well as a form of emotional release, and a closer look at his confrontations with Bolingbroke will show that he does in fact fight very skilfully with them.

In the first of these scenes, III, iii, Richard first makes an impressive speech in the kingly style, then sends a ‘fair’ (and, as he at once indicates, a lying) message to Bolingbroke, then (possibly for Northumberland's ears as well as Aumerle's) indulges in a fantasy of despair which plays ‘idly’, as he says, with traditional Christian symbols. To Northumberland, the sarcastic speeches which follow seem the words of ‘a frantic man’. Yet when Richard re-enters the ‘base court’ he does not sound frantic. He picks up his own words, ‘Down, down I come’ and ‘In the base court?’ as he addresses Bolingbroke:

Fair cousin, you debase your
princely knee
To make the base earth proud with
kissing it …
Up, cousin, up …

(III, iii, 190-1, 194)

Bolingbroke and the rest treat him gently because he seems so helpless; he is then able to show up their gentleness as hypocrisy by hinting that he knows what they are really after. It is possible to argue that his anticipation of Bolingbroke's intentions makes Richard an accomplice in his own destruction; it is possible similarly, to say that Lear makes his daughters into monsters by treating them as such before they have done anything more unfilial than complaining about his hundred knights. But this seems to me too ‘psychological’ an approach to the plays. Richard does not, like a predestinating God, make things happen because he foresees them. He foresees them because they are going to happen, and because his awareness of the situation is both a convenient dramatic shorthand (if an event is accepted as inevitable, Shakespeare does not have to explain the precise practical means by which it comes about) and a means by which he can dominate the action.

Typical of the way in which he uses words to transform weakness into strength is his exploitation, at Flint Castle and in Westminster Hall, of conceits on tears. We dislike this sort of language nowadays, so it is tempting to describe as mere self-indulgence Richard's images of making ‘foul weather with despised tears’ (III, iii, 161), digging a pair of graves with them (III, iii, 165-9), being weighed down with them like a bucket in a well (IV, i, 184-9), and washing away his royal balm in them (IV, i, 207). What all these fantasies emphasise is the power of something which is normally taken to be a symbol of helplessness. The comparison of himself and Bolingbroke to two buckets in a well derives, in its rising-falling pattern, from the idea of Fortune's wheel and the ‘Down, down I come’ and ‘Up, cousin, up’ of III, iii.¹² But in his insistence that he outweighs his cousin, who is able to rise so high only because he is essentially hollow, Richard also echoes and reverses the ‘balance’ image which the Gardener had used to the Queen:

                                                  Their fortunes both are weigh'd;
In your lord's scale is nothing but himself,
And some few vanities that make him light.
But in the balance of great Bolingbroke,
Besides himself, are all the English peers,
And with that odds he weighs King Richard down.

(III, iv, 84-9)

What we see throughout the deposition scene is that Richard alone, in his potently symbolic role as the Man of Sorrows, can in fact out-weigh Bolingbroke and the peers.

The chief irony of this scene is one of which Richard himself is quite well aware: only a king can judge a king, and therefore it is he who must depose himself, yet the very fact that he is in this humiliating position is also a proof of his kingship which nothing can eradicate. He makes as much capital as possible from this two-edged predicament. Bolingbroke, in response apparently to Carlisle's plea, sends for Richard to perform in public what (according to York) he has already agreed to in private. The intention is, first, that the king should be seen to abdicate voluntarily and thus free his successor from the guilt of usurpation, and, second, that he should prove that he is ‘worthily deposed’ by reading out the articles which contain the charges against him. Richard does neither of these things.

Instead, he continues to employ the technique which we first saw at the end of the Flint Castle scene, that of giving with one hand and taking back with the other:

Well you deserve. They well deserve to have
That know the strong'st and surest way to get.

(III, iii, 200-1)

What you will have, I'll give, and willing too,
For do we must what force will have us do.

(III, iii, 206-7)

His first speech in Westminster Hall shows the same teasing ambiguity:

God save the king! although I be not he;
And yet, amen, if heaven do think him me.

(IV, i, 174-5)

Urged to resign the crown, he invites Bolingbroke to ‘seize’ it. The series of quibbles which follows has a serious purpose. By claiming, for instance, that he is willing to resign his crown but not the cares that go with it he is transforming a sacramental object into a piece of metal, a ‘heavy weight from off my head’ (IV, i, 204). He may formally ‘undo’ himself, in language that seems as thorough as Bolingbroke could wish, but his very exaggeration is suspicious. The renunciation culminates in his insistence that by losing the crown he loses his life since the one is so completely identified with the other. Later he virtually takes everything back when he condemns himself and everyone else as traitors for their part in the ritual undoing. The stress throughout has been on the unalterable fact of his kingliness.

He also, by a well-timed burst of hysteria, avoids having to read the articles. He promises to read his sins, not from the paper Northumberland is brandishing, but from the mirror where he can see them written on his face. But the mirror shows him no sins; it reveals the face of a king. He smashes it because it lies about his situation, the true situation of all men, even kings. Thus, in drawing Bolingbroke's attention to ‘the moral of this sport’, he may be offering a warning as well as a further statement of the power of sorrow (IV, i, 290-1).

His last gesture is a trick, and apparently a rather pointless one. He will, he says,

                                                            beg one boon,
And then be gone, and trouble you no more.

(IV, i, 302-3)

But what he begs in fact is permission to be gone. The request is a further move in the power-struggle, both because Richard is able to leave without having read the articles and because he forces Bolingbroke to show his intentions at last by sending him to the Tower.¹³ In his parting shot—

O, good! Convey! Conveyers are you all,
That rise thus nimbly by a true king's fall.

(IV, i, 317-18)

—he seizes on the unfortunately chosen word ‘convey’ (which was slang for ‘steal’) and adds, I think, a characteristic pun on ‘true king’ (a ‘true man’ was the opposite of a thief). It is a good exit, but what he wins is not simply a moral victory; by making it clear that he is not willing to resign the crown and still considers himself the rightful king, he has opened the way for just such a conspiracy as we see taking shape at the end of the scene.

Stanley Wells has pointed out the parallel between the ending of the deposition scene and that of II, i.¹⁴ There, too, mere words—those of the dying Gaunt and York—seem to have no effect, yet the scene ends with three onlookers deciding to take action on behalf of an apparently hopeless cause. Richard's pun on ‘convey’ links the two still further, since it was his own theft of Gaunt's lands which started the rebellion against him. That the rebellion against Bolingbroke is later discovered and crushed does not alter the effect of the rebels' words, coming as they do immediately after the ‘woeful pageant’. It is too simple to treat the deposition scene as a triumph of silent, powerful Bolingbroke over verbose, weak Richard. Language is a source of power in the play, even though there is also an awareness of its inadequacy. Though Richard's rhetoric successfully appeals to the spectators' reverence for the symbol of England and the Church, the nobles and churchmen who rally to his cause are defeated in a way that is clearly providential: Aumerle has no sooner said that he intends to be in Oxford ‘If God prevent it not’ (V, ii, 55) than York notices the seal hanging out of his son's doublet. And the less admirable motives which make the old man gallop away to reveal the plot do not detract from his conviction that Bolingbroke's usurpation, however shocking, must somehow be part of a divine plan.

Shakespeare does not attempt to explain this paradox, but he continues to explore it in the last act of the play, largely through the opposing kinds of language he gives to Richard. On the one hand, the deposed king becomes more formal and rhetorical than ever before. After the ceremonial unkinging, which he later describes as a divorce between him and his crown (V, i, 71-2), comes his equally ritualistic parting with the Queen, when he ‘unkisses’ his contract with her in an exchange of hearts which is also a marriage with sorrow. Even his dying words are formal, a divorce of soul from body:

                                                                      Exton, thy fierce hand
Hath with the king's blood stain'd the king's own land.
Mount, mount, my soul! thy seat is up on high,
Whilst my gross flesh sinks downward, here to die.

(V, v, 109-12)

The speech echoes and unites several dominant images of the play: the rising-falling pattern, the sacrificial blood watering the earth, and the stain which cannot be washed away. Richard shows complete certainty both of his kingly status and of his own salvation; Exton, similarly, accepts the view that he himself is damned forever. We have seen the death of a symbol, not a human being.

But alongside this ritualistic King of Sorrows Shakespeare also gives us intriguing glimpses of the other Richard: sharp-tongued, self-mocking and quite unresigned. The pointed realism of his words to Northumberland in V, i, is fully in keeping with his constant anticipation of Bolingbroke's moves, and I am sure the Quartos are right to give him, and not Northumberland, the cynical reply to the Queen's request that the two of them be banished together: ‘That were some love, but little policy’ (V, i, 84). The symbolic representative of England has little discernible affection for his people (‘A king of beasts indeed’ [V, i, 35]), and, as the prison soliloquy shows us, God's representative on earth is unsure of his own salvation. Unlike the saintly Henry VI with his crown of content, Richard finds that ‘no thought is contented’ (V, v, 11) and he now sees death not as the way to ‘a new world's crown’ (V, i, 24) but as ‘being nothing’ (V, v, 41). The images in which he personifies his own thoughts all tend irresistibly toward the grotesque, whether they are quibbling over scriptural contradictions, plotting an impossible escape, or, like beggars in the stocks (not Stoic philosophers, or even the hermit that he once imagined himself), trying to resign themselves to fate.¹⁵ His playing with words, far from providing a consoling substitute for reality, nearly drives him mad. Yet, despite the desire for human love which comes through at the end of the soliloquy, his immediate reaction to the unexpected appearance of the Groom is a stale pun on ‘royal’ and ‘noble’. The familiar tone of this little episode is almost immediately followed by the outbursts against the keeper and the murderers, in which the dominant note seems one of relief that he at last has an object on which to release his pent-up energies. There is relief for the audience as well, not only in the violent action which follows five acts of fighting with words alone, but also in the sheer arrogance of Richard's reaction: ‘How now! what means death in this rude assault?’ (V, v, 105). Nevertheless, one can see why his dying speech had to be modulated into a different tone.

The formality of that speech, and its rhyming couplets, are taken up at once by Exton, establishing the simplified, symbolic view of Richard (‘As full of valour as of royal blood’ [V, v, 113]) which is to prevail in the final scene. However uninspired poetically, the alternation of speeches reporting the downfall of Henry's enemies with bathetic thank-you couplets from Henry is dramatically effective in that it prepares the entry of Exton, whom the king emphatically does not thank. Moreover, Henry's forgiveness of Carlisle, which ought to be the climax of the scene, is immediately and ironically nullified by the appearance of the coffin which, though it contains ‘the mightiest of thy greatest enemies’ (V, vi, 32), is a source not of triumph but of consternation to him. ‘A god on earth thou art’, was the Duchess of York's phrase after he pardoned Aumerle (V, iii, 134), but Exton's act has identified him irrevocably with Pilate, wishing in vain both to pardon his victim and to wash the blood off his hands. As Reese has pointed out, ‘thy buried fear’ (V, vi, 31) has a double meaning, indicating not only an end to fears but a permanent source of them in the coffin of the murdered king.¹⁶ The presence of that coffin lends dignity and resonance even to the stiff couplets of Henry and Exton; in particular, the phrase ‘Richard of Burdeaux’ has a shock effect which is curiously moving in the theatre. Henry's last speech calls upon the familiar national and religious symbols and attempts to channel potentially dangerous emotions into the ritual of court mourning and the promise of a Crusade. But it is fitting that irony and ambiguity should hang over this solemn ending and that the ‘silent king’ in the coffin should still present a threat. Richard dominates the scene in his silence as he had dominated it before with words.

Notes

1. ‘Dramatic Techniques and Interpretation in Richard II’, Stratford upon Avon Studies, 3, Early Shakespeare (1961), 103.

2. References are to the Arden edition of the play, ed. Peter Ure (London, 1956).

3. Note on II, i, 153-5 in Signet edition (New York, 1963).

4. The first of these couplets apparently derives, rhythm and all, from The Mirror for Magistrates; see Peter Ure's note in the Arden edition.

5. See, e.g., Shaw on Beerbohm Tree, The Saturday Review, 11 Feb. 1905, quoted in Shaw on Shakespeare, ed. Edwin Wilson (New York, 1961), p. 148; Audrey Williamson on John Neville, Old Vic Drama, 2 (London, 1957), 174-5; and A. C. Sprague, Shakespeare's Histories, Plays for the Stage (The Society for Theatre Research, London, 1964), pp. 38-9.

6. E.g., Edwin Booth (Sprague, Shakespeare's Histories, pp. 32) and David Warner (Harold Hobson, Sunday Times, 19 April 1964).

7. Felix Barker, London Evening News, 16 April 1964.

8. Shakespeare's Early Tragedies (London, 1968), p. 119.

9. Ibid., p. 128.

10. Raphael Holinshed, Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (6 vols., London, 1807), III, 860.

11. A. R. Humphreys, Richard II (Studies in English Literature, London, 1967), p. 49.

12. See Peter Ure's note on IV, i, 184-9 in the Arden edition.

13. See Brents Stirling, ‘Up, Cousin, Up; Your Heart is Up, I Know’, from Unity in Shakespearean Tragedy (Columbia, 1956), reprinted in P. M. Cubeta (ed.), Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Richard II (New Jersey, 1971), p. 95.

14. See the introduction to his edition of the play (Penguin, 1969), pp. 30-1.

15. See Nicholas Brooke's comments on this soliloquy, Shakespeare's Early Tragedies, pp. 134-5.

16. The Cease of Majesty (London, 1961), p. 255.