SOURCE: Pilkington, Ace G. “The BBC Richard II.” In Screening Shakespeare from Richard II to Henry V, pp. 29-63. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991.

[In the following essay, Pilkington offers a detailed assessment of the highlights and deficiencies of the 1979 BBC production of Richard II, directed by David Giles and starring Derek Jacobi as Richard.]

FACTORS SHAPING THE PRODUCTION

John Wilders told me in a June 1987 interview that two of the constraints on the BBC Richard II were (as might be expected from the general background of the series) time and money. He used the Mowbray-Bolingbroke confrontation as an example of a scene where “the camera tended simply to shift in a rather automatic way from one to another.” And he went on to argue “that if more had been done with having many more cameras and many more camera angles and more interesting lighting and so on, it wouldn't have been quite such a routine, workaday production.” He pointed out, however, that “we would not only have needed a bigger budget, a much bigger technical crew, but it would also simply have taken a very great deal more time in rehearsal and the actual recording it.”

As John Wilders indicates, the production could have been improved with more time to rehearse and film. The coordination required among director, actors, and camera crew cannot be achieved without careful planning, no matter how capable the artists involved may be; the choreography required on a soundstage must be almost balletic in its precision. Actors must, of course, hit marks to remain within the effective range of the camera. This is complicated when an actor crosses from one part of the set to another; it becomes still more complex when groups are involved. For instance, in a three shot, the actors must carefully restrict their movements and stay close together. They must also keep to the prearranged schedule, delaying or speeding up their dialogue and inserting pauses to allow the camera the time it needs for changes of movement and focus.¹ It is worth remembering in this context that the BBC productions were sometimes taped in blocks of as much as fifteen minutes.

There are, indeed, many signs in Richard II of the haste that lack of money creates. The framing is often sloppy, the actors sometimes shuffle to get out of the way of the camera and each other, there is a worrisome sameness to the camera angles, and, especially in the early scenes, actors are often crammed into shots for no reason other than to add more costumes and bodies. Thus, through most of Bolingbroke's early speeches, he is in two and three shots with stony-faced actors who look blankly away from the action and even down at the floor in what seems much closer to actors' boredom than courtiers' embarrassment. Reaction shots in general tend to be slow (and with the notable exception of Jacobi's) not well thought out. There is perfunctory pointing of a camera at an actor as an illustration to go with a particular line instead of using the reaction shot as a means (like lines and often equally important) of advancing plot and characterization.

Here, for example, are some of the problems that occur in the first three scenes:

At 1.1.36, “And mark my greeting well,” the back of a head bobs between Bolingbroke and the camera and then moves away again. At 1.2.9, “Finds brotherhood in thee no sharper spur?” there is an unsteady camera movement. At 1.2.58, “Yet one word more,” Gaunt is partly out of the frame, the most common type of trouble.²

At 1.3.7, “Marshal, demand of yonder champion,” Richard's face is too distant to be clearly visible in the shallow focus this production often employs. This too is a frequent difficulty, as the following examples show. At 1.3.78, “God in thy good cause make thee prosperous,” Richard is visible in the background during Gaunt's speech, an excellent idea that comes to nothing because the king's features are so blurred as to be indistinguishable. At 1.3.116, “Attending but the signal to begin,” Richard signals, but his face is again unclear.

At 1.3.141, “Till twice five summers have enriched our fields,” there is a cut to Richard, but in the background Gaunt's shoulder and a fringe of hair rock in and out of the frame, partly, no doubt, as a result of the crowded acting conditions. At 1.3.166, “Within my mouth you have enjailed my tongue,” Mowbray is in a two shot with a bored actor who looks down. This is a repeated difficulty; there are many useless faces. Shortly after this, for example, Bolingbroke is in a shot that should belong to him, but two less important actors are seen more prominently than he is. At 1.3.179, “Lay on our royal sword your banished hands,” Gaunt is the cause of a similar problem; he is visible, shuffling from one foot to the other in a way unmotivated by anything but finding an unobtrusive place to stand.

At 1.3.268, “Will but remember me what a deal of world,” there is a more complicated difficulty than sloppy framing. Bolingbroke turns upscreen to speak to Gaunt, and as a result, we lose most of his expression. This would be an excellent place to employ a reverse angle shot, perhaps giving the film a three-dimensional feeling by shooting the reverse angle over Gaunt's shoulder. The result of that strategy would have been to add visual variety plus give us more of Gaunt's expression than we had of Bolingbroke's and all of Bolingbroke's reaction as well.

The difficulties I have so far listed might most readily be ascribed to a too-short shooting schedule. However, there is an overall problem of attitude as well, which appears most clearly in 2.1. This scene should, in my opinion, have been reshot, but, as I'm about to argue, it should first have been rethought. It follows the most cleverly filmed of the early scenes, the king and his courtiers in the baths, and has in addition Shakespeare's excellent stage (and even better screen) transition from Richard's “Pray God we may make haste and come too late!” to Gaunt's “Will the King come” to start things off. One of Giles's better ideas was the juxtaposition of the informalities at the baths with the informalities we see in the dress and attitudes of the two brothers. It is a vital scene for the plot, containing important confrontations and strong performances, made more prominent still by the decision to use this scene (or at least the first two-thirds of it) as the end of part 1 in the three-part structure, which the BBC imposed on the play. But the filming is marred not only by absence of time but also by the presence of Messina's conception of television Shakespeare as a “front row in the stalls with two fine actors shouting at each other.”³

For instance, at 2.1.11, “More are men's ends marked than their lives before,” York crosses downscreen between Gaunt and the camera on Gaunt's line for no discernible reason, and then Gaunt looks back to where York had been to deliver his next line. Surely something odd must have happened to leave two veteran actors in such straits. At 2.1.72, “What comfort, man? How fares it with aged Gaunt?” there is a desperate camera movement to bring a sliver of Richard to the screen while he speaks his line. At 2.1.113, “Landlord of England art thou now,” there is another example of confusion. Gaunt, who has been advancing on Richard during his speech, steps back at this point, which happens also to be the time when the camera switched to Richard for a reaction shot. Since Gaunt and the camera operator had not synchronized their movements and since only one camera appears to have been involved, Gaunt was left very clumsily out of frame before an equally clumsy cut to Richard.

At 2.1.117, “Darest with thy frozen admonition,” the camera is shooting over Gaunt's shoulder at Richard, who is upscreen, but instead of a shot that might have given us the two of them reacting to each other, all we get is the back of Gaunt's head. In fact, we do not see Gaunt's face from this point until the last half of 2.1.124. Far too often in this scene we are deprived of Gaunt's face, of Richard's, or of both. At 2.1.141, “I do beseech your Majesty, impute his words,” there is a similar problem. York is shouting upscreen at Richard, who is facing the wall.

Much in this scene was not caught by the camera. At 2.1.148, “Nay, nothing, all is said,” we fail to get Richard's first reaction to Gaunt's death because Richard is out of focus. At 2.1.151, “Be York the next that must be bankrout so!” we have only the back of York's head. At 2.1.155, “So much for that,” Richard moves quickly offscreen and then back; the camera can't keep up. At 2.1.175, “Than was that young and princely gentleman,” York moves completely out of frame. At 2.1.181, “Which his triumphant father's hand had won,” we have the back of Richard's head, while York is turned upscreen with his hand blocking what little we might otherwise have seen of his profile. At 2.1.184, “O, Richard, York is too far gone with grief,” York now turns downscreen and his face falls out of the frame. At 2.1.200, “Now afore God—” York follows Richard behind the other actors and neither is visible.

Many of the problems with what otherwise could have been a very strong scene come directly from giving the audience a seat in the stalls while two actors shout at each other. There is plenty of shouting, and the camera (there often appears to be only one) does seem to have been confined to the front seats of a hypothetical theater: it is capable of moving in for close-ups but not of shooting from the wings, from the back of the stage, or from anywhere overhead. As a result, we are burdened with the difficulties of the stage and television together. We have not the freedom of watching anything the director does not show us, and the sight lines are so clumsy and the camera's freedom of access so limited that much of the scene is not visible to anybody. Undoubtedly many of these problems could have been corrected with longer shooting time and more retakes, but many of the difficulties could also have been eliminated if the initial idea had been to film television rather than to record a stage production from the front rows.

In fairness to David Giles and his company, I should point out that the problems I have so far listed are at their worst in the early scenes of Richard II. There is a steady decline in the number of technical mistakes through the four BBC Shakespeares he directed and a corresponding increase in the flexibility of camera placement. In addition, the efficient handling of many specialized group shots in the difficult circumstances of Richard II demonstrates his expertise.

Several critics commented on Giles's skill. For Clive James, Giles “showed his firm hand immediately, framing the actors' faces as closely as possible while they got on with … speaking the text.”⁴ Jorgens similarly praises the “scene where Bolingbroke sentences Bushy and Green to death.” He points to “the confident use of the camera, which includes and excludes characters with precision,” providing “a striking contrast with the randomness of earlier productions.”⁵ I have indicated that it also provides a contrast (if not a striking one) with some other scenes in this production, but I do not mean to deny Giles's effectiveness. He should certainly be credited with the victories and finesses that emerged from a rough process.

In addition to the neat juxtaposition of informal scenes from Richard in the baths to Gaunt and York alone together, Giles has made other interesting connections. The last part of 2.1, from 224 to the end (the plot of the three conspirators), was cut away and set at the beginning of part 2, in Westminster, the Cloisters.⁶ And this whole miniscene was cleverly handled. We begin with Northumberland in close-up, speaking, it would seem, to himself. Then Ross, on his first line, turns back into the screen to make it a two shot, and finally Willoughby neatly steps in for a three shot. There is movement provided soon after by Northumberland crossing correctly behind prior to the three of them walking off as a group. Once they are all onscreen, their three faces are adroitly crammed together, providing a visual illustration for Ross's “We three are but thyself, and speaking so / Thy words are but as thoughts” (2.1.275-76). This visual concentration also helps to make them seem more positive, more certain of the success of that coming man (in two of the word's senses), Bolingbroke. The elimination of the first ninety-nine lines of 2.2 gives Giles an all-but-perfect jump cut from the absolute plan for action of Northumberland, Ross, and Willoughby to York's plaintive “I know not what to do” (2.2.100).

That Giles is also capable of handling larger groupings is proved with the arrival of Bolingbroke in 2.3. The whole scene is nicely done, with especially crisp camera movement between Bolingbroke and York during their confrontation. At 2.3.122, “If that my cousin king be King in England,” we get a three shot with Northumberland cannily watching Bolingbroke's persuasion from the background. When Ross and Willoughby are added, we have a neat five shot with Bolingbroke standing silent in front while other voices speak his arguments for him. It is a visual summary of the progress from the three conspirators' certainty to York's dithering, Bushy, Bagot, and Green's fear, and the arrival of Bolingbroke himself. The film has told us, even without the text, that one of the next moves will be against the favorites.

Michael Manheim points to the symbolic use of long shots and close-ups as the strength in the filming of 3.3: “That both Richard and Northumberland are seen at a distance establishes the highly political, patently insincere nature of their exchange.” When “close-ups take over … Richard speaks his real feelings to his entourage.”⁷ A similar juxtaposing of private and public takes place in 4.1 when Bolingbroke, who has been using his private voice, switches at 4.1.199, “Are you contented to resign the crown?” to a public style of declamation, a contrast that the intimacy of television easily heightens. Giles has demonstrated his skill by achieving more than might be expected in such difficult circumstances.

In addition to time and money, there were other factors in the construction of the BBC's Richard II. The decisions made by the designers and directors in that first season reflected the concerns of the producer and his corporate sponsors, which were in turn dictated by the audience expectations they perceived and hoped to fulfill. Messina's initial idea for the series had involved an open-air production of As You Like It, which meant, according to set designer Tony Abbott, “that the studio productions must be able to go alongside the ultra-realism of the location productions.”⁸ Here again is the feeling of restriction I noted earlier. Despite William Walton's music for the opening, despite the reassuring presence of John Gielgud, there is a sense of smallness, of sameness, so that there will be fewer visual styles in a whole season of different plays than in Olivier's Henry V. The decision, however, was part of the producer's concern for the expectations of his audience. And according to at least one reviewer, Messina may not have been conservative (or consistent) enough. Philip Purser complained that if the BBC had decided to limit itself to “reliable texts in a straightforward studio setting—an acoustic cube as the modern equivalent of Shakespeare's wooden ‘O,’” it should not then go “frolicking off on location in Scotland for ‘As You Like It.’”⁹

Tony Abbott describes the style that finally emerged in Richard II as “stylised realism.”¹⁰ That there were distinct limitations both on the realism and the stylization is clear from the handling of the tournament scene (1.3). David Giles says the scene was “an absolute swine.” He goes on to explain the impossibility of doing the scene realistically in a television studio but points out that they used real horses to avoid the alternate danger of too much stylization, because “if we had gone too stylised with the list scene we would have had to stylise the play all the way through.” Giles is apparently aware that a mixture of styles in the same film (or the same season) was not one of his options.

He is also suspicious of too much stylization because “on television where what you see is a real head against a bit of stylised background you can only stylise if you design it shot by shot.” Though later productions in the series, such as The Winter's Tale (and his own Henry V), tend to contradict Giles's initial assumption, it seems to me that his comments are another example of the pressure of truncated rehearsal and shooting schedules. He continues, “There certainly wasn't time for that here and I'm not sure I'd have wanted to do that anyway.”¹¹ He is slightly defensive and almost apologetic about the only part of the filming that was noticeably unusual.

Perhaps David Giles has good reason to sound apologetic. It was, in fact, this sequence that prompted those remarks by Cedric Messina about “arty-crafty” shooting, which I have already quoted. After discussing what he saw as the healthy habit of shooting for fifteen minutes without a break, Messina mentioned that Richard's soliloquy had been cut into ten different shots; he then went on to defend this seeming deviation from his policy of plain shooting: “We've done nothing sensational in the shooting of it—there's no arty-crafty shooting at all.”¹²

Again, such comments indicate Messina's attempts to fulfill the expectations of his mass audience. He says he hoped the productions would “stimulate people who … notice Hamlet advertised in their neighborhood theatre to say, ‘I saw it on the box; I think it's a good play. Let's go in and see it.’”¹³ Apparently, as Messina envisions the viewing experience, his audience must be introduced to art gradually, with no visual shocks to warn them that they have switched to something different from their ordinary fare.¹⁴

David Giles's decision about the costumes for Richard II, which brought him into conflict with the overall costume policy and with Robin Fraser-Paye, the costume designer for the production, tends to support my reading of Messina's remarks. Giles said he did not want the costumes to resemble The Book of Hours but

to look as much like clothes as possible.¹⁵ Robin … said to me, “But they're extraordinary clothes.” I said, “Yes, I know … and I do know Richard spent £2000 on one suit … but I want them to look real—everyday clothes that the audience can accept.”¹⁶

In this case the goal for the costumes in the histories “to be historically accurate to the period in which the play is set”¹⁷ had to give way to what Giles (and Messina behind him) thought his “unsophisticated” audience could accept as real clothes.¹⁸ Robin Fraser-Paye solved the problem by toning down the color palette and omitting the more extreme fashions.¹⁹

Many of the decisions that moved the production toward realism and away from “arty-crafty” shooting were also designed (as might be expected) to reduce the director's impact and importance. David Bevington, for example, calls Giles's direction (of 1H4 but the description applies equally well to R2) “low-key” and his “interpretation less insistent than that in the [stage] productions of Burrell, Seale, Hall, Hands, Nunn and others.”²⁰ I see this reduction of the director's influence as designed because of Messina's obvious desire to avoid “arty” direction and let “the plays speak for themselves.” Of course, plays do not speak, actors do, and this too is clearly one of Messina's designs—to let the actors speak to the audience with as little interference as possible. In the process David Giles has become much less important than some of his stage counterparts, while the actors have emerged as—to some extent—auteurs.

There is nothing particularly unusual about the actor as auteur; both Olivier and Welles might—by stretching a point—be so described. Indeed, Patrick McGilligan argues that a performer who “shifts meanings, influences the narrative and style of a film and altogether signifies something clear-cut to audiences despite the intent of writers and directors” is an auteur.²¹

Obviously, Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier do much more than this, while the actors in the BBC Shakespeares do less. But McGilligan discusses an intermediate situation, where the actor may also be an auteur. In the work of three Warner Brothers directors of the thirties and forties—William Keighley, Roy Del Ruth, and Lloyd Bacon—McGilligan identifies a straightforward, quick style of making movies, which “gave the actors … free rein to interpret their roles: indeed, there was little time for anything else.”²² Bacon, for example, shot Picture Snatcher in fifteen days,²³ a feat that is perhaps comparable to filming a Shakespeare play in six (allowing for the relative difficulty of the material and for the fact that Bacon had no time for separate rehearsal).

In short, given the preconceptions of the producer (including a bias toward realism that foregrounds the individual performance at the expense of any overall pattern), the extremely brief time allowed for shooting, the tendency to film the plays in large chunks when possible and to do retakes only when absolutely necessary, and keeping in mind that many of the actors had more experience with the material than the director did, it makes sense to look at the BBC Richard II (and the other plays of the second tetralogy) as the result of a combined effort. Of course, any film is a combined effort of many artists, but in the circumstances I have just described, the impact of any one of the chief players might be as great or greater than that of the director, and any analysis of the film must be arranged accordingly.

A clear example comes in Michael Manheim's review of Richard II. It is one of the most favorable reviews the production received, and it is undoubtedly strongly influenced by Manheim's admiration for the cast in general and Jacobi in particular. He ascribes the film's success to “the superb realization of the characters” and goes on to say, “Derek Jacobi is for me the best Richard witnessed in over thirty years.”²⁴ Cedric Messina had to some extent anticipated this, calling the play “the tragedy of one man.”²⁵

What emerges from this description of the making of the BBC Richard II is the clear subordination of an individual production to an overall “house style.” It might well be argued that such subordination is dangerous. As Messina himself had said, “Each play creates its own problems,”²⁶ and shaping Richard II perforce to fit the preconceptions of BBC television realism meant rejecting a number of other forms the production could have taken. It might have been more logical to look first at the text and only then to determine the film to be made from it.

In examining Shakespeare's aims in the play, Stanley Wells says, “Shakespeare made a decision of fundamental importance. He decided to write this play entirely in verse.” He goes on to discuss the effects of this degree of “stylisation and artificiality in the language,” maintaining that “a number of the characters are so lacking in individuality that they seem mainly or entirely choric in function.”²⁷

However, since pointing up such a choric function or foregrounding the stylization of the language can be undertaken by actors only when directorial decisions have paved the way, certain elements in Richard II were, of necessity, played down or shut out. Messina no doubt viewed this as part of the process of meeting the expectations of his various audiences, “what the layman would expect to see when he hears the name of … Richard II.” Hence, “in all the histories the aim is to be historically accurate to the period in which the play is set.”²⁸ This principle (violated only when even stronger audience expectations got in the way) emerged in tragedies with historical settings as well, even when the tight budget might not have seemed able to support it. Russell Miller “was told by a disgruntled employee” that during the making of Romeo and Juliet, the only researcher was in the British Museum, “wading through Italian books to try and find out what a town square was like in Italy in the fifteenth century. And she can't even speak Italian.”²⁹

Costume designer Odette Barrow indicates the kind of detail that was expected in the “semidocumentary style” for 1 Henry IV:

I had a problem with Hotspur. Historically, when his mother died he incorporated her arms with his. But Shakespeare manages to have her appear in Part 2 after Hotspur's death; so we thought, well, we'll have to give him his arms as they were before she died. So far as history is concerned his arms at the battle of Shrewsbury are therefore inaccurate, but as far as Shakespeare is concerned, they're right.³⁰

Clearly, David Giles was not meant to be an auteur, making Shakespeare's material his own after the fashion of Orson Welles. Many of the options that would have made a directorial imprint possible had been eliminated. There was not even the inspiration of continuity, of seeing Richard II as the beginning of a four-part sequence. Despite Cedric Messina's description of the histories as a “sort of Curse of the House of Atreus in English,”³¹ there was initially no plan to produce the plays in the second tetralogy as a group. It is true that many of the actors do continue throughout the series, and Giles did direct all four; however, at the time he made Richard II, he “was not expecting to continue with the three Henrys.”³² Thus, it is not safe to regard decisions in Richard II as direct preparations for the later plays. The omission of Henry's reference to Hal, the inclusion of his mention of Glendower, and the change of actors in the part of Hotspur are therefore likely to be influenced by factors other than the connection between Richard II and 1 Henry IV. For example, the choice of Tim Pigott-Smith for Hotspur was probably the result of his success as Angelo in the first season's production of Measure for Measure.

The central interpretation that grew from David Giles's Richard II was, as I have indicated, as much a matter of what could not be done (or what was not allowed) as of what could. It had to fit (or at least seem to fit) Messina's vision of audience expectations, and it had to take into account the naturalism of the production and the interpretive importance (and even control) of the actors, especially Derek Jacobi. It also had to fit in with the BBC's emphasis on the history of the period in which the play was set. In the circumstances, it is not surprising that the central interpretation which emerged was the result of cooperation between Giles and Jacobi (who had read history at university) and that it used the play's historical background as a starting point. In a way, Giles's creative use of history anticipated Jonathan Miller, who was able to work within the restrictions of BBC house style by focusing on the history of Shakespeare's period. Miller said, “It's the director's job, quite apart from working with actors … to act as the chairman of a history faculty and of an art-history faculty.”³³

THE CRITICS, GILES, AND HISTORY

One logical means for charting the central interpretation of the BBC Richard II is to look at the critics' reactions. Often, the unfavorable responses are even more revealing than the favorable ones because they show where the critic's expectational text has been revised by Giles and company. Malcolm Page is right when he says, “Commentators gave moderate praise to the television Richard, grudgingly observing that it was rather better than others of the first six.”³⁴ But as Manheim's judgment makes clear, Page is describing a consensus or average from which individual conclusions diverged widely.

The most sweeping condemnations were made (as might be anticipated) in those instances when Giles seemed to be deliberately revising the expectational text. Sheldon P. Zitner criticizes the whole of the BBC second tetralogy and Richard II in particular for “the effort to ‘clarify’ the text.” However, the example he gives is surprising: “the camera cuts to Bolingbroke in exile, informing us that before he returns to England he knows about the death of his father and about Richard's proposal to confiscate his property. Not so in Shakespeare.”³⁵ And not so in the BBC Richard II either. As happens disconcertingly often in Shakespeare film criticism, a check of the production in question fails to verify the description of events. Bolingbroke's first appearance after the death of Gaunt is in 2.3 with the scene's first line, “How far is it, my lord, to Berkeley now?” There simply is not an interpolated French scene, and, in any event, how would such a scene without lines indicate Bolingbroke's royal ambitions? But Zitner's hypersensitivity to the remote (and in this case nonexistent) possibility is revealing.

At least part of Zitner's objection is expressed more directly by Martin Banham: “When a television (or, to be fair, a film) director … shapes our image of the action, he is intruding his own interpretation of what is significant.” Banham sees in this the danger that the director will “interfere with our imaginative liberties” and may even destroy “the sensitive integral framework of the play itself.” He maintains that one result of this interference “has been to give these Shakespearean productions on television a linear feeling.”³⁶

This comment seems to me to come (on one level at any rate) from an uncritical idealization of the stage and an equally uncritical condemnation of television and film. Surely, as John Barton's 1973-74 production of Richard II for the Royal Shakespeare Company makes clear, a stage director may also interfere with the audience's “imaginative liberties.”³⁷ In fact, as David Bevington's analysis indicates, David Giles's “low-key” direction results in an interpretation that is “less insistent” than that of many of his stage counterparts.

Nevertheless, several factors contribute to the feeling that Giles has more control than is actually the case. I have already pointed out that the shooting schedule and the conscious decisions of Messina and of Giles himself effectively reduced the impact of the director on the films of the second tetralogy. But the large number of close-ups, the small number of reverse-angle shots, and the use of “a very long lens on the camera, so what you see in focus is clear but everything else is blurred” for exterior shots,³⁸ all added up to what Samuel Crowl called a “claustrophobic Richard II.”³⁹ While that adjective may be too strong, there is a closeness (and even, perhaps, a visual flatness) about the production that can give the misleading impression of a linear progression imposed on the viewer by the director.

I do not, of course, wish to suggest by this that David Giles did not make directorial decisions, some of which had strong impact. It is likely to be certain key decisions Giles made that are annoying Banham, even though he does not directly say so. Michael Manheim, who approves of those decisions, praises Giles for serving “as teacher as well as director.” We are, he says, being taught history we may not have learned “when, following Bolingbroke's accusation that Norfolk has murdered the Duke of Gloucester, Giles has the camera switch not to Norfolk but to Richard, the real culprit in Gloucester's death.”⁴⁰ Such a camera movement will not work, of course, unless the actor playing Richard is ready for it and shares the director's vision of the historical events that preceded the opening of the play. But Giles and Jacobi did have a shared vision that shaped the film.

It is in all probability this shape that Banham dislikes. He finds the “linear feeling” uncomfortable because the line moves away from his expectational text. One of the strongest objections to the production from another critic hits at this precise issue of the interpretation of the history behind the history play. Pointing to Cedric Messina's conventional description of the history plays and a television talk given by Paul Johnson as a curtain raiser for Richard II, Graham Holderness argues that “the second tetralogy emerges from this production as a constituent element in an inclusive and integrated dramatic totality, illustrating the violation of natural social ‘order’ by the deposition of a legitimate king.”⁴¹ Additionally, he maintains that the naturalistic conventions which Messina and Giles favor further endorse this ideology,⁴² and he contrasts this with what he sees as the more open and radical version of history and history plays that emerged from Jane Howell's direction of the first tetralogy.⁴³ I find some of Holderness's assumptions concerning the BBC Richard II useful because, though I believe his reading to be incorrect, I think the part of the filmtext that makes him uneasy is the center of the interpretation which Giles and Jacobi created.

Certainly, a naturalistic style of production can be used to endorse Tillyard's thesis, but style does not guarantee the political nature of content. As Henry Fenwick points out, “television casting is able to open up hitherto neglected portions of the play,” and one of the examples he gives is “the tiny part of the Duchess of Gloucester played by Mary Morris.”⁴⁴ The naturalistic television scene (1.2) foregrounds the Duchess of Gloucester's grief, Richard's guilt, and John of Gaunt's expressed belief that God will avenge Richard's crime as emphatically as the same scene was foregrounded in John Barton's stylized and nonnaturalistic stage production.⁴⁵ A good Tillyardian or even a director who wanted to simplify characterizations might have been expected to cut the scene.

Despite Cedric Messina's remarks about an English Curse of the House of Atreus, there was no concerted effort to produce a version of the second tetralogy conforming to Tillyard's Elizabethan world picture. In fact, the emphasis on the history of the period resulted in the contradiction of many of Tillyard's points.

Paul Johnson did say (as Holderness indicates), “According to the orthodox Tudor view of history the deposition of the rightful and anointed King, Richard II, was a crime against God, which thereafter had to be expiated by the nation in a series of bloody struggles.”⁴⁶ But shortly before that he had called Richard “an ideologue, a fanatic, an early supporter of the theory that kings ruled by divine right.” He also accused Richard of “illegal exactions and confiscations” and of exploiting parliament “to commit judicial murder against the nobles and despoil their estates.”⁴⁷ It would seem that the “orthodox Tudor view of history” was not shared by Paul Johnson.

His remarks do, however, fit the interpretation of history that Giles and Jacobi had worked out. To understand how far this is from the “world picture” it is necessary only to contrast it with Tillyard on the same subject: “Shakespeare knows that Richard's crimes never amounted to tyranny and hence that outright rebellion against him was a crime. He leaves uncertain the question of who murdered Woodstock.”⁴⁸

The radio curtain raiser to the BBC Richard II was given by Ian Richardson, who, with Richard Pasco, alternated the roles of Richard and Henry in John Barton's “radical” stage production. Richardson also failed to adhere to the Tillyardian party line, saying on the subject of Gloucester's death, “Richard had ordered it and so Mowbray from sheer loyalty keeps his mouth shut.”⁴⁹ He committed further heresies when he suggested that “Richard plucks defeat from the jaws of victory and wilfully destroys himself,” and “It's important for Henry Bolingbroke to have had no hand in Richard's overthrow, at least as direct instigator, if he is to maintain the audience's sympathy within Shakespeare's moral framework.”⁵⁰

If, in fact, Cedric Messina and the other administrators of the series were bent on “an inclusive and integrated dramatic totality,” they seem to have consistently chosen the wrong people for their purposes. David Giles and Derek Jacobi agreed early in rehearsals that Richard was indeed guilty and that his emotion in the first scene is, in Giles's words, “high tension because it is the moment he's been waiting for so long,”⁵¹ with the clear implication that what Richard has been awaiting is revenge. Nor would the two of them have found a defender of Tillyard's orthodoxy in the series literary consultant, John Wilders.

Wilders's wide range of responsibilities included trimming “the texts to fit the two-and-three-quarter hour time slot allotted for productions,” plus advising “directors of the series … on interpretation of difficult passages, rhythms, cuts, and relevant bibliographical sources” and “holding a ‘literary clinic’ to help actors make sense of Shakespeare's language.”⁵² It is probably safe to assume that one reason for John Wilders's appointment to the post of literary consultant was the appearance in 1978 of his book The Lost Garden, an elegant study of Shakespeare's English and Roman history plays that strongly attacks Tillyard's thesis.

It is, nevertheless, correct, I think, to see the BBC version of the second tetralogy and especially Richard II as productions of the history plays which are very much concerned with history. The background material I have presented up to this point indicates no less. Robert Hapgood said, commenting on Richard II, “The best of the Shakespeare Plays histories have been enlightened costume dramas, at ease with their historical ambience yet not at the expense of … dramatic strengths.”⁵³

I also agree with Holderness (with the reservations my discussion so far makes clear) when he says that the emphasis on history is the result of the plays being “produced in ‘classic drama’ style with predominantly naturalistic devices of acting, mise-en-scène, and filming.”⁵⁴ Extreme stylization of the kind Stanley Wells discusses was ruled out by Messina's house style. At the same time, the emphasis on history and the semidocumentary style that went with it would have pushed many directors (as it later did Jonathan Miller) to consider the historical possibilities inherent in the current play. David Giles and Derek Jacobi created their interpretation within the imposed limits of the BBC Shakespeares, but despite that (and, in fact, partly because of that) they produced a new Richard and an original Richard II.

As might be expected in the circumstances, Giles and Jacobi have done their best to maintain the interpenetration that has long existed between Shakespeare's histories and history itself. As Peter Saccio says in Shakespeare's English Kings, “far more than any professional historian … Shakespeare is responsible for whatever notions most of us possess about the period and its political leaders.”⁵⁵ Or as J. L. Kirby, himself a professional historian, writes in Henry IV of England, “From Shakespeare, of course, we can never escape whether we wish to or not.”⁵⁶

More important, though, for this study than the effect of Shakespeare on the writing of history is the impact of history on Richard II in its BBC incarnation. David Giles assumed that a modern audience was at a disadvantage because “the first third of the play depends on a circumstance which isn't fully explained in the play and which was close to the Elizabethan audience—the murder of Gloucester. To them it was the beginning of the Wars of the Roses.”⁵⁷

While this is hardly a startling position from which to begin,⁵⁸ it pushes the performance in definite directions. For example, in 1963, John Gielgud talked of Richard being “only lightly sketched at first in a few rather enigmatic strokes.”⁵⁹ This attitude pushed to its extreme (as it was by John Neville, playing the role at the Old Vic in 1955)⁶⁰ leads to the idea of two Richards—a pre-Ireland and post-Ireland one—the relevance of character in the latter half of the play having no relevance to the actions in the first half.

David Giles and Derek Jacobi took a precisely opposite view. As Giles says, “Derek and I both agree that the key section for Richard is the opening section of the play—the first three scenes.”⁶¹ This at once introduces a series of subtextual messages into the performance, which may be expected to alert even audience members who come to the play unprovided with the historical background. Instead of an impartial king attempting to resolve a dispute between two important nobleman—well or ill, weakly or powerfully, as actor, as poet, or as aesthete, according to the nature of the production—we now have a politician, manipulating royal justice to serve his own partly concealed purposes.

In a careful analysis of these subtextual (and in the case of historical information, extratextual) possibilities, John Russell Brown pointed out in 1966 that in the first scene Richard's protestations “may carry subtextual impressions of irony, apprehension or antagonism. Bolingbroke's accusations may seem aimed at the King rather than Mowbray, and Mowbray's confidence to stem from royal support rather than his own innocence.”⁶²

Brown's words could easily serve as a description of the relevant portion of the BBC Richard II. Only one significant element is missing, and Brown picks that up in his comments on scene 3: “Bolingbroke's submission … may seem to veil a rivalry with the King himself.”⁶³

Such a shift in perspective makes for what amounts to a reinterpretation of the motives for various actions in the play (and behind it) and a reassessment of Richard himself. Thus, as Andrew Gurr, editor of the New Cambridge Richard II, notes concerning the duel, “Richard cannot afford to have either man win, and therefore chooses to send both into the silence of exile for his own political safety.”⁶⁴ Such a view of the character is a long way from the picture of a histrionic Richard who stops the fight to make himself the center of attention and is even further from the vision of a political incompetent who makes dim and whimsical decisions. If this Richard belongs in the company of Hamlet and Coriolanus, where Yeats placed him,⁶⁵ it is because he too is involved in a battle of mighty opposites. In that case, even his most seemingly self-indulgent moments may shield something more than emotion. Gurr argues, for example, that “Richard calls for the mirror in order to evade Northumberland's insistence that he read the Articles listing his misdeeds.”⁶⁶ Gurr is not commenting on the BBC Richard II, but his words are an accurate description of what happens in the production, nevertheless. In fact, the Richard who emerges from these critical comments, the BBC film, and recent histories⁶⁷ is an altogether more dangerous character than a man who, as Theodore Weiss put it, “is Shakespeare's most thoroughgoing study of the absorption in words.”⁶⁸

HISTORY AS SUBTEXT

The version of history Giles and Jacobi used (and which became a kind of parallel text behind the filmtext) differs from that of Tillyard and other familiar sources in the placing of emphases and the conclusions it reaches. Despite the fact that Giles and Jacobi were contradicting the expectational texts of some of their viewers (including not a few critics), the coherent historical text that was available to them provided a workable interpretation for the play and also fitted in neatly with the BBC emphasis on history. This was true in part because the play is much closer to being historically accurate than many literary critics have realized.

Richard's whole career is seen in this view as a struggle to impose his royal (and therefore divine) will on his recalcitrant subjects. There was an escalating series of clashes between Richard and his nobles. The first—in 1386—involved Arundel and Thomas, duke of Gloucester, and left Richard fuming under the rule of an executive commission for one year. He was compelled to accept this by the threat of deposition, and one chronicle says Richard thought of asking the opposing lords to dinner and murdering them but gave up the idea as unworkable.⁶⁹

The second clash came in November of 1387, when Richard challenged the commission with a royal army in Cheshire and the signatures of many of the country's justices on a document that declared the commission imposed on the king to be not only illegal but also treasonous.⁷⁰ Gloucester and Arundel joined with Warwick, swiftly bringing their own troops to London and “appealing” five of Richard's closest advisors (who were supposedly behind the king's dangerous policies) of treason. Caught without an army of his own, Richard agreed to put the matter to Parliament and until that time to “take the case into his own hands.”⁷¹

However, as soon as the three “appellant” lords had withdrawn their army, Richard let his favorites escape and summoned the royal army of Cheshire archers.⁷² It was at this point, in December 1387,⁷³ that Henry Bolingbroke and Thomas Mowbray joined the appellants. The king's men were defeated at Radcot Bridge, and again Richard found himself pressured to agree to demands by the threat of deposition.⁷⁴

It took Richard ten years to prepare his revenge, building up his royal power to the point of tyranny. He now had a formidable force of Cheshire archers, and Parliament had, at his request, redefined interference in the royal household as treason.⁷⁵ Bruce suggests that Richard “had never fully recovered from the trauma of the Apellants' revolt,”⁷⁶ and the meeting of the five appellants for dinner at this time (and Mowbray's report of it to Richard) pushed him into action. In July of 1397, the three original appellants were themselves appealed of treason. Warwick confessed and was banished, Arundel was executed, and Gloucester, imprisoned in Calais, died mysteriously, almost certainly on Richard's orders.⁷⁷

The next step was to compel Parliament to repeal the general pardon granted after the 1388 Parliament and, in effect, to brand “anyone who had interfered with the king's prerogative, or had persuaded him to do anything against his will”⁷⁸ as a traitor. Parliament was forced to agree to what Richard wanted by the presence of four thousand archers with bent bows and arrows drawn to their ears.⁷⁹ The repeal of the general pardons put most of the people of southeast England in Richard's power,⁸⁰ a power he employed in various profitable ways. He sold pardons, neglected to record the sales, and sold pardons to the same men (and whole counties) again; and, finally, he had blank charters⁸¹ drawn, signed, and stored in chests for later use.⁸²

With Richard censoring all foreign mail and “sheriffs … being made to swear to imprison at once anyone whom they heard speak ill of the king,”⁸³ Mowbray told Bolingbroke of Richard's intention to punish them for their part in Radcot Bridge.⁸⁴ Remembering Mowbray's hand in the destruction of the three elder appellants, Bolingbroke reported his words to John of Gaunt, who, in turn, reported them to the king. Then, it was simple for Richard to force a quarrel and banish both men.⁸⁵

Giles and Jacobi have made their view of Richard's history clear. Speaking of Richard and the five appellant lords, Giles says,

One he has executed, one is in the tower, Gloucester has just been murdered, and now of the five only Mowbray and Bolingbroke, the two youngest, are left. Derek and I both agreed that the key section for Richard is the opening section of the play—the first three scenes. He said, “Why is he so angry in the first scene?” and I said, “He isn't—it's just high tension because it is the moment he has been waiting for so long.”⁸⁶

Giles goes on to give additional insights into his view of Richard and also his directorial decisions: “it's easier on television … because by focusing on Richard … and by using a major actress like Mary Morris … in a part that's usually skimped over on stage, the audience does gather something of what has happened.”⁸⁷

As Giles's remarks indicate, the entire production and not just Jacobi's performance was affected by the historical interpretation (or reinterpretation). Part of the originality of accepting this plausible and well-documented version of history as the blueprint for a production of Richard II is that it means treating Shakespeare's play as a serious attempt to set out the facts as well as to get at the truth, an attitude that many critics have been unwilling to adopt. The play is, in fact, more accurate than many critics believe it to be,⁸⁸ and this accuracy fitted in neatly with the semidocumentary style the BBC Richard II employed.

F. W. Brownlow (among others) finds the play unhistorical, objecting to the view of Thomas of Woodstock as a “plain well-meaning soul” and maintaining that John of Gaunt was never noted for public spirit or high principle. He believes “such changes of character are more damaging to the play's historical truth than are details like the alterations of Queen Isabella's and Henry Percy's ages, because they mean that Shakespeare can never treat properly the political realities of the reign.”⁸⁹ Saccio is similarly unhappy with Gaunt, since Shakespeare has not followed Holinshed, “who with far greater historical accuracy, depicts Gaunt as a contentious and ambitious baron.”⁹⁰

Surely in the special circumstances of 2.1.128 Gaunt ought to be allowed to call his murdered brother a “plain well-meaning soul.” “Plain” after all, may be used to describe behavior such as Kent's in King Lear 2.2, where he is repeatedly called “plain” by Cornwall and by himself. Just such plain speaking seems to have been one of Gloucester's faults. Kirby says he “possessed neither common sense nor the respect for the King's estate which had been shown by his brother, John of Gaunt.”⁹¹

But perhaps in Gaunt's last moments, when he himself has been doing some plain speaking to the king, Gloucester's freedom of speech seems more attractive and his critical viewpoint the correct one. It is often dangerous for any critic to assume he knows history better than Shakespeare shows it.⁹² As Marie Louise Bruce says about Gloucester, “From a twentieth century viewpoint a curiously unattractive character, at the time his honesty of purpose was to make him seem to many … ‘the best of men’ and ‘the hope and solace of the whole community of the realm.’”⁹³ In that light, John of Gaunt's words are not only historical but also moderate.

The portrait of Gaunt himself is equally easy to defend. Even Saccio admits that he was “fundamentally loyal to his nephew, and remained Richard's faithful advisor throughout the 1390s.”⁹⁴ Both Kirby and Bruce see him as a moderate influence, whose absence in Portugal allowed more extreme factions to chart the country's course.⁹⁵ The critical confusion about Gaunt comes from paying too much attention to his early career and not enough to his later one. His reputation (if not his nature) seems literally to have suffered a sea change. In the summer of 1381, as Kirby says, “John of Gaunt had become the best hated man in England.”⁹⁶ But by the time he was preparing to leave for Portugal “with the prospect of seeing the last of him for a while everyone liked the duke of Lancaster.”⁹⁷ On his return to England, as a result of his vast new wealth and his daughters' powerful marriages on the Iberian peninsula, he assumed precisely the role in English politics that Shakespeare gives him. The former hatred of Gaunt “paled into insignificance.” He became “a legendary figure admired by nearly all, and with this new image went a new, more sober approach to politics. In England from now on he was to play the part of the most respected elder statesman.”⁹⁸

Even in the minor details, Shakespeare's picture is accurate. The Duchess of Gloucester suspects Gaunt's motives for peacefully accepting her husband's murder, telling him, “That which in mean men we entitle patience / Is pale cold cowardice in noble breasts” (1.2.33-34). In his campaign of terror, Richard put York and Gloucester in fear of their lives, and they were both “to besmirch the memory of their dead brother”⁹⁹ as a result of that fear. It seems safe to say of many of Shakespeare's historical figures what Marie Louise Bruce says of his York, that the portrait “of the bumbling, well-intentioned duke unhappily trying to choose between duty and inclination and in the end taking the only course open to him appears to be remarkably accurate.”¹⁰⁰ Though there are clearly elements in the play that benefit from the kind of stylization John Barton's production gave it, there are also elements that can be most easily seen when the emphasis is placed on history and naturalism, as it was in the BBC film.

BOLINGBROKE AND YORK

Giles's interpretation of Richard II and his emphasis on history has not only produced an effective Richard but also given other characters firmer ground to stand on than they usually have. I have previously mentioned the Duchess of Gloucester, but two other characters were specially important to this production, the Duke of York and, of course, Henry Bolingbroke. In Michael Manheim's words, “Charles Gray brings new dimensions to the character of York, that loved but lightly regarded political weathervane whose rationalizations of his gross betrayal of Richard never make him forfeit the affection his avuncular bumblings draw from us.”¹⁰¹

Partly, of course, this is because David Giles and Derek Jacobi have given us a different kind of Richard, but partly too it is because York has been allowed his full part, including the semicomic 5.3, which is often cut. We thus have the full range of the character from the man who, despite his fear of the king, is pushed by his brother's death into speaking the truth, to the bemused uncle who first berates and then befriends Bolingbroke, and finally to the bewildered husband, father, and subject whose shifting loyalties have brought him literally to his knees.

Stanley Wells says that in the scenes “concerned with Aumerle's conspiracy and his mother's attempts to save him from its consequences” there is a not altogether successful attempt “to achieve a subtle fusion of seriousness and comedy for which he [Shakespeare] cannot command the necessary technical resources, so that the comedy tends to submerge the seriousness.” But as Wells goes on to argue, “there are good reasons for including the scenes, and the awkwardnesses … can be mitigated by tactful acting.”¹⁰² One of the strengths of the small screen is evident here because the comedy can be underplayed in a fashion that would not work in a large theater and because York can be pointed out and his character deepened in other scenes in ways that would be difficult if not impossible on stage. For instance, at 4.1.238, “Though some of you, with Pilate, wash your hands,” we have a close-up of York bowed over his clasped hands, which he is clearly washing with his own tears.

The same grief emerges in this very different setting as York sits, wearing an informal robe and telling the Duchess the story of Richard's humiliation while she stitches at her embroidery. At 5.2.30, “But dust was thrown upon his sacred head,” York's tears begin, and he unsuccessfully searches both of his sleeves for a handkerchief, which the Duchess then supplies. Aldous Huxley says, “We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.”¹⁰³ But there is a sense in which we participate more fully in this tragedy of a fallen king because we see it, in part, from the vantage of a domestic comedy. Very few members of Shakespeare's audiences now or at any time will have been firsthand participants in royal intrigues; almost everyone, however, will have experienced the varieties of family tensions. In the context of this naturalistic production, the scenes fit neatly, and the historical footnote of the handkerchief (invented by Richard himself and typical of the attention to historical detail in this film) adds an extra bit of intimate irony.

We are also given a chance to see Bolingbroke from a new perspective. (In this context, it is unfortunate that his reference to his problems with his own son was cut.)¹⁰⁴ At 5.3.64, “And thy abundant goodness shall excuse,” he puts his hand on York's shoulder and shakes him affectionately. It is the kind of gesture not often associated with Henry IV, and certainly not with the stiff, self-contained king whom Finch has created. However, throughout the scene Finch manages an undercurrent of exasperation and humor, and at the end, it seems entirely right for him to add the monosyllable “Ha!” to Shakespeare's text while clutching his head.

The praise for Jacobi's Richard usually includes kind comments for Finch's Bolingbroke as well. According to Jack Jorgens he “brought his tough, terse manner from his performance in Polanski's Macbeth.”¹⁰⁵ For Clive James, Jon Finch was “the revelation of the evening.” He went on to argue that if the actor playing Bolingbroke was to do more than look worthy and staunch, “he must play the role on two levels, speaking what is set down for him and transmitting his ambitions … by other means.” According to James, Finch found those means: “even when he was standing still you could tell he was heading for the throne of England by the direct route.”¹⁰⁶ For Michael Manheim also, Finch was a paradigm of political ambition: “Finch's Bolingbroke is a full embodiment of the new Machiavellian ideal in Shakespeare's time.”¹⁰⁷

Finch was probably chosen for Macbeth because “Polanski was insecure about the idea of working with anyone strongly identified as a Shakespearean actor,”¹⁰⁸ and Finch, in his turn, “was understandably insecure when he came to work alongside Sir John Gielgud and Derek Jacobi.”¹⁰⁹ But when Gielgud praised Finch's verse speaking at the read through, Finch says, “I couldn't believe it. It immediately made me feel better and I was relaxed during the rest of the rehearsals.”¹¹⁰

In fact, Finch's limited Shakespearean experience and his lack of drama school training may in some ways have been an advantage for his role in this production. In their Macbeth “Polanski and Tynan … insisted that the lines be spoken almost as natural speech,”¹¹¹ which was a suitable style to bring to the naturalistic BBC Richard II. Perhaps an additional advantage for Finch was that he did not bring a firm “expectational text” with him; his Bolingbroke was not already set in a pattern that would have clashed with Jacobi's Richard. As David Gwillim (the BBC's Prince Hal) points out, “Knowing the play … cuts both ways: if you have a clear vision of the play that's fine, but on the other hand you can have a set vision of the play as opposed to any sense of exploration.”¹¹²

However, despite critical “readings” of Finch's performance that are colored by memories of the dark ambition he showed in Polanski's film, he appears to be a relatively unambitious Bolingbroke. Critical responses to both Finch and Jacobi are here being dictated at least partially by the expectational text: Richard is often weak and so Jacobi's Richard is; Bolingbroke is just as often pointed toward power, and so that must be Finch's direction as well.

There is, though, more to it than that, and while Clive James and Michael Manheim have (I think) got their explanations slightly muddled, I have no serious quarrel with their perceptions. Because of the strength of Jacobi's Richard, because Jacobi is playing so thoroughly to the subtext of the conflict between Richard and his cousin, there is a greater than usual political tension between the two of them, which can easily be misread as Bolingbroke's desire for the crown. In fact, Bolingbroke is locked in a political struggle with the king that is far more complicated (and certainly less superficially ambitious) than any Machiavellian desire to charm the people and harm the king on the way to the throne.

The historical reinterpretation of Richard that this production invites also requires a reinvestigation of Bolingbroke, and because of this, Finch's almost unreadable sternness becomes an advantage. Clive James says “there is a good case for asking the actor playing Bolingbroke to content himself with standing around looking worthily staunch.”¹¹³ This production makes the case for doing so stronger than usual, and on one level Finch's performance could be described in just those terms. His reactions to his banishment comprise realistic exasperation, not the frustrated ambition he reveals as Macbeth. Even when Richard puts the crown into his hands, he looks as he might have looked if, when they were boys, his cousin king had just given him a favorite toy—there is a mixture of surprise and joy.

On another level, of course, Finch's Bolingbroke is moving purposefully—and even perhaps virtuously—toward the crown. When I say virtuously, I mean to suggest that there are arguments by which he had a right to act as he did. Historically, there was disagreement (and this production certainly emphasizes Shakespeare's references to the subject) as to whether Mortimer or Lancaster was the rightful heir. In the event, the burden of restoring law fell on the adult claimant, Henry Bolingbroke, and much of England saw him as a savior.¹¹⁴ Whether or not he later felt guilt for taking and keeping the crown (and Shakespeare, history, and the BBC suggest that he did), many Renaissance political theorists would have absolved him of guilt, as Roland Mushat Frye indicates in an extended discussion of the subject. As he says in commenting on John of Gaunt's refusal to act against Richard, literary historians have used “passive resistance as the panacea for too many problems and ills.” He points to “the influence of E. M. W. Tillyard and Lily B. Campbell” but concludes that “developments in the history of political thought have made such major advances since the time of Tillyard that reassessments can and must now be made.”¹¹⁵

Tillyard's thesis requires us not only to ignore theories of politics but also to suppress facts of history. One of the values of this Richard II and of Finch's Bolingbroke is the chance to look at both in a new light. Finch may be especially effective here because he did not bring with him into the production a preconceived notion of the nature of Bolingbroke, because he was not during this performance planning to carry the role forward into the two parts of Henry IV and was not therefore affected by the pressure of the other role, and because the part he was playing was rather close to the “usual heroic, rather swashbuckling parts he plays in films.”¹¹⁶

GILES, JACOBI, AND RICHARD II

In a production where the acting consistently received greater praise than anything else, Derek Jacobi has equally consistently been praised as the outstanding performer. Jack Jorgens found him “superb at rendering the arc of Richard's development.”¹¹⁷ And Clive James said, “Derek Jacobi gave intelligent, fastidiously articulated readings from beginning to end.”¹¹⁸

Clive James goes on to point up one of the sources of the strength of Jacobi's performance: “each turn of thought [was] given its appropriate vocal weight by the actor and its perfectly judged close-up by the director.”¹¹⁹ Such a critical comment offers evidence of the success of the Giles-Jacobi partnership and also indicates the value of their shared interpretation. Jacobi, who had played the part of Richard II on radio but not on stage, was probably chosen for the role by Messina because of the triumph of “his television Claudius and his stage Hamlet.”¹²⁰ And while, as Clive James says, this Richard “managed to make you not think of Jacobi's Claudius,”¹²¹ Jacobi's Hamlet was waiting in the wings and from time to time doing a bit of prompting. While every actor must draw from his own central image to fill the mirrors of his roles, and Jacobi's Benedick, Prospero, Hamlet, and Richard have their overlapping edges, there seems a special connection between Jacobi's active, political Hamlet and his other king involved in a struggle of mighty opposites.

From Derek Jacobi's point of vantage as actor, the part of Hamlet has one of the same difficulties that he found with Richard: “So much has happened in Hamlet before the play starts.”¹²² About the same problem in Richard II, he said, “the first three scenes all contain allusions to the death of Gloucester, which happened before the play started.” Jacobi goes on to elucidate the problems: “He [Richard] doesn't say very much … but the man's got a lot to hide and a lot to lose and a lot to gain from the situation, and it's completely understated by Shakespeare.”¹²³ Given this vision of two characters who must play to the subtext as a means of explaining what has happened before the start of the action, of two men who are striving against great odds to fulfill themselves as kings and who find themselves in deadly political battle as a result, it is not surprising that Jacobi should use some of the same devices. The comparison not only illuminates Jacobi's acting style, but it also helps to explain the Richard that Jacobi as star and Giles as director created.

Thus, faced in both productions with the problem of successfully communicating a subtext, of suggesting that the character he is playing is at once more complicated and more powerful than he immediately appears to be, Jacobi has employed the device of sarcasm. Indeed, for Jacobi, sarcasm is more than a device, it is a whole armory of weapons—broadsword, rapier, dagger, and even shield. His Hamlet is arguably the most consistently sarcastic version of the Danish prince yet committed to film, and his Richard is also to this manner born. Jacobi's sarcasm as a means of emphasis has two major advantages: it sends a message of hostility that is easily read by the audience, and it announces itself as either the expression of superior power, superior insolence, or the two together.

So, in Hamlet, Jacobi's “Not so, my lord. I am too much in the sun” (1.2.67) immediately signals Hamlet's hostility toward the king, even (in my experience) for student audiences who have never seen the play before and who do not understand the pun. With “I shall in all my best obey you, madam” (1.2.120), which is delivered with all the nastiness of a knife blow and which Claudius is compelled to meet smiling, the battle is truly joined, and the audience settles down to watch the outcome.

The effect Jacobi achieves in Richard II is similar, allowing for the difference in his position. Here his attack is softer, less abrasive because he is king and his position adds emphasis, but the harsh message is still there. He does, of course, send other messages too. At 1.1.15, “Then call them to our presence,” he sounds more eager than apprehensive because this is a confrontation he has been awaiting. Following Bolingbroke's compliments at 1.1.20-21, Richard turns to Mowbray, expecting more of the same, not even commanding the flattery but only waiting for it. The attitude is very much like the one Ian Richardson cultivated for the part. In his words, the sovereign “never needed to ask for anything. … I never looked to see if my commands were executed because I knew they would be.”¹²⁴ That Jacobi bothers to look is the only sign of his tension.

Giles and Jacobi gradually build up the connections between Richard and Mowbray. At 1.1.79, “Which gently laid my knighthood on my shoulder,” there is a cut from Mowbray to Richard. At 1.1.84-86, we get the first full flash of Richard's sarcasm in defense of Mowbray (though it can also be taken as an incitement to Bolingbroke, a stirring of the quarrel and a means of pushing it to extremes). At 1.1.100, “That he did plot the Duke of Gloucester's death,” there is (as Michael Manheim has noted) a cut to Richard and only then to Mowbray. At 1.1.109, Jacobi's slightly worried reading of “How high a pitch his resolution soars!” suggests that there is something more than a well-pointed camera that links him to Mowbray. There is still more evidence at 1.1.131, “Since last I went to France to fetch his Queen,” where a cut to Richard suggests satisfaction on his part and complicity or at least an understanding with Mowbray. In the same speech there is another cut to Richard and an even stronger signal. At 1.1.134, “Neglected my sworn duty in that case,” Richard looks at Mowbray in what must (by now) be taken as a stern warning.

Jacobi has, however, sarcastically signaled that there is another, equally important issue. He puts Bolingbroke in his place at 1.1.116-17, “Were he my brother, nay, my kingdom's heir, / As he is but my father's brother's son.” The camera cuts to John of Gaunt as a visual explanation of the relationship, but Richard's sarcasm suggests that something more is happening than meets the camera's eye. That impression is confirmed at 1.1.122, when Richard says, “He is our subject, Mowbray, so art thou,” with a special emphasis on “subject” that clearly implies that someone somewhere has doubts about that subjection.

Historically, Shakespeare, the BBC production, and Derek Jacobi are essentially right; the issue was uncertain. As Bruce says, “Since William the Conqueror no one as distantly related to the king as the earl of March had succeeded to the throne and the custom of primogeniture had not always been followed.”¹²⁵ So there was a reason for Richard to remind his audience of what he considered to be the proper order and succession of things. When Roger Mortimer, earl of March, died in Ireland on 20 July 1398, leaving only a child heir,¹²⁶ preparations for the combat between Mowbray and Bolingbroke were going forward; Richard had an even stronger reason on 16 September 1398, the day of the duel,¹²⁷ to get his dangerous cousin away from the throne.

With such preparation, the second scene will be watched more closely than it often is, clearly the intention of both Jacobi and Giles. Jacobi continues to build on what are now textual as well as subtextual impressions in the third scene. His hand-holding with the queen may be taken as an indication of the health of their relationship and a refutation in advance of the charge of homosexuality; it may also be seen as his indifference to a ritual he has already decided to abort. At 1.3.119, “Let them lay by their helmets and their spears,” his decision seems firm, and there is no indication of sudden impulse or the process of thinking to a decision, two reactions at which Jacobi is particularly adept.

In addition, his antipathy for the House of Lancaster, father and son, has come much closer to the surface. The embrace he has for his cousin at 1.3.54 is extremely sketchy, and at 1.3.224, “Why! uncle, thou hast many years to live,” he is as close to being sarcastic as he is far from being sympathetic. Almost he anticipates his wish for Gaunt's death. With Mowbray's half-spoken sense of betrayal by the king he trusted (1.3.155, “All unlooked for from your Highness' mouth”) and Richard's cynical determination to be rid of Mowbray and Bolingbroke, we are left with a relatively dark public portrait of the sun king.

The public portrait of the king becomes effectively (and viciously) private in 1.4. The scene begins with Jacobi's laugh climbing above and dominating the laughter of his courtiers. It is the first indication we have had that the king may lose control, but, oddly, this seemingly unplanned mirth soon emerges as one more device in the power struggle. Jacobi has forged a link between Richard's insecurity and his attempts to make himself even more powerful than he already is.

Jacobi employs laughter as a weapon in Hamlet as well as Richard II, and again its use is broader and more obvious in the prince than the king. In Hamlet, for example, at 1.2.94, “‘Tis unmanly grief,” Hamlet laughs at the king in a thoroughly disrespectful but slightly hysterical and therefore presumably forgivable manner. He tries a similar ploy on the king after the play within the play. At 3.2.275, “Give me some light,” the king approaches Hamlet, studies him by the light of a torch, and in response, Hamlet covers his face with his hands and then laughs foolishly. The silly laughter turns to triumph as the king exits.

The BBC Richard II describes the setting for 1.4 (their scene 5) as “Interior. A Room in the King's Palace.”¹²⁸ It is clearly, however, a representation of Richard's famous bathhouse, with the king and his favorites draped Roman fashion. This at once makes a number of suggestions not necessarily present in Shakespeare's text.

At 1.4.11, Aumerle's report of Bolingbroke's “Farewell,” there is a cut to Jacobi for an extended reaction shot. Lying on his back with his head over the edge of a table and the camera shooting down at him as he looks awkwardly up, he appears particularly vulnerable, while his long fit of laughter seems a part of that vulnerability. The laughter is, though, both a sign of his uncertainty and one means to his ends, the ridicule and destruction of Bolingbroke and Richard's other enemies. Again, the insecurity and the attempt to gain greater power are presented as cause and effect.

Richard's resentment (or at least his show of it) continues to build throughout the scene. At 1.4.31, “Off goes his bonnet to an oyster-wench,” he uses a parodic gesture and sarcastic emphasis to suggest his disgust. By 1.4.35, “As were our England in reversion his,” his emotion has reached to royal rage, a danger to his self-control and his control of others and, more than that, an indication of his true feelings and insecurities. At this point Jacobi's Richard disguises himself in the same mask of laughter that his Hamlet uses. It is a means of undermining the seriousness of his own emotion, of reducing the importance of the situation, and as he had done earlier in the scene, of making the very suggestion of ambition in Bolingbroke seem ridiculous, a laughable stupidity. Coming as it does shortly after this, Richard's decision to go to Ireland himself has an air of relief about it. It follows Green's “Well, he is gone, and with him go these thoughts” (1.4.37) and suggests a brief vacation for Richard from his long revenge.

That there is to be no such vacation, that, in fact, Richard's vengeful, insecure nature and central position will not allow it, becomes clear with the news of Gaunt's illness. Jacobi's taking of the news is one of his neatest bits of characterization. From 1.4.59, “Now put it, God, in the physician's mind,” he moves from a quiet acceptance of the news to the thought of Gaunt's death, the satisfaction that death will provide, and the use he can make of it. And he does all of this, arcing from stillness to an almost childish glee, with an eye on his courtiers to make sure they share his antipathies and intentions. The strength of Jacobi's performance as Richard is clearly visible here. In a scene that is not too far removed from the melodrama of Don John in Much Ado About Nothing and his “Would the cook were o' my mind!” (1.3.68), Jacobi conjures a Renaissance prince and a charming tyrant.

I emphasize that Jacobi's Richard is a legitimate king who maintains himself by tyrannous means, a dispenser of justice who suborns murder, and a man whose power has become so great that it must decline. The tension in the early scenes between the Richard who accepts absolute obedience as his due and the Richard who carefully maneuvers to conceal his crime has already begun to send these messages. Like those other Shakespearean tyrants Richard III and Macbeth, Richard II falls as a result of harshness, not weakness. In trying to grasp all, he threatens too many people and ends by clutching nothing. As A. R. Humphreys puts it, “at the beginning he is decisive even to ruthlessness, and it is his very energy of action which, when ill-directed, endangers his kingdom.”¹²⁹

One of the specially interesting facets of Jacobi's performance is that he manages to demonstrate that the Richard in the second half of the play is the same as the Richard in the first half. This Richard has always oscillated between a vision of himself as a divinely supported, all-powerful king and a picture of himself as a nameless beggar. In trying desperately to rise to the height of one, he has fallen almost to the depth of the other.

By 2.1, the family contentions and Richard's tyrannous intentions are very much out in the open. In this production Gaunt's accusation is coupled with the strong memory of the Duchess of Gloucester's, and their two dying voices convict Richard of a crime that his casual acceptance of Gaunt's mortal illness has helped us to believe he could easily commit. The first of several strong reactions to this situation from Jacobi's Richard comes at 2.1.123, where the last line of that verbal assault on Gaunt, “Should run thy head from thy unreverent shoulders,” has a regal ferocity that explains his two uncles' fear of him and lets us know that Gaunt's death is near indeed when he dares to challenge the king as he does. At 2.1.145-46, “Right, you say true, as Hereford's love, so his, / As theirs, so mine; and all be as it is,” Richard's voice is under control, but his anger is still stinging him into telling the truth without his usual rhetoric. He has calmed down for 2.1.153-55, and we have another of the excellent Jacobi-Giles reaction shots; there is some shock for him in this death he has wished for, perhaps even a suggestion that his wish is the cause, but again we see him thinking, walling himself off from everything but his royal purposes. The message that emerges is a deadly callousness: “So much for that” (2.1.155). He is not to be deflected by his Uncle York's tears or even by what seems to be semirebellion from this most placid of his relatives. There is nothing undecided about this Richard or about his “Think what you will, we seize into our hands / His plate, his goods, his money, and his lands” (2.1.209-10). It needs only his casual dismissal of the queen to send him off to Ireland as an unsympathetic tyrant.

One of the advantages of this Giles-Jacobi strategy now becomes apparent: the two halves of the play, pre-Ireland and post-Ireland, hold together. The audience has been asked to work out the nature of Richard before his military voyage, and the clues provided by Shakespeare and the production have proved pretty conclusively what he is.

As I have already pointed out, Jacobi's Richard (and Shakespeare's Richard, for that matter) is clearly identified as a tyrant. For the historical Richard, the use of the Cheshire archers or mercenary troops was one such indication. Shakespeare's Richard repeatedly makes decisions that are enforced by his power as kind and not supported by the people or advisers such as York and Gaunt. As a result, Richard's fear of the love the common people have for Bolingbroke, like “Claudius' twice stated recognition of Hamlet's popularity … indicates the tyrant's fear of being supplanted.”¹³⁰ Also like Claudius, Richard surrounds himself with flatterers and wastes the substance of his country, in his own words, on “too great a court / And liberal largess” (1.4.43-44). Gaunt's condemnation of him rises to the height of wishing for his retroactive deposition: “O, had thy grandsire with a prophet's eye / Seen how his son's son should destroy his sons, / From forth thy reach he would have laid thy shame, / Deposing thee before thou wert possessed” (2.1.104-8). In the crime of murder to which Gaunt refers and in the crime of seizing Lancaster's lands just after Gaunt's death, Richard commits the tyrant's unforgivable sin of destroying the order of the commonwealth he is set to rule and preserve.¹³¹

The rest of the film is (at least from Richard's point of view) a matter of why and wherefores. It is one thing to create and label a tyrant;¹³² it is another to explain him, especially if that explanation is, as Richard's must be, something more than the itch of ambition or some other tragic flaw of the flesh.

Richard's return in 3.2 becomes in this production the means to an explanation; the stress of crisis is used to break through to the why of his earlier actions. Part of Richard's complexity (and no doubt one of the sources of the many suggestions that he is an actor-king)¹³³ comes from the control he exercises over his words and emotions and from the use he makes of them even when they are not in his complete control. Until now Richard has had no reason, either political or personal, to talk about the divine rights of kings. Now his private obsession becomes public; nor can it rightly be called an obsession, an abnormality, except in the intensity of his belief and the insensitivity of his actions. Gaunt and York share his point of view,¹³⁴ and even those very practical politicians, Bolingbroke and Northumberland, want Richard's acquiescence and royal sanction for his own deposition. In this production his speeches to the English earth and his dependence on plagues and angels must be seen not as vain posturing but as the misty periphery of his beliefs, a mixture of wishful fantasy and literal expectation. For Jacobi's Richard, like his historical counterpart, the boundaries of the world are immense, stretching from fear of being deposed and becoming nothing to an ecstatic state in which all his royal words could come divinely true. It is the arc of alternation between these two states that Jacobi has managed to travel.

In the context of 3.2, Richard's appeal to God to end Gaunt's life and Jacobi's almost stunned pause when he receives the news suggest Richard may have been willing to believe in the power of his own prayer. His actions through the rest of the production argue a vacillation between faith in his practical political (and, failing that, divine) support and a desperate uncertainty caused by the fear that at long last he will conclusively lose the battle to hold his throne (his identity as person, priest, and king) while holding down his subjects; thus the alternation between hope and despair, frenzied activity and passive suffering in 3.2. A particularly effective collaboration of director and star to demonstrate this occurs at 3.2.63, “How far off lies your power?” when Richard in an anxiety of optimism thrusts his arm out of the frame (at last an effective use of what has happened often accidentally), reaching to Salisbury as to a more than physical savior.

The danger in the man is demonstrated once more at 3.2.129, “O, villains, vipers, damned without redemption!” as Jacobi works himself up to a terribly active anger that ends in the threat of political execution, which he clearly means to carry out. If another revolution of the wheel (always possible while life remains) brings Richard to the top, Bolingbroke will certainly suffer the fate Richard had momentarily intended for Bushy, Bagot, and Green.

At 3.3.132-40, which begins with “O God! O God! that e'er this tongue of mine,” the fury of Jacobi's Richard is again obvious and indeed barely contained, but he follows Aumerle's advice that it is wiser to delay to a better time than to force battle now and so die. This is very much the sort of policy Richard has pursued before, and always, in spite of humiliations and threatened depositions, he has been able to emerge more powerful in the end. No doubt he hopes beneath all the words of despair that this new deposition will prove impermanent. One of Jacobi's neatest demonstrations of this part of Richard's nature comes at 5.5.105, “How now! What means Death in this rude assault?” He turns his back to the murderers, reading the line as though he is resigned to die without a struggle. Then suddenly, on the next line, he turns to face the murderers again, beating them and making use of the surprise to seize a weapon.

The historical interpretation begun in the early scenes carries through consistently and successfully in the second half of the play. The tension between Richard and Bolingbroke does not relax, though the roles are reversed. Jacobi's Richard (like his Hamlet) is adept at maintaining political pressure even when he is at a disadvantage.

At 3.3.71, he has already insisted on an obeisance from Northumberland. At 3.3.171-72, with double-edged irony he has called Northumberland “Most mighty prince” and his hated cousin “King Bolingbroke.” As he marches energetically down a stone staircase, Richard describes himself (equally energetically) as Phaethon, a sun king “Wanting the manage of unruly jades” (3.3.178). This is not self-pity but a simple act of placing the blame where he feels it belongs; he is a divinity betrayed by baseness, as his reference to Christ and Judas (where, interestingly, Christ's situation is found to be preferable, His troubles less severe) makes plain in 4.1.170. The same point is made in a different way at 5.1.35-36, “A king of beasts indeed: if aught but beasts, / I had been still a happy king of men.” In each of these instances Jacobi's sarcasm is itself a judgment; he is categorizing and chastising what he sees as political injustice. His will is still active, still struggling against circumstance, and though waves of despair wash over him, he is not yet ready to sink.

Thus, in his encounter with Bolingbroke in 3.3, he repeats and expands his earlier accusations against his cousin. “Up, cousin, up, your heart is up, I know, / Thus high at least” (3.3.192-93). In his fuller accusation, which begins at 3.3.198, he reaches with “Cousin, I am too young to be your father, / Though you are old enough to be my heir” (3.3.202-3), an almost exact restatement of his earlier indications of Bolingbroke's royal ambition. Far from giving up, this Richard is naming Bolingbroke's crime as his only immediate means of combating it. Part of the strength of Richard's conviction of his own divine mission is clearly visible once we realize that he cannot totally accept the possibility of being deposed. For Jacobi's Richard, naming the crime—which is also a blasphemy—should almost have the power to stop the criminal, as he has earlier said that his very presence in England will stop “this thief, this traitor, Bolingbroke” (3.2.47).

Perhaps the greatest strength of this production and of Jacobi's acting is the coupling of the sympathy that these scenes usually generate for Richard with a firm conviction in the audience that Bolingbroke is ending a tyranny; the very lines that make us pity Richard's loss of power show us how dangerous he has been and would be again in wielding it. This is especially true in 4.1, where we seem to see Richard breaking down, stripping away the layers of pretence that have surrounded his essential personality, but at the same time we perceive (in this production at any rate) his political maneuverings and his outmaneuvering of both Bolingbroke and Northumberland, who must win by force what Richard has kept them from gaining by any other means.

Jacobi's Richard takes command of the scene immediately on his entrance, and his bitter reading of the biting lines, his taunting emphasis at 4.1.181, “Here, cousin, seize the crown,” show him to be an exceptionally dangerous adversary still.¹³⁵ He does everything that can be done in the circumstances to undermine Bolingbroke. He is compelled to give some small support to the new king, but he retracts everything he says both before and after he says it. Jacobi believes that though Richard is at “rock bottom” in the deposition scene, “he gives a marvellous account of himself.” Jacobi sees Richard as an actor thinking, “‘If I've got to go, I'm going to go in style,’” an attitude he says he found “fascinating. … All the emotions are absolutely real for him—but he can switch it on.”¹³⁶ This is an explicit statement of what we have earlier seen Jacobi's Richard do, that is, turn a real emotion, fear or doubt, for instance, into a weapon in a political situation.

Indeed, much of Bolingbroke's silence seems enforced by the energy of Richard's speech, and only that withdrawal into stillness keeps the new king from being made to look ridiculous. Northumberland too, who tries to force Richard to read a list of his crimes and, in fact, claps the king on the shoulder just after 4.1.220, like a buff-jerkined officer apprehending a malefactor, is repeatedly baffled. Richard first turns against him the accusation of deposing a true king then delays with “Mine eyes are full of tears, I cannot see” (4.1.243), at which point Northumberland casts his eyes up to heaven in frustration. At last Richard tears the list of crimes from his hands and throws it to the floor. The request for the looking glass is another tactic of delay and another opportunity to display the perfidy of his enemies.

The end result of the historical, naturalistic interpretation that Giles and Jacobi have created has been a more coherent and complex protagonist than is sometimes the case. This Richard is a legitimate king whose insecure position, echoed in his oscillations between confidence and despair, makes him a tyrant. His belief in his divine right to power and his fear lest he lose all are at once terrifying and pathetic. His insecurities—internal and external—force him to reach for absolute power and finally mean his downfall. In the desperate attempt to make himself perfectly secure financially, militarily, and therefore personally, he has threatened and alienated most of his supporters. Bolingbroke does not succeed because of his own superior ability or because of Richard's incompetence but because he offers an alternative to tyranny. The production succeeds because it offers a consistent and believable Richard who is set in an understandable historical context.

Notes

1. Mary Ellen O'Brien, Film Acting: The Techniques and History of Acting for the Camera (New York: Arco, 1983), 100.

2. It happens, for instance, at 1.3.183, 207, 216, 242, 249, 254, 295, 303, 305, and 307.

3. Cited Carr, Review of Measure for Measure, 5.

4. Clive James, The Crystal Bucket: Television Criticism from the “Observer,” 1976-79 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981), 158.

5. Jorgens, “BBC-TV Shakespeare,” 414.

6. BBC R2, 49.

7. Michael Manheim, review of Richard II, by William Shakespeare, BBC-TV/Time-Life Inc. Production, PBS Stations, 28 March 1979, “The Shakespeare Plays on TV: Season One,” Shakespeare on Film Newsletter 4, no. 1. (1979): 5.

8. Fenwick, R2, 19.

9. Purser, “Going Round Again,” 13.

10. Fenwick, R2, 20.

11. Ibid.

12. Cedric Messina, “Interview,” 136-37.

13. Ibid., 137.

14. In Messina's defense, I note that even some reviewers were by no means eager for the Bardathon. Philip Purser described the project as “an admirable service to Shakespeare, but not necessarily a service to television” (“In Tight Focus,” Sunday Telegraph, 17 December 1978, 15). And Russell Miller felt that at least some of the plays could be dispensed with. “Titus Andronicus [sic] is widely considered to be unwatchable and Timothy of Athenea [sic] is unlikely to attract a mass audience. So why include them?” (“BBC's Schoolgirl Juliet,” 32).

15. Evidently one other motive here is to avoid copying the Olivier Henry V, which had used The Book of Hours.

16. Fenwick, R2, 20-21.

17. Ibid., 20.

18. A similar example emerges from the first season's production of Julius Caesar. The director, Herbert Wise, was chosen by Messina largely because of his experience with I Claudius. “‘If anybody knows a toga, he does,’ says Messina” (Henry Fenwick, “The Production,” in The BBC TV Shakespeare: “Julius Caesar” [London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1979], 20). Wise rejected the idea of dressing the play in Elizabethan costume with the words, “I don't think that's right for the audience we will be getting. … For an audience many of whom won't have seen the play before, I believe it would only be confusing” (20).

19. Fenwick, R2, 21.

20. David Bevington, The Oxford Shakespeare: “Henry IV, Part I” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 84-85.

21. Patrick McGilligan, Cagney: The Actor as Auteur (New York: Da Capo Press, 1979), 199.

22. Ibid., 202.

23. Ibid.

24. Manheim, “Shakespeare on TV,” 5.

25. Fenwick, R2, 24.

26. Wilders, “Shakespeare on the Small Screen,” 57.

27. Stanley Wells, Royal Shakespeare: Four Major Productions at Stratford-upon-Avon (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979), 68-69.

28. Fenwick, R2, 20.

29. Russell Miller, “BBC's Schoolgirl Juliet,” 32.

30. Fenwick, 1H4, 21.

31. Ibid., 19.

32. Ibid., 20.

33. Jonathan Miller, “Interview; Jonathan Miller on The Shakespeare Plays,” with Tom Hallinan, Shakespeare Quarterly 32 (1981): 137.

34. Malcolm Page, “Richard II”: Text and Performance (London: Macmillan, 1987), 55. Sean Day-Lewis said, for example, “In my view the first season has contained three duds (‘Romeo and Juliet,’ ‘As You Like It,’ and ‘Julius Caesar’) and three successes (‘Richard II,’ ‘Measure for Measure,’ and ‘Henry VIII’)” (“Years of the Bard,” Daily Telegraph, 5 March 1979, 11).

35. Sheldon P. Zitner, “Wooden O's in Plastic Boxes: Shakespeare and Television,” University of Toronto Quarterly 51 (1981): 7.

36. Banham, “BBC Television's Dull Shakespeare,” 50.

37. For discussions of this much-praised production, see Peter Thomson, “Shakespeare Straight and Crooked: A Review of the 1973 Season at Stratford,” Shakespeare Survey 27 (1974): 151-54; Wells, Royal Shakespeare, 64-81; Page, R2, 57-68; and Richard David, Shakespeare in the Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 164-74.

38. Fenwick, 1H4, 20.

39. Samuel Crowl, Review of Henry IV, Part 1, by William Shakespeare, BBC-TV/Time-Life Inc. Production, PBS Stations, 26 March 1980, “The Shakespeare Plays on TV: Season Two,” Shakespeare on Film Newsletter 5, no. 1 (1980): 3.

40. Manheim, “Shakespeare on TV,” 5.

41. Holderness, “Radical Potentiality,” 197.

42. In Holderness's own words, “Messina saw the history plays conventionally as orthodox Tudor historiography, and the director employed dramatic techniques which allow that ideology a free and unhampered passage to the spectator” (Ibid., 197).

43. Ibid.

44. Fenwick, R2, 24.

45. In 1973, “Gloucester's widow was played as a ghost, emerging from the downstage grave-trap with a skull in her hand, and speaking with the aid of echo effects” (Thomson, “Shakespeare Straight and Crooked,” 152). “This created a melodramatic impression which exemplified the dangers of stylisation, and in 1974 she simply entered from the wings and spoke quietly, though she still carried the skull” (Wells, Royal Shakespeare, 69).

46. Paul Johnson, “Richard II,” in Shakespeare in Perspective, ed. Roger Sales vol. 1, (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1982), 35.

47. Ibid., 34.

48. E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1951), 261.

49. Ian Richardson, “Richard II,” in Shakespeare in Perspective, ed. Roger Sales vol. 1, (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1982), 39.

50. Ibid., 41, 43.

51. Fenwick, R2, 22.

52. “Wilders Interview at MLA,” Shakespeare on Film Newsletter 4.1 (1979): 3.

53. Robert Hapgood, “Shakespeare on Film and Television,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies, ed. Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 279.

54. Holderness, “Radical potentiality,” 197.

55. Peter Saccio, Shakespeare's English Kings: History, Chronicle, and Drama (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 4.

56. J. L. Kirby, Henry IV of England (London: Constable, 1970), 2.

57. Fenwick, R2, 22.

58. Richard David, for example, maintains that the issues in Richard II “cannot be appreciated without some identification with the Elizabethans” (Shakespeare in the Theatre, 45).

59. John Gielgud, “King Richard the Second,” in Shakespeare “Richard II”: A Casebook, ed. Nicholas Brooke (London: Macmillan, 1978), 77.

60. In John Neville's words, “there are two different characters. … We quite blatantly made no attempt to link the two; he came back from Ireland a different man” (cited in Page, R2, 20).

61. Fenwick, R2, 22.

62. John Russell Brown, “Narrative and Focus: Richard II,” in Shakespeare “Richard II”: A Casebook, ed. Nicholas Brooke (London: Macmillan, 1978), 84.

63. Ibid., 85.

64. Andrew Gurr, ed., King Richard II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 22.

65. W. B. Yeats, “At Stratford-on-Avon (1901),” in Shakespeare “Richard II”: A Casebook, ed. Nicholas Brooke (London: Macmillan, 1978), 70.

66. Gurr, King Richard II, 22.

67. J. L. Kirby's Henry IV of England (1970) and Marie Louise Bruce's The Usurper King: Henry of Bolingbroke, 1366-99 (London: Rubicon Press, 1986) share this vision of Richard. I am not making the claim that Kirby's book influenced the production or that the production influenced Bruce's book. I am using them only as parallel examples of a particular interpretation that can be a means of organizing both historical and theatrical materials.

68. Theodore Weiss, The Breath of Clowns and Kings: Shakespeare's Early Comedies and Histories (London: Chatto and Windus, 1971), 260.

69. Bruce, Usurper King, 69.

70. Ibid., 71.

71. Ibid., 72.

72. Ibid., 73.

73. Kirby, Henry IV, 25.

74. Bruce, Usurper King, 75-76, 80.

75. Ibid., 156.

76. Ibid., 160.

77. Kirby, Henry IV, 45.

78. Bruce, Usurper King, 164.

79. Ibid., 165.

80. Ibid., 172.

81. “So called not because it was empty of words … but because it gave Richard carte blanche to do more or less as he wished with the property of the unfortunate person whose name appeared on it” (ibid., 172-73).

82. Ibid., 172-73.

83. Ibid., 173.

84. Kirby, Henry IV, 46.

85. Ibid., 47-49. Mowbray's punishment was more severe in fact than Shakespeare shows it to be. Mowbray was allowed to live only in Prussia, Bohemia, Hungary, or among the Saracens (Bruce, Usurper King, 188). As Kirby rather caustically remarks, “There would soon be insufficient countries in Europe to house all the exiles whom Richard fondly hoped to keep apart” (Henry IV, 49).

86. Fenwick, R2, 22.

87. Ibid., 23.

88. Richard Last writes in his review of the BBC Richard II, “Apart from historical shortcomings (Shakespeare seems to have stood in the same relationship to the Tudors as Shostakovich to the Soviet tyrants)” (“‘Shakespeare’ Creates Boxed-In Feeling,” 15).

89. F. W. Brownlow, Two Shakespearean Sequences: “Henry VI” to “Richard II” and “Pericles” to “Timon of Athens” (London: Macmillan, 1977), 98.

90. Saccio, Shakespeare's English Kings, 20.

91. Kirby, Henry IV, 24. Bruce says he “outspokenly criticised Richard, whom he despised as an incompetent ruler” (Usurper King, 62). But his criticisms could well have been the plain truth. In Kirby's words, “Richard had already shown himself completely lacking in all those qualities of tact and statesmanship that were required of a king” (Henry IV, 24).

92. Even that other Gloucester in Richard III, which is sometimes supposed to be the least historical of the history plays, has gotten support in Desmond Seward's 1983 biography, Richard III: England's Black Legend (London: Country Life Books, 1983). Seward says, “Shakespeare was nearer the truth than some of the King's latter-day defenders” (15).

93. Bruce, Usurper King, 62.

94. Saccio, Shakespeare's English Kings, 20.

95. Kirby, Henry IV, 23, and Bruce, Usurper King, 61.

96. Kirby, Henry IV, 18.

97. Bruce, Usurper King, 59.

98. Ibid., 96.

99. Ibid., 166.

100. Ibid., 211.

101. Manheim, “Shakespeare on TV,” 5.

102. Wells, Royal Shakespeare, 74.

103. Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudun (London: Chatto and Windus, 1952), 324.

104. Cutting the reference to Hal is curious in a production of Richard II that was to be followed immediately by 1 Henry IV. Perhaps the cut was designed (like the omission of Exeter's penitence and his praise of Richard at 5.5.113-18, and the list of executed traitors given to Henry IV at 5.6.5-18) to present Bolingbroke in a favorable light.

105. Jorgens, “The BBC-TV Shakespeare Series,” 413.

106. James, Crystal Bucket, 158-59.

107. Manheim, “Shakespeare on TV,” 5.

108. Barbara Leaming, Polanski: The Filmmaker as Voyeur (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), 121.

109. Fenwick, 1H4, 24.

110. Ibid.

111. Leaming, Polanski, 121.

112. Fenwick, 1H4, 24.

113. James, Crystal Bucket, 158-59.

114. Bruce, Usurper King, 204.

115. Roland Mushat Frye, The Renaissance “Hamlet”: Issues and Responses in 1600 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 45.

116. Fenwick, 2H4, 20.

117. Jorgens, “BBC-TV Shakespeare,” 413.

118. James, Crystal Bucket, 158.

119. Ibid.

120. Fenwick, R2, 25. Messina says, “I wanted from the first to get Derek Jacobi,” and Jacobi was, in fact, the first actor to be cast (Fenwick, R2, 25).

121. James, Crystal Bucket, 158.

122. Derek Jacobi, “Hamlet,” in Shakespeare in Perspective, ed. Roger Sales vol. 1, (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1982), 186.

123. Fenwick, R2, 22-23.

124. Richardson, R2, 40.

125. Bruce, Usurper King, 149-50.

126. Kirby, Henry IV, 52.

127. Bruce, Usurper King, 185.

128. BBC R2, 43.

129. A. R. Humphreys, Shakespeare: “Richard II” (London: Edward Arnold, 1967), 31.

130. Frye, Renaissance “Hamlet,” 38-39.

131. Ibid., 40.

132. As Marie Louise Bruce puts it “to disinherit Henry was even more perilous, because the injustice of it outraged public opinion and made the king seem more than ever a tyrant” (Usurper King, 194). This is an unthinkable thought, to which even York has been pushed.

133. The historical Richard was, as perhaps all kings must be, an actor. But there is evidence that hypocritical performance was part of his nature. Marie Louise Bruce refers to “yet another of the king's beloved charades. … With artistry he acted the part of the wronged monarch finally driven to magnanimous mercy at the pleas of his stricken subjects” (ibid., 125).

134. Gaunt himself was a “staunch believer in royal absolutism” (ibid., 153).

135. Bolingbroke is, as Shakespeare is about to demonstrate, peculiarly vulnerable to counterrevolutions. As Ruth Bird relates, “while Richard was a captive at Conventry, a deputation arrived from London to beg for the execution of Richard before he is brought any further,” because they feared his retaliation if he regained power (The Turbulent London of Richard II [London: Longman, Green and Co., 1949], 110).

136. Fenwick, R2, 26.