SOURCE: Shewring, Margaret. “A Question of Balance: The Problematic Structure of Richard II.” In King Richard II, pp. 2-20. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, Shewring maintains that the language of Richard II, patterned and poetic in its nature, complements the play's purposefully and carefully balanced structure.]

Of all Shakespeare's history plays, Richard II is arguably the most difficult to accommodate on the twentieth-century stage. Once ‘the most dangerous, the most politically vibrant play in the canon’ (Berry, p. 16), this tightly structured, poetic account of monarchy in the late Middle Ages is deeply rooted in the political and cultural moment of the 1590s. Such Elizabethan topicality, potentially subversive in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, makes the play difficult to stage today.

THE CHALLENGE OF RICHARD II

Shakespeare's history plays all pose challenges on the contemporary stage. By their very nature they are retelling events from the past, interpreted through the eyes of an Elizabethan playwright. Any subsequent restaging of the play is, inevitably, both an engagement with its general issues and an interpretation rooted in the moment in which each production is presented. In addition, Richard II assumes specific knowledge on the part of its audience: knowledge of the theological and political significance of a medieval king's ‘Divine Right’ to rule, and knowledge of some of the ways in which King Richard II violated that right, undermining morality and justice by his involvement in a plot to murder his uncle, Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester. Shakespeare, writing Richard II in 1595, may well have assumed that his audience would be familiar with the anonymous Woodstock, a morality play on the same dangerous subject, staged in London in the early 1590s. Richard II also assumes a wider knowledge: an understanding of the ways in which issues raised by the historical events of Richard's reign were current in the political thinking of the 1590s. These issues are, in turn, both specific—the extent to which Elizabeth I may be seen to parallel Richard II (see below …), and general—debating the roots of monarchical power and its relationship to both religious and secular authority as well as to inherited right and nobility.

Furthermore, Richard II is written entirely in a formal verse that is the play's very essence and strength: a mode unfamiliar to a modern audience. This patterned poetic language complements a deliberately balanced structure in which episodes are juxtaposed, mirrored or contrasted as Richard gradually loses the respect and authority appropriate to kingship while Bolingbroke's influence increases and he ascends the throne as Henry IV. The strong narrative line through the play constantly juxtaposes the fates of the two men, not in the ambitious ascent of a ‘Grand Staircase’ of power (Kott, p. 9) but in the balanced motion of opposed buckets in a deep well. The King sets up this symbolic action, saying to Bolingbroke:

                                                            Here, cousin, seize the crown,
On this side my hand and on that side thine.
Now is this golden crown like a deep well
That owes two buckets, filling one another,
The emptier ever dancing in the air,
The other down, unseen and full of water.
That bucket, down and full of tears, am I,
Drinking my griefs whilst you mount up on high.

(IV.i.181-8)

Throughout the play Shakespeare gives Richard a language that allows him consciously to shape his personality to fill the role of a king by Divine Right, deposed by a more pragmatic regime. The play's poetry heightens that presentation of kingship through its ceremonially expressive discourse.

The awareness that kingship is a self-conscious, even theatrical, creation is further reinforced by the fact that everyone around Richard speaks to him, and of him, in iconic terms. So Gaunt acknowledges that Richard is ‘God's substitute, / His deputy anointed in His sight’ (I.ii.37-8) and Bolingbroke envisages his encounter with Richard on an elemental stage:

Methinks King Richard and myself should meet
With no less terror than the elements
Of fire and water when their thundering shock
At meeting tears the cloudy cheeks of heaven.
Be he the fire, I'll be the yielding water.

(III.iii.54-8)

Even the Gardeners (an invention of Shakespeare) have a symbolic rather than an everyday role. They too speak in carefully measured verse, not in the colloquial language of the rustic folk in 2 Henry IV. Moreover, Shakespeare's script frequently emphasises the way in which characters play out their assigned roles, even to the extent that York's description of the change of monarch draws explicitly on theatrical terminology:

As in a theatre the eyes of men
After a well-graced actor leaves the stage
Are idly bent on him that enters next,
Thinking his prattle to be tedious …

(V.ii.23-6)

So Shakespeare draws attention to the theatrical skills required by a monarch while providing the player of Richard's role with all the clues necessary to represent a king on the public stage, whether playing the ruler by Divine Right, the petulant nephew of Gaunt, or the suffering individual who once played the king.

Playing a role that confers political authority is, at any moment in history, a matter of political consequence. Arguably this was particularly so in the turbulent context of the 1590s. Perhaps the most notable instance of such role-playing in these years was the role created for himself by the Earl of Essex in his rebellion against Elizabeth I (see below, pp. 24-8). Shakespeare's contemporaries would have been alert to the significant parallels and contrasts between their own time and the 1390s. His interest in a narrative drawn from two centuries earlier can, therefore, be seen to be political rather than merely antiquarian.

E. M. W. Tillyard has drawn attention to a range of source materials (including Shakespeare's debt to John Bourchier, Baron Berners' early-sixteenth-century translation of Jean Froissart's Chronicles of England, France, etc.) to create what Tillyard calls an ‘intuitive rendering’ (Shakespeare's History Plays, p. 253) of a medieval world order. From the perspective of the 1590s such a world order could be seen as representing a nostalgically conceived alternative to current factional and ideological conflict. The aesthetic and artistic achievements of the past, exemplified by the elegance of the perpendicular architecture of the original Palace of Westminster (built in Richard's reign), held a retrospective fascination for some, at least, of Shakespeare's contemporaries—as did the world of chivalry and romance offered by Chaucer and Gower. In Richard II the prettified medieval court, with its ceremonial qualities that constituted the public face of medieval kingship, offers a theatrical language for what must have seemed, however inaccurately, the alternative culture of the 1390s. The play juxtaposes two styles of rule, one backward-looking and one pointing to the future. As Robert Ornstein comments:

Creating through poetic manner the medieval ambiance and setting of his play, Shakespeare is less concerned to individualize the voices of his characters than to project in their sentences the collective consciousness of an age which treasured formality and order, and which found their analogical and symbolic expression everywhere in the universe. More than a dramatic protagonist, Richard is also the poetic voice of his era and the quintessential expression of its sensibility. When he falls, a way of life and a world seem to fall with him.

(p. 102)

In some respects, this attention to the formal concerns of ceremony led Shakespeare towards a simplification of history as he discarded documentary chronicle in favour of a clearly structured, balanced script for performance.

SHAKESPEARE'S HISTORY

Shakespeare patently knew the details of Richard's life from his accession to the throne in June 1377 at ten years of age (as the eldest surviving son of the Black Prince) to his death on 14 February 1400. He made use of the second edition of Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, printed in 1587, an account indebted to previous histories, notably Edmund Halle's The union of the two noble and illustre famelies of Lancastre & Yorke, itself dependent upon Polydore Vergil's history of the Tudor succession, written in 1534 and published, posthumously, by Grafton in 1548. But Shakespeare was selective in his use of this material, drawing directly on less than one-third of Holinshed's narrative.

One aspect of Shakespeare's selectivity is the clarity of focus he gives to the narrative by concentrating almost exclusively on the fortunes of Richard and Bolingbroke, omitting much of the complex factionalism and manipulation of power among the other nobility. So, for example, the contribution made by Northumberland to Bolingbroke's victory is not emphasised in the play. Indeed, when Richard accuses Northumberland of personal ambition and prophesies his impatience in the future (V.i.55-68) it comes as a surprise to the audience in the context of the play's presentation of his character. This is a clear instance of Shakespeare's omitting and reshaping incidents from his sources. No mention is made of the account in Holinshed of Northumberland's duplicity in tricking Richard into leaving Conway Castle and ambushing him, thus putting Richard completely in Bolingbroke's power. In its place Shakespeare develops further the parallel, opposing motion of the fates of the two men as played out in the ‘base court’ of Flint Castle, where Bolingbroke has found the King not as a result of ambush but by chance. As Bolingbroke, belatedly, kneels to Richard, the King acknowledges the inevitable:

Fair cousin, you debase your princely knee
To make the base earth proud with kissing it.
Me rather had my heart might feel your love
Than my unpleased eye see your courtesy.
Up, cousin, up. Your heart is up, I know,
Thus high at least, although your knee be low.

(III. iii.189-94)

All that remains of the Northumberland portrayed in the sources is his support for Bolingbroke's cause—both personal and military—and his grating insistence, in the deposition scene, that Richard read out the Articles setting down his ‘grievous crimes’ (IV.i.222).

In a similar way, Shakespeare is selective in his inclusion of roles for Richard's friends and advisers. Throughout his reign the historical Richard was shielded from the people by his Councils. The modern historian Anthony Steel outlines the way in which a group of ‘professionals’ led Richard's household (see Richard II, pp. 220-5). This group, headed by Sir Thomas Percy and including William Scrope, Sir John Bushy, Sir William Bagot and Sir Henry Green, were all active members of their own local communities and were, to a large extent, instrumental in shaping the way in which Richard and Richard's authority were perceived in the country as a whole. In contrast, Shakespeare does not allow his audience to be distanced from Richard by such ‘professionals’. Rather, he includes these men only as planets to Richard's sun. Shakespeare's quixotic Richard is personally responsible for his public image and, hence, for the country's judgement on his fitness to rule.

No sub-plot is allowed to distract from the main narrative, a narrative that Shakespeare has chosen to restrict to the last three years of Richard's reign. Steel, summarising the relevant historical evidence, concludes that psychologically ‘Richard was clearly not normal in his last three years’ (p. 111). Lacking modern historical sources, Shakespeare intuitively documents the emotional strain behind the King's public persona. So Richard, King by Divine Right, gradually loses his right to that God-given authority until he comes to realise, poignantly, in his uncrowning,

                    I have no name, no title,
No, not that name was given me at the font,
But 'tis usurped …

(IV.i.254-6)

The trappings of the public role discarded, the closing scenes present the deposed King isolated in his sorrow and trying to come to terms with his own identity: a private man alone with his private grief.

This juxtaposition of public role and private individual ensures that the play's focus is on the tension between the ideal of monarchy and the idiosyncratic personality of the monarch. Shakespeare makes that tension explicit in an encounter of his own invention, on the occasion of Gaunt's death at Ely House. Shakespeare's Gaunt tries out on York some of the arguments he wants to put to Richard in order to force the young king to understand the consequences of his erratic behaviour and self-conceit. The result is the famous ‘sceptred isle’ speech (II.i.31-68) which has since been frequently quoted out of context, even to the point where ‘in the patriotic 1940s … [it] was a standard elocution exercise’ (Elsom, p. 79). In the 1590s Gaunt's words would surely have been heard with a greater sense of political urgency. A most telling indication of the dramatist's control of his audience's attention here, and in Gaunt's subsequent encounter with Richard, is that Shakespeare has Gaunt's death take place off stage. The audience's attention is thus focused on the dying Gaunt's last heroic effort to ‘undeaf’ (II.i.16) the King's ear with ‘wholesome counsel’ (II.i.2) and on the content of that advice with all its implications for ‘time-honoured’ right and compromised allegiance that preoccupy both York and Gaunt at their last meeting. Human sympathy is not then elicited by the presentation on stage of the moment of Gaunt's death. Rather, the audience's instinctive support for the absent Gaunt ensures that Richard's wilful disregard for his death is shockingly brutal:

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

(II.i.153-5)

In a similar reshaping of his sources, Shakespeare develops the role of York as the ageing Gaunt's trusted confidant, as he tries to restrain Richard from seizing on Gaunt's ‘plate, his goods, his money and his lands’ (II.i.210) and thus disinheriting Bolingbroke, Gaunt's exiled heir. Shakespeare's York serves as a barometer of opinion as his personal loyalty, as well as his whole concept of the appropriate authority of God's deputy on earth, is stretched to the limit by Richard's callous actions. Moreover, Shakespeare extends York's role as a loyal and reasonable subject by implicating the whole York family in the issues raised by the deposition of a rightful king, augmenting the historical source material to include scenes showing the Duke's discovery of his son's treachery to the new king. An important function of these scenes is to ‘demonstrate the effects of revolution’ (Brown, p. 127) as Richard's fate reverberates through his country, affecting the lives of individual subjects and setting son against father, father against son.

THE PLAY'S FEMALE ROLES

Shakespeare includes scenes which demonstrate the implications of decisions of state as they affect the lives of a small group of noble women—scenes which are (as far as we know) entirely Shakespeare's invention. No direct source has been identified for Gaunt's meeting with the Duchess of Gloucester (I.ii), nor for the Duchess of York's intervention in the fate of Aumerle. Above all Shakespeare has, it seems, conflated Richard's two queens—Anne of Bohemia and Isabella of France—into the person of Isabella in the play. Another printed source, the first edition of Samuel Daniel's epic poem The First Fowre Bookes of the Civile Wars Between the Two Houses of Lancaster and Yorke (1595 version), may have suggested the basis for such a ‘composite’ persona for the queen. But Shakespeare develops the idea more fully, presumably with performance in mind. Following Richard's formal, public abdication of authority the Queen's grief does much to readjust the audience's balance of sympathy in favour of the deposed King. Historically, Isabella was just twelve years old when Richard was deposed. The depth of emotion expressed in Richard's brief encounter with his wife while on his way to prison does not seem to be appropriate to a child bride. Rather, it seems to derive much from the close relationship of the historical Richard with his first wife, Anne, who was a few months his elder. The encounter in the play reinforces sympathy for Richard's isolation and vulnerability, rather than deflecting that sympathy on to the Queen as might well have been the case had the abandoned Isabella been presented as no more than a child left to fend for herself in her enforced return to France. (The emotional maturity suggested by the writing here may also have been a conscious attempt on Shakespeare's part to add weight to lines to be spoken by a boy player—suggesting adult womanhood rather than emphasising the performer's youth.) In general, Shakespeare's inclusion of parts for strong female characters in Richard II (however brief their roles), along with the Groom's visit to the prison cell, ensures a depth of emotion beyond the immediate issues of political expediency.

Equally notable in the context of Shakespeare's selective focus is the absence of a wider range of female characters. Northumberland never mentions Henry Percy's mother, nor does she appear. Nor is there any reference to Bolingbroke's wife (mother of Prince Hal), although Shakespeare's York does refer to some interference by Richard in a planned match between Bolingbroke and a cousin of the King of France (II.i.167-8). Presumably the inclusion of such roles would have dissipated Shakespeare's chosen focus, distracting attention from Richard and his eclipse by Bolingbroke. Above all, Shakespeare's treatment of the historic narrative ensures single-minded concentration on Bolingbroke's rise as the inevitable consequence of Richard's fall. The strength of Shakespeare's script, however, does not lie in its structural clarity alone but in its sense of history's significance in the context of England—‘the king's own land’ (V.v.110).

THIS ENGLAND

Shakespeare's evocation of the country as a whole can provide one of the greatest challenges in subsequent stagings of Richard II. Shakespeare takes care to establish a sense of space, with constant allusion to locations encompassing all of England, from the border counties in the north to the south-west and south-east, as well as Wales and Ireland. Yet the very references that contributed so much to a sense of involvement in ‘England’ and English values for a Elizabethan audience can sometimes prove more difficult to convey today. This change in performance resonance between Elizabethan times and the twentieth century may serve to confuse rather than to clarify. For example, Richard returning from Ireland sees Barkloughley Castle—not Berkeley but Harlech. The resonances even of familiar names have also been muffled. So the fact that many of the noblemen's (and clergy's) names imply their home seats—Carlisle, Northumberland, Wiltshire, Worcester, York and Lancaster, Salisbury and Norfolk—all too easily escapes a modern audience. Today, titles evoke social status rather than close identification with specific regions and landed estates, and a person's identity is less likely to be defined by strongly regional roots than by a general sense of being English. We regard the whole of the country as conveniently accessible from its capital. There is little sense of open, rough countryside or of journey-times of several days to travel across the land.

It is in this context that one needs to view a play that, deriving resonance from the allusiveness possible on the essentially bare Elizabethan stage, moves from palace to palace the length and breadth of the country. Scenes are set in such noble homes as Langley, Ely and Pleshey and in the castles of Bristow, Harlech and Flint as well as in the Tower. The seat of government shifts from its traditional location in Westminster Hall to Coventry and Oxford. Travel is undertaken from ‘Ravenspurgh to Cotshall’ (II.iii.9), London to Pontefract. Indeed, the play frequently refers to journeys—from escorting Hereford to the next ‘highway’ to his travel to Brittany. York's servant travels to Langley via Pleshey and then to Harlech. The Queen goes to Langley Place (and eventually returns to France). Norfolk (Mowbray) undertakes a series of holy crusades before retiring to Venice, where he dies. Early on, references to travel are merely reported; as the play progresses and the political momentum gathers, we see people in transit—Green, Bushy, Bagot, York and, of course, Harry Percy and his father, Northumberland. In the context of movement and confusion it is not surprising that some information comes too late. The Welshmen have waited ten days and the news they have received is at best muddled, at worst contradictory (II.iv). Bolingbroke himself stumbles upon the King by accident when he seeks shelter at Flint Castle (III.iii). The complex geographical sense conveyed in the play is more than an accumulation of historical detail for its own sake. It serves a structural purpose in embodying the confusion surrounding the final months of Richard's rule as the old order breaks down, in the troubled transition of power leading to the accession of Henry IV.

The names that pose such a challenge to modern interpretation reverberated with significance in the 1590s, carrying associations of space, distance, allegiance, faction, even treason. A good example of the range of implications evoked by the discourse of names is the rapid accumulation of significant historical incidents that are distilled from Holinshed and crowded into a single episode preceding the formal uncrowning ritual that is the play's linguistic, emblematic and political fulcrum. Within these first 150 lines of Act IV Bagot and Fitzwater challenge Aumerle (implicating him in plotting Gloucester's death in Calais), Surrey implicates Fitzwater in the conspiracy, Bolingbroke repeals the banished Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, only to learn from the Bishop of Carlisle that Norfolk has died in Venice, York arrives with news of Richard's abdication and Carlisle challenges the validity of such an abdication, thus opposing Bolingbroke's move to ascend the throne. Much of this material is often cut in modern productions in acknowledgement of the need to make concessions to a more limited understanding of the play's historical, geographical and political location.

What audiences past and present need to share, in some measure, is a sense of what it means to be in England. So, in the ‘sceptred isle’ speech, Tony Church, playing Gaunt in John Barton's production for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1973/74, found his truth in the speech by emphasising the words ‘this England’—not with the hollow poetry of rhetorical celebration often infused into the familiar ‘set’ speech, but with the emphatic repetition of serious identification with one's own land, belonging to the earth, even in death. Unable to draw on the full strength of implication in Elizabethan performance convention, John Barton's production found a way to substitute an immediacy of reference which urged the audience's involvement with a country whose infinite possibilities are being pawned before their eyes for short-term political expediency.

PAGEANTRY AND POWER ON THE ELIZABETHAN STAGE

Shakespeare was writing for performance in a context in which he was familiar both with the individual members of the Chamberlain's Men—including his fellow sharers—and with the opportunities inherent in the playing conventions of his day. These conventions made possible visual reinforcement of the play's verbal and structural parallels. Shakespeare was in a position, that is to say, to exploit the resources and performance languages of the Elizabethan stage to the full.

For many critics of Richard II, an awareness of the ways in which the patterned poetry of the play's language parallels the structural symmetry of the narrative stops short of an understanding of the script's full theatrical potential. For example John Palmer, in common with most critics, emphasises the political incompetence of Richard in the first scene, in contrast with Bolingbroke's skill in controlling a comparable situation later in the play, in which Bolingbroke ‘successfully handles in five minutes an incident such as had cost Richard his throne’ (p. 124). But Palmer stops short of developing his case into an analysis of the challenges such parallelism offers in performance. ‘The main dramatic purpose’ (ibid., my italics) of the play's opening scene, for the audience in the playhouse, is unlikely to be dependent upon an incident much later in the play. On the bare stage of the Elizabethan popular theatre the opening scene allowed the visual establishment of all the spectacle and pageantry of a strongly hierarchical court, a pageantry shortly to be reinforced by the tournament (I.iii). Of course Shakespeare intended the scene to be memorable—even to reverberate in the audience's memories as Bolingbroke copes with a parallel crisis later in the play. But above all the opening of the play establishes Richard in his public, ceremonial role as king—using all the performance languages available to the Chamberlain's Men performing in an open-air playhouse to a popular audience.

The tournament scene in the Lists at Coventry is the first of a series of key scenes in which the visual and linguistic possibilities of ceremony and authority are exploited to the full in confrontations between Richard and Bolingbroke. These scenes demonstrate significant shifts in the balance of power from the occasion of the Lists to the negotiation at Flint Castle, the capitulation of Richard in the deposition scene and his death in prison with its consequences for Bolingbroke (now Henry IV) in the closing moments of the play. Each scene poses a considerable challenge on the modern stage, as each is conceived primarily in terms of the full potential of Elizabethan theatre conventions.

THE TOURNAMENT: ABSOLUTE POWER

Shakespeare's script repeatedly indicates the need for ceremonial entries, often involving processions. The tournament affords an excellent example of the formality befitting a state occasion where language complements and is complemented by visual display. Each contender presents himself, answering the Marshal's call and formally stating his cause. Each receives his lance from the Marshal and each reiterates his challenge through a Herald. It is in the context of this public language of ceremony that Tillyard's assertion that some of the play's verse is ‘indifferent stuff’ (p. 168) needs to be understood. Frequently quoted out of context as an assessment of the overall quality of the play's verse, this is rather an acknowledgement of Shakespeare's understanding of the place of repetitive and patterned public language. Such speeches as the challenges formally announced in the Lists are not great poetry; they are an integral component of an occasion in which ceremonial discourse replaces action (the tournament is not fought). Moreover, the verse here does not stand alone; it would have been reinforced by costume appropriate to state pageantry. On the Elizabethan stage ‘costumes were the most substantial of the portable properties’ used for performance (Gurr, p. 43) and, although we have little detailed knowledge of specific costumes, it seems likely that the Chamberlain's Men would have used rich, colourful robes for the courtiers. These would in all probability have been supplemented by appropriate heraldic devices on banners, standards and flags. Many among the Elizabethan audience would have been aware of the details of heraldry and the hierarchical implications conveyed in the fabric and detail of individual costumes—implications reinforced by Queen Elizabeth I's 1597 Edict ‘Enforcing Statues and Proclamations of Apparel’ which set out in precise terms what people were permitted to wear, according to their social status and degree. The players, presenting some of the highest nobility in the land, including the monarch, had licence to wear costumes above their own social rank and appropriate to the social positions of the characters they represented. These costumes would have been appropriate to the wealth, order and magnificence of the court, comparable to the clothes worn by courtiers themselves in the streets of London on royal Entries, at aristocratic funerals or for the annual Accession Day Tilts. The stage would have been filled with colour: a splendid show reinforcing Richard's pre-eminence. The supreme demonstration of Richard's control of the public discourse of the tournament is his ability to disrupt the whole formal occasion, causing confusion by the single gesture of throwing his warder down.

FLINT CASTLE: WANING POWER

An equally strong visual statement is made by the pivotal scene in which Richard, standing ‘on the walls’ of Flint Castle, negotiates with Bolingbroke who waits for him in the ‘base Court’ (III.iii). The physical structure of the Elizabethan playhouse complements the emblematic significance of this scene as Richard appears ‘above’ (on the gallery over the rear of the stage), expecting Bolingbroke and Northumberland, on the main stage, to respect his authority and to kneel to him. The blocking (i.e. the positioning and movement of the players on the stage) mirrors not just the formal hierarchy but the relative position of the two main protagonists in relation to the populace. Richard's position is elevated, as he stands at a point traditionally associated with power and divine authority—but distant from the majority of the people. Bolingbroke has already taken over the main stage with its greater proximity to the people (the groundlings). As Richard descends, ‘like glistering Phaëton’ (III.iii.178), attended by Aumerle, it is he who comes into Bolingbroke's space, where Bolingbroke already has control. The scene exploits, too, the tension between public statement and private emotion. Richard's formal exchange with Bolingbroke, with all its political ramifications, is set alongside the private comments of each to trusted companions. Thus the stage picture becomes an eloquent emblem of the play's central concern—the division between the office of king and the fitness of a particular individual for that office. (Shakespeare's control of the timing of the action in this scene is so masterly that the moment of Richard's descent, covered by no more than two lines of script (III.iii.184-5), has been taken by the committee of academics and architects attempting to reconstruct Shakespeare's Globe in Southwark as a measure of the distance behind the stage between the gallery and the entrance on to the rear of the stage.) In removing the player of Richard, however briefly, from the audience's view while the player of Bolingbroke commands the forestage, Shakespeare allows the audience a prophetic glimpse of what is to come as King Richard retreats into private space, leaving Bolingbroke in control of the public arena.

THE DEPOSITION SCENE: POWER IN ECLIPSE

It is in the deposition scene that all the resources of the play's performance languages come together, posing a challenge to actors and directors alike as Shakespeare presents a ceremonial reversal of ceremony. Drawing on established reversals of ritual used to take away honours conferred by the Church as well as by military and secular authorities, Shakespeare makes the formal declaration in the play's deposition scene a reversal of investiture and coronation. (See Ranald, pp. 170-96). In a play so preoccupied with ceremony, ‘the ritual stripping away of Richard's symbolic attributes is infinitely more than mere formality’ (ibid., p. 195). Underlining the implications of the deposition by allowing Carlisle to speak passionately about the nature of royal power, Shakespeare goes beyond the chronicle accounts and transmutes the action of Richard's resignation ‘into a quasi-religious returning to God of his kingly office’ (ibid., p. 191). He even allows Richard to draw parallels between himself and Christ:

                    I well remember
The favours of these men. Were they not mine?
Did they not sometime cry ‘All hail’ to me?
So Judas did to Christ, but he in twelve
Found truth in all but one, I in twelve thousand none.

(IV.i.167-71)

Shakespeare's sense of stage rhythms and space ensures that the very structure of the scene as a whole underlines the political consequences of the process of deposing a king whilst reasserting the authority of the monarchy. Andrew Gurr's note on the opening moments of IV.i makes this clear. He discusses the processional entry, the need for the royal regalia to be carried in to this judicial meeting of Parliament, and the requirement for ‘the presence of the throne, since Parliament was formally rex in parliamento, the king, lords and commons together’ (p. 137). … M. M. Mahood underestimates the significance of this scene which, she argues,

for all its brilliance, adds very little to the total effect of the play. If Richard II was ever acted in the mutilated text represented by the first and second Quartos—and the long and rather irrelevant ‘gage’ scene which precedes the deposition reads like the padding to an abbreviated text—the loss, though serious, cannot have been structural, for the deposition only repeats the contrast, made in the scene at Flint Castle, between the reality of Richard's inward grief and its sham appearance in a profusion of words.

(p. 87)

This argument depends more on literary interpretation than on a visualisation of the text in performance. It needs to be set against the sense of pageantry and spectacle integral to the structure of the script.

The scene begins with Bolingbroke hearing challengers speak against Aumerle. Far from being ‘irrelevant’, this episode parallels the opening of the whole play when Richard hears Bolingbroke challenge Mowbray. The narrative parallel invites a visual parallel on stage, suggesting that Bolingbroke should be sitting on the throne at the start of Act IV as Richard is at the opening of the play. ‘On the evidence of [line] 113, however, he [Bolingbroke] must stand uncomfortably in front of the empty seat while acting as judge’ (Gurr, p. 137). Thus the visual structure implicit in the play is used, in advance of the un-crowning, to separate out the office of kingship from the person of the king. The empty ‘state’ sharply focuses the potential national crisis.

Alongside the public spectacle and pageantry Shakespeare allows Richard an element of poetic self-indulgence and self-awareness as he confronts the problem of his own identity. The ‘mirror scene’ within the deposition sequence is Shakespeare's invention, alluding perhaps to the familiar Mirror for Magistrates tradition. It offers far more than a contrast between Richard's deep-seated personal grief and ‘its sham appearance in a profusion of words’ (Mahood). The moment is focused by Shakespeare with the choice of one single domestic, personal property in a context which is dominated by the public trappings emblematic of kingship. Yet even in this personal reflection of self there is also a reflection of the public persona, for the mirror with its framed image of the king's face may suggest, also, the framed portrait or miniature painted by the enhancing hand of a creator of public identity. Bolingbroke's enigmatic yet intensely personal reaction to his cousin's plight emphasises the fragmentation of Richard's self as clearly as Richard's gesture in shattering the mirror:

The shadow of your sorrow hath destroyed
The shadow of your face.

(IV.i.291-2)

The role has destroyed its own theatrical presentation, or mask, as the trappings necessary to the identification between the player and the role are systematically removed and the symbols of royal authority change hands.

THE PRISON SCENE: POWER OVER THE SELF

Richard's grief and isolation towards the close of the play find full expression in the performance languages of the Elizabethan popular stage. The trappings of ceremony—the rich costumes, the royal regalia, the deferential language and the presence of friends and favourites—are stripped away. The evocation of the country at large, extending to the invasion of Ireland, is replaced by the confinement of the prison. We are hardly aware of the move from London to Pontefract. With Richard we visualise the bars of the cell. And with Richard we experience his extreme desperation when even that tiny refuge is threatened and invaded. In these closing scenes two facets of the play that have been kept at arm's length—love and violence—are now present. The Queen, previously seen with Richard only on crowded public occasions, turns an empty street into the personal space in which to share her husband's pain. Public ‘policy’ (V.i.84) has deprived them of their private marriage as well as their royal place, and Richard's memory of the ‘pomp’ (V.i.78) and pageantry of the wedding now increases the sadness of their separation. The visit of his Groom serves to underline Richard's isolation. The affectionate memory of a retainer can only emphasise Bolingbroke's power to take away all that had supported Richard's authority—even ‘roan Barbary’ (V.v.78). Similarly the gift of music, as ‘a sign of love’, is soured by Richard's pain (see V.v.41-67). Yet in his vulnerable isolation Richard finds a personal strength that is both spiritual and physical. The only on-stage violence in the whole play is saved for Richard's attack on his murderers. He kills at least two of them before Exton strikes him down. In that moment Shakespeare ensures that the full consequence of the action is seen for what it is—regicide:

                                                                                                    Exton, thy fierce hand
Hath with the king's blood stained the king's own land.

(V.v.109-10)

THE KING IS DEAD. LONG LIVE THE KING!

With regicide go rebellion and conspiracy. Shakespeare ensures that Richard's personal tragedy does not, on its own, constitute the play's closing image. The last scene underlines the national significance of the act of deposition as Bolingbroke struggles to control the public presentation of the change of power: a struggle in which he is forced to engage from the moment he ascends the throne. Once again, use of stage space (including the number of players on stage) reinforces the wording of the text. In this final scene Bolingbroke is not seen alone, ruling confidently and securely as King Henry IV; he is embroiled in the consequences of the authority that he has usurped. In a scene reminiscent in structure of that following the return of Richard from Ireland (III.i) York, then Northumberland, then Fitzwater, then Percy and Carlisle and finally Exton, come into the King's presence to bring news. Whereas the news brought to Richard was negative and increasingly dispiriting, each bulletin for the new King confirms Henry's power while also underlining the fact that this power depends upon the use of physical force. Understanding that the force is all too likely to lead to violence on a country wide scale, Henry tries to intervene, at least on a personal level. His punishment for the Bishop of Carlisle is not to be death. Rather, Carlisle is distanced from the sphere of national influence. The presence of Carlisle on stage to hear his sentence is important in terms of the play's structure. It must surely recall for the audience his earlier objections to the reported abdication of Richard and his prophecy that, if Bolingbroke is allowed to ascend the throne of state,

The blood of English shall manure the ground
And future ages groan for this foul act.

(IV.i.137-8)

The final stage picture depends, as in so many key scenes in the play, on the presence of both Richard and Bolingbroke on stage. Richard is brought, once again, into Bolingbroke's presence. The Chamberlain's Men presumably carried the player of the murdered Richard onto the stage on a bier (as would be usual for Elizabethan corpses). If so, at least a proportion of the audience would have seen the faces of both players. Richard's bier alone would have been enough to invoke the memory of regicide and its ability to influence the minds of the living. Even as King Henry gives order for King Richard's state funeral, the threat to national peace is clear:

Lords, I protest my soul is full of woe
That blood should sprinkle me to make me grow.
Come mourn with me for what I do lament,
And put on sullen black incontinent.
I'll make a voyage to the Holy Land
To wash this blood off from my guilty hand.
March sadly after. Grace my mournings here
In weeping after this untimely bier.

(V.vi.45-52)

To an extent the patterned structure of Richard II, even in its evident disequilibrium, has provided the audience with some sense of historical order. The new reign, we now learn, may be disturbed in a more comprehensive and turbulent fashion. This is indeed the case in the structural language of the Henry IV plays.