SOURCE: Forker, Charles R. Introduction to The Arden Shakespeare: King Richard II, edited by Charles R. Forker, pp. 1-170. London: Thomson Learning, 2002.

[In the following excerpt, Forker explores the complex, subtle, and ambivalent means by which Shakespeare renders the principal characters of Richard II.]

CHARACTERIZATION: ATTITUDES TOWARDS RICHARD AND BOLINGBROKE

Shakespeare inherited divergent and competing interpretations of Richard and Bolingbroke. In the interests of simplification—indeed over-simplification—these have been referred to conventionally as ‘Yorkist’ (pro-Richard) or ‘Lancastrian’ (pro-Henry) according to the dynastic factions that subsequently fostered them for their own political advantage. From the Lancastrian point of view (represented by the majority of English chroniclers), Richard was a weak, incompetent and despotic king, extravagantly self-indulgent, deaf to wise counsel, dominated by corrupt and selfish favourites and altogether ruinous to his country. Bolingbroke, on the other hand, was a justly popular and wronged nobleman, a strong and capable leader, the darling of fortune and destiny, the politically natural successor to Richard, a man who responded boldly to the needs of his time and the saviour of the nation. This essentially is the view of his career that Henry himself voices in 2 Henry IV when, indulging in the luxury of hindsight, he disclaims any ambition for the throne: ‘then, God knows, I had no such intent, / But that necessity so bow'd the state / That I and greatness were compell'd to kiss’ (3.2.72-4).¹ But according to the Yorkist writers, who naturally wished to discredit the Lancastrian revolution, the youthful Richard was more victim than villain—a generally devout and well-meaning monarch, misled into wrongful policies and exploited by false and self-seeking friends. Bolingbroke tends to emerge in this interpretation as an ambitious, unscrupulous, opportunistic and dissimulating politician.² The French chroniclers, who sympathized with Richard on account of his birthplace and his Gallic wife, promoted the image of a royal martyr betrayed by his own subjects and dethroned by a shrewd and cruel usurper. The complex intersection, assimilation and overlapping of these contradictory traditions in the writings that must have influenced Shakespeare, whether directly or indirectly, have been well described and analysed by Duls.³

Even in Holinshed, a chronicle compiled of diverse materials, Shakespeare encountered mixed attitudes to Richard and Bolingbroke. There we read that Richard ‘began to rule by will more than by reason, threatning death to each one that obeied not his inordinate desires’; given to ‘furious outrage’, he was ‘a man destitute of sobrietie and wisedome’ who wickedly ‘abused his authoritie’ (3.493). Yet the same chronicler can also refer to him as a ‘bountifull and louing souereigne’, victimized by ‘ingratitude’ (3.508) and lied to by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Pilate-like Arundel, who had promised that he should be safe from ‘anie hurt, as touching his person’ (3.501). In general Holinshed treats Bolingbroke benignly—as courageous, politically adept, deservedly popular and carefully respectful of the King. Yet it is equally clear that the Duke is ruthless in destroying Richard's friends. Accusing Bolingbroke of ‘ambitious’ and ‘tigerlike crueltie’, Holinshed also says that he ‘wanted moderation and loialtie in his dooings’ for which he was afterwards duly punished: ‘What vnnaturalnesse … was this, not to be content with [Richard's] principalitie’, ‘his treasure’, ‘his depriuation’, ‘his imprisonment’ and ‘wooluishlie to lie in wait … and rauenouslie to thirst after his bloud, the spilling whereof should have touched his conscience[?]’ (3.508). Referring specifically to the scene at Flint Castle where Richard and Bolingbroke have their all-important encounter, Talbert observes that such ‘antithetical attitudes … are so closely juxtaposed’ by Shakespeare ‘that for all intents and purposes they fuse with one another, and that fusion accords with the way in which two attitudes toward kingship have been kept alive’ throughout the play: ‘Even as Richard lacks the vigorous and wise [capacity to govern] …, his right by inheritance, by the hand of God, by a simplified world-order, is expressed forcefully’ (168-9). What is true of this crucial scene is true in a broader sense of the tragedy as a whole.

Shakespeare partly accomplishes the ‘fusion’ to which Talbert points by subtly undercutting or rendering ambiguous the roles of Richard and Bolingbroke as divine-right monarch and irresistible challenger. This technique is clearest in the Flint Castle episode where Richard, a figure of ‘Controlling majesty’ (3.3.70) who dazzles his subjects like the sun, nevertheless descends from his royal eminence into ‘the base court’ (3.3.176) at the request of a mere vassal and not only grants Bolingbroke's demands but, in his ‘doom-eagerness’,⁴ yields his person to the enemy, all the while indulging in histrionic and unkingly self-pity. Nor does Shakespeare fail to balance the mixed portrayal of Richard with an equally mixed image of Bolingbroke. The Duke approaches the castle with the full force of his army and the sound of ‘brazen trumpet’ (3.3.33), yet ‘without the noise of threat'ning drum’ (3.3.51). He protests ‘allegiance and true faith of heart’ to his sovereign. He offers to lay his ‘arms and power’ at Richard's ‘feet’, at the same time issuing an ultimatum to his liege lord that if his demands are not ‘freely granted’, he will ‘use the advantage of [his] power’ to create ‘showers of blood / Rained from the wounds of slaughtered Englishmen’ (3.3.37-44). He kneels before Richard with a show of submission and kisses the royal hand; but the elaborate courtesy and tactful observance of protocol, although minimizing imputations of ambition, in no way alter the military and political facts. And in Northumberland's dropping of Richard's title (3.3.6-9) and failure to kneel (3.3.75-6), Shakespeare subtly conveys a hint of the usurper's ultimate goal. Bolingbroke accomplishes his purpose of regaining the status of Duke of Lancaster and of taking Richard prisoner without creating the impression that he openly seeks the crown. Yet Richard's sarcastic address to him as ‘King Bolingbroke’ (3.3.173), taken in conjunction with Northumberland's unceremonious behaviour, creates just the opposite impression. Has Richard masochistically delivered up himself and his throne to a hypocritical enemy who would have seized power in any case? Or has Bolingbroke through luck, percipience, a heroic temperament and skilful manoeuvring simply placed himself in a position to have greatness thrust upon him? The scene leaves these equivocal issues unresolved.

Shakespeare, indeed, contrives to promote ambiguous impressions of both antagonists throughout the drama and to manipulate audience responses in such a way as to keep approval and disapproval, or sympathy and alienation, in a more or less constant state of flux. According to Rackin, the audience is made to play ‘a carefully calculated role’ not listed among the cast of characters, ‘complete with motivations, actions, errors, and discoveries’ (263). Rabkin goes so far as to allege that ‘keeping our sympathies in suspense’ constitutes the play's ‘primary technique’ (86). These minor fluctuations, of course, do not disturb the general drift towards increased emotional identification with Richard, as befits a tragic protagonist, or the gradual distancing from Bolingbroke that naturally accompanies it. Nevertheless, the progressive disclosure and complication of character adopted in Richard II represents a new and subtler technique than anything observable in earlier plays, especially the histories.

There is space here to touch only on high points by way of illustration. While the opening act presents a generally negative impression of Richard (his weak yielding to subordinates, his apparent responsibility for Gloucester's death, his unjust caprice as judge, his implied jealousy of Bolingbroke, his farming the realm, his callousness towards Gaunt), it simultaneously qualifies the effect by dramatizing his royal demeanour, his shrewd capacity to assess enemies and Gaunt's principled refusal to take vengeance against ‘God's substitute’ (1.2.37). Although the portrait of Bolingbroke is contrastingly positive, emphasizing courage and patriotism, the action also raises doubts about his loyalty since, while protesting concern for ‘the precious safety of my prince’ (1.1.32), he seems to threaten Richard by accusing Mowbray and suggesting (in opposition to his father's doctrine) that the duty of avenging Gloucester falls specifically to him. The play promotes further uncertainty by Richard's reference to the opponents' ‘sky-aspiring and ambitious thoughts’ (1.3.130) and to Bolingbroke's political craft in wooing commoners ‘As were our England in reversion his, / And he our subjects' next degree in hope’ (1.4.35-6). An additional ambiguity arises when Gaunt, asserting that Richard has ‘caused’ Gloucester's death, adds the phrase, ‘if wrongfully’ (1.2.39), thus blurring the issue of royal guilt.⁵ Although Richard later acknowledges his ‘weaved-up follies’ (4.1.229) and refers to his ‘sins’ (4.1.275) in general terms, he never expresses the slightest guilt for the killing of his uncle, an action carried out by subordinates. Shakespeare leaves the question of Richard's bad conscience for the death unresolved just as, at the end of the play, he applies a balancing ambiguity to the murder of Richard at the hands of Exton—a deed which King Henry may or may not have secretly authorized despite his combination of relief and guilt after it has been accomplished.⁶

By dramatizing the King's arrogance, his deafness to wise counsel, his heartless response to Gaunt's death and the confiscation of Bolingbroke's inheritance, Act 2 brings Richard to his nadir in the sympathies of the audience; Northumberland's ‘Most degenerate King!’ (2.1.262) seems justified. Yet our dismay at Richard's tyrannical incompetence is immediately balanced by the news that Bolingbroke has already raised an army and plans to invade England, violating his oath of fealty and delaying only until Richard has left for Ireland.⁷ In his phrase, ‘Redeem from broking pawn the blemished crown’ (2.1.293), Northumberland seems to hint enthusiastically at usurpation. If the ‘anointed King’ (2.3.96) has demonstrated unfitness to rule, the alternative to the passive obedience which Gaunt had endorsed is the backing, in Bolingbroke's own phrase, of ‘a banished traitor’ (2.3.60)—what York later calls ‘gross rebellion and detested treason’ (2.3.109). Moreover, Shakespeare now introduces the Queen, who acknowledges nothing of her husband's misrule, as a means of evoking sympathy for her ‘sweet Richard’ (2.2.9). In emotional terms, this prepares for York's dilemma, torn, as he is, between his two ‘kinsmen’—the one his ‘sovereign, whom both my oath / And duty bids defend’, the other a nephew ‘whom the King hath wronged, / Whom conscience and my kindred bids to right’ (2.2.111-15). Worcester's defection and the flight of Bushy, Bagot and Green, who apparently ignore York's order to ‘muster up … men’ (2.2.118), only increase our sense of Richard's vulnerability and further emphasize the King's isolation. Richard's power to command the loyalty of friends now looks significantly weaker than his cousin's.

On his return Bolingbroke conveys mixed impressions—attractive humility in response to Northumberland's fulsomeness but also self-assurance and promises of reward as his ‘infant fortune comes to years’ (2.3.66); the metaphor suggests his long-range strategy. He speaks also of ‘my treasury’ (2.3.60) as though he were already a monarch. York's horror of ‘braving arms against [the] sovereign’ (2.3.112) reincorporates the orthodoxy of passive obedience voiced earlier by Gaunt. Moreover, the speciousness of Bolingbroke's argument that his new title, Duke of Lancaster, has annulled the crime of his early return, since he was banished only as Hereford, has an alienating effect. The situation nevertheless allows him to describe with eloquence the legal injustice of which he has been the victim—an injustice that is seen once more (as in 2.1) to weaken Richard's implied position that inheritance alone is enough to make and protect a king. Then York's futile assertion of authority, his wish to make Bolingbroke ‘stoop / Unto the sovereign mercy of the King’ (2.3.156-7), proves hollow, as he collapses into a stance of neutrality and offers the rebels whom he has just so roundly scolded the hospitality of his castle. York's failure of nerve recapitulates Richard's earlier failure (1.1.196-9) to make Bolingbroke and Mowbray obey his will. Although York is ‘loath to break our country's laws’, he seeks to evade the political untenability of his position by welcoming the invaders as neither ‘friends nor foes’ (2.3.169-70). Act 2 concludes with Salisbury's gloomy forecast of Richard's setting sun, ‘weeping in the lowly west’ and the political ‘storms’ in prospect (2.4.21-2). Up to this point, Shakespeare has so manipulated responses that audiences can hardly be sanguine or approving of either Richard or Bolingbroke.

In Act 3, as Stirling observes, Shakespeare presents Bolingbroke and Richard in two consecutive scenes that individually dramatize their ‘utter difference’ of ‘temperament’ (29), finally making them confront each other in the third scene, which settles dispositively the issue of Richard's removal from the throne. All three scenes encourage ambivalent responses to both antagonists. In the first Bolingbroke is shown to be decisive, efficient, brisk and diplomatically prudent, condemning Bushy and Green, sending courteous commendations to the Queen, and setting in motion a military expedition against Glendower and the remaining loyalists. But by executing the favourites, he ruthlessly exceeds his authority, behaving already as though he were king; he also makes them scapegoats, trumping up charges of sexual misconduct and blaming them for Richard's injuries to him personally, just as he had earlier attacked Richard through Mowbray for Gloucester's death.⁸ The parallel scene of the King's return from Ireland develops the sentimental side of Richard, showing his histrionic oscillations between unjustified elation and the ‘sweet way’ of ‘despair’ (3.2.205). Self-indulgently anticipating total defeat, Richard is the first person after Bolingbroke's return to pronounce the word ‘deposed’, obsessively repeating it four times (3.2.56, 150, 157, 158). Attraction to the martyrdom of abdication causes him to ritualize the abandonment of his sacred body, the body symbolized by his throne, to sit upon the ground, where he can meditate on death and the common humanity that unites him in his physical body to his subjects and all other mortals:

                                                                                Throw away respect,
Tradition, form and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while.
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends. Subjected thus,
How can you say to me I am a king?

(3.2.172-7)

As a monarch Richard never appears weaker, more self-absorbed or more in love with catastrophe than in this scene, which ends in his renouncing politics altogether: ‘Discharge my followers. Let them hence away, / From Richard's night to Bolingbroke's fair day’ (3.2.217-18). Clearly the scene functions to contrast the King's emotional instability with the icy and rigorous control of his adversary. Yet tragic sympathy for Richard begins to emerge with the challenge to his authority, and self-knowledge, though incomplete, begins to accompany self-pity. The brittle confidence, arrogant self-possession and careless indifference of the earlier Richard have melted to disclose a richer and more vulnerably complex personality. The ‘hollow crown’ speech (3.2.160-77) reveals that the speaker's untested faith in the divine protection of his title has been shattered as completely as the mirror he will later break. The new ingredient is Richard's own questioning of the integrity of the king's two bodies—a unity that heretofore he had shallowly assumed. Attack from without has sparked dividedness within. And the result is a protagonist of greater capacity for self-understanding and emotional depth than has yet been disclosed. Meanwhile, Bolingbroke has remained a closed book—a figure whose inner self has been carefully screened from our gaze. Paradoxically, the ineffectual King appears to be a more interesting, interior and multifaceted human being than the figure who threatens him. But most importantly, the scene near the Welsh coast serves as a significant watershed in Shakespeare's dramaturgical scheme, clarifying the lesson that the political conflicts of the play are inseparable from the psychological and moral complexities of the men who contend for dominion. Tragedy, even if its historical subject is a revolution, must concern itself as much with human beings as with political theory.

The pivotal scene at Flint Castle continues to show both figures in a double light. While Bolingbroke presents himself as the loyal proponent of justice (‘My gracious lord, I come but for mine own’), thus gaining our approval, Richard's bitter response, ‘Your own is yours, and I am yours and all’ (3.3.196-7), embraces a more far-reaching truth. Richard becomes a prisoner, knowing that London can mean only dethronement and probable death; and when he adds, ‘For do we must what force will have us do’ (3.3.207), Bolingbroke revealingly fails to contradict him.⁹ Our impression of Richard is equally mixed. While theatricalizing his own humiliation in the ‘base court’, behaving like a spectator at his own tragedy,¹⁰ Richard nevertheless clings to that exalted conception of royalty that supplies the foundation for his grief in having to forfeit it. Richard's majesty, which impresses even his opponent and causes York, now fully committed to Bolingbroke, to weep for what has been lost, emerges as something more than romantic illusion. At the same time both antagonists are to some extent victims of self-delusion. Richard remains unable or unwilling to confront the flaws of character and policy that have brought him to his unhappy pass, however realistically he may now assess his present danger; and Bolingbroke seems equally unable to acknowledge (perhaps even to himself) the thirst for sovereignty that underlies his self-restraint and calculated realism, even though his upward momentum towards the throne is now more obvious than ever.¹¹

The garden scene, which immediately follows, confirms objectively what was implicit at Flint Castle—that ‘Bolingbroke / Hath seized the wasteful King’ (3.4.54-5) and that his deposition at ‘London’ is imminent (3.4.90). Sympathy for Richard is renewed through the Queen's distressed reaction to the baleful news she has overheard. But at the same time the Gardeners elaborate a patterned explanation of how badly the fallen King had tended his ‘sea-walled garden’ (3.4.43) and, by implication at least, defend the usurpation of power as a sad necessity. The Queen, moreover, voices the momentous implications of her husband's dethronement by comparing it to the Fall, thus endowing Richard's tragedy, as did the chronicler Hall, with the significance of a mythic and long-lasting national disaster.

Bolingbroke's status as king de facto becomes clearer early in Act 4 where the Duke, using the royal ‘we’, presides impassively over his squabbling nobles and exerts his control by deferring their ‘days of trial’ (4.1.106-7). By reviving the matter of Gloucester's death, Shakespeare muddies the waters more disturbingly than before. Although Bolingbroke says little, his resolute demeanour contrasts with Richard's inability in the analogous opening scene to make his quarrelling subjects obey him.¹² Yet only when York announces that ‘plume-plucked Richard’ has willingly adopted him as ‘heir’ (4.1.109-10) does Bolingbroke for the first time acknowledge his claim to sovereignty: ‘In God's name I'll ascend the regal throne’ (4.1.114). This is the dramatic moment in Shakespeare's brilliant recasting of Holinshed that elicits Carlisle's divine-right protest and the prophecy that crowning Bolingbroke will transform England into a Golgotha of national slaughter for generations yet unborn. Carlisle's brave defence of the inviolable sanctity of kingship causes Bolingbroke to hesitate;¹³ and although the prelate is instantly arrested for his reactionary loyalty, he nevertheless forces the usurper, most inconveniently, to summon the fallen King into Parliament so that his abdication may be witnessed and Bolingbroke's accession accepted ‘Without suspicion’ (4.1.158). For once, Bolingbroke has been placed on the defensive. And, once he appears, there Richard manages to keep him for the remainder of the act, dominating the stage in his improvised pageant of self-unkinging. This scene, as Palmer rightly says, ‘is the summit of the play’ (167).

Thus Shakespeare contrasts two kinds of power—the political and the theatrical. Bolingbroke may hold the reins of sovereignty, but Richard is the master of self-dramatization with its attendant arts—command of rhetoric and metaphor, the power to embarrass enemies, ironic wit and quicksilver fancy, the capacity to evoke both pity and irritation, the posture of associating his own sufferings with the Passion of Jesus, and the histrionic skill to make the narcissistic contemplation of his own identity coterminous with a ceremony of monarchical renunciation that communicates a sense of desecration and the loss of sacred tradition. Richard manages to endow his own fall with cosmic significance—with the fracturing of an ancient and venerable world order in which the king is seen as a vital link in the great chain that connects the celestial with the earthly. The player-king now triumphs theatrically over the king of Realpolitik but at the cost of half-annihilating both himself and the beautiful principle on which he had believed his royalty to be founded.

Yet again a certain doubleness of perspective, rooted in the sacramental theology of kingship itself, pervades the episode of discrowning; for, paradoxically, Richard contrives to assert the sacred inviolability of his office while simultaneously divesting himself of its symbols and thereby violating it himself. Although Richard has the talents of an actor, inventing ‘a great ceremony for his humiliation’, as Philip Edwards phrases it, ‘kingship is for him no actor's part, put on and put off at will’ (102), but rather the defining ground of his being. The man who had grandly claimed that an ocean of sea-water could not ‘wash the balm off from an anointed king’ (3.2.55) now affects to remove it ‘With [his] own tears’ (4.1.207). In rituals of the degradation of priests and bishops, only those who have been anointed themselves can presume to officiate in the scraping off of the holy oils and chrism. Yet it is equally clear that in such degradations the subject is prohibited only from lawfully exercising his sacramental powers, since the gifts of the Holy Spirit conferred by anointing at consecrations and ordinations are permanently valid and beyond the power of human beings to annul. ‘Ay, no. No, ay’, Richard's equivocal answer to Bolingbroke's question of whether he is ‘contented to resign the crown’ (4.1.200-1), encapsulates concisely his divided attitude. The inverted rite of dispossession to which Pater famously called attention (see Forker, 298), and which Richard languishingly draws out to such liturgical length, expunges in a psychological sense the very identity of the speaker.¹⁴ As Ranald (195) observes, the ceremony ‘is infinitely more than mere formality’, constituting as it does ‘his annihilation as a kingly person, his reduction to the rank of knave, the destruction of his achievements, and, as Richard sees it, his excision from the roster of English kings, since he has become a traitor to the office he had held’. Yet at the same time Richard cannot but asseverate the timeless legitimacy of his kingship—his claim to the body mystical that cannot theoretically be sundered from the body physical until death. He condemns the ‘heinous’ act of ‘deposing … a king / And cracking the strong warrant of an oath, / Marked with a blot, damned in the book of heaven’ (4.1.233-6); he compares himself twice to Christ, the King of all creation, whose Godhead is sempiternal; and he condemns himself for cooperating in the inversion of an immutable hierarchy—for consenting ‘T'undeck the pompous body of a king’, for having made ‘Glory base and Sovereignty a slave, / Proud Majesty a subject, State a peasant’ (4.1.250-2).

Of course the episode exposes also the fallible side of Richard's nature so that a tragic divide opens up between the semi-divine dignity of the rank he once held (and still glorifies) and his own solipsistic exhibitionism. The comparisons to Christ have a double edge. Looked at from a merely human perspective, Richard's claim that his sufferings exceed those of his Saviour, since Jesus had only one Judas while he has had to cope with ‘twelve thousand’ betrayers (4.1.171-2), reveals a degree of presumption approaching blasphemy. At the same time, however, the analogy between the dethroning of an anointed sovereign and the Passion contains a certain theological validity according to the christology of divine-right doctrine. The windlass image of the two buckets carries something of the same doubleness about it (see 4.1.184n.). Richard applies it to his own advantage by making the high bucket (Bolingbroke) dance emptily, carelessly and illegitimately in the air while the low bucket, representing himself, is heavy with grief and the weight of sacred tradition. The analogy is tactically clever since it apparently exasperates Bolingbroke as intended; but the verbal wit displayed also casts doubt upon the profundity of Richard's grief since the deepest kinds of suffering do not usually accommodate such ostentation. The same point can be made about the emblematic mirror into which Richard gazes before he smashes it in a climactic coup de théâtre—an action he himself can refer to as ‘this sport’ (4.1.290). At one level the episode can be read as extravagant escapism, a means by which Richard narcissistically evades a reality he himself has invited. The Epistle of James likens a Christian who hears the word of God but, self-deceivingly, fails to translate it into action ‘unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass’ for ‘he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was’ (1.23-4). It is this self-deception that Bolingbroke imputes to Richard's gesture as he refers with a hint of contempt to ‘The shadow of [his] sorrow’ (4.1.292). But the mirror, as a reflector of truth (as well as of vanity), also allows the fallen King a moment of deeper insight into his own nature. It becomes for him ‘the very book … Where all [his] sins are writ’ (4.1.274-5) and the means of disclosing, as through a glass darkly, ‘the tortured soul’ (4.1.298) that lies beneath the youthfully handsome and as yet unwrinkled countenance.¹⁵ The brittleness of the glass symbolizes for Richard the fragility and impermanence of life itself and links up thematically with the ‘hollow crown’ speech of 3.2 with its effect of expanded consciousness and deepened self-perception.¹⁶ And throughout Richard's quasi-tragic performance, Bolingbroke has been reduced to the role of a ‘silent King’ (4.1.290), who can only regain a measure of assurance by ‘conveying’ his rhetorically potent enemy ‘to the Tower’ (4.1.316). Nor is it other than by masterly design that Shakespeare concludes the scene of Richard's ‘woeful pageant’ (4.1.321) with the Abbot of Westminster's counter-revolutionary plot. Having permitted Richard to usurp the spotlight emotionally, thereby casting the political usurper into shadow, the dramatist now revives the possibility, perhaps even the distant hope, of an actual reversal in the power structure of the state.

Mixed reactions to Richard continue in Act 5. In the largely private farewell of the royal lovers (dramatically, the Guard and the Queen's ladies are non-presences), Richard's devotion to his wife comes over as deep and genuine; yet Richard still acts the player-king, emoting over his own tragedy and transmuting it into literary artifact—‘the lamentable tale of me’ (5.1.44). But the self-conscious language of both speakers may be read in part as a psychic effort to control the rawness of grief adopted in the spirit of mutual protectiveness. However we receive Richard's egoism, it contains an element of self-recognition. He can speak of their ‘former state’ as a ‘happy dream’ from which present cruelties have awakened them, at the same time acknowledging ‘grim Necessity’ and hoping for the ‘new world's crown’ that will deliver them from the ‘profane hours’ of earthly existence (5.1.18-25). Richard's thoughts of an incorruptible crown probably represent more than a flight to platitude since piety was an aspect of his historical personality well documented in the sources available to Shakespeare. Finding his resigned passivity unroyal, the Queen rebukes him for playing the submissive schoolboy rather than the lion, ‘king of beasts’ (5.1.26-34), to which Richard wittily responds that he has indeed been overthrown by ‘beasts’ rather than ‘men’ (5.1.35-6). In coming to terms with his fall, Richard still lashes out at subjects rather than blaming himself. Northumberland's entrance returns us instantly to Bolingbroke's world of Realpolitik, the impingement of the public realm upon the private being a pervasive theme of Shakespeare's histories.¹⁷ And Richard's shrewd forecast of Northumberland's treason under Henry dramatizes the painful truth that the fallen King is a better judge of his enemies than of his friends. The scene shows Richard in defeat as a loving husband and perceptive analyst of the Bolingbroke-Northumberland alliance without diminishing our awareness of his self-absorption or his continuing belief in the rightness of his inherited role. The emotional parting between husband and wife also balances the drawn-out leave-taking between Gaunt and his son in 1.3.

York's evocative description of Bolingbroke and Richard in the London streets provides a final contrast between the antagonists. His lingering sympathy for the King he has deserted makes his rigorous commitment to Bolingbroke and, later, his condemnation of his own son in proof of it, doubly ironic. York's finely contrasted vignettes delineate political success and failure, at once underscoring the de casibus theme of mutable fortune and the volatility of popular opinion.¹⁸ Bolingbroke, who receives the prayers and accolades of the crowd with gestures of humility, is clearly the master of public relations, nor does the portrait necessarily suggest insincerity despite our memory of what Richard had said about his ‘Wooing poor craftsmen with the craft of smiles’ (1.4.28). Still, York's metaphor involving the difficulty of following a ‘well-graced actor’ (Bolingbroke) onstage because the next actor (Richard) will be received as tedious by contrast (5.2.24-6) again suggests political manipulation in the usurper. And in view of Richard's histrionic character, already so thoroughly developed, it is also piercingly ironic, for the contrasting description of the martyr-king, on whose ‘sacred head’ dust is thrown and who bears his humiliation with ‘grief and patience’ (5.2.30-3), seems to embody unvarnished authenticity while it is Bolingbroke who has succeeded to the role of player-king. Despite his engaged feelings, York comments gnomically on the providential nature of the power-shift without assigning blame or innocence to either winner or loser: ‘heaven hath a hand in these events, / To whose high will we bound our calm contents’ (5.2.37-8). Such resignation could be interpreted as York's final evasion of responsibility for pusillanimously capitulating to the stronger of two leaders—to his prizing of a settled order above all else.¹⁹ But the lines are chiefly choric and emphasize a theme that undergirds Shakespeare's histories as a group—namely that the tragic currents of political change lie finally outside and beyond the power of men to control.

The eruption of conflict between York and Aumerle dramatizes a tragic effect of revolution—division within nuclear families (staged emblematically in 3 Henry VI, 2.5). Like Bolingbroke, York also has a rebellious child. The vehement condemnation of a son for treason to one king, by a father who has already committed the same offence to his predecessor, is obviously replete with irony. But the play implies that there is an important difference between Aumerle's immature act of rashness and York's bowing to unalterable circumstance. Moreover, Aumerle, once exposed, is so desperate to save his own skin that he makes no attempt to plead for his confederates whose secrecy he had religiously sworn to protect. Before the dangerous discovery, however, his parents comment tartly on the slippery footing of a courtier's life in a way that would resonate meaningfully with Tudor audiences.²⁰ When his mother inquires casually about those currently in favour with the new regime (the latest ‘violets’ of ‘the new-come spring’), Aumerle replies suspiciously that he neither knows nor cares, prompting his father to urge caution lest the boy ‘be cropped before [he] come to prime’ (5.2.46-51). Once Aumerle's secret has been bared, the urgent relevance of these remarks becomes frighteningly clear: in great agitation York calls for his boots to accuse the traitor openly, while his duchess tries to prevent him in a panicky effort to spare her child's life.

Shakespeare complicates our response to the fresh crisis, and to the conflict between family and state that it precipitates, by allowing the parental disagreement to degenerate into farce. Ridiculously trying to cope with contradictory orders, York's servant is baffled, while Aumerle stands impotently mute, transfixed by confusion and despair. Then the son, the father and the mother, each having ridden independently and in sweaty haste to Windsor, successively enter the royal presence, flinging themselves down in a contest of kneeling that elicits an amused couplet even from King Henry: ‘Our scene is altered from a serious thing, / And now changed to “The Beggar and the King”’ (5.3.78-9). The suppliants plead passionately for opposite decisions—the father for his son's death, the mother for his life—and all three embarrass the King by refusing to rise until he has acted on their conflicting petitions. Their begging, couched mostly in a jingling doggerel, cannot but undercut the gravity of the matters in hand—somewhat as the Bastard's unceremonious tone in King John undermines the fustian of other characters in that play. The rhetoric becomes absurdly formalistic and antiphonal—a virtual burlesque of court protocol. Henry disposes of the first real threat of his reign with masterful self-possession, implacably executing the most dangerous members of the conspiracy while showing mercy to Aumerle, who no longer poses a security threat. But as Zitner observes, the farcical elements modify the tone and import of the drama in a significant way and therefore, inevitably, of its politics: the scenes of Aumerle's conspiracy parody magniloquence and the courtly ceremoniousness insisted upon elsewhere, even hinting at Shakespeare's growing ‘disaffection’ with the genre in which he was working and with the ‘illusion’ that stylized ‘historical tragedy’ is adequate to its purpose (255).²¹ Zitner believes that the Aumerle scenes, often cut in production, ‘enrich the play’ by introducing a new perspective characteristic of Shakespeare's ‘complexity and toughness of mind’ (257) and thus anticipate the tension between comedy and tragedy, between high and low, that the Henry IV plays were to realize so fruitfully. Perhaps Zitner overstates the revisionary effect of these scenes upon audiences (the comic material passes rather quickly); but there can be no question that the episode encourages a response to political crisis different from that evoked in the more elevated parts of the play. A certain thematic continuity is nevertheless preserved for, to quote Nevo (94), York's ‘loss of inner coherence’ in his unsuccessful struggle to reconcile his role as a loyal subject with his humanity as a father ironically prefigures the similar problems of identity that beset Richard in his prison soliloquy and that lead up to his confrontation with ‘being nothing’ (5.5.41).

The small episode (5.4) in which Exton explains what he takes as King Henry's command to murder Richard prepares us for the death scene. It besmirches Henry's character as damagingly as any of the play, still leaving the tiniest doubt as to the precise degree of his culpability because the incriminating words, not themselves fully explicit, are reported rather than heard directly from the King's lips. Like Richard, who never admits to having Gloucester destroyed, Henry clings to a stance of deniability by repudiating and then exiling the agent of his villainy. When Exton later protests that he had acted in response to words from the King's ‘own mouth’, he is answered with Machiavellian equivocation: ‘Though I did wish him dead, / I hate the murderer, love him murdered’ (5.6.37-40).²² A few moments afterwards, of course, King Henry confesses his responsibility in general terms, hoping to ‘wash this blood from off my guilty hand’ by means of ‘a voyage to the Holy Land’ (5.6.49-50). But in Shakespeare's handling of the matter, we never know whether King Henry consciously arranged his rival's death or merely encouraged it by innuendo. It is worth noting nevertheless that even in the final episodes, when sympathy flows naturally to Richard as tragic victim, the dramatist gives us reason to identify in certain respects with the private emotions of his destroyer, thereby muting the contrast between them. He slightly mollifies the impression of Henry's cold-hearted ruthlessness and political realism by showing also his concern for his son, his compassion for Aumerle and his bad conscience for the murder he has authorized, whether wittingly or no.²³

Even in the scene at Pomfret, the only episode to stage physical violence, Shakespeare preserves a certain ambivalence of attitude towards Richard. The overall purpose is to create as much sympathy as possible, thus muting or helping us to forget his role in Gloucester's death and the other tyrannies. And when Richard manfully strikes down two of Exton's assistants before falling himself to the assassin, Shakespeare leaves us with the impression of a man who finally claims the martial tradition of his royal ancestors from which his uncles had seen him as shamefully defecting.²⁴ Richard also reasserts his infrangible identity as King, heroically repossessing the sacred title for which his birth had destined him.

That hand shall burn in never-quenching fire
That staggers thus my person. Exton, thy fierce hand
Hath with the King's blood stained the King's own land.
Mount, mount, my soul! Thy seat is up on high,
Whilst my gross flesh sinks downward here to die.

(5.5.108-12)

These words contain no hint of a guilty conscience nor any suggestion of unorthodox doubt about the king's two bodies: Richard's body mystical will rise to rejoin the divine source of its sacramental power, while his body natural will sink down and dissolve to earth like that of other mortals. Regnal flaws notwithstanding, eternal condemnation is for regicides, not for legitimate monarchs. If Cibber had adapted this play instead of Richard III, he might have added at this point, ‘Richard's himself again’ (66). The touching loyalty of the Groom, the mixed humour and pathos of the ‘roan Barbary’ incident and the surliness of the Keeper, who, in contrast to the King, treats the visitor badly, combine to bring out Richard's humanity and personal charm. And the Keeper's refusal to taste Richard's food on the orders of Exton, who ‘lately / Came from the King’ (5.5.100-1), suggests the possibility that instructions from Windsor are being obeyed.

The long meditation on identity, isolation, time and harmony with which the scene opens, Richard's only soliloquy, is, however, less unitary in its effect on audience response. Here uniquely we see Richard without an onstage audience. His island realm has now shrunk to the enclosure of a prison cell, and, psychologically speaking, to the confines of his own fanciful mind. Now he must ‘hammer out’ the imaginary contours of a new kingdom of introversion, peopling it with a ‘generation of still-breeding thoughts’, fragmenting himself into a collection of listeners to his own performance, all of them discontented (5.1.5-11). The imaginary roles include the better and worse aspects of himself, the higher and more divine thoughts being ‘intermixed / With scruples’ and with his consciousness of former pride and worldly luxury. He strains ingenuity to invent analogies for the competing facets of his own personality, exhausting his rhetorical skills in a bewildering confluence of fugitive ideas and speculative associations. See-sawing between opposite conceptions of himself, he must alternately be actor and audience, king and beggar, free spirit and frustrated prisoner. But the competing roles engendered by his fancy tend to obliterate each other, reducing him to nullity:

Thus play I in one person many people,
And none contented. Sometimes am I king;
Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,
And so I am. Then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better when a king;
Then am I kinged again, and by and by
Think that I am unkinged by Bolingbroke,
And straight am nothing. But whate'er I be,
Nor I nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased
With being nothing.

(5.5.31-41)

This, of course, is a reprise of Richard as the ‘mockery king of snow’ melting himself away ‘in water-drops’ (4.1.260-2) and of the histrionic narcissist dispersing his identity in the smithereens of a shattered looking-glass.²⁵ The nothingness on which the King muses is the psychological equivalent of death. But Richard's tragic limitation is that, even in defeat, he cannot break free of his own crippling self-consciousness from which only death will release him.

The intrusion of music awakens him to the disharmony and disproportion that have defined his reign: ‘I wasted time, and now doth Time waste me’ (5.5.49). Here he acknowledges slackness or self-indulgence as a cause of his fall, but, paradoxically, his confession occurs in a long rumination that, by elaborately pursuing overstrained conceits, constitutes in itself a form of self-indulgence. Yet of this point also Richard seems aware, for, still resentful of his enemy, he contrasts Bolingbroke's world of political activism to his own enforced stasis: the false king in his ‘proud joy’ has usurped the ‘time’ that should have been Richard's by right, while the legitimate king must ‘stand fooling’ in a cell, the puppet or ‘jack o'the clock’ to an upstart (5.5.58-60). Richard's attempt to come to terms with his own tragedy seems flawed and incomplete, too deeply mired in pain, regret and frustration to allow for full moral self-recognition or access to the larger, more metaphysical significances of his experience. He remains still obsessed with ‘this all-hating world’ (5.5.66). But at the same time he is able to bless the unidentified musician whose playing offers him ‘a sign of love’ (5.5.65) and thereby to show that he has shed enough of his egoism to be capable of gratitude.

Summing up the political ambivalences that Richard II seems designed to generate, we may note several features of the play's characterization, structure and thematic emphasis that contribute generally to the mixed effect. One such is Shakespeare's technique of making subordinate characters bear the heaviest onus of disapproval—disapproval that would otherwise fall directly upon the chief antagonists. Bushy, Bagot and Green, the ‘caterpillars’ of Richard's ill-tended garden, are meant to function chiefly as self-aggrandizing parasites and the givers of bad counsel to a youthfully impressionable and emotionally unstable king, although in the action this is merely implied rather than shown.²⁶ As such, they help to soften and explain, if not wholly excuse, the King's most egregious tyrannies. Yet, even here, there is a measure of ambiguity, for we never see the favourites behave treasonably; Bushy and Green are apparently the victims of scapegoating, and Bagot, who survives the usurper's accession, charges Aumerle with responsibility for Gloucester's death, thus bringing his own loyalty to Richard into question. On the other side, Northumberland serves increasingly as the usurper's hatchetman, allowing the audience to displace some of its gathering hostility to Bolingbroke onto his more nakedly ambitious second-in-command. York's ambiguously conceived character serves also to complicate our attitude towards the two principals. Early in the play the old Duke stands with Gaunt as a venerable and justified, though fervently loyal, critic of Richard's follies. Then, thrust into an impossible predicament during the King's absence, he collapses into attempted neutrality from which circumstances quickly push him into treason (from a legitimist's perspective) or into acquiescence to necessity and the good order of the realm (from a Lancastrian point of view). Shakespeare sets York's nostalgic reverence for Richard's sanctity (even after his capitulation to Bolingbroke) against his almost fanatic condemnation of his own son for disloyalty to the new king. And the semi-comic elements in his character make it possible for an actor to portray him as either a frail, well-meaning old man pathetically driven to choose between two nephews who both have a valid claim on his loyalty, or a foolish parcel of self-justifying ineptitude blown hither and yon by the winds of change. The somewhat featureless portrait of Aumerle complicates responses further still. In the first three acts he behaves as one of Richard's most loyal and intimate friends. Then, with his fierce denial of Bagot's charge that he was involved in Gloucester's murder and that he had wished for Bolingbroke's death, we are forced, temporarily at least, to reconsider his fidelity to Richard's cause. His rush, later in the scene, to take part in the plot against the usurper reconfirms his loyalty to Richard; but he is so quick to seek his own safety, pleading that his ‘heart is not confederate with [his] hand’ (5.3.52), that he seems finally more expedient than even his father. Carlisle, the Queen and the anonymous Groom emerge as the only supporters of Richard whose devotion to principle can be counted on.

Certain of the play's ‘unconformities’, as Smidt terms them, conduce also to a blurring of the play's politics. Smidt argues that the tragedy ‘underwent … major changes of design in the course of its shaping’ (89). Whether or not the text betrays different phases of composition (as Smidt believes), it is nonetheless true that curious shifts of thematic emphasis and plot direction are observable. For the first third of the play we are left with the impression that Gloucester's death is Richard's most heinous crime and that the action to follow will surely involve retribution as well as, perhaps, some depiction of the King's tortured conscience. Bolingbroke, Gaunt and York all refer in turn to the malicious spilling of Gloucester's blood, and Richard's banishment of both combatants at Coventry seems motivated, at least in part, by his need to silence Mowbray and to defend himself against revenge at the hands of his threatening cousin. A tragedy of nemesis would appear possible. But even before 2.2.100-2, where York alludes in passing to the victimization of his brother, the theme of crime and punishment is already being supplanted by a heavier emphasis on Richard's more public misrule—his farming the realm, his oppressive tax policies, his ignoring wise counsel and, worst of all, his wanton seizure of Bolingbroke's inheritance. In effect the play drops the murder charge, shelving the unsettled mystery of Gloucester's death until it resurfaces briefly at the beginning of Act 4 where Bagot implicates Aumerle in the murder. But even here, at a point where Richard has already been imprisoned and is facing certain dethronement, the issue of his guilt for murder goes unpursued.²⁷ As mentioned already, the monarch himself suffers no torment of conscience for the death. At this point Richard's tragedy seems to be defined by a clash between political ineptitude or volatile temperament and hostile circumstance. After the King's return from Ireland, the thematic emphasis shifts again—now to royal martyrdom at the hands of a politically shrewd enemy, who never again charges his adversary directly with any crime whatsoever. And Exton's murder of the fallen ruler, far from being a punishment for past offences, is meant to be received by audiences as a tragical outrage against divine-right legitimacy. To quote Smidt's summing up, ‘The misgovernment theme is … more and more effaced by the sacrilege theme and the conflict between divine right and mortal frailty’; ‘the central issue becomes not the king's guilt or his irresponsibility, but the sacredness of his office’ (101-2).

Tomlinson in a shrewd analysis of the dramatist's shaping hand concludes with a statement with which it is hard to disagree:

The pressure of Shakespeare's critical scrutiny does not let up at any point, either in his treatment of authority or of rebellion. He approaches each new situation without rigid ideological preconceptions or pointers. We are used to finding ‘contraries’ in his work, but this approach has rarely been applied to the great political question of order and rule. Shakespeare's consolidation and development of different attitudes to monarchy leads us to the conclusion that there can be no model kings or adequate model conceptions of kingship, and no univocal doctrines of social allegiance.

(58)

From Rabkin's point of view, the ambivalences of the play are not only vital to its structure but lie also at the heart of its tragedy. ‘On one level Richard II is a play about political success and the ideal of the commonwealth’, a level on which ‘Bolingbroke is admirable; on another it is about what it is to be a fully sentient human being’, a level on which ‘only Richard commands our respect’ (92). The tragic conception of politics and history embedded so powerfully in this contrast springs from ‘the complementarity of [the] protagonists' virtues’—virtues that are ultimately seen to be irreconcilable or ‘incapable of being commingled’ (95).

Notes

1. Cf. Holinshed, who remarks on the ‘verie notable example … that this Henrie duke of Lancaster should be thus called to the kingdome, and haue the helpe and assistance (almost) of all the whole realme, [who] perchance neuer thereof thought or yet dreamed’. Supernatural powers are ultimately responsible for Richard's fall and Bolingbroke's success: ‘in this deiecting of the one, & aduancing of the other, the prouidence of God is to be respected, & his secret will to be woondered at’ (3.499).

2. Cf. 2H4 [King Henry IV, Part 2] 4.5.183-5: ‘God knows, my son, / By what by-paths and indirect crook'd ways / I met this crown’. It should be remembered also, as Smidt (98) reminds us, that ambition was considered to be a ‘serious … vice … in the Elizabethan moral system’. Cf. Baldwin's dedication of the Mirror (63): ‘Well is that realme gouerned, in which the ambicious desyer not to beare office.’

3. See Duls, especially 7-8, 112-90, 196-203.

4. Harold Bloom (2) uses this term: ‘Richard is both his own victim, or rather the victim of his own imagination, and the sacrifice that becomes inevitable when the distance between the king as he should be and the actual legitinate monarch becomes too great’ (Bloom, 3).

5. Rabkin comments: ‘If the unthreatened rule of the King is the principle of the state's survival, there may be some justification for what he [Richard] has caused to be done. At any rate, to take arms against God's minister is to Gaunt an even more egregious crime than Richard's’ (83).

6. Morse finds Shakespeare ‘specific and explicit on the crisis in 1399, but tacit and inferential about responsibility; he managed to keep interpretation open and to avoid fixing blame’ (123).

7. See 2.1.289-90n. As early as 1852 Hudson could speak of Bolingbroke's ‘noiseless potency of will’, of ‘his most silent, all-pervading, inly-working efficacy of thought and purpose’ (Forker, 193).

8. See 3.1 headnote and 3.1.11-15n.

9. Act 4 makes it clear that ‘London’ means not only Parliament but also ‘the Tower’ (4.1.316). Stirling notes the ‘economy and understatement’ as well as the ‘taciturnity’ of Bolingbroke's ‘discursive self-revelation’ in the falling action of the play: Bolingbroke's most significant decisions regarding Richard tend to be ‘embodied in a terse statement’, each time another character having ‘either evoked it from him or stated its implications for him’ (33-4).

10. Pointing to such moments of self-consciousness as Richard's ‘Well, well, I see / I talk but idly, and you laugh at me’ (3.3.170-1), Palmer observes that the King is ‘possibly the only appreciative witness of his tragedy’ (159); he is echoing Chambers, who says of Richard that he ‘becomes an interested spectator of his own ruin’ (Survey, 91).

11. Bolingbroke ‘never allows himself to know where he is going. Every step in his progress towards the throne is dictated by circumstances and he never permits himself to have a purpose till it is more than half fulfilled’ (Palmer, 134). He ‘does not attempt to think through his position clearly or persistently’ (Baxter, 112). See also the discussion of Daniel (pp. 143-4).

12. Berger (‘Perspective’, 264-5) argues that the contrast redounds to Richard's credit rather than to Bolingbroke's: sitting ‘quietly through most of the scene’ Bolingbroke, unlike his counterpart, refuses to ‘intervene in the volatile factionalism that bodes ill for future stability’. Although I regard Bolingbroke's silence during the quarrel as evidence of his shrewdness and politic restraint, not of his weakness, Berger's contrary interpretation serves to illustrate the shifting and ambiguous responses that both characters seem designed to elicit.

13. It is debatable whether Bolingbroke actually occupies the throne at this point. See 4.1.114n.

14. See Ranald, 183-96; also 4.1.203n.

15. Nichols quotes a report that in her final illness Queen Elizabeth ‘desired to see a true looking-glass, which in twenty years she had not sene, but only such a one as was made of purpose to deceive her sight: which glasse, being brought her, she fell presently into exclayming against those which had so much commended her, and took it so offensively, that some which had flattered her, durst not come into her sight’ (3.612).

16. See 4.1.275.1n., 287-8n., 292-3n. and 294n.

17. Benthall's production starring John Neville emphasized the intimacy of the King's encounter with his wife by having the lovers sit on the ground—a recapitulation of Richard's posture in the ‘hollow crown’ speech (3.2.160-77). Trewin (Neville, 57) comments on the ‘heartbreak’ in Neville's voice at this point.

18. See 4.1.184-9n.

19. See 5.2.37-8n.

20. It was well known, for instance, that Leicester, Raleigh and Essex, each of them particular favourites of Elizabeth, had several times fallen in and out of her good graces.

21. Black disagrees with Zitner, arguing that the near-farcicality of the conspiracy scenes, far from ‘undercutting or mocking the seriousness of the play’, ‘intensif[ies] that seriousness by contrast or counterpoint’ as in the relationship between masque and antimasque (‘Interlude’, 112).

22. See 5.6.40n.; also Berger, ‘Perspective’ (266-8), where the ambiguities of the Bolingbroke-Exton relationship are explored in detail.

23. Barton's RSC and Warner's National Theatre productions both stressed the similarity, even the symbolic identity, of Richard and Bolingbroke; in the first of these Irving Wardle referred to the two kings as ‘fatal twins’ (The Times, 11 April 1973, 13).

24. Cf. the speeches of Gaunt and York at 2.1.104-8 and 171-83; see also 2.1.172-83n.

25. The symbolic identification of the mirror with death was enforced visually in Pimlott's RSC production, in which a long wooden casket served as both a coffin and, when turned vertically, a looking-glass.

26. Both the play and the principal sources stress Richard's immaturity, influenced by his accession to the throne as a boy of ten and by the earlier domination of his uncles over him. In later ages and even in his own time, writers made much of Richard's minority and the dangers to national security of a child king. When Henry IV succeeded, Archbishop Arundel preached a sermon on 1 Samuel, 9.17, stressing the new king's adulthood and supporting it with a passage from 1 Corinthians, 13.11: ‘When I was a child, I spake as a child … but when I became a man, I put away childish things.’ Arundel was exploiting a Lancastrian myth; in physical age, Bolingbroke was actually junior to Richard by three months. See Aston, 306-7.

27. Campbell (200) discerns an analogy between Gloucester's death and the execution of Mary Stuart. Perhaps the shedding of royal blood by a legitimate monarch with its implied evil consequences for the perpetrator was too dangerous a subject to carry to its natural conclusion in the theatre.

References

Margaret Aston, ‘Richard II and the Wars of the Roses’, in F. H. R. Du Boulay and Caroline M. Barron (eds), The Reign of Richard II: Essays in Honour of May McKisack (1971), 280-317

T. W. Baldwin, On Act and Scene Division in the Shakespeare First Folio (Carbondale, Ill., 1965)

John Baxter, Shakespeare's Poetic Styles: Verse Into Drama (1980)

Harry Berger, Jr, ‘Richard II: A Modern Perspective’, in Mowat & Werstine, 237-72

James Black, ‘The Interlude of the Beggar and the King in Richard II’, in David M. Bergeron (ed.), Pageantry in the Shakespearean Theater (Athens, Ga., 1985), 104-13

Harold Bloom (ed.), William Shakespeare's ‘Richard II’, Modern Critical Interpretations (New York and New Haven, Conn., 1988)

Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare's Histories: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (San Marino, Calif., 1947)

E.K. Chambers, Shakespeare: A Survey (New York, 1926)

Samuel Daniel, The First Four Books of the Civil Wars Between the Two Houses of Lancaster and York (1595)

Louisa D. Duls, Richard II in the Early Chronicles (The Hague and Paris, 1975)

Philip Edwards, ‘Person and Office in Shakespeare's Plays’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 56 (1970), 93-109

Charles R. Forker (ed.), Shakespeare: The Critical Tradition: ‘Richard II’ (1998)

Raphael Holinshed, The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 2nd edn, 3 vols in 2 (1587)

Ruth Morse, ‘Telling the Truth with Authority: From Richard II to Richard II’, Common Knowledge, vol. 4, no. 1 (1995), 111-28

Ruth Nevo, Tragic Form in Shakespeare (Princeton, N.J., 1972)

John Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, new edn, 3 vols (1823)

Allardyce Nicoll, Shakespeare (1952)

John Palmer, Political Characters of Shakespeare (1945)

Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York, 1967)

Phyllis Rackin, ‘The Role of the Audience in Richard II’, SQ, 36 (1985), 262-81

Margaret Loftus Ranald, ‘The Degradation of Richard II: An Inquiry into the Ritual Backgrounds’, ELR, 7 (1977), 170-96

Kristian Smidt, Unconformities in Shakespeare's History Plays (1982)

Brents Stirling, ‘Bolingbroke's “Decision”’, SQ, 2 (1951), 27-34

Ernest William Talbert, The Problem of Order: Elizabethan Political Commonplaces and an Example of Shakespeare's Art (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1962)

Michael Tomlinson, ‘Shakespeare and the Chronicles Reassessed’, Literature and History, vol. 10, no. 1 (1984), 46-58

J.C. Trewin, John Neville: An Illustrated Study of His Work (1961)

Sheldon P. Zitner, ‘Aumerle's Conspiracy’, Studies in English Literature, 14 (1974), 239-57