Richard II

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In the second act of
The Life and Death of King Richard the Second
, the queen weeps after her husband departs to fight a war in Ireland. She is comforted by Bushy, one of the king’s courtiers:

Tears glaze the eyes and distort our vision, fragmenting what we see. The emotions are at odds with the work of reasoning. The “substance” of the queen’s grief—Richard himself—is away in Ireland. What she holds in her head is a “shadow,” or rather many shadows, of him. When we are away from those we love, we fear that something bad may be happening to them. But the pictures of those bad things are not a reality: they are “things imaginary.”

Strong emotions and imagined images are themselves the substance not only of grief and foreboding, but also of fiction and theater. The Richard and the queen whom we witness on stage, or conjure into our minds in the act of reading, are “shadows” rather
than substances. They are brought into being by performance, by the impersonation of roles, by playacting. When we think more deeply about the roles of king and queen in historical reality, we might consider this question of “substance” and “shadow” further. Which is the substance and which the shadow? The office or the man? The king in his capacity as embodiment of the nation and God’s representative upon earth assumes his role by means of costumes and props (robe, crown, scepter, orb, throne on which to sit) and of a highly theatrical ceremony (coronation, anointing, ritualized words, the blessing of the Church). Is there some sense in which that role is no more than a performance, in which a king is an actor-like “shadow,” whereas the true “substance” is the flesh-and-blood body of the mortal individual whose name is Richard? Or is it the other way around: does Richard become a mere “shadow” of himself when he loses the name of king?

These are some of the questions with which the Shakespeare of
Richard II
was fascinated. The play is the most static and inward-looking of his histories, and perhaps for that reason it has always been one of the less frequently staged. Yet its visual images are striking: a shattered mirror, a king stripped of everything and mired in a dark prison cell. And its verbal music is of startling beauty. The exploration of shadows and substances, selves and roles, public and private, is conducted in intensely lyrical, formal language. Bushy’s speech is typical. It proceeds in the form of a complex, balanced argument, rendered vivid by poetic imagery, such as the figure of the “perspective” glass, a kind of distorting mirror. And it is made memorable for both the actor learning the lines and the audience hearing the play by the resolution in rhyme at the close and by the beat of the iambic pentameter throughout. The pattern is of unstressed followed by stressed syllables five times over, with occasional reversals for variety and surprise. “Find shápes of gríef, móre than himsélf to wáil.” The contrast between the “shapes of grief” and Richard “himself” is highlighted by the stress on “more,” which breaks up the regular rhythm that would lead us to expect a stress on “than.”

Richard II
is the most poetic of Shakespeare’s history plays. The extreme formality of its rhetoric and verse forms perhaps represents the high point, and the end point, of his early style. Hereafter, his
forms will become more fluid, less formal, more conversational. He will use less rhyme.
Richard II
is indeed a very rare example of Shakespeare writing a play entirely in verse. In the history plays he had written before—the
Henry VI
sequence and
Richard III
—and those he would go on to write soon after—the two parts of
Henry IV
and
Henry V
—the march of verse-speaking kings and courtiers is peppered with interruptions from the prose voices of the commoners. But in this play even the gardeners speak in polished and elaborate verse as they make an allegorical comparison between the overgrown garden and the kingdom run to seed.

The 1580s was a decade of war in Flanders, where the English fought with the Dutchmen against the might of Catholic Spain. The 1590s was a decade of war in Ireland, where the Earl of Essex struggled in vain to quell the rebellion of the irrepressible Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone. For the first half of his career, all through the last years of old Queen Elizabeth’s reign, Shakespeare was a war poet. He had an obsessive interest in military life. Richard III, Titus Andronicus and all his sons, Othello, Iago and Cassio, Macbeth and the other Thanes, Hamlet’s armored father and young Fortinbras, King Lear, Julius Caesar, Brutus and Cassius, Mark Antony and Octavius Caesar, Coriolanus, Alcibiades, Henry IV and Sir John Falstaff, dozens of dukes, earls, and knights in the ranks of the history plays, Benedick and his colleagues in
Much Ado About Nothing
: all are soldiers, some by profession and others by force of circumstance. All are defined to a greater or lesser degree by the hunger to fill the vacuum left by battle and by war as the defining male action (which is not to say that Shakespeare failed to create a good line in female soldiers—Queen Margaret, Tamora Queen of Goths, Joan of Arc, Cleopatra, Cordelia and her sisters). But the most famous of all his soldiers would be King Henry V.

Having completed a sequence of four plays about the Wars of the Roses, then the rise and fall of Richard III, ending with the establishment of the Tudor dynasty following the battle of Bosworth Field, Shakespeare turned his mind to the preceding period of English history. In writing
Richard II
, which inexorably moves toward Henry
Bullingbrook’s ascent of the throne as King Henry IV, Shakespeare was setting himself up for another cycle of plays that would inevitably climax in the short but triumphant reign of Bullingbrook’s son, King Henry V, victor over the French.

At the beginning of the fifth act of King Harry’s play, the Chorus describes his triumphal procession through the streets of London upon his return to England after his astonishing victory on the field of Agincourt. In the course of this speech, Shakespeare makes the most open and striking topical allusion anywhere in his works:

When these lines were first spoken on the stage of the newly built Globe Theatre in the summer of 1599, few audience members could have had any doubt what the Chorus was talking about. The “gracious empress” is Queen Elizabeth and “the general” is the Earl of Essex—the queen’s sometime favorite, embodiment of the martial code of chivalry and honor, leader of the war party in the long-standing debate at court over how to proceed in relation to Spain. At this moment he was leading his campaign against Tyrone in Ireland. The allusion is unmistakable.

Shakespeare does not let go of his habitual political caution. It is a “likelihood,” not a certainty, that Essex will bring rebellion broached on his sword and it is an open question how many people will turn out
to cheer him. But there is still a boldness in the comparison. When “conqu’ring Caesar” crossed the Rubicon and returned to Rome, there was talk of him seizing an imperial crown and Brutus and his friends had to take drastic action to save the republic. Conversely, there were moments in late Elizabethan court politics when exasperation with the old childless queen’s refusal to name an heir led some to wonder whether there might not be a future for England in some form of Roman-style republican government, with the Privy Council serving as its Senate and a strong man such as Essex in the role of Consul. Shakespeare wrote
Julius Caesar
that same year of 1599.