Richard II (2 page)

But
Richard II
, written a few years before, is another powerful shadow behind the allusion to Essex and Tyrone. After all, that too is a play in which an Irish war is of pivotal importance in demonstrating an English monarch’s failing grip on the handle of national power. Essex was often perceived as a Henry Bullingbrook figure, a no-nonsense military man greeted with acclaim whenever he rode through the streets of London, as he did before heading off on his French campaign in 1591. What is more, he claimed descent from Bullingbrook, which made some people worry that he had aspirations to the throne himself.

Shakespeare seems to have been aware of the Essex/Bullingbrook identification. At the climax of
Richard II
, he describes Bullingbrook in London, portraying him in a manner that draws on the public image of Essex:

There is no precedent in Shakespeare’s historical sources for this striking image of Bullingbrook’s popularity. It has been invented in order to establish a contrast with the deposed Richard, who follows in after with no man crying, “God save him,” and dust and rubbish being thrown out of the windows on his head. Shakespeare thus illustrates the process of the two cousins being like two buckets, one descending down a well as the other rises up. He also highlights the fickleness of the common people. At the same time, the close concentration on Bullingbrook’s management of his proud horse makes a point about his strong statecraft: good horsemanship was a traditional image of effective government. This sequence in the play was explicitly quoted apropos of Essex in more than one political intervention of the period.

In the
Henry IV
plays, however, Shakespeare conspicuously dropped the image of Bullingbrook, now king, as a popular figure. Far from showing himself among his people and exemplifying strong government, Henry IV skulks in his palace as his kingdom disintegrates around him, the penalty for his usurpation of his throne. The horseman and populist is his son Hal, who goes on to become Henry V, leading his men to triumph in battle. The description of his return to London after the victory at Agincourt clearly echoes that of the speech about his father at the corresponding moment in
Richard II
. As so often in Shakespeare, the wheel of history comes full circle.

Regardless of Shakespeare’s semiconcealed political intentions in making the allusion—one gets the sense that he is only somewhere a little over halfway to being an Essex man—it is easy to see how the two remarkably similar passages in
Richard II
and
Henry V
could have been perceived as pro-Essex. This perception drew him into exceptionally dangerous political territory. Things came to a head in 1601 and if they had gone just a little differently, his career—and indeed his life—would have come to an abrupt end. He could have found himself in the Tower of London or even in the hands of the public executioner.

How do we measure the worth of our rulers? By the justice of their claim to power or the quality of their actions at the helm of state? King Richard II has wasted public funds and is under the influence of self-serving flatterers. He has arranged the murder of his uncle, Thomas of Woodstock. Yet he is the rightful king, anointed by God. Are his failures so great that it will be in the interest of the state to get rid of him? Or is the removal of a king from his throne a crime against God and the order of nature? In the central scene of Shakespeare’s play, the king is forced to participate in a ceremony in which he formally removes himself from the throne. Deposition was a matter so sensitive that a large segment of this scene may have been censored out of the early printed editions of the play. And in the last years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, the contemporary resonances of the story of Richard II’s deposition were so powerful that the followers of the Earl of Essex took a particularly close interest in Shakespeare’s play.

The Essex faction, including the young Earl of Southampton to whom Shakespeare had dedicated his narrative poems
Venus and Adonis
and
The Rape of Lucrece
, considered the old queen to be as bad as Richard. Like him, they murmured, she was surrounded by flatterers, raising too many taxes, and conducting a disastrous Irish policy. Could she be ripe for Richard’s bloody fate?

Early in February 1601, Sir Charles Percy, a descendant of the Percy family who had joined with Bullingbrook to overthrow King Richard, had a bright idea. Along with Southampton, he had joined the group of aristocratic malcontents who hung around Essex House and voiced their frustration at Elizabeth’s policies and preferments. The Earl of Essex himself was plotting to march against the court and confront the queen with demands for change. Percy, together with Lord Mounteagle and one or two others, slipped over the river to the Globe. They asked the players to put on a special production of
Richard II
. Shakespeare’s men were reluctant: the play was so old and had not been staged for so long that there would be little or no audience. Essex’s gentlemen responded with an offer that the players couldn’t refuse: an immediate down payment of forty shillings to supplement their takings. Lines were relearned overnight and the next afternoon, the show was staged, with a large number of Essex’s followers prominent in the audience.

At supper after the show, rumors began to fly, and the next morning the Essex men armed themselves and headed for the palace, vainly hoping to gather popular support along the way. It didn’t come. They were roundly defeated and the ringleaders tried for high treason. Augustine Phillips, the actor who served as business manager of Shakespeare’s theater company, was immediately brought in for interrogation. His story about their reluctance to perform such an old play as
Richard II
, together with the fact that Essex himself was not present at the performance, provided an escape route. The tribunal was persuaded that they had only revived the show for the sake of the money.

To judge from the choices that Shakespeare made in dramatizing his historical source materials, he seems to have been more interested in the human story of Richard’s fall than the politics of rebellion. It is likely that the Essex faction commissioned the special performance not so much for its actual content—we cannot be sure that the full deposition scene was actually staged at this time in the play’s life—as for the broad association between the rise of Henry Bullingbrook and the career of the charismatic earl. Essex’s men were probably remembering a book originally dedicated to their master, Sir John Hayward’s
The First Part of the Life and Reign of King Henry IV
. Published in 1599, it had caused much controversy as a result of its detailed treatment of Richard’s removal from the throne. It was almost certainly Hayward’s book rather than Shakespeare’s play that led Queen Elizabeth to say, some time later, “I am Richard the Second. Know ye not that?”

Following the rebellion of 1601, Essex was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. That meant having his privy members cut off and draped around his neck. His sangfroid did not desert him. On hearing his sentence, he joked that since he had served Her Majesty in the four corners of the world, it was fitting that his body should be cut in quarters and driven through the four corners of London. The Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s sometime patron, was consigned to the Tower. Given their connections with him, it was a very close run thing for the players. Hayward the historian took the rap and Shakespeare was saved by the cool performance of his friend Phillips under interrogation.

Richard II
was very attractive to Essex and his followers not only because it seemed to give good reasons for taking action against an ineffective, vacillating monarch, but also because it appeared to lament the decline of chivalric England. One of Essex’s chief strategies during his rise to prominence at court in the 1590s was to portray himself as a hero from a nobler age that had gone. He invoked the code of “honour” and made himself synonymous with such displays as the Accession Day tilts, in which courtiers would joust like knights of old.

The beginning of the play, so redolent of medieval rites of knighthood, would have been very much to Essex’s taste. Mowbray and Bullingbrook throw down their gages and prepare for single combat with sword and lance. They are concerned above all with “spotless reputation”: “Mine honour is my life; both grow in one,” says Mowbray, “Take honour from me, and my life is done.” Honor is seen as the hallmark of the “trueborn Englishman.” The feuding dukes regard themselves as true patriots, appealing to “English earth” and lamenting that in exile they must forgo their “native English” language. Richard’s native language, by contrast, was French (which was also the nationality of his wife) and his court is implicitly seen as a place of French affectation. One of the most cultured of English kings, Richard was a munificent patron of poetry and the arts; Shakespeare does not exploit this, but he may imply it through the way in which he gives such eloquent and rhetorically elaborate poetry to the king, whereas Bullingbrook speaks a blunter English idiom, albeit still in finely honed verse. Near the end of the play, when the Yorks kneel before the new King Henry and ask pardon for their son Aumerle, the duke suggests that he should take on the French manners associated with the court and say “
pardonnez-moi
,” but the duchess, a better judge of character, is the one who wins the pardon because she knows that Bullingbrook will stick to English (“Speak ‘pardon’ as ’tis current in our land: / The chopping French we do not understand”).

King Richard stands accused of wasting the patrimony of the English nation. He has been fleeced by his flatterers, and costly Irish
wars have required him to “lease out” the land. Given that Queen Elizabeth’s exchequer was also heavily overdrawn as a result of the Irish problem, Shakespeare was probably being diplomatic as well as practical in not attempting to stage Richard’s military campaign in Ireland, which is described at great length in his source, Holinshed’s
Chronicles
. The focus remains firmly on the English land, imagined metaphorically as a sea-walled garden “full of weeds, her fairest flowers choked up.”

Within two years of the play appearing in print, John of Gaunt’s “this sceptred isle” speech was ripped from its context and included in an anthology called
England’s Parnassus
as an exemplar of patriotic writing. It appears there as an unfinished sentence, lacking the sting in the tail: “this England … Is now leased out … That England, that was wont to conquer others, / Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.” True patriotism, the original context reveals, involves fierce criticism of bad government as well as rhetorical praise of the land.

But if the bad governor is sacredly endowed as God’s anointed deputy on earth, then is it permissible to remove him, even in the name of England and “true chivalry”? If the king is synonymous with the law, then to turn the law against him may seem a contradiction in terms: “What subject can give sentence on his king?” The monarch was traditionally imagined to have two bodies: as body politic, the king was the incarnation of the nation; as body natural, he was a mortal like anyone else. This was what made possible the paradoxical words “The king is dead, long live the king.” When Richard stages his own unthroning, he inverts the words of the coronation service, shatters a mirror and gives up one of his two bodies.

What is left for the private self when the public persona is stripped away? Without “honour,” according to the contentious dukes, “Men are but gilded loam or painted clay.” But what would a king be without his crown, without a name and a title? Once Richard has broken the mirror, he turns from his image to his inner self. Whereas monarchy depends on exterior show, inwardness is explored through the medium of words. Richard is by far the most inward-looking of Shakespeare’s kings. By focusing on the individual consciousness, considering Richard’s fate in psychological terms, Shakespeare
neatly sidesteps the alarmingly destabilizing political consequences of the moment when a subject gives sentence on a king.

“I had forgot myself. Am I not king?” In the very act of asking this question, Richard reveals that the answer is “no”: since a king has two bodies, he has the right to speak in the royal “we,” but here Richard is no more than an “I.” In speaking of himself he veers between “I,” “we,” and “he” (“What must the king do now? Must he submit?”). Inconsistent pronouns are the surest sign of the instability of his self.

Richard speaks between a quarter and a third of the text; he soliloquizes frequently and at length. One of the key respects in which he and Bullingbrook function as dramatic opposites is that Bullingbrook never reveals his motivation and feelings in soliloquy: he is symbolically the man of action, whereas Richard is the man of feeling. Bullingbrook is defined by what he does; Richard anticipates Hamlet in defining himself through his obsessive talking about, and to, himself. “The play throughout is a history of the human mind,” observed Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a self-confessed Hamlet of real life. The American poet Robert Lowell developed the analogy between Coleridge and Richard II in a taut sonnet exploring “the constant overflow of imagination / proportioned to his dwindling will to act.”

Soliloquy and rhetorical elaboration are forms of self-dramatization. Richard sustains himself through a bravura linguistic performance: “Let’s talk of graves …” He makes himself the object of his subjective musings: “ … Must he lose / The name of king?” He watches himself losing his grip on his role: “Ay, no; no, ay, for I must nothing be.” And he becomes more and more aware that to be is also to act, that we are all role-players: “Thus play I in one prison many people, / And none contented” (“one prison” is the Folio text’s interesting variant on the original Quarto’s “one person”—“prison” nicely suggests both Richard’s confined location and the
traditional idea of the body as prison of the soul, which is then released to eternity in death). He leaves the stage in the manner of “a well-graced actor.”