Richard II (20 page)
Authors: William Shakespeare
In the last two decades, two major London productions have shown that the play has lost none of its power to cause controversy. In 1995, Deborah Warner’s production for the National Theatre caused a stir with its casting of Fiona Shaw in the title role. Shaw’s performance deeply divided critics, prompting Paul Taylor to mount a defense in the
Independent
:
Fiona Shaw’s dazzlingly discomforting impersonation of Richard is so integral to the thinking behind Deborah Warner’s gripping, lucidly felt production that it would only make sense to like neither or both … her portrayal of the monarch as an anguishedly insecure, clowningly exhibitionist man-child—mirrors more than subliminally the psychological confusions caused by the identity crisis of a King’s dual nature.
35
As Shewring argues, “it is not the fact that the King is played by a woman that is significant; it is that the presentation of kingship is, in itself, an elaborate theatrical charade.”
36
Trevor Nunn’s 2005 production for the Old Vic brought the play right up to date in a modern-dress production that used video to display footage of the decline of Britain, emphasizing both the impact of Richard’s ineffectual rule and his isolation from those effects, “the split between inner and outer, public and private.”
37
Starring Kevin Spacey in the lead role, combining authority with “a really terrifying temper,”
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it was nevertheless the play’s contemporary resonances that once again commanded critical attention. The play’s cynical commentary on the interaction between the public and the ruling classes was made uncomfortably clear in Genevieve O’Reilly’s Queen Isabel, “interrupted in the middle of a Diana-style photo session,”
39
and Charles Spencer compared Spacey’s “self-dramatising” Richard and Ben Miles’ “humourless, sharp-suited Bolingbroke” to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
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While perhaps not as directly dangerous as the Star Chamber of 1601 once deemed it to be, it is clear that
Richard II
remains a timelessly political tool for directors wishing to hold up Richard’s own mirror to today’s leaders.
Shakespeare’s history is always about the “now” of Elizabethan England.
41
Queen Elizabeth I: “I am Richard II, know ye not that?”
42
Richard II
is a play that can stand alone, but directors also position it first in an epic cycle, as the catalyst for the bloody action that Shakespeare
unfolds in his dramatic sweep of English history. In an interesting departure, Michael Boyd’s
The Histories
(2008) produced
Richard II
, not only as first in a chronological ordering of history but in a distinctly separate cycle, based on the order of their composition. The
first
cycle begins with Shakespeare’s earlier (written) plays,
Henry VI Part 1, Part 2,
and
Part 3
, and
Richard III
, and charts the playwright’s developing relationship with the politics of Elizabethan England, culminating in his dissection of kingship in
Richard II
, the strategies of king-making in
Henry IV Part 1
and
Part 2,
and the disturbingly modern account of Henry V’s decision to wage war with France through an appeal to the value of an English “nation.” The
second
complete cycle of eight plays charts “over a century of turbulent English history, from the usurpation of Richard II and Henry V’s glorious battle at Agincourt, to the bloody chaos of the Wars of the Roses and their brutal climax on Bosworth Field.”
43
For actors and directors there are distinct challenges in what Stuart Hampton-Reeves refers to as “the totalising notions of ‘tetralogy thinking,’ ” or seeing the plays as episodes in a national epic.
44
The yoking together of four or eight plays can exert a particular pressure on the chronologically first play,
Richard II
, to begin a political history of England, worked through the performed cycle. Anthony Quayle’s
The Cycle of the Historical Plays 1951
at the Memorial Theatre in Stratford marked the Festival of Britain by treating the four plays, beginning with
Richard II
, as “one great play.”
45
Richard (Michael Redgrave) was to be viewed as “the last of the old line of mediaeval kings, the last ruler by hereditary right, unbroken, undisputed since the Conqueror,” but the “true hero” of “the whole play” was to be King Henry V, “the ideal King: brave, warlike, generous, just” (played by Richard Burton). Michael Hattaway argues that Tanya Moiseiwitsch’s sets, fashioned in an “Elizabethan style,” created “a kind of illusion that turned politics back into romanticized history.”
46
This “history” owed much to the spirit of E. M. W. Tillyard’s
Shakespeare’s History Plays
(1944), which offers an account of the working through of divine providence, from the sinful deposition of Richard II to the expiation of a curse on the House of Lancaster. Such an approach in the theater risks idealizing Richard and pushing the play’s politics back into an older world of medieval kingship
to be contrasted with the more modern and secular kingship, portrayed in
Henry V
. This treatment downplays the modern political resonance of
Richard II
for Shakespeare and his Elizabethan theatergoers in the context of an impending succession crisis.
It is possible to perform the plays as a historical cycle but to attend carefully to the
differences
within each play in order to resist the temptation of trying to make seamless connections that totalize the experience for an audience. Where the play is performed on its own, there may be an opportunity to place more emphasis on personal aspects of kingship, particularly the idea of the Divine Right of Kings, rather than political history. However, the political realities of the Elizabethan context are clearly illustrated in the Queen’s comment, “I am Richard II, know ye not that?” She was apparently responding some months later to an attempt by the Essex conspirators to stage a play, about King Richard’s deposition, on the eve of their rebellion in 1601.
Modern power politics lies at the heart of the landmark production of seven plays in 1964, directed by Peter Hall, John Barton, and Clifford Williams. The production celebrated the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth at a moment of political uncertainties just two years after the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Jan Kott wrote in
Shakespeare Our Contemporary
(1964) that “the great abdication scene in
Richard II
, the scene omitted in all editions published in the Queen Elizabeth’s lifetime,” revealed “the working of the Grand Mechanism.”
47
He explained this was “the very moment when power was changing hands.”
The throne of England was given center place in John Bury’s model set of steel-clad walls and metallic stage, conveying the stark, cold reality of a brutal power politics. The tetralogy of
Richard II, Henry IV Part I
and
Part 2
, and
Henry V
was added to
The Wars of the Roses
(1963), which comprised a two-part adaptation of the three
Henry VI
plays (
Henry VI
and
Edward IV
), followed by
Richard III
. In this earlier production the central image was a great steel council table that alienated the action in Brechtian fashion, revealing the strategies of the self-serving opportunists who grouped around it, as
they jostled for position and power. Hall and Bury banished romanticized pageantry by creating costumes attuned to their metallic setting. Colin Chambers describes some of Bury’s experiments to achieve texture: “Glue crystals, marble chippings, chicken grit and stone gravel swept up from tennis courts in Southern Lane were all thrown onto the ‘gunked’ costumes while still wet.”
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Margaret Shewring commented of the whole cycle: “John Bury’s stage picture provided a sustained visual image” that helped to link the tetralogy and trilogy.
49
One reviewer observed:
John Bury’s settings for
Richard II
are an impressive part of the production, and allow scene changes to be made with maximum smoothness.
Heavy armour-plated walls have a coppery tint and can quickly be revolved to bring something fresh into the exciting pictures created on the stage.
For many scenes there is a background of trees, woven together like some delicate tracery. Mellow, autumnal colours are used at one point—suggesting the beginnings of decay which Richard’s mismanagement has brought about.
50
David Warner played the saintly but weak and ineffectual King Henry VI in the earlier trilogy, and brought a corresponding impression of weakness to his role as King Richard II. The critic J. C. Trewin observed:
It is the gilded throne of England that one sees first on entering the theatre. Even so, one hardly observes Richard’s entrance. In this production, he is deliberately insignificant, the vain indulgent weakling—strange offspring of the Black Prince, that Mars of men—who, like one of his forerunners, dies for the sweet fruition of an earthly crown.
51
Shewring felt that the impression of weakness was a reading that “could be accommodated in
Richard II
played as part of a full cycle, but would, perhaps, have been less appropriate had the play stood on its own.”
52
However, Harold Hobson took an opposing view:
If one sees
Richard II
alone, even in the unsurpassed performance of Sir John Gielgud, one sees only the sad downfall of a tragic poet who is overthrown by a rebellious and dynamic subject. But in Mr Hall’s programme
Richard II
, placed in its proper sequence, takes on a more cataclysmic significance. The deposition of Richard is seen, not as in any way excused by the tyrannical vagaries of his rule, but, quite simply and unforgivably, as a crime against God.
53
However, the king’s downfall could not be romanticized. One reviewer commented that Richard’s actions were “firmly anchored in the world of practical politics,” for example, in the Mowbray-Lancaster quarrel, where the king could be seen “meting out subtly different degrees of intimacy to his kinsmen and his favourites.”
54
Eric Porter played Bullingbrook as a strong-willed opportunist, displaying “just the right amount of blended patience and impatience with the weak king he manages to depose.”
55
The theater program suggests that Bullingbrook be viewed as “the new man, the coming man of integrity” who “becomes a rebel almost against his will.” This idea was borne out in performance, one reviewer remarking on Eric Porter’s “fine study” in “restrained but ruthless ambition,” a portrayal that suggested “an underlying hint of unease and guilt at having deposed the king.”
56
In 1971, Richard Pasco played King Richard in the touring production by Theatregoround which took the company’s work to theaters, schools, colleges, and community centers throughout Great Britain. The production served as the “prototype” for his exciting and innovative “mirror image” version in 1973 with Pasco and Ian Richardson alternating the roles of King Richard and Bullingbrook. Irving Wardle remarked on the need to break with the history cycle mentality:
For nearly 10 years the Royal Shakespeare Company have lived in the shadow of
The Wars of the Roses
. Apart from an erratic revival of
Richard III
they have left the English histories
severely alone. Now, at last, they are laying the ghost starting with the first play in the cycle which John Barton (a co-director of
The Wars of the Roses
) has cast in a determinedly fresh optique. The last production was the cornerstone of an epic; the new one is a work in itself.
57
As Robert Shaughnessy relates, apart from “a poorly received” production of
Richard III
, directed by Terry Hands in 1970, Barton’s
Richard II
(1973) “was the first major production of a mainstream history play since
The Wars of the Roses
,” and is “often cited as the most influential, if not the definitive, modern production of the
play.”
58
The enduring significance of this production lies in its ability to make relevant the analysis of kingship so keenly worked by Shakespeare in the “now of Elizabethan England.” The program for the 1973 production contains a short essay by Anne Barton entitled “The King’s Two Bodies.” Ernst H. Kantorowicz in
The King’s Two Bodies
(1957) explores an idea of kingship found in Edmund Plowden’s
Reports
(collected and written under Queen Elizabeth I) that “the King has in him two Bodies,
viz
., a Body natural, and a Body politic.”
59
In Anne Barton’s explication of the concept:
