Richard II. Revision Sheet

Richard II belongs to the ‘second tetralogy’, or group of four plays, that deals with the Wars of the Roses, a period of civil war between the aristocratic ‘houses’ (or families) of York and Lancaster from 1399 to 1485. Although Shakespeare wrote this play after he had already written four others on this topic, the events of Richard II are those that begin the entire sequence. The play deals at length with the dual problems of the origin authority and the circumstances under which authority may be challenged.

The Origin of Authority

The King’s Two Bodies: A medieval idea of kingship that emphasizes the continuity, omniscience, and supernatural aspect of authority across generations. The king has a ‘body natural’ and a ‘body politic’. The ‘body natural’ is the actual, organic, living body of the king, susceptible to age and eventually death. The ‘body politic’ is the idea or ideal of the king, an idea that is bigger than the physical king and which guarantees consistency and continuity from one generation to another where the laws of primogeniture and the legitimacy of a line has been observed. ‘The King is dead, long live the king’.

The Divine Right of Kings and the Great Chain of Being: Authority that is validated from a heavenly source, put in place and maintained by the will of God. A strictly hierarchical system of social organization that understands its own hierarchy as the ‘natural’ and divinely ordained order of things. Attacks on the social order are attacks on God, rebellion is against God’s law and shares in the shame of Satan’s revolt in heaven.

The Anxiety of Authority

The Essex Rebellion: On February 7^th 1601, Robert Devereaux, the Earl of Essex, led an unsuccessful rebellion against the Queen, Elizabeth I, with the intention of seizing the throne from the elderly monarch who had no immediate heir. The day before the uprising, supporters of Essex commissioned a special production of Richard II, presumably because it narrates the deposition of a monarch for lawful and morally just reasons. Elizabeth is supposed to have commented: ‘I am Richard II’.

Censorship: When originally printed, copies of the play omitted Act 4, scene 1, Richard’s deposition scene, presumably because of their potentially incendiary content. It would not have been in the interest of the Government to have allowed a play that shows kings being stripped of their power and others taking their place. Elizabeth I was an extremely successful monarch, but never a particularly secure one. An Elizabethan political strategy was to insist that Elizabeth represented the reconciliation of warring factions and the embodiment of centuries-old promises and prophecies of a just, strong, and infallible ruler. This neatly overlooked facts such as Elizabeth being proclaimed illegitimate by her own father, her mother’s execution, her sister’s Catholicism, that she was unmarried and had no heir, that the Pope had put a bounty on her life, and that her grandfather, Henry VII, was essentially a usurper who had seized power in a bloody coup (narrated, with Elizabethan bias, in Richard III).

Gloucester’s Ghost, the Death of Chivalry and the Disintegration of the State

1.1 Chivalric codes unsettled by mistrust. Secrets, accusations, and deceit.

1.2 Gaunt haunted by Gloucester’s assassination. Edward’s ‘sacred blood’ and the disturbed natural order: 1.2.9-36. The dissipated, louche and corrupt younger generation (Richard, Mowbray, Aumerle, even Bolingbroke) are unfavorably contrasted with their noble, chivalric elders (Edward, Gloucester, Gaunt, York).

1.4 Richard’s distrust of Bolingbroke’s popular support. Aumerle revealed unmannered, untrustworthy and spiteful. Richard’s army overstretched by insurrectionary forces. The king must leave his kingdom to fight wars in Ireland.

The Idea of England and the Edenic Ideal

2.1 Gaunt’s panegryric for England, once a paradise, now a bankrupt farm. Richard’s love of ‘fashions in proud Italy’ condemned as unkingly (l.21).

3.2.3-26 Richard beseeches the land to harm and hinder Bolingbroke’s army.

3.2.145-160 England as Richard’s cemetery.

3.4. Gardener’s scene: horticulture and husbandry as a metaphor for the ideal commonwealth and healthy government.

The Origin of Authority and the Paraphernalia of Monarchy

2.2.85-105: York, ‘Tut, tut’, insists that the ground of authority rests on the loyalty of its subjects.

3.2.160-177: ‘The hollow crown’ and the kingship as a performance.

3.3.143-175: Dismantling the identity of a king.

5.3.102-106. York suspects his son, Aumerle, is a bastard. As Richard’s authority is challenged the legality of other supposed legitimacies is questioned.

The Deposition Scene

4.1.114: Carlisle’s final insistence on the divinity of monarchy.

4.1.181. Power is transferred like energy, the crown as the medium of transference.

4.1.203. ‘Now mark me how I will undo myself’: monarchy dissolves as the accessories of kingship are surrendered.

Seeing, Perspective, Anamorphism

2.2.14 Bushy and the anamorphic image. Unified vision equated with truth, multiple perspectives with deceit.

3.2.36. Richard as the sun king, solis, omnipotent, all-seeing. Truth and justice emanate from him.

4.1.273. The metaphor of vision prefigured by Bushy matures as Richard destroys the mirror and his singular identity is shattered into a multitude of reflective fragments.

The Fruit of Usurpation

4.1.136. Carlisle’s correct prophecy of costly civil war. Shakespeare’s audience would have recognized that Richard’s deposition inaugurated almost a century of war.

5.3.1. King Henry’s son, Hal (later Henry V), is mentioned as an ‘unthrifty’ wastrel (continues themes of disappointment in the younger generation).

5.6.38. The play closes in a mood of mourning and penitence.