Richard II

New Critical Essays

Jeremy Lopez, Jeremy Lopez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136479762
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik von Shakespeare

Arguably the first play in a Shakespearean tetralogy, Richard II is a unique and compelling political drama whose themes still resonate today. It is one of the few Shakespeare plays written entirely in verse and its format presents unique theatrical challenges. Politically engaged and controversial, it raises crucial debates about the relationship between early modern art, audience response and state power.

This collection provides a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the critical and theatrical history of the play. The substantial introduction surveys the history of critical interpretations of Richard II since the eighteenth century. The eleven newly written critical essays by leading and emerging scholars in the field then adopt an eclectic range of critical approaches that encourage scholars and students to pursue new and imaginative directions with the text.

1 Dead Men Talking

Elegiac Utterance, Monarchical Republicanism and Richard II

James Siemon

In a recent discussion of responses to looming catastrophe, Timothy Morton writes that literature imagining global warming manages to “fuse elegy and prophecy.” Offering “elegies for a future” apocalypse that is now only emerging as an incomplete process, future-anterior lamentation indulges a “subject position [of] passive enjoyment” (Morton 2010: 254). Critical traditions have read Shakespeare’s Richard II as simultaneously an elegiac evocation of a past order based on sacral monarchy and a prophetic anticipation of a pending crisis for the contemporary form of that order.¹ Anticipating the approaching train-wreck, one listens to extended, moving evocations of loss and ruin before, during, and after the fact. The play’s pervasive elegiac tone, furthermore, is especially pronounced in the pathos-laden treatment of its largely passive protagonist’s lyrical “subjectivity.”² The suffering Richard has evinced comparisons with the martyr-monarchs that Walter Benjamin describes in Baroque Trauerspiel (Luis-Martinez 2008), his “conspicuously poetic” language taken to register an inability to reconcile history with transcendence (Moretti 1995: 71).³

Instead of simply evoking a sympathetic passivity, Richard II interweaves lyricism with prompts to active reflection on a dialogical struggle among the ideologically inflected languages and modes of behavior within which and against which characters interact in ways often awkward, jarring, or confused. The following analysis approaches Shakespeare’s history play from an angle suggested by his contemporary, Thomas Heywood, who claimed that along with orthodox political messages concerning obedience and allegiance, history plays, his own included, also offered audiences means to apprehension, articulation, and topical interpretation.

Playes haue made the ignorant more apprehensiue, taught the vnlearned the knowledge of many famous histories, instructed such as can[n]ot reade in the discouery of all our English Chronicles: & what man haue you now of that weake capacity, that cannot discourse of any notable thing recorded euen from William the Conquerour, nay from the landing of Brute, vntill this day.

(Heywood 1612: sig. F3r)

In addition, I will enlist recent accounts of early modern English history to argue that the discursive skills and practices Heywood claims to be encouraged by history plays were already significant elements of everyday social intercourse outside the theater.

Amid its haunting evocations of Eden lost and majesty martyred, Richard II suggests between its lines a more positive future-anterior already in action. An analysis of micro-features of articulation and interaction within the play and its early modern environment suggests affinities with James Scott’s account of hidden transcripts, the traces of resistance in apparently compliant responses of the dominated to their domination in highly-stratified peasant societies (Scott 1990). However, instead of tracking a more or less unified voice of the resistant abject, this account attempts to trace a more diverse set of constructive trends at work in the discursive activities of those who had some purchase, albeit mis-recognized or under-recognized, on authority. In this pursuit, I will enlist early modern literary and non-literary utterances that offer parallels for the play’s treatment of languages and exchanges, including an unpublished Parliamentary address, a printed Charge to Assize Justices, a widely-reprinted sermon, and two very popular texts from the 1590s literature of tears. Each text shares identifiable discourses with the play; each also reveals attitudes toward communication and social order that might contribute to an as yet-unrealized future comprising a communicative habitus of practices and orientations that has become more discernible in historical retrospect than it was in the 1590s, when it went without a name.⁴ Historians have come to call it monarchical republicanism.⁵

I

The early modern history play permits ample pathos, resounding prophecies, and multiple sorts of irony. Its loose generic parameters allow an intersection of high and low, tragic and comedic, lyrical and vulgar elements along with retrospection, topicality and prediction. In the 1590s London’s commercial theaters provided mass audiences with plays, according to Thomas Nashe, “for the most part … borrowed out of our English Chronicles” in which “long buried” forefathers were “reuiued, and they themselues raised from the Graue of Obliuion, and brought to pleade their aged Honours in open presence,” as exemplified by “braue Talbot,” brought from “his Tombe” to the stage and “newe embalmed with the teares of ten thousand spectators … who, in the Tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding” (Nashe 1904: 1: 212). Theater could raise the dead, at least in imagination, to bleed, plead, and knit together a new affective congregation of the living and the dead. No “immortalitie” on earth or “hopes of eternitie,” Nashe claims, could rival those offered by such pan-temporal communication. His example, brave Talbot’s play, would turn out to be only one of the nine Shakespearean history plays staged in Elizabeth’s last years, the loose generic group that went on to constitute Shakespeare’s most frequently reprinted plays through the next century.⁶

The history play’s brief ascendancy on the English stage coincided with the enormous popularity of new forms of elegiac verse and prose. Only a handful of English elegies survive that predate the Reformation, and they differ radically in form from the many post-Reformation elegies (Wayland 2009).⁷ Historical changes put the form under different pressures. George Puttenham and Sir Thomas Browne might still express a lingering impulse to pray for the dead, but the vast social apparatus of late-Medieval piety linking the living and dead was not only gone but vigorously denounced as idolatry and scam. London’s most popular late-Elizabethan preacher put it baldly: “Purgatorie is like your painted sepulchers, which are framed more for the liuing then for the dead, for you know that the locusts of Rome liue by trentals, and dirges, and masses for the dead, as the Siluersmiths in Ephesus liued by Images” (Smith 1592: 535).

Medieval elegies typically took the form of eidolopoeia, in which the dead speak from purgatory, inviting readers to commiseration, prayer, repeated rites, reflection and memorial. By contrast, the speakers in Post-Reformation elegies neither express regrets from purgatory (which the Reformers had rejected), nor beg the living for prayers (now forbidden) or rites (“vain repetitions” to be eschewed), nor do they offer intercessions (dismissed as fantasies). Eventually, the dead would cease to speak at all, first-person address by the dead to the living reader largely giving way to the poet’s second-person apostrophe to a silent departed. Put in the context of this very broadly-sketched formal history, the speaking dead in such quasi-historical forms as The Mirror for Magistrates appear interestingly transitional. Addressing readers from somewhere beyond life, though specifically not from purgatory, the talking dead of the Mirror lament their downfalls, elicit sympathy, demand remembrance, and provide moral examples and dicta for the living. This form did not, however, restrict resurrection to the virtuous dead.⁸

As in the history play, contemporary elegy gave voice to those that few would want revived: the plaintive ghost of the “tyrant” Richard of Gloucester is as prominent in the Mirror as that of holy Henry VI. Chidiock Tischborne’s “My Prime of Youth” is movingly spoken by the recently-executed traitor. The notorious Mistress Shore grounds an entire tearful sub-genre of female complaint (Helgerson, 1999), giving the poet Churchyard, Nashe claimed, his own claim to eternal life: “in her shall you liue when you are dead” (Nashe 1904: 1: 309). The biblical Mary Magdalene achieves a similar prominence, and even Saint Peter, hardly so notorious as she, is introduced in one popular complaint with a warning that his “weakenes” should offer readers “no warrant” for excusing sin (Southwell 1595: sig. A3v). Furthermore, in the Mirror as elsewhere the lamenting voice often appears juxtaposed with other voices, creating a polyvocality open to ironies of discrepant awareness, alternative languages of evaluation, misperceptions and self-exculpations, even while expressing suffering and demanding sympathy (Budra 2000: 35–36).

Elegy, whether historically or biblically based, often shared with history plays an assumption of shared knowledge about characters and events. Few would be unaware that The Tragedy of King Richard the Second—as quartos of 1597, 1598, 1608, and 1615 title it—would end with its King deposed and slain. Authors of the Mirror thought Richard still “so sore intangled” by what people continued to say about him as to complicate “to this day” attempts to “say sumwhat for king Richard” (Campbell 1938: 110). John Hayward’s 1599 history of Richard’s reign got a close reading by Edward Coke for possible topical implications and earned him imprisonment; the investigation of Shakespeare’s company for performing the play on the eve of the 1601 Essex rising is well known.⁹ Mindful of the past, many Elizabethans would register the play’s accurate prophecies: Gaunt’s prediction of Richard’s downfall (2.1.93–114) or Carlisle’s denunciation of Bolingbroke’s usurpation as preparing an English “Golgotha” in the Wars of the Roses (4.1.135–50) are but two of the play’s many unusually “straightforward” prophetic utterances (Dobin 1990: 232).¹⁰ Yet Shakespearean history plays can be so complexly threaded with ironies of articulation that it is worth looking beyond content to the form of the speeches (and silences) that provide it, treating them as utterances in Bakhtin’s sense by analyzing their implementation, the responses they occasion and the languages at play in them.¹¹

Carlisle’s Golgotha prophecy, for example, while orthodox about the historical future, as witnessed by countless applications, not only falls on deaf ears but results in immediate arrest for speaking “capital treason” (4.1.152). Thus far, the sequence might suggest the outlines of Scott’s accounts of pressures militating against resistant utterance, as well as the historical irony of resistant pronouncements becoming official orthodoxy over time; but Carlisle’s speech also employs a Christologically-inflected language with a complicated relationship to authority both in the play and in Elizabethan culture. Officially endorsed as an idiom for expressions of reverence, Christological discourse also appears deeply compromised by its association with and sometimes instrumental role in the failings and excesses of Richard.¹² Another and related instance of the play’s fulfilled-prophecies may suggest how to begin to approach such ironies as components of utterance.

In act three, the Queen rightly predicts that the play’s Gardeners will talk of “state”; she claims no grand prophecy but what Bacon calls a “probable foresight”: “My wretchedness unto a row of pins / They will talk of state, for everyone doth so / Against a change” (3.4. 26–28).¹³ This remark conveys her conditional sense of ongoing political (“state”) events and of social realities shared by “everyone.” In her subsequent encounter with the Gardeners, however, she denies this socio-political assessment, fails to register what they actually say as to fact, tone, or implication, and indulges in theological vilification. The entire exchange constitutes a vivid ...