'This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle ... This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England'
John of Gaunt on his deathbed, lamenting a country leased out like a tenement
Shakespeare · Histories
Richard II
c. 1595
History — the first play of the second tetralogy, the Henriad
The opening play of the second tetralogy, and the only one Shakespeare wrote entirely in verse, without a line of prose. A king who believes his anointing makes him untouchable banishes his cousin Bolingbroke, then seizes his inheritance to pay for an Irish war; Bolingbroke returns with an army, and the king surrenders without a battle, gives up the crown in a scene of extraordinary self-dramatisation, and is murdered at Pomfret Castle. Because it staged the deposition of an anointed monarch, it was politically dangerous for the whole of Elizabeth's reign.
How to spot them
- ▸England in 1399; a king deposed by his cousin without a battle
- ▸The only Shakespeare play written entirely in verse, with no prose at all
- ▸A dying uncle's speech on England as a sceptred isle
- ▸A deposition scene with a crown and a mirror, cut from the printed text for a decade
- ▸The Earl of Essex's followers paid for a revival of it the day before their rebellion
Scenes, characters & lines
'For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings'
On the Welsh coast, as the news gets worse
'Not all the water in the rough rude sea Can wash the balm off from an anointed king'
The doctrine of divine right, stated just as it is about to fail
A king hands over his crown, calls for a looking-glass, and dashes it to the ground
The deposition scene, Act 4 Scene 1
'I wasted time, and now doth time waste me'
The prison soliloquy at Pomfret
A trial by combat at Coventry, stopped by the king before a blow is struck
Bolingbroke against Mowbray; both are banished instead
The only play in the canon written entirely in verse, with not one line of prose
A formality that matches its ceremonious king
Key ideas
- The play sets the sacred theory of kingship against the practical fact of power, and refuses to say which is right
- It begins a four-play sequence — this, the two parts of Henry IV, and Henry V — in which the usurpation of 1399 haunts every reign that follows
Quick-fire facts
- •The deposition scene was omitted from the quartos printed in Elizabeth I's lifetime and first appeared in the fourth quarto of 1608
- •Supporters of the Earl of Essex paid the Lord Chamberlain's Men forty shillings to revive the play at the Globe on 7 February 1601, the day before their rising; the company was questioned but not punished
- •Elizabeth is reported to have told the antiquary William Lambarde, 'I am Richard II, know ye not that?'
- •John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, is the king's uncle and the father of Bolingbroke, who becomes Henry IV
- •The historical Richard was deposed in 1399 and died at Pontefract (Pomfret) Castle early in 1400, probably of starvation
- •Sources include Holinshed's Chronicles, Samuel Daniel's poem The Civil Wars and French accounts of the reign
- •Fiona Shaw played the king in Deborah Warner's 1995 National Theatre production; David Tennant played him for the RSC in 2013 and Ben Whishaw in the BBC's The Hollow Crown in 2012
- •The king's queen in the play is Isabella of Valois, who was in fact about ten years old at the time
Drill it — 8 cards
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Sources
- Folger Shakespeare Library — Richard II
- Charles R. Forker (ed.) — King Richard II (The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series)