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Bickley, Pamela , and Jenny Stevens. "King Richard II: The performance of majesty." Essential
Shakespeare: The Arden Guide to Text and Interpretation. London: Bloomsbury Arden
Shakespeare, 2013. 211–232. Arden Shakespeare. Drama Online. Web. 2 Aug. 2020.
<http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781408174692.ch-010>.

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Copyright © Pamela Bickley. Jenny Stevens. All rights reserved. Further reproduction or
distribution is prohibited without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
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 King Richard II
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DOI: 10.5040/9781408174692.ch-010
Page Range: 211–232

Richard II raised a number of highly topical and controversial issues for its original
spectators. A drama of deposition, it played out on stage a reversing of the sacred
ceremony of coronation, prompting audiences to question whether the language and
symbolism of royal ritual and ceremony was any more than outward display.

This chapter

attends to the play’s interest in language through the lens of deconstruction

considers the significance of clothing and costume in the early modern period

analyzes the function of the play’s dramatic verse

examines the critical reception of Deborah Warner’s controversial production of
Richard II

Deconstruction and Shakespeare

Over the past decade or so, the term ‘deconstruction’ has migrated from the academy to
the cultural mainstream. In its popular sense, to ‘deconstruct’ signifies a criticism or
analysis of anything from a piece of writing to a political standpoint.In its more specialized
literary-theoretical sense, it denotes a critical practice grounded in the writings of the
philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004).The discourse of deconstruction is replete with
images of instability – slipping, sliding, shifting and floating – expressive of its major
contention that meaning can never be fully contained or fixed.

Deconstruction is a major area of post-structuralist thought; indeed, the two terms are
often used interchangeably. As the term implies, post-structuralism is closely related to its
forerunner, structuralism, a wide-ranging intellectual movement, which had a significant
impact on several knowledge areas, including philosophy, the social sciences and literary
studies. To understand post-structuralist thought, and deconstruction in particular, it is
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first necessary to have some grasp of the ideas of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de
Saussure (1857–1913), whose ground-breaking work in linguistics underpins the
structuralist contention that all human thought and activity is constructed and not natural.
At the core of Saussure’s analytical framework is a simple idea: ‘The bond between the
signifier and the signified is arbitrary … it [the signifier] actually has no natural connection
with the signified’ (‘Course in General Linguistics’ in Literary Theory: An Anthology, Julie
Rivkin and Michael Ryan (eds), 1998, 79). What this means in practice is that a word like
‘cow’ (what Saussure calls the signifier) has a purely conventional relationship with the
concept it conjures up in our minds (the signified). There is nothing essentially ‘cow-like’
about the word ‘cow’, either in its sound or appearance on the page; indeed, if there was
agreement in the language community to refer to this milk-producing quadruped as a
‘fismus’, there is no reason why it should not signify just as well – as long as ‘fismus’ was
 not already in the linguistic system. This, according to Saussure, is because ‘in language
there are only differences without positive terms [Saussure’s emphasis]’ (Rivkin and Ryan,
88). We can tell ‘cow’ apart from ‘wow’ or ‘sow’ by the slight but crucial shift of the initial
letter. The connection between word and meaning is, then, entirelyrelational: we
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understand something not so much by what it is, but by knowing what it is not.

If language is entirely arbitrary, removed from the way humans experience the concepts it
defines, then it follows that it is also constitutive: it does not reflect the world around us; it
makes it. What is assumed on an everyday, commonsensical level to be ‘natural’ is actually
a formal organization of the world around us through the symbolic system of language.
The demarcation between, say, spring and summer, green and blue, or day and night is a
matter or convention and indeed, there are often times when the artificial nature of these
linguistic markers become apparent such as when we encounter a language which chops
up the world in a different way from our own (the classification of colours, for example).
Reading, too, is part of a network of structures already in place before any kind of
‘personal response’ can take place; these include genres, conceptual and psychological
frameworks and the system by which the text reaches the reader.

The precise relationship between structuralism and deconstruction is a much debated

one. Put simply, deconstruction, and post-structuralist thought more generally,
undermines any notion of a stable signifying system, offering a critique of objective
knowledge, eternal truths and, in the case of literature, a unified text. One of the key
structuralist ideas to be extended by deconstruction is Saussure’s contention that all
meaning inheres in difference and not in a fixed sign. Derrida’s engagement with this idea
brought into being one of the most hotly disputed terms of deconstructive practice:
différance. A verbal pun, typical of the playful nature of so much of Derrida’s writing, the
term originates in the French verb ‘différer’, meaning both to ‘differ from’ and ‘to defer’.
It is a neologism which captures both the idea that meaning is only created through the
difference between one word (or sound unit) and another, and the concomitant idea that
meaning is always deferred: when we pronounce a word it stands in place of something
not present; when we write that word, it stands in the place of the word we pronounce.
Not only does theword stand for a ‘deferred’ presence, each one encountered carries
traces of what it is not, pointing to another signifier in an endless chain of signification.
The only way ‘brown’ can be signified is through reference to other signifiers that denote
what it is not (so, according to the OED, not red, yellow or black, but a mixture of all
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three). It follows, then, that the signification of a literary text can never be fixed, nor can
readings ever be exhausted as any use of language (whether in the text under
examination or the metalanguage in which it is discussed) is inextricably bound up in the
endless chain of signifiers and the multiplicity of meanings they generate.
The philosophical ideas that underpin deconstruction are often highly abstract and may
not appear directly applicable to Shakespeare. However, literary scholars have employed
them to open up new and invigorating ways of reading the plays, challenging the
interprative habit of imposing a unifying design on the text. Richard II, for example, is
often seen as a play organized around a series of oppositions embedded in its structure,
imagery and stage action and it is tempting to ignore any ‘loose ends’ which cannot be
tucked neatly into this picture. Deconstructive critics would seek to interrogate such a
reading by challenging its attempt to staunch the proliferation of textual meaning, and by
teasing out its contradictions and uncertainties. Indeed, the indeterminacy of
 Shakespeare’s plays makes them especially amenable to deconstruction, insisting as it
does that a text can sustain plural, often diametrically opposed readings. Furthermore,
the protean nature of Shakespeare’s dramatic language (puns for example) has offered
plentiful opportunities for Derrida’s concept of différance to be explored.
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Deconstructive critics have been particularly attentive to the linguistic scepticism that is
seen to run through the entire Shakespearean canon. Numerous critics have hailed
examples such as Juliet’s remark that ‘a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet;’
(2.2.43–4) as signs that Shakespeare was a Saussurean avant la lettre. However, as
Jonathan Hope points out in Shakespeare and Language (2010), ‘Juliet … is
anAristotelian: she believes that names are arbitrarily attached to the things they
designate by human convention’ (2) and some in the play’s original audiences would have
recognized the connection with classical Greek thought. Yet, even if Shakespeare turns
out to be more a man of his time than a forerunner of Saussurean linguistics, there is still a
strong case to be made for his being more than usually interested in the relationship
between words and meaning.

Deconstructing Richard II
Richard II is a play preoccupied with language and as such an ideal text for deconstructive
reading. It makes frequent reference to forms of speech such as oaths and vows and to
the power (or otherwise) of the spoken word. The word ‘tongue’, or words closely related
to it, occurs thirty or so times in the text, often drawing attention to language and its
usage (notice that ‘tongue’ was the most common term for ‘language’ in a culture where
oral expression still dominated over the written). At the start of the play, Richard is
supremely confident that his word is law and that the title of king is inseparable from the
divinely ordained role of kingship. The power that inheres in Richard’s ‘breath’ seems
absolute, akin to God’s when he breathes life into Adam:

The hopeless word of ‘never to return’

Breathe I against thee, upon pain of life.
  --(1.3.152–3)

It is a power that Bolingbroke publicly acknowledges:

How long a time lies in one little word!

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Four lagging winters and four wanton springs

End in a word; such is the breath of kings.
  --(1.3.213–15)

However, acquiescence to the fixed signification of the word is short-lived as Bolingbroke

topples words with deeds and renders the title of king a floating signifier.

John of Gaunt makes the first strike against Richard’s confident belief in the marriage of
the signified and signifier. The sustained punning which results from Richard’s renaming of
his uncle as ‘aged Gaunt’ (2.1.72) demonstrates the multiple meanings that can proliferate
from a monosyllable. That the significance of a proper name can be so easily disrupted
anticipates Richard’s own loss of title and his reduction to ‘nothing’ in the play’s final act.
While Richard appears unmoved by any of the advice Gaunt offers him, he does note that
 it is possible to play ‘nicely’ (2.1.84) with names. In fact, Richard has his first direct
experience of such play when his own title is transformed from King into ‘Landlord of
England’ (2.1.113) by his dying relative.
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As Richard’s fortunes decline, so his faith in the unassailable power of the monarchical
‘breath’ becomes ever more severely challenged. On landing at Barkloughly castle,
Richard’s call to the natural world to destroy his enemies is pronounced with a theatricality
that suggests his words are all alone sufficient. Yet as loss follows loss, he is driven to
assert what was once assumed:

The breath of worldly men cannot depose

The deputy elected by the Lord.
  --(3.2.56–7)

Assertion rapidly shifts to rhetorical questioning ‘Is not the King’s name twenty thousand
names?’ (3.2.85), and then to a dawning realization that his word is not absolute:

O God, O God, that e’er this tongue of mine

That laid the sentence of dread banishment
On yon proud man should take it off again
With words of sooth!
  --(3.3.133–6)

Bolingbroke’s attitude towards language differs markedly from Richard’s. He understands

that words are no more than labels to be moved around at will; he dismisses his father’s
suggestion to rename his exile ‘a travel … for pleasure’ (1.3.262) as no more than a
linguistic realignment, one that will have no real bearing on his situation. At the same
time, he is quite ready to exploit the arbitrary nature of the signifier. In the course of the
play, those around him have to adjust to his rapidly changing titles: Hereford, the Duke of
Lancaster and, finally, King Henry.

As mentioned earlier in the chapter, Richard II is, on the surface at least, a play of
contrasts and opposites and as such is worth examining in the light of Derrida’s challenge
to the binary oppositions which informed so much of structuralist practice. According to
Derrida, Western thinking is structured around pairs of opposites such as man and
woman, presence and absence, speech and writing. Deconstruction shines light on how
each binary pair contains a superior partner, often indicated in the ‘natural’ order in which
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they are pronounced or written down; so, for example, it is more usual to place ‘man’
before ‘woman’ (‘woman and man’ sounds strange to most native English speakers). It
sets out not to destroy or reverse such antitheses but to dismantle and examine them.
The deposition scene (4.1) draws attention to the binary oppositions of high and low
through Richard’s analogy of the two buckets, chosen to convey the passing of power
from one cousin to another. It is a wily metaphor by which he seems to reverse the
hierarchical pairings of high/ low and up/down which run through the play. The bucket
rising high is obviously Bolingbroke, yet though its position carries the usual implications
of high office and success, its ‘lightness’ connotes lack of substance, and the potential to
be easily swayed; the heavy bucket on the other hand, while still figuring Richard’s
lowered status and heavy heart, also implies the weight of his natural authority, something
that cannot be easily moved or removed. What would seem to be a straightforward
reversal of binary opposites, however, proves morecomplicated on closer inspection.
 According to Richard’s own analogical description, the heavy bucket should be ‘down,
unseen’ (4.1.187), yet by his very recitation of it, he ensures that all eyes are turned on
him.
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Though deconstruction is perhaps less prominent today than it was in the 1980s and early
1990s, a number of its concepts and terminologies continue to influence today’s critical
practice. While it is often accused of being bewilderingly abstract and too intent on
returning to its own first premises, its determination to expose the contradictory elements
of a text (sometimes called the ‘textual subconscious’) often involves forensically close
reading and an alertness to gaps and absences that can prove every bit as significant as
what lies on the literary surface.

Clothes and the early modern theatre

Dress has always been a powerful semiotic, a system of outward display by which the
individual can signal who they are – or at least who they would like to be thought of as
being. One of the crucial differences between England today and the England of
Shakespeare’s time is that men and women are now more or less free to wear what they
choose. High-street fashion copies the designer labels of the elite almost as soon as they
hit the catwalk, allowing those on modest incomes to appear as on trend as their
wealthier contemporaries. In the late sixteenth century, however, what people wore was
restricted by economic circumstances, gender, religion and social status. Clothes were
extremely expensive and were often included in the sum total of people’s worldly goods,
and willed to relatives or servants on their deaths.

Controlling what people wore was a means of maintaining social order. In 1559, Elizabeth
I reinforced the sumptuary laws of 1533 and 1544, at a time when the rising middle class
was acquiring the financial means to dress above their station.The laws set down for each
category of citizen the colour, textile and trimming of garments that could be worn; they
specified the length of swords and the dimensions of ruffs and, in an attempt to
discourage the purchase of imported goods, prohibited the wearing of certain foreign
fabrics. Enforcing such laws proved extremely difficult and many who dressed above their
status went undetected. However, not everyone escaped the full force of the law. One
recent study of clothing in the early modern period cites a particularly memorable case of
one who did not get away with ‘dressing up’:
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A Fellow of King’s College was committed to prison in 1576 after a formal dispute with
the Provost, when it was discovered that he was wearing ‘a cut taffeta doublet … and a
great pair of galligastion hose’ under his gown.
  --(Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass,
Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, 2000, 188)

Such modish aspiration was very much part of the spirit of the age. The Tudor court was a
highly fashionable one with Elizabeth I at its sartorial centre. The Queen exhibited her
sumptuous clothing both at court and to the wider public when she went on her summer
travels through England (known as ‘Progresses’). Courtiers were also required to display
their fashion credentials if they were to cut a dash in courtly circles. As Polonius advises
Laertes: ‘apparel oft proclaims the man’ (1.3.71).
 The theatre provided an opportunity for anyone with the price of admission to see the
fine fashions of the courtly world. It was a space where the usual sartorial rules were
suspended, where boys could dress as queens, laymen as bishops, and actors of relatively
slender means could play the king. While the stage sets were frugal, costumes were often
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lavish, with a substantial amount of a theatre company’s budget being reserved for their
purchase and upkeep. Andrew Gurr points out that an embroidered black velvet
cloak,itemized in theatre records, cost £20 10s 6d, more than a third of what Shakespeare
paid for his great house in Stratford (The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642, 2009, 238).
Managers needed to weigh up the enormous expense of costume against the enormous
attraction it held for spectators. The only extant visual evidence of costuming practices is
a drawing, believed to be by Henry Peacham, of a set for Titus Andronicus. Showing a mix
of Roman and Elizabethan garb, with the most ornate outfits reserved for the main
characters, the sketch suggests that the theatres took a fairly eclectic approach to
costume, dictated by economic necessity. It is generally assumed that most of the cast
would have worn contemporary dress, with the sartorial glamour and historically specific
dress being reserved for the leading men.

Clothing is a highly significant feature of Shakespearean drama and can play a crucial role
in the stage action. Costume allows heroines such as Viola to experience living in another
gender and class; Malvolio’s yellow stockings create comic uproar, while Cloten’s ill-fated
decision to dress in Posthumus’ garments sets up one of the most gruesome moments in
early modern theatre. Moreover, the plays abound with the imagery of clothes and
fashion. Macbeth’s title is said to ‘Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe/Upon a
dwarfish thief’ (5.2.21–2), Benedick is accused of changing his friends as often as ‘the
fashion of his hat’ (1.1.71) and Enobarbus responds to the death of Antony’s wife by
assuring him that his ‘old smock’ will bring ‘forth a new petticoat’ (1.2.175–6).

There are few such direct references to clothing in Richard II, but those that do appear
carry considerable impact. Richard’s contemptuous description of Bolingbroke’s taking off
‘his bonnet to an oyster-wench’ (1.4.31) draws attention to the contrast between the two
cousins: the one contemptuous of the lower orders, the other pragmatically aware of the
importance of the common touch. And his declaration that ‘The lining of his [Gaunt’s]
coffers shall make coats’ (1.4.61) for soldiers, with its alliterative play and punning on the
literal and figurative meaning of ‘lining’, portrayshim as lacking the gravitas and maturity
expected of a king, as well as forecasting a violation of the laws of inheritance which will
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lead to his downfall. The relatively high number of static scenes in Richard II allows
audiences ample time to gaze on the actors, to appreciate through costume the shift from
the courtly to the martial and from the splendidly regal to the abjectly ragged. The crown,
orb and sceptre, insignia of monarchical power, act as material markers of Richard’s
descent in an unflinchingly drawn-out deposition scene: a vision of the ‘unkinged’ which
would take on a brutal reality fifty years hence with the execution of Charles I. The striking
contrast of the magnificent costume of the King at the start of the play with what we
assume to be the habit of a beggar in Act 5 must have had a powerful visual impact on
audiences, not least because, unlike the unrobed King Lear whose indigent state is shared
by ‘poor Tom’, Richard’s move from riches to rags is his alone. The sight of a destitute
king would have had radical political implications, as well as reminding audiences of
Christ’s teachings on the ephemerality of material possessions. As one of Shakespeare’s
sources for the play, A Myrroure for Magistrates (1559) warns:
 Loe howe the power, the pride, and riche aray
Of myghty rulers lightly fade away.
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It is a warning that seems appropriate for a King who moves from the ‘fashions in proud
Italy’ (2.1.21) to the rags of a prison cell, though Shakespeare’s treatment of the fall
complicates and questions its simple morality.

Shakespeare’s all-verse drama

Richard II is one of only two Shakespeare’s plays to be written entirely in verse (the other
is King John). With its measured line lengths and metrical regularity, verse is an ideal
medium for aplay set in the medieval world of courtly ritual. However, it also proves highly
adaptable to a diverse range of characters and establishes an extensive range of
tonalities. The eloquent despair of Richard, the desolation of the widowed Duchess of
Gloucester, the Machiavellian expediency of Northumberland, the maternal fervour of the
Duchess of York, the choric pronouncements of the Gardener and the loyal simplicity of
the Groom are all captured in blank or rhymed verse and sometimes a mix of both.

More than four-fifths of Richard II is in blank verse. The verse is termed ‘blank’ because of
the absence of rhyme and is distinguished from prose by its regular iambic pentameter
lines. The five-beat pulse of blank verse was particularly popular with playwrights of
Shakespeare’s generation and everything points to its being equally popular with
audiences. As George T. Wright explains in his extensive survey of Shakespeare’s metrical
techniques, iambic pentameter is impossible to split into two equal halves as a ‘midline
pause, wherever it appears, leaves two stressed syllables on one side and three on the
other’ (Shakespeare’s Metrical Art, 1988, 5).This property of the metre makes it less sing-
song than, say, tetrameter, ensuring that its cumulative effect is neither soporific nor
trivializing. The stress pattern of iambic pentameter is often said to be close to ‘natural’
speech intonations and thus an ideal choice for dramatic dialogue. However, scholars such
as Robert Shaughnessy have challenged this truism:
the unproblematised notion that the verse prioritizes the construction of ‘character’
through ‘natural’-sounding speech foists a modern conception of selfhood, and of its
articulation through the spoken word, onto texts that originated within a theatrical and
cultural milieu … in which these conceptions would have been barely imaginable.
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  --(The Routledge Guide to William Shakespeare, 2011, 361)

While it is always wise to be alert to the type of ahistorical thinking which Shaughnessy
highlights, analysing the dramaticeffects achieved through the sounds and inflexions of
spoken dialogue on stage (or at least as they appear to modern ears) can be an
illuminating process.

Blank verse is often defined in terms of a set of ‘rules’, making it seem a rather limited
mode of expression. However, its rules are there to be broken and changes in line length
and variations in stress patterns achieve striking, sometimes subtle, dramatic effects. It is
commonly held that the ears of Shakespeare’s original spectators would have been more
attuned to such deviations from the norm than audiences of our own time, able to pick up
 an alexandrine line, an unstressed ending or a shift from iambic to trochaic metre. In a
recent essay on Richard II, Brian Walsh lays emphasis on the actual process of listening to
a verse drama, arguing that it can be a highly active and engrossing one:
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In straining to hear an expected end rhyme, in being surprised by one that appears
seemingly at random, in being presented with a sudden pause in a speech, audiences of
Richard II are put off balance throughout the play by the variegated sound patterns.
  --(‘The Dramaturgy of Discomfort in Richard II’, Richard II: New Critical Essays,
ed. Jeremy Lopez, 2012, 185)

The ‘variegated sound patterns’ of Richard II are managed through a number of

techniques, one being the inversion of the stress pattern at the start of a line. Take, for
example, Mowbray’s speech lamenting the loss of his native language (1.3.154–73), where
the sudden inversion of the initial iambic rhythm just over mid-way through the speech
suggests anger threatening to break through:

Within my mouth you have engaoled my tongue,

Doubly portcullised with my teeth and lips,
  --(1.3.166–7)

As with all poetic verse, sound variations also come from the caesurae which interrupt
lines in one or more places. Notice how the caesurae in Richard’s speech below create
pauses pregnant with meaning, underscoring the absence of the responses he was once
so sure of commanding:

God save the King! Will no man say ‘Amen’?

Am I both priest and clerk? Well then, Amen.
God save the King, although I be not he,
And yet Amen, if heaven do think him me.
  --(4.1.173–6)

Enjambement is another device which helps to vary the pace set by the blank verse
pattern. Enjambed lines cross over from one line to another, often adding force to the first
word of that which follows, or building momentum. Carlisle’s lengthy homily in protest at
the overthrow of an anointed king is carefully modulated through short sequences of
enjambed lines dispersed throughout the speech:
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Disorder, horror, fear and mutiny

Shall here inhabit, and this land be called
The field of Golgotha and dead men’s skulls.
  --(4.1.143–5)

Here, the unstopped lines serve to drive home the inevitability of the civil turmoil
prophesied by Carlisle. Yet speeches with a high proportion of end-stopped lines can also
seize the attention of listeners. For example, the Duchess of York’s speech imploring King
Henry to pardon Aumerle’s sedition (5.3.110–17) consists of mainly end-stopped lines
which work together to aurally convey her obdurate refusal to budge.
The blank verse of Richard II is alternated or interleaved with rhyming verse. Although
there had been a distinct swerve away from rhymed verse in the drama of the mid-to-late
sixteenth century, Shakespeare continued to exploit itseffects, especially in comedies such
 as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Love’s Labour’s Lost. In Richard II it fulfils the
common dramatic function of indicating the end of scenes or concluding speeches, as
well as creating more subtle resonances. Mowbray underscores the integrity of his case by
concluding his speech with a complete rhyme:
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And when I mount, alive may I not light

If I be traitor or unjustly fight!
  --(1.1.82–3)

And, not to be beaten, Bolingbroke responds in kind at the end of his next speech:

And by the glorious worth of my descent,

This arm shall do it, or this life be spent!
  --(1.1.107–8)

Gaunt’s reaction to Richard shortening Bolingbroke’s banishment (1.3.216–48) is made all

the more powerful by the movement between blank verse and rhyme. The father’s
certainty of his own approaching death and of the injustice of his son’s sentence is evoked
by his insistent rhyming couplets, sustained over more than twenty lines of verse. The
assurance of Gaunt’s rhyming speech seems to discountenance the King who, at two
points in the dialogue, attempts to disrupt it. But Gaunt’s rhyme never falters and
Richard’s interjected, unrhymed line is simply capped and subsumed into the rhyming
pattern.
King Richard  Why uncle, thou hast many years to live.
Gaunt  But not a minute, King, that thou canst give.
  --(1.3.225–6)

While Richard’s kingly status lends him the public advantage, Gaunt’s age and familial
authority give the scene a perceptiblecounter-current: the subject-Gaunt keeps himself in
check through the constraints of rhyme; the uncle-Gaunt rebukes the nephew through the
solemn and immovable quality of the same.

The magniloquent verse of Richard II is often viewed as the play’s keynote. The Victorian
academic and writer Walter Pater, seen by many of his generation as a grand master of
English prose, admired Richard’s ‘golden language’ (Walter Pater: Three Major Texts, ed.
William E. Buckler, 1986, 512); the poet W. B. Yeats followed suit, comparing those critics
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who cast moral censure on Shakespeare’s hero to schoolboys ‘persecuting some boy of
fine temperament, who has weak muscles and a distaste for school games’ (W.B.Yeats:
Selected Criticism, ed. A. Norman Jeffares, 1976, 99). This aestheticizing of Richard
focused on his appreciation and command of language, seen by his admirers to grow all
the more pronounced as his earthly fortunes decline. While most readers and audiences
find little to admire in Richard in the first two acts of the play, some find themselves
increasingly swayed in his favour through the rhetorical elegance of his language.

Compare the possible impact of one of Richard’s early

speeches (1.1.152–159) to an extract from one delivered
half-way through the drama (3.2.155–170). Look out for the
effects created by:
 rhyme

enjambement
caesurae
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modulations in the iambic stress

Immediately evident in the first speech, spoken in a highly ceremonial situation, is
Richard’s complete control. Eachline is end-stopped and the regular caesurae lend the
lines a stately formality. The sequence of three rhyming couplets and the symmetry of the
proverbial ‘Forget, forgive, conclude and be agreed’, whilst all adding to this style of
command, also carry an offhand levity: this is a king who pronounces decrees as if reciting
a prayer rendered meaningless by over-familiarity. In contrast, Richard delivers the later
speech seated not on his throne, but on the ground, a visual sign of his fall from power.
Gone is the self-consciously authoritative tone of the earlier lines, to be replaced by verse
whose vigour and variety engage and surprise the ear. The mesmeric effect of the
anaphora in lines 157–9 is abruptly dispelled by ‘All murdered.’ The extra initial stress
placed on ‘All’ and the strong caesura placed at the end of the phrase seem to mark the
speaker’s fearful anticipation of his own fate. As Richard’s imagination dwells on the
essential vapidity of kingship, it is as if he, as well as Death, is ‘scoffing’ at his earlier self: a
king much given to ‘monarchize’. The enjambement on line 160 seems to enact the crown
circling the king’s head, while the ‘king’ at the end of line 161 is brought into an enjambed
collision with ‘Keeps Death his court’ at the start of the line which follows. Death’s stealth
and inevitable triumph are captured in the enjambement from line 169 to 170, the soft
unvoiced plosive of ‘pin’ contrasting forcefully with its voiced equivalent ‘Bores’, and
made all the more threatening by its being an irregularly stressed syllable positioned at
the start of the line. The caesura after ‘castle wall’ indicates the precise moment of death,
the mid-line pause allowing, perhaps, for the recovery of Richard’s trademark flippancy
detectable in ‘and farewell, king!’

While audio adaptations of Shakespeare tend to be overlooked in today’s predominantly

visual culture, they can prove an effective means of studying poetic verse. Richard II’s rich
verbal textures make it particularly well suited to audio performance, such as that directed
by Jeremy Mortimer for BBC Radio 3. Starring Samuel West as Richard – a role he also
played in the 2000 RSC production – the recordingskilfully replaces the visual splendour of
regal iconography and chivalric display with music and sound effects and features clear,
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well-modulated verse speaking. Listening to such a performance brings out the iteration
of certain words and images, tonal modulations, rhetorical patterns and metrical
variations, all aspects of Shakespeare’s language which can be missed in a stage or screen
performance.

‘Girlie’ Shakespeare: Deborah Warner’s Richard II at the

Cottesloe (1995)
Deborah Warner’s production of Richard II was sold out long before its opening night.
This was partly due to the fact that the cast included Fiona Shaw, one of the most
acclaimed performers of her generation, and not a little to do with the fact that she was
 playing the male lead. Shaw and Warner had already collaborated on various productions
and were seen as a formidable duo in their willingness to approach canonical texts with a
fresh, irreverent spirit: their Richard II would prove no exception.
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The press reviews of Warner’s Richard II read like a concerted attempt to break up a
beautiful friendship, with the majority heaping praise on the director and opprobrium on
the lead player. Shaw was condemned for over-psychologizing, indulging in excessive
gesture, breathing too heavily, massacring the verse and, with her cropped hair and
aquiline profile, resembling a ‘shorn Virginia Woolf’. In a review in the Independent (so
excoriating it prompted a ‘second opinion’ from Paul Taylor in the same newspaper nine
days later, defending Shaw ‘from the baying critics’) Rhona Koenig complained that
‘Shaw’s Richard … is a stereotypical girlie. Though crowned at 10, Richard was 30 during
the events chronicled … and unlikely to be such a giggling prat’. Koenig had clearly
missed the core idea of Warner’s interpretation and Shaw’s performance: the
consequence of being a king at ten is arrested development and neurosis.

Warner’s production foregrounded family relationships. Shaw talked in interview about

inventing her own back-story, in which the royal cousins were childhood companions,
Bolingbroke acting as Richard’s main protector. While academics would be dubious about
thinking about Richard as a ‘real person’ whose experience precedes the text, the actor’s
method, as evidenced here, is more psychologically grounded and the idea of the
cousins’ intimacy was central to performance. David Threfall, who played Bolingbroke,
bore a strong physical resemblance to Shaw and familial fondness was demonstrated
through Richard’s kissing and embracing his cousin. According to literary critic, Peter
Holland, one of the production’s admirers, the deposition scene captured the relationship
between the two with particular intensity:
Richard entered with the crown in a shopping-basket and placed it on the floor between
himself and Bolingbroke, undercutting the solemnity of the ritual by trying to play pat-a-
cake with him. But the game was now excruciatingly painful and he responded to
Bolingbroke’s question, ‘Are you contented to resign the crown?’ … with an off-hand
‘Aye’, then turned and buried his head in the lap of the seated York and screamed ‘No.’
Miming the reverse coronation through tears, Richard prostrated himself full-length
before the crowned King Henry, then punched at him until Henry embraced him and
calmed him.
  --(SS, 49, 1996, 266)
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Warner’s emphasis on family turmoil led to criticisms that she had neglected the play’s
political dimensions. However, critics could not deny that her presentation of kingship as
little more than a charade had a sharply political edge and one that some of the more
right-leaning newspaper critics found disturbing. The performance opened with Richard
behind a gauze curtain, being dressed in his robes and handed his orb and sceptre: a
dumb show suggesting that kingship is littlemore than a construct of ritual and clothing.
This ceremonial figure contrasted starkly with the Richard who followed. For most of the
drama he was dressed in white leggings and a short white tunic – making him resemble a
mummy in the eyes of some critics and a model for fashion designer, Issey Miyake, in the
eyes of others. By turns petulant, vulnerable and infantile, he was presented as a child in
office, his feet not touching the ground when seated on the throne, and sucking his
thumb as he prepared to recount ‘sad stories of the death of kings ’ (3.2.156) – a gesture
 that even the most well-disposed critics found a step too far. Other moments, such as
when Richard comes to the ailing Gaunt, wearing a black-armband and carrying a wreath
(hurriedly discarded when his uncle proves to be still breathing), pushed the implications
of the text to their limit and portrayed a king who, in the words of Benedict Nightingale in
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The Times, was ‘unfitted to rule anything larger or older than Enid Blyton’s Famous Five’.
How far the production was informed by sexual politics was another major talking point
and one which academics continue to debate. Both Shaw and Warner denied it had
feminist impetus. In an interview for the Independent Warner explained how she cast
Shaw because ‘There’s no one else I would want for Richard’, while Shaw, in an interview
with Carol Chillington Rutter, described her cross-casting as an ‘experiment’ (SQ, 48,
1997, 315), a means of liberating someone from gender. For the most part, though,
reviewers did not focus on gender. As several of the better informed among them pointed
out, cross-gendered casting was nothing new; there was a tradition of women playing
male parts going back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when, on a stage
considerably less wedded to realism than today’s, women performed roles such as
Hamlet, Romeo and Iago. Moreover, as Shaw remarked in an interview for the Open
University, the role of Richard has ‘gone off the cliff of effeminacy’ – a woman playing him
would seem to be a logical next step. The critical consensus was that Shaw had achieved
an entirely androgynous performance, with Nicholas de Jonghof the Evening Standard
commenting on how ‘the theatre’s power of make-believe seduces you into taking
androgyny in your stride’.
Some academic critics were unwilling to accept Warner’s avowed lack of feminist intention
and argued that a woman playing a major male Shakespearean role inevitably signalled a
gender-political stance. Elizabeth Klett asserted that ‘Shaw’s Richard was androgynous,
embodying a wide spectrum of gender identities’ (Cross-Gender Shakespeare and English
National Identity, 2009, 34); others, such as Grace Tiffany, saw the production as
ultimately reactionary, one which played into ‘traditional notions of femininity as lack of
emotional control, fickleness, finely tuned sensitivity, and weakness’ (‘How Revolutionary
Is Cross-cast Shakespeare? A Look at Five Contemporary Productions’ in Shakespeare:
Text and Theatre, Lois Potter and Arthur F. Kinney (eds), 1999, 121).
Warner’s Richard II was a highly ambiguous theatrical event, prompting radically different
responses (the only aspect of the production reviewers were in one mind about was
Hildegard Bechtler’s stage set which transformed the Cottesloe into a highly flexible and
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multiperspectival space). Challenging audience expectations of kingship, masculinity and,

perhaps most profoundly, Shakespearean performance, it succeeded in shaking up what
its director and leading woman saw as a somewhat moribund theatrical climate. While a
number of Shakespeare productions have since taken the casting of women in male roles
a stage further by featuring exclusively female casts (most recently Phyllida Lloyd’s 2012
Julius Caesar at the Donmar Warehouse in London), it is Shaw’s performance which has
left the greatest mark on theatre history.

Further thinking
Can you think of other Shakespeare plays where the visual impact of clothing is crucial
to its meaning and dramatic impact?
 John Gielgud (one of the most celebrated actors to have performed Richard II in the
twentieth century) felt that the elaborate verse of the play prevented the audience
from getting on intimate terms with the characters. How would you respond to this
comment?
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Kathryn Hunter played the title role in a production of King Lear directed by Helena
Kaut-Howson (Leicester Haymarket, 1997). What challenges would this role present
for a female performer? How would they differ from those faced by Fiona Shaw in
playing Richard?

Afterlives …
In 1789, John Boydell set up the Shakespeare Gallery in Pall Mall, dedicated to exhibiting
paintings of scenes from Shakespeare. One of the artists commissioned to produce work
was James Northcote; his painting, The Entry of Richard II and Bolingbroke into London,
vividly depicts a scene which is narrated but not actually staged in the play (5.2.1–40). The
painting now hangs in the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter (
www.rammuseum.org.uk ) and provides a thought-provoking example of Shakespeare’s
words translated into brushstrokes.
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