Dave's Book Blog: "Richard II" by William Shakespeare

Henry Bolingbroke accuses Norfolk of treason; the two men decide to joust it out but just before they do King Richard II exiles them both. Then, when Bolingbroke's dad John of Gaunt Duke of Lancaster dies, Richard disinherits the exiled Bolingbroke to raise revenue for his Irish war. This causes Bolingbroke to invade while Richard is fighting in Ireland. Returning, Richard finds himself without armies and has to abdicate in favour of Henry.

The beauty of the play is in the way it depicts Richard's torn and troubled mind as he is forced to give up being a King.

The plot (spoiler alert)

The play opens with a dispute between Bolingbroke (son of John of Gaunt, who is the richest man in the land and the king's elderly uncle) and Thomas Mowbray. Bolingbroke accuses Mowbray of being responsible for the murder of the Duke of Gloucester (another uncle of the King) who was in Mowbray's custody when killed. (There is an unstated suspicion that King Richard has sent the murderers and Mowbray connived at this, but no-one dare state this aloud.) Because Bolingbroke and Mowbray cannot resolve their dispute, Richard orders them to fight it out, but at the last moment calls off the joust and exiles them both: Mowbray for life (rather unjustly, but then he is a potential blackmail source the king wants silencing) and Bolingbroke for ten, no, on second thoughts, six years.

While Bolingbroke is abroad his dad, John of Gaunt, dies and Richard confiscates his possessions to pay for the war in Ireland, to which Richard then goes. This is a direct challenge to the principle of inheritance, so Bolingbroke illegally returns from exile, claiming to be doing so to defend his rights. But in the ensuing civil war, which Bolingbroke wins, Richard is captured and persuaded/ forced to abdicate in favour of Bolingbroke who becomes King Henry IV.

The themes that the play explores are:

Rights of inheritance (Richard denies Bolingbroke his inheritance which results in Bolingbroke denying Richard his)
Divine Right of Kings against the need for a ruler to rule justly and according to the accustomed law
The Wheel of Fortune (Richard falls, Bolingbroke rises)

Historical context of the play

Famously, this play was commissioned to be performed by followers of the Earl of Essex shortly before Essex staged a 'rebellion' against Elizabeth I.

Sources for the play

Shakespeare used, as he often did, The Chronicles of England (1587) by Holinshed as his principal source. Christopher Marlowe's play Edward II (1590?), which also dealt with the forced abdication of a weak king who was later murdered, is another likely source.

The style of the poetry
In the first Act the lines show a significant lack of enjambments and caesurae. There are also more rhyming couplets than usual. So, for example, in Act 1, Scene 1, when Henry Bolingbroke accuses Thomas Mowbray of treachery he says:
Thou art a traitor and a miscreant
Too good to be so and too bad to live,
Since the more fair and crystal is the sky,
The uglier seem the clouds that in it fly.
Once more, the more to aggravate the note,
With a foul traitor's name stuff I thy throat;
And wish, so please my sovereign, ere I move,
What my tongue speaks my right drawn sword may prove.

Every line end-punctuated, almost no punctuation within the lines, and the last six lines paired with rhyme, even muddling up the 'natural' order of the words in order to achieve the rhyme. All of the lines are strong endings too and most are pretty standard iambic pentameters although this is altered a little with, for example, weightier and 'with a foul'.

John of Gaunt's patriotic speech at the start of Act Two is similar:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,

Almost every line in here stands separate, its own little strong ended iambic pentameter (with the noticeable exception of the'Nature for herself Against infection)

Contrast this to Richard's speeches while he is losing his crown and, perhaps, his sanity:

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd:

Several caesura. But the only enjambement is the line that runs on with an 'And' and that is a very weak run on.

And in this example the caesurae are used to provide a call and response style but again there is only a single enjambment:
What must the king do now? must he submit?
The king shall do it: must he be deposed
The king shall be contented: must he lose
The name of king? o' God's name, let it go:

But even as he resigns the throne the tyranny of the single line continues:
Ay, no; no, ay; for I must nothing be;
Therefore no no, for I resign to thee.
Now mark me, how I will undo myself;
I give this heavy weight from off my head
And this unwieldy sceptre from my hand,
The pride of kingly sway from out my heart;
With mine own tears I wash away my balm,
With mine own hands I give away my crown,
With mine own tongue deny my sacred state,
With mine own breath release all duty's rites:
All pomp and majesty I do forswear;

My manors, rents, revenues I forego;
My acts, decrees, and statutes I deny:
God pardon all oaths that are broke to me!

It seems to me that as Shakespeare learned his craft, in later plays, there are many more enjambements. For example:

“To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;

Enjambements here in at least lines 2-3, 6-7. 7-8, 8 -9, 11-12, 13-14, 18-19, 20-21, 24-25, 26-27; nearly half the lines!

Edward II by Kit Marlowe as a source:

My fundamental assumption is that Shakespeare was a genius, but not a lone genius. He thrived in the competitive world of Elizabethan drama and one of his characteristics was to adapt (and substantially improve) the works of others. For example, there is evidence for a play about King Lear (King Leir, perhaps written by Thomas Kyd and performed in 1594) before Shakespeare’s and for an ur-Hamlet (also perhaps by Thomas Kyd and written somewhere around 1587). When contemporary playwright Robert Greene attacked Shakespeare in 1592 he referred to this ‘upstart crow’ as a Johannes factotum (Jack of all trades) which at the time probably meant that he adapted the works of others. And Richard II is relatively early in Shakespeare’s career, when he is known principally for comedies and the Henry VI series, and Christopher Marlowe was an established and respected playwright of the time.

Both Shakespeare and Marlowe came from similar backgrounds (son of a glover, son of a shoemaker) but Marlowe went to university. Shakespeare may well have envied him and even, in the early days, modelled himself on Marlowe. Christopher Marlowe was a trail-blazer in the Elizabethan theatre. His Tamburlaine (c1587 - 1588) is thought to be the first Elizabethan play to be written in blank verse. He may have collaborated with Shakespeare on the Henry VI trilogy. He was certainly an established and, with Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus, an acclaimed and popular playwright while Shakespeare was still learning his craft. Shakespeare seems to have admired him and probably referred to Marlowe (after Marlowe’s death) as “Dead Shepherd [this might refer to Marlowe’s poem, the Passionate Shepherd], now I find thy saw of might, 'Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?'” in As You Like It (3.5.80-81); this is a quote from Marlowe’s unfinished poem ‘Hero and Leander’ (1593).

Just as the deposition of Richard II was preceded by the deposition of his great-grandfather Edward II, so Shakespeare’s play Richard II was preceded by Edward II by Christopher Marlowe. Edward II was performed (possibly for the first time) in 1592 at the Theatre by the Earl of Pembroke’s Men starring Richard Burbage (Shakespeare’s leading man; Shakespeare may also have been part of this company; in 1593 a financially disastrous tour by the company included both Edward II and Shakespeare’s Henry VI part 3.) The first quarto edition of Edward II was issued in 1594. Therefore Edward II was a play with which Shakespeare could have been intimately familiar when he penned Richard II in 1595.

When considering writing his next play, Shakespeare may have been persuaded by the historical parallels between Edward II and Richard II which would enable him to write a play similar to Edward II (with a similar hope of box office success) while writing something original. These historical parallels include:

The king is extravagant, loses wars, and has favourites (in each case three: Gaveston and the elder and younger Spencers; Bushy, Bagot and Green)
The leader of the rebellion has, at the start, a legitimate grievance. He returns from abroad and defeats the king’s forces.
The king is dethroned, imprisoned and murdered.

There are differences, the principal being:

Marlowe’s subtext (though to be quite honest, Marlowe is so blatant it can hardly be described as a subtext) accusing Edward II of homosexuality which is only hinted at in Richard II when in 3.1.12 - 13 Bolingbroke says that Bushy and Green have “Made a divorce between his queen and him, Broke the possession of a royal bed”; “Since no historical warrant for such a claim exists, Shakespeare almost certainly borrowed the idea from Marlowe’s play” (Arden 2002, 163)
In Edward II the queen is one who attacks the king; in Richard II she supports the king
In Edward II there is regime change without dynastic change which doesn’t happen in Richard II (although it sort of does; Bolingbroke is the next in line given that Richard II has no children)
The fact that at the end of Edward II the usurper is held to account, and executed; while in Richard II the usurper becomes king.

An obvious difference is that Shakespeare’s play is much better focused than Marlowe’s. Marlowe writes about the whole of Edward II’s reign (so we start with the rise and fall of Gaveston and, after G’s death, we get the new favourites, the Spencers. Shakespeare only deals with the last two years of Richard II’s reign. This greater focus results in less confusion, greater clarity and more intensity: Shakespeare may have repeatedly used material from other playwrights but he was brilliant at improving them.

Not only that, but there are also similarities in the script which suggest Shakespeare borrowed lines from Marlowe. In the Elizabethan drama there was very limited copyright (which, it has been suggested, is one reason why the drama was so vibrant, by analogy with the modern fashion industry where ‘borrowing’ is rife forcing designers to produce new designs at least yearly). Here are some ‘echoes’:

In both plays, the King desires the death of an enemy (coincidentally, the Duke of Lancaster);
Both plays like "wanton" (or "lascivious") music and Italian fashions;
The principal complaints of the Lords seems to be that 'base' men have risen through royal preferment;
Both kings sit upon the ground at a key moment of the play, symbolising they are no long 'highnesses';
The Phaeton myth (the son of the god of the sun who drove his dad';s chariot and, through his incompetence, wrecked the earth, having to be cast down by Jupiter) is used in both plays.

Other quotes: