Abstract
Well before the staging and first publication of Shakespeare’s Richard II in 1597, the story of the unfortunate Plantagenet king had been on the shelves of Elizabethan stationers, available to almost every cynic and malcontent of the period.1 Indeed, when Shakespeare completed the writing of Richard II in or around 15952 the life of Richard of Bordeaux and the allusions to his reign had already been used by historians and law specialists to discuss the terms under which a king might be deposed. The theme had also been repeatedly appropriated by polemicists and malcontents to point to the moral of the story, in ways which sought to confront the so-called Elizabethan status quo.3 Polemical tracts which warned Elizabeth to beware the fate of Richard II (and other weak English sovereigns) had been in circulation since the 1580s.4 In other words, allusions to Richard II had become commonplace when commenting on the realm of politics. The tale of an ambitious courtier of royal blood who was to challenge and depose his lawful king might also have had a peculiar ring to some ears, especially to the ears of those who regarded the rise to prominence and influence of such young and eager royal favourites as Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, as a threat.5 Evidently, the reception of such stories could prove as dire as it was unpredictable. Plays were volatile material within a fast-changing context which called for caution, especially when, as a dramatist, one had very limited control over events.
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Notes
Most editors agree on 1595 as the probable date of composition for Richard II (W. Shakespeare, Richard II, ed. P. Ure, Arden Shakespeare (London and New York: Routledge, 1961), p. xxix
W. Shakespeare, King Richard II, ed. A. Gurr, New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 [1984]), p. 1
W. Shakespeare, King Richard II, ed. C. R. Forker, Arden 3 (London: Thomson Learning, 2002), p. 111).
For non-Shakespearean uses of the theme, see L. B. Campbell, Shakespeare’s Histories, Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (London: Methuen, 1964), p. 191
On Sunday, 25 February 1593, Robert, Earl of Essex took the oath of supremacy and the oath of a privy councillor. In the early 1590s the Queen’s Privy Council had become an ageing body and was in great need of new blood. At twenty-seven, Essex was then seen as definitely on the rise; he was recognized as one of the Queen’s chief advisers in matters of state and particularly in the domain of foreign affairs. The antiquary and historian William Camden reminds us in passing of the associations between Bolingbroke — the defender of his murdered uncle, Woodstock — and Robert, Earl of Essex. In the eyes of some of the Catholics, recalls Camden in his history of the reign of Elizabeth I, Essex had antecedents for the crown and these Catholics ‘cast their eyes upon the Earle of Essex... feigning a Title from Thomas of Woodstock, King Edward the third’s sonne, from whom hee derived his Pedigree’ (W. Camden, The historie of the most renowned and victorious princesse Elizabeth (London, 1630), book 4, p. 57. S.T.C.: 4500.5). In Book 2 of his Civil Wars Daniel highlights the noble virtues and ‘glorious worth’ of Henry Bolingbroke even if, admits Daniel, his cause might not have been ‘as lawfull’. This admission brings Daniel to wish that the deposition of Richard had not happened. Thus, instead of telling the sorrowful story of England’s civil wars he could have sung the deeds of Robert, Earl of Essex, whose blood was so close to Bolingbroke’s (S. Daniel, The first fovvre bookes of the ciuile wars between the two houses of Lancaster and Yorke (London, 1595), book 2, ff. 42r-43r, S.T.C: 6244). See also Richard McCoy’s seminal study. The Rites of Knighthood, The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 88
J. Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 85.
See P. Holmes, Resistance and Compromise, The Political Thought of the Elizabethan Catholics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 143.
D. Flynn, John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 145–6).
‘Gaunt’s lines must be read ironically, although even some commentators seem not to be able to perceive the strange contradictions contained within them. The central point is that England is not an island and it is not protected from invasion in the way that Gaunt hopes it will be. The invasion is actually led by the banished Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford, Gaunt’s own son, who deposes the king of the “scepter’d isle”...’ (A. Hadfield, Shakespeare, Spenser and the Matter of Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), p. 8).
The ultimate irony is, of course, that Bolingbroke falls short of his promise in 2 Henry IV, dying on English soil in a room called ‘Jerusalem’: ‘In that Jerusalem shall Harry die’ (W. Shakespeare, 2 Henry IV, in The Complete Works, eds S. Wells and G. Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986)
This fuller text was reprinted in 1615 and — probably with the prompt-book with which it was collated — it provided the basis for the text reproduced in the 1623 folio of Shakespeare’s works. A final quarto (Q6) — with a text derived from the second folio edition of Shakespeare’s works (F2, 1632) appeared in 1634 (see M. Dobson and S. Wells, eds. The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare’s Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 381
See J. Clare, ‘The Censorship of the Deposition Scene in Richard II’, The Review of English Studies, 41 (1990) 90.
S. Wells and G. Taylor, A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 311.
See J.-C. Mayer, ed., Breaking the Silence on the Succession, A Sourcebook of Manuscripts and Rare Elizabethan Texts (c. 1587–1603) (Montpellier: Université Paul Valéry, 2003), pp. 1–27.
This was the line which the Queen sought to maintain during her reign. This does not mean that such views were embraced unanimously, even at the highest levels of the state. Thomas Digges, who was employed by Elizabeth’s own lord treasurer and administrator — William Cecil, Lord Burghley — devised in the mid-1580s an interregnum plan which, in the event of the Queen’s sudden death, would give unprecedented powers to the Privy Council and to Parliament should the royal seat remain vacant for want of an heir apparent. The plan was proposed to the Queen by Burghley, but it was immediately rejected and — needless to say — it was never discussed in Parliament. The existence of such a plan proves nonetheless that senior Elizabethan political administrators could conceive (in exceptional circumstances and no doubt for a limited time) of the state being run without a sovereign (see P. Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 69.2 (1987) 418–19
Cf. Wells and Taylor, Textual Companion, p. 312. See also C. S. Clegg, ‘“By the choise and inuitation of al the realme”: Richard II and Elizabethan Press Censorship’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 48.4 (1997) 443–4.
Jean Froissart reported that the Articles were read to Richard in the Tower, where he resigned and handed over the crown; then a parliament was called and Bolingbroke was elected (J. Froissart, Of the Chronicles of Lnglande, fraunce, Spayne, etc. (1525), vol. 2, chap. 313
Italics mine. (R. Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, 6 vols. (London, 1807 [1586]), vol. 2, pp. 863–4).
R. Dutton, ‘shakespeare and Lancaster’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 49 (1998) 18.
A. Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 116).
P. Collinson, ‘John Stow and Nostalgic Antiquarianism’, in Imagining Early Modern London, Perceptions and Portrayals of the City from Stow to Strype, 1598–1720, ed. J. F. Merritt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 42
A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland ([Antwerp], 1594) S.T.C: 19398. The work was printed in 1594 (under the pseudonym of R. Doleman); it began to appear in England in 1595, despite the government’s efforts to stem its circulation (see P. Holmes, ‘The Authorship and Early Reception of A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crown of England’, Historical Journal, 23.2 (1980) 415–29).
As Ronald Corthell wrote, ‘Noting the historiographical struggle for control over the story of Bolingbroke’s takeover. Persons foregrounds historical writing as itself a form of political discourse’ (R. Corthell, ‘Robert Persons and the Writer’s Mission’, in Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts, ed. A. F. Marotti (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), p. 46).
As the historian Nigel Saul remarks, ‘the real Richard was never put on trial in Parliament’ (N. Saul, Richard II (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 4).
Cf. M. McKisack, The Fourteenth Century 1307–1399 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 494.
P. Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 29).
The audience has a very special role in Richard II, as Phyllis Rackin has also remarked: ‘there is an extra role in the play not listed in the dramatis personae, a carefully calculated role complete with motivations, actions, errors, and discoveries, a role designed to be filled by the members of the audience’ (P. Rackin, ‘The Role of the Audience in Shakespeare’s Richard II’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 36.3 (1985) 263).
See A. Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).
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© 2006 Jean-Christophe Mayer
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Mayer, JC. (2006). Religious Conscience and the Struggle for the Succession in Richard II. In: Shakespeare’s Hybrid Faith. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230595897_4
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