Abstract
In the previous chapter, I concentrated on the repeated use of “eyes” and sight in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a way of understanding how playgoers are exposed to a variety of notions of how sight functions, both within the frame of the play and for the playgoers themselves. While Richard II is not so obviously dependent on the motif of vision, the visual has important reverberations in the moments when characters are left alone on stage. The noticeable dearth of soliloquies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is also the case in Richard II. In Richard II, only two characters have soliloquies: Salisbury in 2.4 and Richard in 5.6.1 I think it worthwhile in the first of these to tease out some of the connections to vision in order to pave the way for some of the larger concerns of this chapter.2 Salisbury remains on stage after the departure of a Welsh Captain in the very short 2.4. Salisbury’s soliloquy before departure is a brief seven lines, but effectively connects the truth-telling aspects of a soliloquy to many of the recurrent images in the play. Noticeably, Salisbury draws attention to his vision of Richard through the “eyes of heavy mind” (2.4.18). He even more emphatically notes the metaphoric nature of his vision by providing the linking “like” when he says, “I see thy glory like a shooting star / Fall to the base earth from the firmament” (2.4.19–20).
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Notes
Later in this chapter, I return to Richard’s 5.6 soliloquy. I draw a firm distinction around soliloquy here and insist on the character being alone on stage; Janette Dillon’s Shakespeare and the Staging of English History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) argues for a wider use of the term soliloquy, particularly in connection with Richard II, 89–91.
For a useful exploration of the available different objects called “perspectives” in the period, see Allan Shickman, “The ‘Perspective Glass’ in Shakespeare’s Richard II,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 18.2 (1978), 217–228.
Jeremy Lopez, The Shakespeare Handbooks: Richard II (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 30.
Charles Forker, (ed.), Richard II, by William Shakespeare (London: Thomson, 2002), 65.
Brian Walsh, “The dramaturgy of discomfort,” in Richard II: New Critical Essays, ed. Jeremy Lopez (London: Routledge, 2012), 181–201, 190.
Jonathan Baldo’s Memory in Shakespeare’s Histories: Stages of Forgetting in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2012) reads memory and forgetting in Richard II to offer a modified notion of the kingship the play displays, 10–50.
E.M.W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1951), 251.
Phyllis Rackin, “The Role of the Audience in Richard II,” Shakespeare Quarterly 36.3 (1985), 262–281, 268.
Jane Kingsley-Smith, Shakespeare’s Drama of Exile (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003) 56. Kingsley-Smith reads Romeo’s banishment as being essentially about “speechlessness,” which links that banishment to Mowbray’s exile in interesting ways.
Michael Grene, Shakespeare’s Serial History Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 170.
Jeremy Lopez, “Eating Richard II,” Shakespeare Studies 36 (2008): 207–228, 215.
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© 2014 Darlene Farabee
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Farabee, D. (2014). Grounded Action and Making Space in Richard II . In: Shakespeare’s Staged Spaces and Playgoers’ Perceptions. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137427151_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137427151_3
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