The Other Richard

Richard II is Shakespeare's elegy for an England that once was whole.  It's easy to see why it's not one of the bard's more popular plays: it's mostly talk and little action.  So many gauntlets get thrown down and picked up again with hardly a drop of blood spilled till the end.  As political theatre, though, it's pretty intriguing.  Forget The West Wing and House of Cards; Richard II started all of that.  Perhaps it's time for a revival.

The most interesting thing about King Richard's character is his complete ignorance of what an off-putting and charmless blighter he really is.  Richard is a character without much character, and he never does much to deserve our sympathy.  He doesn't seem to have a sense of identity separate from his title, and when that is taken away from him his only sense of substance comes from bemoaning the loss of what once was his.  He has no substance until he realizes that he is nothing.  In a way, Richard is Shakespeare's ultimate king because he has no other qualities to interfere in the definition of his character -- he is the pure essence of kingship.

Even within the realm of the play, it's hard to tell what's true about Richard and what's not.  Is he really a lecherous debauchee?  In his interactions with his queen, he doesn't come off as one.  He does, however, bear a callous disregard for the interests of anyone lower than he is -- and that includes everyone, of course.  Reckless and profligate he is, a financially imprudent manager of the kingdom, and weak in earning the respect of anyone who has cause to question the wisdom of his decisions.  Richard rules without regard to his subjects, and in the medieval worldview he inhabits, this is simply his prerogative.  Those in the play who do respect him seem to do so because of his office, and this notion they cling to with a fierceness and determination that goes no little distance in helping a modern audience to understand what the notion of kingship meant at a certain point in history.  As Marjorie Garber notes, "the older generation is shown to be impotent and powerless, placing its faith in God and in an old world order" (Shakespeare After All 244).  That old world order is about to vanish.  Henry Bolingbroke -- later King Henry IV -- is shrewder than Richard in this new world order, and yet, ultimately, almost equally hapless, as the same political machinations by which he topples Richard immediately threaten him, too.  Richard II bears witness to nothing less than the invention of politics as we know it, when power ceased to be a right and became instead something that a ruler had to manage, manipulate, and defend from internal threats as well as external threats.  The play reveals kingship itself as a communally agreed-upon fiction, a social construction.  The title is awarded to the one who does the best job of convincing others that he should be king.  When Richard dies, it marks the end of an era in which the privilege of kingship could be taken as a given. 

A paradise England was then, but perhaps only a paradise in retrospect.  Between the lines, the play questions if it really could have been that perfect if it held within it the mechanism of its own downfall and decline by placing such a hollow man on the throne.  Once the illusion of kingly virtue is shattered, it's gone for good, though, and England is left in a precarious place.  Two hundred years later, this was the still precarious England in which Shakespeare found himself.  The language of the play, though, is continuously retrospective, the language of a paradise lost, and the action is completely downward, or perhaps chiastic -- with Richard falling as Bolingbroke rises.  The first elegy of the play is spoken in prophetic form by the dying John of Gaunt, who in the midst of a longer speech declares

          This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle,
          This earth of majesty, ...
          This other Eden, demi-paradise,
          This fortress built by nature for herself
          Against infection and the hand of war,
          ... Is now leased out ....

          That England that was wont to conquer others
          Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
          (2.1.45-72)

Fittingly, given the Eden theme here, much of the casual conversation throughout the play is devoted to gardening, to tending plants and making them bear fruit.  Richard is no Adam, though; whatever fruit he eats imparts little knowledge, and instead of a line of descent he engenders only a downward descent of fortune.  Many of Richard's speeches, increasingly lengthy and increasingly elegiac, would not be out of place coming from exiled Lear's mouth, but Richard, unlike Lear, fails to excite much sympathy. 

What Richard does do right and do well is to elegize.  He elegizes not only his downward descent from kingship but also the wholeness of the England that was, when the office of the king was enough to unite the kingdom.  "Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs," Richard says when he first realizes that all is lost,

          Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
          Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.
          Let's choose executors and talk of wills.
          And yet not so, for what can we bequeath
          Save our deposed bodies to the ground?

          For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
          And tell sad stories of the death of kings.
          (3.2.150-155, 160-161)

Richard's elegies are inevitably part harangue, as well.  He's incredulous, outraged, offended; he's histrionic and petulant.  Unlike Lear, who finds himself in a situation that is in some ways analogous, Richard never demonstrates remorse, never demonstrates a glimmer of understanding why he has fallen, only that he has: "for I must nothing be" (4.1.210).  His most dramatic gesture is to smash a mirror in which he sees a reflection of himself, to prove "How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face" (4.1.302).  The action produces a cool and measured rebuke from pragmatic Bolingbroke: "The shadow of your sorrow" -- meaning the sorrow that Richard's imprudent actions have produced -- "hath destroyed / The shadow of your face" (4.1.303-304).  The unresolved irony of Richard's character is that he never once seems to acknowledge that his own weaknesses, his own poor decisions as a ruler, are the cause of his own downfall.  Still, there are glimmers of an active consciousness, most especially in an exceptionally long and powerful speech at the end, which includes these lines:

          Thus play I in one person many people.,
          And none contented.  Sometimes am I king.
          Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar.
          And so I am: then crushing penury
          Persuades me I was better when a king.
          Then am I kinged again, and by and by
          Think that I am unkinged by Bolingbroke
          And straight am nothing.  But whate'er I be,
          Nor I nor any man that but man is
          With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased
          With being nothing.
          (5.5.31-41)

The idea of the self as nothing would be revisited by that other doomed king, the aged Lear, many years later.  The meta-dramatic theme of the king playing a part will also be revisited in Macbeth's most famous soliloquy.  The insights here are powerful and poetic.  They do Richard little good, though, for by the end of the scene he is dead -- not, it is worth noting, without slaying two of his would-be murderers. 

Is this play a history or a tragedy?  The distinction here, as with Richard III, would seem only to place limits on a play that can appeal to traditions in both genres.  The major structural irony of the play is that Richard himself in slain by the same means that set into motion the chain of events leading to his downfall.  Rumor killed Gloucester -- the rumor that Richard wanted him dead, which is the kind of rumor that inspires ambitious men to action -- and the same kind of rumor kills Richard himself.  The irony is not lost on the newly crowned Henry IV, who seems to realize that his own rule will be plagued by dissent and strife.  The difference is that Henry will not deal so weakly with threats to his safety.  One can believe that Henry has the capacity to be a better king, but will the office of kingship allow it in this new political world?  This becomes the matter for the next installment in what scholars call the Henriad, chronologically the first of Shakespeare's two tetralogies in English history, thought the second in composition.

Lion-hearted Richard I may not have boasted a Shakespeare play to his name, but he has plenty else in legend.  Richard III, of course, lives in ignominy -- rightly or wrongly, all parking lot discoveries aside.  Richard II has languished in obscurity for lo these many years.  He's a curious character, after all, though, and worth a second look -- despite the fact that the harder you look, the less there is to see.