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Richard II: The State and the Image of the Theater

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 August 2021

Leonard F. Dean
Leonard F. Dean*
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut Storrs
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Extract

One way to describe the passage from Richard II to Henry V is to say that the first play is a picture of a sick state in which appearance and reality are at odds and that the last play is a picture of a healthy state in which political appearance and reality are unified in terms of the Elizabethan ideal of monarchy. This essay suggests that one sign of the political sickness in Richard II is the presence, explicit or implied, of the Renaissance comparison between the state and the theater. As the suggestion is developed, the reader will be asked to grant that political problems are also philosophical problems, and that plot and character may be controlled expressions of a general moral theme as well as dramatic accounts of typical personalities or recurrent historical situations. Examples of the state-theater comparison from More and Machiavelli will be reviewed, not to prove direct indebtedness by Shakespeare, but to show how the comparison was available in two pertinent contexts, Christian humanism and Renaissance Realpolitic.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 67 , Issue 2 , March 1952 , pp. 211 - 218
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1952

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References

Notes

1 The state-theater comparison is not noticed by Richard D. Altick in his “Symphonic Imagery in Richard II,” PMLA, lxii (1947), 339-365. Altick does, however, follow Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare (New York, 1939), pp. 85-87, in remarking the insistent use of tongue, mouth, speech, word, and this leads him to the conclusion: “That words are mere conventional sounds moulded by the tongue, and reality is something else again, is constantly on the minds of all the characters” (p. 350). He also suggests that “the tragic sense of unsubstantiality in this play—the confusion of appearance and reality” is supported by the repeated use of hollow and face (pp. 350-351, 363).

2 The interpretation which emphasizes the contrasting personalities of Richard and Bolingbroke is widely known. According to it, the theatrical and narcissistic Richard, a poet manqué, goes down before the efficient Bolingbroke, who, in Oscar J. Campbell's words, “never clogs his impulse to action with play-acting or sentimentalizing” (The Living Shakespeare, New York, 1949, p. 181). The possible implications of the play as a mirror of a recurrent historical pattern have been stressed by Lily B. Campbell in Shakespeare's “Histories” (San Marino, 1947), pp. 168-212: “Shakespeare thus offered the follies of Richard II only as a background for the presentation of the problem that was so often discussed during Elizabeth's reign, the problem of the deposition of a king ... He used Richard II as the accepted pattern of a deposed king, but he used his pattern to set forth the political ethics of the Tudors in regard to the rights and duties of a king. It might equally well have served as a warning to Elizabeth and to any who desired to usurp her throne” (pp. 211-212).

3 The English Works, ed. W. E. Campbell and A. W. Reed (London and New York, 1931), i, 479; see pp. 462 and 482-483 for the stage image in conjunction with the un-weeded garden, sickness, deposition and execution.

4 English Works, i, 447-448.

5 The Utopia, ed. J. H. Lupton (Oxford, 1895), pp. 98-99.

6 It is not discussed in the best and latest account of the play's sources: Matthew W. Black, “The Sources of Shakespeare's Richard II,” Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies (Washington, 1948), pp. 199-216. The first act offers little or no evidence for the interpretation which stresses the contrast between the personalities of Richard and Bolingbroke. Miss Campbell is mainly interested at this point in the possible resemblance between Bolingbroke and “the Earl of Essex, famous for his courtesy and in love with the power which popularity brought” (p. 198). E. M. W. Tillyard in Shakespeare's History Plays (New York, 1946) does deal at length with Act I, but he interprets the two tones or styles here and elsewhere in the play as representative of two eras, medieval and modern, that are at a moment of transition: “the ‘poetry’ of Richard is all a part of a world of gorgeous tournaments, conventionally mournful queens, and impossibly sententious gardeners, while Bolingbroke's common sense extends to his backers, in particular to that most important character, Northumberland. We have in fact the contrast not only of two characters but of two ways of life” (p. 258).