So today, I'm focussing on Shakespeare's history plays, which is the second house, a play. Generally dated to fifteen ninety five. First published in 15 97. So it has near chronological neighbours. Romeo and Juliet and Midsummer Night's Dream and shares quite a lot of linguistic features with both those plays. But obviously, it also introduces a new sequence of English history plays, which is going to continue with the two parts of Henry the Fourth and then Henry the Fifth.
And it shares an interest in regicide and regime change with later plays, which might include Julius Caesar and Macbeth. So what I want to try and talk about in today's lecture is the politics and the dramaturgy of Richard. The second under the heading. Was it right for Bowling Brook to take the throne from Richard? Was it right for Bolingbrook to take the throne from Richard? So, as usual, let's back up and contextualise that critical question within the plot of the play.
Richard, the second begins with a confusing scene, a near duel between two noblemen, Bowling Brook, the Duke of Hereford and Thomas Mowbray, the Duke of Norfolk. They're each accusing the other of killing the Duke of Gloucester. Richard intervenes to postpone the combat between the two noblemen.
But it's clearly something odd going on and is until later in the play that we get to know that Richard himself, the king, is implicated in the death of the Duke of Gloucester, Bolingbrook Mowbray returned to take up that quarrel again. And Richard again defers the combat, banishing them instead for 10 years for pulling Brooke, which he later reduces to six and life for Mowbray.
Bullying Brooke's father, John Gaunt, expresses while he's dying his eloquent disappointment in the king's lavish behaviour and prophesies the decline of England. But Richard is unrepentant and he takes away Gordon's estate on guns death in order to pay for a military expedition to Ireland on the death of his father, Bolingbrook returns to England with an army attempting to recover his inheritance.
And when Richard returns from Ireland, troops, including some of his former supporters, are defecting to Bolingbrook. Bolingbrook, though, agrees to surrender if he is reinstated to his property. But Bolin Brooks power grows. He has Richard's former advisers executed, and he arrests other noblemen on the charge of murdering the Duke of Gloucester. Richard's queen. Here's to gardeners talking about the inevitability that Richard will be overthrown.
Richard agrees to abdicate in favour of Bolingbrook. And he publicly hands over the crown to him in parliament. Bolingbrook announces his own coronation. Much to the disgust of the bishop of Carlisle, who speaks passionately about the divine rights of kings. Richard says goodbye to his queen. He's taken into captivity. There's a small counter conspiracy against Bolingbrook, but this is discovered in Bolingbrook.
This actually decides to forgive the conspirators. Richard is in prison where Piers X10 comes to visit him. Axton believes he has Bollon Brooks mandate for doing this and kills Richard. Although Richard defends himself bravely, Axton bears Richard's body to Bolingbrook. Now, Henry, the fourth, who denies that he ever wanted Richard to be killed. It banishes Axton and vows a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to wash away his guilt.
It's essentially a play about the way in which Bolingbrook takes over, takes the throne from Richard. The play gives us the depiction of the transfer of power between Richard the Second and Henry Bolingbrook, who then becomes handed the fourth. Henry takes up the throne before Richard is dead, but his predecessor's death confirms his succession. So where should our sympathies? Emotional, rational, dramatic, political. Why should they lie in this story?
I want to start quite closely within the play, and then I'm going to move out to some of the contacts we might want to put round it. I going to start with two metaphors. The play itself uses for the transfer of power.
It depicts the first comes from Richard. Richard uses a wide range of emotive language to describe the events of the play from his own perspective, particularly a kind of Christological symbolism where he is the betrayed Christ, Bollon Brooking's a Judas, and the noblemen who do nothing to stop him are the the disciples who stand by.
So in such moments, the figurative language Richard uses to describe what's happening makes it quite clear that Richard himself believes in Brooks' actions to be a sinful betrayal. But as Mandy Rice Davies families famously said, in only a slightly different context, he would, wouldn't he? The image I want to discuss, however, sees Richard in more material and less metaphysical mode. He and bowling both hold the crown at the moment of the transfer of that prop inact foreseen one.
And Richard's image is of a well. Now, is this golden crown like a deep well that those two buckets filling one another, the emptier ever dancing in the air, the other down unseen and full of water, that bucket down unseen and full of tears. My drinking, my griefs whilst you mantar up on high. So now is this golden crown. Like a deep well that owes to buckets filling one another. The MTA ever dancing in the air, the other down unseen and full of water.
That bucket down unseen and full of tears are my drinking my griefs whilst you mount up on high. So two things seem me potentially interesting about Richard Simile here. One is the way in which its spatial dynamic, the rise and fall of the buckets in the well, recalls a mediaeval theory of tragedy sometimes known as the day kazee. Both tragedy they casias tragedy. You might be familiar to this, familiar with this as a Chaucerian kind of idea.
Their customers, so their cars obvious tragedy depicts the downfall of noble or highborn individuals. Describing tragedy in his art of English posi in fifteen eighty nine. George Putnam has it as the doleful falls of unfortunate and afflicted princes. The doleful falls of unfortunate and afflicted princes. So that's from Putnam writing in fifteen eighty nine. And that's a description of decades of US tragedy, the downfall of noble individuals.
Richard visualises his tragedy then in terms which are analogous to the idea of the Wheel of Fortune. One figure rises while the other falls. Now, when it was first published in 15 '97 and in fact, in all its Quarto editions before the Folio of Sixteen Twenty three, the play was titled The Tragedy of King Richard the Second. How might our reading it as a tragedy that Casias or otherwise affect the question of how we read Pauline Brooks' actions?
So the question of John, I think is an interesting one. In some ways we can read the structure of Richard the second as endorsing Richard's own claims to the central dramatic interest afforded to the titular character in tragedy. So that's central. Dramatic interest. Not really moral poll position. This is someone at the centre of the play rather than someone who has a particular moral character. Richard, the third, for example, was also called a tragedy in its first publications.
So as in King Lear or Coriolanus or Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet, it is the name of the title character that brings the play to a close. Richard's life and the span of the play are equivalent terms. Shakespeare's shaping of the historical material here is all the more striking, given that obviously there's lots more of the story still to come. History does not come to an end. Unlike tragedy at the end of a tragedy, we don't really feel any interest in what comes next.
And in fact, it could almost be said that the idea of the future is one of the most significant casualties amongst the body count at the end of a tragedy. 114 brass comes in at the end of Hamlet or Winnetka or Albany, tried to say something trite at the end of King Lear. We know that they're just temporising. The focus has gone from the tragic world. We are not interested or convinced that there is any future beyond the end of the play.
Tragedy is therefore apocalyptic or eschatological tells it tells us something about the end of the world. The promised end as the final lines of King Lear puts it. Now, to some extent, Richard, the second shares this structure. And it's interesting to think structurally about the figure of Bolingbrook compared with, say, the figure of 14 brass is Bolingbrook, like Fortum Brass, merely the kind of external nemesis of the tragic character.
Not really a particular agent, but almost a scapegoat for internal or societal fissures which make the tragic, hearer's demise inevitable. So what is that the way in which the play engages with the genre of history? There's another aspect to the play. Obviously, it's engagement with the ongoing processes of of history. So it's thinking about a tragic form and the historical form.
At the same time. The thing about history is it continues, the death of one king inevitably means the combination of another. The king is dead. Long live the king part of the myth of monarchic sanctity. What Ernst Cantarell of memorably dubbed the king's two bodies. The idea that the king has both a physical body which is susceptible to agent decline like every other person, but also a kind of political body which never changes.
So the king's body continues across time, even where individual physical occupants of that will decline and fade away. What? So what Kantaro Vitz calls the king's two bodies means that the death of a king is never the end. The death of the great man is not a tragedy in this schema. It's just the necessary and inevitable renewal of the of the role of monarch. So a monarchy like history itself is opposed to tragedy by opposing the finite end stopped idea of tragedy.
Those buckets to go back to Richard's image. Keep moving. Richards is implicitly an image of historical process, not of tragic finality. The bucket that's down goes up again and vice versa. Now, when Richard the second comes to be published in the Folio text, that edition of Collected Shakespeare plays invents the genre of history. It includes it as one of three genres, it showcasing from Shakespeare's works, comedies, histories and tragedies.
And it invents history as a genre entirely to do with England. So the history play genre in the First Folio catalogue includes only English history plays. And it also puts the plays in order of chronological history rather than, say, in order of their composition. So we know, for example, that Shakespeare writes the Henry the Sixth plays before he writes to Henry. The fourth plays. Its title in that order in the First Folio catalogue is quite different.
The Life and Death of Richard the second, the life and death of Richard, the second that's part of the tragedy of King Richard. The second historical sequence, that's to say it does not have room for individual tragedy. And therefore, one way of answering the question about Bolin Brooks' actions is generic. We might answer it differently if we read the play is a tragedy from the way we would answer it if we were reading it in the sequence of historical plays in the First Folio.
Now, what's striking about Richard's metaphor is that the buckets can't really take any responsibility for their respective positions or for their movement. Are inanimate objects dependent on some external impetus to move? It would be unreasonable not to say surreal for one bucket to blame the other for the change in their positions. Related to this is that the simile of the world buckets makes no moral distinction between the two figures, between the two kings.
Neither is better at the job. Neither is more suited to be a bucket. There's an arbitrariness about which one is up and which one is down. Perhaps related to a feeling that Richard could have used this simile in the opposite way that he is dancing in the air, relieved of his duties while Bolingbrook is down. Wade with the cares of office. In this respect, there's a radical arbitrariness about the play's answer to the question of bowling books conduct in taking the throne.
When the director, John Barton, produced the play for the RNC in 1974, he had two actors, Ian Richardson and Richard Pasko, alternating the two roles of Richard and Bowling Brook, alternating those two roles. Bartons Barton had wanted each night's casting to be random and determined by the roll of a die on stage at the beginning of the performance. But box office logistics meant this wasn't possible, that they had to say in advance who was going to be playing which row.
But he kept the idea of the die at the beginning of the performance, ALEC, as if it allocated. Which actor will play which role that night? As you know, more recent incidents of this Swopped casting Danny Boyle stage version of Frankenstein in 2010, where Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller alternate the roles of monster and creator Bartons direction of Richard the second.
In this way suggested the similarities between Richard and his antagonist rather than seeing them as has had been traditional as complete opposites.
So the view of Richard and Bolingbrook as opposites had been used to suggest that the transfer of sovereignty could be read as a transfer of huge historical atlast seems like the change from feudalism to capitalism or from divine right to pragmatism or political or personal versions of Hegel's influential view of tragedy as conflict conflict between two opposing forces.
By contrast, Bartons Productions suggested that far from representing two opposing worldviews, the two men at the heart of this play are cousins placed in arbitrary but different positions and therefore subject to historical process in different ways. That example from the theatre related to the image of the two buckets can help us move to another simile. The play uses to describe the transfer of power.
The Duke of York, who's shifting sympathies in this play act as a kind of weather vane for the audience, is describing to his wife the entrance into London of the victorious Bolingbrook and the defeated Richard Bolling. Brook says York was greeted with God save the bawling brook. You would have thought the very windows spake so many greedy looks of young and old through Casement's started that desiring eyes upon his visage.
The duchess asks her husband about poor Richard, where, writes he the whilst. And Yorke's metaphor is striking, as in a theatre. The eyes of men after a world graced actor leads the stage are idly bent on him. That enters next, thinking his prattled to be tedious. Even so, or with much more contempt, men's eyes did scowl on Richard, as in a theatre. The eyes of men after a well-dressed actor leaves the stage idly bent on him.
That follows next, thinking his prattled to be tedious. Even so, or with much more contempt, men's eyes did scowl on Richard. Now that image of the king as an actor is a trope that recurs throughout Shakespeare's history plays and throughout the culture, which prompted them Elizabeth's own much quoted phrase. We princes, I tell you, are set on stages in the sight and view of all the world duly observed. We princes, I tell you, are set on stages in the sight and view of all the world.
Duly observed, acknowledges the theatricality intrinsic to a spectacular early modern monarchy. In an age in which progress's coronation processions and accession tilts drew on some of the emerging vocabulary of the public stage. But here in York speech, the image again is an interesting one. The difference between the old and the new kings or more pointedly, between the legitimate king and the usurping one is not the difference between the true and the copy.
The difference between the real monarch and the counterfeit player, rather, the contrast is between a good, well, great actor and a tedious one. Both are actors. Both are pretending neither can claim authenticity, according to the simile. So what we haven't got here is a is a comparison of the real and the copy or the real and the counterfeit. We've got two counterfeits, but one. That's good. Good to take. And one that's less good.
Bolingbrook is just better at pretending to be king. He's a better actor. This logic of the theatre that the audience prefers, the better actor and his restless and contemptuous when a lesser performer comes on, is extremely subversive when attached to the issue of monarchy because it replaces the notion of authenticity with facility. Doesn't matter whether you're supposed to be king, what matters is if you're good at it or good at seeming to be it.
It overlays the question of who is the rightful king with the one of who is the better king. And the question of who is a better care, of course, is a completely unanswerable one in a hereditary monarchy. Even to ask then whether Bollon Brooks actions in taking the throne might be justified. Is therefore a potentially politically challenging question. Having analysed to the similes used within the play for that transfer of power.
Now I want to try and think about it in the broader context of early modern politics. So, as you probably know, behind the history play boom of the 50 nineties is almost certainly contemporary concerns and cultural anxieties around the Elizabethan succession.
That's to say these are plays about late 16th century politics, not late 14th century ones, play after play by Shakespeare and others obsesses on moments of transfer, obsesses on the theme of the king challenged by rivals, obsesses on scuffles over the crown. No history play ever depicts the long or settled reign of an established monarch.
While Elizabeth had made discussion of the succession a felony, so a crime punishable by death plays and other texts using historical subjects probed the otherwise and articulable question of what might happen after her death. Unsurprisingly, we see that once we know what's going to happen after her death. Once James the first comes to the throne, the interest in history plays evaporates almost immediately.
In 15 99, the so-called bishop's barn attacked two literary genres and made them subject to increase censorship and regulation. Those two genres were satire and history. Each of those. Both satire and history had become a means for commentary, often unflatteringly on contemporary events. Now, for some critics, the relation of the history plays to their own moments in the 15 nineties is an essentially conservative one. And in this, they tend to follow a really influential critic. He w Tilyard.
Tilyard influential vision of the history plays was as a as as a version of what he called the Tudor myth. And this idea was that Shakespeare wrote his history plays to please Elizabeth as a long, implicit hymn of praise to the settled civil peace ushered in by The Tudors.
Fertility at the deposition and murder of Richard, the second that we're talking about today was the act of terrible sin for which the whole of the rest of the historical sequence up to Richard, the third defeat at Bosworth Field by Henry Tudor was a long and bloody expiation. So here his view of it was that in the play we're talking about today, we see the crime in the next seven plays.
We see the consequences of that crime. And it's only when we get Henry Tudor at the end of Richard the third that this has been put. Right. In fact, Tilyard, more of us is actually in Richard the second. His view of events is pretty clearly spoken by the bishop of Carlisle, who gives the play's most extensive defence of the divine right of kings. As the other nobles stand by waiting for Richard to be brought to parliament to abdicate, what subject can give sentence on his king and who sits here?
That is not Richard Subject thunders Carlisle and he voices a view view of the king, an unforeseen one as the figure of God's majesty. His Captain Stewart, deputy elect, anointed and crowned the idea that the King is God's representative and deputy on Earth. The bishop goes on to predict that if Richard is deposed, the blood of English shall manure the ground in this seat of peace, tumultuous walls shall kinn with Ken and kind with kind confound.
So he predicts civil war. And of course, he's right. As audiences would have already probably recognised. Shakespeare has written those plays on the reign of Henry the Sixth, which dramatise the wars of the roses, which in some sense lead lead on from this action here. But within the play itself, however, there are no such consequences. Attending the murdering of Richard, partly because of the way the murder of Richard is placed in the structure of the play.
So we're back to the idea of tragedy. If we compare it to the second with Julius Caesar for a moment, another play about a deposed ruler. We can see a different structural Hunde handling of the same theme in Julius Caesar. The death of Caesar comes right in the middle of the play. So the beginning of the plays, the lead up to the murder of Caesar, the assassination and the second half of the play are the consequences by having the death of Caesar in the middle of that play.
Shakespeare can show us the consequences as Caesar's supporters tipped into action by the persuasive rhetoric of Anthony, take back power from the conspirators. So the arc of the play Julius Caesar shows us the decision to take power, the taking of power and the losing of power in return. So it's a we might see a similar kind of complete movement in Macbeth day. Macbeth decides to take the throne. He takes the throne. He has the throne taken from him in return.
Both those plays dramatise an act and its consequences. In Richard, the second, we get only the first of those, but not the last. That movement of retribution is not completed. There just isn't time within the play in the way Shakespeare has written it. Henry ends the play. Confirmed in his throne by Richard's murder. Even as he professes that he did not wish his predecessor killed.
Although I do not think Shakespeare writes his plays to convey messages. The reminder of film mogul Sam Goldwyn in the early days of Hollywood. If you want to send a message, use Western Union. It's actually quite a good one for the early modern theatre. But even so, we might think that one outcome of Richard the second as a standalone play perhaps at the Curtain Theatre is you can depose and murder the rightful king and nothing happens.
No punishment falls on your head. Tilyard idea of a broadly conservative cast to the history plays in which Borling Brooks Act is a terrible crime. Aline's Richard the Second, with Orthodox contemporary views about disobedience to the sovereign and the sovereign in this case would be Elizabeth. The official homily on disobedience and wilful rebellion.
The homily on disobedience, a wilful rebellion which was appointed to be read in Elizabethan churches, described in graphic terms just how bad rebellion and disobedience were. The first rebellion was that of Lucifer in heaven, the second that of Adam and Eve in paradise. The consequences clearly are terrible ones, according to the homily, which is at pains to hammer home the message that however bad the sovereign, the subject has no right to rebel.
The punishment for any such rebellion will be much, much worse than the original suffering under the bad sovereign. In this framework, we can see that Bollon Brooks acts up, act as a rebellion against the sovereign, have criminal far reaching consequences. But of course, we need to bear in mind that the homilies on subjects including drunkenness, idolatry, adultery and excessive apparel tell us as much about what people did do by telling us what they were exhorted not to do,
just as some people probably drank too much. So some people may not have been entirely convinced that rebellion was always such a bad thing. But that homily against disobedience and wilful rebellion gives us a context in which Bollon Brook's actions are clearly wrong to rebel against a sovereign. It's clearly the wrong thing to do, and we might see this reading.
The idea that Waldenbooks behaviour is unjustifiable, we might see that reading supported by some of the choices Shakespeare has made in selecting from the historical sources for the play. He seems, for example, to diminished the negative role of Richard Parasitic Advisors, Bushi Budget and Green. We never really see them in this play. Behaving very badly. He stresses that Richard takes gaunt money not for his own lavish expenditure, but for the national coffers to prosecute a war in Ireland.
Quite a quite a contemporary and topical view for the 50 nineties. Shakespeare gives Richard a soliloquy in prison in the play's final scene that creates sympathy for him. He develops an extended non historical role for Richard's wife, which also seems to serve to humanise the king. And he chooses not to give any active voice to the common people and their complaints against the social elite.
Even the gardener in this play, who might be thought to be a representative of ordinary people, speaks blank verse and sophisticated political theory. The common people in this play who we never see are always called subjects a word which indicates they're hierarchical subservience to the monarch rather than in Hollywood. Hollinshead chronicles Shakespeare's major source citizens, a word which Shakespeare uses elsewhere in his history plays.
So the word citizen has more sense of active participation in the Commonwealth or in the Polis subject as a much more kind of hierarchical role. And that's the word that Shakespeare chooses to focus on, in which the second, if you want to play to compare it to you, might have a look at the contemporary anonymous play Woodstock, sometimes titled Thomas of Woodstock. That's a play about the murder of the Duke of Gloucester, which is the source of contention with which Shakespeare's play begins.
And in this anonymous play, Woodstock, Richard's presentation is much darker. So it's interesting to think about how Shakespeare uses his source material. And in this case, an alternative and contemporary view of similar events in the play Woodstock. These might help us answer the question about Bolin Brook's behaviour in the negative. Shakespeare has deliberately minimised Richard failings, Richard's failings, perhaps in order to make his deposition less excusable.
Gates has built up the case for Richard rather than for Bolingbrook. Tell Yards overall argument about the Tudor myth is, however, a slightly curious one. It's perverse, I think, to see these plays which so insistently dramatise the excitement of regime change as propaganda for settled monarchy. They're just not about that. And it takes an effort to make them refer to that.
And it's also odd to believe that when the Tudor dynasty is reaching its anxious terminus in the figure of the ageing Virgin Queen, proclaiming The Tudors as England's sole saviour from civil war is not particularly reassuring. Tilyard is writing in 1945, which perhaps explains his insistence on order unstability emerging from violent chaos.
But for readers and viewers of the 50 nineties, it's not clear that Richard, the second was only interpreted, as Tilyard does, as the sinful deposition of a rightful king. For one thing, it seems from the publication history of the play that it may have been censored.
Those speeches in Act four, including the one about the buckets that have already discussed the scene in which Richard hands over the crown orb and sceptre to Bolingbrook are not present in any of the texts published during Elizabeth's lifetime. Many critics feel this is due to censorship, showing a lawful king being deposed on stage, perhaps particularly through a case I legalistic instrument like parliament might have been thought to subversive.
It's a dangerous play, which then seems to depict the overthrow of a sovereign. We also know that the historical rivalry between Richard and Bolingbrook comes during the 15 nineties to have a particular connexion with the fortunes of the most prominent Elizabethan nobleman, the Earl of Essex. Essex's role in court as the champion of a more active military engagement in the Protestant cause in Europe means that he's a controversial figure.
And after the failure of his military expedition to Ireland in 50 99, I talk about this in my lecture on Henry the Fifth because it's part of that paycheque that mentions it in Henry the Fifth. After the failure of that expedition to Ireland 50 99 Essex Falls from favour. He and his supporters mount a disastrous attempt to persuade Elizabeth to reinstate him, which turns into an ill fated rebellion against Elizabethan rule.
ASX is arrested and executed for treason. But Richard, the second is on the sidelines of this story. The Lord Chamberlain's men, Shakespeare's company, were paid by Essex's supporters to perform their old play, Richard, the second on the eve of Essex's abortive revolt in February 16, 01. So the play's commission to be part of the preparation, the ideological preparation, we might say, for Essex's attempt to challenge Elizabeth's authority.
Presumably, there was some sense that this play about a monarch and his unhelpful advisers might help gather support for Essex's own challenge, as it kept saying that he was his real target was not the queen herself, but the terrible advisers around her. After the failure of the rebellion, the Chamberlains men are called before the Privy Council to account for their part in the affair. Why did they agree to perform a play under the auspices of Essex and his supporters?
Their spokesman, Augustine Phillips, claims they merely took a commission to perform an old play. And since they were back at court performing within a month, their participation in this rebellion count caused too much concern.
But the idea of a play which is co-opted for contemporary political action, however doomed that action might be, has been extremely attractive to historians of early modern drama who've been dissatisfied by Tilyard idea that players are conservative and have been keen to find instead in the theatre. A challenge to Orthodox political ideas. This line of argument sees the actions of Bowling Brook as dangerous, endorsed by the play and radically subversive of contemporary order.
But perhaps we can begin to see that as an interpretive position, this is as ideologically constructed as that of Tilyard. Both readings find in the plays politics, confirmation of their own politics. We make Shakespeare mean what we want him to mean. So does that mean that Shakespeare doesn't take sides in the question of bowling Brooks' actions?
Well, it has certainly been one aspect of Shakespeare's ongoing flexibility to different theatrical and political agendas that his own politics seem always to be so hidden. Richard, the second does suggest that Bowling Brook may be a better king with a broader base of support, but it never suggests that he is the rightful king. And so it replaces two incompatible frameworks, better and rightful, which structure the whole play.
The system of hereditary monarchy does not have any place for a meritocratic condition, consideration of how different candidates would be as king. It can't even allow that is a question. And it may be that it's this interest which is going to leach expert away from English history and towards Roman history, particularly in Julius Caesar, or the question of what makes a good ruler can be openly debated.
But Shakespeare gives us in Richard the second a presentation of Richard, which seems much more detailed, maybe even more inward than that of Bolingbrook. We never know, for example, why Volin Brook Wobble Brooke has in mind when he returns from France to claim his inheritance, nor when he decides that he is not just going to get his inheritance back. But the whole throne, he never tells us there are no soliloquies, no private moments, no privileged access to what Bolingbrook is thinking.
It's very hard, therefore, in the way Shakespeare has structured the play to feel close to or sympathetic towards Bolingbrook on stage. All his speeches are practical, controlled and public. Imagine scenes which might have made him more sympathetic. How he takes news of his father's death, for example, or whether he struggles over the rightfulness of taking the throne. We never get those scenes, so we never see whether there is a kind of inner in a struggle or or torment.
Richard, stage presence is much more emphatic, much more dramatic than that of his rival. If you got the role of Bolingbrook, your cast in the role of Wallinger, Brooke. And Richard, the second, I think you would feel slightly disappointed. The scene of the handover of those props of kingly office in unforeseen one, for example, sees Richard speak 150 lines to bowling Brooks 10.
If you look at the scene on the page, you'll see long speeches of poetic conceit from Richard punctuated by phlegmatic reminders from Bolingbrook of the business in hand. Even as Richard is handing over control of his kingdom, that's to say he does not hand over control of the stage. The moments of his application is a dramatic set piece in which he utterly dominates the action. So Richard's characterisation is handled quite differently from that of Bolingbrook.
And again, we might try and link this with genre. Richard is in a tragedy in which the suffering of the unique individual is a set aside through his speech when he ought to be at his most history play like rounding up soldiers and fighting Bolingbrook. Richard collapses instead into tragic self-pity. For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.
In some ways, Richard's downfall is that he knows too early on is in a tragedy and is therefore not very much at the very much point trying to do anything about it. Bolingbrook, on the other hand, reveals himself quite differently, thinking in its broadest sense. Bolingbrook is in a comedy. His star is rising. Things are getting better for him. And as a comic character, he reveals himself in dialogue and company, not in isolation.
But that does mean that there is a loss of audience involvement with Bolingbrook and with his cause. So it may be that we're arguing in the end that balance is at the heart of the play structure. Perhaps we could see Richard, the second as a kind of animated version of the grammar school debates, which were so important for humanist sixteenth century culture.
The technique of arguing in a Trump Kway part term in Trump kwe Partons from either side of a proposition with equal, emotive and rhetorical force. The point of that grammar school education was not what you really believe, but how persuasively you could put both sides.
This may be a sign of Shakespeare's measured approach to contemporary politics or of or of a kind of habitual evasiveness that may find its biographical corollary in the case discussed by Charles Niccolò in his book The Lodger or Shakespeare on Silver Street. Nickel in this book talks about a legal case where Shakespeare is called as a witness to clarify whether his landlord had bestowed a larger dowry on his daughter than was now being claimed.
It ought to be a really fascinating insight into Shakespeare. And in fact, it kind of is, but not in the way you would expect. So Shakespeare is brought forward having as a witness, having witnessed the agreement with the daughter's husband about the dowry. And he's asked what the dowry is. And Shakespeare says he can't remember, can't remember how much it might have been. Public political even-handedness may have corresponded to private slipperiness.
He seemed like a man who will not put his not nail his colours to the mast, will not say when given a choice between two things, he will not not plump for either of them. And that may be something that we're seeing in the plains. Gary Taylor, writing of the possibility that Shakespeare was a closet Catholic, suggests that this characteristic refusal to back one side over another is the consequence of a lifetime of self-censorship.
The constant act of ventriloquism which is necessary for so-called church papists who only pretended allegiance to the Church of England. He argues that this is a very Catholic idea. Not to say what you believe is is one of the ways we could identify Shakespeare as a Catholic thinker. You might want to look for other examples of apparent even handedness in King John, for instance, or in Julius Caesar or in the trilogy.
Henry, the six other examples of plays about struggle in which Shakespeare seems not to take sides. Arguing along these lines might suggest that Shakespeare cannot answer the question about the justification of Bolin Brooks actions. Taking the throne is neither right nor wrong. It just is. As often then in these lectures, the question of whether bullying Britt was right to take the throne from Richard is just that a question.
The play invites us to ask it and it gives us different frameworks in which to come to a provisional conclusion. But it's always aware of the other side of the argument. And we might end perhaps by thinking about a medium, the theatre in which such careful balance can seem dramatically or ethically unsatisfactory. What can seem on the page like a fine balance between opposing readings or an ability? A susceptibility to multiple reasons can seem in the theatre confusing or bland or evasive.
Reviews, for example, of Stephen Pimlott are sea production of 2000. Speak of a fragile, ironic Richard matched with a thuggish, ambitious following Brooke. In nineteen ninety six, Fiona Shaw played an immature and irresponsible Richard who believed that Bowling Brooks personal loyalty would kerb his ambition. Michael Pennington has played dandified regency Richard giving way to the sober, buttoned up Victorianism of Bolingbrook and his followers.
Ron Daniels directed Alex Jennings as a tyrannical Richard ruling over a totalitarian state toppled by a reluctant, intelligent dissident. Bowling Brook, played by Aunt on Lessa, a famous mediaeval book of hours inspired production, had Jeremy Irons as an introspective, poetic king who is rather relieved to pass on the world of politics to his cousin. You can read all these reviews and others in John O'Connor and Katherine Goodwin's collection of Shakespeare on the modern stage.
The point I wanted to make by raising them very briefly is that decisions of casting, setting and direction can and usually do clarify or reshape the play's balance on stage. The actions of a stage bowling brook may therefore be interpreted with more clarity than those on the page. And it might be that there are endless provisional answers to whether Bowling Brook is justified by looking at the play in different kinds of performance.
The answers to our interpretive questions about Shakespeare can be found, albeit in provisional and contingent form in the theatre. Even when we can't find them, however hard we try in the play on the stage. So I'm thinking I guess my conclusion is I don't think Shakespeare tells us if that's not comfortable for you. You need to look in the theatre where directors do tell us. So if you want an answer to the question, you can answer it in relation to specific productions.
To do that, you can answer it very easily in relation to the play itself. Next week, I'm going to talk about Antony and Cleopatra, and the question I want to ask them is, whose tragedy is it? Who's tragedy? Is it? I think that will give us the chance to continue the discussion of the genre of tragedy and to think about gender reception and doubleness in that play.