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The Oxford Shakespeare : Richard II

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The Oxford Shakespeare : Richard II engineeringwithraj the oxford shakespeare General Editor · Stanley Wells engineeringwithraj This page intentionally left blank engineeringwithraj the oxford shakespeare Richard II edited by anthony b. dawson and paul yachnin engineeringwithraj3 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin 2011 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn ISBN 978–0–19–818642–7 (hardback) 13579108642 engineeringwithraj ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Our edition, the last of the Oxford series, has been a long while gestating and during that time we have incurred a number of debts. To previous editors of the play, especially Peter Ure (Arden 2), Stanley Wells (Penguin), Andrew Gurr (Cambridge), John Jowett et al. (Complete Oxford), and Charles Forker (Arden 3), we owe dozens of insights both textual and semantic. Several graduate student research assistants have contributed signifi- cantly and cheerfully to the shaping of this edition. Amy Scott provided assistance with bibliography early in the project and excellent service on a number of matters, especially the images, toward the end. Karen Oberer worked through the text with Paul Yachnin before he and Anthony Dawson analysed and shaped it again; the earlier process is vestigial but foundational. David Anderson provided assistance with the commentary, again at an early stage, while Andrew Brown and Katie Davison helped with indexing and proofs near the end. Colleagues have also graciously lent their help. Of these we would like to thank especially Patsy Badir, Bradin Cormack, David George, Gordon McMullan, Michael Neill, Patricia Parker, Steve Partridge, and Carol Rutter. We thank Kate Rumbold and Christie Carson for timely advice about sourcing of images. The staff of the Folger Shakespeare Library, especially Georgianna Ziegler, have been hugely support- ive; the Folger collection has been an indispensable resource. The Shakespeare Association of America sponsored a research sem- inar on Richard II, led by Paul Yachnin, whose members helped deepen our understanding of the play. Steven Mullaney was a member of that seminar; his thinking about the theatre and the play has been of considerable value. We are pleased to acknow- ledge the careful and creative contributions of our copy-editor, Christine Buckley, whose judicious attention to detail rescued us from error on many occasions. More than anything, it is a pleasure to thank the General Editor. Many Oxford editors have engineeringwithrajsaid it before us; it is true: Stanley Wells is a model of patience, deep learning, and great intellectual generosity. He has no part in any of the faults of this edition, but a substantial share in v Acknowledgements anything in it that is sound and insightful. Finally, we would like to thank each other—this is not the first time that we have worked together collaboratively, and we are pleased that the spirit of cooperation and friendly debate established in our earlier work together has remained as vital as in the past. engineeringwithraj vi CONTENTS List of Illustrations ix Introduction 1 The Play in Its Time 2 The Earl and the Queen 2 A Question of Censorship 9 Performing Politics 16 The Character of History 33 Inventing Genre 40 Dramatizing the Histories of Richard II 44 Language 57 Character 66 King Richard 67 Henry Bolingbroke 72 Gaunt and York, Northumberland and Mowbray, Aumerle and Friends 75 The Play on the Stage 78 Early Fortunes and Misfortunes 78 Victorian Extravagance 84 Richard the Poet 85 Richard and Bolingbroke in the Balance 89 Ritualism 93 Politics, Character, and Sequence in Modern Performance 97 Richard on the BBC 106 Textual Analysis 109 Editorial Procedures 119 engineeringwithrajAbbreviations and References 123 RICHARD II 129 Index 285 vii This page intentionally left blank engineeringwithraj LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. Map of England showing the key locations mentioned in the play xii 2. The courtly and flamboyant Earl of Essex, by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger from c.1597 3 (with permission of the National Portrait Gallery) 3 & 4. Pages showing part of 4.1, from the first quarto of 1597 and the fourth quarto of 1608 10 (This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California) 5. The Wilton Diptych, c.1395 28 (National Gallery, London, UK / The Bridgeman Art Library) 6. Gardeners, from William Lawson, A New Orchard and Garden (1648) 31 (University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections) 7. The Fall of Phaëton by Simone Mosca 47 8. Gilt bronze tomb effigy of Richard II in Westminster Abbey 68 (with permission of Dean and Chapter of Westminster Abbey) 9. Henry Bolingbroke, as King Henry IV 73 (with permission of the National Portrait Gallery) 10. John Gielgud as Richard (Queen’s Theatre, 1937) 88 (Hulton Archive / Getty Images) 11. Richard Pasco as Richard and Ian Richardson as Henry, in John Barton’s RSC production of 1973 91 (Joe Cocks Studio Collection at Shakespeare Birthplace Trust) 12. The deposed King Richard (Georges Bigot) imprisoned in a web of poles and attacked by murderers, in Ariane Mnouchkine’s 1981 production at the Théâtre du Soleil, Paris 96 engineeringwithraj(Magnum Photos / Martine Franck) 13. Ian McKellen as Richard in the Prospect Theatre Company’s 1968 production 99 (Rex Features) ix List of Illustrations 14. Michael Pennington as a highly sympathetic Richard, in the English Shakespeare Company’s version of 1987–8, directed by Michael Bogdanov 102 (Laurence Burns / ArenaPAL) 15. Fiona Shaw as Richard, in a production directed by Deborah Warner at the Cottesloe, in 1995 104 (with permission of Donald Cooper / Photostage) engineeringwithraj x This page intentionally left blank engineeringwithraj 1 engineeringwithraj. Map of England showing the key locations mentioned in the play. INTRODUCTION Richard II occupies an important place in the Shakespeare canon. Written in 1595, at a point when Shakespeare was finding his full stride as a poet and dramatist, the play marks a transition from the earlier history plays (the ‘first tetralogy’ comprising the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III) in which the terrible mechan- isms of civil war and naked power dominate the scene. Here a new note is audible, a more nuanced representation of the political conflicts of the English past in which character and politics are so deeply intertwined as to be inextricable. The language too is suppler and more richly elaborated. Overall, there is a sense of emerging mastery, as there is too in the other plays he completed in that very productive year, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet. In Dream he takes the comic genre in which he had worked in several earlier plays to new heights of complexity while Romeo, with its subtle blend of chance and inevitability, does something similar for tragedy (his only previous tragedy had been the bloody and savage revenge play, Titus Andronicus). Richard II dextrously combines history play and tragedy, giving to its narra- tive of bad government and usurpation a tragic shape that Shake- speare would, in a richer vein, take up again a decade later in King Lear. Indeed, the title-page of the earliest edition, in 1597, calls it ‘The Tragedie of King Richard the second’, though in the Folio of 1623 it appears with the other history plays and is entitled ‘The life and death of King Richard the Second’. However it is designated, it clearly traces a kind of tragic fall from kingly authority and pomp to lonely, painful imprisonment and violent death. Within that frame, Shakespeare develops an historical theme that had great political immediacy for its first audiences, due largely to its concern with royal succession at a time when the question of who would inherit the throne occupied by the ageing and childless Queen Elizabeth was on everyone’s mind. The play confronts head-on an important contemporary debate about engineeringwithrajpolitical, indeed monarchical, legitimacy. But it is also a drama, so that
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