Strong Recommend: Shakespeare's Richard II

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Welcome to Strong Message Here, Strong Recommend, our cultural recommendations and a look at their impact on language.

I'm Helen Lewis.

And I'm Amanda Yochi.

Amando, you have come bearing a gift.

Yes, my recommendation.

It's not a new book.

It's Richard II by William Shakespeare.

I'm in the process of plugging my enormous gaps in my reading.

And although I love Shakespeare, there are just lots of the plays that I still haven't read.

I did that during the pandemic.

With a couple of friends, this is the only improving thing I did during the pandemic.

We did a little book group and we read all of the history plays.

Because I thought, in what other world am I going to read, Henry VI Part 3?

It seems unlikely that this is going to be.

Oh, what have I got to do this evening?

Oh, shall I flick Netflix?

No,

I'll read all of the Henry Plays.

Yes,

I read The Odyssey, which I hadn't read before.

And which Christopher Norland is now doing a film.

It turns out you could have saved all that time.

You could have, yeah.

But Richard II is, so it's the first of the history plays, isn't it?

Yeah, so it's not first written, but he so Shakespeare had done Henry VI three parts prior to that, but it's the first of the sequence that will go Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V parts one and two.

All the three Henries and then Richard III and then it ends with him obviously being deposed by the Tudors who were the ruling family at the time Shakespeare was writing.

Yes, and Richard II is often overshadowed by the much more crowd-pleasing Richard III.

I first encountered the play as a television adaptation.

The BBC did an adaptation of all the history plays called The Hollow Crown.

Ben Wishaw was Richard II.

Rory Kinnear was Bolingbroke, who becomes Henry IV.

I mean, it was the best drama.

He's very good at drama.

I know, see, some Shakespeare plays

dramatically are quite clunky.

Whichever one.

Tell me what's happened.

Oh, all happened over there.

We're not staging it, but let me tell you.

I'm a character you've not met yet.

I'm just coming on to tell you what's happened.

Yes.

Yes, there was a bit where we were in bed and we snuck someone in who wasn't the person the other person thought was that.

And you think, really, really, really, Shakespeare, we're doing this.

The drama offstage is less important than the drama going on internally in the mental collapse of Richard II.

Because Richard II

believes that he has been chosen by God to be king.

And therefore, there is no,

no one should be questioning his role, except reality plays itself out.

He goes on, doesn't he, in the manner of many kings at the time, have a slightly disastrous war with the French?

He does a little bit of that, but also more disastrously, he exiles Bolingbroke.

Who is is his cousin who is his cousin who then returns later fatulently

and and confiscates all his estates and wealth Bolingbroke pretty miffed off manages to round up an army to come back and if need be claim the throne off Richard so Richard is deposed I'm not giving too much away because it's all in the history books but what is great and memorable about the play is it's about the mental collapse that Richard II goes through in that if that identity which he believes has been given to him by God and it's unquestionable is then questioned and reduced to nothing.

What is he?

And it becomes this very.

It's one of the very

in the deposition scene.

So very famously, it's got a scene where Richard has to accept that he's going to have to give up the crown.

And he says something like, I know, I know, for I must nothing be.

Yes.

And it's this kind of, I think the way I would sell it to people who haven't read it or seen it is that it's about a fae, petulant boy,

king, who loses everything that's valuable to him and his status, and through that comes to a kind of spiritual nobility.

I think that's what I've seen it three times, which is kind of of mad.

I've seen Ray Fienes do it, David Tennant, and God, I saw someone quite recently do it.

Not Jonathan Bailey, although he recently did it at the bridge.

I just think it's a really underrated and beautiful Shakespeare.

Did you say beautiful?

Because it's one of the few plays that he wrote in verse all the way through.

So it's very lyrical.

That's why I'm saying, although there is a lot of physical action off stage, as it were, the real action is to do with the language.

You know, Richard tries to articulate his unique position as someone chosen by God to be king in this wonderful language.

And then the language starts, like you say, the language starts reducing itself to very commonplace references.

Do you have a favourite line?

Because I think a bit that people will know, the kind of, you know, the sort of to be or not to be of this play is John of Gaunt's speech, which is about this England, this Jewel said to himself this speech, which he gives to Richard basically saying, I'm dying.

You're screwing all this up.

This is a really good country, but like, watch it, mate.

I'm going to miss this.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, that's the memory one.

No, it's when Richard is kind of alone, bereft of his identity, his role, his power, and it's almost like Registered trying to make a kingdom out of himself and

out of his prison cell.

Yeah, I mean, so he says things like, yeah, cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood with solemn reverence.

Throw away respect, tradition, form, and ceremonious duty.

For you have but mistook me all this while.

I live with bread like you, feel want, taste grief, need friends.

Subjected thus, how can you say to me, I am a king?

I mean, it's total despair.

I mean, that's interesting.

When you say that, it makes me think of the fact that Shylock in the merchant of Venice has a similar bit where he says, essentially, as a Jewish person, I'm just like you.

Yeah, prick me, do we not bleed?

Yeah, Shakespeare must have discovered that it was quite a powerful thing in the theatre to take these characters and make them have a direct appeal to the audience.

And this is one of the things I think is one of the great innovations that he brought to English drama: these complicated, psychological, real characters, rather than the stock characters of the pageant plays and very religious dramas.

I have a favourite line on it, which is is Richard saying, I wasted time and now doth time waste me, which is symptomatic of that fall where he was just a young, callow boy king.

And now he just realises that he wasted all of that time and now he has to sit in a prison cell at someone else's schedule.

Yes, and then, you know, he then is killed.

It's not quite explained.

Here's another gobsmacking.

In fact, actually, it was written in 1595 when Shakespeare also wrote Romeo and Juliet and Midsummer Night's Dream.

I know, it's one of those things that you just think, oh,

what did I do this year?

Yeah, I know.

The thing that always struck me about it, too, was that it was quite politically brave to write it.

So the 1590s, right at the end of Elizabeth I's reign, she dies in

1601.

And the thing that everybody talked about at the time was the deposition scene, which was watching a king renounce their crown.

Now, she was the, let me get this right.

She's only the granddaughter of Henry VII, who basically had no real claim to the throne.

It was through a sort of semi-minor line and very tenuous.

And then he said it by conquest too.

So you're you're watching someone with actually really a very new dynasty, a shaky dynasty, single, childless at the end of her life, and then saying, what happens if you get rid of a king?

You know, one of the things I think is really nice about studying Shakespeare is trying to think what the original audience would have brought to it.

Yes.

And that must have, seeing that on stage must have been quite a big deal.

Yeah, and very popular.

And it's...

We talked about the history cycle.

It was after that he then went on to write the remaining, you know, the Henry IVs and the Henry V parts one and two and a spin-off.

Was that like it's sort of too fast, too furious?

That everybody really just they were like, oh, we like these ones.

Can we have a few sequels?

But the idea of like high art actually, you know, also was commercially successful.

That he wasn't below Shakespeare to write a sequel and a poor sequel and the

Too Richard, too furious.

Yes.

That's why, that's how I think of this play now.

Tudor cinematic universe.

I love it.

Or is it Plantagenet to Tudor?

I don't know.

Yeah.

Ask me to describe what other orders is.

I get very confused.

I don't know what happened there.

I read on holiday Catherine by Anya Seaton, which is a classic historical novel.

It's about Catherine Swinford, who is the mistress and then later wife of John of Gaunt.

So, if you are, there are a lot of people who change their name when they get a new title.

Yeah, I think that's also a problem with the history plays.

Someone will start off as someone and then they'll come back with a completely different name.

Yeah, you're meant to know who they are.

Who's this guy now?

Yeah, he's from earlier.

And also, you know, I bring it up also because a lot of these history plays, when they're staged, are modernised to reflect current politics, clashes, clashes and titles for the leadership and competitions to see who succeeds.

Who knows?

By the time we come back for our next season, who knows where we'll be in terms of the leadership of the different parties?

So it's one, two.

Which plantagenet is Keostalma?

That's what you're making me think.

Yeah.

You know, is he Richard II or is he?

Oh, Richard III.

Will he be found buried in a car park?

Well, you can find Richard II at all good theatres.

And I hear it's been published as a text since one of the folios.

Thanks for listening to Strong Message Here, Strong Recommend.

We'll be back next week with a recommendation from me.

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