Pray God we may make haste, and come too late!Įven if we are hissing Richard, there is an underlying question: at what point do Richard’s actions as king allow us to ignore the fact that he is king? He has just banished Gaunt’s son, so he figures he might as well help himself to Gaunt’s estate: Richard’s petty qualities are wonderfully demonstrated when he is delighted to hear that “Old John of Gaunt is grievous sick”. He responds with patience to Bolingbroke and Mowbray arguing about the murder of Bolingbroke’s uncle, but we quickly learn from Bolingbroke’s father, John of Gaunt, that Richard probably arranged the murder himself. Yet Richard’s actions are undermined by his implied motivation. At that point, he stops it with the lesser (but still tough) penalty of banishment.Ĭompared to some of Shakespeare’s kings, this might seem fairly considerate. They will not forget or forgive, so Richard goes along with the plan for ritual combat until it is clear they won’t back down from that either. He listens to these two hotheads arguing and tries to get them to simmer down: “Forget, forgive conclude and be agreed”. On the surface, Richard is not doing too badly. But just when they are about to fight, Richard calls the whole thing off. Which since we cannot do to make you friends,īolingbroke and Mowbray spend a long time prepping after all, one of them is about to die. Richard knows even a king cannot command these two enemies to be friends, so ritual combat seems the way to sort things out: Mowbray, in response, calls Bolingbroke “a slanderous coward and a villain”. Henry Bolingbroke – Richard’s cousin and the future Henry IV – calls Thomas Mowbray, the Duke of Norfolk, The play begins with an argument in front of Richard. Macbeth by William Shakespeare: a timeless exploration of violence and treachery The Hollow Crown Trailer (Focus Features) A brief comment by the new king, Henry IV, leads to Richard being murdered in his cell. By the end of the play, he is not king anymore he is dead. When Richard II begins, Richard is in full king mode: throne, crown, sceptre. The “Henriad” shows the monarchy in a state of turmoil. These plays were recently presented as the BBC series The Hollow Crown (2012-2016). It is the first part of the “Henriad”, a sequence of eight historical plays that span the “Wars of the Roses”: Richard II, Henry IV parts 1 and 2, Henry V, Henry VI parts 1, 2 and 3, and Richard III. Shakespeare wrote Richard II around 1595. It is also a play that saw Shakespeare risking some serious trouble with the God-appointed monarch of his time, Elizabeth I. Shakespeare’s Richard II is a play that asks us, among other things, what it means to have power, what it means to take power, and what we’re left with when power is gone. What do you do with a bad king? And what do you do when that bad king is (allegedly) appointed by God?
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