Things came to a head in 1601 and if they had gone just a little differently, his career—and indeed his life—would have come to an abrupt end. He could have found himself in the Tower of London or even in the hands of the public executioner.

How do we measure the worth of our rulers? By the justice of their claim to power or the quality of their actions at the helm of state? King Richard II has wasted public funds and is under the influence of self-serving flatterers. He has arranged the murder of his uncle, Thomas of Woodstock. Yet he is the rightful king, anointed by God. Are his failures so great that it will be in the interest of the state to get rid of him? Or is the removal of a king from his throne a crime against God and the order of nature? In the central scene of Shakespeare’s play, the king is forced to participate in a ceremony in which he formally removes himself from the throne. Deposition was a matter so sensitive that a large segment of this scene may have been censored out of the early printed editions of the play. And in the last years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, the contemporary resonances of the story of Richard II’s deposition were so powerful that the followers of the Earl of Essex took a particularly close interest in Shakespeare’s play.

The Essex faction, including the young Earl of Southampton to whom Shakespeare had dedicated his narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, considered the old queen to be as bad as Richard. Like him, they murmured, she was surrounded by flatterers, raising too many taxes, and conducting a disastrous Irish policy. Could she be ripe for Richard’s bloody fate?

Early in February 1601, Sir Charles Percy, a descendant of the Percy family who had joined with Bullingbrook to overthrow King Richard, had a bright idea. Along with Southampton, he had joined the group of aristocratic malcontents who hung around Essex House and voiced their frustration at Elizabeth’s policies and preferments. The Earl of Essex himself was plotting to march against the court and confront the queen with demands for change. Percy, together with Lord Mounteagle and one or two others, slipped over the river to the Globe. They asked the players to put on a special production of Richard II. Shakespeare’s men were reluctant: the play was so old and had not been staged for so long that there would be little or no audience. Essex’s gentlemen responded with an offer that the players couldn’t refuse: an immediate down payment of forty shillings to supplement their takings. Lines were relearned overnight and the next afternoon, the show was staged, with a large number of Essex’s followers prominent in the audience.

At supper after the show, rumors began to fly, and the next morning the Essex men armed themselves and headed for the palace, vainly hoping to gather popular support along the way. It didn’t come. They were roundly defeated and the ringleaders tried for high treason. Augustine Phillips, the actor who served as business manager of Shakespeare’s theater company, was immediately brought in for interrogation. His story about their reluctance to perform such an old play as Richard II, together with the fact that Essex himself was not present at the performance, provided an escape route. The tribunal was persuaded that they had only revived the show for the sake of the money.

To judge from the choices that Shakespeare made in dramatizing his historical source materials, he seems to have been more interested in the human story of Richard’s fall than the politics of rebellion. It is likely that the Essex faction commissioned the special performance not so much for its actual content—we cannot be sure that the full deposition scene was actually staged at this time in the play’s life—as for the broad association between the rise of Henry Bullingbrook and the career of the charismatic earl. Essex’s men were probably remembering a book originally dedicated to their master, Sir John Hayward’s The First Part of the Life and Reign of King Henry IV. Published in 1599, it had caused much controversy as a result of its detailed treatment of Richard’s removal from the throne. It was almost certainly Hayward’s book rather than Shakespeare’s play that led Queen Elizabeth to say, some time later, “I am Richard the Second. Know ye not that?”

Following the rebellion of 1601, Essex was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. That meant having his privy members cut off and draped around his neck. His sangfroid did not desert him. On hearing his sentence, he joked that since he had served Her Majesty in the four corners of the world, it was fitting that his body should be cut in quarters and driven through the four corners of London. The Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s sometime patron, was consigned to the Tower.