Given their connections with him, it was a very close run thing for the players. Hayward the historian took the rap and Shakespeare was saved by the cool performance of his friend Phillips under interrogation.

THE KING’S TWO BODIES

Richard II was very attractive to Essex and his followers not only because it seemed to give good reasons for taking action against an ineffective, vacillating monarch, but also because it appeared to lament the decline of chivalric England. One of Essex’s chief strategies during his rise to prominence at court in the 1590s was to portray himself as a hero from a nobler age that had gone. He invoked the code of “honour” and made himself synonymous with such displays as the Accession Day tilts, in which courtiers would joust like knights of old.

The beginning of the play, so redolent of medieval rites of knighthood, would have been very much to Essex’s taste. Mowbray and Bullingbrook throw down their gages and prepare for single combat with sword and lance. They are concerned above all with “spotless reputation”: “Mine honour is my life; both grow in one,” says Mowbray, “Take honour from me, and my life is done.” Honor is seen as the hallmark of the “trueborn Englishman.” The feuding dukes regard themselves as true patriots, appealing to “English earth” and lamenting that in exile they must forgo their “native English” language. Richard’s native language, by contrast, was French (which was also the nationality of his wife) and his court is implicitly seen as a place of French affectation. One of the most cultured of English kings, Richard was a munificent patron of poetry and the arts; Shakespeare does not exploit this, but he may imply it through the way in which he gives such eloquent and rhetorically elaborate poetry to the king, whereas Bullingbrook speaks a blunter English idiom, albeit still in finely honed verse. Near the end of the play, when the Yorks kneel before the new King Henry and ask pardon for their son Aumerle, the duke suggests that he should take on the French manners associated with the court and say “pardonnez-moi,” but the duchess, a better judge of character, is the one who wins the pardon because she knows that Bullingbrook will stick to English (“Speak ‘pardon’ as ’tis current in our land: / The chopping French we do not understand”).

King Richard stands accused of wasting the patrimony of the English nation. He has been fleeced by his flatterers, and costly Irish wars have required him to “lease out” the land. Given that Queen Elizabeth’s exchequer was also heavily overdrawn as a result of the Irish problem, Shakespeare was probably being diplomatic as well as practical in not attempting to stage Richard’s military campaign in Ireland, which is described at great length in his source, Holinshed’s Chronicles. The focus remains firmly on the English land, imagined metaphorically as a sea-walled garden “full of weeds, her fairest flowers choked up.”

Within two years of the play appearing in print, John of Gaunt’s “this sceptred isle” speech was ripped from its context and included in an anthology called England’s Parnassus as an exemplar of patriotic writing. It appears there as an unfinished sentence, lacking the sting in the tail: “this England … Is now leased out … That England, that was wont to conquer others, / Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.” True patriotism, the original context reveals, involves fierce criticism of bad government as well as rhetorical praise of the land.

But if the bad governor is sacredly endowed as God’s anointed deputy on earth, then is it permissible to remove him, even in the name of England and “true chivalry”? If the king is synonymous with the law, then to turn the law against him may seem a contradiction in terms: “What subject can give sentence on his king?” The monarch was traditionally imagined to have two bodies: as body politic, the king was the incarnation of the nation; as body natural, he was a mortal like anyone else. This was what made possible the paradoxical words “The king is dead, long live the king.” When Richard stages his own unthroning, he inverts the words of the coronation service, shatters a mirror and gives up one of his two bodies.

What is left for the private self when the public persona is stripped away? Without “honour,” according to the contentious dukes, “Men are but gilded loam or painted clay.” But what would a king be without his crown, without a name and a title? Once Richard has broken the mirror, he turns from his image to his inner self. Whereas monarchy depends on exterior show, inwardness is explored through the medium of words. Richard is by far the most inward-looking of Shakespeare’s kings. By focusing on the individual consciousness, considering Richard’s fate in psychological terms, Shakespeare neatly sidesteps the alarmingly destabilizing political consequences of the moment when a subject gives sentence on a king.

“I had forgot myself. Am I not king?” In the very act of asking this question, Richard reveals that the answer is “no”: since a king has two bodies, he has the right to speak in the royal “we,” but here Richard is no more than an “I.” In speaking of himself he veers between “I,” “we,” and “he” (“What must the king do now? Must he submit?”). Inconsistent pronouns are the surest sign of the instability of his self.

Richard speaks between a quarter and a third of the text; he soliloquizes frequently and at length. One of the key respects in which he and Bullingbrook function as dramatic opposites is that Bullingbrook never reveals his motivation and feelings in soliloquy: he is symbolically the man of action, whereas Richard is the man of feeling. Bullingbrook is defined by what he does; Richard anticipates Hamlet in defining himself through his obsessive talking about, and to, himself. “The play throughout is a history of the human mind,” observed Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a self-confessed Hamlet of real life. The American poet Robert Lowell developed the analogy between Coleridge and Richard II in a taut sonnet exploring “the constant overflow of imagination / proportioned to his dwindling will to act.”

Soliloquy and rhetorical elaboration are forms of self-dramatization. Richard sustains himself through a bravura linguistic performance: “Let’s talk of graves …” He makes himself the object of his subjective musings: “ … Must he lose / The name of king?” He watches himself losing his grip on his role: “Ay, no; no, ay, for I must nothing be.” And he becomes more and more aware that to be is also to act, that we are all role-players: “Thus play I in one prison many people, / And none contented” (“one prison” is the Folio text’s interesting variant on the original Quarto’s “one person”—“prison” nicely suggests both Richard’s confined location and the traditional idea of the body as prison of the soul, which is then released to eternity in death). He leaves the stage in the manner of “a well-graced actor.”

Though the Folio text is entitled The Life and Death of King Richard the Second, the earlier Quarto edition was called The Tragedy of King Richard the Second. The structure of the drama answers to a very traditional idea of tragedy as a story in which a powerful figure falls from earthly prosperity and in so doing rises to greatness of soul. Pity for Richard is the prevailing tragic emotion in the closing scenes. “It seems to be the design of the poet to raise Richard to esteem in his fall, and consequently to interest the reader in his favour,” wrote Dr. Johnson. Note “the reader” there, not the spectator—this is a play that has been more admired on page than stage.