In the prologue he describes how she came to him in a dream led by the God of Love. She is clothed all in green; in her hair a gold ornament is gleaming; above it a white crown adorned with gold flowerets reminds him of a daisy. The Legend was written in 1385, the year in which our play begins. In a letter written to the Duke of Guelders after her death Richard speaks of the “heavy sorrow and bitterness of lus heart” and she was spoken of as “good Queen Anne”; she must have inherited much of the capacity for winning affection of her grandfather, John of Bohemia. Of the three sons of Edward III who are characters in the play, John of Gaunt was the fourth son, Edmund of York, a colourless person whose main interest was sport, the fifth and the Duke of Gloucester the youngest. Gloucester, even in history, is a distinctly unpleasant person, typical of the “over-mighty” subject in the fourteenth century. He was only eleven years older than Richard though he was Richard’s uncle. Michael de la Pole was the son of a Hull merchant, and had been a minister of Edward III’s; his descendants became Dukes of Suffolk, one of them the notorious minister of Henry VI; none of them were as honest and capable as this one. He died abroad in the year 1389 just after Richard had once more assumed power. In Act IV, Scene VI of Shakespeare’s Henry V there is an account of the deaths at Agincourt of this Michael’s grandson and of Edward, Duke of York, the Rutland of this play. Rutland during the reign of Henry IV was sometimes loyal and sometimes disloyal; he inherited the Dukedom of York on his father’s death and became the father of the York of the Wars of the Roses. Edward IV was his grandson. It is to be remarked that in the play Anne does not like him. Factiousness, military leadership and selfishness were inherent in the family of the Fitz-Allens, Earls of Arundel; one took a hand in the murder of Gaveston in the reign of Edward II; another shared the command at Crécy; the rather truculent gentleman of the play had been the King’s tutor, Admiral and Chancellor. His enmity to Richard grew steadily as Richard vindicated his independence and he was the only one of the Appellants who was condemned to death and executed. Of Robert Vere, Earl of Oxford, little is known; he was no low-born favourite for his family had held the earldom since the reign of Stephen; he married a niece of Gloucester and just before the battle of Radcot Bridge repudiated her and married one of the Queen’s waiting-women, which did not help to smoothe difficulties over. He lived till 1392 but Richard never recalled him from exile. Sir John Montague was a brother of the Earl of Salisbury and a prominent Lollard; he eventually succeeded his brother and was the Salisbury to whom Richard came in the disguise of a friar at Conway; he figures in Shakespeare’s play as Salisbury. He was consistently loyal to Richard.

SOME GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS ON STYLE

One critic of modern drama [S. R. Littlewood: Drama (Nelson)] ascribes the long run of Richard of Bordeaux to the fact that it is frankly modern in its prose and makes no effort to compass a mock-mediaeval tongue. To begin with, English was only just coming into general use; John of Gaunt’s Registers were written for the most part in French; to write in the English of Chaucer would have been out of the question. Obviously a mock-mediaeval tongue would have been as inartistic as sham Gothic in architecture. Shakespeare wrote in Elizabethan English, and Gordon Daviot, in employing the prose of her own time, is following his example. But there is a further question: need she have made these royal and noble characters employ quite so many colloquialisms as she does? “You are becoming a dark horse, Thomas “—”as if we were licked”—”highfalutin”—or “Robert is sprouting a new poem” would hardly be considered literary English. The justification is to be found in the vigour and life of the play. The King moves in a world we realize; his companions are not aristocratic puppets but living men and women; and their racy talk and the absence of formality make the play live. After all Shakespeare did it; there is always Lear’s “Pray you undo this button.” It is, however, not only in the form but in the content of the dialogue that Gordon Daviot has adopted a modern standpoint. This is particularly so in the discussions in Council. She, quite deliberately, I think, makes no attempt to view war as it was viewed then; her object appears to be to make us feel that the question of war and peace is ours as much as Richard’s.