Richard II & Richard III: Shakespeare's Version

Gone Medieval

The episode explores how William Shakespeare's plays 'Richard II' and 'Richard III' blend historical reality with theatrical drama and Tudor

Key takeaways

• Shakespeare's 'Richard II' focuses on the end of a reign, creating an intentional sense of historical opacity about preceding events.
• The play 'Richard II' provides a unique female perspective by merging two historical queens into one character to humanize the monarchy.
• In 'Richard III', Shakespeare uses a 'moral holiday' to make a mass murderer charismatic and engaging to the audience despite his atrocities.
• The plays reflect Elizabethan fears regarding the stability of succession following the long reign of Elizabeth I.
• Shakespeare presents kingship through the lens of performance, suggesting monarchs are actors playing specific political roles.

Main topics

• Shakespeare's History Plays
• Richard II and legitimacy
• Richard III and characterization

Notable quotes

Shakespeare gives us two of them. Richard II, depicted as a doomed poet-king forced to hand over his crown. And Richard III, who Shakespeare labelled... a murderous, misshapen villain.

Conclusion

The discussion highlights how Shakespeare's dramatic choices shaped lo

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:01) From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places, to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr Eleanor Jarnagher, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week exploring... everything from the ancient world to World War 2. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe Speaker 2 (0:40) Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the Crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval. This week on Gone Medieval, we're debunking some of the things we think we know about the Plantagenet kings of England. Not because they come from the Chronicles, court records or battlefield dispatches, but from William Shakespeare. Speaker 2 (1:37) In the last episode, Eleanor surveyed Shakespeare's take on Kings Henry IV and V and how the Bard freely bent the truth whenever the drama demanded it. Do go back and have a listen to that episode if you haven't done so already. We heard how living in the Elizabethan and early Stuart world also meant that Shakespeare was often commenting on his own times or labouring under certain restrictions on his speech, rather than sticking to the facts about past monarchs. Having looked at the Henrys, today we're going to meet the Richards. Shakespeare gives us two of them. Richard II, depicted as a doomed poet-king forced to hand over his crown. And Richard III, who Shakespeare labelled, or in my view, libelled, a murderous, misshapen villain, smiling as he clawed his way to power through a river of blood. But why did the Tudors need Richard III to be so spectacularly evil? And how much... of either man was real or just brilliant drama, Tudor propaganda or Shakespeare's own political survival. I'm pleased to welcome back Professor Emma Smith to explore Richard II and Richard III, two plays which are concerned with kingship, legitimacy, rebellion and the terrible fragility of power. Two medieval kings, spun perhaps for an Elizabethan audience, still haunted by the question, what happens when a monarch can be overthrown? Speaker 2 (3:09) Welcome back, Emma. We can't have been too bad the first time around with Eleanor. You've come back and joined us for a second instalment. Those Richards, they're just waiting. They're calling to us. They are. They need to be addressed. So I hope everyone has managed to listen to your episode with Eleanor, which did a fantastic job of talking about Henry IV and Henry V, but also kind of teeing up some of the historical context in which Shakespeare is writing and why he's writing his plays. So you can find all of that in Eleanor's episode from earlier this week. So we're going to focus today on... Richard II and Richard III. And I've just given you a warning that listeners are probably well aware of that once I get onto Richard III, we're in for the long haul then. So Richard II is a really interesting one of Shakespeare's history plays, I think, in that it's one where he doesn't particularly stretch out the time. You know, he's not looking at the whole reign of Richard II. He really just focuses on the last couple of years and some of the key events around that. And in many ways, it's often positioned as one of his more historically accurate. Do you think that's fair in terms of the kind of the facts that he deals with, the politics that he's dealing with and the drama? How close does it stay to the history? Speaker 1 (4:15) That's a really interesting take. I think it is quite close to the history. But as you suggest, by focusing in on the end of the reign, it means that some of the things that have led us up to the point that we're at. in that period are very opaque somehow. We haven't seen them ourselves. They haven't been laid out for us. It's a good example actually of how the history plays are often telling us, showing us something we know to be a truth about history, which is that it's always competing. There are competing narratives about what happened in the past. And in a way, the play sort of embodies those because we don't see for ourselves. So yes, it is close to the history of the end. But by focusing so closely, I think Shakespeare opens up quite a lot of the questions about why things have got to the place they've got. Speaker 2 (5:06) And even within that kind of narrow window of Richard's reign that he's dealing with, there are lots of things that we can talk about that he deals with that are fairly true to the history. The exile of Bolingbroke and Mowbray, seizure of Gaunt's lands, Bolingbroke's return. Are there places where he more definitely departs from the history and reshapes some of those events? And what might we see him doing where he does do that? Speaker 1 (5:28) It's an interesting element that's not so often talked about where Shakespeare's clearly sort of combined the two queens of Richard II together. We often think about the history plays as being all about men, politics, military escapades, male bonding and male frictions, fathers and sons and so on. But it's an interesting moment to highlight where the queen is given a voice in an ahistorical. way. Shakespeare's clearly wanted to construct that to give us a different angle on what's happening. Speaker 2 (6:02) And is there a reason he might want a more, I guess, interesting, slightly more powerful female voice in there at that point? I Speaker 1 (6:09) think as we talked about in our conversation about the Henrys, I think Shakespeare wants the opportunity to humanise his monarchs and to recognise that they are private individuals to some extent, as well as public ones. And sometimes it's the sort of domestic insight maybe. that helps us to see that. Speaker 2 (6:32) And it's an interesting way to twist the history as well, because it kind of ignores the fact that Anna Bohemia's death marks a turning point for Richard, which again, we don't see all of that build up in the play. We don't see how Richard kind of arrives at this point of crisis that is ultimately going to cost him his crown. Shakespeare tries to present it as sort of being really around the confiscation of the Lancastrian inheritance. And that sort of blows up in Richard's face. But we also need to be aware that really this is a culmination of a much longer political crisis. I mean, I think Eleanor told you she's not a big fan of Richard II. I think I'm slightly more sympathetic to him than Eleanor might be. But the arrival at the last couple of years of his reign is really the story of a decade or more of really intense political problems and confrontations that we simply don't see, do we? It's all just hinged on this. seizure of the Lancastrian estates. Is there a reason why Shakespeare might have wanted to pick that to hang it all on? Speaker 1 (7:30) I think it's thematically really fantastic that it's about, somehow, it's a moment of interrupted succession, the interruption of patrilinear inheritance that brings about this crisis in the monarchy. I mean, Richard doesn't have a direct heir, but he has named an heir that Bolingbroke supersedes. I think... It's so interesting what you say. It makes me think about the very opening scene of the play, which is all about a kind of mystery about what has been happening. Why is it that Mowbray and Bolingbroke are having this duel? What is it that they're talking about? What is the death of Gloucester? You know, this event from the past that is brought into the courtroom and it seems very difficult to judge what's going on. I mean, of course... Later, perhaps it becomes slightly clearer that what can't be said there is that Richard himself is heavily implicated in this crime. But the play and the scenario with which it opens can't quite say that directly. And so it gives us a sort of test case for how mysterious the past is and how subject it is to powerful interest in the present that don't want us to know what happened. So it's almost as if the play opens by dramatising precisely its own obfuscation of how we got here. Speaker 2 (8:52) There's sort of a hint that there is more going on that you can't be completely aware of, but it's there in the background. And I guess it's tempting, I think, to see something like that as well in the light of more contemporary politics when you've got Elizabeth I, the monarch who has executed... Mary Queen of Scots in a way that she herself has tried to obfuscate and kind of say, oh, it was an accident. You know, I didn't mean to sign the death warrant. I was tricked into it almost. There is this element of kings killing other kings, rulers killing other rulers. It is not meant to happen and it's kind of covered up and it's pushed away and it's secret and we can't Speaker 1 (9:25) know about it. It's such a great point because it makes me realise that that's precisely what Bolingbroke does at the end of the play. We start with the play where Richard the King... won't admit to, you know, can't be blamed for this murder before the play has begun. And we end with the new king saying, well, that's not what I meant. I didn't mean you to go and kill him. It's a really interesting parallel structure. But you're right that the parallels with Elizabeth are very prominent. And Elizabeth herself supposedly said to the antiquary William Lombard that she was Richard II. No, you're not that. And historians have sort of pondered over quite what she meant there. But certainly the reign of Richard II and the role of the so-called flatterers, the malign advisors, people too close to the throne, exerting an unhealthy influence, that seemed a very resonant element of critiques of Elizabeth's court, particularly towards the end of her reign, the last decade or so. Speaker 2 (10:27) And also, I guess the other big parallel is the impending succession crisis that everybody in Elizabethan England by this point knows is coming. And we're aware that that's going to be a huge thing in Richard II because he has no heir, or at least no heir apparent. So there is a big question mark over what might happen, what could happen, what should happen. How do you decide what's going to come next? And ultimately it will be Bolingbroke with the military might to make it stick. But this must be something that is... playing on the minds of Elizabethans by the 1590s. Speaker 1 (10:58) Completely. I think that's the appeal, really, of these medieval history stories, primarily in drama, but in other modes too, rehearsing and going through these different models of reigns ending, kings losing power, transitions of power and transitions of dynasty, all as ways of filling this genuine abyss, actually. I mean, in retrospect, it seems very smooth. the death of Elizabeth and the proclamation of James VI of Scotland as James I of England. But I don't think that's how it felt at the time, either for those Elizabethans who had never known another monarch, or for those who had known that extraordinarily turbulent decade between the end of Henry VIII's reign and the accession of Elizabeth. Yeah, Speaker 2 (11:47) it's true. Because whether you knew that or not, it's a moment of uncertainty and... Yeah, Speaker 1 (11:53) and particularly since, you know, the Edward, Mary, Elizabeth succession is so religiously and politically turbulent, it serially creates traitors to the realm, you know, just sort of overnight. And so the uncertainty about what the policy of a new monarch might be, and the big question for many Elizabethans is whether a Catholic monarch is the most likely. outcome of this succession uncertainty. So I definitely think that Richard's succession questions are resonant with the contemporary history. Speaker 2 (12:33) There's long been a reading or an interpretation of Richard II that sees it as opening the wound, which the rest of the history cycle up to the end of Richard III is all about healing, constantly picking at and reopening until eventually... the Tudors come along and heal that wound. Do you think the play itself, does it support a view that that's what Shakespeare is trying to do, that he's trying to really open this wound that we can then dig around in and think about what different types of succession might mean for a nation? Speaker 1 (13:03) It's so interesting. Ella and I talked a bit about the retrospective construction of these history plays as a cycle. versus their appearance on the stage and in print as individual self-contained dramas. And one of the consequences of seeing it as a cycle has been this quite small-c conservative crime, expiation, chaotic repentance, healing model that you've just outlined. I think that in some way is an interpretation of Richard's... downfall which gathers momentum almost over the historical sequence and it doesn't seem quite to be so clearly indicated here at this point. When Richard is bundled off the throne, the Bishop of Carlisle predicts that the blood of English shall manure the ground and future age is grown for this sad act. So he sort of predicts the Wars of the Roses and says it's all going to come from here. But where the play itself ends, there's no particular indication of that. There's no sense that that's coming. We also talked in the other podcast about Shakespeare's choice about where to start and end his plays. And with Richard II, he started it and ended it as a tragedy. It ends really with the downfall of Richard and the kind of consequences are perhaps slightly less interesting, just as we're not that interested. in Fortinbras taking over from Hamlet at the end of that play. And Bolingbroke, I think, in this play, struggles to be the equal in dramatic terms of Richard. Speaker 2 (14:43) You quite often see that with the kings. I mean, I guess the exception maybe being Prince Hal, who is quite