on unsentimental classical precedents.Richard IIIis based on More’s prose History
of Richard III (written in 1513 in Latin and English), a study in tyranny.
Shakespeare’s twisted plotter comes from More (see p. 82). Compared with medieval
chroniclers who construct their narratives in terms of divine providence and
personal character, humanists like More wrote analytic moral history in the mode of
the Roman historian Tacitus (AD55–after 115). Although modelled on the Vice
figure from the Morality plays, Richard is not merely malignant. A central figure
whose soliloquies show internal consciousness is found in the Morality play
Everyman, but Richard is the first Shakespearian protagonist to soliloquize.
Shakespeare’s reigns-on-stage stop with Richard IIIand the advent of the Tudors.
Henry VIII’s three children had each in turn reversed preceding religious policy. As
Shakespeare began writing, Mary Queen of Scots – mother of Elizabeth’s successor,
James VI of Scotland – was beheaded with Elizabeth’s consent. Dynastic historio-
graphy was dangerous. From 1547, Tudors ‘tuned the pulpits’ to preach obedience.
Church attendance was compulsory, and nine times a year Homilies were read on
the divine appointment of kings and the duty of subjects to order and obedience.
The Stuarts’ doctrine of the divine right of kings had ample Tudor precedent. The
manuscript of a play ofc.1594 on Sir Thomas More survives, with contributions by
six hands,one of them Shakespeare’s; it was not performed. Ten years after
Elizabeth’s death Shakespeare could write about her father, collaborating in a Henry
VIII notably sympathetic to the king’s victims.
Shakespeare’s Histories draw on the Chronicles of Holinshed (1587), and on plays
such as Woodstock, about the murder of Thomas Woodstock, uncle of Richard II. On
the afternoon before his attempted coup in 1601, supporters of the Earl of Essex
commissioned a special performance ofRichard II. The players at first demurred,
saying that the play was stale.The Queen said on this occasion that it had been
playe d forty times (that is, since 1595). It was not stale, however, for she also said ‘I
am Richard II, know ye not that?’ Richard had been deposed (and murdered) by
Lancastrians, from whom the Tudors inherited their right to the throne. Essex was
executed.Richard II
Richard II is an histor ical tragedy, modelled on Marlowe’s Edward II in its set-up and
its manipulation of our sympathies. In each play the king’s irresponsibility and
unfitness are clear, but once he is deposed we are made to pity him. Edward neglects
his country for the favours of Gaveston; Edward’s noble opponents are less likeable
ev en than he; his wife and son conspire against him. Marlowe shows the unedifying
workings of power, relieved by the flares of homosexual infatuation. After a red-hot
poker and screams, the play closes with the ‘reassuring’ young Edward III. In
Marlowe’s history there is no moral significance.
In marked contrast,Richard II is rich in poetry and in ideas. Through John of
Gaunt,Duke of Lancaster, Shakespeare provides a poetry of England as a Christian
kingdom, this ‘other Eden’, this ‘blessed plot’, but watered with the blood and tears of
civil war. The king is ‘the deputy anointed by the Lord’, and the play is symbolic,
sacramental, symphonic. It opens with mutual chivalric defiance (which Richard
calls off, exiling the combatants) and continues with formal, ceremonial verse almost
throughout.The keynote is Gaunt’s dying vision of England, first as it ought to be,
and then as it currently is, leased out to Richard’s tax-farming cronies. The feudal
music of ‘time-honoured Lancaster’ ends with his death; Richard smartly announces118 4 · SHAKESPEARE AND THE DRAMA