I've been thinking about Richard II all week. I used to think it was my favorite of Shakespeare's plays, but upon rereading it, I think as a whole, it's not especially challenging or engaging. It does, however, feature one of my favorite characters, Richard II himself.
He's a king who believes he is a god. Or, at least, he believes that his crown is bound to him irrevocably by divine right. When he is overthrown, is god's will overthrown with him? His speech on the battlements of Flint turns your blood to ice because of what he is asking:
Because we thought ourself thy lawful king:
And if we be, how dare thy joints forget
To pay their awful duty to our presence?
If we be not, show us the hand of God
That hath dismissed us from our stewardship;
For well we know, no hand of blood and bone
Can gripe the sacred handle of our sceptre,
Unless he do profane, steal, or usurp.
He's literally asking Bolingbroke if he is willing to betray god to remove him from power. Of course, he collapses like a house of cards in the same scene, basically talking himself into abdication. But Richard didn't make the rules, he was just made king because of them. And really, his fatal mistake is not listening to his flatterers or robbing the populace blind, it's stealing Bolingbroke's fortune. If John of Gaunt had not died while his son was abroad or if the king hadn't taken Bolingbroke's legacy, would Richard have been overthrown?
The whole play wrestles with this huge theological conundrum: If the king is god's agent on Earth, what happens when the king betrays his people? Does that mean god has betrayed his people or that god has abandoned the king? If the latter is true, where in the tradition of divine right of kings does it say "unless the king is a big loser?" Well, nowhere. And that's Richard's point. According to the laws of the time, everyone MUST agree that god has made Richard king. So either god made a colossal blunder (for England, anyway) or god's will is now that Bolingbroke usurp the throne. For Shakespeare's purposes, god is on Bolingbroke's side. But the whole play raises the question "What if god is on no one's side?" Which leads to the question "What if there is no god?" This is not Shakespeare's intent, but I feel the presence of those questions throughout the play.
And then there's the notion that Richard II and Hamlet have a great deal in common in that they are both all talk and no action (though each uses language differently). Unlike Hamlet, however, Richard II the play is rather anticlimactic. Then again, we have Henry IV parts I and II to tie things up, followed by the everybody-loves-an-underdog Henry V, in which the victory at Agincourt basically justifies any misdeeds on Bolingbroke's part. I mean, really Richard II is just backstory for Henry V.
Still, there's just something about it...
You can find more of the interesting word usements I structure on Apple.com.
Read my article, Better Writing Through Design, on No. 242 of A List Apart.