Themes in Richard II

Richard II is a king who believes God has personally invested him with authority. Divine right — the theory that kings are God's chosen representatives and cannot be legitimately removed — was standard political doctrine in Shakespeare's time. Richard carries it further than prudence allows. When Bolingbroke returns from exile in Act 3 with an army, Richard's response is to invoke his anointed status as a defence against military reality.

"Not all the water in the rough rude sea / Can wash the balm off from an anointed king." This is both a theological claim and a tactical error. The balm is the holy oil applied at coronation — the physical sign of divine sanction. Richard believes it makes him untouchable. It does not. Act 3 is the process by which this becomes clear.

The hollow crown speech that follows in Act 3 Scene 2 is the exact moment when Richard's theory of kingship meets the fact of his vulnerability. Inside "the hollow crown / That rounds the mortal temples of a king / Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits, / Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp." Death is already inside the crown. The ceremony of kingship is the container of its own emptiness. Richard has just been told Bolingbroke has forty thousand men; his response is a meditation on mortality.

The logic is not confused. His point is that kings die like everyone else, and ceremony cannot prevent this. What he does not do is ask what should come next. He asks instead for "a sad story of the death of kings." The self-dramatisation is not vanity. It is the only resource he has left.

Bolingbroke's authority comes from different sources: military force, popular support, and what York identifies as an instinct for political management. He does not claim divine right. He claims necessity and, when necessary, Lancastrian inheritance. When Richard is deposed in Act 4 Scene 1, the crown passes in near silence from one man to another. The language of divine sanction is simply not invoked.

What the play traces is the failure of divine right as a working theory of power — not because the theory is wrong, but because it offers Richard nothing when the practical structures of kingship have been taken from him. He believes in it completely. It saves him from nothing. The Bishop of Carlisle prophesies in Act 4 that deposing Richard will bring generations of bloodshed. He is correct. But the prophecy does not prevent the deposition. Divine sanction turns out to be a principle that cannot enforce itself.

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Richard II is the most consistently poetic of Shakespeare's history plays, and this is not incidental. Richard's language is his identity. He thinks in verse the way other people think in prose. When everything else is stripped from him — the crown, the court, the armies — language is what remains, and he keeps working with it to the last scene.

The deposition scene in Act 4 Scene 1 gives Richard a mirror. He asks for it, stares into it, then smashes it and turns the smashing into a metaphor: "The shadow of your sorrow hath destroy'd / The shadow of your face." This is Bolingbroke's dry response, pointing out that Richard's grief is itself a kind of performance. Richard does not seem to hear it. He is already elsewhere, turning the broken mirror into another image.

His prison soliloquy in Act 5 Scene 5 is the play's most extraordinary speech. Alone in Pomfret Castle with nothing to do, he tries to populate the space with thoughts: one thought a king, another a subject, a third a divine, a fourth questioning. He is a king in a cell, building an entire kingdom out of language because there is nothing else available. "I wasted time, and now doth time waste me; / For now hath time made me his numbering clock." The person who governed time has become time's instrument.

"Down, down I come; like glistering Phaethon, / Wanting the manage of unruly jades." This is Richard in Act 3 Scene 3, physically descending from the walls of Flint Castle to meet Bolingbroke. He reaches for classical myth in the middle of his literal descent. Phaethon was the son of the sun god who drove his father's chariot and lost control of the horses, and was struck down by Jupiter. Richard chooses this image precisely, while knowing he is choosing it.

Bolingbroke is his opposite. His language is political and functional. He says what needs to be said to achieve what needs to be achieved, then stops. In the deposition scene he speaks less than fifty words. He does not need more. The contrast between the two men is most visible when they are both in the same scene: Richard producing image after image, Bolingbroke waiting for it to be over.

This contrast has sometimes been read as Shakespeare favouring Richard over Bolingbroke — the poet king over the practical usurper. The play does not straightforwardly support this. Bolingbroke's terseness is effective. Richard's eloquence is real but cannot save him. What the play seems to weigh is the cost of inhabiting language so completely that it becomes impossible to act without first converting action into art — and what this means when the situation demands action before art.

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Richard II moves slowly by the standards of Shakespeare's histories. Act 1 establishes ritual — formal accusations, trials by combat — and then dismantles it, as Bolingbroke and Mowbray are banished rather than allowed to fight. Richard intervenes in the combat at the last possible moment and commutes both sentences. This is a king who performs the forms of justice without allowing them to reach conclusions. The slowing is deliberate.

Gaunt is the play's temporal conscience. Dying at the start of Act 2, he uses the time he has left to deliver what amounts to an elegy for a kingdom he believes is already lost. "This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle, / This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, / This other Eden, demi-paradise." The England he describes is past tense. He is naming what it was, so the audience can measure what it has become.

Richard arrives and tells Gaunt he is dying of his own anger — essentially, to save his breath. Gaunt responds with the accusation directly: "England, bound in with the triumphant sea / Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege / Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame." The repetition of "bound in" is the whole argument. The same phrase that names England's protection becomes its imprisonment. Richard has made this transformation happen. Gaunt dies immediately after making the point.

Richard's own grief, after Bolingbroke's return, is the grief of a man being forced to acknowledge a reality he has avoided for years. "Of comfort no man speak: / Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs." He chooses elegy over action. He prefers to dwell in the ending he can see coming. His enemies counted on this, and they were right to.

In Pomfret Castle in Act 5 Scene 5, Richard finally has nothing to do but think. "I wasted time, and now doth time waste me; / For now hath time made me his numbering clock: / My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar / Their watches on unto mine eyes." Time has reversed the relationship. A king who treated time as something he owned now belongs to time. He watches the reversal from inside it.

His death in Act 5 Scene 5 is the play's final comment on the theme. He fights the murderers — kills two of them — then is cut down. Exton delivers the body to Bolingbroke, who says immediately that he did not want this and will go on pilgrimage. The grief he now carries is the grief Richard spent five acts rehearsing. The play ends with Bolingbroke inheriting not just a crown but an accounting he cannot discharge, and a grief for something that cannot be undone.

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Gaunt's speech in Act 2 Scene 1 is the most quoted piece of writing about England in Shakespeare and possibly in the English language. "This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle, / This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, / This other Eden, demi-paradise." It runs for fifteen lines before arriving at "this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England."

The trap in the speech is placed there deliberately. Everything Gaunt says about England's ideal greatness is already past. He is not praising the present. He is condemning Richard's England by measuring it against a standard it has abandoned. "This precious stone set in the silver sea" is being sold off, leased out, treated as a property to be rented rather than a kingdom to be governed. The paradise and the corruption exist in the same speech.

Richard does not respond to the substance. He responds to Gaunt's timing — dying men waste their words — and then seizes his lands the moment Gaunt dies. The speed of the seizure proves Gaunt's accusation more effectively than any argument could.

Richard's own relationship to the physical land of England is more intense than any other character's. His return from Ireland in Act 3 Scene 2 involves him touching the ground, speaking to it, bidding the land itself to fight for him with spiders and adders and nettles. He is not performing this for an audience. He genuinely believes the earth is on his side. The belief is touching and useless in exactly equal measure.

York in Act 2 Scene 2 is the play's figure for the ordinary English conscience under pressure. He believes in legitimate order, is horrified by Bolingbroke's return, and yet ends up guiding Bolingbroke's army toward Richard because the practical political facts have moved beyond his capacity to resist. "I cannot mend it, I must needs confess, / Because my power is weak and all ill left." He is not corrupt. He is simply overmatched.

The garden scene in Act 3 Scene 4 — where gardeners discuss the deposition as if tending a garden — is the play's most formal use of England as metaphor. The gardener refuses to weep for what he sees: the kingdom was left unpruned, the dead wood not cut back, the weeds allowed to flourish. He is a pragmatist. The Queen, overhearing, curses the ground he stands on. His analysis is accurate. Her grief is proportionate. The play does not ask them to resolve the difference between being right and having lost something.

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Act 4 Scene 1 of Richard II has no equivalent in Shakespeare's other histories: a king physically surrenders his crown on stage, in a scene he manages himself rather than allowing the new power to manage for him. Richard hands the crown to Bolingbroke, then immediately reaches back and takes hold of it again — "Here, cousin, seize the crown" — so that both men hold it at once before it passes. He makes a ceremony of what is happening. He cannot stop it happening.

Bolingbroke says almost nothing. The political process concluded before this scene began. He is present because presence is required. What is unusual is that Shakespeare gives Richard all the time in the world to perform his own deposition, and Richard uses every minute of it.

"Now is this golden crown like a deep well / That owes two buckets, filling one another, / The emptier ever dancing in the air, / The other down, unseen and full of water: / That bucket down and full of tears am I, / Drinking my griefs." Richard at the crisis: turning the physical transfer of a crown into an extended image about emptiness and weight, and making himself the vessel of loss rather than its cause.

Northumberland, who has managed the practical politics of the deposition throughout Acts 3 and 4, wants Richard to read aloud a list of his crimes. This is the documentary version of what is happening — a formal record that gives the deposition legal and historical shape. Richard asks for a mirror instead. The logic is that Northumberland wants to impose a narrative of justified removal; Richard refuses it and offers a series of images that cannot be co-opted into that account.

He stares into the mirror and smashes it. "The shadow of your sorrow hath destroy'd / The shadow of your face," says Bolingbroke. The observation is precise and dry. Richard's response — turning even this into another image — is the scene in miniature. He cannot stop making art of what is happening, and making art of it does not stop it happening.

The Bishop of Carlisle speaks before the deposition is formalised, prophecying in Act 4 Scene 1 that if Bolingbroke takes the crown "the blood of English shall manure the ground." He is immediately arrested. His prophecy will be proved correct across the next century of English history — the Wars of the Roses, which the Henry VI plays and Richard III have already shown. The audience in Shakespeare's theatre knew the outcome. The play has always been about what it costs to get there.

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