Playing the King

As he lay dying in squalor, the playwright and pamphleteer Robert Greene counseled his friends not to spend their wits making plays. It is a mere waste of talent and energy, he declares, for the servile “puppets” who speak the lines you have written for them have no loyalty. Instead of conferring upon you the respect you deserve–for Greene and his friends were proud of their degrees from Oxford and Cambridge–the fickle players and audiences forsake you for “rude grooms” and “peasants.” “Trust them not,” Greene warns, “for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tigers heart wrapped in a Player’s hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.”

The principal object of Greene’s venomous attack then is Shakespeare–the upstart peasant in a world of decayed gentlemen, the annoyingly self-confident Jack-of-All- Trades (“Johannes Factotum”), the great appropriator. “Beautified with our feathers”: to be imitated by Shakespeare is no honor; it is a particularly disagreeable form of theft in which the victim winds up looking like a has-been and the thief an absolute genius. Poor, sour, envious Greene: already in 1592, with only one of Shakespeare’s earliest history plays to parody (“Tigers heart wrapped in a Player’s hide” mocks a line from 1 Henry VI), he knows that he has been surpassed, that he will soon be dismissed, despised, forgotten. Still, worse, he has the terrible intimation that he will be absorbed: the memory of Greene survives now only because he attacked Shakespeare and because Shakespeare, who no doubt remembered the attack with wry amusement, years later paid him the posthumous compliment of stealing the plot of The Winter’s Tale from his moldy romance Pandosto.

In the early 1590s the young Shakespeare did not have his eye on Greene; his admiring and larcenous attention was caught rather by his brilliant contemporary Christopher Marlowe. In or around 1592, the Lord Admiral’s Men, rivals to Shakespeare’s company, performed Marlowe’s remarkably original history play, Edward II. If he hadn’t known it already, Shakespeare would certainly have learned from this play that he was not the only Shake-scene in London. In the story of a sensitive, self-indulgent king who is brought to ruin by his love for his handsome male favorite Gaveston, Marlowe found a way to represent the clash between power politics and emotional inwardness, here the intense intimacy of homosexual lovers in a violent, Machiavellian world. Nothing like it had ever been seen on the English stage.

Marlowe’s achievement seems to have jolted Shakespeare out of the energetic but crude history plays with which he had made his name. In 1595 he wrote Richard II, a history play suffused with a distinctly Marlovian sensibility, a play whose king–the great-grandson of Edward II–suffers a strikingly similar fall from petulant, self-indulgent authority to abjection and a violent death. But though Shakespeare adopts some of the emotional and erotic currents that fascinated Marlowe, his king’s passion is far less sharply focussed on a single, forbidden love. Or rather, though Richard toys affectionately with his favorites Bushy, Bagot, and Green and takes comfort from his young cousin Aumerle, his sustained and consuming source of fascination is himself. Richard rivals Prince Hamlet as Shakespeare’s most self-involved, self-scrutinizing, and self-dramatizing hero.

It is often said of Richard II that he is a poet, and it is easy to see why. In the play’s first scene, we see him toy with rhymed couplets–couplets that call attention to themselves as irresponsible, flippant language games:

Thus we prescribe, though no physician;

Deep malice makes too deep incision;

Forget, forgive, conclude, and be agreed;

Our doctors say this is no month to bleed. (I, i)

Later in the play, when the rebellion against him is flourishing and it is time for decisive action, he turns instead to a gorgeous operatic performance of despair:

For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground

And tell sad stories of the death of kings.

How some have been deposed, some slain in war,

Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,

Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed,

All murdered – for within the hollow crown

That rounds the mortal temples of a king

Keeps Death his court. . . . (III, ii)

The image of Death as antic jester is unfolded with magnificent eloquence, but the problem, of course, is that this is no time for an aria. Richard is up against a tough, powerful enemy–his cousin Bolingbroke–whom he has wronged and who is singularly indifferent to rhetorical flights of fancy.

Richard’s poetic sensibility takes seriously, as a direct description of reality, the metaphors with which medieval kingship dressed itself. He does not think of himself as a politician, the representative of the people, the agent of a social contract. He believes rather that he is God’s anointed, a sacred ruler whose body bears a mystical, inalienable relation to his land. “As a long-parted mother with her child/Plays fondly with her tears and smiles in meeting,” he exclaims on his return to England, “So weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth.” “My earth”: in his mind, nothing he does, no matter how irresponsible, can threaten this relation; it is part of the structure of his identity and part of the structure of the universe.

The problem is that it is not true. Shakespeare play depicts the cracking apart of the metaphors, the collapse of a whole system of belief. Faced with a rebellion, Richard wildly imagines that his royal title is itself immensely powerful: “Is not the King’s name twenty thousand names?” he cries, “Arm, arm my name!” He calls upon God and his angels to fight for him, he intones the sacred chants, he fashions the ritual phrases–but his name is hollow, his words mere whiffs of emptiness. Resourceful, worldly Bolingbroke is not deceived; he knows that power does not come from words alone, that the king’s poetic flights of fancy are impotent self-delusions, that the old order is sick from within and vulnerable from without.

A monarchy that depends upon symbolic gesture, gorgeous performance, and glittering surface is challenged by something else, something different: a new man, tough, realistic, Machiavellian. Clear-eyed, ruthless Bolingbroke does not live in a world of mystical signs, of language promising access to cosmic truths, of authority claiming transcendental guarantees; he lives in a world of false appearances, manipulations, amoral calculations, and improvised strategies that he does not fully articulate even to himself. He stands up and challenges the prevailing mythology of power–unsure himself what will happen–and the universe fails to respond in the way that the old fictions dreamed that it would.

Richard II then gives us the spectacle of a political, social, and psychological order that is undergoing the agonizing process of radical change. From the opening scenes, we see a society that seems to be going along in the old, time-honored, familiar ways, with the usual rhetoric and the recognizable principles and characters, but that is in fact rapidly coming to an end. The decisive change in language is not at first noticed by those who use the language; the change in authority is not at first noticed by those who wield authority; the change in identity is not at first noticed by those who think their identity is forever fixed and unchangeable. At the symbolic center of this process stands a ruler who blindly trusts in the old order, who thinks he can swim gaily along the surface of things, who is flippant, corrupt, elegant, eloquent, and decadent – and, though he does not know it, who is dying.

Richard is finally forced to face what is happening, and, characteristically, he turns the moment of his fall into an operatic performance: “Down, down I come, like glist’ring Phaethon.” In one of the play’s most famous scenes–censored during the reign of Elizabeth who feared it might inspire fantasies of rebellion–Richard takes it upon himself to strip off the trappings of his own royal identity, piece by piece. He is, he declares, like a shattered mirror, a jumble of broken fragments, a man without a name. It is one of the marks of Shakespeare’s daring that the play does not at this moment finish with Richard. Not only does Bolingbroke wryly mock the ruined king’s histrionic performance–

The shadow of your sorrow hath destroyed

The shadow of your face–(IV, i)

but Richard himself lives on. And in the strange interval between his deposition and his murder, he begins to discover something deeper than the social identity he has lost, something that he did not know he possessed: an inner life. The extraordinary prison scene at the close depicts Richard, in solitary confinement, struggling to sort out what it means to live in a shattered world:

My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul,

My soul the father, and these two beget

A generation of still-breeding thoughts. (V, v)

Shakespeare has broken through to something he himself did not know he possessed, something he would bring to perfection in the mature tragedies: the capacity to represent tormented inwardness.

Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard.