ABSTRACT
It is a terrible shame that, as W. B. Yeats points out, Richard II is not the wiliest king. But Yeats insists that Richard’s command of language is the greater of the two contending characters, that Richard’s story is tragic because this wonderful man who is king is not, in fact, a wonderful king, and he argues that there should be sympathy for the tragedy of that circumstance rather than joyful divestiture of Richard’s crown. When the dispossession of Richard’s crown renders him a subject of the kingdom he once ruled and of a man who was once his subject, he famously attempts to recreate through language a new subjectivity for himself-a new identity as ruled rather than ruler-and to take control of that new identity with the same force he had used to inhabit his previous role as king.
