ABSTRACT
On 6 February 1601, on the eve of the Earl of Essex’s rebellion, some members of his circle asked the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to stage a special performance of a play about “the deposyng and kyllyng of Kyng Rychard the second.” When told that the play was “so old & so long out of vse as that they shold have small or no Company at yt,” they offered a top-up payment of 40 shillings, finally persuading the players to revive the dusty and unpopular show the next day (Chambers 1930: 2:325). Most scholars assume that Essex’s friends were asking for Shakespeare’s Richard II. The anecdote is well known, likely the most famous historical reference to a play about Richard II. It has occasioned much debate on the relationship between early modern theater and politics, the relative subversiveness or conservatism of the Chamberlain’s Men (and Shakespeare as their leading playwright), and the power or failure of censorship. But to my mind, what is most telling and remarkable about the episode is not what it says about the political impact or powerlessness of the theater, but what it can tell us about early modern notions of popularity.
