Richard II and the Politics of Murder

Richard II and the Politics of Murder What did he know and when did he know it? These two questions are at the center of Shakespeare’s “court drama” Richard II.1 Admittedly, calling a staged history about the beginning of the saga of the War of the Roses a court drama runs the risk of creating generic confusion. I call it a court drama, however, because both Richard and Henry are involved in legal cover-ups that promise to render as nonevents their encounters with death. Chapter two revealed how Shakespeare indirectly comments on the difficulty in representing England’s own historical legacy by depicting the violent relationship to a fictional Roman past in Titus Andronicus. In his history plays, however, Shakespeare pointedly addresses historical crimes and the problems that emerge when those crimes become the subject of popular stage in London during the early 1590s. Like the drama of his theatrical competitors, his plays pose questions about the contested nature of individual and national memory; specifically, his history plays examine how cultural memories can evolve through ritual and popular repetition as they continually redefine the parameters of national identity. The contention of this chapter is that the boundaries of nationhood during the period include a past that is reanimated in the process of historical transmission. Richard II famously represents the death of a king and the perpetuation of sovereign power despite the traumatic enactment of royal demise. In the play’s stage production and in the discourses which record and register the poetics of nationhood during the early modern period, the representation of royal death is used to reveal how those discourses of national identity were, in fact, enabled by traumatic experience that resists mediation through narrative or ritual. Loss persists in the rituals designed to overcome it. The dialogue between psychoanalysis and the social that this chapter engages is useful in highlighting the playwright’s own engagement with the various historical narratives. Shakespeare’s use of history on the public stage suggests that he was keenly aware that narratives of historical progress also bear witness to the residual demands of the past. As we will see in chapter six, this awareness will return to haunt the public and poetic reaction to Charles I’s execution in 1649. Over 60 years earlier, however, contemporary reaction to Mary’s execution in 1587, specifically from Elizabeth I herself, reveals how the contingent death of sovereignty resists integration into narrative structures that memorialize the past by trying to leave it behind. Richard II deliberates on this moment, exposing it to be a

crisis in England’s national memory. In the play, Shakespeare represents characters obliged to forget traumatic events in an effort to overcome them. The spectators in the theater, too, are distracted by historical events that exceed simple representation and understanding. Memories of crime haunt Shakespeare’s archives and emerge belatedly through a process of historical transmission that distorts recollection and representations of what appears to be a knowable past. Reaction to Mary’s execution will provide a backdrop to the chapter’s examination of the case against historical progress in Richard II. Let’s begin our own deliberations: Again, what did he know and when did he know it? An “Answer without an Answer:” Mary’s Execution on Trial Critics have long recognized the resemblance of events in Richard II to contemporary political developments in England between 1586 and 1601.2 Elizabeth’s own words-“I am Richard II. Know ye not that?”—represent perhaps the earliest evidence that the play forces its spectators to allegorize events on stage. Put otherwise, Elizabeth’s allegorical reading is evidence that she and perhaps others who witnessed the drama during her reign are forced by the play’s dramatic structure to complete the historical narrative. Revealing an historical imagination in process, Elizabeth’s remark appears to be an act of inheritance. In her act of historical reflection, she becomes part of a transaction that links past to present. In all sixteenth-century versions of the play, however, and perhaps also in staged productions, the lines indicating Richard’s abdication of the crown were omitted.3 As much as Elizabeth’s criticism of the play suggests an historical legacy, accounts of acts of censorship that erase the scene of Richard’s abdication indicate the disavowal of a residual danger in the act of historical reflection: the censorship marks a moment of danger where the past may have an afterlife that exceeds its mere representation as history. While the play may have inspired extra-textual disavowals because of its political content, Richard II’s concern is precisely with the act of disavowal itself-an act of historical distortion that makes allegorical criticism always miss the mark. Elizabeth’s allegorical remark about the play may suggest an acute fear of suffering Richard’s fate. Her reading, however, can also direct us closer to the play’s margins, forcing us to look more deliberately in the direction of desire. In doing so, we can see how the queen’s act of criticism responds to the residual demands of the past, recalling the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. Her famous remark indicates one way that the executed queen reappears. It is an act of historical reflection that animates the afterlife of the Catholic Queen’s execution fourteen years earlier. Creating an unofficial act of oblivion (one that will be echoed in official doctrine during the decades after Charles I’s execution), Elizabeth wanted voices linking her to the imprisonment and execution of her rival to remain silent. Even

before 8 February 1587, Elizabeth had demonstrated the vehemence of this desire on the body of John Stubbs, who lost a hand in 1579 in part for what he wrote about Mary’s threat to the kingdom in Gaping Gulf (1579).4 Suggesting Elizabeth’s fantasy to have the parliamentary issues surrounding Mary’s impending trial and execution behind her, Elizabeth’s action against Stubbs resembles a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy-one that was doomed to fail as Parliament became more vocal in its own desire to deal with the threat Mary posed to monarchical stability. In a retrospective of the events of 1586-87, Robert Naunton, an official in the court of James I, gives an account of Elizabeth’s reign that captures Elizabeth’s premature desire for things to be behind her. He describes those years in terms of a seamless narrative that speaks well of Elizabeth’s decisions: “the whole .... course of her government deciphers [her decisions] to the admirations of posteritie.”5 Lowell Gallagher characterizes Naunton’s work as a “seamless cloth of estate .... no distinct moment was to be singled out.”6 To be sure, Naunton’s account is a narrative about the ineluctable progress of Elizabeth’s history, yet its seamless narrative stutters at the moment of the queen’s treatment of Mary. The queen’s reign was noted as a series of “justice, pity, and piety,”7 except that the series was marred by “(to speak truly), with but one stain or taint”8-a reference to her relationship with Mary. Elizabeth, of course, possessed the power, both real and mythical, to overcome this “one stain.” As if in response to the stain that Naunton identifies, many descriptions in the period attributed to Elizabeth a Medusa-like gaze that rendered powerless conspirators such as Mary and silenced those who might criticize her role in history.9 The image of Elizabeth’s powerful gaze underscored the extent to which her authority resided in undisclosed places. Her ability to deal with traitors was not subject to public scrutiny; it was simply, as Gallagher notes, an “event that not only should not but could not be directly observed.”10 Traces of royal intervention in Mary’s death vanish and those capable of scrutiny see only distraction. Or, more significantly as in the case of Stubbs’s dismemberment, those who scrutinize too closely are themselves distracted, their bodies torn apart as punishment for looking too intently in the direction of desire. Queen Elizabeth’s own pragmatic, political rhetoric months before Mary’s execution suggests the way that Mary’s death is an event already to be forgotten. Lord Burghley’s private papers include a fragmented note that reads:

.... Knowledge from the queen. Always not to be acquainted with the circumstances. The queen meant it not. Esto. This not known. The matter always present. The matter for surety. 11 (emphasis mine)

As either a transcription of Elizabeth’s own rhetoric or a description indicating Burghley’s strategy to protect the queen, the fragment “Always not to be acquainted with the circumstances” deserves further comment. Although not to be considered an objective historian, John Strype, the mid-seventeenth-century curator of material on prominent figures during Elizabeth’s reign, characterizes the puzzling remark as being “occasioned upon the death of Mary Queen of Scots; and upon Queen Elizabeth’s displeasure towards him on that account.”12 The vagaries of the fragment indicate in microcosm the complexities of language that the following pages will more fully explore. The fragment is vague insofar as it could impart an announcement of Elizabeth’s intended ambiguity about the crisis, but it also points to Burghley’s own frustration in trying to figure out what the queen intends in her equivocating discourse. It speaks to what Lowell Gallagher describes as a “pattern of unaccountability in language,”13 but more than a moral shield to protect the queen, her equivocation, I contend, is a distortion of an experience that exceeds comprehensibility within the narrative structures available to Elizabeth. In her conflicted discourse, we can begin to see the refraction of an anamorphic lens that helps to erase the queen from the events of February 1587. Of course, the erasure began much earlier, during the trial of her cousin and rival beginning in October of 1586.14 Elizabeth was not present at Mary’s trial, nor did she ever meet Mary during the time of her imprisonment. Labeled in a contemporary drawing of the staging of the trial as “a chayr for ye Q of England,”15 Elizabeth’s throne remained empty during the proceedings, covered only by a “cloth of state,”16 as was customary during state trials during the period. Elizabeth’s role in the execution of her rival, however, is noteworthy precisely because of the ritual of the absence of participation; her veiled presence under the cloth of state seems to exonerate her of responsibility for the execution of a fellow sovereign. These rituals-a semiotic of unaccountability-are designed to leave history behind once the events of 1586-87 have transpired. In addition to the semiotics of the staging at the trial, Elizabeth’s speech to Parliament on 24 November 1586, provides an equivocal explanation of her role in Mary’s death. She responds famously to Parliament’s call for a decision about Mary’s fate with an “answer answerless” or an “answer without an answer.”17 And in a report of a speech to the Lords and Commons on 12 November, the queen describes her failing memory of the events surrounding Mary-“And lest you might mistake mine absence from this Parliament (which I had almost forgotten).”18 Elizabeth’s self-critical comment about her nearly forgotten absence during the opening of the Parliamentary session disguises a more urgent message about a future legacy:

although there be no cause why I should willingly come amongst multitudes-for that amongst many, some may be evil-yet hath it not been the doubt of any such danger or occasion that kept me from thence, but only the great grief to hear this cause spoken of;

especially that such a one of state and kin should need so open a declaration, and that this nation should be so spotted with blots of disloyalty.19