ABSTRACT
Like Marlowe’s Edward II, Shakespeare’s Richard II features competing versions of masculinity and the differing registers of emotional expressiveness that accompany them. In contrast to Bolingbroke, whose manhood is based on stoical restraint of his passions and verbal reticence, Richard is prone to displays of affect, rhetorical excess, and theatricality. A man of feeling, he combats his loss of political power through woeful rhetoric and tears that ally him with women who weep and wail in the play. Richard delivers affective lyrics, narratives, laments, complaints, and groans in enclosed spaces that become increasingly less public and more private.29 Though manhood and the public world of politics are often synonymous in Shakespeare’s history plays, Richard redefines his masculine identity in terms of privacy and interiority. Despite the King’s deposition and his Queen’s exile, he becomes a memorable, even legendary figure as a result of their emotionally-charged utterances
29 In this section on Shakespeare’s Richard II, I use the term “lyric” to denote a passage set off from the surrounding text and framed by a beginning and end, creating a seemingly enclosed textual space. Northrop Frye emphasizes the contained aspect of a lyric in “Approaching the Lyric,” in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hôsek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 34. Although I argue that lyrics in Richard II are enclosures in several respects, those I discuss are neither atemporal or ahistorical. On the contrary, time is a critical factor in these lyrics prominent in Shakespeare’s history play. Other critics who defend the necessity of reading lyrics in relation to their cultural context are Mark Jeffreys in “Ideologies of Lyric: A Problem of Genre in Contemporary Anglophone Poetics” PMLA 110 (1995): 196-205 and Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 2-10.
