ABSTRACT

Richard II has been ably deconstructed, psychoanalyzed, historicized, and, more recently, queered. The agendas of the legion of scholars who have scrutinized the play through these schools of theory, along with their results, are as variegated as we might expect, although they tend to congregate, for obvious reasons, around a fairly consistent set of concerns: the status of monarchy, the concept and practice of usurpation, the impact of loss on the psyche, and the implications of political change. 1 These theoretically-inflected approaches to Richard II are in the mode of “strong theory.” Strong theory has been described as that which produces a “highly organized way of interpreting information so that what is possibly relevant can be quickly abstracted and magnified,” usually as part of “a triumphant advance toward truth and vindication” of the scholar’s thesis and, more broadly, his or her methods ( Sedgwick 2003: 135). 2 One question this tendency raises is whether there is room, when faced with such a critically overdetermined work as Richard II, for examining its affect rather than the information it communicates or the ideology it embeds. Attention to Richard II as a species of performance is one way to explore this proposition, and to experiment with a phenomenological performance criticism that could be an alternative or “weak theory,” one that accounts more for what the play does than what it signifies.