ABSTRACT
Of all Shakespeare’s plays, the histories present the most difficulties to modern interpreters, teachers, and theater practitioners. By definition, they are the hardest to universalize. It is possible to talk about Macbeth’s “ambition” (to use a crude but familiar example) without worrying about the real political character of medieval Scotland. To talk about Henry Bolingbroke’s ambition, however, one feels obligated to worry about the real political character not only of medieval England, but of Shakespeare’s England as well. Like the ghost of Woodstock, which can be neither laid to rest nor confronted head-on by the actors at Richard’s court, the historical nightmare of civil butchery haunts and vexes contemporary critical engagements with Richard II—not least because we are uncertain whether we have awakened from it, or simply fallen into a new phase of troubled sleep.
