ABSTRACT
Each New Year offers both an end and a beginning. Journalists look back on the past and forward into the future. Most of us survey recent triumphs and failures and hope for a productive year to come. This mixture of memory and anticipation becomes notably more intense at the transition of one decade, or one century, into another and reaches fever pitch, in some minds at least, at the turn of a millennium. Theater responds, as it must, to public fears and expectations; as is evident in the stage history of Shakespeare’s Richard II, a play that from its origins has responded to the public, and especially the political, preoccupations of its day. This chapter shows that it is capable, too, of expressing the preoccupations of our own time.
