ABSTRACT
William Shakespeare evokes “sad stories”—traumatic historical narratives—to explore how sorrowful language exposes Richard’s emotional fragility. “Infused” by “self and vain conceit,” King Richard sees monarchial agency as perfunctory, where Death allows him but “a breath, a little scene, to monarchize” himself among the “murdered” kings. Richard II engages a residual tension between a traumatic monarchial history and an emergent political narrative that sought to energize the Tudor political apparatus. E.M. Tillyard famously notes that the history play dramatized historical mythology to support the Tudor monarchial line, encouraging the queen’s people “to look on the events that led to their accession” in a way that endorsed Elizabeth within the canon of earlier English monarchs. Shakespeare maps Richard’s propensities for inaction and slumber, correlating despair to poor leadership with its affective response to it. In terms of the deficit model, sluggard despair is a temporary, downward position, “artificial” in that Richard’s brooding is situationally inappropriate and a product of his wallowing.
