Richard II [1595]

There are a few untidy patches in the text of Richard II which give rise to argument about the unity of the play, the possibility that it is a revision of an earlier play, and so on. None of this is very impressive, ¹ certainly not enough to question Shakespeare’s authorship of, and responsibility for, the play as it stands. The only scenes one might wish away are V. ii and V. iii, the feebly protracted concerns of the Duke of York and his family; but these do not suggest another play, or another hand, so much as Shakespeare writing at very low pressure. The date generally accepted for it is 1595, which is plausible enough but by no means certain. It leaves us in doubt whether Romo and Juliet is the earlier or later play, which is perhaps not very serious: the important point is that they were written close together in time, an association marked in the extent of rhymed passages, and even lyrical forms, in both plays. Together they constitute, as it were, a second round in Shakespeare’s tragic output: Romeo and Juliet, like Titus Andronicus, is in a sense a ‘classical’ tragedy and clearly conceived in five Acts; whereas Richard II, like Richard III, is a ‘tragical history’ and more flexibly constructed in successive movements separated by brief scenes for the queen, but not answering to the Folio Act divisions. The first movement is continuous to the death of Gaunt in II. i; the second contains the whole of Bolingbroke’s rebellion and ends with Richard’s surrender in III. iii; ¹ the fourth Act, encompassing the abdication, may reasonably be taken as a complete unit, and Act V covers Richard’s imprisonment and murder. In this, the structure resembles Richard III’s development; but it is a much less formal ordering than Titus or Romeo are given. One may reasonably suppose that Shakespeare understood a difference of genre between the two pairs of plays.