Shakespeare’s Richard II and Elizabethan Politics

Abstract

The censorship of Shakespeare’s Richard II, including the deposition scene, along with the commissioning of the play the night before the Essex rising and the comment of Elizabeth I, “I am Richard II, know ye not that?” (Nichols 552), have led to decades of analysis on how the play shadows the potential deposition of Elizabeth herself. Did the play spur the Essex rebels to action against the Queen? Did the Queen see herself in the play’s fallen monarch? Did her advisors recognize the parallel as well, thereby ordering the play’s censorship? While readings of the play might have hinged on these direct relations ofRichard II to Elizabethan state politics-the play’s censorship, the rebels’ commissioning, and Elizabeth’s comment-recent critics have challenged every one of these suppositions. Cyndia Susan Clegg carefully considers the alleged censorship of the play only to conclude that fourth quarto’s expanded deposition scene may not indicate earlier press censorship but merely expansion and revision (Clegg 1997). Paul E. J. Hammer has argued that, if Shakespeare’s play was indeed commissioned the night before the Essex rising, it was a mere coincidence; the rising was not a planned event, but instead an unexpected skirmish. Finally, the queen’s comment has been deemed questionable, being published years after its supposed delivery (Barroll 1988: 447; Bate 2009: 23-27; Clegg 1999: 119).1 In short, there is no evidence that the performance of Shakespeare’s play was used as a spur to immediate action against Elizabeth or her advisors; and there is little firm evidence the play provoked royal or state disapprobrium in the way scholars hypothesized. Richard II does, however, address some of the most crucial political ques-tions of the Elizabethan era. Succession, tyranny, divine-right monarchy, popularity, favoritism, state expenditure, and military involvement in Ireland are among the issues that both define late Elizabethan political conversation and appear in the play. Scholars have explored such connections: they have suggested how the play might shadow Elizabethan policy, be it in Ireland or at court with favorites such as Leicester or Essex; they have also studied how the play might challenge or bolster the Elizabethan state in its representation of the deposition of an English king. Most pointedly, connecting the play toCatholic resistance theory such as the Jesuit Robert Parsons’ A Conference against the Next Succession to the Crown of England (1594), scholars investigate how the tyrannical, illegitimate rule of Richard II might mirror the government of Elizabeth, both trespassing law and custom, and therefore prompting allegedly legitimate deposition. This chapter contributes to discussions of Richard II in relation toElizabethan politics from a different angle. Rather than viewing the play through the prism of Elizabeth, her advisors, and the English state, I examine the play through the lens of European political thought, and the forms of kingship which England might well experience when a new and most likely foreign monarch (such as James VI or Philip II) comes to sit on its throne. In the period after the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots in 1587 and the resulting war with Philip II of Spain; in the period of wars in the Low Countries, with English troops defending the Protestant Dutch against the Spanish; and in the period just after the conversion of the French king Henry IV to Catholicism in 1593, England stood in embattled relation to Catholic Europe and particularly to Spain. Yet Philip II-former king of England by his marriage to Mary I and, through his rule of Portugal, alleged descendant of John of Gaunt-had a claim to the throne asserted repeatedly by English Catholic recusants, including most vehemently Parsons whose pamphlet appeared the year before Shakespeare’s play. Repositioning Shakespeare’s Richard II in relation to European debateson succession, tyrannicide, and sovereignty illuminates the play’s timely engagement with contemporary political issues, while at the same time avoiding the critical acrobatics necessary to read the play as a political allegory of the Elizabethan court itself. By the 1590s, Elizabeth made an unlikely Richard. In contrast to Shakespeare’s king, she was neither young, tyrannical, impulsive, lawless, nor easily led. This is not to say she was free from the charge of tyranny: the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots and the cutting of John Stubbes’ writing hand, to give two examples, earned her notoriety. Further, her more radical Catholic subjects deemed her recusancy policies a sign of her tyranny, while Stubbes, John Goodman, and John Knox wrote against female rule as inherently unlawful and tyrannical (see Walker 1998). But by 1595/6, the year of the play, Elizabeth’s imminent demise (she was 62 when the play was first performed) and the rule of her potential successor were more immediate concerns than her mode of governance over the last four decades (on the play’s date see Forker 2002: 111-20).2