Shakespeare’s Historical Drama as Trauerspiel: Richard II—and After Zenón Luis-Martínez Source criticism of William Shakespeare’s Richard II (1595) has often emphasized what its third Arden editor calls “the play’s innovative reduction of historical narrative as compared with the other histories,” a reduction that shows that “Shakespeare for once preferred ideas, motivational complexities and modulations of feeling to facts as a stimulus to his creative dramaturgy.”1 Explanatory of Shakespeare’s procedure as it certainly is, this argument renders problematic the play’s generic status by stressing significant differences between this and his other history plays. This distinction is by no means new, since Richard II has been often regarded as a precursor to the tragedies of the so-called middle period—a view that does not always accord with its consideration as historical drama.2 And yet this alleged focus on motivation and feeling, especially as it concerns the king’s emotional universe, has been sometimes a reason to cast doubt on the play’s serious alignment with tragedy.3 Paramount among these “motivational complexities,” Richard’s grief has served to raise the play to the altars of tragic drama while consigning it to a limbo of generic indefiniteness: considered a mark of tragic stature, of excessive sentimentality, or of universal folly, grief has made Richard II a favorite play for character-driven approaches that do not often acknowledge in this aspect of its emotional structure the index to its distinctive assemblage of tragedy and history.4 This essay contends that grief in Richard II is not a mere occasion for emotional show or character introspection, but is the purveyor of dramatic perspective: the dense web of mournful discourse woven into Shakespeare’s account of the last three years of Richard’s reign (1398–1400) is of primary importance to understanding both the play’s innovative dramaturgy and genuine philosophy of history.5 For these reasons I propose reading Richard II in terms of the language, form, and ideology of Trauerspiel—or mourning play—as envisaged by Walter Benjamin.6 Though Benjamin’s concept, as developed in ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1924), primarily designates a group of plays written during the German baroque, it can be also [End Page 673] a powerful tool for assessing the relations of history and tragedy in Shakespeare’s plays. In the notion of Trauerspiel Benjamin captured the strong interrelatedness of poetic diction and theatrical ostentation for the expression of the early modern experience of historicity and temporality: in Benjamin’s view, early modern dramatists understood this experience as political in its nature, mournful in its outlook, and allegorical in its aesthetics. My point is that the mournful experience of history is essential to the second Henriad, and that Richard II supplied the foundational moment of this historiographic project by bringing mourning to the foreground in all its political essence and ostentatious aesthetics.7 In tracing the multiple but tightly connected aspects of the Shakespearean mourning play—and for this, this essay must jump from rhetoric and poetry to historiography and political philosophy in ways that might seem somewhat uncomfortable—I proceed from an account of Benjamin’s ideas to a fuller reading of Richard II, and a more succinct look at its sequels. I. History and Tragedy: The Object of Trauerspiel Benjamin’s starting point is the distinctiveness in the German language of two seemingly synonymous words: Tragödie and Trauerspiel. Equivalents for the second are only found in medieval descriptions of tragedy as carmen luctuosum.8 This lexical cohabitation is not a mere accident but the root of a crucial difference between classical and modern drama: the scope of tragedy should be confined to Greek antiquity, whereas Trauerspiel comprises the essence of post-humanist serious drama. As Benjamin contends, in the frequent listings of terrible events found in early modern definitions of tragedy we find the indexes to the artistic and epistemological kernel of Trauerspiel.9 Murder, tyrannicide, war, and lamentation are essential marks of the dependence of Trauerspiel upon historical action: Historical life, as it was conceived at that time, is [the] content [of Trauerspiel], its true object. In this it is different from tragedy...