Medieval English history was a popular subject on the Elizabethan stage, providing a ready-made stock of dramatic stories on popular patriotic themes. But there was more than that to the interest of Shakespeare’s contemporaries in the medieval past. The Tudor dynasty itself depended, for its legitimacy, on a particular interpretation of English history, and could gain or lose in the public eye from dramatizations which promoted or questioned their official version of the story. Moreover, with overt discussion of the political present and future effectively banned, arguments concerning pressing contemporary political issues tended to gravitate around the past, where analogous issues that had played out before could serve as proxies for direct comment on the here and now. For all these reasons, stories from medieval history became spaces for intensive thinking about political issues – not least about the essential nature of monarchy and of the powers that hold it in check, and about the rights and wrongs of kings and of those who promote or resist their authority.
Shakespeare’s Richard II takes one of the defining episodes in English history, and retells it with an extraordinary complexity of perspective and subtlety of characterisation which take us deeply and compellingly into the political issues which mattered most to the Elizabethans, and which meanwhile take Shakespeare’s dramatic technique to an extraordinary new level that will be sustained through the great plays of the following years. We will see how the play vividly dramatizes rival ideas about the nature and limits of regal power, and about the validity or otherwise of rebelling against royal tyranny; we will also see how, as a result, it became perilously involved in the politics of authority and rebellion its own day.
The course will involve extensive close reading of the set text, so students must bring a copy with them to every class, and should also become as familiar as possible with the play in advance.
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