Richard II I have ended up liking a bit more than I expected I would. It suffers from not-enough-happens, I think…but there are moments of brilliance in it, and the character of Richard is very interesting. He’s contradictory, and intentionally so, because it happens in the same scene sometimes. He pings back and forth between what we’d expect from a king and wildly emotional, not at all what we’d expect. And there’s a Muse lyric that I didn’t know owed itself to the play: “I wasted time, and now doth Time waste me.”
I still think the beginning is far too devoid of why Richard is such a flawed king. Backing up Henry’s (Bolingbroke’s) beef is the fact that the country is in crisis. Gaunt says the same thing…but we don’t see that. Nor do we see how what he does with Bolingbroke and Mowbray is so bad. It’s not until he takes away his inheritance to fund his Irish war that we see something obviously no-no.
But it does…I was going to say “pick up” but that’s not right, because it doesn’t really…but there are some scenes that are legit interesting. The one in which Henry essentially forces Richard to abdicate reminded me so much of the scene in The Crucible where they ask John Proctor to sign the confession, and when it comes down to it, pen in hand, he can’t do it. “But it’s my name,” he cries. Not exactly the same, because Richard does agree to abdicate, but when it comes to confessing to their litany of charges against him, their show to the outside world that this is legitimate and not usurping, Richard won’t do it. It’s a solid scene. I didn’t know how it was going to end. The same, too, for when he speaks directly to the audience—more directly if feels to me than any other character has addressed the audience—in his prison cell, sharing how his entire world, so wide and vast before, has now become this tiny single space, and how he has inhabited that space in his mind. And then men come to murder him, and he fights back with surprising ferociousness. Surprising. Vivid. Alive.
Yeah. It’s a play that has its moments.
Night night.