The Life and Death of King Richard the Second

This is not the one about the hunchback. No kingdoms are traded for horses. This is the one that stands at the other end, the beginning, of Shakespeare’s great octology; the Henry IV, V, and VI plays, flanked by this play—and the one about the hunchback.

It’s not often performed. That’s a shame, because it’s one of Shakespeare’s best plays, and, therefore, almost by definition, one of the world’s best plays. The language—the poetry—is stunning. Nothing surpasses the language of Richard II; not even the gorgeous diction of the great tragedies.

And this play really is a tragedy. It is always grouped with the history plays, of course, and has been so grouped since the First Folio edition of 1623, and it does stand at the head of that cycle of eight history plays. But were it not part of that cycle, if Shakespeare had not written the Henry plays, we would certainly call it a tragedy just as we call Macbeth a tragedy even though, like this play, it deals with the life and death of a historical British monarch. And also as we call King Lear a tragedy, although, of course, that king is not historical.

Richard II is about the nature of kingship. Western Europeans in the middle ages and the Renaissance had a very odd notion of what a king was. The king, legal scholars held, had two bodies: a body natural and a body politic. (Yes, that’s where that term comes from.) The body natural was what you and I have. The Body Politic was immortal and perfect. It inhered in the body natural of the king and at the death of that body it instantly inhered in the body natural of the king’s successor. Hence the odd formulaic cry: “The king is dead; long live the king.”

The king of course reigned by divine right and was God’s anointed deputy. As king he could do no wrong. If he did do wrong, it was only the mortal person, not The King who did it, but merely the king’s body natural. Shakespeare’s King Richard believes this, and acts upon it. It is what destroys him. The play is largely an exploration of the tragic folly of the notion of the divinity of kings. In one of the most poignent moments of the play he admits to his followers:

     For you have but mistook me all this while:
     I live with bread like you, feel want,
     Taste grief, need Friends: subjected thus,
     How can you say to me, I am a King?

Nobody today would entertain such a notion. And yet … Not long ago another Richard; not a king perhaps, though he may have thought he was one famously said, “If the president does it it’s not illegal.”

-Richard Bell