THREE STEP ESSAY ASSIGNMENT
STEP 1: GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS
One of the most powerful moments of Richard II in performance occurs in (F) 4.1.154-311 when Richard is summoned to court to enact (perform) his own deposition in favor of his usurping cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, the future King Henry IV. Yet this “moment”, covering over 150 lines of Folio text, was left unrecorded in the first three editions of the play published during the reign of Queen Elizabeth (Q1-3, 1597-98), and would not appear in a print edition of the play until 1608 (Q4), that is, in the fifth year of the reign of King James I, the queen’s successor. The scene would remain included in two subsequent editions (Q 5, 1615 and in the First Folio in 1623), and retains pride of place in every edition of the play published thereafter.
Scholars generally agree that the scene in question was seamlessly integrated into Shakespeare’s original composition of Richard II, included in the play’s prompt book, and likely performed in the public theater in the 1590s but that publication of the deposition scene was prohibited by the Queen’s censors. But the lack of evidence in support of this consensus prompts one to ask:
- What makes scholars so sure that the deposition scene was actually performed during Elizabeth’s reign?
- Why would such a provocative scene be allowed to be performed in the volatile setting of a public theater that could accommodate over 2,000 playgoers at one time but be precluded from being read in the isolation of one’s home?
- What could have made private reading more dangerous than public viewing?
There are many ways of answering the first question but the most direct would be Elizabeth’s own reported claim in 1601 that “this tragedy was played 40 times in open streets and houses.” However, a second reported statement she made at the same time–“I am Richard II—know ye not that?”—would seem to make answering the second question nearly impossible. Why would she—an embattled but also remarkably competent, confident, and long-serving ruler–identify with the irresponsible Richard? Who would her Henry Bolingbroke be? More pointedly, did she often feel this way or was her identification with Richard prompted by events closer in time (see below) to her two reported pronouncements?
Possible answers to these questions lurk in the documents found in the digital edition of the Norton Shakespeare, which comment on and describe how followers of the Earl of Essex made use of the play to generate support for his effort at deposing the queen, whose favorite he once was. Your initial job is to review such documents in an effort to determine whether the play itself, inclusive of the deposition scene, justifies the queen’s concerns, or arguably works more in the interest of the queen (or Richard) than of Essex (or Bolingbroke). In so doing, note that the published 1597 quarto effectively highlights the Bishop of Carlisle’s prophecy of what would befall England in the wake of Richard’s deposition, each detail of which was proven true well before Shakespeare composed this play.
STEP 2: GO TO APPENDICES, DOCUMENTS, SHAKESPEARE AND HIS WORKS IN DIGITAL EDITION, THEN TO five extracts under heading “Augustine Phillips, Francis Bacon, et al., on Richard II (1601) Augustine Phillips, Francis Bacon, et al., on Richard II (1601). Read carefully and annotate.
STEP 3: WRITING PROMPT
Note that the purported commandeering of the play’s performance in no way confirms the logic (of the presumed censorship decision) that the play would be more dangerous in the reading than in the performing. Indeed, some scholars maintain that the deposition scene was not performed in the 1590s and that it may have only been written in order to promote the 1608 edition’s claim that it contained new matter, which the coronation in 1603 of a more secure King James enabled. Reconsidering the justice of this claim requires 1) a comparative reading of Q 4.1 and F 4.1 in light of the textual editor’s contention that “Q1 offers a decidedly less dramatic, less heightened version of events” than does F1; and 2) an assessment of what exactly the Bishop of Carlisle is referring to when he calls “a woeful pageant” (see F 4.1.314 and Q 4.1.158) whatever has preceded his remark in the two differing editions of the play. Those who contend that the deposition scene was performed in the 1590s claim that the “woeful pageant” refers to Richard’s highly performative deposition, which is transacted in the course of 150 lines in F.4.1.154-311. Those who don’t point to the continuity of the Bishop’s forthcoming speech with the speech he delivers earlier in the scene, seeing “woeful pageant” as a summing up of what the Bishop sees as a catastrophic event that will (and does) ramify for many, many years to come.
The primary concerns I’d like you to address are whether or not a “less dramatic, less heightened version of events” (as recorded in the 1597 quarto) could actually prove just as effective in performance as, or even more effective than, the 1608 version of the Parliament scene, and how it might alter the way audiences would respond to the less histrionic, less performative Richard who emerges in the play’s fifth act. To arrive at a critical assessment of this question, you will need to re-read the F and Q versions of the play from 4.1 straight through to the end, and determine what difference adding or subtracting the deposition scene makes both in terms of reading and performance. In order to better gauge the dramatic effectiveness of the deposition scene, you may also find it useful to stream, and comment on, excerpts from any of three recent performances of Richard’s deposition, featuring Ben Whishaw, David Tennant, and Fiona Shaw, respectively, in the featured roles (all available in the Canvas Richard II module). How do one or more of these performances help persuade you that the staging of Richard’s deposition was and remains absolutely essential to the successful production of this play?
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