In a world where a whisper in the pub against the state could get your balls chopped off, followed by your head, a hotshot playwright from the sticks dared to put on a public stage a thinly-veiled attack on the head of that state. It sent shock waves through London and beyond, and the queen herself into a flame of fear.
William Shakespeare had committed the unthinkable: Richard II was political dynamite. Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen too old for childbearing, was refusing to name an heir, and so the dramatist sent her a warning. It is impossible for us to recover the cataclysmic shock experienced by the audience as they watched the enactment of a king humiliated, uncrowned, arrested, thrown in the Tower of London, and butchered before their eyes. Military might had seized the sacred crown and usurped God’s divinely-ordained deputy on earth. But most dangerously of all, Shakespeare had shown the audience how easily it could be done.
Why did Elizabeth ensure that in every version of the published play this abdication scene was excised? To understand the answer to that question, we need to look at why it was considered a danger to the state. In 1595, the monarch had held power for 37 years and was facing a torrent of unprecedented challenges. Her rule was becoming dangerously fragile, and Shakespeare knew her grip on power was precarious.
Elizabeth had no allies in Europe and was under constant threat of war with Spain, the world’s greatest superpower. The country was bedevilled by a disastrous economic policy, mounting debt, nightmare inflation and a monopolies system so unfair it amounted to bureaucratic theft. The people were subsisting at near starvation level, facing unprecedented mass unemployment and devastating crop failures year after year. Taxes for the working poor were sky-rocketing while being drastically reduced for the already rich. With no standing army, no organised police force for maintaining control over civil disorder, a revolution was all too possible.
What made Richard II spectacularly seditious was that Elizabeth was well aware of the widespread slander that “Richard-the-Second” was one of her nicknames. To be a “King-Richard-II’s-man” was to be a duplicitous flatterer of the queen. Like that earlier monarch, she bestowed gifts and monopolies on luxury goods to keep her favourites loyal. Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, was becoming dangerously popular and the parallels between him and the character of Bolingbroke, the man of action who forces the divinely-ordained monarch to take off his sacred crown, were unmistakable. Any play that depicted disruption of the realm would be seen as inciting rebellion.
Some years earlier, Shakespeare had offered a vehement warning of this danger with his complex, blood-soaked Henry VI plays, which were monster hits with huge box-office takings. But when the Bard delivered the uncrowning and assassination of his Richard II on the London stage, the warning had become more urgent. The inescapable conclusion to be drawn from Richard II was that if the crown can be seized by might not right, what of the divine right of kings, the absolute tenet on which society’s hierarchical order was constructed? If rulers are divinely ordained, then why does God keep changing his mind?
But there was still the threat of invasion by Spain, when Elizabeth had to rely solely on the country’s geographical isolation for a defence policy, and was under constant threat of assassination, her personal staff selling secrets to ambassadors from enemy states to the highest bidder. And then there was the perennial problem her father had created. Dissidents of the state-enforced religion, backed by Spain, were plotting to overthrow the government. The Pope was even sending troops to Ireland to invade the land and urging the country’s closet Catholics to murder Elizabeth.
Where could the queen turn when there seemed nothing left to protect her fragile power from such threats? She set up a ruthlessly efficient international spy network to monitor the cold war, and a national spy network to root out anyone who spoke out against her reign. To fill up her depleted treasury, she sent out some adventurous types across the seas to fertile lands and rich mines, to starve the inhabitants into submission or massacre them if necessary, force them into belief in a Protestant God, and steal their valuable resources. In other words, she started to build an Empire.
Even that wasn’t enough to restore her endlessly depleted coffers. As her father had done, she made sure the punishment of a crime against the state was ghoulishly public. String up the traitors till they’re only half dead, rip out their bowels and only then hack off their heads.
Now that’s all very well. But what she needed above all else was the illusion of power, and her most valuable weapon was already there – in the theatre. She had watched new playhouses being thrown up all over the capital: fifteen to twenty thousand playgoers were flocking to them every week. The actors were fed up with being classed as vagabonds, so she got some courtiers to act as their patrons, such as her cousin, the Lord Chamberlain, the first patron of Shakespeare’s company. She ensured that the plays were well-rehearsed on a public stage before performing for her at court. Most importantly, the actors would tour the provinces as well, reaching a nationwide audience.
But Elizabeth, usually an astute political operator, missed a trick. Even bringing in tough censorship laws couldn’t ensure absolute control over what the playmakers wrote, less still what the actors actually performed. They’d started to find ways around the censors: setting their plays in earlier times and in foreign climes. What she was about to find out was that if you succeed in making the theatre the most important location for the representation and legitimisation of your power, you should never forget that the theatre itself has an even greater power – to subvert the very authority you want it to sanction.
Richard II did exactly that.
Shakespeare’s audiences would later be offered a barely disguised eulogy to Essex towards the end of Henry V, when, at the time of its staging, Essex was about to return from his Irish campaign. Ostensibly about Henry returning from Agincourt, it is Essex who is “the general”, and Elizabeth “the empress”:
How London doth pour out her citizens! [to]’ fetch their conquering Caesar in.
As, by a lower but loving likelihood,
Were now the general of our gracious empress,
As in good time he may, from Ireland coming,
Bringing rebellion broached on his sword,
How many would the peaceful city quit,
To welcome him!
It was a rallying cry for Essex’s fans, and the suggestion that he be seen as a King of England is clear. (It’s intriguing to remember that this was the year Shakespeare was concerned with another act of regicide, Julius Caesar.)
On Saturday, 7 February 1601, a new performance of Richard II was staged by Shakespeare’s company on the eve of the rebellion against the Queen. It was a public statement of support for Essex and his team, including Shakespeare’s friend, Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton. The rebellion failed. Shakespeare wasn’t put on trial, though some of his company were. None of them were imprisoned. Essex was executed; Southampton only jailed.
The myth that Richard II was written to flatter Elizabeth 1 should be blasted off the stage
A document that might be of uncertain provenance but could well be authentic, describes Elizabeth pouncing on the state papers for the reign of Richard II, raging: “I am Richard the Second, know ye not me?” complaining that “the tragedy was played 40 times in public streets and houses.” It must surely be how she felt. Elizabeth didn’t see the play’s author as toadying to the Tudors and must have wished he had. How did Shakespeare get away with it? This was treason. He had become so wildly popular, did she fear punishment of him would reveal a dangerous admission of his power?
Shock was one of the most potent strategies of Shakespeare’s theatrical practice, and we often lose the sense of what was revolutionary about his works. He abjured Marlowe’s sensationalism, rejected outright all Renaissance theories of art, empowered actors in ways they had never been before, satirised political corruption, interrogated the ethics of war, and, as we have seen, dared to challenge the authority of his queen.
The idea that Shakespeare was a royal propagandist is wheeled out every time there’s a whiff of news about the monarchs of his history plays. But the myth that Richard II and the earlier Richard III were written to flatter his queen, should be blasted off the stage.
Racist, anti-semitic, misogynistic, Tudor propagandist, nationalistic warmonger. It’s hard to find a writer who has attracted a more diverse array of abusive terms. Applying lazy and simplistic labels to Shakespeare’s plays is both intellectually sloppy and theatrically naive. We may not be able to fully recover the impact the plays made then, but we can do him the courtesy of not imposing our modern sensibilities on his works, and wilfully misrepresenting what he wanted his drama to do, and why.
Pauline F Kiernan is a Shakespeare scholar and playwright. Her crowdfunding book, “RADICAL SHAKESPEARE: Why Do We Get Him So Wrong is forthcoming from Unbound
