Free Richard II by William Shakespeare

above.
    Significantly, the scene depicting Richard’s deposition was not included in any printed version of the play until the Fourth Quarto of 1608, implying that this scene may not have been performed during Elizabeth’s reign.
    The play would first have been performed at The Theatre, with the 1601 revival taking place at the Globe. The play itself presents staging requirements that suggest full use of the different levels of these large open-air amphitheaters, such as the entrance of Richard and his attendants on the walls of Flint Castle (Act 3 Scene 3). Richard Burbage undoubtedly played the title character, though other casting details are only conjectural. There is no obvious part for the company clown, although a long-standing stage tradition turns the sober gardener of Act 3 Scene 4 into a comic part.
    While there may have been some continuity of casting into
Henry IV Part I
, there are no records of the history plays being performed in sequence until Frank Benson’s “Week of Kings” at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1901. Perhaps more interestingly, the play with the earliest connection to
Richard II
is
Hamlet
: records of the East India Company ship
Dragon
show that the ship’s crew performed the play off the coast of Sierra Leone on September 30, 1607 for an audience of Portuguese visitors, a few days after one of the first recorded performances of
Hamlet
.
    Unsurprisingly, in the immediate wake of the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, it would have been dangerously inappropriate to attempt a revival of
Richard II
in its Shakespearean form, the political climate still being too sensitive to tolerate even a distant depiction of regicide. Nahum Tate attempted to get around the problem through geography, resituating the play in Sicily with the title
The Sicilian Usurper
in December 1680. The play lasted for two performances before being banned, and an attempt the following month to revive the play as
The Tyrant of Sicily
met a similar fate. Despite Tate’s claims that “My Design was to engage the pitty of the Audience for him in his Distresses” and that he shows his King Oswald “Preferring the Good of his Subjects to his own private Pleasure,” 2 the plot still resonated too nearly with recent events. The political power of
Richard II
, even in adapted form, continued to render the play dangerous.
    This bias against the play continued into the eighteenth century. Only two productions of
Richard II
are recorded in London during the century: 3 an adaptation by Lewis Theobald in 1719 and John Rich’s production of the original at Covent Garden in 1738–39. Theobald’s Preface to this “Orphan Child of
Shakespear
” sets out his agenda:
    The many scatter’d Beauties, which I have long admir’d in His Life and Death of K. Richard the II, induced me to think they would have stronger Charms, if they were interwoven in a regular Fable. 4
    Interestingly, Theobald’s most powerful intervention was to bolster the character of Aumerle, turning him into a sentimental tragic hero who ultimately dies for his king. The play’s finale becomes a bloodbath in which Richard is killed by Exton but survives long enough to tell Bullingbrook that “all thy Fears with me ly bury’d: / Unrival’d, wear the crown” 5 before crying out for Isabella, who witnesses his death. Lady Piercy, another of Theobald’s additions, commits suicide for Aumerle’s sake, and even York dies of a broken heart upon seeing Richard’s body. The buildup of tragic pathos is symptomatic of the period’s tastes, and the play was evidently briefly popular:a 1720 promptbook survives for performances at Dublin’s Smock Alley Theatre.
    Rich’s production was the first since the Restoration to revive Shakespeare’s text in something nearing a complete form. The testimony of Thomas Davies suggests political intent behind the production, with one particular addition greeted rapturously by the audience,
    who applied almost every line that was spoken