Richard II

Summary

Richard II dramatizes the last two years of the reign of Richard of Bordeaux (1398–1400): a lawful, anointed king who governs badly loses his crown to his cousin Henry Bolingbroke, and in losing it finds a voice of extraordinary inward eloquence. The play is written entirely in verse, and much of its action is ceremony: a formal accusation, a tournament stopped at the moment of combat, a deathbed counsel, a surrender on the walls of a castle, an abdication staged before Parliament. The opening quarrel already hides a crime. Bolingbroke accuses Thomas Mowbray of plotting the death of the Duke of Gloucester, the king's uncle, but the audience soon learns from the widowed Duchess of Gloucester and from John of Gaunt that Richard himself was behind the murder. At Coventry Richard halts the trial by combat and banishes both men, Mowbray for life and Bolingbroke for six years. He then farms out the realm's revenues to pay for war in Ireland, and when old Gaunt dies after rebuking him for wasting England, Richard seizes the Lancastrian estates that should pass to the banished Bolingbroke. The Duke of York warns him that by breaking the law of inheritance he cuts away the ground of his own title. While Richard is in Ireland, Bolingbroke lands at Ravenspurgh claiming only his inheritance. Nobles led by Northumberland join him, York declares himself neutral, and the king's favourites Bushy and Green are executed. Returning to Wales, Richard swings between confidence that heaven will defend its anointed and despair, sitting on the ground to tell sad stories of the death of kings. At Flint Castle he yields before he is asked. In a garden at Langley a gardener explains to his servants, and to the overhearing Queen, that the king failed to prune his commonwealth. In Westminster Hall the Bishop of Carlisle protests that no subject may judge his king and prophesies civil war; Richard hands over the crown, calls for a mirror and shatters it. He is parted from his Queen and sent to Pomfret Castle. A conspiracy against the new king is uncovered when York discovers his son Aumerle's involvement and demands his punishment, while the Duchess of York begs for pardon and receives it. In prison Richard reasons through his own unkinging, hears music, and is murdered by Sir Pierce of Exton, who believes he is fulfilling Henry's wish. The new king disowns the deed and vows a voyage to the Holy Land to wash away the blood. Read historically, the play stages a hard Elizabethan question without settling it: whether a bad but lawful king may be removed, and what the removal costs.

Top Lessons

• The anointed king and the limits of obedience

  Gaunt and Carlisle hold that God's deputy may be judged only by God, while the play shows Richard plainly guilty of murder, extortion and the theft of an inheritance. York adds a third view: by violating Bolingbroke's right of succession, Richard undermines the very principle that makes him king. Shakespeare gives each argument its full weight and lets consequences, not a narrator, test them.

• Eloquence is not the same as rule

  Richard speaks the play's most beautiful poetry, while Bolingbroke says little and acts steadily. Richard's images of sun, balm and angels tend to replace action rather than direct it, and his finest lines come when there is nothing left to do. The play asks students to admire his language and also to notice what it costs a kingdom when a ruler prefers performance to governance.

• Learning to grieve in the mirror and the cell

  Stripped of office, Richard turns inward. In the mirror scene he discovers that grief lies within, beyond outward show; at Pomfret he concedes that he wasted time and is now wasted by it. Whether this is repentance, self-knowledge or exquisite self-pity is a fair question for seminar, and the text supports more than one answer.

• The Gardener's commonwealth

  In Act 3, Scene 4 a servant and his master speak more clearly about policy than any lord. Their trade teaches pruning of overgrown branches, weeding of what chokes the good plants, and timely restraint of excess, and they apply it to a king who let caterpillars flourish. The scene invites reflection on stewardship as a duty owed by those who hold any authority, and on the dignity of practical wisdom in humble people.

• York's house divided: justice and mercy for Aumerle

  Act 5 turns the national question into a family one. York, now loyal to Henry, demands that his own son be punished for treason; the Duchess kneels for mercy and Henry grants it. The scene tests what loyalty means when allegiance changes, and shows the new king choosing pardon at the very moment his own legitimacy is weakest.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The play has no physician on stage, but its political language is saturated with Galenic medicine: choler to be purged, a season unfit for bleeding, a sick realm entrusted to physicians who wounded it, a garden whose overfull sap must be let. These figures make the play a useful teaching text on how humoral theory shaped Elizabethan thinking about the body politic. Its psychological interest is greater. The Queen's grief without a known cause, and Bushy's account of how sorrow multiplies its objects like a trick perspective, give an early modern description of anticipatory melancholy and anxious foreboding. Richard's swings between exaltation and despair in Act 3 have tempted modern readers to retrospective labels; these should be offered as readings, not diagnoses, since Shakespeare frames them in terms of providence, flattery and fortune. The mirror scene and the Pomfret soliloquy explore the distinction between outward signs and inward grief, and the soliloquy touches the old belief that music could restore the distracted mind. Gaunt's punning on his gaunt, fasting, sleepless body links old age, grief and wasting.

• Act 1, Scene 1

  Richard frames reconciliation as humoral treatment: purging choler without bloodletting, and his doctors' advice that the month is wrong for bleeding.

• Act 1, Scene 4

  Richard learns that Gaunt is grievously sick and prays that his physician will hasten his death, so that the estate can fund the Irish war.

• Act 2, Scene 1

  Gaunt, dying, puns on his name as a wasted body worn by watching, fasting and grief, and casts England as a patient on a deathbed tended by flattering physicians.

• Act 2, Scene 2

  The Queen's causeless heaviness and Bushy's explanation of grief through the image of perspective pictures that distort when viewed straight on.

• Act 3, Scene 2

  Richard alternates between confidence and despair as each messenger arrives, ending in a meditation on death and the hollow crown.

• Act 3, Scene 4

  The Gardener describes wounding the bark of fruit trees to check excess sap and blood, an arboreal analogue of therapeutic bleeding applied to statecraft.

• Act 4, Scene 1

  The mirror episode: Richard studies his face for the marks of sorrow, breaks the glass, and concludes that grief lies within beyond its outward signs.

• Act 5, Scene 5

  Richard's prison soliloquy peoples his solitude with competing thoughts and humours, then reflects on music as a remedy for madness that instead disturbs him.

• Act 5, Scene 6

  Percy reports that the Abbot of Westminster has died under the weight of conscience and melancholy.