Boyd: If any one character encompasses the "story of a nation," it is Edmund, Duke of York. He is shown tormented on the rack between a deep loyalty to the old dynastic certainties, and an equal repugnance toward the destructive tyranny of Richard. The closing movement of the play, where Edmund's attempts to maintain his old belief system in the new world of Bullingbrook lead him to betray his own son against his nature, is a brilliant portrait of the human cost of the Reformation on buckled English lives in Shakespeare's time.
What's going on in that very curious scene with Aumerle near the end?
Peymann: The central thought of this scene, in which Aumerle begs forgiveness, is "grace." The absurdity of this scene is more akin to the farces of Eugene Ionesco and Feydeau than to Shakespeare's history plays. Forgiveness and grace--the highest virtues of regal power which Bullingbrook, the new King Henry IV, must now learn. Grace and forgiveness: does this perhaps hint at the recurring speculation that Shakespeare was a Jesuit scholar and a secret Catholic? We don't know.
So, finally, how much does Richard change in the course of his journey?
Peymann: Through his fall the human side of Richard becomes visible--there was someone living in the crown who hid behind the mask of king. And as we come to see this person, he gains our sympathy. Henry IV's eulogy next to the bloody corpse of the king moves us: "March sadly after: grace my mourning here, / In weeping after this untimely bier."
Boyd: Richard never quite loses his arrogance. Shakespeare is rarely judgmental but does reserve a special room in purgatory for those who think themselves "wise" as Richard refers to himself as late as 5.5.63. He has perforce learned humility in other respects, and the self-knowledge that he has "wasted time." The humanity and the simplicity of his parting with Isabella: "hand from hand, my love, and heart from heart," are the most convincing symptoms of real change.
PLAYING RICHARD: AN INTERVIEW WITH FIONA SHAW
Fiona Shaw was born in Cork, Ireland, in 1958. She studied at RADA and has extensive experience with the National Theatre, as well as credits for a diverse range of films including My Left Foot (1989) and more recently a recurring role in the Harry Potter series. In the theater she has regularly collaborated with the director Deborah Warner, achieving great success in a variety of roles. Recently the pair revived their highly acclaimed production of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, first performed in New York in 1996. Fiona has won numerous awards for her acting and was awarded an Officier des Arts et Lettres in France in 2000 and an honorary CBE in the 2001 New Year's Honors. She talks her about her performance as Richard II at the National Theatre in London in 1995, in a production again directed by Warner, which was also filmed for the BBC.
Richard is traditionally described as a "weak" king, but that doesn't seem a very rewarding place for an actor to start, does it?
At the beginning of the play Richard seems more of a spoiled king than a weak king. He uses his power to banish Bullingbrook in the first act, which results in the world tumbling down on his head. His weakness lies in his abuse of power. He has none of the evenness that John of Gaunt describes in the beautiful "sceptred isle" speech. The play is about his journey to wisdom.
The play is closely related to Christopher Marlowe's Edward II, in which the king has explicitly gay relationships. And the great critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw in Richard what he called "a kind of feminine friendism," whatever that means. Did you explore questions of the king's sexuality and effeminacy?
Well, certainly the gender of the actress playing Richard meant that in our case we were obliquely sideswiping the thorny issue of Richard's sexuality. In historical terms Richard is said to have written the first cookbook, and he was also a king who prided himself on an England full of peace. As we know to our detriment, strong governments prefer war. My playing Richard did mean that I was free from using energy on the issue of effeminacy. And certainly I played the passionate affection for Bullingbrook, which was freed by the fact I was female so I could indulge the physicality of their affection; though it may have heightened the homoeroticism in the minds of the audience. What interested us was the way in which an intimate childhood friendship like Bullingbrook's and Richard's turned into a power battle later where neither party can win because both are fundamentally sympathetic to the other. I always felt Richard was both released in handing Bullingbrook the crown, the power reverting to the stronger member of the duo, as well as furious with himself in his famous "Ay, no; no, ay, for I must nothing be." There are very complex feelings at play in this section where love and revulsion meet.
And his kingliness? He has a strong investment in the idea of the sacredness of monarchy and of the king having two bodies, one representing his personal self and the other his kingly embodiment of the state. Is it hard to put these very medieval ideas across to a modern audience?
Again, being female meant that there was an iconoclastic element in tiptoeing into the area of "kingship" as opposed to "queenship." Richard speaks from the battlements with great fluency about the divine right of kings, which became his only protection against an insurgent group. His vulnerability and need to name God as the top of the pyramid in which he was second says a lot about how frail these notions are. The king is the servant of the will of the people as much as the people serve the king. There was a spectacular reply to this moment implicitly when the royal family reluctantly gathered for Princess Diana's funeral. The gift of kingship does lie with the people.
The central scene, when the crown passes from Richard to Bullingbrook, is usually referred to as the "deposition" scene, but, in the playing, did it seem more like an abdication?
The deposition scene is one of the greatest scenes ever written. Theatrically the audience has begun to turn its allegiance to Richard as he appears poor and a prisoner, broken from the previous "Down, down I come, like glist'ring Phaethon." He doesn't really abdicate because he asks Bullingbrook first to take up the crown and, finally, with his intellectually accurate contortions, he crowns the thieving cousin. But always on the edge of a dialectical ambiguity: " 'God save King Henry,' unkinged Richard says."
And what about the development of Richard's language: the poetry is very formal at moments such as the one where he inverts the language of the coronation ceremony, but at other times--especially toward the end--it's much more personal and fragmented, isn't it?
The whole play is entirely in verse, which gives the impression that the world of the play is held in a more formal and perhaps more innocent time. There is no free prose, no breakages of line; it has a metronome, as if it is one long poem. Richard's language improves from the moment he returns from Ireland with the beautiful speech, "let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings." It is as if, when his wit meets sorrow, something beautiful is minted. By the time we meet him in the prison he has the gentle "aria": "I have been studying how to compare / This prison where I live unto the world." His fluency has the motor of a search rather than triumph, he uses his phenomenal mind to say something about the state of being; far too late for him, but not for us hearing it. We are privileged because we learn his lesson:
... But whate'er I am,
Nor I nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
With being nothing....
A very particular language question: what did you make of his shifts between the royal "we" and the personal "I"?
He uses the royal "we" during the first half of the play; his final speech before being killed is his discovery that he is not a god or a king, but a man, and that is enough. He sheds the "we" to become himself: this is very much the Christian model of having to lose everything to gain the eternal life.
So how much does Richard change in the course of his journey?
One of the reasons it is a spectacular part to play is that the play needs the actor playing Richard to be in flying colors from the top of the evening. It also needs the actor to know that you will lose the audience
's sympathy very early on. The coup of the play is that Richard gains the sympathy of the audience by losing his seeming charms. Richard changes entirely from someone who does not notice what he eats to being someone who needs "bread like you." From this access in the play onward he joins us, the ordinary people, leaving us with the question: what do we do when we elevate people too high? We map our aspirations onto them and punish them when they fail us. Richard is a star that falls.
8. Fiona Shaw as Richard II, National Theatre, 1995. Richard leaves the audience asking the question "What do we do when we elevate people too high?"
SHAKESPEARE'S CAREER IN THE THEATER
BEGINNINGS
William Shakespeare was an extraordinarily intelligent man who was born and died in an ordinary market town in the English Midlands. He lived an uneventful life in an eventful age. Born in April 1564, he was the eldest son of John Shakespeare, a glove-maker who was prominent on the town council until he fell into financial difficulties. Young William was educated at the local grammar in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, where he gained a thorough grounding in the Latin language, the art of rhetoric, and classical poetry. He married Ann Hathaway and had three children (Susanna, then the twins Hamnet and Judith) before his twenty-first birthday: an exceptionally young age for the period. We do not know how he supported his family in the mid-1580s.
Like many clever country boys, he moved to the city in order to make his way in the world. Like many creative people, he found a career in the entertainment business. Public playhouses and professional full-time acting companies reliant on the market for their income were born in Shakespeare's childhood. When he arrived in London as a man, sometime in the late 1580s, a new phenomenon was in the making: the actor who is so successful that he becomes a "star." The word did not exist in its modern sense, but the pattern is recognizable: audiences went to the theater not so much to see a particular show as to witness the comedian Richard Tarlton or the dramatic actor Edward Alleyn.
Shakespeare was an actor before he was a writer. It appears not to have been long before he realized that he was never going to grow into a great comedian like Tarlton or a great tragedian like Alleyn. Instead, he found a role within his company as the man who patched up old plays, breathing new life, new dramatic twists, into tired repertory pieces. He paid close attention to the work of the university-educated dramatists who were writing history plays and tragedies for the public stage in a style more ambitious, sweeping, and poetically grand than anything that had been seen before. But he may also have noted that what his friend and rival Ben Jonson would call "Marlowe's mighty line" sometimes faltered in the mode of comedy. Going to university, as Christopher Marlowe did, was all well and good for honing the arts of rhetorical elaboration and classical allusion, but it could lead to a loss of the common touch. To stay close to a large segment of the potential audience for public theater, it was necessary to write for clowns as well as kings and to intersperse the flights of poetry with the humor of the tavern, the privy, and the brothel: Shakespeare was the first to establish himself early in his career as an equal master of tragedy, comedy, and history. He realized that theater could be the medium to make the national past available to a wider audience than the elite who could afford to read large history books: his signature early works include not only the classical tragedy Titus Andronicus but also the sequence of English historical plays on the Wars of the Roses.
He also invented a new role for himself, that of in-house company dramatist. Where his peers and predecessors had to sell their plays to the theater managers on a poorly paid piecework basis, Shakespeare took a percentage of the box-office income. The Lord Chamberlain's Men constituted themselves in 1594 as a joint stock company, with the profits being distributed among the core actors who had invested as sharers. Shakespeare acted himself--he appears in the cast lists of some of Ben Jonson's plays as well as the list of actors' names at the beginning of his own collected works--but his principal duty was to write two or three plays a year for the company. By holding shares, he was effectively earning himself a royalty on his work, something no author had ever done before in England. When the Lord Chamberlain's Men collected their fee for performance at court in the Christmas season of 1594, three of them went along to the Treasurer of the Chamber: not just Richard Burbage the tragedian and Will Kempe the clown, but also Shakespeare the scriptwriter. That was something new.
The next four years were the golden period in Shakespeare's career, though overshadowed by the death of his only son Hamnet, aged eleven, in 1596. In his early thirties and in full command of both his poetic and his theatrical medium, he perfected his art of comedy, while also developing his tragic and historical writing in new ways. In 1598, Francis Meres, a Cambridge University graduate with his finger on the pulse of the London literary world, praised Shakespeare for his excellence across the genres:
As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for comedy, witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love Labours Lost, his Love Labours Won, his Midsummer Night Dream and his Merchant of Venice: for tragedy his Richard the 2, Richard the 3, Henry the 4, King John, Titus Andronicus and his Romeo and Juliet.
For Meres, as for the many writers who praised the "honey-flowing vein" of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, narrative poems written when the theaters were closed due to plague in 1593-94, Shakespeare was marked above all by his linguistic skill, by the gift of turning elegant poetic phrases.
PLAYHOUSES
Elizabethan playhouses were "thrust" or "one-room" theaters. To understand Shakespeare's original theatrical life, we have to forget about the indoor theater of later times, with its proscenium arch and curtain that would be opened at the beginning and closed at the end of each act. In the proscenium arch theater, stage and auditorium are effectively two separate rooms: the audience looks from one world into another as if through the imaginary "fourth wall" framed by the proscenium. The picture-frame stage, together with the elaborate scenic effects and backdrops beyond it, created the illusion of a self-contained world--especially once nineteenth-century developments in the control of artificial lighting meant that the auditorium could be darkened and the spectators made to focus on the lighted stage. Shakespeare, by contrast, wrote for a bare platform stage with a standing audience gathered around it in a courtyard in full daylight. The audience were always conscious of themselves and their fellow spectators, and they shared the same "room" as the actors. A sense of immediate presence and the creation of rapport with the audience were all-important. The actor could not afford to imagine he was in a closed world, with silent witnesses dutifully observing him from the darkness.
Shakespeare's theatrical career began at the Rose Theatre in Southwark. The stage was wide and shallow, trapezoid in shape, like a lozenge. This design had a great deal of potential for the theatrical equivalent of cinematic split-screen effects, whereby one group of characters would enter at the door at one end of the tiring-house wall at the back of the stage and another group through the door at the other end, thus creating two rival tableaux. Many of the battle-heavy and faction-filled plays that premiered at the Rose have scenes of just this sort.
At the rear of the Rose stage, there were three capacious exits, each over ten feet wide. Unfortunately, the very limited excavation of a fragmentary portion of the original Globe site, in 1989, revealed nothing about the stage. The first Globe was built in 1599 with similar proportions to those of another theater, the Fortune, albeit that the former was polygonal and looked circular, whereas the latter was rectangular. The building contract for the Fortune survives and allows us to infer that the stage of the Globe was probably substantially wider than it was deep (perhaps forty-three feet wide and twenty-seven feet deep). It may well have been tapered at the front, like that of the Rose.
The capacity of the Globe was said to have been enormous, perhaps in excess of three tho
usand. It has been conjectured that about eight hundred people may have stood in the yard, with two thousand or more in the three layers of covered galleries. The other "public" playhouses were also of large capacity, whereas the indoor Blackfriars theater that Shakespeare's company began using in 1608--the former refectory of a monastery--had overall internal dimensions of a mere forty-six by sixty feet. It would have made for a much more intimate theatrical experience and had a much smaller capacity, probably of about six hundred people. Since they paid at least sixpence a head, the Blackfriars attracted a more select or "private" audience. The atmosphere would have been closer to that of an indoor performance before the court in the Whitehall Palace or at Richmond. That Shakespeare always wrote for indoor production at court as well as outdoor performance in the public theater should make us cautious about inferring, as some scholars have, that the opportunity provided by the intimacy of the Blackfriars led to a significant change toward a "chamber" style in his last plays--which, besides, were performed at both the Globe and the Blackfriars. After the occupation of the Blackfriars a five-act structure seems to have become more important to Shakespeare. That was because of artificial lighting: there were musical interludes between the acts, while the candles were trimmed and replaced. Again, though, something similar must have been necessary for indoor court performances throughout his career.
Front of house there were the "gatherers" who collected the money from audience members: a penny to stand in the open-air yard, another penny for a place in the covered galleries, sixpence for the prominent "lord's rooms" to the side of the stage. In the indoor "private" theaters, gallants from the audience who fancied making themselves part of the spectacle sat on stools on the edge of the stage itself. Scholars debate as to how widespread this practice was in the public theaters such as the Globe. Once the audience were in place and the money counted, the gatherers were available to be extras on stage. That is one reason why battles and crowd scenes often come later rather than early in Shakespeare's plays. There was no formal prohibition upon performance by women, and there certainly were women among the gatherers, so it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that female crowd members were played by females.
Richard II (Folger Shakespeare Library) Page 17