From Critical Essays in Shakespeare’s Richard IIed. Kirby Farrell (GK Hall, 1999)

Introduction:Play, Death, and History in Richard IIKlRBY FARRELL

Like Miranda spellbound by Prospero's story of herorigins, Shakespeare's audience was avid to behold thepast, and the young dramatist made his reputation bystaging English history. Yet like Prospero’s tale,Shakespeare's histories open the way to deepermysteries. Even though the plays defer toHolinshed„Hall, and other authorities, they alsofictionalize and improvise at will. Nigel Saul,Richard II's most recent biographer argues thatShakespeare drew an apt portrait of the king.1 YetRichard’s sketched in dramatic but also ambiguousbrushstrokes. Is his downfall the original sin thatplunged England into mayhem and ultimately broughtQueen Elizabeth's grandfather Henry Tudor to thethrone in providential triumph? Is the play driven, asE. M. W Tillyard argued, by a propagandists Tudormyth?2 But then, what of Frank Brownlow's contentionthat Richard's politic murder of his uncle Gloucesterwould remind Elizabethans that their own queen "hadalso committed (through a servant whom she laterdisowned, as Richard disowns Mowbray) an act ofsacrilegious violence when she ordered the beheadingof her kinswoman, the Queen of Scots" ? Or is WilburSanders right that Shakespeare consistently cultivates"political agnosticism"? Are the plays opportunisticcommercial entertainment? Meditations ,on centuries ofpredatory politics and conniving ambition? And what,did the plays mean in a culture that compulsivelymoralized history,5 imagining rhe past infused withuncanny prophetic intent? The antiquary, Sir SimondsD'Ewes believed the Protestant religion had flourishedin England 400 years before Augustine, and been keptalive among the Welsh and the Scots until properly".rediscovered" by the Reformation.^ In breaking withRome, Henry VIII thought he was emulating King LuciusI of Roman Britain:—who was- actually a legendaryfigment, the' stuff of dreams. English aristocrats

traced their ancestry back through Troy to Adam, usinghistory as a credential authorized in heaven.

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Shakespeare's ambiguity is not simplycircumstantial. Critics have long beenfascinated by his peculiar capacity forevoking multiple perspectives. Dr. Johnsonquipped that the pun was a "fatal Cleopatra"that Shakespeare could never resist. Keatspraised Shakespeare's "negative capability."Although the terminology has changed,critics still try to bring this fundamentalcognitive quality into focus. In a well-known essay (1981), Norman Rabkin comparedShakespeare's radically equivocal conceptionof Henry V to an optical illusion thatallows the beholder to see either a rabbitor a duck, but not both at once.7 Rabkin'sShakespeare perfected a dramaturgy that bothidealizes and disenchants his material,producing in this instance a Hal who can bea model king and a ruthless Machiavel.Likewise, on a larger scale, Shakespeare'sEnglish history can appear to be a triumphalmarch toward civic fulfillment (the Tudormyth) or a protracted, murderous storminterrupted by sunlit coronation days.

In actual experience, Rabkin's analogy toan optical illusion is misleading. Once yourealize that Hal can be either a rabbit orduck, you may not be able to perceive bothconfigurations at once, but neither are youlikely to see one and forget the other. Evenif you conceive Hal as a rabbit, you arelikely to remain tacitly aware of hispotential duckiness. That awareness oflatent meanings is characteristic of irony,and Shakespeare's imagination is modernbecause he sees the world as conditioned byirony. This is why his histories can be socompelling. Where didactic narratives areapt to be flat and coercive, Shakespeare'scomprehensive ironies seem to do morejustice to the storm of causality that ishistorical process, the play of motive andaccident, the emotional palette of livedexperience. In the wisdom of slang, hishistories "come to life" for us becausetheir meanings and perspectives can seem

inexhaustible.Yet this is by no means an unequivocal

virtue. To peer into "the dark backward andabysm of time," as Prospero calls it,'8 is toopen imagination to the overwhelming mysteryof life and death. To the practical eye,life emerges from, and will return to, anabysm of nothingness, even as the cloud-capped towers and the great globe itselfwill dissolve. Like other animals", we die,rot, and disappear forever, but with aburden of awareness that is unique tohumans. As Otto Rank and Ernest Beckermaintain, we cope with that threat ofannihilation by developing cultural systemsthat support a conviction of immortality andturn anxiety into a source of energizingheroic values.^ Not just religion buteverything in culture, from art to law,contributes to that sustaining conviction.Every culture devises stories that give lifelasting value. Such public stories areenabling fictions that make the worldusable.

In anthropological terms, Shakespeare'stheater was a boundary-controllinginstitution. Like a church, it refocusedimagination on the edge of the conventionalworld and what lies beyond—it is worthremembering that many early chroniclers likeBede were ecclesiastics. Like the church,the theater offered participants acontrolled exposure to the intolerablecontradic-

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tions of the human situation. In effect, audiencespaid to probe the limits of conventional life and theprofound emotions invested in fantasies about theground of being: the purpose of life and the pressureof death. Although Christians expressed proprietaryconfidence in their own cosmic ground, some of themflocked to hear an actor celebrate the infinite pieceof work man is, gag at the decay signified byYorick's skull, and mime his own death. This suggeststhat theater augmented the dynamic, reality-testingdimension of religion, opening outward the oftendefensively homiletic formations of orthodox belief.While theater boasted no ultimate answers, it workedto structure imaginative experience and reinforcevalues whose popularity could be empirically measuredat the box office. Plays could allow audiences toexplore the usually taboo margins of experience and

change, enlarging—and testing—the range of thingsthey could safely think about.

For most people everyday life is a closed circleof conventions, a sheltering space of custom and mythcircumscribed like the medieval walled city or "thehollow crown / That rounds the mortal temples of aking" (R2, 3.2.160—6l). Outside of that shelteredspace lies contingency and the unknown: terraincognita, an earthly or heavenly paradise, or thedark abysm, sources of ecstasy and revelation, ormadness and annihilation. Cultures fortify thatboundary with the structures of symbolic immortality,like the medieval minster that enclosed the faithfulin an edifice of immutable stone and ideal design,controlling access through its great portals,mediating the infinite sky with stained glass storiesthat embodied the past and future, alpha and omega.The medieval mystery plays fashioned a mythic timeframe out of holy writ. Herod might rage against theinnocents and the mob torment Jesus, but God was theultimate playwright explicitly directing his storytoward revelation.

By contrast, the tremendous dynamic instability ofthe Renaissance shook and deformed traditionalpsychic guarantees even as it liberated unprecedentedenergies. The boundaries of conventional realitybecame more acutely unstable—think of Prospero'sexotic isle—even as medieval castles fell to ruinsand cities began to outgrow their medieval walls.Cosmologists like Copernicus reconceived the heavens.Rediscovery of the ancient world expanded Europe'spsychic horizon even as feats of circumnavigationdid. Unprecedented social changes and storms of newinformation buffeted imagination, and the need toorient self and society was no mere figure of speech,since the shock of globalization set culturalcompasses spinning. At the same time traditionalforms of mythmaking met new, complex forms ofresistance, from humanist curiosity about the naturalworld and self-criticism to religious sectarianismand pragmatic commercialism. As in the master tropeof the Renaissance, that all the world's a stage,Europeans became fascinated by the invented, natureof cultural forms and verities. The power of analysisto disenchant familiar conventions produced a grearerconviction of mastery and freedom, but it also raisedthe specters of illusion, alienation, and madness.

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History accordingly became a dark abysm full ofpromise and menace. A confident imagination could be

tantalized by the wonders of classical civilization,the origins and secret causes of the world. Yet theabysm* also yielded terrifying phantoms, fromatheistical pagans to catastrophes that implied anangry or hostile God. Catholic eschatology had oncemapped reassuring landmarks onto the abysm:hell, .purgatory, and heaven; originary "past andredemptive future. By contrast, the Reformation triedto repudiate such superstitious schemes and face thedarkness supported only by vigilant faith. Even onthe most practical level there "was danger, since theabysm could spawn histories whose doctrinal orpolitical implications could provoke deadlypersecution. Even many decades after Henry VIII'sreign of terror networks of spies served an elitewhose insecurities and opportunism could turn acareless opinion into a life-threateninginterrogation in Star Chamber.

While historians have clarified many of theseconflicts, I want to focus attention on theexistential processes that the conflictsparticularize ,and sometimes mask. Lynn White Jr.calls the Renaissance "the most psychically disturbedera in European history." He holds that the era'sabnormal anxiety "rose from an ever increasingvelocity of cultural change compounded by a series offearful disasters," and that "this spiritual traumawas healed by the emergence, in the minds of ordinarypeople^ of an .absolutely novel and relaxed attitudetoward change."10 As I see it, popular fascinationwith Shakespeare's histories was. in part a responseto this traumatic stress. It was an attempt tointegrate terrifying psychic materials into acoherent cultural narrative. The dramatist and hisaudience were groping toward the healthier "relaxedattitude toward change" that White discerns in thecentury that followed.

That the Renaissance was an era of creativeferment and traumatic injury is less contradictorythan might appear. One of the fundamental modes ofcoping with traumatic stress, in< contemporary therapyas well as in Homer's day,11 is for victims to createa narrative that cap integrate'the violent experienceinto psychic life. Injury may produce urgent creativestriving. Buffeted by a flood of new information andcultural changes, not to mention natural disasterssuch as plague, early modern culture developed acompensatory dynamism. But'then, Becker would findthis dynamism unusual only in its intensity. In hisview humankind doesn't simply screen out the terror-ofdeath. Rather, by developing cultures that fosterconvictions of immortality, people turn terror into asource of energizing heroic purpose. The sense ofapocalyptic doom that oppressed many early modernimaginations, for example, also inspired efforts to

build a new Jerusalem in North America in the face ofstaggering .hardships. This compensatory strivingresonates everywhere in Shakespeare's histories, moststrikingly in the remarkable imaginative scope oftheir speeches.

Not that creative striving guarantees a happyoutcome. Like an inspired playwright, the magicianProspero fashions a triumphal resolution to his

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exile, yet henceforth "every third thought shall bemy grave" (Tempest, 5.1.312). Again and againShakespeare's kings construct cloud-capped towers ofrhetoric that cannot withstand the seismic shuddersof history. As Richard II laments, the lordly mind isfull of "self and vain conceit, / As if this fleshwhich walls about our life were brass impregnable"(3.2.166-67). Yet at any moment death may "with alittle pin / [Bore] through his castle wall, andfarewell king!" (169-70). Richard struggles toimagine himself divinely empowered—"a god on earth"(5.3.136) in the formula of the homilies—to counterhis* obsessive terror of nothingness, as in hisimages of shattered mirrors or a bucket plunging intoa dark (abysmal) well (4.1.184-89).

Both 'Shakespeare'^ play and Saul's biography record afault line or fracture that runs through-Richard'scharacter. In the last two years of his reignRichard's behavior became extravagant, sharpening theconflict between his conception of godlike majesty andhis incompetence as a ruler. In 1397 the king launcheda political and territorial revolution thatstrengthened the monarchy even as his self-aggrandizement alienated his subjects. In the processhe abruptly struck down old enemies among the nobilitywith excessive cruelty, -contriving the murder of theDuke of Gloucester that in Shakespeare's playindirectly precipitates the fatal rebellion. But then,suddenly confronted by Bullingbrook in 1399, Richardstumbled, lost political control, and collapsed. Sostriking were these changes in him that some scholarshave maintained that the king .became mentallyderanged in his last years.12 Saul, by contrast; playsdown psychopathology. He endorses Shakespeare'sportrait, construing Richard as a narcissisticpersonality (Saul, 459-67), histrionic, self-idealizing, and dangerously intolerant of criticism.

In Shakespeare, Richard's conflicted nature

starkly emerges at Bark-loughly Castle on his returnfrom Ireland in 1399 (3-2). At first the king conjuresa providential vision of his* own righteousinvincibility and scorns his opponents. When wordarrives that his Welsh forces have defected toBullingbrook, however, he persists in his magicalthinking, but with reversed polarity. Instead ofcelebrating a supernatural self-confidence, heconjures self-intoxicating" rage, condemning theimagined betrayal of his closest supporters, Bagot,Bushy, and Green, and cursing the rebels as villains,vipers, dogs, snakes, and Judases—"each one thriceworse than Judas" (3.2.132).

At this point Scroop reveals that the rebelshave*already executed Bagot, Bushy, and Green, andthe announcement of punishment and death abruptlycollapses Richard's mood, eliciting his famoussymphonic monologue about King Death and the vanityof human life. The reversal is startling. Yet hisbehavior is as coherent as it is unstable. Richardremains deeply self-referential,

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oscillating between unrealistic self-inflation andabnegation* One way to probe the sources of hisnarcissism is to explore its function as a strategyfor self-preservation and terror management. ^

In his speech (3.2.144—77) Richard envisions aBrueghel-like triumph of death, but with murderedkings the salient victims. While he has good reason tofear that he will be killed if deposed, his speechimagines universal doom. In the opposed categories ofthe speech, the mortal king is besieged by the nemesisKing Death. The human king survives by annihilatingothers through the sublimated killing of intimidation.To "monarchize" is to "be feared" and able to "killwith looks" (3.2.165). At bottom Richard assumes thatthe world is the wilderness of wolves that haunts thedying Henry IV (2HIV, 4.5.136-37). This is the "all-hating world" (5.5.66) whose basic principle is killor be killed. In such a world a king must rely on thetheatricality of his "little scene" to command respect(3.2.164) and thwart assaults on his life. In such aworld the preoccupation with majesty begins to lookless self-indulgent and frivolous, and more like adesperate technique to- control—to rise above—relentlessly encroaching competitive violence. Justthis wolfish violence marauds through* Shakespeare'sEnglish histories, especially when Henry V's prematuredemise unleashes the predatory frenzy of the Henry VIplays.

Richard's panicky speeches show public violenceresonating in the depths of intimate experience. As

his biographers witness, Richard's entire life wasmarked by appalling insecurity. His father, thevaliant Black Prince, returned from war wasted byillness, in a long bedridden decline. When Richardwas four, his older brother Edward died. At nine hefinally lost his father. In 1394, while still in hertwenties, his beloved wife Anne died, possibly ofplague. Early in his reign, still only a boy offourteen, Richard faced the Peasants' Revolt, "thelargest and most serious outbreak of popular unrestin England in the middle ages" (Saul, 56). When heascended the throne, recurring episodes of plague hadprobably reduced. Europe's population by half.14

Throughout his reign, often ineptly if not unwisely,he quarreled with factions of the nobility. Suchstrife was by no means new—after all, his great-grandfather Edward II had been overthrown. But inRichard's time and for a century afterward England'sevolving structure of governance proved to beespecially precarious.

For Richard the first crisis came in the greatPeasants' Revolt of 1381, to be followed by a virtualcoup in 1388, when a faction led by his uncleGloucester effectively deposed him for several days.His friend Robert deVere raised a force to defend thecrown, but it was routed in Oxfordshire, leaving theking helpless to resist the Appellant lords and the"Merciless Parliament" they convened. "The period ofthe Appellant coup and its -aftermath," says Saul,"was the most anguished and harrowing that Richardhad yet lived through. He had seen his policiesreversed, his'household taken over and purged, andhis friends either exiled or sent to their deaths. Hehimself had

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been subjected to humiliation and constraint" (Saul,195). He had also potentially faced the same sort ofassassination that -overtook him in captivity adecade later. The traumatic near collapse prefiguredand helps to explain Richard's fatal demoralizationin the final struggle with Bullingbrook.

In this context Richard appears not weak orderanged in his last years but worn down by—andovercompensating for—morbid stress. It shows in hisfascination with corpses that "was apt to combinewith his finely honed sense "of the theatricalpossibilities of burial. Several times in his lateryears he intervened to secure for a servant or friendreburial in grander or more dignified surroundings"(Saul, 461). Attending the reburial of Robert deVere,for example, he "ordered the coffin to be opened sothat he could touch his friend's fingers and gaze on

his face one last time" (Saul, 461). These reburialsused funeral art's to dramatize a posthumous glorycapable of consoling the departed soul and thegrieving king. In this respect funeral monumentsfunctioned like inflated majesty in kingship andself-aggrandizing eloquence: each served as importantmeans of managing basic existential dread.

As in the King of Navarre's opening speech inLove's Labour's Lost, Richard's monumentalizing urgecrystallizes the more general cultural drive tocreate lasting structures and values that can makelife seem significant and everlasting. Thecompensatory nature of the drive is evident inRichard's preoccupation with the ceremonies ofmajesty, especially in his last years. Saul quotes acelebrated description of the thrice-yearly crown-wearing ceremonies, when Richard "ordered a throne tobe prepared for him in his chamber on which he satostentatiously from after dinner till vespers,talking to no one but watching everyone; and when hiseye fell on anyone . . . that person had to bend hisknee to the king" (Saul, 342). The taboo dramatizesthe wish for omnipotence that could humble—and disarm—anyone who came within his sight.

Looked at this way, Richard's behavior fascinatedShakespeare and his audience as a style of coping"with ultimate threats one example of many in thelarger project of the histories. In adapting one ofHolinshed's accounts of the king's death, for example,Shakespeare chose to emphasize that fear infected eventhe triumphant Bullingbrook. "Didst thou not mark theKing," asks Sir Pierce Exton, "what words he spake?'Have I no friend will rid me of this living fear?'Was it not so?" (5.4.1-3). In fact the new king "urg'dit twice together" (5), and "he wishtly look'd onme, / As who should say, 'I would thou wert the man /That would divorce this terror from my heart' " (7-9).Exton takes this terror to be "the King at Pomfret"(10), but in fact Henry will be actively managingpangs of anxiety until he draws his last breath in 2Henry IV Although he will prove far more realisticthan Richard, he too will try to tame fear withmonumentalizing fantasies, notably his vow to "make avoyage to the Holy Land" (5.6.49), which will beironically fulfilled at his own death in the JerusalemChamber.

In his preoccupation with death, then, Shakespeare's Richard gives voice

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to fears that resonated far beyond the theater."Europeans of 1300 to 1650 had an obsession withdeath," says White, "because death, in, hideous forms

descended about them so often" (White, 29). Outbreaksof pestilence devastated Shakespeare's London,especially the visitation of,1593, about the time he.was. preparing-to write Richard II. Periodic famineterrorized the poor and contributed to civil unrestsuch as the Peasants' Revolt. Even in the 1590sstarvation was still a menace.15 During the sixteenthcentury population growth soared after two centuriesof stagnation, but with increased "economic activitycame inflation, unemployment, enclosures, .landspeculation, vagrancy, and related evils thatthreatened ordinary folk. Shakespeare's generationexperienced the aftershocks »of Henry VIII's reign,and paranoid themes shadowed the regime of Good QueenBess too. To the end of her life and the belatedpeace treaty with Spain, they felt embattled andanxious about invasion. Political unease resonatedwith many other deep currents of persecutory, feelingevident, for example, in reactions to naturaldisasters and atrocious religious persecution. York'smurderous rage, against his son Aumerle expresses aterror of being tainted by treason that waschillingly real to many in Shakespeare's audience.The Duchess's humiliating begging mission to Henrymust have been dark comedy for spectators who sawpolitical terror strike down victims from recusantCatholics to the incidental madman—r-as it wouldclaim the Earl of Essex.Richard II dramatizes some* of the processes by whichimaginations adapted to the psychic stress Whitedescribes. To be sure, in the middle ages and inShakespeare's day, people coped with death anxiety inbewilderingly individual ways, from religiousasceticism to wild abandonment, the more extreme intimes of great stress. As a result it makes sense tolook at Richard II for signs of shifting attitudesrather than some "definitive change in cognitivestyle. In the histories, immortality fantasies focuson the crown .because the monarch personifies thefount »of cosmic vitality even as his power tosubsume and command his subjects palpably acts-outseemingly unlimited access to more life. ForShakespeare's audiences, this fantasy system remainedcharged with tremendous energy, despite currents ofdisenchantment that surfaced in Essex's rebellion anda few decades later, in, the English Revolution.While the histories explore one of the basic motiveforces in culture, Shakespeare was also criticizingits equivocal nature, its volatile mixture ofspiritual aspirations and survival greed. Foralthough the monarch can be a parent to his people,that symbiotic relationship may falter undei stress";releasing predatory greed for life. The king maybegin to feed on his subjects' vitality, or they maydestroy him. Richard II came of age hearing himself

compared to Christ, treated as England's hope ofdeliverance.lD^ As king, he stressed the hieraticaspects of monarchy. Deposed, he construes himself asthe sacrificial Christ (4.1.170, 239-42). To hisenemies, however, Richard*and his cronies are greedyparasites,-"caterpillars of the commonwealth," swarm-

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ing on the body-politic (2.3.165, 3.4.47). Richard'seloquent suffering after his overthrow isfascinating, among other things, because Shakespearemakes us see that, his real selfishness and obstinacyare rooted in deep existential hopes and fears thatcompulsively drive his personality.

But then, the histories are remarkable justbecause of this awareness of deep motives: theyrepeatedly probe the way immortality fantasies shapestrategic policy. At the opening of I Henry VI, atthe beginning of the English histories, for example,the corpse of Henry V dominates the scene, evokingdread of lost power and spurring compensatoryfantasies. Gathered around his bier, the distressednobles compare the fallen king to the superhumanwarrior-Christ of the Apocalypse (1 H VI, 1.1.110-14). They feel weakened—tainted—by death: "Likecaptives" forced to witness "death's dishonorablevictory" (2 H VI, 1.1.22, 20). In reaction, theyscapegoat the French, inciting each other torighteous violence against these demonized enemies.Onto the French the mourners project their ownunconscious motives, as subsequent plays willdemonstrate in episode after episode of murderouscontention. In this light the histories unfold fromthe traumatic death of a strong leader and anoutbreak of anxiety that inaugurates an era ofviolent political transformation.

What can Richard's strikingly individualized interiorlife tell us about the radical existential motives atplay in the histories and the historical moment? Forone thing,' Richard II argues that neither kings norbeggars can live by ritualistic absolutes. Symbols oftranscendent authority can protect him no better thanthe castle walls that death can penetrate with "alittle pin" (3.2.169). In fact, the frantic effort tofortify identity threatens to dissolve the self

entirely, so that either Richard is an immortalmonarch or "must nothing be" (5.1.200). In the middlescenes of the-play he oscillates hysterically betweenthese extreme positions. Then gradually, as inchildhood, his voice begins to manage the splitbetween infantile omnipotence and abjection.Subjectivity emerges most strongly as imaginationrelaxes its obsession with ritualistic identity. AsHamle$ puts it, the readiness is all. Subjectivityturns out to be not the discovery of a preexistinginner self but rather a process of self-fashioningand self-presentation.17

The play emphasizes the dynamic potentiality ofthe self, its construct-edness and instability—itstheatricality. In his thoughts the imprisoned Richarddiscovers a throng of incipient roles and no self-evident, godlike principle to organize them. "Thusplay I in one person many people," he concludes, "Andnone contented" (5.5.31-32). The speech callsattention to the self as a mediating process that hasno reassuring natural resolution. This

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sense of living through mediation is especiallyrevealing" in the play because it crystallizesdefining conflicts in early modern culture.Richard's great soliloquy could be the wonderingvoice of the dramatist contemplating an imaginationovercharged with possible characters *and stories,forced to "hammer out" a plot coherent enough toengage the world. But it could also be the voice ofthe nation in the 1590s: specifically the nation asseen by a gentry perplexed to find the populace itgoverned grown too expansive, protean, and unruly tofit the older, unitary concept of a body politic; anelite anxiously trying to "hammer out" or enforce a-nostalgic civil harmony. The 1590s were a time ofdiscontent for the nation, especially in London,,where the city fathers repeatedly shut down thetheaters to forestall disturbances among the crowds.Barbara Freedman argues that criticism hasconsistently underestimated thepressure of distressin1 the decade.

However culturally determined one's view of crisisis-, the years between 1594 and 1597 [the years ofRichard H's composition] fit the most stringentrequirements. These years saw the lowest real wagesand the highest,* most continuous .price inflation ofany time in the century. For a predominantlyagricultural economy, the result of four bad harvestsbetween 1594 and 1597 spelled disaster. Jobs were

scarce for the rapidly expanding London population;yet work was mandatory and unemployment criminalized.Wages, when achieved, were insufficient to purchasebare necessities, and resources such as grain had tobe shipped at considerable expense from othercountries. That widespread starvation andunemployment were in fact perceived as a crisis iscorroborated by the unprecedented number of foodriots, and the greatest poor relief legislation thecentury had known.18

Although Richard envisions his thoughts as "manypeople, / And none contented," the social world as heimagines it is actually split between only twocategories, immortal monarchy and mortal beggary:

sometimes am I king, Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar, And so I am. Then crushing penury Persuades me I was better when a king(5.5.31-35)

The mood of civic crisis, that is, is structured likethe psychic crisis associated with the collapse ofbelief in traditional, ritualistic monarchy, and bothdisturbances reveal deep concerns about death. Theresemblances, I take it, are not simply coincidentalpatterns or artistic contrivances, but signs of theway individual and cultural forces interact to shapeeach other. An older mentality structured aroundpolarized opposites—king, beggar; heaven, hell; life,death—is developing toward a structure emphasizingmultiplicity, strategy, and dynamic equilibrium.Unlike his cousin Bullingbrook—or even more,

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Bullingbrook's son, the future Henry V—Richard istragically unsuited to carry through thatdevelopment.

But this is exactly why Richard's behaviordeserves attention. Unlike his triumphant enemies,Richard wrestles revealingly with death, and hiscoping style can tell us something about thementality of Shakespeare's world. In fact, we areable to see Richard's psychic defenses clearlybecause they fail. He is more existentially aware andanguished—and also convincing—than the warriors whoexpire in glib couplets on the battlefield in theHenriad. What's more, his sense of human futility and.doom is associated with the theatrum mundi trope oflife as theater. Throughout the play monarchy isplainly theatrical, yet even the most cynicalparticipants pretend to believe in its shows. Forthem the theatricality of rule poses a danger only of

deception or disillusionment. By contrast, thedeposed Richard begins to recognize that kingship isshow, but also that shows are not just variations ofsome "true" reality. Rather, he begins to see whatmakes Shakespeare's concept of theater distinctivelymodern: that as Macbeth puts it, life is but a poorplayer strutting and fretting over an abyss and rhensilenced forever.

Richard only begins to see because although theterror of the abyss lurks in his speeches, he is atransitional figure. Although he repeatedly uses theword "nothing," for example, his nothing usuallyimplies a reassuring "something." No jnan, he vows,"With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased/With being nothing" (5.5.40-41). In systematicallyopposing kingship and nothingness, however, he uses acognitive style that keeps him from seeing death's"nothing-ness" as annihilation. Not to be king is tobe a "beggar" (5.5.33), a religious ascetic(3.3.147), or some other abject personage. "Nothing"here implies social death—a tormented condition butbetter than Hamlet's sinister-sounding "undiscover'dcountry" (Hamlet, 3-1.78) or annihilation. Similarly,if he is "buried in the King's highway," he willstill ambiguously exist because "subjects' feet / Mayhourly trample on their sovereign's head" (3.3.154—56). This sort of death is picturesque and euphemizedby a sense of righteous victimization. It is tamerthan Macbeth's vision of "sound and fury signifyingnothing" (Macbeth, 5.5.27-28).

Richard's polarization of roles- produces dizzyingoscillations of mood, and yet the sum of thesecognitive shifts is a shadowy condition of intensebut controllable anxiety, not terror. In effect, theoscillation keeps the anxious mind fully occupied andtherefore distracted from the engulfing threat ofdeath. The dynamics of this oscillation are akin toritualism, as in the absorbing process of chanting ortelling prayer beads. Listen to his hypnotic-soundingrhetoric:

I'll give my jewels for a set of beads; My gorgeous palace for a hermitage; My gay apparel for an almsman's gown; My figur'd goblets for a dish of wood;

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My sceptre for a palmer's walking-staff; My subjects for a pair of carved saints;And my large kingdom for a little grave, A little little grave, an obscure

grave— (3.3.147-54)

Here as in many 6f the Sonnets, the repetition isself-intoxicating. It can be seen as an effort toConcentrate the mind to withstand forces that wouldfragment it into a mob of thoughts (5.5.8—11) andincoherent roles (31). As in the Sonnets, this magicalrhetoric functions as incantation, concentratingthought on an absolute, immortal meaning. In crisis,Richard conjures armies of angels.19 With imperativeverbs and the magic of names he summons his alreadytacitly alienated will from sleep: "Awake, thou cowardmajesty! Thou sleepest. / Is not the King's nametwenty thousand names? / Arm, arm my name!" (3.2.84—86). But as in the Sonnets, and like all magic, thesense of transcendence is furiously unstable andperiodically collapse^ into panic and despair. Themore Richard tries to "hammer out" his thoughts(5.5.5), the more obsessive the need for rhetoricalforce to save the mind from terror and madness.

The Sonnets systematically exploit incantatoryrhetoric to create an experience of praise. Therepetition, wordplay, and paradox so compoundrational meanings that they exceed the mind's abilityto process them all in reading. The result is anexploded, riddling sense that,is emotionally clear—the poem celebrates loye—even as its exact' meaningis beyond us and may seem uncanny:

What is your substance, whereof are you made, That millions of strange shadows on you tend? Since every one hath, every one,one shade, And you, but one, canevery shadow lend.

These lines from Sonnet 5 3 .project a superabundant,seemingly transcendent meaning which is itselfambiguously the "substance" or essence of thebeloved. Since "shadows" is Elizabethan slang foractors, the ,poem is conjuring an immutable integrityin the beloved that can transcend the threateningillusions of the world as stage. In effect, theSonnet is systematically risking incoherence todisarm critical reasoning long^ enough for a senset)f absolute meaning and value to emerge. The poet isquibbling as fools do ("since everyone hath, everyone, one shade"), but in order to induce wonder andfaith as a priest might.20

Compare this quatrain with Richard's use oftheatricality when he riddles on the words "face" and"shadows" with a mirror for a prop in the depositionscene. He plays fool and priest, trying to evoke "the"substance" of his "unseen grief" (4.1.276—99)- LikeSonnet 53,,he strives to make a transcendent

KIRBY FARRELL ♦ 13

meaning substantial. "Give me the glass," hecommands, "and therein wUlI read":

Was this face the face That every day under his household roof X5lci ke'ep ten thousand men? Was this the face That, like the sun, did make beholders wink? Is this the face which fac'd so many follies, And was at last outfaced by Bullingbrook? A brittle glory shineth in this face, As brittle as the glory is the face.[Dashes the glass against

the ground.] For there it,is, crack'd in an hundred shivers.Mark, silent king, the moral of this sport, How soon my sorrow hath destroy'd my face.

Richard is using theatricality to moralize hisoverthrow, attempting to conjure pity and guilty awein his enemies. Bullingbrook, however, breaks thespell by criticizing Richard's incantation as a self-deceiving show: "The shadow of your sorrow hathdestroy'd / The shadow of your face."

Trying to recapture the initiative ,and controlthe emotional impact, Richard redoubles his riddling,turning Bjujlingbrook's criticism into a stale truismthat can be rationally taken apart to reveal itsinadequacy and a deeper, ineffable truth. Like thepoet in Sonnet 130 ("My mistress' eyes are nothinglike the sun"), he exposes the superficiality ofconventional rational? ity in order to point to anindefinable truth beyond "false compare":

Say that again. The shadow of my sorrow! Ha, Jet's see. Tis very true, my grief lies all within, And these external [manners] of lamentsAre merely shadows to the'unseen grief That swelllswith silence in the tortur'd soul. There lies the substance

(4.1.293-99)

The "substance" of "unseen grief" eerily anticipates

Hamlet's attempts to conjure "that within whichpasses show" (Hamlet, 1.2.85). The problem is thatthis sort of conjuring depends on imaginativesympathy-;—the "marriage of true minds" in Sonnet 116—which Bullingbrook cannot, feel. In the end thepriestly, invocation of "substance" is moot, andRichard is left with the voice of the subversive,carping—and impotent—fool. When Bullingbrookhypocritically 'offers ,to grant "One boon"(4.1.302), and calls him "Fair cousin," Richard playsthe fool, inverting his terms:

14 ♦ KIRBY FARRELL

"Fair cousin"? I am greater than a king; For when I was a king my flatterers Were then but subjects; being nowa subject, I have a king here to be my flatterer, Being so great, I have no need to beg.

(4.1.305-9)

When Bullingbrook deflates these paradoxes—"Yet ask"—Richard is reduced to asking for his freedom: "Giveme leave to go." Bullingbrook asks, "Whither?""Whither you will," Richard parries, "so I were fromyour sight." At which point his opponent trumpshim>"convey him to the tower." The voice of the foolthen shrinks to sententious sarcasm: "O, good!convey! Conveyors [thieves] are you all, / That risethus* nimbly to a true king's fall" (310-18).

While this exchange is about the transcendent"substance" of "true" kingship, the mentalitiesimplied are complexly disenchanted. Bullingbrook iscoolly strategic, while Richard uses rationalrhetorical techniques to subvert rationality andpoint to a chimerical absolute authority. Trying to"hammer out" an understanding of his own crowdedthoughts (5.5-5), Richard intensifies self-awarenessto try to dispel it and evoke a ground forpersonality. This quixotic creativity in the face ofannihilation is quintessentially Shakespearean; itprefigures the imaginative styles of the poet of theSonnets as well as the great lyrical, tragic voicesof Hamlet and Cleopatra, who are also uncannilyexpressive but doomed poets.

The "substance" Richard tries to project is a formof symbolic immortality arrived at through wit'sself-intoxicating exploitation of magical language.Like the "special providence" Hamlet envisions in thefall of a sparrow (Hamlet, 5.2.220), it is a

radically equivocal cognitive behavior that cansignify some ineffable absolute or merely "bodilesscreation ecstasy" (Hamlet, 3.4.138). Asked if he iscontent to resign the crown, Richard tries to createan insoluble riddling answer, an intermediate,ecstatic reality that would defer the moment of self-loss:

Ay, no, no ay; for I must nothing be; Therefore no no,for I resign to thee. Now mark me how I will undo myself: I give this heavy weight from off my head

(4.1.201-4)

The wordplay (ay = I; I = ay; no = know) and possiblenuances ("Therefore no 'no,' " for instance) create acloud of indeterminacy. The possible meanings of hisanswer defy immediate comprehension. Although he vows"I must nothing be," Richard is actually multiplyinghimself m his meanings; rather as Falstaff parriesPrince Hal's annihilating scorn in 1 Henry IV byinflating himself into "sweet Jack Falstaff, kindJack Falstaff, true Jatk'Falsfaff, valiant JackFalstaff," and so on (1 HIV, 2AA75-76).

KIRBY FARRELL ♦ 15

The play criticizes Richard's artful magic as itdoes Falstaff’s, but in both cases with radicallymixed feelings. Shakespeare knew that wishes are notomnipotent, and that nobody can live merely as amask, by forcibly manipulating self and others. Butthen, to be stripped of masks is to face nothingness.Hence the dialectic of fool and priest, the artfulcreation of tacit, mediated identity, and the riddleof the later tragedies, that readiness or ripeness isall. To be able to be aware of that shockinglyconditional sense of being is the closestcompensation in a fallen world for the lost gracethat imagination nostalgically dreams on. For thesake of this glimpse of dangerous exaltationtheatergoing mortals submit to the exertions ofdrama.

Like a spectator in a playhouse, Richard, too,grasps for the same moment of story potential in hisfrantic effort to hammer an identity out of hisswarming thoughts. All along he has tried to turndeath into a narrative he can control: "Let's talk ofgraves, of worms, and epitaphs" (3.2.145); "let ussit ... / And tell sad stories of the death of kings"(156); "tell thou the lamentable tale of me, / Andsend the hearers weeping to their beds" (5.1.44—45).

These fantasies imagine him mirrored—given substance—by an audience, and tacitly deferring nothingness.They function like the looking glass he calls for athis deposition. They also reflect an obsessivementality since like all stories and narratives ofself, even tales of a king's demise grow stale andneed continual retelling and renewal.

Hence the precarious mood of heroic striving andexhaustion that haunts Richard's final soliloquies.Trapped in a dead end, he sees the self as endlesslyinterchangeable roles and himself as time's"numb'ring clock" (5.5.50). Once again a kind ofmagical riddling suspends the self over the abyss, ina state of grieving indeterminacy:

My thoughts are minutes, and with sighs they jar Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch Whereto my finger, like a dial's point, Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears.

(5.5.51-54)

The speech prefigures Macbeth's nightmarish "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow" (Macbeth,5.5.19) in its sense of terminal, exhausted meaningand imagination that can neither fully live nor die.The "hammer" of obsession (5.5.5) flattens or expandsmeaning into riddling indeterminacy, until it becomeslike the music that evokes Richard's speech.

As a kind«of sense beyond words, music depends onintuition. It may sound right or chaotic for reasonsthat are not readily fathomable. As the music plays,Richard's determination to hammer out sense becomesidentified with "clamorous groans" (5.5.56) as heturns into the numbering clock striking. Thesimultaneity of real and figurative music is apalpable analogue of the verbal magic of concatenatedriddling meanings: a kind of

16 ♦ KIRBYFARRELL

expanded sense that shimmers with uncanny-seemingsignificance or intimations of mad chaos. This is the"music of men's lives" now "broke" and "disordered"(46). Although music "have holp madmen to their>wits,/ In me it seems it will make wise men mad" (62-63).As in the late romances, music dramatizes art'sshimmering intimations of wondrous ecstasy andhellish madness. Richard cannot sustain a convictionof visionary exaltation, and the obsessive jarring ofthe clock marks suffering relieved* only by a finalspasm of physical violence as he, like Macbeth andHamlet, dies fighting for his life.

What can this exploration of radical existentialmotives tell us about Richard II as history? I haveisolated Richard's cognitive style of managing terrorbecause it sheds light not only on him but also onShakespeare and a charged moment in culturaldevelopment. His rhetorical defenses, work topreserve vestiges" of consoling ritualism even asritualism was losing its conviction in the worldoutside the theater. As attested by the fabulousmagical practices catalogued by Keith Thomas inReligion and the Decline of Magic, Shakespeare'scontemporaries were complexly equivocal about ancientpsychic guarantees. A wax figure of-the queen foundwith pins stuck in it could cause serious alarm, evenas a Reginald Scot and Samuel Harsnett couldsystematically debunk witchcraft and jugglery.21

Richard's mentality reflects just this sort oftransitional complexity.

Compared to the hysteria and disordered thinkingthat accompanied outbreaks of plague and intermittenthunger, especially among the lower classes, Richard'spanic reflects the mental world of an educated,economically sheltered elite. His primary defense isargument and verbal self-substantiation. His appealsto the supernatural are comparatively abstract,ratiocinative, and homiletic, with almost no tracesof dreams, superstitions, and other folk materials,and virtually none of the psychotic disturbances thatwere common among the poor in the throes of calamity.When terrot overtakes him, he invokes orthodox angels(3.2.36-62). In later plays such as King Lear,Shakespeare would become more adept at dramatizingthe pain, horror, and frenzy of the poor, perhaps in-part because'his* audience was1 also better able totolerate a more dir&t presentation of what PieroCamporesi calls "the terrifying dreams of thecollective unconscious during the pre-industrialperiod."22 Although the prospect of beggary* frightenshim, Richard uses beggars didactically as theantithesis of king\'reinforcing a sense of patternand meaning in the scheme of things. In Poor Tdm, bycontrast, King Lear'makes a more palpable, althoughstill somewhat bookish, attempt to evoke theuncontainable dementia that real beggari-suffered.23

KIRBYFARRELL ♦ 17

Richard comes to glimpse a universe of fearthrough hyperrationality and the disintegration of

formal ideological guarantees. Compelled to reimaginehis life in a-world suddenly teeming withunaccustomed thoughts and roles, he also tacitlymirrors the perplexity of the dramatist and hisculture. His political tragedy is also*a comedy—ortragicomedy—of reluctantly liberated imagination.Death/for him is partly, a problem of disinhibition.Even as he relinquishes a monolithic fortressmentality, he finds himself imprisoned in a castleand not free to explore the field of possibilitiesopening before him. Just this volatile dilemmaconfronted the 1590s as imaginations strove to devisenarratives that could make new freedoms livable.

One of those new freedoms was the theater,, whichwas after all a way of collectively thinking aboutthe new horizon of possibilities. In adversity,Richard discovers powers of language and narrativethat sustain him in crisis but are poignantlyinsufficient. He shifts from conventionalaristocratic eloquence to the magical riddling of thecourtier-poet, a figure more sympathetic—andaccessible—to the Shakespeare who was affiliated withthe Earl of Southampton-and his circle. The playtreats Richard with a mixture of nostalgic sympathyand deflating -scorn. Through him Shakespeare wasable to exploit his own verbal resources, exploringthe visionary extremes of his imagination,criticizing its- delusions but also celebrating itsambiguous sense of transcendence.

After all, the dramatist also behaves like thepoet of the Sonnets, deliberately compounding so manyperspectives and ironies that the play's meaningbecomes teasingly immanent but inexhaustible.Shakespeare makes Richard relinquish the narcissismof lordly social masks, even as he mocks theinadequacies of theater as show. In effect, thisnegative maneuver empties out conventionalexpectations, allowing intimations of more removedmeaning to emerge. The riddling Richard dies onstagebut the play lives on, full of coherence that resistsour attempts to simplify it. Criticism registers thismultiplicity in the play's, many cruxes, butspectators directly experience the play'sperspectivism—ideally at least—as wonder. This iswhere Shakespeare's plays get their reputation forlifelikeness and how they inspired the popularillusion that they are deathless creations,inexhaustible, not for an age but for all time.

This conviction is partly a trick of cognitiveframing. On the verge of death Richard begins to seethe baffling fullness of life invisible to thequotidian eye. Like Gaunt-on his deathbed; he unfoldsa wider perspective. Moreover, he sees that he isseeing deeper into the mystery of things.Contemplating his own thoughts as incompatible roles

(5.5), he is like a spectator at a play or even adramatist baffled by the anarchic abundance of theworld. Analogously, on another level, Richard IIexposes its spectators to a wondrous superabundance ofperspectives. The play disposes spectators to identifywith, and criticize, Richard's struggle withsubjectivity and the abyss, in the projectedhistorical distance but also in the dramaturgicalpresent, where a group of

18 ♦ KIRBYFARRELL

ordinary people is trying to fathom an actor's speechabout the mortal destiny that is pressing on themtoo. This implies that the spectators* can recognizeRichard's frightening sense of disintegrated self andalso tolerate it better than he can because, insteadof being imprisoned in a nightmare as he is, they cangive it a still wider-frame. The spectators areneither beggars nor monarchs, but that new species ofcitizen, the playgoer. With their ambiguous sense ofimaginative autonomy and their ability to hear theplay's story, they can experience theconcatenation,of perspectives before them—like thecompounded meanings of the Sonnets—in the largestkinetic frame, readiness or wonder.

At the end of the twentieth century this style ofcognitive manipulation has become familiar,especially in writers like Joyce and Faulkner.Critics have construed Shakespeare's myriad,ironizing mentality, in countless ways. For mypurposes it is important to see that it is rooted ina historically particular engagement with the problemof death, in a moment when an older belief in wordmagic was developing toward psychologicalunderstanding, with an emphasis on the creativepowers of imagination and the constnlctedness of theworld as stage. It also represents,a new degree ofrespect for analytical inquiry and the materials ofthe past. The many unresolved critical questionsabout the play testify to its multiplicity, itseffort to resist reductive, didactic, narcissisticmanipulation. I am not claiming that Shakespearereally was the godlike visionary that tradition hasapotheosized but rather reminding us that hisimagination—and the imagination of his culture-1—wasfascinated by that paradigm.

That Shakespeare could depict historical causalityas overdetermined is in itself a remarkabledevelopment. It presupposes an increased capacity forimaginative sympathy and tolerance in himself and his

audience. Like the riddling language of Richard andthe Sonnets, an overdetermined plot can be radicallyequivocal, conforming to the rules of neither comedynor tragedy. Even the wonder or readiness it arousesmay be volatile, intimating visionary coherence ormadness. Such a»plot may be shockingly dynamic,allowing the beholder no repose. Richard dies, forexample, but there is no gratifying closures Bulling-brook's ambivalent rebuke to Exton only deflects theplay's motion into new directions, with new conflictsand biases that will unfold as civil slaughter insubsequent plays. Richard's agon ends in death, yetShakespeare's perspec-tivism can support not onlytraditional, pious solemnity but also the sort ofdisillusioned satirical energy that John Halversonfinds in the play.24

The range of interpretive responses to Richard IIargues rhat the multiplicity of behaviors framedonstage had- an analogue in the imaginative behaviorsof the theater audience. The play thinks out loud, soto speak, about such disturbing subjects as killing aking and being killed. This loosening of imaginativecontrols can. be taken as one -sort of corroborationfor White's hypothesis that the "spiritual trauma"people endured in the Renaissance "was healed by theemergence, in the minds* of ordinary people, of anabsolutely novel and relaxed attitude toward change"(White/26). In the the-

KIRBY FARRELL ♦ 19

ater change can register not only onstage—in thiscase as a momentous political upheaval—but also inthe fluid responses spectators may have to thatchange. The possibilities of interpretation in theplay invite spectators to explore differentperspectives. Some views, the play insinuates, aretruer than others, but no'absolute judgment ofRichard or Bullingbrook is possible. This is not acarnival inversion of order, but a different sort ofdevelopment: a licensed public argument thatencourages the public to find pleasure and evenheroic purpose in the freedom to change your mind andto live with the resulting provisional, heuristicreality.

One of Shakespeare's fundamental insights,reiterated to the end of his career, is that forceconfounds itself. The engineer is hoist with his ownpetard; like Macbeth, Othello, and Leontes, RichardII Unleashes havoc by seeking chimerical security.His attempt to hammer out the logic of anoverwhelming world perversely drives toward paralysisand obsessive dread that "will make wise men mad"(5.5.63). Such force is maddening because it springs

from terror, trying to overcome death. Thecompulsiveness of this project grips the histories.They show a hundred years of English history as amonotonous succession of murderous plots andmonstrous appetites: an epidemic of fear andviolence.

Shakespeare and his audience were fascinated bythat epidemic terror, yet they also wanted to believein the power of sublimation and negotiation—as intheater—to manage the boundaries of experience.Shakespeare himself, we know, invested in law andStratford real estate in creating a stable gentryidentity for himself in his middle years. At the sametime, in play after play, the prosperous businessmanwas writing about inscrutable forces shaping theworld. His cultivation of riddling magical languagewas an effort to experience—to objectify and control—those forces. Again and again he intimates that theexperience of the play is akin to dreams, comic blissor tragic nightmare. In this way the plays are partof a larger project to expand and tame the furtherreaches of thought.

This, I think, is why Richard II showsBullingbrook sidling or stumbling into violence. Fora time the usurper seems to be the model of strategiccalm, as in the comic pardon of Aumerle that tne playcontrives. But then Exton kills Richard on thestrength of wishful words overheard almost by chance—"Have I no friend will rid me of this living fear"(5.4.2)—as if to illustrate the power of lurkingterror to slip out of civilized restraints. LikeRichard's riddling speech, Bullingbrook's words havespun off supercharged meanings, and one of thosemeanings has put a king to death as if by magic. Thewords that seal Richard's doom shimmer withcontingency. "From your own mouth," says Exton, "didI this deed" (5.6.37). Exton could have echoedTheseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream and soothedBullingbrook's fears by quipping, "How easy is a-bushsuppos'd a bear" (MND, 5.1.22). But as if misled byPuck, for whatever mysterious reason—doggedobedience? self-promotion?—he followed out adifferent subtext. Like the Bishop of Carlisle's20 # KIRBY FARRELL

prophecy, which Richard's death begins to fulfill,the moment has an uncanny aura, holding thepossibilities of calculation, chance, and providencein suspension.

The critical history of RichardII is a story ofincreasing freedom to'recognize the disturbingopenness in its conception of history. Generations ofcritics have chided kings such as Richard II or HenryVI for their supposed weakness, a§ if life were not

tragic but merely problematical,* to be successfullynegotiated through a proper choice of maps .orfidelity to blueprints. Derek Traversi typified thisstyle of prudential commentary- when he lamentedRichard IPs "hysteria and self-pity."25 Such criticismwas tacitly normative, sometimes openly speculatingabout the qualifications of Shakespeare's ideal,king, or debaring about the true character, of HenryV More specifically, researchers have fixed onRichard H's perplexing role in the Essex rebellionand its relation to E. M.'W Tillyard's magisterialthesis that the histories play outia Tudor scheme ofprovidential'ideology that culminates in England'srescue by-Henry VII. Whatever their.particularmerits, these projects are themselves expressions ofour own culture's need to keep devising and renewingconvictions of heroic immortality. Like otherimaginative endeavors, literary criticism—fromhardheaded archival scholarship to the mostaggressively skeptical postmodernism-r-is inescapablyimplicated in immortality striving. The most naivepractitioners have unwittingly behaved like earlyhistorians who tried to extract order from the pastthat could rationalize the present or predict thefuture.2^ Centuries ,of such work1 made Shakespearea>monument of western civilization,, the object ofsublime hero worship, especially,in crises like WorldWar II: an all-embracing and enduring figure in aworld whose real leaders are all too apt tobetray .or tragically fail their followers.

In recent decades much work on Richard II hasproved to be more tolerant of the play's peculiarfractures and, ambiguities. The range of work shows awide variety of methodological styles and sometimesremarkably fresh imagination. In the essay thatfollows, Morgan Griffin sorts out some of thesevirtues and liabilities, explaining how we selectedessays for this collection. The essays repay study ascontributions to the*centuries-long engagement withShakespeare, but also because, they show first-rateminds incidentally coming to terms with radicalexistential concerns, managing our deep crea-turelycompulsions by seeking greater particularity andaccuracy eyen as they cultivate greater tolerance forcontingency and the siren.songs of insight just overthe shimmering horizon.

Notes

1. Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven: Yale Univ.Press, 1997); hereafter cited in the text. For acompact biography, see* Peter Saccio', Shakespeare'sEnglish Kings (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), 17-35.

KIRBY FARRELL ♦ 21

2. E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays(New York and London: Macmillan, 1944; New York,1962).

3. Frank Brownlow, Two Shakespearean Sequences(Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), 4.

4. Wilbur Sanders, The Dramatist and the ReceivedIdea (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1968), 158.

5. As Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton point out,scholars mined history for instructive antecedentsthat could be used to guide statecraft in thepresent. See "Studied for Action: How Gabriel HarveyRead his Livy," Past and Present 129 (1990): 30-78.

6. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic(New York: Scribner's, 1971), 424.7. Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of

Meaning (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), 33-62.

8. Tempest, 1.2.50. Quotations are from TheRiverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

9. See Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (NewYork: Free Press, 1973) and Escape from Evil (NewYork: Free Press, 1975).

10. Lynn White Jr., "Death and the Devil," in TheDarker Vision of the Renaissance, (ed. Robert Kinsman(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1974), 26;hereafter cited in the text.

11. See, for example, the historical overview inJonathan Shay's Achilles in Vietnam (New York:Atheneum, 1994).

12. Saul describes and argues against the theoriesof Bishop Stubbs, Anthony Steel, and May McKisack(pp. 462-63).

13. "Terror management" is the term used by JeffGreenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski,"Terror Management Theory of Self-Esteem and CulturalWorldviews: Empirical Assessments and ConceptualRefinements," Advances in Experimental SocialPsychology, ed. Mark E Zanna, vol. 29 (New York:Plenum, 1997), and in their account of terrormanagement in Psychological Inquiry 8, no. 1 (1997):1-20, 59-70.

14. This is Lynn White Jr.'s estimate in "Death andthe Devil" (p. 29).15. See Andrew Appleby, Famine in Tudor and Stuart

England (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1978). InBread and Dreams: Pood and Fantasy in Early ModemEurope (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996), PieroCamporesi describes the psychological damage thatcould accompany famine.

16. In an address to Parliament as Richard wasabout to inherit the throne, for example, BishopHoughton said that God had sent Richard to England toredeem his people the same way that God had sentChrist. See Saul, p. 18.

17. "Self-fashioning" is Stephen Greenblatt's term.See Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: Univ. ofChicago Press, 1980).

18. Barbara Freedman, "Elizabethan Protest, Plague,and Plays: Rereading the 'Documents of Control,' "English Literary Renaissance 26, no. 1 (1996): 29-30.

19. The historical Richard openly relied on

supernatural help. He "appears to have paid aconsiderable amount of attention to astrologicalpredictions,'1 Saul tells us, and owned astrologicalapparatus, including a "beautifully produced book ofdivinations, the Libellus Geomancie" (p. 324).

20. For a demonstration of this process, seechapters 1 and 2 of my Shakespeare's Creation: theLanguage of Magic and Play (Amherst: Univ. ofMassachusetts Press, 1976). See also SigurdBurckhardt, "The Poet as Fool and Priest," inShakespearean Meanings (Princeton: Princeton Univ.Press, 1968).

21. Reginald Scot, Discovery of Witchcraft (London,1584); Samuel Harsnett, A Discovery of the FraudulentPractices of John Darrell. . . . (1599); ADeclaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603,1604). .

22. Camporesi, Bread and Dreams, 89.23. Shakespeare (or Edgar) borrows many details of

Poor Tom's madness from Harsnett's treatises.

24. John Halverson, "The Lamentable Comedy of Richard II" English Literary Renaissance 24, no. 2 (1994): 343-69

25. D. A. Traversi, An Approach to Shakespeare, 3rded. (New York: Doubleday, 1969), I, 168.

26. See, for example, Jardine and Grafton, "Studiedfor Action."