This Is Shakespeare

by Emma Smith

But the idea of a play being co-opted for political action – however doomed that action might be – has been extremely attractive to recent historians of early modern drama. E. M. W. Tillyard saw the histories as an essentially conservative cycle of crime, expiation, punishment and then deliverance (discussed in the chapter on Richard III). By contrast, the Essex rebellion Richard II is a radical challenge to political orthodoxy. Advocates of this transgressive reading delight that the usurping actions of Bolingbroke are dangerously endorsed by the play. But my sense of Richard II is that it allows for these ideological certainties but does not underwrite them. Readers, critics and performers have tended to find confirmation of their own politics in the play’s careful impartiality: again, we make Shakespeare mean what we want him to mean.