Richard II

"Richard II is an amazingly poetic play, all in verse. It has very beautiful, formal language all through. It has the quality of a dramatic poem. I love the fact it’s so politically balanced that you can see a production that makes you really despise Richard for his self-indulgence and his passivity, or that makes you really sympathise with him for the impossibility of the position he’s in. I think Shakespeare has given us a script within which you can find a pro-Richard play, or a pro-Henry play. I think that’s quite different from the other history plays, that tend to be a little clearer where the emphasis is. For me, if we call it a tragedy, Richard is our focus, and Richard’s demise is the end of our interest in the other characters and in the play. That’s how tragedies work. Our dramatic sympathies are really clear if it’s a tragedy. If it’s a history, the emphasis on Bolingbroke is quite different. There is going to be something after Richard, that’s a given. Like everyone in the play, we have to transfer our interest to the new man in order to go forward. Is Bolingbroke like Fortinbras in Hamlet: a sideshow nobody cares about? Or is he the person who is going to take a whole sequence of plays forward? I think it is really different if you’re reading it in a sequence going from Richard II to Henry V than if you’re reading it, as people did when it was first printed, as a single stand-alone play, emphasised by the idea of being a tragedy. Absolutely. In some ways those questions don’t arise out of Marlowe’s play as we don’t have any sequels. That comparison between Richard II and Edward II used to be something criticism was interested in. It’s fallen away because we’ve tended to focus on the idea of the histories as a sequence. That’s been really prominent in performance. It feels rare to see these plays as standalone plays now. They’ve become a part of a commemorative culture. If there’s a big anniversary or a big event, you do a block and get people to go to all of them, whereas I think that sense of Richard as a single play is why I like it. Looking again at the Folio, I think a more expected way to organise the plays would have been by authorial chronology. Of course, that puts certain plays into conversation with each other, but it also tends to marginalise early plays as juvenile, or immature. Whereas the division by genre is completely uninterested, apparently, in an idea of authorial development, or even the development of the genre. And I think that is something which we could do with going back to, rather than being so focussed on chronology."

"I clearly see a feature they all share: they all push our subjective experience to its extreme, they all enact what Lacan calls “subjective destitution.” In every play, the hero is pushed beyond a certain limit, out of the domain in which rules of normal human existence apply; he or she finds him or herself in what Lacan called “between-the-two-deaths”: dead while still alive. Oedipus is thrown out of human community, wandering around as an excremental/sacred outcast with no place in any polis—he has seen too much. Richard II is gradually deprived of his royal symbolic identity and authority, reduced to a point of madness with nothing to rely on. Sygne de Coufontaine first sacrifices everything for a higher, Catholic, cause, and is then forced to sacrifice this cause itself, so that she finds herself in an existential void. In a homologous way, Brecht’s anonymous hero has to sacrifice sacrifice itself, to disappear and to accept the disappearance of his very disappearance. Last but not least, the speaking mouth in Beckett is directly deprived of personality and reduced to a “partial object,” something like the smile of the Cheshire Cat which survives the cat’s disappearance. The underlying premise of all five plays is that this extreme limit-position is not just a point of total annihilation or destruction but, simultaneously, the unique chance of a new beginning."