Only a very rude mechanical could have failed to notice that this past April marked the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. It has been a year of discoveries. In a private library on the Isle of Bute, a copy of a vamped First Folio came to light, along with the meaning of the word vamped. And in Brooklyn recently, the Royal Shakespeare Company unveiled to an American audience a new play by Shakespeare—The Comedy of Richard II. The play follows very nearly the better-known Life and Death of King Richard II but replaces Shakespeare’s fated poet-king with a vain incompetent, who appears to spend as much time at the hairdresser as he does ruling. The RSC’s newest production of Richard II debuted in Stratford-upon-Avon three years ago, part of a quartet of Shakespeare’s history plays. The RSC performed the four—Richard II, Henry IV (parts 1 and 2), and Henry V—this spring at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Richard II—which follows the deposal of the God-anointed king by his usurping cousin Henry Bolingbroke—was very serious business in its day. Shakespeare and his fellow company members in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were paid to perform it just prior to the failed Essex uprising, and hundreds of offending lines were cut from one edition to the next. Regarding the threat of deposal, Elizabeth herself reportedly exclaimed, “I am Richard II, know ye not that?” Shakespeare and his fellows apparently escaped censure, and the play received a command performance before the queen on the eve of Essex’s execution in 1601.
William Shakespeare, of course, can be riotously funny, but Gregory Doran (the RSC’s artistic director) and David Tennant (Richard) resorted to some special pleading in this regard, finding jokes where even Will Kemp, Shakespeare’s go-to clown, might have failed to find them—all, one imagines, in the service of jollying up the crowd of twentysomething Harry Potter and Doctor Who fans who packed the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theatre to see Tennant time-travel to medieval England.
This led to some odd moments. Tennant—whose animated, avian features and heavy-metal hairdo ably command the stage—managed laughs even during Richard’s serious moments, such as his famed “mirror speech.” Presented with the “flattering glass,” Richard mocks his fairweather friends before smashing it to the ground: “No deeper wrinkles yet?” he asks of his own careworn face. For Tennant, it was a moment to note how well his skin cream has been battling back the years.
Shakespeare’s popularity apparently knows no bounds, and not just in the English-speaking world (consider the throngs of Bollywood adaptations). Richard II proved particularly popular during Shakespeare’s lifetime, going into five quarto editions (while Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth, and numerous others did not see print until the posthumous First Folio of 1623). But one gets the feeling that the RSC doesn’t fully trust Shakespeare’s common touch. There was so much mugging to the crowd, so many winking pauses (even from Oliver Ford Davies’s Duke of York), that the most necessary questions of the play went unconsidered: Will a crack open in the universe at the deposal of a monarch—and if it does not, what does that say about Richard as both a ruler and man? Richard’s metaphysical wit rivals John Donne’s in lines like “Ay, no; no, ay: for I must nothing be; / Therefore no, no, for I resign to thee,” where his juggling of assent and negation bear on his very existence.
Despite its designation as a tragedy in the quartos, Richard II lacks true tragic stature, except perhaps in his own mind. It’s a history play, the first in which Shakespeare introduced a new comic sense, which then blossoms in Henry IV and V. By playing every scene for laughs, Doran stole thunder from the truly funny scenes, such as the Duchess of York’s wild appeal to Bolingbroke in Act V. The proof that this Richard prefers camp to poetry comes just moments before his death in Pomfret Castle. Richard’s anguished rumination on his fate, in which he peoples his lonely prison with his thoughts, was dropped almost entirely from this production. One didn’t feel bad for Tennant’s Richard; he got too many laughs. Any Jack Falstaff could only hope to do as well.
Fortunately, Antony Sher was no ordinary Jack, but a Jack for the ages. Not only was he funny without cajoling, he was also fiery, mean, mendacious, ribald, cowardly, romantic, cunning, adorable, and reprehensible. A reluctant Falstaff—too short, too thin, as he documents in Year of the Fat Knight: The Falstaff Diaries—Sher is known for brooders such as Macbeth, Leontes, and Shylock. But Falstaff (“As melancholy as a gib cat or a lugg’d bear”) has a dark side, too, and Sher effortlessly evinced tears as well as guffaws. His most affecting moment came in his brief liaison with Doll Tearsheet (a vibrant Emma King). After the lovely Doll planted a kiss on the fat knight’s gob, Falstaff managed a crushing insight: “I am old. I am old,” he confessed to himself and to us.
Sher’s sobs at their parting amplified the play’s themes of lost youth and severed ties. Part Two, by extension, became a sweetly sad tone poem on death and absent friends. As Shallow says to Silence, “Jesu, Jesu, the mad days that I have spent! and to see how many of my old acquaintance are dead!” To which Silence replies: “We shall all follow, cousin.” The final blow came with Hal’s denial of his old friend: “I know thee not, old man.”
Shakespeare’s earlier history plays contain comic moments, but the two parts of Henry IV reinvent the form, interweaving scenes of high seriousness with riotous bawdry. As Bolingbroke, now the remorseful King Henry, grapples with former friends who desire the crown, Hal, the Prince of Wales (played with vigor and wit by Alex Hassell), spends his days in a tavern avoiding the headaches at court. Hassell showed how Hal’s envy of the martial Hotspur, in part, fuels his renunciation of his dissolute past and his embrace of kingship. Hal’s reckoning with his father plays out first as comedy (with Falstaff as stand-in) then as stirring drama.
Performing the plays as a tetralogy drew out welcome resonances. “Depose me?” bellows Falstaff, as Hal hectors him for failing to portray King Henry convincingly. The line landed a shudder coming so soon after Richard’s downfall. Also, we see how the characters develop from play to play. When performed alone, Henry V often lacks any vestige of the bad boy Hal. After his miraculous victories, Hassell’s Henry performed a rock star slide at the French princess’s feet; it was the impish Hal in him who wins her heart.
One challenge of performing the Henriad in rep is that Richard II will not be made to conform in tone to the other three, nor should it. Bolingbroke invokes St. George at the beginning, as does Henry V toward the end of Shakespeare’s great paean to the Sceptered Isle. But what a lot has happened historically—and also stylistically—between the years of Richard’s misrule and the Siege of Harfleur.
David Yezzi’s latest book of poems is Birds of the Air.
