“I Live With Bread Like You”: Forms of Inclusion in Richard II
Landau, Aaron
Early Modern Literary Studies 11.1 (May, 2005)
Abstract
In this paper I examine the subtle, complex, and roundabout ways in which popular voices and perspectives inform the construction of English history in Richard II (1595). On the face of it, this play is concerned almost entirely with dynastic struggles within the aristocracy and leaves very little room for actual representations of non-aristocratic characters and ideologies. And yet, when examined in relation to various manifestations of social unrest in the 1590s, the play discloses manifold connections also with middle- and lower-class sensibilities in the period. By showing that even this mid-decade history play, which is ostensibly among the most exclusive and elitist by Shakespeare, is substantially more inclusive and popular than it might at first appear, I should like to counter a common critical tendency to regard Shakespeare’s historical imagination as in principle — and increasingly so over the decade of the 1590s — elitist, exclusive, and orthodox. Rather than representing yet another stage of exclusion in an increasingly gentrified project of forging English nationhood, this play should be viewed as offering different, intricate forms of including lower-class and radical viewpoints within its ken.
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