Historicising Shakespeare’s Richard II: Current Events, Dating, and the Sabotage of Essex
Fitter, Chris
Early Modern Literary Studies 11.2 (September, 2005)
Abstract
This essay unfolds three, interlinked arguments. First, on the basis of several intriguing possible parallels between the drama and current events, it challenges the uneasy, guesswork dating of the play hitherto to 1595. Richard II, it suggests, probably derives from 1596, or possibly even 1597. Second, the essay argues that, irrespective of the question of exact dating and of whether the parallels derived from design or subsequent historical coincidence, these topical ‘echoes’ are of importance in reconstructing the play’s received meaning, since they must have powerfully impacted the political responses of early audiences (1596-97). The drama could not but have been decoded through the ‘popular optic’ of such apparent allusions, which generated crucial dimensions of contemporary political significance lost on moderns, concerning the figure of Essex-in-Bullingbrooke. Finally, resituating Richard II primarily in the year or so that it first was staged (circa 1596) rather than in the very different conjuncture of the Essex revolt (February 1601), the article suggests that while the drama’s apparent allusions in act one to certain current events help establish a seemingly celebrative evocation of the wildly popular Essex — a figure so frequently posited by critics as an object of Shakespearean admiration — that subsequently, the drama effects, with characteristically sardonic Shakespearean reversal (and in a strategy not dissimilar to that of Parsons’ ‘Conference about the Next Succession’ of 1594) a calculated assault on the controversial earl’s standing. The paper thus contests the widely credited view that since the followers of Essex procured performance by Shakespeare’s company of Richard II on the night before the rebellion, a favorable assessment of Essex must have been written into the play by Shakespeare. This view is dismantled on the basis of strict historical reasoning: the contextually established meaning of the Essex-Bullingbroke figure had indeed become favorable by 1601, given a number of historical developments of 1599-1601; but back in the mid-1590s, when the drama was first performed, the political conjuncture was such that Richard II must have comprised an assault on the character and ambitions of Essex, as scheming, insatiable machiavel. That an anti-Essex play of circa 1596 should so have metamorphosed as to have become, in effect, a weapon in the arsenal of the Essex rebels, is one of the major ironies of the late Elizabethan period, and of Shakespeare’s career.
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