Derek Jacobi on Richard II Shakespeare Uncovered

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories

of the death of kings.

Westminster Abbey.

For over 1,000 years,

graveyard of the great kings and queens of England.

This is one of them, Richard II,

murdered, some say,

over 600 years ago.

The inscription says here that he was tall in body,

and as sage as Homer.

It goes on to say that he laid low

anyone who violated the royal prerogative.

Well, that last bit perhaps flatters him.

One man, Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford,

not only violated the prerogative, he dismantled it.

The play Richard II dares to imagine what it is to have supreme power

and then lose it.

Are you contented to resign the crown?

Ay.

No.

No.

Ay, for I must nothing be.

This drama offers a ringside seat to one of the most scandalous

and shocking moments in English royal history.

Richard II, a play about

a weak, ineffective monarch who is deposed.

The tragedy of the play and the theatrical dynamic of it

comes from the fact that Richard is the rightful king,

anointed by God, but he's an ineffective king.

Bolingbroke is not the rightful king,

but he is an effective politician.

It's a brutal and forensic examination

of Richard's catastrophic mental collapse.

The play is very powerful in the way that it

deals with redefining where power comes from.

Can it ever be right to dethrone a king?

This is deeply threatening to Elizabethan politics.

Threatening, too, for the man who wrote it.

If things had gone just a little bit differently,

Shakespeare could've been thrown in the Tower or even executed.

Beyond the politics,

Richard II is also a powerful evocation of England,

and the only one of Shakespeare's plays written entirely in verse.

This royal throne of kings,

this sceptred isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars...

..This other Eden,

demi-paradise,

This fortress built by nature for herself against infection

and the hand of war.

I want to find out who the real Richard II was.

And how - long after Richard was dead -

Shakespeare was able to piece together his story.

I'll show how actors bring poetry to life,

giving us one of history's most complex characters

in a drama as fresh today as it ever was.

Because it's a warning to kings,

presidents and prime ministers anywhere

who dare to believe in their own invincibility.

We were not born to sue but to command!

Any actor would kill to play Richard.

Ben Whishaw is the latest to take on one of acting's greatest roles.

Six frozen winters spent,

Return with welcome home from banishment.

How long a time lies in one little word!

My understanding of him

is of someone who's not really in the world.

He doesn't consider himself to be

a human being quite like other human beings.

For a long time, actually,

I was really interested in

Richard II as a sort of Michael Jackson figure -

sort of sexually ambiguous, separate,

playful, capricious, a diva.

There's a monkey in the piece which is the one echo still of that.

Whishaw follows a clutch of actors who've tackled the role,

each in their own unique way.

A young Ian McKellen wallowed in Richard's self-love.

Not all the water in the rough rude sea

Can wash the balm from an anointed king.

Mark Rylance played the king as a spoilt child.

We were not born to sue but to command!

Stars like Jeremy Irons,

Ralph Fiennes and Kevin Spacey

have all tackled Shakespeare's masterpiece.

Rarely performed for decades,

the play has even been staged with a woman, Fiona Shaw,

in the title role.

What must the king do now?

Must he submit?

I, too, have worn the crown.

Back in the 1978, I played Richard on BBC television.

The king shall be contented.

Must he lose the name of King?

It's strange to see it.

It's quite moving to watch it because I've never seen it.

And to see yourself 31 years younger is quite startling anyway.

No deeper wrinkles yet?

Of course, they tried to make me look like the pictures of Richard,

so they curled and frizzed my hair.

O flattering glass.

Like to my followers in prosperity, thou dost beguile me!

And there I am with this round moonface,

which sort of works for the part.

My Richard also starred one of Britain's greatest actors -

John Gielgud.

In the 1930s, Gielgud's own Richard had been a critical triumph.

As near as I could sift him on that argument...

Gielgud was the legendary Richard,

so the part was very much associated with Gielgud.

I knew the legend

and when we were all together, doing the first read-through,

and he was sitting next to me, it was a very daunting experience.

This royal throne of kings,

this sceptred isle...

Nearly 50 years later, Gielgud, now playing the aged John of Gaunt,

dominates the early scenes

with a blistering attack on Richard's misrule.

This dear, dear land,

Dear for her reputation through the world,

Is now leased out.

Should dying men flatter with those that live?

No, no, men living flatter...

'A huge row with Richard follows.'

Thy death-bed is no lesser than thy land

wherein which thou liest in reputation sick.

A thousand flatterers sit within thy crown.

Why, cousin, wert thou regent of the world,

Landlord of England art thou now, not king.

Now, by my seat's right royal majesty,

Wert thou not brother to great Edward's son?

This tongue that runs so roundly in thy head

Should run thy head from thy unreverent shoulders!

I don't think Richard's cruel, and Gaunt very much was

a father figure to him. I think he's insensitive.

We were not born to sue but to command.

It's a kind of inherent insensitivity to other people,

to other people's feelings, to other people's possessions,

just to other people.

There is only one person that's of any importance in this room

and that is me, Richard.

Shakespeare's Richard was, of course, based on a real king -

Richard of Bordeaux.

Like his character in the play,

the real Richard adored the trappings of power.

This was just one of Richard's many baubles.

It is the last surviving medieval English crown,

pure gold and peppered with diamonds, rubies and pearls.

By rights, the crown should have gone to Edward, the Black Prince,

one of England's first heroes.

but the Prince died before he could claim it.

And so, in 1377,

it was Richard, his ten-year-old son,

who was crowned in Westminster Abbey.

Richard became the first king in English history

to demand that subjects call him "majesty".

But where did the supreme arrogance come from?

At the National Gallery in London,

one of the real King Richard's most intimate possessions is on display.

It's an object that perfectly sums up his sense of divine destiny.

This is the famous Wilton Diptych.

600 years old,

and still so wonderfully vibrant and colourful,

and meaningful.

This was Richard's own personal travelling altarpiece.

He'd simply open it up, kneel down and pray.

You see him here.

You see his curly, golden hair,

kneeling with three saints -

John the Baptist, holding the Lamb of God,

St Edward the Confessor and St Edmund.

And they are all looking over to the right here,

where there's this wonderful representation of the Virgin Mary

and the Christ child,

surrounded by eleven angels,

one of whom's carrying the flag of St George,

and she seems to be offering or presenting it to Richard.

So there you have it.

This is how Richard sees himself -

in sole and divine possession...

..of England.

To be fair to Richard,

he wasn't the only one who thought himself divinely appointed.

It was taken as read.

De jure divino. By divine right

is a core late medieval understanding,

not only about kingship, but about society.

Everybody has their proper order and degree.

So, from angels in the heavens

down to the lowest stone that we would encounter in the street,

everything is created by God to have its right station.

The most powerful sort of figure on earth is, of course, the king,

who is appointed by God. He's God's representative on earth.

For Shakespeare's audience, Richard's divinity

and his downfall 200 years earlier were the stuff of legend.

But where did that legend come from?

Researching his subject in the early 1590s,

Shakespeare would have turned to the standard history book of the Elizabethan age.

It's one of the great scholarly industries,

trying to identify precisely the sources for Shakespeare's Richard II.

There are a number of candidates,

but the major one must be Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles,

which devotes about 140,000 words to the entire life of Richard II.

We can see that Holinshed himself has a very clear moral position on the reign of Richard II.

He is regarded as an evil man and these are evil times.

"There reigned abundantly the filthy sin of lechery

"and fornication, with abominable adultery, especially in the king."

It goes on,

"Those who he chiefly advanced were readiest to control him,

"which stirred such malice betwixt him and them

"that at length he could not be assuaged without peril and destruction to them both."

Digging for as much dirt as possible, Shakespeare's drama,

written early in his career in the mid-1590s,

is one of his greatest history plays.

It both documents and embellishes

Richard's painful overthrow at the hands of Henry Bolingbroke,

the future Henry IV.

These iconic figures from history

would be brought back to life at London's Globe Theatre,

an Elizabethan playhouse.

Today, a replica stands on the south bank of the River Thames.

I think you have to remember that

despite the codification of their relationship,

they are close relatives...

'Inside, actors are discussing Richard's overwhelming arrogance.'

Richard's a bit like the thief who's come to rob his relative, who's...

'John of Gaunt is now dead, his son, the exiled Henry Bolingbroke,

'Duke of Hereford, is his rightful heir.'

Though death be poor, it ends a mortal woe.

'But for Richard, himself desperate for cash,

'Gaunt's tragic death is an enticing opportunity.'

The ripest fruit first falls, and so doth he.

His time is spent, our pilgrimage must be.

So much for that.

Now for our Irish wars.

We must supplant those rough rug-headed kerns,

which live like venom where no venom else but only they have

privilege to live.

And for these great affairs do ask some charge,

towards our assistance we do seize to us the plate, coin,

revenues and moveables, whereof our Uncle Gaunt did stand possess'd.

Whereof our Uncle Gaunt did stand possess'd.

Excuse me for interrupting...

'I'm dropping in on the Globe rehearsal.'

It sounds fascinating!

You're making him much nicer than I did!

Right, OK.

I remember when he said, "The ripest fruit first falls."

It's a kind of, "Oh, well, we're all going to die.

"He's old, of course he's going to die, he's old.

"I'm young, right, don't let's talk about that,

"let's talk about these Irish wars.

"I've got to go and do something about them.

"I don't want to do them, it's going to cost money.

"Who's got any? He's got some money, I'll have his."

Its very in the moment, it's very much attitude-driven.

You know, the man's dead, you were very close to him,

and all you can think of saying is,

"Well, he's old, what do you expect?"

-That's virtually what you're saying.

-Yeah.

In theatrical terms, if you want to set it up

with the first two lines being very serious and sombre,

and then just going,

"Bollocks to all that anyway, he's dead, who cares?"

Potentially, you can get a laugh out of it. Did you ever do that?

Always one for the cheap gag!

My uncle, what's the matter?

'Gaunt's brother, though, can't believe his ears.

'To him, Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford, has been

'royally ripped off.'

Seek you to seize and gripe into your hands

the royalties and rights of banish'd Hereford?

Doth not the one deserve to have an heir?

Is not his heir a well-deserving son?

For how art thou a king but by fair sequence and succession?

It's not just that succession is right,

it's that it's right in this case as well.

He's questioning Richard, he questions Richard openly

and says what Richard is doing is wrong.

Yeah, the basic one is, the father's dead, the son's alive.

The son inherits.

For how art thou a king but by fair sequence and succession?

'Shamelessly stealing Bolingbroke's inheritance is

'the decisive act on which the entire play turns.

'It's vital that the audience understand this.'

You pluck a thousand dangers on your head.

They're hearing it for the first time, most of them,

so for them, the accessibility is triggered by your attitude.

And they can hear by your tonality, whatever,

what you're thinking. Because it ain't what you say, it's the way what you say it.

And prick my tender patience

to such thoughts as honour and allegiance cannot think.

Think what you will, we seize into our hands

his plate, his goods, his money and his lands.

It's this divinity, hedging this king.

He can do anything, he can be wayward.

And it's a wayward thing to do.

Its whim, it's caprice, and at the end, he says,

"Oh, sorry, I've hurt your feelings.

"I tell you what, you be regent, that'll be nice for you!

-"You can be in trouble."

-Yeah.

-With little thought for the consequences.

-Yeah.

Which is his great tragedy, he doesn't think.

-He doesn't think things through.

-No.

Ah, Richard,

with the eyes of heavy mind I see thy glory

like a shooting star fall to the base earth from the firmament.

Thy sun sets weeping in the lowly west,

witnessing storms to come, woe and unrest.

Exiled, his father dead, his inheritance stolen,

the Duke of Hereford, Henry Bolingbroke, returns home

to wage war against the King.

Richard at first panics,

but then comforts himself with the belief that, whatever happens,

God will save him.

Not all the water in the rough rude sea can wash the balm off

from an anointed king.

The breath of worldly men cannot depose

the deputy elected by the Lord.

For every man that Bolingbroke hath press'd

to lift shrewd steel against our golden crown,

God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay a glorious angel.

Then, if angels fight, weak men must fall,

for heaven still guards the right.

So, who is Shakespeare's Bolingbroke, the man who believes

he can defeat both Richard and his army of angels?

Thou art a banish'd man,

and here art come before the expiration of thy time,

in braving arms against thy sovereign.

I am a subject and I challenge law.

Attorneys are denied me, and therefore,

personally I lay my claim to my inheritance of free descent.

I don't think Bolingbroke's the bad guy.

He doesn't set out to replace Richard in anyway.

Bolingbroke, when he comes back to England continually says

he's only come back to regain what is his.

He hasn't come back to be King, he hasn't come back to usurp Richard.

He's come back to gain what is his.

Now, the thing is, do you believe him?

OK, we'll spend a few minutes thinking about Bolingbroke...

'At the Globe, actors are discussing Bolingbroke

'as he captures two of Richard's closest allies.'

In this particular speech he appears to be punishing these men

on behalf of Richard and I think a key line in it is when you say,

"Myself a prince by fortune of my birth,

"Near to the king in blood and near in love..."

This is Bolingbroke's main problem, is that he cannot

make clear his objective because to do so would be treason.

Bolingbroke at this moment is surrounded by lords and nobles.

He has to make sure he doesn't put a foot wrong

and that seems to be his objective throughout the play.

He is politic in a way that Richard isn't.

That's right. Bolingbroke is a sort of realist. You're trying to isolate Richard.

Bolingbroke is a politician.

Only a politician could execute Richard's closest allies

and claim he's only doing it to protect the King.

You have misled a prince,

A royal king,

A happy gentleman in blood and lineaments,

By you unhappied and disfigured clean.

Bolingbroke himself says all he is doing is seeking to remove these people

to allow you again to be the king you should be

and were before.

Now, that may well force Richard into an untenable position.

But this is old-style punishment.

He's going to kill a number of people, starting with these two.

So he takes a pretty stern line

and I think it is intended to demonstrate strength.

Myself, a prince in fortune of my birth,

Near to the king in blood, and near in love,

Till you did make him misinterpret me,

Have stoop'd my neck under your injuries,

And sigh'd my English breath in foreign clouds,

Eating the bitter bread of banishment,

Whilst you have fed upon my signories,

Dispark'd my parks and fell'd my forest woods,

From my own windows torn my household coat,

Razed out my impress, leaving me no sign...

..Save men's opinions and my living blood,

To show the world I am a gentleman.

This and much more,

Much more than twice all this,

Condemns you to the death.

Today, battles for power in England are fought here

at the Palace of Westminster.

Most of the buildings date from the 19th century.

One original building, though, survives.

Westminster Hall.

In the 1300s, this was Richard's military headquarters.

Some of the events recreated in the play actually happened here.

The real Richard had a huge timber roof built overhead.

It was studded with wooden angels,

watching over him like a divine army.

Now, in the drama,

Shakespeare's Richard is about to mobilise them.

Yet know my master, God omnipotent,

Is mustering in his clouds

Armies of pestilence, and they shall strike

Your children yet unborn and unbegot

That lift your vassal hands against my head

And threat the glory of my precious crown.

The central theme of Shakespeare's Richard II

rings remarkably true across the centuries.

Like Richard, many despots from our own time

have professed themselves amazed that anyone could challenge them.

Although Richard II is set in a distant past,

even when it was first put on it was set in the past,

it's hugely relevant to the present.

The reality of regime change

is something that the leader who's losing his grasp on power

simply doesn't fully understand.

I remember that moment when Ceausescu finally lost power

in Romania as the Soviet empire was collapsing

and he's on the balcony. He looks out.

And you can almost see on his face that he can't quite believe

that the people are shouting for his downfall

not shouting in praise of him.

They love me. All my people love me. All.

They're often in a state of delusion.

They think that people still love them, that

they can still give orders, but it doesn't happen.

Still waiting for God's reinforcements, Richard,

now confronted by Bolingbroke, is running out of options.

We are amaz'd and thus long have we stood,

To watch the fearful bending of thy knee,

Because we thought ourself thy lawful king,

And if we be, how dare thy joints forget.

Well, I remember when we were preparing to film the play.

it was the time when Gaddafi's regime was in its death throes.

And, I think it was actually Gaddafi's son, was making these speeches

about how if the people rose up in rebellion,

there would be rivers of blood,

and they would be dammed and blah, blah, blah.

And Richard stands on a rampart at one point and says exactly the same thing.

Tell Bolingbroke, for yond methinks he stands,

That every stride he makes upon my land

Is dangerous treason!

He is come to open the purple testament of bleeding war,

But ere the crown he looks for live in peace,

Ten thousand bloody crowns of mothers' sons

Shall ill become the flower of England's face,

Change the complexion of her maid-pale peace

To scarlet indignation and bedew her pastures' grass

with faithful English blood.

That felt incredibly...

I mean, it was literally, you could sort of put the two speeches side by side

and they resonated so strongly.

The themes marbled into the text of Richard II

don't just resonate with one-party states and self-appointed dictators.

20 years ago, England famously witnessed a political drama

not unlike the one faced by Richard.

For ten years, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady,

had, like Richard, been invincible, her leadership unchallenged.

But in 1990 her attempt to levy a new poll tax triggered violence

on the streets of London,

and ultimately a rebellion deep within her own party.

Itching to take over, former minister Michael Heseltine

challenged Mrs Thatcher for the leadership.

For BBC Journalist John Sargeant,

it was a battle of Shakespearian proportions.

'Mrs Thatcher, could I ask you to comment?

'Good evening. Good evening, gentlemen.'

He's pushing me.

'I got more than half the Parliamentary party

'and disappointed that it's not quite enough to win on the first ballot

'so I confirm it is my intention to let my name go forward...'

SHOUTING AND BABBLE OF VOICES

The game is up. Within two days she's gone.

-It's two days after this?

-Two days after this, she's finished. She resigns, that's the end of it.

And the comparison with Richard II is extremely close.

It is amazing the parallels between

what happens when a Prime Minister of Margaret Thatcher's stature

is then brought down by the people who she would regard as traitors.

She certainly had a sense in which she could spot the people who might be traitors.

Michael Heseltine clearly was, in fact, the most dangerous one.

He was Bolingbroke

and there was no question that he wanted the crown

and he was then going to attack her, as he did,

in the ballot of Conservative MPs.

And even in referring to her being stabbed.

-Yes!

-Stabbed in the front.

-Absolutely.

But these are the death of kings, aren't they?

In the Richard II quote, "Let us sit around and discuss the death of kings

"Are they deposed, are they killed in battle?"

'When Mrs Thatcher entered the chamber...'

Mrs Thatcher described events leading to her fall

as "treachery with a smile on its face."

And Parliament seemed to agree.

May I pay tribute to the Prime Minister

and to her decision this morning.

She showed by that, that she amounts to more

than those who have turned upon her in recent days.

It's interesting, because I only met her met her once

and at one point she said to me.

"The job you do and the job I do has many differences

"and many parallels."

She said, "But one interesting thing I noticed tonight,

"you require a darkened auditorium,

"you don't see your audience, they're beyond the fourth wall.

"I need lights. I need to see their eyes."

As she said it, the way she said it,

the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

"I need to see their eyes."

Ladies and gentlemen,

we're leaving Downing Street for the last time

after 11.5 wonderful years.

Deserted by many of her closest allies,

Mrs Thatcher finally accepted that it was over.

So far, Shakespeare's Richard has fought bitterly to deny the inevitable.

Now, though, he appears to just give up,

almost deposing himself.

What must the king do now? Must he submit?

The king shall do it. Must he be deposed?

The king shall be contented. Must he lose the name of king?

O God's name, let it go.

I'll give my jewels for a set of beads,

My gorgeous palace for a hermitage,

My gay apparel for an almsman's gown,

My figured goblets for a dish of wood,

My sceptre for a palmer's walking staff,

My subjects for a pair of carved saints

And my large kingdom for a little grave,

A little, little grave, an obscure grave.

It's the sensitivity of Richard, it's the vulnerability of Richard

behind the divinity, the impregnable man,

the man with ostensibly total self-belief.

And therefore total courage

and inside is this kind of boy.

This sensitive boy who actually can't cope.

I'll be buried in the king's highway,

Some way of common trade, where subjects' feet

May hourly trample on their sovereign's head,

For on my heart they tread now whilst I live,

And buried once, why not upon my head?

The pathos is simultaneously

moving and annoying, as pathos sometimes is.

Richard is self-indulgent, infantile,

absurd in his too-easy glorying and too easy despair.

But at the same time one feels the poignancy of it all.

What we feel is obviously heightened by the brilliance of the play's stunning poetry.

Indisputably it's the work of a literary genius.

But was it Shakespeare's genius?

Some think not.

Hedingham Castle, near London,

is the ancestral home of the De Vere family.

The De Veres first came here over 800 years ago.

In the course of his reign, Richard proved a very contentious King.

He set many cats among many pigeons.

And my presence here at Hedingham Castle may,

like Richard, set the fur flying.

Edward De Vere,

the 17th Earl of Oxford, once entertained Elizabeth I here.

Oxford was close to the Queen.

He had a reputation as a bit of a poet too.

But I believe his literary skills went way beyond dabbling in verse.

I believe he, and not William Shakespeare,

wrote both Richard II, and, in fact, all the plays

attributed to the man from Stratford.

Hedingham's current incumbent agrees.

Like me, Jason Lindsey believes Oxford wrote the works anonymously,

allowing Shakespeare to stage the plays

and take all the credit.

You've presumably heard of the authorship debate?

Very much so, yes.

I, for my part, am totally convinced that it wasn't Shakespeare.

Yep. It is a contentious issue. I am descended from Edward

so I have a vested interest, it's worth declaring that,

but I do feel that there is so little

on the William Shakespeare of Stratford,

there just isn't enough knowledge, really,

that can be gained from a person who was educated in a local school.

Why aren't there any manuscripts?

There are only six signatures, I think, of William of Stratford,

and they're barely legible.

And why did, if he were the greatest writer that's ever lived,

did he keep his children illiterate?

And if you'd been involved, would you have had in your will,

surely you would have mentioned something to do with the theatre or books,

-there's nothing mentioned at all.

-No, nothing, absolutely nothing.

It's the most amazing conspiracy.

Denying Shakespeare the authorship of...Shakespeare

is, I'm well aware, hugely controversial.

I'm always surprised that an actor,

a great actor such as Sir Derek,

should question the idea that Shakespeare's plays

were written by William Shakespeare, the actor from Stratford-upon-Avon.

Because the plays are so full of the actor's way of looking at the world.

So full of the technical knowledge of the theatre.

So many of the plays are collaborative,

they're written for particular actors

who were Shakespeare's friends and colleagues.

They are insider plays.

The argument is, how could a mere, middle-class grammar school boy

from the provinces have understood about courts and kings and politics?

Well, of course the answer is, the actors went to court,

they saw the court, they were paid to play there.

And courts and kings and politics are things that you can read books about.

I'm not the first to question Shakespeare's authorship.

In the last century and a half,

dozens of alternative writers have been proposed.

Most are speculative, but for me,

the 17th Earl of Oxford has the most convincing claim.

I firmly believe writers write from their own experience and personality.

-Yes.

-De Vere had the perfect background.

Well, he had an amazing education.

His family background, he was a courtier,

he was with Queen Elizabeth at court,

he travelled extensively in Italy.

And these all appear in the plays.

He also saw service in the army

and the plays are full of references to war and fighting and sailing.

There's too much knowledge.

I think the claim has so much going for it.

But we always come back to the one question of

if it was Oxford, why the cover-up?

You have to imagine the contemporary fever that was going on.

If you wrote a play that was basically the deposition of a king,

it was a treasonable offence.

You can't put your name to it. You'd have been locked up, beheaded,

-it was too dangerous.

-Exactly.

At the same time

Oxford couldn't be allowed to be seen to publish a play,

it was below his status.

It's very hard in our day and age to understand the shame.

It was known that he was a writer, but not a playwright.

I'll always believe Shakespeare was just an actor,

a clever opportunist who bathed in Oxford's reflected glory.

In the play, Richard has built his royal career

on God's reflected glory.

As the drama approaches its final scenes,

perhaps he too has been unmasked.

This blessed plot, this earth,

this realm,

this England,

this nurse.

This teeming womb of royal kings.

From the womb of royal kings,

Richard's majesty is now stillborn.

In the play, his kingdom is compared to an abandoned garden,

her fruit trees upturned

and her wholesome herbs swarming with caterpillars.

With echoes of the real-life transfer of power,

originally played out right here on the floor of Westminster Hall,

Shakespeare's Richard now prepares formally to renounce the crown.

Right, now we're moving on to the deposition scene, Act IV, i.

I think what Richard fears is that this will be a rubber stamping

of his resignation, this deposition.

He's already, in effect, resigned, but he's determined

to do it in his own way.

I'm still, I have to admit to being still slightly unsure

as to exactly what he's trying to achieve at this moment.

-That's fine, that's good.

-I know we said about a sense of occasion,

but exactly what it is that he's trying to...

He wants an acknowledgement of the reality of what is happening.

I'm resigning my crown, I'm giving you what you want,

but you're not going to shirk seeing the dismantling of myself.

You are going to see that.

So it's a kind of disclosure or disclosing.

It has no point beyond that, but you want him to understand

you are taking not just this crown, this thing,

but my mind, my body and my heart.

Here, cousin.

Seize the crown.

Here, cousin.

On this side my hand, and on that side thine.

Now is this golden crown like a deep well

that owes two buckets, filling one another.

The emptier ever dancing in the air.

The other down, unseen and full of water.

That bucket down and full of tears am I,

Drinking my griefs, whilst you mount up on high.

There's a wonderful image of two buckets in a well.

That image is used with regard to the arc, the narrative line,

as Richard goes down, Bolingbroke goes up.

And I think symbolically, looking at those two characters,

there's a sense in which Richard represents an old world,

a medieval world of chivalry, of the divine right of kings.

Whereas Bolingbroke represents a new world,

a world of ambition, of pragmatic politics.

I thought you had been willing to resign.

My crown I am, but still my griefs are mine.

You may my glories and my state depose,

but not my griefs, still am I king of those.

Part of your cares you give me with your crown.

Your cares set up do not pluck my cares down.

My care is loss of care, by old care done.

Your care is gain of care, by new care won.

Are you contented to resign the crown?

Ay.

No. No.

Ay.

There's a great line in the deposition scene,

"Ay. No. No. Ay."

Yes. No. No. Yes.

I can't make up my mind.

But it's also, of course, "I, no, no, I" -

who am I if I'm not the king?

For I must nothing be.

He cannot distinguish between his role and his persona.

He thinks if he has no role, he has no persona, that he will disappear.

Therefore no, no...

..for I resign to thee.

I think he's feeling so sorry for himself that the danger is

he could alienate your sorrow.

From the actor's point of view it's a dangerous moment

because he could lose the audience's sympathy

if he's too obviously sorry for himself,

ie, the audience is saying, "You don't need our sympathy

"you've got it all yourself."

You're your own audience, in a sense.

This is the great dichotomy of playing Richard,

he is always his own audience.

But, ultimately, there's got to be something about him,

that makes the audience see through that and say, yes,

I can see you're acting it, I can see,

but at the same time I know you're feeling it too.

When Richard II was first performed in the early 1590s,

it was seen by some as a thinly veiled attack

on Shakespeare's own monarch, Elizabeth I.

Elizabeth, queen for over 30 years and with no obvious heir,

was, it's true, seen by some as a tyrant.

And she knew it.

In a memorandum by the Keeper of the Records,

she is reputed to have said,

"I am Richard II, know ye not that?"

Playing it safe, it is believed that Shakespeare's original production

of Richard II was performed with the deposition scene cut.

A few years later, though,

the scene would come back to haunt both him and Elizabeth.

She has, over a number of years,

made particular use of an ambitious military man, the Earl of Essex.

He's fought the Irish campaign for her,

he's led the campaign against the Spaniards.

But Essex has over-stepped the mark, he's fallen out with the queen

and in the late 1590s, a group of discontented courtiers,

they really feel something needs to be done and they begin to plan,

potentially a coup d'etat against the queen.

Essex as a political figure has become a rival to the Queen.

He is a powerful figure

who can conjure a lot of support from leading aristocrats.

So, so here we have almost a good parallel, in historical terms,

between Richard and Bolingbroke,

and a lot of Essex's contemporaries see that parallel.

Essex knew that even a hint of deposing Elizabeth would be considered treason.

In early 1601, he began to fortify Essex House,

his town mansion, which once stood here, close to the Strand.

Something big was about to happen.

Secretly recruiting a small band of like-minded aristocrats,

he now looked around for ways to encourage and inspire them.

On the night before the coup he decided to treat them all to a show

at London's Globe Theatre.

For one night only, the auditorium would reverberate

to the sound of revolutionary English poetry.

The play was Shakespeare's Richard II,

performed, it's thought,

with the previously censored deposition scene

restored and intact.

Now mark me, how I will undo myself,

With mine own hands I give away my crown,

With mine own tongue deny my sacred state,

With mine own breath release all dutious oaths.

All pomp and majesty I do forswear.

My manors, rents, revenues I forgo.

My acts, decrees and statutes I deny.

God pardon all oaths that are broke to me!

God keep all vows unbroke that swear to thee!

Make me, that nothing have, with nothing grieved,

And thou with all pleased, that hast all achieved!

Long mayst thou live in Richard's seat to sit,

And soon lie Richard in an earthy pit!

Richard II - a play about a weak, ineffective monarch who is deposed.

It's as if they're psyching themselves up

for what they're going to do themselves.

God save King Henry! Unking'd Richard says,

And send him many years of sunshine days.

What more remains?

The morning after the performance, Essex and his fellow conspirators

swarmed into the City of London. Their goal? To confront the Queen.

But he'd badly miscalculated.

Essex was relying on popular support to help him force the Queen's hand.

The people of London, however, stubbornly refused to play ball.

Essex retreated back to his house where he was later arrested.

The Queen was in no mood for mercy. On 25th of February 1601,

Essex was beheaded on Tower Green.

Sir Walter Raleigh is said to have stood at a nearby window,

disdainfully puffing tobacco smoke in sight of the condemned man.

Retaliation, however, didn't end there.

For the Globe Theatre, tangled up in a heinous conspiracy,

it was a dangerous moment.

Interrogated by Elizabeth's security police,

the actors were, however, ruled out of involvement in the plot.

It seems Shakespeare himself never, apparently,

received a late-night knock on his door.

There was a real sense of a Shakespeare history play

playing a huge part in contemporary politics.

If things had gone just a little bit differently

in the interrogation following that performance,

Shakespeare could've been thrown in the Tower or even executed.

He got off by the skin of his teeth.

Let's talk of graves, of worms and epitaphs.

You have misled a prince, a royal king.

Here, cousin, seize the crown.

Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke's,

And nothing can we call our own, but death.

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground

And tell sad stories of the death of kings.

God save King Henry! Unking'd Richard says.

What more remains?

Richard I we remember by his soubriquet, Lionheart.

Richard III we style the hunchback who killed the Princes in the Tower.

Perhaps.

But how does England remember the second King Richard?

The truth is, we remember the real Richard II

mostly through the play that was written about him.

I don't think it really matters whether Shakespeare's Richard II

is an authentic, historically accurate account of that history.

What does matter is the debate around justice and tyranny,

and that, in one sense, the truth that Shakespeare spoke, still speaks to us today.

Discarded in a dungeon at Pontefract Castle,

Shakespeare's Richard is about to discover that truth.

I have been studying how I may compare

This prison where I live unto the world.

And for because the world is populous

And here is not a creature but myself...

..I cannot do it.

Yet I'll hammer it out.

I think, you know, Richard's great speech

in the prison cell at the end is incredibly moving.

He's very stoic. He's very positive. He's quite funny.

And he's really profound.

Thus play I in one person many people...

..and none contented.

I think it's the story of somebody who goes through

this very radical and unhappy identity crisis, breakdown.

And he's forced to confront the fact

that he is a frail human being and he will die.

And he has this sort of moment of enormous clarity

where he sees that, you'll never really BE in the world

until you can accept the fact that you're sort of nothing.

Nor I nor any man that but man is...

..With nothing shall be pleased

Till he be eased with being nothing.

That idea is... I think is very profound.

And a radical idea, really. Cos none of us like to think that we're nothing.

We're always just buffeted around from one thing to another.

We're never satisfied, we're never at peace.

I wasted time.

And now doth time waste me.

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.

In a sense he is redeemed because he finds himself,

he finds the man, the real man, inside all this kingliness.

He finds the real man.

Yet blessing on his heart that gives it me!

For 'tis a sign of love.

But my goodness he pays for it, and he ends appallingly

I have real sympathy for him.

I feel that when he dies, something has been lost.

Something...

..from the world is gone.

In the play, Richard's chilling murder

would probably have satisfied Shakespeare's Elizabethan audience.

Historians, though, tell us that the real Richard

probably wasn't, in fact, murdered in quite such a brutal and bloody fashion.

In all likelihood he simply starved to death

in the bowels of Pontefract Castle.

However, to the writer, this was probably just a detail.

I can't help thinking that Richard, in Shakespeare's eyes,

was already dead long before he reached Pontefract.

That once unimpeachable force had been stripped of all majesty.

His sense of self had simply imploded.

All that remained was the question of his legacy,

which was to leave two squabbling families - York and Lancaster -

fighting over the spoils of England.

The Wars of the Roses would drag on for decades.

As for Shakespeare's Richard II,

the play has fascinated and enthralled audiences for 400 years,

and served as a warning to tyrants.

So perhaps Richard II will last another 400 years.

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground

And tell sad stories of the death of kings.

Watching it, actually, I want to play it again.

I could do it better.

I know, now, how to do it,

and seeing myself do it there...

..I know what it needs, now.

I know I... I could do it better, yes.

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