Shakespeare and Richard II
How accurate are Shakespeare’s historical plays? Harold F. Hutchison compares the dramatist’s account of Richard’s downfall with the actual course of events.
The story of Richard II is usually quoted as a classic example of a Prince who, as a young King, displayed the fairest promise, but who deservedly lost his throne because of his own folly and an insane lust for tyranny. Shakespeare’s play is widely accepted as the authentic history of a despot who deserved his fate, and who is only rescued from our contempt by the pathos of his abdication and the bravery of his end.1
Most of us have two other memories of Richard II. We remember a handsome fourteen-year-old boy who faced Tyler’s mob at Smithfield, alone and unafraid. We have a more confused recollection of a group of Richard’s barons known for obscure reasons as the Lords Appellant whom we are for ever mixing up with another group of barons in an earlier reign known as the Lords Ordainers.
Neither Shakespeare nor our text-books have done much to clarify our confusions or to reconcile that brave fourteen-year-old with the pathetic neurotic he is usually supposed to have become, and, lacking evidence to the contrary, most of us have continued to assume that the Shakespearean version is reasonably reliable history.
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