Richard II by William Shakespeare Page B

Field.” 43
    For actors and directors there are distinct challenges in what Stuart Hampton-Reeves refers to as “the totalising notions of ‘tetralogy thinking,’ ” or seeing the plays as episodes in a national epic. 44 The yoking together of four or eight plays can exert a particular pressure on the chronologically first play,
Richard II
, to begin a political history of England, worked through the performed cycle. Anthony Quayle’s
The Cycle of the Historical Plays 1951
at the Memorial Theatre in Stratford marked the Festival of Britain by treating the four plays, beginning with
Richard II
, as “one great play.” 45 Richard (Michael Redgrave) was to be viewed as “the last of the old line of mediaeval kings, the last ruler by hereditary right, unbroken, undisputed since the Conqueror,” but the “true hero” of “the whole play” was to be King Henry V, “the ideal King: brave, warlike, generous, just” (played by Richard Burton). Michael Hattaway argues that Tanya Moiseiwitsch’s sets, fashioned in an “Elizabethan style,” created “a kind of illusion that turned politics back into romanticized history.” 46 This “history” owed much to the spirit of E. M. W. Tillyard’s
Shakespeare’s History Plays
(1944), which offers an account of the working through of divine providence, from the sinful deposition of Richard II to the expiation of a curse on the House of Lancaster. Such an approach in the theater risks idealizing Richard and pushing the play’s politics back into an older world of medieval kingshipto be contrasted with the more modern and secular kingship, portrayed in
Henry V
. This treatment downplays the modern political resonance of
Richard II
for Shakespeare and his Elizabethan theatergoers in the context of an impending succession crisis.
    It is possible to perform the plays as a historical cycle but to attend carefully to the
differences
within each play in order to resist the temptation of trying to make seamless connections that totalize the experience for an audience. Where the play is performed on its own, there may be an opportunity to place more emphasis on personal aspects of kingship, particularly the idea of the Divine Right of Kings, rather than political history. However, the political realities of the Elizabethan context are clearly illustrated in the Queen’s comment, “I am Richard II, know ye not that?” She was apparently responding some months later to an attempt by the Essex conspirators to stage a play, about King Richard’s deposition, on the eve of their rebellion in 1601.
Peter Hall, John Barton, and Clifford Williams (1964)
    Modern power politics lies at the heart of the landmark production of seven plays in 1964, directed by Peter Hall, John Barton, and Clifford Williams. The production celebrated the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth at a moment of political uncertainties just two years after the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Jan Kott wrote in
Shakespeare Our Contemporary
(1964) that “the great abdication scene in
Richard II
, the scene omitted in all editions published in the Queen Elizabeth’s lifetime,” revealed “the working of the Grand Mechanism.” 47 He explained this was “the very moment when power was changing hands.”
    The throne of England was given center place in John Bury’s model set of steel-clad walls and metallic stage, conveying the stark, cold reality of a brutal power politics. The tetralogy of
Richard II, Henry IV Part I
and
Part 2
, and
Henry V
was added to
The Wars of the Roses
(1963), which comprised a two-part adaptation of the three
Henry VI
plays (
Henry VI
and
Edward IV
), followed by
Richard III
. In this earlier production the central image was a great steel council table that alienated the action in Brechtian fashion, revealing the strategies of the self-serving opportunists who grouped around it, asthey jostled for position and power. Hall and Bury banished romanticized pageantry by creating