#Anyway absolutely fascinating to me that a tumblr meme made in 2012

[astralazuli]

??????????

[shredsandpatches]

Shakespeare Appreciation Week Day Two: Favourite Play(s): Richard II

Images (from top and then left to right by row): Title of 1608 Quarto, the first appearance in print of the deposition scene; Derek Jacobi (BBC, 1978); Fiona Shaw (National Theatre/BBC, 1995/1997); Mark Rylance (Shakespeare’s Globe, 2003); Ben Whishaw (BBC, 2012); David Tennant (RSC, 2013/2016); Charles Edwards (Shakespeare’s Globe, 2015); Christopher Liam Moore with Jeremy Peter Johnson as Aumerle (Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 2016); Sarah Fallon (American Shakespeare Center, 2018); Simon Russell Beale (Almeida, 2018)

(All images come from productions I’ve seen, either live or filmed, although they don’t represent every production I’ve seen -- I can think of at least five I’ve seen that aren’t included, mostly because I don’t have quality color pictures of them or in at least one case any pictures of the production, and tumblr only gives you so much space.)

***

There was, of course, no question which play I’d choose for today’s focus. I first read Richard II 20 years ago as an undergraduate; it had been on my radar for a few years before that, largely because of Fiona Shaw’s performance in the title role at the National Theatre, which at the time was pretty controversial -- although my very first encounter with it was this United Airlines commercial, which stuck with me for years afterward although I was quite small when I saw it. I had an idea when I first read it that Richard was seen as something of a romantic hero who gains wisdom through suffering and was a bad king because he was really a poet, and then when I first read the play I was very confused because that wasn’t how I saw it at all. I found it really interesting intellectually but it didn’t grab me emotionally, and I also found that this made it perfect fodder for the undergraduate thesis I had to write the following year and by the time I was finished with that I was basically the gibbering wreck you see today.

Some years back I wrote a couple of posts about why it is my favorite play for a “30 Days of Shakespeare” meme on my old livejournal, so I thought I would reproduce them here since I stand by most of what I said in them. (I will put it under a readmore because it got long.)

Day #1: Your favorite play Probably anyone who has a) read the play and b) looked at my lj for about a second or c) ever talked to me for more than about five minutes knows that it is Richard II. In the interests of making this post mildly interesting, perhaps, I suppose I had better talk a little bit about why! Occasionally I get asked this question by people I don't know very well, because it is kind of a weird play to have as one's favorite, and I have learned to say that it's because the language is so beautiful and the politics are so fascinating and complex, which is all absolutely true, but I say it because when I have tried to explain that I identify with Richard's self-destructive tendencies and absolute inability to shut up and the fact that he ends up completely alone in his own head, people look at me like I am crazy (and probably like I am reading the play on a sort of high-school level, like when they teach Romeo and Juliet because it's about teenagers so they assume The Kids Can Relate). Not that they are exactly wrong, at least about the crazy (I wrote a dissertation in which the play is central, so I think I can safely claim to be reading it above a high-school level). Anyway, the other thing that I have probably explained many times, but is probably illustrative of my approach to things, is that what really hooked me on the play in the first place was that it was really quite puzzling and not at all what I expected. What I knew about it going in was that it was about a Tragic Poet-King who Gains Wisdom Through Suffering -- the Romantic reading, basically -- which I thought sounded like the sort of thing that would appeal to 20-year-old me, and then I actually read the play and did not get that at all, and did not really have much of an emotional reaction. Naturally this meant it was perfectly suitable as a topic for the BA thesis I was going to have to write the following year, as it was both puzzling and completely ruinable, since I didn't think I would be sad if I came out of the thesis hating it. That was ten years ago and recently a well-known scholar asked me why I haven't buried Richard II yet. But no, I am not Henry the Fifth, nor was meant to be.

Day #2: Your favorite character Yesterday's post, I trust, makes my answer to this question fairly obvious, doesn't it? I suppose it doesn't have to, since there are texts I like in which I don't like any of the characters, and Richard II is one of those plays where nobody who has a significant amount to say is tremendously admirable, but I dunno, I love them anyway, except for Northumberland, who is awful, and anyway, you guys know me by now, you obviously have guessed I'm going to talk about my dead bisexual Plantagenet boyfriend. Yesterday I said that "when I have tried to explain that I identify with Richard's self-destructive tendencies and absolute inability to shut up and the fact that he ends up completely alone in his own head, people look at me like I am crazy," and in many ways they are right to do so, because, I mean, those are the things I identify with about Richard -- he always does exactly the wrong thing for the situation, and it is genuinely impossible to shut him up without killing him (and the things he says are invariably gorgeous, which I love but do not really identify with exactly, because I just babble). And then, too -- I always get twitchy about trying to universalize Shakespeare especially when he is talking about kingship/succession/politics, and obviously he is and you can't separate that from what happens in the play, but we all do it anyway in our own heads. And Richard II is so much about wrestling with the idea that after all you're really not special, so I guess -- since this is something I worry about way too often -- there is something cathartic about it? I don't know. I felt very inhibited writing this post, because my great squishy love for Richard II is intimately connected to ALL MY RAMPANT INSECURITIES even as I talk about identifying with someone who thinks not all the water in the rough rude sea can wash his bum. ;) (And besides it turns out he kind of is special, because, I mean, listen to him! I have arguments with people all the time about how we are not supposed to take his super-shiny awesome poetry as necessarily him being a super-shiny awesome poet, it's just the way the play is, which, yes, but then we get to the Pomfret speech and I go over all wibbly. That's the one I kept reciting to myself during my first real depressive episode, and it made me cry a lot but it also helped a bit.) ...you know, I was going to talk about how he is also canonically snarky and pretty and bisexual and I am surprised he doesn't get more love in the tiny Shakespeare fandom such-as-it-is, but he does now, in the corner of it I frequent, and anyway I had an opportunity for mopey navel-gazing, so I did that instead.

These posts are themselves now ten years old (almost exactly) and I don’t think I have changed that much, although I have slid far deeper into an indifferent middle age than when I wrote them, and now all the stuff about the pain of discovering you’re not special is much keener. These days you see a lot of talk about how this is A Play For Our Times that centers around the idea that Donald Trump is basically Richard II because he doesn’t have the dignity to be Lear and it always makes me want to hide in a hole (I don’t think Trump has the dignity to be any Shakespeare character). But it probably takes a certain kind of person to identify with Richard II, especially if you’re not even gay, so perhaps I should hide in a hole anyway.

(also: I totally need to listen to the Public Theater production, but I’m dithering over whether to wait until it’s all done and listen to it all at once! It sounds amazing though)