Languages & literature > Shakespeare's Richard II

Introduction to richard ii.
5
Eolingbroke cultivates the populace also, but shews himself as a
defender of their rights and an avenger of their wrongs. Richard
gratifies every whim and momentary appetite ; Bolingbroke
takes his stand upon unbroken tradition and upon law. Richard
is full of fancies ; Bolingbroke is a hard ‘ practical ’ Englishman.
Richard never shews fight for one moment in the play ; he has
no fight in him ; he dissolves into tears like ‘ a mockery king of
snow standing before the sun of Bolingbroke: ’ but neither
tears nor pity delay the unhalting course of Bolingbroke for a
single instant.* The denouement of the play is almost foreseen
from the very beginning ; the reader is never kept in doubt; he
is never distracted by hopes and fears ; the action takes a settled
way to its end. Hence this play is more like a short epic poem
in the dramatic form. So far as the mere events are concerned,
the story might just as Well have been told as an epic ; but
Shakespeare’s genius was essentially dramatic, and could not
long have sustained this form.
5. The following are the opinions of eminent critics regard¬
ing the characters in this play :
Richard Second.— (i) ‘ There is a condition of the intellect which
we describe by the word “boyishness.” The mind in the boyish stage of
growth “ has no discriminating convictions, and no grasp of consequences.”
It has not as yet got hold of realities ; it is “ merely dazzled by pheno¬
mena instead of perceiving things as they are.” The talk of a person
who remains in this sense boyish is often clever, but it is unreal; now he
will say brilliant things upon this side of a question, and now upon the
opposite side. He has no consistency of view. He is wanting as yet in
seriousness of intellect; in the adult mind. . . . Richard’s will is entirely
I lunformed ; it possesses no authority and no executive power; he is at the
II mercy of every chance impulse and transitory mood. . . . Instead of com¬
prehending things as they are, and achieving heroic deeds, he satiates
his heart with the grace, the tenderness, the beauty, or the pathos of
situations. . . . He has abandoned his nature to self-indulgence, and there¬
fore the world becomes to him more unreal than ever. He has been
surrounded by flatterers, who helped to make his atmosphere a luminous
mist, through which the facts of life appeared with all their ragged out¬
lines smoothed away. . . . He is proud, and he is pious ; he is courageous
and cowardly; and pride and piety, cowardice and courage, are all the
* The young student may also compare Richard with Hamlet. But the wit¬
lessness of Hamlet is very different from that of Richard. The one arises from the
enormous _ difficulties which external circumstances oppose against one man and
from the intellectual doubts which he feels; the other, because his will has been
sapped by self-indulgence, and because he has permitted himself to break every
law—both internal and external. Hamlet, too, is beloved by every one who knows
him ; Richard has gained the love only of his wife and his groom.