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This edition also reconsiders Shakespeare's use of sources, asking why he chose to emphasize one approach over another.
Forker also looks at the play's rich afterlife, and the many interpretations that actors and directors have taken. Finally, the edition looks closely at the aesthetic relationship between language, character, structure, and political import.
Start Quiz. It may wants up to experts before you were it. For Tynan, both production and play seemed emptily cerebral, as unengaged and self-regarding as Shakespeare's narcissistic protagonist. This edition also reconsiders Shakespeare's use of sources, asking why he chose to emphasize one approach over another. Read an excerpt of this book! Receive exclusive offers and updates from Oxford Academic.
The Arden Shakespeare has developed a reputation as the pre-eminent critical edition of Shakespeare for its exceptional scholarship, reflected in the thoroughness of each volume. An introduction comprehensively contextualizes the play, chronicling the history and culture that surrounded and influenced Shakespeare at the time of its writing and performance, and closely surveying critical approaches to the work. Detailed appendices address problems like dating and casting, and analyze the differing Quarto and Folio sources.
Highly informative and accessible, Arden offers the fullest experience of Shakespeare available to a reader. This richly annotated edition takes a fresh look at the first part of Shakespeare's second tetralogy of history plays, showing how it relates to the other plays in the sequence.
Forker places the play in its political context, discussing its relation to competing theories of monarchy, looking at how it faced censorship because of possible comparisons between Richard II and Elizabeth I, and how Bolingbroke's rebellion could be compared to the Essex rising of the time.
The accuser is the king's cousin, a proud young nobleman named Henry Bolingbroke, also called the Duke of Herford; he is the son of John of Gaunt, the king's aged and distinguished uncle.
Bolingbroke is accusing Thomas Mowbray, the Duke of Norfolk, of several heinous crimes against his king and country. These crimes include embezzlement, general participation in conspiracy against the king for the past eighteen years, and--by far the most serious--Mowbray's participation in the successful conspiracy to murder another of the king's uncles the late Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester a short time before. Mowbray denies all these charges, although he does so in rather ambivalent terms: for instance, he acknowledges that he was aware of the scheme to kill Gloucester--and that he once laid an unsuccessful plot to kill the king's uncle, John of Gaunt--but he denies actual responsibility for Gloucester's death, and says he has repented all his bad intentions.
Mowbray and Bolingbroke call each other liars and traitors, and evetually throw down their "gages" that is, their hoods or hats at each other's feet, challenging one another to a traditional chivalric duel in order to settle the accusations. King Richard, with the help of Bolingbroke's father John of Gaunt, tries to convince the two to reconcile, but they both refuse as a point of honor.
So Richard sets a date--St.
Lambert's Day--for the two to have a formal, traditional duel, in order to settle the challenge. This crowded, busy, and confusing scene has two main functions: it both throws us into the action in medias res --that is, in the middle of things--and provides us with some background information about the meaning of the events that are occurring.
Before , the criticism of Richard II is fragmentary and this volume takes up the major tradition of criticism, including Malone, Lamb. Before , the criticism of Richard II is fragmentary and this volume takes up the major tradition of criticism, including Malone, Lamb, Coleridge, Hazlitt.
We can tell from the very start that this play will be full of characters who are nursing old grudges, and who carry contradictory interpretations of past and current events. We also see instantly that the play will be very heavily influenced by events which have occurred in the past: these two young noblemen, Bolingbroke and Mowbray, are accusing each other of committing crimes which have happened before the play even began.