2

Politics in Shakespeare’s
London:

Richard II (1595) and

Whitehall

Introduction
Richard II is one of the very few Shakespeare plays to contain
scenes that are specifically set in London, albeit the historical
city inhabited by the medieval king whose downfall it charts,
rather than that of the dramatist himself. The play explores the
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behaviour that causes Richard II to lose the support of his

nobles and the country at large, his subsequent deposition and
the ascent to the throne of Bolingbroke, future King Henry IV.
It contains episodes set at the Duke of Lancaster’s London
residence, Ely House, to which we will turn in a moment, and
a pivotal scene between Queen Isabel and her recently deposed
husband that takes place amongst the bustle of a London
street. The Queen is forced to wait amongst the crowds there
in the hope of interrupting the procession in which Richard is
being taken ‘To Julius Caesar’s ill-erected tower, | To whose
flint bosom my condemned lord | Is doomed a prisoner by
proud Bolingbroke’ (5.1.2–4). Shakespeare even refers to the
seedier side of London in the closing moments of Richard II,

47

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 48 SHAKESPEARE IN LONDON

when the newly crowned Henry IV wonders where his son

might be:

Can no man tell me of my unthrifty son?

’Tis full three months since I did see him last.
If any plague hang over us, ’tis he.
I would to God, my lords, he might be found.
Enquire at London, ’mongst the taverns there,
For there, they say, he daily doth frequent,
With unrestrained loose companions.
(5.3.1–7)

This passage is not only specifically placed in London, it also

speaks the language of everyday life in the metropolis, with its
concerns about money (‘my unthrifty son’), fear of the ‘plague’
that hangs over its inhabitants and talk of the ‘taverns’ full of
‘loose companions’. As such it shares the city’s preoccupations
with credit and debt, sickness and health, and tensions between
social classes that we examine in our chapters on Timon of
Athens, King Lear and Romeo and Juliet, respectively. The
young man lost for more than ‘three months’ amongst the
lowlife of the capital is of course the dissolute Prince Hal,
whose exploits form much of the plot of the two Henry IV
plays and who eventually becomes the warrior king seen in
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Henry V. Hal’s mettle is tested in an odyssey through the

teeming streets of London’s dark underbelly; it is the city itself
that takes the measure of the man who will one day wear the
crown. The prince who is heir to the throne of England through
his blood ties to the house of Lancaster is equally connected to
the ‘unrestrained’ inhabitants of the drinking holes he ‘daily
doth frequent’ in London. Hal is as much at home on Bankside,
with its pubs, amusements and brothels, as he is at the palace
of Westminster; this is the conundrum that will occupy
Shakespeare throughout his second tetralogy of history plays
(comprising Richard II, Henry IV 1, Henry IV 2 and Henry V).
As we saw in our introduction it is this social and economic

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 POLITICS IN SHAKESPEARE’S LONDON 49

diversity, the close juxtaposition of such extremes, that in fact

characterizes early modern London itself and which makes the
city so exciting for the playwright.
In this chapter we will focus on the wide-reaching, capricious
and highly changeable political life of Shakespeare’s city,
concentrating primarily on the neighbourhood of Whitehall
and especially the environs of Westminster, the beating political
heart of early modern London. John Norden’s 1593 map of
the neighbourhood (Figure 3) depicts a complex of
governmental buildings, law courts and other administrative
and ceremonial venues at Westminster. The massive and lavish
Whitehall Palace was the primary residence of monarchs in
London up until the early eighteenth century. The only part of
the building to survive today is the banqueting hall, built
between 1622 and 1634 by Elizabeth’s successor, James I, who
liked to hold Bacchanalian parties in its undercroft (less
happily, the hall was also the scene of Charles I’s execution in
1649). Gardens, parkland and a tiltyard (for jousting
tournaments) are also clearly visible on the map, emphasizing
the fact that this was a dwelling place used for the activities
that filled the leisure time of early modern courtiers, as well as
a working political centre.
Let us begin by looking at another scene from Richard II
that takes place in a specific London setting and which contains
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a speech that not only gives us a useful introduction to the

political issues dominating both Shakespeare’s city and the
play itself, but that also happens to be one of the playwright’s
best known and most brilliant pieces of poetry. The dying
words of Bolingbroke’s father, John of Gaunt, are spoken at his
London home as he awaits a visit from the King of whom he
has come to despair. (The historical John of Gaunt died on
3 February 1399 and was buried in London in St Paul’s
Cathedral, which we will visit later in this book.) Ely House,
then a large dwelling just off Holborn, near the modern-day
Hatton Gardens, is the location for this scene. Gaunt moved
into this mansion after his great palace on the site of the
modern Savoy Hotel was burnt to the ground in 1381 by rebels

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 50 SHAKESPEARE IN LONDON
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FIGURE 3 From John Norden, Speculum Britanniae (1593) (© The

British Library Board, Maps Crace Port. 1.22)

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 POLITICS IN SHAKESPEARE’S LONDON 51

who believed him to have aspirations towards kingship himself.

The rebuilt ‘Savoye’ is clearly visible on Norden’s map of
Westminster, just south of Covent Garden (Figure 3). Stow –
who reports that ‘there was none in the realm to be compared
in beauty and stateliness’ to Lancaster’s house of Savoy – notes
that the rebels destroyed all the many precious goods they
found in Gaunt’s possession, breaking ‘plate and vessels of
gold and silver’ into ‘small pieces’, which they threw into the
Thames. ‘They found there certain barrels of gunpowder,’ Stow
recounts ‘which they thought had been gold or silver, and
throwing them into the fire more suddenly than they thought,
the hall was blown up, the houses destroyed, and themselves
very hardly escaped away’ (372). His residence destroyed,
Gaunt leased from the bishops of Ely their grand London palace,
which, Stow tells us, included some ‘two cellars, and forty acres
of land’, a ‘chapel’, ‘a large port, gatehouse, or front towards the
street or highway’ and a series of ‘large and commodious rooms’
(326). Given the lavish nature of his London homes, the
laudatory tone of much of Gaunt’s speech – in which he
compares England itself to a ‘precious stone’ of the kind he
owned in great quantities – is perhaps not surprising. But as we
will see, his words also reveal his experience of the other side
of London life too, the social unrest, fear of conspiracy, envy of
others’ wealth and wilful destructiveness he had experienced
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at the hands of the rebels who destroyed the house of Savoy,

and whose actions presaged the greater instability to come as
Richard’s reign progressed.
Gaunt’s speech is often cited as defining all that is great
about Englishness but in fact, in its full version, presents a
highly political critique of Richard’s reign and the current state
of the country:

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,

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 52 SHAKESPEARE IN LONDON

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Feared by their breed and famous by their birth,
Renowned for their deeds as far from home,
For Christian service and true chivalry,
[. . .]
This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out – I die pronouncing it –
Like to a tenement or pelting farm.
England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of wat’ry Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds.
That England that was wont to conquer others
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
(2.1.40–54, 57–66)

The speech explores the four key issues with which we will be
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concerned in this chapter. First, it portrays the realities of

political life – for better or worse – medieval, early modern or
(for that matter) modern England and particularly, we might
argue, the London in which Gaunt speaks, is figured as a
‘teeming womb of royal kings’, a tightly bound network of
allegiances and claims to power, in which each bearer of the
crown is determined by ‘their breed’ and ‘birth’. Gaunt’s
comments about ‘Christian service’ and ‘true chivalry’ will
begin to seem ironic as the play progresses, given Richard’s
treatment of him and his son, prompting Shakespeare’s
audience to question what it really means to be ‘Feared’ and
‘famous’. The England of Gaunt’s speech is not the idyll that it

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 POLITICS IN SHAKESPEARE’S LONDON 53

first appears; rather it inspires envy, both within and without,

riven by conflict and teetering on the edge of a self-defeating
civil war. As such, the speech reflects the reality of the political
climate of Shakespeare’s own day, as much as that of fourteenth-
century England, and the play’s depiction of the fickle nature
of political allegiances, shifting loyalties, petty infighting and
outright jealousy offers an unflattering portrait of early
modern Westminster, portrayed through the guise of Richard
II’s court.
Second, we get a symbolic image here of the mechanisms by
which members of the court were included or excluded from
royal favour in Gaunt’s exploration of England’s status as an
island, surrounded by an ocean that keeps enemies out and
others in. This ensures the nation’s population and its monarch
are almost divinely protected within a ‘fortress built by Nature
for herself’ that is bounded by the ‘silver sea’, which fulfils ‘the
office of a wall | Or as moat defensive’, he says. But, at the
same time, England is cut off, isolated, its people trapped by
the same ‘triumphant sea’ that now seems to subdue them,
such that they are ‘now bound in with shame’. Just as London’s
city walls both offered protection and also served to curtail the
behaviour of its citizens, or as the court functioned as a physical
manifestation of royal favour, by which nobles were either
elevated or cast out, embraced or forbidden entry (as will
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become especially clear in our study of Henry VIII in the

epilogue to this book), so here the sea that surrounds England
manifests some of the contradictions of its political position.
This is mirrored in the complex network of interlinked spaces
that make up the nation’s physical centre of power at Whitehall.
Third, the speech also reflects what may be Shakespeare’s
most important political insight in Richard II, the idea that the
fates of its central characters, Richard and Bolingbroke, are
interlinked and that the rise of one depends upon the fall of the
other. This understanding determines the structure of the
drama, as well as one of the most striking features of its
language. Throughout Richard II Shakespeare is very fond of
the use of a rhetorical device known as chiasmus, by which

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 54 SHAKESPEARE IN LONDON

two grammatical clauses are repeated in reverse order,

switching their original positions. It appears here when Gaunt
bemoans the fact ‘That England that was wont to conquer
others | Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.’ The two
lines of verse are mirror images of each other, with the subject
and object of their repeated verb, ‘conquer’, inverted; England
becomes the subject of a conquest having previously succeeded
in subduing ‘others’. Likewise, the ‘dear dear land’ of ‘dear
souls’ has now become ‘dear’ in another sense, ‘leased out’ at
what Gaunt implies is too high a rate, ‘Like to a tenement or
pelting farm’ (the class implications of this phrase will also be
important later in this chapter). Repetition here turns a word’s
meaning inside out, just as Richard’s life is emptied of meaning
by Bolingbroke’s exposure of his own vacuousness, what he
himself will call his ‘hollow crown’ (3.2.160).
Finally, while Richard II is highly attuned to the often
unattractive realities and pragmatic worldliness of political life
the play also reminds us of the sanctity of ‘This royal throne’,
and the wondrous quality of ‘majesty’. Shakespeare uses
unearthly terms here to invoke the quasi-divine status of the
anointed monarch, who inhabits ‘this seat of Mars, | This other
Eden’. This latter phrase is particularly important. As we will
explore later in this chapter, one of Richard II’s key concerns is
with the relationship between the holy office of kingship,
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which is passed from one monarch to the next, and the body
of an individual ruler, upon which the divine right to rule is
temporarily bestowed. Rather paradoxically, the English king
is part human, part divine; as such, Gaunt’s speech suggests, it
is fitting that he dwell in a ‘demi-paradise’.
Gaunt’s eulogy thus reveals some of the central discoveries
that Shakespeare’s play uncovers about the nature of power
and the political workings of his city. In what follows we will
explore the four aspects of the play’s depiction of early modern
politics highlighted by his speech. First we examine the ways in
which Richard II reflects the vicissitudes of political life in
Shakespeare’s London, revealing the ever-shifting and often
self-serving nature of allegiances between those who aspire to

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 POLITICS IN SHAKESPEARE’S LONDON 55

power, quickly forged and just as quickly broken. In the second

section of this chapter we look more closely at the workings of
royal favour and the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion by
which this is bestowed, or taken away, in the play, an aspect of
the drama that we argue reflects the architecture and location
of Westminster itself. The structure of power itself as depicted
in the play is our focus in the third part of this study, where we
explore the rapidity with which political fates are transformed
in Richard II – as in Shakespeare’s London – and the fact that
these reversals are often interconnected, the success of one
courtly career depending upon the failure of another. In our
final section we take up the last idea illuminated by Gaunt’s
speech as discussed above, exploring Richard II’s notorious
deposition scene as an inversion of the coronation process in
order to cast light upon the ways the play mirrors early modern
understanding of the quasi-divine nature of kingship.

Whitehall: Political networks in

Shakespeare’s London
On 7 December 1595 the MP Sir Edward Hoby wrote to Sir
Robert Cecil, the Queen’s Secretary of State, inviting him ‘to
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visit poor Canon row’, where ‘a gate for your supper shall be
open: & K. Richard present him self to your view’ (quoted
in Forker’s introduction to his Arden Shakespeare edition of
the play, 114). Hoby had risen at court under Cecil’s father,
Lord Burghley, serving on several important parliamentary
committees, but had more recently fallen from favour, being
briefly placed under house arrest after insulting the privy
councillor Sir Thomas Heneage. The invitation he extends to
Cecil could well be interpreted as an attempt to secure the
support of one of the most important of Elizabeth’s advisors,
and thus a shrewdly political move. The location to which
Cecil is invited also speaks of Hoby’s political ambitions; his
dwelling has been chosen to place him as close to the political

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 56 SHAKESPEARE IN LONDON

action of Shakespeare’s city as is possible. Canon row, a series

of townhouses in the heart of Whitehall, directly abutting
Westminster Hall and the Star Chamber, can be seen along the
riverfront running between the ‘King’s bridge’ and ‘Garden
stairs’ on Norden’s map (Figure 3). The choice of entertainment
on offer may also be revealing: some critics believe that Hoby’s
letter refers to a performance of Shakespeare’s Richard II, and
think that the play may have been first performed in this
private Westminster residence. While no direct evidence exists
confirming that Hoby refers to Shakespeare’s play here (we do
not know when or where the drama was premiered), we do
have reason to believe that early modern politicians would
have been particularly interested in Richard II. The play’s ever-
shifting network of allegiances mimics those encountered in
their daily lives at court and in Elizabeth’s parliament, where
the rapidly changing fortunes of a figure such as Hoby (who
would return to royal preferment under James I) is indicative
of the vacillations faced by her government as a whole.
Opening with a confrontation at Windsor between
Bolingbroke and the Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Mowbray, the
play initially positions the future challenger of Richard II as
primarily concerned with ‘Tend’ring the precious safety of my
prince’, accusing his adversary of being ‘a traitor and a
miscreant’ (1.1.32, 39). Mowbray, for his part, lays the same
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charge at Bolingbroke’s door: ‘I do defy him, and I spit at him,

| Call him a slanderous coward and a villain’ (1.1.61–62). The
heated exchange that culminates in Richard’s command that
the two do battle in hand-to-hand combat ‘At Coventry upon
Saint Lambert’s Day’ (1.1.199), repeatedly invokes
Bolingbroke’s noble blood. Mowbray asks the King to set aside
his rival’s ‘high blood’s royalty’, imploring Richard to ‘let him
be no kinsmen to my liege’ (1.1.58, 59). Both antagonists are
at pains to prove their loyalty to the crown, by blood or
otherwise, and the first scene is dominated by their rhetorical
attempts to demonstrate this commitment.
As the play proceeds such concerns about loyalty will become
pressing as Bolingbroke mobilizes his own allies against the

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 POLITICS IN SHAKESPEARE’S LONDON 57

King’s followers. Richard’s former supporters gradually join the

Lancastrian cause until he is left with just a few favourites,
Bagot, Bushy and Green, along with his stalwart political allies
the Earl of Salisbury, Bishop of Carlisle, Abbot of Westminster
and Sir Stephen Scroop. Such allegiances are particularly
important in Richard II because they bring with them access to
the resources (money and soldiers) of each respective nobleman;
the need to establish or maintain networks of power therefore
becomes the driving force for the play’s action. It is the fear that
his followers have deserted him, and the subsequent discovery
they have in fact lost their lives fighting his cause, that prompts
Richard’s first realization that his reign is drawing to a close. In
act three, scene two he acknowledges the time has come to ‘talk
of graves, of worms and epitaphs’, confronted by the stark
reality that ‘Our lands, our lives, and all are Bolingbroke’s’
(3.2.145, 151). The Duke of York, who successfully navigates
the tumultuous events of the play, shifting his allegiance from
one king to his successor while privately assuring Richard of his
ongoing sympathy, is perhaps the most visible representation of
the need to fit oneself to the changing political climate of the
court. Richard’s downfall is completed, he must realize, when
Scroop reports later in the same scene:

Your uncle York is joined with Bolingbroke,

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And all your northern castles yielded up,

And all your southern gentlemen in arms
Upon his party.
(3.2.200–203)

York’s changing allegiances seem to mirror, or even bring

about, the loss of support Richard sustains across the country
as a whole, as both north and south go over to Bolingbroke’s
side and his own network of support shrinks ever smaller.
Shakespeare’s acute rendering of the vicissitudes of political
life, including the need to respond with subtlety and care to
shifting power dynamics amongst the ruling class, as well as his

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 58 SHAKESPEARE IN LONDON

emphasis upon the necessity of loyal supporters in maintaining

a secure power-base may partly reflect his own experiences of
such matters in early modern London. His position as a poet
and a playwright in the city depended to a large extent on the
protection of certain nobles in the face of a constant stream of
challenges from the city authorities, puritan opponents of the
theatre, the plague closures, rival companies, legal disputes and
demands to conform to a febrile, newly reformed national
church. Just as Bolingbroke depends upon Richard’s former
supporters forsaking the king and flocking to his own cause, so
Shakespeare himself had to court the nobility (including the
reigning monarch) as he sought patronage for his writing.
Protection, credibility and even hard cash were initially
provided to the playwright by Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of
Southampton, to whom his narrative poems, Venus and Adonis
(1583) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594) had been gratefully
dedicated. Shakespeare would then be more securely supported
by the Lord Chamberlain, Henry Cary, Baron Hunsdon, who
in 1594 formed the playing company with whom he would be
profitably associated for the rest of his career, as a writer, actor
and later shareholder. The date of the formation of the Lord
Chamberlain’s Men, and Shakespeare’s recent experiences with
Southampton (a politically and personally volatile figure, as we
will see later in this chapter) together form a particularly
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important context for Richard II, a play written with the

politics of patronage and the importance of support networks
amongst the nobility foremost in Shakespeare’s mind.

Inclusion and exclusion: Court

politics and royal favour
Throughout Richard II this preoccupation with maintaining
royal or noble favour, in all its magnitude and fickleness, is
physically represented by the recurring motif of banishment,
which we will discover is also important in his much later

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 POLITICS IN SHAKESPEARE’S LONDON 59

history play, Henry VIII. Characters including Bolingbroke

and Richard themselves (as well as Mowbray, and the Queen)
are frequently exiled from the court, a potent symbol of loss of
political status in Shakespeare’s London as much as it was in
the medieval England of the play. The poet Sir Philip Sidney
had been forced to withdraw from court in 1579, for example,
having written an ill-advised letter opposing the Queen’s
mooted marriage to the Duke of Anjou and subsequently
engaged in an equally misguided row with the earl of Oxford
over a game of tennis (his absence did at least provide him
with the opportunity to compose his Old Arcadia, with which
Shakespeare was very familiar). Sidney’s return to court was
only welcomed after he gifted Elizabeth a diamond encrusted
whip at the start of 1581 as a symbol of his submission.
Richard II, whom Shakespeare appears to deliberately parallel
with the Queen (as touched upon later in this chapter), likewise
sets his own demise in motion when he banishes Bolingbroke
and Mowbray for six years and for life, respectively, saying to
the latter, ‘The hopeless word of “never to return” | Breathe I
against thee, upon pain of life’ (1.3.152–53).
So bleak is the prospect of banishment, of never speaking
his mother tongue again, that Mowbray compares his fate to
its apparent opposite, imprisonment: ‘Within my mouth you
have engaoled my tongue, | Doubly portcullised with my teeth
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and lips,’ he says (1.3.166–67). The idea that exile – casting

out – might be a form of enclosure – or locking in – is a curious
paradox that recurs on a larger scale in what happens to
Richard himself. If his (albeit voluntary) exile to Ireland traps
him into behaviour that will be his undoing, Richard’s later
imprisonment in the Tower will ultimately free him from the
bonds of his office. In one of the play’s most remarkable
speeches the embattled monarch imagines the crown and even
his body as a kind of prison:

For within the hollow crown

That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court; and there the antic sits,

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 60 SHAKESPEARE IN LONDON

Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,

Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be feared and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life
Were brass impregnable; and humoured thus,
Comes at last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell, king!
(3.2.160–70)

In Richard’s sustained imagining a personified Death toys with

his prisoner, the king, ‘Allowing him a breath,’ but equally able
to snatch life away with a mere pinprick. The ‘brass
impregnable’ crown that has seemed to protect the monarch’s
quasi-divine state is compared to the body that ‘walls about
our life’, each equally restrictive because each offers nothing
more than a temporary illusion of endurance. Just as life and
kingship are fragile, both a mere performance or ‘a little scene’
(to return to that favourite trope of Shakespeare’s), so those
things that first appear to sustain them can in fact function as
a prison, drawing out mortal suffering to the point that death
or deposition come to seem welcome.
Richard’s comparison of the ‘hollow crown’ to a court is
remarkable in another sense, too, for this underlying notion
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that what seems to protect can really imprison also reflects the
architecture of the physical space inhabited by English
monarchs. Anne Barton discerns a pattern of concentric circles
centred around the Queen herself in the structure of Whitehall
and the other royal palaces of Elizabeth’s reign. The Palace at
Westminster ‘housed the sovereign’s person, in a series of
carefully graded spaces’, she writes, ‘extending outward from
the intimacy of the Bedchamber and various withdrawing
chambers, access to which was denied to all but a select few, to
the somewhat more populous but still elite Privy Chamber’. As
Barton continues, next came ‘the Presence Chamber, where the
monarch could sometimes be viewed – by those with any right

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 POLITICS IN SHAKESPEARE’S LONDON 61

to be present at court at all – receiving ambassadors and other

guests, or dining in state, the Great Chamber, and finally, a
Hall’ (123). In fact, Barton’s description could be extended yet
further. Westminster was constructed on land reclaimed from
the Thames estuary, and had in Anglo-Saxon times been
effectively cut off from the rest of London by river inlets (the
area was known at this period as Thorney Island). During
Elizabeth’s rule traces of these waterways remained; John Stow
describes the ‘Long Ditch’ that ‘almost insulates the city of
Westminster’ in his account of Shakespeare’s London (378).
He also notes that the water level was still high enough in
medieval times for the neighbourhood to flood, recounting
that in 1236 the Thames overflowed its banks ‘and in the great
palace of Westminster men did row with wherries in the midst
of the hall’ (387). The Elizabethan Whitehall Palace remained
effectively moated, its inhabitants both sheltered and also
contained by the multiple layers of its walls and the remnants
of this river, which continued to isolate it from the rest of the
city. Shakespeare was acutely conscious of the layout of
Westminster and the intricate workings of the court, at both a
symbolic and a practical level; his playing company was
frequently called upon to perform there. Richard II reveals this
familiarity with the court’s enclosed nature, with each
successive layer of increasing grandeur and exclusivity serving
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to cushion the King artificially from having to confront the

greatest danger of all: his true self.

‘Ascend his throne | Descending now

from him’: Chiasmus in Richard II
The gradual unpeeling of these layers and need to confront the
reality of who and what he is forms the central dramatic
trajectory of the character Richard II, a protagonist who
anticipates King Lear’s eventual journey towards self-discovery
and with it an awakening of human empathy (as we see in

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 62 SHAKESPEARE IN LONDON

Chapter 6). Richard II contains at its centre a pair of key scenes

in which this process reaches its fulfilment, and to which we
turn now in the next section of this chapter. When Richard
surrenders at Flint Castle (3.3) he literally descends from the
highest throne of kingship, forced by Bolingbroke’s allies to
come down from the battlements where he first appears to them
(for which the Globe’s Upper Gallery may have served in early
modern productions) into the base court. This is mirrored in the
play by the new King Henry IV’s ascent of the throne before
parliament at Westminster Hall (4.1). ‘Ascend his throne,
descending now from him,’ urges the Duke of York (4.1.112).
In a further iteration of the rhetorical device of the chiasmus,
which we have already identified as an important feature of the
play’s form and language, Shakespeare has carefully designed
this structure to balance the fall of Richard with the rise of
Bolingbroke. Another important example of this also occurs in
the Flint Castle scene, when Bolingbroke insists, ‘My gracious
lord, I come but for mine own,’ to which Richard replies, in an
inversion of what has just been said, ‘Your own is yours, and I
am yours and all’ (3.3.196–97). Thus the language of the play
displays at a local level the same organizational principles, the
same fondness for doublings and reversals, which its larger
structure also embodies.
Reluctant to give up the crown to his cousin, Richard
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compares it to ‘a deep well’:

That owes two buckets, filling one another,

The emptier ever dancing in the air,
The other down, unseen and full of water.
That bucket down and full of tears am I,
Drinking my griefs whilst you mount up on high.
(4.1.184–89)

Standing in the middle of Westminster Hall, Richard employs

a metaphor that draws upon the daily lives of those he
addresses; the Norden map (Figure 3) clearly shows ‘a deep

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 POLITICS IN SHAKESPEARE’S LONDON 63

well’ just outside of the building, which those assembled to see

him uncrowned would have passed on their way inside. That
Shakespeare uses such a quotidian image to convey the mystery
of kingship is typical of his dramatic technique, as we saw in
Chapter 1, where he employed the same understated image to
portray the horrific violence done to Lavinia. Throughout this
study, we will witness the playwright rendering the most
exceptional of states more vividly by firmly placing them
within the common experiences of his first London audiences.
The contrast between what is being described here and the
register in which Richard speaks (the enormity of the
dethroning of a king reduced to the scope of what can be held
in ‘two buckets’, one of them empty) is in turn a measure of the
contrasting fates of the two kings portrayed in this scene.
Comparing himself to the lowlier of the two buckets, ‘full of
tears’ and ‘Drinking my griefs’, Richard makes clear that
Bolingbroke’s ascent, ‘dancing in the air’ and ‘up on high’, can
only be achieved at his own personal cost. As such, in keeping
with the delicate negotiation of the transfer of power
throughout the scene in Westminster Hall, Richard continues
to assert his own importance while seeming to resign himself
to obscurity. If he maintains the authority to make a king – if
Bolingbroke’s ascent is dependent upon his acquiescence –
then in some senses Richard might yet be thought the more
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powerful man here, Shakespeare suggests fleetingly.

Forker picks up on this same point, noting that the two men
are shown in a ‘double light’ throughout this scene and its
precursor at Flint Castle. Both Richard and Bolingbroke ‘are to
some extent victims of self-delusion’, he writes in his Arden
introduction. ‘Richard remains unable or unwilling to confront
the flaws of character and policy that have brought him to his
unhappy pass,’ while ‘Bolingbroke seems equally unable to
acknowledge (perhaps even to himself) the thirst for sovereignty
that underlies his self-restraint and calculated realism’ (32–33).
By complicating the characters and relative moral values of his
two anti-heroes in this way, Shakespeare prevents his audience
from straightforwardly shifting their sympathy from one king

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 64 SHAKESPEARE IN LONDON

to the next. In the same way, characters in the play are not
permitted to simply change their political affiliations (we have
already discussed the complex case of the Duke of York, for
instance). Instead he holds his characters, and his audience’s
sympathies, within a carefully woven net of differing
allegiances, constantly shifting in response to the ever-changing
political circumstances. If Richard II was performed at
Westminster on that night in 1595, then its events would in
this respect have felt all too familiar to the MPs and royal
councillors in the audience.
Lest the interdependency of the twin fates of Richard and
Bolingbroke go unnoticed by his audience, Shakespeare uses a
striking flashback scene to reiterate the connection between
them, in which the Duke of York tells his wife about ‘our two
cousins’ coming into London’ some weeks previously (5.2.3).
Conflating the events of what are two separate days in
Holinshed into a single re-entry into the city, Shakespeare
again emphasizes the complex connections between the
destinies of Richard and Bolingbroke. The Duke notes that
‘rude misgoverned hands from windows’ tops | Threw dust
and rubbish on King Richard’s head’ (5.2.5–6); his account
makes clear that the former monarch is subjected to the most
undignified treatment at the hands of Londoners while
Bolingbroke is welcomed with adulation:
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Mounted upon a hot and fiery steed,

Which his aspiring rider seemed to know,
With slow but stately pace kept on his course,
Whilst all tongues cried, ‘God save thee, Bolingbroke!’.
You would have thought the very windows spake,
So many greedy looks of young and old
Through casements darted their desiring eyes
Upon his visage, and that all the walls
With painted imagery had said at once,
‘Jesu preserve thee! Welcome, Bolingbroke!’
(5.2.8–17)

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 POLITICS IN SHAKESPEARE’S LONDON 65

Once again, the descent of Richard is contrasted with

Bolingbroke’s ascent. In a reversal of the coronation procession
in which new monarchs parade through London from the
Tower to Westminster, where they will be crowned, Shakespeare
has Richard dragged through the city’s streets in the opposite
direction, on his way to prison (we might recall here similar
treatment of early modern religious martyrs, as witnessed in
Chapter 1). By drawing attention to the citizens pelting their
former king with ‘dust and rubbish’ from above, Shakespeare
positions him in the most abject and lowly state while
Bolingbroke’s elevation is highlighted, ‘Mounted’ up on an
impressive horse. The streets and buildings of London itself are
anthropomorphized here, the ‘very windows’, ‘casements’ and
‘walls’ seeming to speak and even see. The city that once
celebrated Richard’s own coronation now greets his usurpation
with similar jubilance, London proving as fickle to the deposed
King as his noble supporters proved to him.

Richard uncrowned: Westminster hall

and the king’s two bodies
In the final section of this chapter we will address the deposition
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of Richard in more detail, exploring the ways in which

Shakespeare’s play reverses the conventions of early modern
coronations in the ceremonial uncrowning of the former king
that begins with this inversion of the traditional procession
through the streets of London. Against his will, Richard is
brought to Westminster hall: ‘Alack, why am I sent for to a king,’
he asks, ‘Before I have shook off the regal thoughts | Wherewith
I reigned?’ (4.1.163–65). In the dramatic climax of Richard II
he will be formally called upon to give up the crown in favour
of Bolingbroke, who is about to become King Henry IV.
Known as the ‘deposition scene’, the staging of this moment
was considered so controversial in Shakespeare’s lifetime that
it was left out of the first printed quarto text of the play. One

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 66 SHAKESPEARE IN LONDON

of the other most notable aspects of the scene is its highly

ritualistic nature. Shakespeare portrays Bolingbroke as
wanting to be sure everything is done properly ‘So we shall
proceed | Without suspicion’ (4.1.147–48). Richard’s position
is already hopeless, and it would be perfectly possible for
Bolingbroke simply to seize the crown by this point in the play
as most of the nobility of the country supports him, not
Richard. But it matters to Bolingbroke that Richard be made
to come to Westminster hall and to hand the crown over to
him ‘in common view’, a pun on the role of the House of
Commons, which in English political life sanctions the
decisions of the monarch (4.1.146). He wants his actions to be
ratified before this audience, in this particular place.
The location for the deposition scene is also important
because it was Richard II himself who had funded the building
of Westminster hall (in the form in which it survives today),
part of the old palace that the King used as his primary London
residence. ‘This great hall was begun to be repaired in the year
1397 by Richard II,’ notes Stow, ‘who caused the walls,
windows, and roof to be taken down, and new made, with a
stately porch, and diverse lodgings of a marvelous work, and
with great costs’ (388). This ominous allusion to the financial
incontinence that will bring the ‘prodigal prince’ Richard II
such trouble in Shakespeare’s play is further amplified in Stow’s
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accounts of the lavish feasts and entertainments put on in the

hall under his reign. The chronicler describes one particularly
extravagant Christmas celebration in 1398 that the King
attended in a specially made gold and pearl gown (worth the
astronomical sum of three thousand pounds) and ‘whereunto
resorted such a number of people, that there was every day
spent twenty-eight or twenty-six oxen and three hundred
sheep, besides fowl without number’ (388).
The hall lies just metres away from Westminster Abbey, in
which English monarchs are traditionally crowned, and many
critics have pointed out the way that Richard’s speech on
(reluctantly) giving up the crown is a reversal of the processes
a monarch undergoes at his investiture:

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 POLITICS IN SHAKESPEARE’S LONDON 67

Now mark me how I will undo myself:

I give this heavy weight from off my head,
[Gives crown to Bolingbroke.]
And this unwieldy sceptre from my hand,
[Takes up sceptre and gives it to Bolingbroke.]
The pride of kingly sway from out my heart;
With mine own tears I wash away my balm,
With mine own hands I give away my crown,
With mine own tongue deny my sacred state,
With mine own breath release all duteous oaths.
All pomp and majesty I do forswear;
My manors, rents, revenues I forgo;
My acts, decrees, and statutes I deny.
God pardon all oaths that are broke to me;
God keep all vows unbroke are made to thee.
Make me, that nothing have, with nothing grieved,
And thou with all pleased, that hast all achieved.
Long mayst thou live in Richard’s seat to sit,
And soon lie Richard in an earthy pit!
‘God save King Henry’, unkinged Richard says,
‘And send him many years of sunshine days!’
(4.1.203–221)
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The last six lines of Richard’s speech play with the exchange of
power between him and Bolingbroke, contrasting their
differing fates in another illustration of the kind of structural
chiasmus employed repeatedly throughout the play.
Shakespeare uses rhyme here to highlight this idea, offering a
series of paired lines – rhyming couplets – that describe in turn
what will happen to each of them (‘me’ – ‘thee’; ‘grieved’ –
‘achieved’; ‘sit’ – ‘pit’ and ‘says’ – ‘days’). The verse here is
perfectly balanced, its very form charting Richard’s fall and
Bolingbroke’s rise. From the opening line – ‘mark me how I
will undo myself’ – the main body of this speech is concerned
with the question of how far Richard himself is defined by his
kingship. Does he have an identity outside of that of being

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 68 SHAKESPEARE IN LONDON

king? What does it mean to be ‘unkinged Richard’, no longer

Richard II? In what we have already described as a reversal, or
even parody, of the coronation process, Richard hands back
the sceptre and the crown, perhaps the single most potent
symbol of kingship in the play. Richard’s language here also
replicates some of the ceremonial formality of the Whitehall
coronation ceremony in the formulaic series of lines beginning
‘With mine own . . .’ (ll.207–210). He here employs another
rhetorical device, anaphora, in which each line begins in
exactly the same way, and has exactly the same grammatical
structure. This form of repetition recreates – and undoes – the
ceremony that invested him with royal power, the coronation
that had confirmed him at the heart of England’s political
networks as they converge upon the palace of Westminster.
In the final part of this chapter we wish to take up a key
political idea from Shakespeare’s England that is referred to in
Richard’s speech. In a particularly important phrase the
deposed monarch alludes to the ‘sacred state’ of kingship.
Richard (and indeed Shakespeare) lived in an age when the
English believed their monarch to rule by divine right, tracing
a direct connection between the reign of God in heaven and
that of the king or queen in England (Queen Elizabeth II is still
de facto head of the Church of England in this way). Perhaps
the single most important part of the coronation ceremony is
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the moment at which the new monarch is anointed with holy

water (what Richard refers to in his speech as ‘balm’),
symbolizing the transference of divine power into the new king
or queen. It is this belief in the ‘sacred state’ of the monarch, as
Richard calls it, which makes the idea of deposing a crowned
king so traumatic in this play.
We should also note though that Richard does not seem to
believe he will die instantly upon losing his God-given power
to rule. Rather he will still be left ‘With mine own tongue’,
with a voice that he can use to ‘deny my sacred state’. In other
words, his physical life may continue after his kingly life is
extinguished. This is an allusion to an important aspect of how
kingship was understood in the medieval and early modern

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 POLITICS IN SHAKESPEARE’S LONDON 69

periods, an idea that has come to be known as the concept of

the King’s Two Bodies. According to this theory of monarchy,
kings and queens have both their ordinary, physical body, but
also another spiritual, royal, divine body. We might think of
this latter entity in the terms of the ‘body politic’, of whom the
monarch is figured as the head, and all the people who make
up a nation the rest of the body. It is the idea of this sacred
function of the monarch as head of the body politic that allows
the famous proclamation, ‘The King is dead! Long live the
King!’ How, we might ask, can the king be both dead and alive
at once? The answer lies in the fact that while the previous
king’s physical, earthly body has died (or been forcibly
separated from the crown, in the case of Richard II), the
spiritual body of kingship has already passed over into the new
ruler, in medieval and early modern understanding. This divine
body, or body politic, cannot die. The theory of the King’s Two
Bodies was articulated in detail by Edmund Plowden in his
legal reports published in French in London in 1571. The issue
had come into focus upon the succession of Edward VI, then
still a minor (he was only ten when Henry VIII died in 1547).
When certain of his decisions were challenged on the grounds
of his age, lawyers had made the case that it did not matter
that the King’s natural body was underage, his political body
was nevertheless fit to rule.
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The historian Ernst Kantorowicz wrote an influential

account of this theory, publishing his still highly regarded The
King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology in
1957. Kantorowicz pays particular attention to the ceremonial
function of the coronation in Westminster as the moment at
which a successor’s body became formally invested with the
power of the body politic. Elizabeth I’s coronation on
15 January 1559 was a particularly grand affair, beginning the
previous day with a procession of the new queen through the
streets of London. The procession stopped at five different key
locations in the city en-route in order to enjoy a series of
pageants put on for the royals (these were usually highly
symbolic displays celebrating the powers of monarchy). In

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 70 SHAKESPEARE IN LONDON

Shakespeare’s lifetime – as in the fourteenth century when the

historical Richard II reigned – it was considered particularly
important that the monarch be made visible to the people, that
the population at large could see for themselves the physical
manifestation of the divine right to rule (body politic) in the
actual person (body natural) of the king or queen.
Not coincidentally, this physical body would be dressed
extremely elaborately, to reflect the dignity of this spiritual
role. Queen Elizabeth I famously loved clothes; Richard is
likewise accused of being vain about his appearance in
Shakespeare’s play, as when he asks for a mirror in the
deposition scene (a moment not in any of Shakespeare’s
sources). This possible parallel was played upon by a recent
RSC production of Richard II, in which Jonathan Slinger
played the title role in a costume designed to resemble
Elizabeth’s iconic appearance. The extent to which Richard
considers his identity to be predicated on how he looks is also
suggested by the old Duke of York’s rather bitter comment to
the dying John of Gaunt that the King is unwilling to listen to
advice, unless it is about the latest trends, heeding only ‘Report
of fashions in proud Italy, | Whose manners still our tardy-
apish nation | Limps after in base imitation’ (2.1.21–23).
Before television, newspapers or the internet, displaying the
royal personage to the people meant embarking on a kind of
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extended procession known as a progress; those regularly

undertaken by Elizabeth I each summer usually lasted around
10 weeks (although they never got very far, impeded by the
logistical difficulties of moving with her huge retinue).
Historian Patrick Collinson has emphasized the way this
impressed upon citizens their sense of connectedness to the
monarch, of being part of the network that makes up the body
politic, observing in his entry for the Queen in the Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography that ‘Elizabeth in procession
may well have been a familiar sight in and around London, as
she moved from one palace to another, by road or river, and
displayed herself ceremonially when she returned to Whitehall
to keep Christmas.’ It is this phenomenon of showing the

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 POLITICS IN SHAKESPEARE’S LONDON 71
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FIGURE 4 Jonathan Slinger as Richard II, RSC Histories Cycle

(2008) (Ellie Kurttz © Royal Shakespeare Company)

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 72 SHAKESPEARE IN LONDON

monarch to the people that Shakespeare plays upon at the end

of Richard II. In a parody of the type of progress undertaken
by Elizabeth I described by Collinson here, the new King
Henry IV parades the former Richard II, now his prisoner,
through the streets of London to the Tower (although
Bolingbroke then changes his mind at the last minute, deciding
the symbolism of imprisoning his predecessor there is unwise,
and therefore send him instead to Pomfret Castle in Yorkshire,
where he will later be assassinated). In another juxtaposition
of the downfall of Richard with the rise of Bolingbroke, this
mockery of a coronation procession in reverse takes place just
after plans for the crowning of the new king have commenced;
‘On Wednesday next we solemnly set down | Our coronation,’
says the future Henry IV (4.1.319–20). As one monarch comes
to the end of his reign, another takes his place, and so the cycle
that persists throughout Shakespeare’s history plays repeats
itself again. Some years later the playwright would himself live
to witness the elaborate coronation procession of James I
through the city of London, enjoying the patronage of the new
monarch as his company became the King’s Men. Upon the
death of Elizabeth I in 1603, Shakespeare would hear cries
through the streets: ‘The Queen is dead. Long live the King!’
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