‘This prison where I live’: Richard II

Abstract

Richard III was a condemnation of one solitary individual: Richard II expands this single focus into a multiple perspective which makes simple condemnation impossible. The play explores three different kinds of solitude: the solitudes inherent in the natures of Richard, Bolingbroke and of kingship itself. Both Richard and Bolingbroke, as well as possessing characteristics of solitude peculiar to themselves, participate in this third, more abstract kind of solitude, which is one that Shakespeare explores in several plays. He sees the king as set apart from other men by his position, but simultaneously, as king, symbolically representative of other men. The king is both human and superhuman, possessing, according to medieval theory, two bodies, the first mortal, the body of the particular king at any one time, the second immortal, passing from king to king, the body of the public role.¹ The king was thus the image of God as well as of man: as head of the kingdom, he was a symbol of God on earth and of the divine potential within man, a mediating vehicle between the levels of human and divine through which God could reveal himself on earth and men could find fulfilment, by transferring their potential imaginatively to the person of the king, who ‘is in act what everyman is only in potency’.²