Critical Reception

Abstract

Richard II seems to have been popular in its own day, and was published in no fewer than six quarto editions between 1597 and 1634. This popularity did not continue, however, and it was very seldom performed in the Restoration period or in the eighteenth century. In part this was because it was still felt to be politically dangerous, and when Nahum Tate tried to stage an ‘improved’ version of it in the 1680s it was banned. In part, however, it was because the play was found uninteresting: Samuel Johnson, in his edition of Shakespeare (1765), wrote approvingly of the passages proclaiming the Divine Right of kings, but thought that the play as a whole was to a great extent a mere versification of Holinshed’s Chronicle, which did little ’to affect the passions, or enlarge the understanding’.