It’s not a cocktail, but we kind of accidentally made a marzipan cake feat. weirdly coloured vaguely sunburnt bisexual Richard-slash-Hannibal-esque antlered Shakespeare and felt it had to be shared with the world.
this snippet from the no fear shakespeare version of richard ii has the same energy as me frantically racking my brains for things to say when the professor asks us to share 3 interesting facts about ourselves at the start of a new semester
Shakespeare’s Sequels: Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 and Henry V.
Research Assistant Hailey Bachrach looks at why you don’t need to know English monarchical history to have a good time at one of Shakespeare’s History plays. In this blog she looks at Henry IV Part 1.
Richard II ends with a promise: the newly crowned King Henry IV vows to take a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to atone for his role in the murder of King Richard. A couple years later, Shakespeare decided to follow up on King Henry IV’s reign, opening Henry IV Part 1 with a reiteration of this promise. He brings back a cast of characters that those who have seen Richard II will recognise: Bolingbroke, now King Henry IV; the Earl of Northumberland; and Northumberland’s son, whose fervour in battle has now earned him the nickname Hotspur—which is also the alternate title we’ve given the play.
So the two plays are definitely linked… but they’re also very capable of standing alone. In fact, in early attempts to cut down the play, co-directors Federay Holmes and Sarah Bedi tried to remove as much of the backstory relating to Richard II from the script as they could, for the sake of clarity, and recognizing that not everyone in our audiences will have seen Richard II. As rehearsals went on, however, we found that it was almost impossible not to add those lines and references back in. One of the fundamental questions of Hotspuris whether the present can ever really make a clean break from the past… so it makes sense that the characters can’t stop reminiscing about it.
However, this definitely doesn’t mean that you need to have seen Richard II in order to understand Hotspur(orHenry IV Part One to understand Part Two, for that matter). Hotspurdevelops its own characters and its own versions of past events. One conspicuous example is Northumberland’s brother, the Earl of Worcester, who is frequently referenced in Richard II, but never seen in that play. In Hotspur,he is treated as a central conspirator, and characters describe him as if he was present for events that Richard II does not depict him as a participant in.
This slight disconnect can help us understand how early modern writers and audiences may have approached the idea of sequels. Multi-part plays, especially those based on history or mythology, were very popular during the 1590s. However, this wasn’t the only way audiences experienced sequential historical narratives. As I discussed in my previous post, audiences could also watch multiple versions of the same historical figure’s life in different plays by different companies, or even by different writers for the same company. When we remember this, the not-quite-seamless nature of Shakespeare’s sequels begins to make a lot of sense. People were accustomed to seeing multiple ‘takes’ on a single set of historical figures and events. Serial history plays feel less like a box set or a TV drama and more like big superhero movies, where different writers offer slightly different takes on characters and events that all coalesce into a collective mythology rather than a single linear storyline.
Hotspuris therefore a continuation of Shakespeare’s own play, but also a continuation of the broader mythology of Henry IV, the king who usurped his crown. The play introduces another well-known figure, the future Henry V, who was famous for his reckless, irresponsible youth and surprise transformation into an adept military commander and widely-admired king. Both of these cultural legacies are as important to the play’s background as any of the specific events of Shakespeare’s Richard II.
This naturally raises the question of whether the same principle applies to Shakespeare’s other history plays. Do you need to see the histories we’ll be performing this summer—Henry IV Part One andTwoandHenry V—in that order? We think that you don’t. That’s one reason why we’ve given them new individual names: Hotspur, Falstaff, andHarry England. As with Richard II, all three plays both do and do not follow directly on from one another. Time moves forward across the plays, and they reference past events. But they also slightly reset themselves, giving the characters the chance to re-enact the story arc they’re best known for. In all three, Prince Hal must labour to convince the world that he’s better than his reputation; in both HotspurandFalstaff,King Henry must grapple anew with his guilt over the crown and his mistrust of the son who will inherit it. In Falstaff,Falstaff remembers an event that actually took place in a completely different play about the youth of Henry V, while King Henry IV and one of his lords reminisce about a scene from Richard II for which neither were present. This is a perfect example of the complex ways in which early modern ‘sequels’ relate to one another and to other plays about the same characters, the way they exist in sequence and in parallel at the same time. The order that you see our productions in will change your understanding of each play, but the plays are designed to withstand being seen in any order, with any level of prior knowledge of the characters and events they depict.
In short, if you loved Richard II, come join us to see the next chapter in the story of Bolingbroke, Northumberland, and Harry Percy. And if you missed it, choose any play you like and embark on an entirely new adventure this summer.
Adjoa Andoh and Lynette Linton direct the first ever company of women of colour in a Shakespeare play on a major UK stage, in a post-Empire reflection on what it means to be British in the light of the Windrush anniversary and as we leave the European Union.
Designed by Rajha Shakiry. Co-directed by Adjoa Andoh and Lynette Linton.
Research Assistant Hailey Bachrach will be blogging about History. This week she shines a light on Richard II.
It’s a common question when faced with a history play, by Shakespeare or Marlowe or anyone else: what do I need to know to before I see it? What background do I need to make it make sense?
The assumption seems to be that these plays are impenetrable without a solid background in English monarchical history—that the original audiences must have had this knowledge. And it’s true that some Renaissance audience members may have come armed with information gleaned from the chronicle histories of Rafael Holinshed or Edward Hall, who compiled massive, sprawling narratives of England’s past, and which writers like Shakespeare and Marlowe drew upon when writing their plays.
But many others wouldn’t have. Such books were extremely expensive, and that’s assuming you knew how to read. But that doesn’t mean that only the wealthy and literate knew anything about the past. Just like many of us today will get a vague sense of periods we’ve never studied from films or books, in Shakespeare’s time, plays and ballads served to fill in many people’s understanding of England’s history.
So if you were an ordinary English person who’d never read a chronicle history, what might you have already known going in to see Shakespeare’s Richard II for the first time?
If you were a theatre fan, you might have been familiar with the story of King Richard II from the play now generally called Thomas of Woodstock. It now only survives in an incomplete manuscript, but may predate Shakespeare’s play—and fittingly, depicts events that take place slightly earlier in Richard’s reign.
In this play, you would have seen Richard’s neglect of his new bride, Anne of Bohemia, and his sorrow at her sudden death. You would have met his favourites, Green, Bushy, Bagot, and Scroop, all elevated to important political positions that they then abuse for personal gain, unconcerned that they are impoverishing the citizens of England in the process. Ghosts appeared to remind you of Richard’s regal lineage: his father, the war hero called the Black Prince and his grandfather, King Edward III. And you would have met Richard’s uncles, John of Gaunt; Edmund of Langley, the Duke of York; and the titular Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, the humblest and gentlest of them all, who Richard’s favourites persuade him to have murdered. Richard is quickly seized by remorse… but not quickly enough to save Woodstock’s life.
But sometimes connections were less direct. Marlowe’s Edward II and Shakespeare’s Richard II were likely written around the same time, and they are plainly plays in close conversation with one another. Aside from their central scenarios of irresponsible kings surrounded by favourites, even lines and images seem to echo from one play to the other.Edward II was written before Richard II,and these echoes may have sounded for original audience members, shaping their expectations of Richardbased on what they’d seen in Edward.
Thomas of Woodstock isn’t a direct prequel toRichard II,and of course neither is Edward II (though Edward was Richard’s great-grandfather).All three plays offer their own interpretations of their parallel characters or scenarios. But the plays’ similarities and vague familiarities are what many original audience members would have brought with them into a new history play—not a list of facts about the reign of King Richard II. In a time before national history was taught in school, and before the majority of the population was literate, plays were as good a source as any for learning about the past… or at least a version of it.
Writers played fast and loose with historical fact—and often the chronicles themselves were contradictory or incorrect—and the facts (or ‘facts’) that an audience member had learned from one source may have been flatly contradicted by another. Even if you came into a history play with some knowledge of its subject, that knowledge might turn out not to apply.
This pick-and-mix approach to history was all that most audience members would have brought along with them into a new play. The upcoming season offers the exciting opportunity for us to have a similar viewing experience, accumulating knowledge from play to play, and letting playwrights teach us their own version of history.
Richard II opens in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 22 February.
Edward II appears at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse until 20 April.
Edward II production photography by Marc Brenner Richard II rehearsal photography by Ingrid Pollard
A very interesting private commission I did recently. David’s Richard II in the style of the Westminster Abbey portrait of Richard II (mixed with a little bit of Gustav Klimt for the face…)
