{"id":19729,"date":"2011-01-06T00:00:57","date_gmt":"2011-01-06T05:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?p=19729"},"modified":"2011-01-06T00:00:57","modified_gmt":"2011-01-06T05:00:57","slug":"richard-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2011\/01\/06\/richard-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Richard II"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=6M775evBE8A<\/p>\n<p><em>Mark Rylance performs Richard&#8217;s prison soliloquy in a 2003 BBC broadcast from the Globe Theatre<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Today is <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Richard_II_of_England\" target=\"_blank\">Richard II<\/a>&#8216;s birthday (1367-1400).<\/p>\n<p>Frye in <em>On Shakespeare<\/em>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>A lawful king, as Shakespeare presents the situation, can be ruthless and unscrupulous and still remain a king, but if he&#8217;s weak or incompetent he creates a power vacuum in society, because the order of nature and the will of God both demand a strong central ruler.\u00a0 So a terrible dilemma arises between a weak king de jure and a de facto power that&#8217;s certain to grow up somewhere else.\u00a0 This is the central theme of <em>Richard II<\/em>.\u00a0 Richard was known to his contemporaries as &#8220;Richard the Redeless,&#8221; i.e., a king who wouldn&#8217;t take good advice, and Shakespeare shows him ignoring the advice of John of Gaunt and York.\u00a0 His twenty-year reign had a large backlog of mistakes and oppressions that Shakespeare doesn&#8217;t need to exhibit in detail.\u00a0 In the scene where his uncle John of Gaunt is dying, John concentrates mainly on the worst\u00a0 of Richard&#8217;s administrative sins: he has sold, for ready cash, the right of collecting taxes to individuals who are not restrained in their rapacity by the central authority.\u00a0 This forms part of what begins as a superbly patriotic speech: Shakespeare&#8217;s reason for making the old ruffian John of Gaunt a wise and saintly prophet was doubtless that he was the ancestor of the House of Tudor.\u00a0 We also learn that Richard had a very understandable lot of court favorites, spent far too much money on his own pleasures, and at the time of the play was involved in a war in Ireland that had brought his finances into a crisis.\u00a0 (57)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=6M775evBE8A Mark Rylance performs Richard&#8217;s prison soliloquy in a 2003 BBC broadcast from the Globe Theatre Today is Richard II&#8216;s birthday (1367-1400). Frye in On Shakespeare: A lawful king, as Shakespeare presents the situation, can be ruthless and unscrupulous and still remain a king, but if he&#8217;s weak or incompetent he creates a power vacuum [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[13,146],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birthdays","category-shakespeare"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Richard II - The Educated Imagination<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2011\/01\/06\/richard-ii\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Richard II - The Educated Imagination\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=6M775evBE8A Mark Rylance performs Richard&#8217;s prison soliloquy in a 2003 BBC broadcast from the Globe Theatre Today is Richard II&#8216;s birthday (1367-1400). 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