Page 82 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

5

THE HOLLOW CROWN

Richard II; Henry IV, Parts I and II; Henry V

This scepter'd isle, this other Eden, this England.
—John of Gaunt

ollowing the diversions of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shake-
Fspeare was ready to tackle the history play again with newly
enhanced playwrighting powers. In Henry VI and Richard III, he had
chronicled the conclusion of England's War of the Roses, employed in
the present as a cautionary fable for the future. Now the Bard pro-
vided a prequel, depicting the beginning of that long, costly conflict.
The result was his spectacular tetralogy about decades of dueling
between the houses of Lancaster and York. Both houses were "alike
in dignity," but their personal ambition made them oblivious to the
greater good, and they all but destroyed the "royal throne of kings,"
to which both families aspired.
In 1595, Shakespeare returned to Holinshed and the chroniclers,
also drawing from a recent, popular epic poem by Samuel Daniel,
A History of the Civil Wars Between York and Lancaster. Freely
inventing from these sources, he fashioned The Tragedy of King
Richard II, which stretches beyond historical epic into the realm
of full-blown tragedy in a way Richard III had not. Despite the
title, the truly tragic figure isn't the foolish fop of a king, Richard
of York, but his chief rival for the throne (and eventual supplan-
tor), Henry Bolingbroke, duke of Hereford, of the House of Lan-
caster.
Richard II is weak, effeminate, corrupt, and sentimental. He pos-
sesses none of the necessary kingly qualities, but he does rule by

71