1 - Begins the Woefullest Division: The Tragic Reign of King Richard II

Summary

There is no action of man in this life, that is not the beginning of so long a chayn of Consequences, as no humane Providence, is high enough, to give a man a prospect to the end. And in this Chayn, there are linked together both pleasing and unpleasing events; … he that will do any thing for his pleasure, must engage himselfe to suffer all the pains annexed to it; and these pains, are the Naturall Punishments of those actions, which are the beginning of more Harme than Good. And hereby it comes to passe, that Intemperance, is naturally punished with Diseases; Rashnesse, with Mischances; Injustice, with the Violence of Enemies; Pride, with Ruine; Cowardise, with Oppression; Negligent government of Princes, with Rebellion; and Rebellion, with Slaughter.

—Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 31, para. 40

The historian G. M. Trevelyan observed that ‘the reign of Richard II has interested people more, perhaps, than any other equally brief period of English medieval history’, because (he explains) in the ‘long-drawn-out process’ whereby the so-called Middle Ages came to an end, the events of Richard's reign hold ‘a peculiarly important place’. From Shakespeare's depiction of the final year of that unhappy reign, seen in the context of the historical sequence of plays his Richard II initiates, one may surmise that he held a similar view—indeed, suspect that Shakespeare's portrayal has substantially contributed to the peculiar interest Trevelyan notes.

Doubtless much of that interest, whatever its source, derives from an awareness that the deposing of Richard precipitated a century of civil strife in England, leading to the Wars of the Roses, which in turn resulted in the termination of some three and a half centuries of unbroken Norman-Plantagenet rule and the ascension of the House of Tudor (whose early years continued to be troubled by disturbances in favour of rival claimants). By the time Shakespeare wrote his dramatic accounts of English history, the de facto basis of royal authority in England, of its ‘legitimacy’, had been radically transformed. For though lip service continued to be paid to its de jure basis of ‘divine right’, that principle was increasingly viewed as moribund even as it was first being declaimed as absolute.