INTRODUCTION

Summary

Richard II comes down to us in a good text, upon which Dr A. W. Pollard has written a masterly bibliographical essay, and has been happy in its modern editors, among whom the name of Herford stands preeminent. The character of its central figure has moreover laid a spell upon most of the great critics, a spell scarcely less potent than that of the Prince of Denmark, with which it has often, somewhat misleadingly, been compared. The concentration of nineteenth-century criticism upon character-problems has, however, here as elsewhere, led to a distorted view of the play as a whole, a view which merits reconsideration, while recent discoveries in regard to the sources seem likely to revolutionize our ideas of the genesis not only of Richard II itself but of the Histories that succeed it. These matters form the staple of the ensuing introduction, the main purpose of which is, as in the case of Hamlet and King John, rather to reconstruct, so far as is now possible, the Elizabethan attitude towards the play than to add one more interpretation of the characters of Richard and Bolingbroke to the ever-growing collection of modern analyses.

KING RICHARD ON THE STAGE AND IN HISTORY, MODERN AND ELIZABETHAN

The date of the play

Fortunately we can date Richard II with more precision than most of Shakespeare's other plays. It was entered in the Stationers' Register by the publisher Andrew Wise on 29 August 1597 and was printed for him shortly after by Valentine Simmes, in what is now known as the First Quarto.