For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
In my first reading of Richard II as a teenager, I was captivated by Richard’s speeches.
The moment he steps onto his land from his Irish wars and celebrates his connection to the land, and gloats for a moment over his sovereignty—as though he were untouchable. Moments later, he has realized the true scope of the disaster swelling against him, and he loses hope, meditating on the mortality of kings. They really are as vulnerable as anyone else, even with their heads encircled by the hollow crown.
Later, the scene where he holds the crown, as the court demands he hand it to Henry, his language was so captivating to me, revealing a man giving up everything he believed he could hold onto and the double impossibility in his mind, both of holding and letting go of the crown. The scene stuck so vividly in my mind that I had to recreate it for my friends when I finally stepped down as president of the Souvenirs, a poetry club I’d started in college. (I made the new president hold a crown with me while we read the lines. That was not even weird for the kind of delightful club it was.)
It wasn’t until years later that I watched a performance of it and delighted in it all the more. Although, as with many Shakespeare plays, I’m still looking for the “perfect” version, I have two that I have found interesting.
The first was the RSC Henriad version that was performed beginning in 2013. They played all four plays with the same cast, allowing the audience to enjoy the full development of the characters across the arc. The cast is phenomenal: Michael Pennington as John of Gaunt, Oliver Ford Davies as Duke of York, and David Tennant as Richard II. Later, Alex Hassell plays Prince Hal, and Antony Sher plays Falstaff.
David Tennant’s acting is, as one would expect, superb. He plays the king’s effeminate and feckless nature up, a man completely steeped in his own pleasures and excesses without the slightest reflection for the way he’s destroying his country and family. In some ways, the excesses are so sharply displayed that I wouldn’t recommend the play to younger audiences (That’s probably true for many Shakespeare plays anyway—there’s a reason I’ve mostly stuck with the Comedies when reading Shakespeare to my younger children.)
More recently, I’ve also had the pleasure of watching a very young Ian McKellen as Richard II in the 1971 production. This one is available through YouTube (below), and although it’s older and feels a bit more stylized (as many earlier productions of Shakespeare do), the pleasure of seeing McKellen in the role as a young man and playing off of the gruff Timothy West is not to be missed.
What are some of your favorite productions of the play? Have you seen either of these? Let me know in the comments or discussion groups on Patreon!
