For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings
- Richard II, the emo king
The plot of this play is pretty easy to summarize: Richard II is a bad king who is squeezing nobles and commoners alike for cash and squandering it on easy living for himself and his favorites, and who can't command his way out of a paper bag. He exiles Bolingbroke and Mowbray instead of letting them duel out a charge of treason (which verdict might implicate Richard in the death of his uncle). He villanously tents his fingers at the death of John of Gaunt (Bolingbroke's father, and Richard's other uncle), then strips John's estate of cash with which he scarpers off to war in Ireland. When Bolingbroke returns prematurely to retrieve what's left of his father's lands and goods, he easily sways both the nobles and the commoners to his cause, and when Richard returns from his little wars he finds he doesn't have much of a country left to come home to. Richard resigns his crown to Bolingbroke (now Henry IV) and is first imprisoned and then murdered.
It's hard to sympathize with anyone in this play. There's no fool, or clown, or bastard to make you laugh or to feel sorry for. Bolingbroke is a politician, and he's good at what he does, but he's not particularly interesting. Richard is interesting, but he's also self-centered, venal, and incompetent. As he loses his position and his freedom, he becomes more poetic and considered, but it's always all about him. His final soliloquy isn't about what it means to be human, but what it means to be Richard.
So, while his fall from king to man is interesting to watch, it's not especially moving. He and the older generation of characters believe that the king is annointed by God (and, can I just say, while we're on the subject, that the word 'chrism' really squicks me out?), and Bolingbroke and his realpolitik cohort school them otherwise. This would be a good place to note that Richard II was the play that Essex paid Shakespeare's company to perform on the eve of his (failed) rebellion, prompting Queen Elizabeth to remark, "I am Richard the Second, know ye not that?" It probably wasn't the play's fault that the rebellion failed, but since the forced resignation of Richard II eventually led to years terrible, bloody civil war, maybe it wasn't the best choice.
I'll be honest with you, this play left me a bit cold. Apart from noting how some of the language and some of Richard's meditations pave the way from Hamlet, I didn't really get much out of it, but, although I've read the play a couple of times I've never yet seen it performed. I can imagine that a good actor might make me see Richard in a different, more sympathetic, light, but until then I don't have much more to say.
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