‘There are certain characters in Shakespeare whom it is particularly easy to identify with homosexuality. One is Richard II , whom Shakespeare portrays as being influenced for the bad by ‘caterpillars of the commonwealth’(2.3.16)...It commonwealth’(2.3.16)...It may be for this reason that Richard II was II was little performed during the nineteenth century’ (Stanley Wells) Discuss. The characterisation of Shakespeare’s Shakespeare’s Richard II as an effeminate and homo-erotically charged figure, as seen in the currently running production at the Barbican, performed by David Tennant and directed by Gregory Doran, appears to follow a trend in the late 20th century of ‘camping up’ the part: associating the vanity and fickleness of Richard’s nature with homosexuality. This is probably aided by the fact that at least four of the major actors of Richard II in England over the past half century or so are generally known to be, or to have been homosexual (Sir Michael Redgrave, who was bisexual - Sir John Gielgud, Sir Ian MacKellen and Sir Derek Jacobi). The designation designation of Richard as effeminate originates with Coleridge, who wrote: ‘[He possesses] an intellectual feminineness feminineness which feels a necessity of ever leaning on the breast of others, and of reclining on those who are all the while known to be inferiors. To this must be attributed as its consequences all Richard’s vices, his tendency to concealment, and his cunning’ 1. It is fair to say that Richard’s preoccupation with those nobles who serve him is very much his weakness, and his inability to stand autonomously autonomously apart from the nobility much of the cause of his downfall, yet the association of this weakness with ‘effeminacy’, and more recently ‘homosexuality’, appears a somewhat one dimensional reading of Shakespeare’s history. Laurence Olivier inappropriately inappropriately described Michael Redgrave’s portrayal of Richard as ‘an outand-out pussy queer, with mincing gestures to match’, this idea of ‘mincing’ alerting us to the fact that just as the presence of homosexuality homosexuality in a text may be a matter of interpretation, so its presence in a performance is a matter not only of the way an actor behaves on stage but also of the way a spectator ‘reads’ the performance. Actual caressing, caressing, embracing, or kissing, may leave little room for doubt; there are many other kinds of signal which may be more or less explicit and have to be interpreted, or decoded. There are metaphors of bodily closeness between king and ‘flatterers’ by John of Gaunt, who accuses Richard of a dependency upon his inferiors: ‘And thou, too careless patient as thou art,/ Commit’st thy anointed body to the cure/ Of those physicians that first wounded thee’(2.1.97-99), but these lines can be interpreted in a number of different ways. Michael Pennington, Pennington, delivering these lines in the current production of Richard II at the Barbican, speaks with a tone of indignant disapproval disapproval and irritation, shaking his head and pointing his finger, stereotyping a somewhat homophobic member of the older generation. Yet the homoeroticism of Doran’s recent Royal Shakespeare Company production is not implied at all, rather spelled out. Davids Tennant’s Richard forges a close connection to Oliver O liver Rix’s Aumerle, sharing a tender kiss with him at Flint Castle. It is this relationship that dominates dominates this production: Aumerle takes the place of Exton in murdering the king, and his divided loyalties to Richard and his father f ather (and additionally, additionally, Bolingbroke) torment him. Aumerle slowly dissolves into tears as Richard ponders ‘What must the king do now? Must he submit?’ (3.3.143) In this production the subtle homoerotic undertones became the chief subject of the play, the political aspect of Richard II sidelined under his emotional and sexual connection with his ‘flatterer’. Stanley Wells is not strictly correct in his assertion that Richard II was ‘little performed’ during the nineteenth century. Though there are indeed fewer recordings of productions of the play, Andrew Hurr argues that ‘Perhaps the most influential revival the play has ever had began in 1 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shakespeare Criticism, vol 1, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor
1857, when Charles Kean staged a spectacular gothic-historical production’2. Dummy horses were used in the combat scene, and the opening of Act V used nearly six hundred walk-on extras in a huge-scale production. Walter Pater described the performance thus: ‘the sympathetic voice of the player, the tasteful archeology confronting vulgar modern London with a scenic reproduction, for once really agreeable, of the London of Chaucer.3 Richard, to Pater, was a ‘graceful, wild creature’, and to Schlagel in 1846 ‘Shakespeare exhibits a noble, kingly nature, at first obscured by levity and the errors of an unbridled youth, and afterwards purified by misfortune’4. Despite an apparent Victorian dislike of tragic histrionics, Richard’s oscillating nature is held more as a result of his power-crazed youth than because he has homoerotic tendencies. His desire for salacious entertainment over monarchal responsibilities, as described by York, demonstrate a desire for flattery which easily fits within a victorian construction of the ‘follies of youth’ as much as any homoerotic tendencies: As praises, of whose taste the wise are fond: Lascivious metres, to whose venom sound The open ear of youth doth always listen Report of fashions in proud Italy, Whose manners still our tardy-apish nation Limps after in base imitation (2.1.17-23) York’s speech formulates the image of a dandyish king, basking in overseas fashions and glorious youth. Yet these ‘lascivious metres’ with which Richard is endowed in comparison to his ‘tardy-apish’ nation are an example of Richard’s rhetorical skill. Richard’s capacity for selfdramatisation, his verbal dexterity, provides him with an opportunity for introspection as Shakespeare’s play proceeds. Indeed, it is this same skill which gains the audience’s sympathy at his point of imprisonment: ‘The better sort/ As of thoughts of things divine, are intermixed/ With scruples’ ( 5.5.11-13). The grandiose delivery of Richard’s final imprisoned speeches on such a large scale production may reflect a sense of gained maturity, rather than simply an effeminate man attempting to gain the sympathy of his audience. An earlier example of characterising Richard II as the ‘effeminate’ king was Deborah Warner’s casting decision of 1995 in casting Fiona Shaw as Richard. The casting choice, argued by Warner to be one unrelated to gender, and increasingly a common directorial decision (see Helen Mirren in Julie Taymor’s 2010 film of The Tempest ), was seen as a controversial choice by some critics. Andrew Temple, writing in The Independent, complained, ‘A female Richard II is the sort of thing you might expect to see at the end of term in a boarding school but there is no history of the part being played by a woman professionally. The idea is as bizarre as a male Cleopatra. It is gimmick casting’5. This argument against gender-blind casting appears antiquated, as well as H.C.Coulter’s belief that he saw ‘a homosexual male6 in Shaw’s characterisation of Richard. Deborah Warner argued ‘Fiona for me is the most exciting and suitable Richard I could think of’7, and Shaw was cross-dressed, acting as a man rather than changing the gender of the part itself (unlike the Cambridge University production of ‘Lady Hamlet’ performed in Summer 2013, where Sarah Livingstone took on the role of a homosexual 2 Arden Richard II introduction Andrew Gurr 3 Walter Pater ‘Shakespeare’s English Kings’ in Appreciations, 1889 4 Schlegel, 1846 Shakespearean criticism in England 5 ‘To play the King (and Be a Woman) Independent (London) 21st May 1995 6 H.R.Coursen ‘The Warner/Shaw Richard II on television: A Review Article’ Shakespeare Bulletin 19 (2001) 7 Claire Armistead, ‘Kingdom under siege’ Guardian (London) 31st Mary 1995
woman, wishing to enter a lesbian relationship with Ophelia.) The effect was a characterisation of Richard that was more androgynous than effeminate, and what Shaw was able to provide was a reflection on the nature of ‘manhood’: ...whate’er I be, Nor I, nor any man that but man is, With nothing shall be pleas’d, till he be eas’d With being nothing (5.5.38-41) With Richard’s increasing reputation for being an ‘effeminate’ king, this speech has been commonly construed as a question around masculinity. The lines being delivered by a woman allow the audience to be less concerned with the societal idea of how one fulfils the capacity of ‘manliness’, and more with the idea that it is humanity that ‘with nothing can be pleased’, always striving for more. Yet Warner too was concerned with ‘the private love affair between Richard and Bolingbroke’, rather than having a vanity that is protected by his ‘flatterers’, but nothing more. Warner argued ‘If he hates Bolingbroke, if his cousin is his archenemy, than the play is about one cousin who hates another destroying him. That’s not interesting’8. Yet Warner, like many 20th century directors, appears uninterested in the political statements of the play, perhaps in line with the reduced importance of ‘kingship’ in contemporary society. George Johnston’s 2012 production of Richard II at the ADC theatre did in fact dwell more on the political undertones of the play, setting and staging it according to Elizabethan convention (although women did perform the female roles). Alex Gomar as Richard, appeared to take pleasure from witnessing the warring nobles, amusedly calling for Bolingbroke’s accusations of treason against Mowbray to be played as high drama, like a staged show: Face to face And frowning brow to brow, ourselves will hear The accuser and the accuséd freely speak. High stomached are they both and full of ire, In rage deaf as the sea, hasty as fire (1.1.15-19) The obvious pleasure in Richard’s response to the dispute between his nobles, coupled with his desire to witness the ‘face to face’ spectacle of a disagreement between them overrides the issue of treason itself. The metaphorical aspect of Richard’s language, comparing his subjects to the elements, is demonstrative of his understanding of his lack of power over his nobility, choosing instead to derive pleasure from the ‘aesthetic’ of his nobles fighting ‘brow to brow’. Richard’s powerlessness is ‘unkingly’, and this is an entirely separate issue from that of ‘effeminacy’. These aspects of Richard’s behaviour can also serve to challenge the stereotypical perception of ‘kingship’, such as in John Rich’s 1738 production at Covent Garden, who had staged John Gay’s A Beggar’s Opera a decade before. Here, the production was political, serving to comment on the vanity and apparent criminality of Prime Minister Robert Walpole. Thomas Davies in Dramatic Miscellanies discussed this topicality: When he pronounced the following words, The king is not himself, but basely led By flatterers, 8 The Girl as Play-King as Comic, Carol Chillington Rutter Shakespeare Quarterly 1997
the noise from the clapping of hands and clattering of sticks was loud and boisterous. And when Ross said, The Earl of Wiltshire hath the state in farm, it was immediately applied to Walpole, with the loudest shouts and huzzahs I ever heard. 9 The satire of Richard’s production produced a political relevancy, and it was conceived of as a direct response to Walpole’s new licensing rules regarding what was to be allowed onstage in the wake of A Beggar’s Opera. Richard, by being modelled on a current ruler, was given a resonance that was far from the human ‘weaknesses’ or propensity toward ‘effeminacy’ that continually appear in recent productions of the play. To conclude, whilst the homoerotic undertones of Richard II are continually drawn out of recent productions of the play, although admittedly to varying degrees of impact, this often has the effect of limiting and even sidelining other interpretations of the script. Tennant’s continual costume changes into medieval ‘robes’, his long hair and high pitched quivering voice in the current RSC production at the barbican merely contribute to a recent heritage of portraying the King’s weaknesses via his ‘effeminacy’, his reliance on his nobles explained via an apparent ‘feminine weakness’, and resulting in an interpretation of Richard II that is somewhat limited and even outmoded. Warner’s Richard , alongside earlier and lesser known adaptations of the play, especially Rich’s satire serve at least to challenge and rework the themes within it: those of kingship, power, and human pride.
9 Thomas Davies Dramatic Miscellanies, 3 vols, 1783-4, 1, 152-3
