Richard, a king in love with the poetry of kingship, banishes his cousin Bolingbroke and seizes his inheritance — then watches, almost mesmerized, as Bolingbroke returns to take everything.
It is written entirely in verse, and the language does the work drama usually leaves to swords: the deposition scene turns a transfer of power into a shattering piece of theatre about identity itself. Read it before the Henry IV plays; everything that follows in the tetralogy is an argument about what happened here.
Which edition?
1Arden Shakespeare, Third Series
Ed. Charles R. Forker · Bloomsbury
Forker’s introduction runs to two hundred pages and earns every one.
2Folger Shakespeare LibraryFirst read? Start here
Ed. Barbara Mowat & Paul Werstine · Simon & Schuster
The play is written entirely in verse; the glosses keep the music audible.
3Oxford World’s Classics
Ed. Anthony B. Dawson & Paul Yachnin · Oxford University Press
Dawson and Yachnin are the best pairing on the play as political theatre.
4The New Cambridge Shakespeare
Ed. Andrew Gurr · Cambridge University Press
Gurr is the great authority on the playhouses, and it shows in the staging notes.
Richard II on stage
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Richard II on screen
1The Hollow Crown: Richard II (2012)
TV film · dir. Rupert Goold
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Reading Richard II this year?
Mark it in your record when you finish — one seat, kept for decades.