As usual, Shakespeare plays fast and loose with historical detail, relying on several sources for his play. Superficially, the play is about the struggle between Richard II and Henry Bolingbroke. Ultimately, though, I found this a complex and involving character study of a young, inexperienced king, that foreshadows elements of Henry V and many other of his plays. ( )

FFYAA

http://nhw.livejournal.com/1109008.ht...

The plot is pretty simple: King Richard II starts the play by exiling his cousin Henry, who then returns and overthrows him, with Richard killed by one of Henry's overzealous supporters at the end.

It's a bit different from the three Henry VI plays. Apart from the last act (which has the rather odd York/Aumerle murder conspiracy subplot), I felt that there was almost too little attention to historical detail; it's not at all clear why Richard is so very bad, let alone why the nobles and commons desert him for Henry as rapidly as they do. Richard, indeed, is a rather sympathetic character, getting several of the better speeches in the play - while he is being overthrown, and just before he is murdered. The other famous speech, of course, is John of Gaunt's oration about England ("this blessed spot, this earth, this realm, this England"), declaimed while waiting for Richard to turn up to Gaunt's deathbed.

Besides the set-piece speeches, the most interesting scene is at the end of Act 3, when Richard's Queen learns of his overthrow by listening to the gardener gossiping. (This is the third Shakespeare play in a row with people hiding in foliage - Romeo does it in Romeo and Juliet, and three of the four male leads do so in Love's Labour's Lost.) There are lots of good bits here but they don't quite knit together.

The Arkangel production is decent enough - lots of big names (Rupert Graves as Richard, Julian Glover as Henry) but I actually found it rather hard to get through.
( )

"Richard the Second" is far from my favorite Shakespeare play, but it does contain one of my favorite speeches, which I used in a 5th grade Tories vs. Radicals debate in which I was assigned to convince representatives from the Colonies not to go to war with the mother country:

This royal throne of kings, this scept'red isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise...
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea...
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

The Tories won. *g*

This is one of Shakespeare's lesser known tragedies but it also became the first in the series that led to Henry V, et al. It is the tale of a king whose kingdom falls apart and who is eventually dethroned, imprisoned, and killed. It had political significance in its time, such that Elizabeth II compared herself to King Richard. For me, it was not an overwhelming work compared to his other plays. ( )