Readings and Misreadings of Duchess of Gloucester and King Richard

In our early readings of Richard II, two characters interest me, one for her character’s archetypal past and the other for his unapparent complexity.

Almost three hundred years after Shakespeare’s time, Henrik Ibsen, the father of Modern drama, invents a new convention and gives the (problematically) flawed female character a way out. A colleague of Professor of Theatre Frank Trezza calls the plays to which Ibsen responded “a woman with a past plays.” They are dramas characterized by a disgraced woman who inevitably goes off stage to kill herself whether due to a fault of her own or more often was the case a man’s. This convention would lead an audience to expect that a corrupted woman like A Doll’s House’s Nora would do just that. She of course did not kill herself but instead (much to the dismay of 19th Century Norwegian audiences) returned and basically flipped her husband the bird.

This is not to suggest that the female characters that predated Nora were entirely passive. Duchess of Gloucester is no wall flower. She does not pull any punches or hold back her passion. Her husband’s death need be revenged. Blood for blood as it were. When John of Gaunt pushes back and calls attention to the elephant in the room that he can’t quarrel with a king, Duchess of Gloucester doesn’t cede any ground. “Where then, alas, may I complain myself” is her response effectively emasculating and shaming John of Gaunt’s weak sense of familial responsibility. Now this is not the perfect example of a woman with a past play (but maybe a woman without a future?) but it is notably parallel in that the Duchess has few options in the bleak future ahead. Her last lines offer an ominous assortment of suicidal tendencies: “ Yet one word more... Nay, yet depart not so... Let him not come there to seek out sorrow that dwells everywhere. Desolate, desolate will I hence and die.”

Like Hamlet, King Richard is a hard nut to crack. Each characters’ inaction offers an irresistible impulse to judge them as being indecisive. The last point is one that I challenge. Let’s first start with Hamlet, the philosophizing, art loving nerd terribly miscast to do instead of his more inclined impulse to talk and think ad infinitum. In the first scene we meet a Hamlet intent on hitting the books at Wittenberg. We listen to him mediate on ideas and words, “Seems, madam?” And later we of course have no choice but to indulge in his meta-theatrical designs. These character traits point to idea that Shakespeare has (purposely and terribly) miscast Hamlet in the bloody role.

In King Richard’s case the potential to misread his character lies in how he acts (or does not act) as ruler of England. In act one, the nobles and officers stand in disbelief when King Richard calls off Bolingbroke and Mowbray’s duel. But here too we see a classic Shakespearean (and historical) miscast. King Richard is in fact a sensitive, pampered, diplomatically-inclined ruler who to no fault of his own is attuned to nature and peace rather than blood and war: “Which, so roused up with boisterous untuned drums, with harsh-resounding trumpets dreadful bray, and grating shock of wrathful iron arms, might from our quiet confined fright fair peace.”