In the Library
Richard II
William Shakespeare, 1595
- Form
- Form Play
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 1.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 19
- Length
- Length 23k words
£1.99
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This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle, / This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, / This other Eden, demi-paradise
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Hamlet
William Shakespeare
Richard talks his way off the throne in gorgeous verse, and Hamlet is the other royal who thinks aloud more than he acts, turning a crisis of the crown into a crisis of the self.
£1.99
Macbeth
William Shakespeare
Macbeth does the same thing, but drives the crime forward instead of suffering it, showing what a stolen crown does to the man who took it.
£1.99
King Lear
William Shakespeare
King Lear does the same thing, but strips an old king of his crown by his own hand, and watches identity unravel once the title is gone.
£1.99
About the book
For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings: the words come from a king who still wears his crown and already knows it is gone. Shakespeare wrote this play entirely in verse, not one line of prose in it, because the man at its centre cannot stop turning his own ruin into music. Richard believes what an anointed king is raised to believe, that not all the water in the rough rude sea can wash the balm from his forehead, and he is wrong, and discovering how wrong is the most beautiful thing he ever does. Bolingbroke takes the throne with a soldier's economy. Richard gives it up in cascading images, calling for a mirror to see whether the face that ruled England looks any different now. The unbearable sweetness of it is that the useless king is the poet, and the capable one has almost nothing to say.