Beyond the Epic. Richard II and the Nature of the Tragic in Shakespeare

Abstract

The major disagreement on the nature of the epic is rooted in the opposition of two concepts — either the epic draws on the myth, or its optics is regulated by history. In Leonid Pinsky’s opinion the way leading from the epic past towards the individual and inward self was the way of Shakespeare’s heroes both in his tragedies and history plays. Richard II (1595, opening the second tetralogy) follows one of the two archetypes suggested by Hugh Grady in his article “Shakespeare's links to Machiavelli and Montaigne.” Richard is not essentially a machiavellian type, though occasionally called a weak, “deficient” tyrant by critics and a “landlord” (not a king) by John Gaunt in the play. Creating this character Shakespeare makes the first step towards Hamlet. The climax is reached in the scene of his dethronement, much more known for its political topicality than being scrutinized for the discovery a dethroned king is to make. Who is he now? A nonentity, or a new being? The mirror he asks to bring lies, he thinks, when he recognizes his own unchanged face in it. Several scenes in the play (the Queen and Bushy, Richard and his jailor) demonstrate how the lyrical experience, Shakespeare must have acquired in the two plague years (1592–1594), had changed his dramatic technique. In Richard II he gave a start to a new metaphysical tradition.