Historicising Shakespeare’s Richard II: Current Events, Dating, and the Sabotage of Essex

Chris Fitter
Rutgers University
fitter@camden.rutgers.edu

Fitter, Chris. "Historicising Shakespeare’s Richard II: Current Events, Dating, and the Sabotage of Essex". Early Modern Literary Studies 11.2 (September, 2005) 1.1-47 <URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/11-2/fittric2.htm>.

      “I am Richard 2d. Know ye not that?”^[1]

1. Queen Elizabeth’s moment of shattering candor with the bureaucrat and jurist William Lambarde as they pored over antiquarian records in her Privy Chamber at Greenwich on the 4^th of August 1601 -- not to mention Lambarde’s apparently pat comprehension of her allusion (“Such a wicked Immagination was determined and attempted by a most unkind Gent, the most adorned Creature that ever yr Matie made”) -- have long driven scholars of Richard II to historical research: unearthing numerous analogues between the monarchic regimes of Richard and Elizabeth on the one hand, and between power-hungry super-courtiers Bullingbrooke and Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex on the other. In furthering this project, I suggest, it is critical to establish the play’s precise date if we would recuperate political overtones and connotations activated in the earliest productions. The present essay accordingly presents three, interlinked arguments. First, on the basis of several intriguing possible parallels between the drama and current events, it challenges the accepted but uneasy guesswork dating of the play to 1595. Second, it argues the further importance of these topical echoes, whether envisioned by Shakespeare or not, as impacting political response in early audiences to major events within the play: responses crucial to evaluation of Essex-in-Bullingbrooke. Finally, resituating Richard II primarily in the year or so that it first was staged (circa 1596) rather than in the very different conjuncture of the Essex revolt (February 1601), it will suggest that while the drama’s earlier apparent allusions to certain current events help establish a seemingly celebrative evocation of the wildly popular Essex  -- a figure so frequently posited by critics as an object of Shakespearean admiration -- that subsequently, the drama effects, with characteristically sardonic Shakespearean reversal (and in a strategy not dissimilar to that of Parsons’ Conference about the Next Succession of 1594) a calculated assault on the controversial earl’s standing.
   
   Dating
   
   
2. Drawing demonstrably upon Samuel Daniel’s The First Fowre Bookes of the Civile Warres  (registered on 11 October 1594 and probably on sale some time the following year), and appearing in first quarto in the Stationers’ Register on 29 August 1597, Richard II clearly was written and first staged between these dates. Sir Edward Hoby’s famous letter of December 1595 inviting Sir Robert Cecil to supper where “K. Richard [shall] present him selfe to your vewe” ^[2] cannot be taken to refer to Shakespeare’s play, however, for Hoby had commissioned in 1593 a series of  historical portraits depicting Constables of Quinborough Castle in Kent (of whom he was one) beginning with Edward III: so his letter may indicate a recent acquisition.^[3]  Even were a play indicated, it could have been Richard III, Woodstock, or indeed any play featuring a King Richard. Indeed as Shapiro reasoned, “it might be argued that [Hoby’s] bare reference to ‘King Richard’ implies he was writing before Shakespeare’s Richard II was known, for after it had been performed a few times it would presumably have been necessary to distinguish between Shakespeare’s plays about the two Richards, as Francis Meres did in Palladis Tamia (1598).”^[4] Although “Such uncertainties should wonderfully encourage scholarly agnosticism”,^[5] the view seems current still that Richard II dates from 1595.^[6] For this dating, however, we have absolutely no dependable evidence, and given the demolition of the argument from the Hoby letter, indeed no argument. Richard II could have been written at any point up to a matter of weeks before the registering of the first quarto.
   
   
3. On the basis that Elizabethan drama in general and Shakespeare in particular were, in their very nature assiduously topical, “the abstract and brief chronicles of the time”, we may be able by matching close textual reading to events of 1595-97 to date the drama more closely through moments of apparent allusion. On the basis of several such instances, Richard II emerges as quite possibly dateable, I suggest, to some point following April 1596, and possibly even to early 1597. The case, we shall see, is by no means conclusive; yet even in its dubiety it retains critical importance, because a number of charged circumstances of late 1595 and 1596 will --  whether by authorial design or force of subsequent coincidence -- have been read into the text by audiences from 1596 on, as well as by readers of the early quartos (published in August 1597, and twice in 1598).  
   
   Chronos as bardolater? National events as popular optic
   
   
4. Two incidents of national resonance that would appear to be reflected in Richard II are the 1595 Accession Day tournament and the fall of Calais in April 1596.  
   
   
5. Since Albright, Chambers and Campbell^[7] pioneered recognition long ago of the substantiality of the Richard / Elizabeth and Bullingbrooke / Essex parallels, modern criticism has been cognisant in general terms of the martial figure of the earl adumbrated in the challenging profile of Bullingbrooke.^[8]  That Shakespeare chose to open his version of the deposition of Richard II, however, with Bullingbrooke’s stylized and highly rhetorical chivalry -- ceremoniously hurling down his gage, challenging his foe with lengthy declamation (“by that, and all the rites of knighthood else / Will I make good against thee, arm to arm”, 1.1.75-76) -- may possibly have been stimulated by something more particular: concern to render Essex almost instantly apparent to contemporary audiences through evoking the extraordinary Accession Day tilts of November 1595.
   
   
6. The earl’s celebrated personal courage at Lisbon and Rouen (1589 and 1591-92) had typified, as his most authoritative biographer suggests, “the ritualised posturing which Essex performed in the tiltyard.” Essex in war was aware that “he was participating in the greatest theatre possible -- as Sir Walter Ralegh remarked of the battle of Cadiz: ‘the best wilbe that ther was 16,000 witnesses.’” ^[9] Essex was a longstanding virtuoso of the lists, featuring, indeed, as principal challenger in 1588,1590, 1594 and 1596; and on these last two occasions he took on all-comers. ^[10] Yet the Accession Day tournament of November ’95 stood out nationally, as something dramatically new: a deliberate coup de théâtre staged by Essex to present himself to England as more than just a chivalric hero: “He used a public occasion intended for glorifying the Queen to spell out his own political credentials.”^[11]
   
   
7. Before thousands of spectators, packed into the tilt-yard at Whitehall palace, Essex not only jousted, but centred the occasion upon himself through a rhetorical set-piece that in Hammer’s words “became the talk of London.” Performed both before and after the supper break, Essex’s mini-drama presented a hermit, a soldier and a secretary who each besought him to follow their profession, only to be rebuffed as the earl -- in whom all three personae existed -- proclaimed  through his squire exclusive devotion to the love of the Lady Philautia, representing Elizabeth. Though ostensibly designed as public profession of loyalty to the queen in the wake of Parson’s book A Conference about the next succession to the crowne of Ingland (glaringly dedicated to Essex in terms treasonably suggesting him Elizabeth’s heir), the tournament set-piece in fact alienated a queen who felt herself marginalized by the nobleman’s publicity-seeking rhetoric. (“The queen sayd that, if she had thought their had bene so much sayd of her, she wold not have bene their that night, and soe went to bed.” )^[12]  To the Cecils, too, the grand display must have seemed breathtakingly brazen: not least because the relentless appetite for political decoding of London audiences ensured that the figures of hermit and secretary were construed as caricatures of Burghley and Robert Cecil -- principal rivals of the dramatic earl. Essex’s drama, however, as Hammer points out, had been designed not only for Elizabeth but “to appeal over her head to the assembled ranks of courtiers and citizens.”^[13] Manuscripts of the set-piece were circulated; Hilliard’s miniature of the earl in tournament dress seems to have commemorated the occasion; and several ballads were published in the days following the event -- possibly produced and distributed by Essex’s friends.
   
   
8. The opening scenes of Richard II may recall the occasion in a number of ways. The co-existence of stylized knightly professions of honor, fealty, and desire for “chivalrous design of knightly trial” (1.1.81), with the presence of a ‘Marshal’ (line 204), impose even upon the first scene that framework suggestive of the tilt-yard supplied again in the third scene as the setting for ritual combat. Overtones of Essex in the representation of Bullingbrooke -- ritualistically chivalric, unmanageable in his insistent rhetorical vehemence, hurling himself to his knees before his sovereign in a moment strongly evocative of the November set-piece 

   Lord Marshal, let me kiss my sovereign’s hand
   And bow my knee before his majesty
                          (1.3.46-47)

   -- are matched by the cool responses of the monarch. Referring somewhat disdainfully to the young nobleman’s “boisterous late appeal” (1.1.4), characterizing him wearily as “high-stomached” (1.1.18), the sovereign responds initially with dry detachment to Bullingbrooke’s self-dramatizing passion (“How high a pitch his resolution soars!”, 1.1.109), but subsequently with some irritation as he finds himself unable to command events (“We were not born to sue, but to command”, 1.1.196).
   
   
9. There is a major problem, however, with dating the play accordingly to some point following November 1595: the key details of this scene are to be found in the edition of Holinshed’s chronicle (1587) that we know Shakespeare to have used. In Holinshed lie the knightly professions of the two noble rivals; the tiltyard-like setting of  “a great scaffold erected within the castell of Windsor” where the king sat with great prelates of the realm; the refusal to come to accord; the king’s irritated response; the appointment of a day of combat; and the king’s sudden intervention to prevent the fighting. Even the ‘marshal’ derives from Holinshed, for when Bullingbrooke and Norfolk refuse conciliation, Richard creates the Duke of Surrey “marshall of England” on the spot, for the purpose of arresting the two and standing pledge for their subsequent appearance.
   
   
10. It may accordingly seem wilful to suggest that Richard II here evokes contemporary parallel. Yet in the aftermath of the November tilts – witnessed by thousands, and commemorated with ballads and the circulation of the Essex text, not to mention with the continuing popularity of Essex through 1596-97 as the nation’s leading military hero crusading against the Spanish enemy –  the parallels between elements of the opening of the play and the surprise extravaganza of aspiring  knightly professions at the Accession Day of 1595 must, given their number, surely have been evident to Shakespeare: and to almost anyone who knew of the November tilts. Basic analogies between the Accession Day sensation and the play’s first scene include the tiltyard framework, chivalric protestation of loyalty, denigration of a rival, a contest of wills between prince and paladin, and the ensuing sidelining of the monarch. The king finds himself ironically bested by the incorrigible force of grand aristocratic display much as a displeased Elizabeth had found herself upstaged at Whitehall. A burning, declamatory chevalier steals center stage from a worried monarch in the very action of professing loyalty (“Tend’ring the precious safety of my Prince, / And free from other misbegotten hate”, 1.1. 32-33).
    
    
11. Further, Shakespeare suppresses a number of elements in Holinshed that, by coincidence or otherwise, would have jarred with suggestion of the tournament episode. The creation of Surrey as Marshal of England, to stand pledge for Bullingbrooke and Mowbrays; the creation of Aumerle as Constable; the withdrawal of the sovereign, on hearing the rival’s accusation, to “commune with his councell”;^[14]  and the subsequent announcement not by monarch but by Bushy, on behalf of king and council, of the day of combat: all these disappear. The omissions can be put down, of course, to artistic streamlining of the action. But certain overtones of Essex’s character, peculiar to the text, are added: for instance the paladin’s passionately swelling egocentrism

    [Gloucester’s] blood, like sacrificing Abel’s, cries
    Even from the tongueless caverns of the earth
    To me for justice and rough chastisement;
    And by the glorious worth of my descent
    This arm shall do it or this life be spent.  
                                               (1.1.104-09)      

    Likewise, the note of hysteria evident in Bullingbrooke, as in the promise rather to bite off his tongue and spit it bleeding in his adversary’s face than withdraw his accusations, is Shakespeare’s creation (1.1.190-95). And the Earl of Essex, was, of course, a descendant of the murdered Duke of Gloucester for whom Bullingbrooke seeks vengeance. 



12. Richard II’s latest editor, Charles R. Forker, deduces that Shakespeare’s usage of Daniel’s Civile Warres means that “the play could not have been composed earlier than the latter part of 1595.”^[15] This would place composition within a few months, at most, of the Accession Day spectacle. It would accordingly seem unconvincing, I suggest, to impute to sheer coincidence Shakespeare’s dramatization of an inflammatory scene in the lists between an Elizabeth-like monarch and an Essex-like figure in precisely the period (September - December 1595) when such an encounter actually and explosively happened. Rather, given Shakespeare’s track record of legitimating critique of current events by swooping on ‘toxic parallels’ with chronicle history,^[16] and given the established Elizabethan analogising of the queen with Richard II and Bullingbrooke with Essex, it would seem more probable that Richard II was influenced by and thus composed later than the November tilts, and may thus derive from some point in 1596.    
    
    
13. Woven into the first scene and reappearing in act four come angry references to infamy at Calais. News reached England at the beginning of April 1596 that the Spanish were besieging Calais, held by England’s ally, Henri IV.^[17]  Immense alarm was generated, as a port so close could provide devastating military advantage should it fall to Philip II; and the booming of cannons could be heard in Dover. Certain Londoners, including the queen, claimed to be able to hear the artillery barrage of the desperate battle. Essex and Lord Admiral Howard had troops already assembled in Plymouth for an attack on Spain, and Elizabeth commissioned their deployment in a relief expedition. On April 3, a spy-ship sent by Essex reported back that Calais’ harbour was still open, and English troops could be easily landed to engage the Spanish. “On 9 April, Good Friday, orders went out to the Commissioners of Musters in the south east to have 6,000 men with arms in Dover by Sunday night at the latest”, writes Lacey. “The Mayor and aldermen of London were listening to the Good Friday sermon at St Paul’s Cross when they got the order to raise a thousand men. By eight o’clock that evening, they had assembled that number.”^[18]  Next morning, to the angry astonishment of her Privy Council, Elizabeth canceled these instructions: Henri IV had not agreed to the request that the English could remain in a liberated Calais. The impromptu London troops went home. When reports arrived on Easter Sunday, however, that Calais had not fallen and yet could be saved, “Elizabeth cancelled her previous cancellation.” London’s Lord Mayor and aldermen were again commanded to a levy: and they responded by locking the doors on their packed parish churches until their quotas were filled. “By noon 1,000 Londoners were again under arms -- and by sunset most were marching toward Dover.”^[19]  A row now developed between Essex and Howard over command seniority: and the queen once more canceled the expedition. On April 14 she yet again changed her mind, and the expedition was yet again on. Essex spent all day on the 15^th embarking troops at Dover. By evening, however, dispatches confirmed the worst fears as to why the guns had fallen silent across the water. 
    
    
14.  “The shambles of Calais”, writes Hammer, “ . . . showed Elizabeth at her worst as a wartime leader, issuing contradictory orders and adopting a stop-go approach which drove even Burghley to despair.”^[20] Essex, however, emerged from the crisis in full luster. Throughout the twelve days of the Calais fiasco, he, like the Lord Admiral, had contributed deeply to military expenses. Essex  armed fifteen hundred soldiers, supplied one hundred lancers, and paid the wages of a thousand men. As his army lingered at Plymouth through May, waiting for the queen to authorize a strike against Spain, he found himself paying paid twelve hundred and fifty pounds a week -- for a month -- to maintain the army. His “promptness in paying his men”, moreover, was “quite untypical of the age.”^[21]  When his ships returned from the counter-expedition against the Spaniard in late July and early August, he was greeted as ‘the hero of Cadiz’. As bonfires burned, bells rang, and citizens banqueted in London on August 8 as a day of public thanksgiving, Essex used the jubilation to urge Elizabeth to retain his troops for the recovery of Calais. When she proved indifferent, he urged members of the London Corporation to press the queen on the project, with such success that they offered to fund a Calais expedition largely themselves.^[22] 
    
    
15. Both the Calais and Cadiz affairs had generated tension between monarch and nobleman. Elizabeth knew herself scorned for her vacillation, even without Essex’ letters pleading practical action; and she countered Essex’s attempts at a self-glorifying propaganda campaign when she forbade publication of the tract he had hastily composed on the voyage home from Cadiz, and restricted to London the nation-wide celebrations he had solicited from Archbishop Whitgift. ^[23] 
    
    
16.  Whether or not Shakespeare had already written the play, such developments could not but color reception of any performances of Richard II taking place from April 1596 on, for several years. The details of the drama’s exchange over Calais come, once more, from Holinshed. Yet in these circumstances, the play’s very mention of Calais (let alone its association with a dark royal disgrace which outraged Bullingbrooke-Essex) would have evoked contemporary public anger towards a wayward, incompetent monarch; and would have heightened the drama’s contrast of undependable crown against the driving man of action embodied in Essex’s whole line of behavior, and in his urgent letter to Elizabeth of late April or early May -- “princes that ar once in warr, if theie doo littel, must suffer much”:^[24] a line that could stand as the caption to the close of the Barkloughly Castle scene. Further, the denunciatory fury of Bullingbrooke towards Mowbray would have accrued overtones celebrative of Essex: for Bullingbrooke contemns the Duke as failing to pay the Calais troops, reserving instead eight thousand nobles to himself (1.1.88-91). “Through the false passage of thy throat thou liest!” shrieks Mowbray in insufficient retort. “Three parts of that receipt I had for Calais / Disbursed I duly to his highness’ soldiers” (1.1.125-27). Behind the accusation here would loom the figure of the generous earl, so concerned for the well-being of his troops that he had disbursed his own funds to see them paid: an association that would only heighten audience response to a rightfully incensed Bullingbrooke-Essex at this point, locked by high principle into a battle of will with shadowy sovereign and caterpillars of the court. It is precisely the kind of dramatic moment that may have stood out in the mind of the earl or his followers in 1601, when the play was chosen as the curtain raiser to their own rebellion. There is also the possibility that Richard’s astounding command in scene three to call off the duel between Bullingbrooke and Mowbray (a detail faithful to Holinshed) -- a reversal abrupt, exasperating, and all the more surprising since the crown itself had set it in motion -- may have jolted audiences with recollection of Elizabeth’s stop-go-stop policy at Calais, by which the London masses had been repeatedly stirred, levied, then frustrated.               
    
    
17. Shakespeare’s references to Calais were made, perhaps, overwhelmingly probable by his sources: not only Holinshed, but the anonymous play Thomas of Woodstock (deriving probably from the mid-1590s and greatly influenced by 2 Henry VI), whose sequel Richard II has in some degree fashioned itself to be.^[25] Yet Holinshed is starred with geographic allusions ignored by the dramatist. A list of those place names that Shakespeare found, and chose to omit, in Holinshed’s section on the Richard II events (and leaving aside the other sources Shakespeare consulted), includes Shrewsbury, Brainsford, Windsor (twice), Almane [Germany] (twice), Eltham, Holborn, Langley, Brittany, St. Albans (twice), Doncaster, Evesham, Conway, Rutland, Nantwich, Newcastle, the Isle of Man, Stafford, Lichfield, Dantry, Northampton, Dunstable, Leeds Castle in Kent, and Sterling. In this context, Shakespeare opts to specify Calais, however, in both act one and act four (1.1.126; 4.1.13).  Further, Shakespeare omitted such elements in Holinshed’s Calais exchange as Mowbray’s insistence that Calais was still well-governed, Mowbray’s claim that he had retained certain funds in recompense for his journey to Germany on his sovereign’s behalf, and the crown’s noting that the Calais troops remained unpaid. Shakespeare’s version thereby becomes more economical, but also prunes certain elements inapplicable to the circumstances of 1596.
    
    
18. Even were the play the product of 1595, the tiltyard analogy would have supervened upon dramatic meaning in performances following November of that year, and the Calais parallels from the following April: and their impact on perceived political significance would have been no less the powerful for the coincidence. Whether their origin was in fact Shakespearean intentionality, or whether history itself strengthened Shakespearean identification -- Chronos as bardolater -- this set of parallels will have conferred resounding allegoric resonance. Exceedingly few among the thousands in  Shakespeare’s audiences would have known how much in the play derived from Holinshed; whereas the events of November 1595 and of 1596 we have described will have formed a determining popular optic through which much in Richard II must have been viewed by the many. Magnifying  and enriching the Elizabethan analogues of the Ricardian story, and doubtless contributing to the exceptional popularity of this play, this optic becomes important for assessing what Elizabethans -- among them Essex himself and his followers -- made of the play’s politics at the time that the quartos went on sale; and indeed, on the night before the Essex revolt. The Calais references’ apparent evocation of disastrously unfit monarch as against angered crusading nobleman, patriotic and generous, along with the opening scenes’ seeming celebration of the wronged and noble tiltyard hero, may well have helped emphasize to Essex’s supporters at the juncture of 1601 the pro-Bullingbrooke elements in the drama.
    
    
19. A subtler political critique, however, emerges with another topical field: the theme of  Englishmen as intrepid travelers. On September 5 1595 Sir Walter Raleigh returned from his exploration of the Orinoco basin in Guiana, bearing fabulous tales of cannibals, men whose heads grew beneath their shoulders, and directions through shrieking jungle and churning swamp to El Dorado. He rushed out a sensational account, The Discoverie of the large, rich and beautifull Empire of Guianna, published early in 1596; and dispatched his friend Lawrence Keymis in January 1596 to locate the gold mine in Guiana of which he had learned.^[26] Almost concurrently, two other legendary English travel-adventurers, Francis Drake, the circumnavigator of the world, and John Hawkins, pioneer Guinea coast slave-trader and commander of the Victory against the 1588 Armada, died and were buried at sea (Hawkins November 1595, Drake January 1596) in the ill-starred Panama expedition. Survivors straggled home in April and May with tales of desperate hand-to-hand fighting with the Spaniard. Drake in particular had been “enveloped” in “the haze of patriotic myth” even in his own lifetime;^[27]  and it was claimed that in the furious cannon exchanges at San Juan in November his stool had been blasted away from under him.^[28] The national epic continued. Even as Raleigh’s fantastical Discoverie hit the streets, he was planning, with the dashing Essex, to carry the war to the homeland of the national foe in the Cadiz expedition: sailing on 30 May 1596 and returning to festivities in August.   
    
    
20. The high tide of these events would seem to have been the spring and summer of 1596, when the glamorous constellation of Raleigh’s Discoverie, news of Drake’s and Hawkins’ fighting deaths, and the mounting of the Cadiz expedition must have created, in certain London circles at least, a wistful and rock-jawed mood of patriotic pride, contemplating an unquelled tradition of veteran English venture. This mood must have been part at least of the reason why even the queen was unable wholly to ban public rejoicings over the Cadiz attack in August. It is hard to see what in 1595, at least prior to Raleigh’s return in September, could have prompted a like patriotic buzz. The concurrence of such events with Richard II’s celebrative motif of English travel-heroics may be less than coincidental. Mowbray’s response to Bullingbrooke’s challenge  -- “[I would] meet him, were I tied to run afoot / Even to the frozen ridges of the Alps, / Or any other ground inhabitable, / Wherever Englishman durst set his foot” -- solicits symmetrical patriotic hubris: Bullingbrooke will fight Mowbray “Or here or elsewhere, to the furthest verge / That ever was surveyed by English eye” (1.1.63-66, 93-94). Gaunt’s sceptered isle panegyric hymns English kings “Renowned for their deeds as far from home / For Christian service and true chivalry / As is the sepulchre, in stubborn Jewry” ( 2.1.53-55). England is “dear for her reputation through the world” (2.1.58). Holinshed, for once, offered no original of the motif in these protagonist’s speeches.
    
    
21. When, however, these two burning noblemen learn that, exiled by Richard, they actually must set English feet on foreign soil, the braggadocio of fearless English roving abruptly disappears. Mowbray laments turning from “my country’s light, / To dwell in solemn shades of endless night”, just as Bullingbrooke will insist that “every tedious stride I make / Will but remember me what a deal of world / I wander from the jewels I love” (1.3.170-71, 256.1-3). Whether due to Shakespeare’s humane scepticism of facile nationalism, the playwright’s relish of dramatic volte face, or the psychologist’s intrigue in human instabilities (“Thou art not certain, / For thy complexion shifts to strange effects /After the moon”^[29]), this heroic motif of Englishmen braving travels, now thrown into sudden reversal, might be thematically negligible: were it not for the remarkably sustained and prominent treatment we will see Shakespeare accord it in focusing Bullingbrooke.    
    
    
22. For tellingly, here is yet another Essex parallel: and it offers in itself, the sensational tiltyard friction and Calais debacle quite aside, a sturdy case for post-1595 composition of the play. The earl, as Paul Hammer notes, was in the habit of encouraging young noblemen to travel; and when the Earl of Rutland departed for a lengthy continental tour in October 1595, Essex wrote him no less than three letters of encouragement and guidance for the experience. The last of these epistles on making the best use of a tour was revised for rhetorical sophistication by members of Essex’s secretariat (including probably Francis Bacon), sprinkled with humanist erudition, redated to January 1596, and then passed out in manuscript that year as Profitable instructions. “In this highly polished form, the Rutland letter was circulated in and around the Court, ultimately gaining a widespread currency.”^[30] Many manuscript copies survive; and it was eventually published, in 1633. Praising foreign travel as stimulus and trial in the cultivation of “unmoveable constancy and freedome from passions”, “active strength” of disposition, “true Fortitude”, reason and knowledge, whose culminating goal is “clearnesse and strength of Judgement”, the tract aimed to showcase the new self-image of the earl, who had been admitted to the Privy Council in 1593.^[31]  No merely ‘boisterous’ martial youth, Essex was seeking now to appear as steady statesman, judicious counselor, flower of humanist learning. “Hys lordship is become a newe man”, reported a follower, Anthony Bagot, “cleare forsakinge all hys former youthfull trickes, cariinge hym sealf with very honorable gravyty and singulerly lyked of, boath in parliament and at [the] counsayle table.”^[32]  Like the mini-drama of the November tournament, and the ‘True relacion’ of the Cadiz expedition Essex would seek to publish in August 1596,^[33]  the letter of travel advice formed part of an audacious propaganda campaign: “nothing less than a demonstration of Essex’s credentials to helm the ship of state.” Indeed, since Lord Burghley had also penned, two decades previously, a letter of travel advice to the previous Earl of Rutland, Essex’s action was also “an implicit challenge to the old lord treasurer.”^[34]  
    
    
23.  The public persona emerging from the letter -- this freshly minted paragon of politic sagesse, mellifluously sententious, at ease in smiling equilibrium -- would seem reflected in Bullingbrooke’s similar and remarkable shift in identity, when he returns from banishment in act two a very different creature from the turbulent militant who would spit his tongue bleeding in his enemy’s face. Northumberland compliments him that “your fair discourse hath been as sugar, / Making the hard way sweet and delectable . . . / [your company] hath very much beguiled / The tediousness and process of my travel” (2.3.6-7, 11-12). Hotspur, now introduced to Bullingbrooke, will look back bitterly on the accomplished but instrumental self-fashioning of the ambitious nobleman here, recalling “a king of smiles” purring forth a “candy deal of courtesy” (Henry IV Part One, 1.3.244, 247).    
    
    
24. Like Essex’s Profitable instructions, Shakespeare’s Bullingbrooke proves prompt with traditional wisdom on countering the misfortunes of travel. On first being banished, he responds “This must my comfort be / That sun that warms you here, shall shine on me, / And those his golden beams to you here lent / Shall point on me and gild my banishment” (1.3.138-41): a stock motif of exile consolation rhetoric, descended from classical Stoicism, circulated in Renaissance proverbial collections, and taken as fit archangelic consolation by Milton in Paradise Lost for an Adam and Eve expelled from Paradise.^[35]  Essex’s letter and Bullingbrooke’s rhyming couplets alike disclose a firm-minded man of letters, versed in the proper wisdoms on daunting travel and mental adaptation.
    
    
25. Further, in a move which diminishes the likelihood of pure coincidence, Shakespeare reprises the thematic and extends it, remarkably, across forty-seven lines (1.3.258-305 ^[36] ). Only the first quarto, published in August 1597, saw a point to supplying this lengthy exchange of views on travel / travail (for the pun see line 262): so extensive is the passage, and so apparently needless was it deemed in after years, that the four later quartos and the folio of 1623 all omitted the discussion.
    
    
26. That discussion, however, engineers the opening of Shakespeare’s sly turn against Bullingbrooke-Essex. As soon as king and courtiers have left the stage, the ‘private’ Bullingbrooke, alone with father and friends, abandons the topos he had drawn on -- the rhetoric of the universal patria -- whose sententiae his father now approvingly echoes: “All places that the eye of heaven visits / Are to a wise man ports and happy havens” ( 1.3.275-76). Bullingbrooke now, however, refuses adamantly the logic of that venerable wisdom theme, which urged fortitude in the reconceptualization of exile,^[37] even when Gaunt persists with it: “Teach thy necessity to reason thus . . .” (277). In terms of the standard perspective taught by the humanist adagia, Bullingbrooke’s vein of counter-reasoning is a kind of heresy: resolutely materialist. “O who can hold a fire in his hand / By thinking on the frosty Caucasus? / . . . Or wallow naked in December snow / By thinking on fantastic summer’s heat?” (294-95, 298-99). Epistemologically, it is of a piece with Bullingbrooke the agent of demystifying worldly force, dethroning the Richard whom no celestial angels guard. Yet the contrast is abrupt with Bullingbrooke’s earlier, ‘public’ responsiveness. The mask of humanist fortitude has slipped; beneath is revealed an implacable self-pity, bitterly impatient of the foolery of classical tropes.
    
    
27. Exposing the hollowness of the earlier pose was suggestive. Where parallel with Essex was perceived, its logic would be to undermine the earl’s credit with the very classes he had hoped to woo by circulating his Profitable instructions. “Unmoveable constancy” has gone to the winds. Adversity encountered, the courtly young propagandist of travel advice rejects all such high perspective. Passionately despising his conventional earlier trope (“This must my comfort be . . .”, 1.3.138ff), the man who would ‘helm the ship of state’ becomes he who switches his rhetoric at convenience: humanist or materialist, courtly or populist, as mood or need served.        
    
    
28. As with the earlier overtones of the Accession Day tilts and infamy at Calais, the topical thematic of travel-adventure perspectives may have been analogy retrospectively conferred: supplied with Puckish twinkle by an obliging zeitgeist. Yet it furnishes one more hint that we might reallocate the drama to 1596; and in that year -- whatever the play’s originary date -- to the eyes of the courtly, of Essex-watchers, and of Londoners eager to be in the know, sardonic parallel will have been swooped upon.  
    
    
29. There are other elements in the drama that might be taken to point towards a late 1596 -- or even early 1597 -- date of composition. Gaunt’s lines in his sceptered isle speech on England’s “silver sea / Which serves it in the office of a wall / Or as a moat defensive to a house / Against the envy of less happier lands / . . . the triumphant sea / Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege of  watery Neptune” (2.1.46-49, 61-63) may carry overtones of English impunity against the Spanish Armada; and if so, sounds more like the second armada, wrecked by gales in October 1596, than the 1588 fleet destroyed in part by naval action. Again, “What news from Oxford?” (5.2.52) would have resonated mightily in the wake of the Oxford rising at Enslow Hill in November 1596, when a carefully planned uprising was foiled. The conspiracy had been organized in the conditions of intensified class hostility following the century’s worst harvest in 1596, the persistence of enclosures, and the transport of grain during the dearth to London.^[38]  The world, said the rising’s guiding spirit, Bartholomew Steere “would never be well untill some of the gentlemen were knockt downe”^[39] Around three hundred men were expected at the Oxfordshire rendezvous, to commence leveling egregious local enclosures then march to London and join with its apprentices, who had rebelled in the summer. At the appointed time and place, however, only ten to twenty appeared -- 

    A dozen of them here have ta’en the sacrament
    And interchangeably set down their hands
    To kill the king at Oxford
                                                             (5.2.97-99)

     -- and these dispersed in disappointment, to be arrested following a tip off.  

    To Oxford, or wher’er these traitors are.
    They shall not live within this world, I swear,
    But I will have them if I once know where.
                                                             (5.3.139-41)  

30. Fearing widespread rioting in the hungry midlands, the government determined to make an example of the Oxford protestors, whose leaders were taken to London for months of interrogation, then torture. Finally tried in June 1597, they were, thanks to Attorney-General Sir Edward Coke’s twisting of the law, executed for treason.^[40]  Holinshed, again, furnishes the original, in the plot of the Abbot of Westminster and Aumerle to kill Henry IV during jousting at Oxford. In Holinshed, however, the plotting takes place at the Abbot’s house in Westminster; and when the rebels, who rise at Oxford, flee, they are finally beaten at Cirencester. The drama presents neither the Westminster plotting nor the Cirencester battle, consigning them to passing reference; but, suggestively, it makes five references to Oxford, four of them to rebellion there. The last two are clumsily insistent:        

    My Lord, I have from Oxford sent to London
    The heads of Brocas and Sir Bennet Seely,
    Two of the dangerous consorted traitors
    That sought at Oxford thy dire overthrow 
                                                            (5.6.13-16; emphasis added)  

    
    It is difficult to know what to make of the clunky repetitiveness of the last line, if arch further import is not being underlined. (The June 1597 trial of the Oxford rebels, incidentally, would have helped account for the excision of the deposition scene in Q1, published two months later.) Such highlighting could easily have been, of course, Shakespeare’s late-year interpolation. 
    
    
31. If it is to Shakespearean intentionality that we owe the second armada and the Oxford rising overtones, the composition date for Richard II must have been winter 1596 or spring 1597. A corroborative hint (and it is no more) is a letter from Raleigh to Robert Cecil of July 6 1597, written probably from Plymouth ^[41] where Raleigh and Essex were preparing a fleet for what would be the Azores Voyage. “I acquainted my Lord Genrall [Essex] with your letter to mee”, recounts Raleigh, “and your kind acceptance of your entertaynment. He was also wonderfull merry at your consayt of Richard II. I hope it shall never alter, and whereof I shalbe most gladd if it is the trew way to all our good, quiet, and advancement, and most of all for her sake whose affairs shall truely fynd better progression.”^[42] The letter is guardedly cryptic, for relations between Essex and Cecil continued strained beneath a temporary accord; but it appears that Cecil may recently have seen a performance of Richard II (“your entertaynment”), and that he had passed on to his friend Raleigh (who felt close enough to Cecil to have made a bequest to him in his will in June ^[43]) a “consayt” concerning contemporary parallel with the story of Richard II. Frustratingly, we can only speculate here: but it seems that the conceit both referred unflatteringly to Elizabeth (whose affairs Raleigh hopes will find “better progression”), and qua Bullingbrooke to Essex: whose emphatically mirthful response, implicitly disavowing parallel, Raleigh hopes but apparently doubts to be sincere (“I hope it shall never alter”). Raleigh, Essex’s long-time rival, has experimentally conveyed to Essex the implied accusation; and Essex’s laughing attempt to ridicule the Bullingbrooke analogy as so much nonsense (“wonderfull merry”) has not allayed those dark presentiments of a career that would not conduce to “all our good, quiet, and advancement.”
    
    
32. That this ‘entertainment’ of the story of Richard II, which Cecil has recently seen in July 1597, was Shakespeare’s play, recently opened and causing a stir that has reached the Secretary’s ears, can only be speculation; but this would certainly fit with that dating through reflected current events which we have pursued. One argument against such dating is that it would have been anomalous to publish a play (August 1597) so shortly after composition.^[44] Yet Shakespeare, and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, appear to have been under remarkable financial strain at this point. This was a ‘starvation year’, threatful even to those -- such as London’s lower classes -- not immediately at risk: diminished theatrical takings were inevitable. Moreover, the lease for the Theatre -- where Richard II probably first played -- expired in April 1597, and could not be renewed; and following the Isle of Dogs scandal, all London theaters were ordered closed by Privy Council decree on 28 July 1597 (though the Rose somehow managed to ignore the ban). Further, the Blackfriars chamber that Burbage had bought for the Chamberlain’s Men in February 1596 and paid to refurbish was firmly closed to their usage by the City Fathers. In September 1597, the Chamberlain’s Men were driven on provincial tour. That Shakespeare had bought New Place in May must have sharpened the personal bite of  economic pressure. It was thus short of cash and deprived of a playhouse that the Chamberlain’s Men, as Gurr has noted, sold the playbook of Richard II, along with Richard III, I Henry IV and Love’s Labour’s Lost. ^[45]
    
    
33. In summary, a number of current events between late 1595 -97 are perhaps reflected in the drama. Two of these apparent allusions -- to Essex’s unexpected and unwelcome self-dramatization at the Accession Day tilts, so strenuously commemorated by his circle, and to royal scandal at Calais -- retain importance for Shakespeare scholars as (re)conditioning Richard’s reception, whether the play dates from 1595 or otherwise. For Shakespeare’s audiences from April 1596 onward will have decoded allusion in the former to the earl’s dauntless chivalric image, and will have nosed contemporary royal scandal in the latter, whether or not compositional dating allowed. These ‘echoes’, moreover, help us make sense of the play’s construal by the Essex conspirators, years later, as subversive of Elizabeth. Yet by themselves, I think, neither of these instances offer a strong case for designed topical echo and a post-1595 date of origin. The existence and extensiveness of the drama’s debate on the adagia of travel affect, however, supply far more compelling evidence. The remarkable prolongation of that discussion would seem to have been quite unwarranted unless it glanced at Essex’s celebrated letter on the topic circulating in 1596 -- particularly since the passage was to be excised by all versions of the play, quarto and folio, after the 1597 quarto. 
    
    ‘Sky-aspiring and ambitious thoughts, / With rival-hating envy:’ 1596 vs. 1601 
    
    
34. The tendency of most literary criticism to focus Shakespearean historicity in terms of general structures of thought and sensibility, or of decade-long period characterizations (‘the late Elizabethan world’, ‘post-Armada England’ etc) has conduced to political analysis of Richard II in broad terms of the 1590s. Yet where the erratic career of the Earl of Essex is concerned, no easy ‘1590s’ homogeneity existed. Notwithstanding Essex’s vagaries, however, and despite the intense, calculated topicality of the drama, to the best of my knowledge, critics have never assigned consideration to the impress of differing political implications stamped by the almost polarized conjunctures of the play’s first emergence circa 1596 and its pre-rebellion reprise by the rebels in February 1601.^[46] 
    
    
35. In 1600-01, Essex, still popular despite military failure in Ireland, had taken on the status of an outrageously maltreated hero: economically ruined, dogged by creditors, publically disgraced in open tribunal, abandoned by many prudent friends (such as Bacon), cast off by Elizabeth, discredited by former rivals, and exiled from court. For readers of Richard II at this point (three quartos having sold in 1597-98), such circumstances would centralize the Bullingbrooke-Essex of act two: the victim figure undone by caterpillars of the court. In the eyes of supporters,  malevolent ruination enveloped the nobleman’s rebellion in something approaching legitimacy: rectifying an otherwise irreversible grievance, it was a stratagem of very survival. Its Essex surrogate a wronged hero destitute of alternative, a revived public performance of  Richard II now made excellent sense to the earl’s faction. Though the echoes of Essex’s magnanimity and Elizabeth’s infamy in the affair of Calais might by this time have been lost, those of the longstanding tiltyard virtuoso would still have rung clear. Moreover, several biographical developments further sharpened the Shakespearean analogy. Essex, like Bullingbrooke, was recently returned (September 1599) from ‘exile’: for as Kingsley-Smith notes, exile was the way a posting to Ireland was widely  conceived, and ‘banishment’ was how Essex’s own letters described his stay there.^[47]  Like Bullingbrooke’s, further, the return was illicit, since-- as the ensuing commission of inquiry (June 1600) made punitively public -- this had contradicted the Queen’s express instructions not to return until so permitted by her. In the financial aftermath of the royal humbling, Essex was also now enduring conditions, in Bullingbrooke’s words, “leaving me no sign, / Save men’s opinions and my living blood, / To show the world I am a gentleman” (3.1.25-27). Royal violation of the earl’s dignity was the more outrageous, for supporters, given his now (literally) peerless stature: for in 1597 he had become Earl Marshal, a rank that made him a kind of official commander in chief of the kingdom, and leader of the aristocracy. “Evidently determined to make full use of all its powers”, Essex had at once instigated researches into the precise authority and privileges of the position.^[48] The new status would have conferred immeasurably greater constitutional resonance to the principled assurance of Bullingbrooke’s stand: “I am a subject, / And I challenge law” (2.3.132-33). As Essex had written to Lord Keeper Egerton, when Elizabeth boxed his ears in 1598, “What I owe as a subject I know, and what as an Earle, and Marshall of England: to serve as a servant and a slave I know not.”^[49]  Demanded, following his revolt, by what authority he had acted, he replied “that he was earl marshall of England, and needed no other warrant.”^[50] Publication of Hayward’s history of Henry IV in February 1599 revived comparison of Essex with Bullingbrooke, and sold a remarkable 1,500 copies.^[51] A second edition in late May sold some five to six hundred copies before confiscation. Infuriated by Hayward’s history, Elizabeth told Bacon it was “a seditious prelude to put into the people’s heads boldness and faction.”^[52] The awkwardly haunting analogy with Bullingbrooke may have helped prompt Essex’s defensive letter to the queen of May 1600: “already they print me, & make speak to ye world, and shortly they will play me in what form they list upon ye stage.”^[53]
    
    
36. When the drama was written around 1596, by contrast, the earl’s rising star had been almost incomparably brilliant. In Hammer’s summation, “The ‘newe man’ of 1593 grew by 1596 into ‘the great earl’”.^[54]  Following Cadiz, in particular, Essex was he for whom the bells of celebration tolled. Edmund Spenser applauded him that year as “Great Englands glory and the World’s wide wonder” (Prothalamion, 146); and in his View of the present state of Ireland, written probably in the same year and circulating in manuscript, Spenser declared of Essex “such an one I could name uppon whom the ey of all Englande is fixed and our last hopes now rest.”^[55] The panegyric perspective was widely shared. Essex was now an influential Privy Councillor, repeatedly indulged royal favorite, national military champion, master of “the greatest single intelligence apparatus in England”,^[56] friend and host to a European-wide network of noblemen, and industrious architect of a propaganda campaign placing himself in the brightest heaven of invention. Such conditions would seem to augur, in Spenser’s words, “Joy . . . of thy noble victory, / And endlesse happinesse of thine owne name / That promiseth the same” (Prothalamion, 152-54). To write in such circumstances, therefore, a play that intelligibly signaled the notion of Essex, in the name of personal grievance, honor and popular acclaim, displacing Elizabeth, could but damage the standing of the earl in courtly and politic eyes, associating the man and his qualities with treason in the most brazen degree.  Shakespeare’s highly extended description of the triumphant London entry of Bullingbrooke-Essex following Richard’s deposition -- “all tongues” crying out praise, “greedy looks of young and old / Through casements dart[ing] their desiring eyes”, the great nobleman bending low on horseback to thank them humbly as he passed the streets (5.2.5-21) -- may have echoed Essex’s ecstatic reception in London and the public thanksgiving for his Cadiz victory in early August 1596: yet another reason for suspecting a dating later than 1595.^[57]  Notwithstanding the frequently negative characterisation of its reigning monarch, the very creation and public performance of such a play while Essex still gleamed at the zenith of national pre-eminence was, like Parsons’ Conference, richly incriminatory in suggestion.
    
    
37. Richard II arrived, moreover, at a time when the great earl, growing embattled, became vulnerable. Despite the strenuous efforts toward gravitas and diplomacy, deep cracks were appearing in the facade of the ‘new man’ by 1596. “I live in a place where I am howerly conspired against and practised uppon”, Essex enthused to Bacon in the mid-1590s.^[58] The atmosphere at Elizabeth’s court in the 1590s was already “electric with paranoia”, as Lacey Baldwin Smith styles it;^[59] but Elizabeth’s discovery in May 1595 that the earl had fathered a son upon Elizabeth Southwell four years previously so deeply incensed the queen that some thought Essex’s hold on her irreparably broken. The ageing queen, moreover, was hypersensitive to expectations of her passing -- she arrested the bishop of St. David’s in March 1596 for a court sermon implying her death to be imminent -- and her neurosis provoked outbursts at any who intrigued over the succession. Correctly suspecting Devereux to be in secret contact with James VI, she became inflamed by the earl’s ambition, exploding in the summer of 1596 over his “wilfulnes and rashnes, alleaging that [he] would not be ruled, and that she would brydle and staie [him].”^[60]  Further, Devereux’s escalating competition with the Cecils between 1593 and July 1596 over filling the Secretaryship was now hardening rivalry into faction. The polarization actually sharpened with Essex’s return from Cadiz, which “raised the tensions at Court to a new pitch” in the wake of “shattering criticism” of his handling of the expedition.^[61] The queen was made livid by his creation, contrary to her instructions, of large numbers of new knights (twenty-eight at Rouen, and now at least thirty-eight at Cadiz): a process, ominously, that both undermined her personal authority as sovereign, and established a special bond between himself and proven fighting men.^[62] Vast amounts of booty from the Cadiz expedition, furthermore, had disappeared into the hands of the soldiers, and a furious Elizabeth seized back as much of it as possible, appointing an inquiry, under the Cecils, to establish blame. Although the indignant earl was cleared, many of his dispossessed followers appealed to him for help, so that he must, as Hammer puts it, “have felt that all his friends and followers were under siege.”^[63] Flushed at the dizzy altitude of supreme national pre-eminence, Essex could be seen to be teetering.
    
    
38. Under these conditions of deepening mutual ambivalence between crown and popular superhero, Devereux’s circle was quietly affirming limited monarchy. In 1595 Essex’s secretary Henry Wotton wrote for the earl’s eyes a commentary on Philip of Spain’s conduct which expressly contradicted divine right theory, arguing the popular foundation of princely power. Kings, he wrote, “remember not their maker on earth; for the people and peers of the realm are their makers next unto God.”^[64]  Essex’s later outcry in mid-1598 -- “Cannott princes erre? Cannott subjectes receive wrong?” -- thus derived, as Hammer notes, from a consciously held political theory, and suggests that Bacon was right to hold these words against the earl at his treason trial in 1600.^[65] Certainly, it was from 1595 that Essex embarked on his propaganda crusade to recruit popular forces to his banner, with the Accession Day display, the Profitable Instructions on travel, then the True Relacion of the Cadiz adventure.   
         
39. Great England’s Glory was thus already vulnerable as clandestine overreacher: and the suspicion that this might be so had already been brilliantly disseminated by Essex’s enemies, the Jesuits. Appearing in 1594, Robert Parsons’ Conference about the Next Succession openly discussed whether “princes may for good cause be deposed”, and praised the deposition, among others, of Richard II, as bloodless, constitutionally enacted by parliament, and beneficial to national interest. Its dedication, sensationally, was to Essex: “no man is in more high and eminent place or dignitie at this day in our realme then your selfe . . . .and consequently no man like to have a greater part or sway in deciding of this great affaire.”^[66] The ensuing stir struck fear into Essex, whom Hammer argues to have known of the book months before the queen. When finally she learned of it, Elizabeth, at the end of October 1595, arrested the Earl of Hertford (mentioned by Parsons as a possible successor), then confronted Essex with the work. “The shock drove him to his sick bed” for over a week.^[67]  “At his comming from Court”, reported Rowland Whyte to Robert Sidney, “he was observed to looke wan and pale, being exceedinglie troubled at this great Piece of Villanie donne unto hym.”^[68]  On his recovery, the queen decided to vindicate him publicly, assigning him to answer on her behalf all her foreign correspondence; and it was at this point (November 1595) that Essex reciprocated, nominally at least, with the tiltyard mini-drama of devotional service. One impresa designed for the occasion depicts him, indeed, as an eagle soaring above “the Dartes and boultes” fired at him by the envious.^[69] Yet the Achilles heel had been publicly bared; and, as Whyte’s letter noted of Parsons’ Conference, merely “To wryte of these Things are [sic] dangerous in so perillous a Tyme.”^[70]
    
    
40. And this is precisely what Shakespeare now did. Inflaming the worst suspicions with its unmistakable overtones of Essex in Bullingbroke, Richard II, circa 1596, must have amounted, I suggest, to a kind of Parsonesque counter-propaganda assault on the earl’s personal integrity and his political career. It was “of an Intent surlie”, as Beale reasoned of the Parsons stratagem,  “to bringe him [Essex] in Jalousye and Disgrace here.”^[71] 

    What thou art, God, thou, and I do know,
    And all too soon I fear the king shall rue . . .
                                  (1.3.197-98)      

41. If Essex chose to display the soaring eagle impresa in the tournament, it would have been hard to miss the suggestive echo in Richard’s fears of civil rebellion as “eagle-winged pride / Of sky-aspiring and ambitious thoughts”. Essex’s followers may have hoped, as Parsons implied, for Essex’s role as kingmaker or even successor, upon the ageing queen’s death. But an act of usurpation by Essex against a living monarch, carried through with the murderous ruthlessness so clearly implied in the play, could not possibly, for mid-1590s audiences, have looked justified. At very best, it would appear profoundly problematic, and to most, a monstrous ingratitude and excess of ambition. Any suggestion of Bullingbrooke would have to be determinedly laughed off, as described in Raleigh’s letter of July 1597. It is even possible that Francis Bacon may have had Richard II in mind when, in October 1596, he confidentially warned Essex that he could never fully win the queen while maintaining active military stature and directly courting the affections of the commons. “I demand”, insisted Bacon, “whether there can be a more dangerous image than this represented to any monarch living, much more to a lady, and of her Majesty’s apprehension.”^[72]
    
    
42. Given the vicissitudes of his relationship with Elizabeth, as late as February 1599 Essex would on occasion shrink from the Bullingbrooke association: for as Cyndia Clegg suggests, it was the earl himself -- presented at Whitehall and Richmond by printer John Wolfe with copies of Hayward’s Henry IV, with its dangerous dedicatory epistle to himself –– who asked his friend Archbishop Whitgift to have the epistle removed. Preparing feverishly for the Irish campaign, but overwrought as Elizabeth’s letters patent officially commissioning him its leader failed to appear, Essex was in no position to risk antagonizing the queen.^[73]  Even when, in 1601, his revolt came, Essex, calling desperately on the London masses to aid him, dared not summon them to aid deposition of the queen. He cried out, confusedly, “For the Queen! For the Queen! A plot is laid for my life!”^[74]  Had Essex been aware of the play in the mid-1590s, he must logically have shrunk from it as hostile exposé.
    
    
43. It is thus, in summary, clear that we must challenge on historical grounds the widely held belief that, as the drama solicited by Essex’s supporters on the eve of their rebellion, Richard II must have offered considerable and conscious support of Essex - Bullingbrooke. By 1601, the figure of the earl implicated in Bullingbrooke had undergone, I would argue, a conjuncturally mediated transformation of identity, metamorphosed from the insatiable covert Machiavel, salient in 1596, to the provoked victim-hero, centralised by 1601. By the latter date, circumstances had supervened with consummate irony upon authorial intentions. Shakespeare the adept of historical texts spliced to urgent topicality had his own, now ‘historical’, text worked to contravention of his purposes.  
    
    
44. Shakespeare’s work elsewhere reinforces this interpretation. As Hamlet, for example, charming and populist Essex became by turns a pathologically unstable and lethally arrogant figure. More speculatively, I have suggested elsewhere that Essex may have been glanced at in the aristocratic super-hubris of aspiring York in 2 Henry VI, as “the dog who howled at the moon.”^[75]  And yet another drama suggests quite clearly Shakespeare’s profound antipathy to the crusading earl at the level of basic values. In 1594 Essex had showcased the primacy of his new intelligence network and impressed the court with his manipulative deadliness by accusing, indicting and securing execution of Roderigo Lopez, the queen’s physician. Dr Lopez was a Jew, and it appears that during the contentious period of his prosecution, Essex’s friends helped by fanning the flames of anti-semitism in London.^[76]  As Dr Lopez continued to plead his innocence on the scaffold, the Christians howled him down, volleying racist insult as he was castrated, disemboweled and quartered. Shakespeare’s response, it seems, was The Merchant of Venice’s exposure of Jewish anger as the product of relentless Christian persecution, and the elevation of Shylock, the stock scheming Jew, to tragic stature. The play’s humanitarian retorts to the Lopez affair include Portia’s incisive lines:

    Ay, but I fear you speak upon the rack,
    Where men enforcèd do speak anything.   
                                  (3.2.32-33)

    
    Merchant’s allusions date it to some time following July 1596, and almost certainly to the autumn of that year.^[77]  If my conjecture is correct that Richard II dates from late 1596 or early 1597, then the two plays, with their appalled scepticism about the great earl’s values, must have been written almost in tandem, within twelve months of each other.  
    
    
45. Shakespeare’s motivation for freezing the career of the hot and headlong young nobleman in a lucid frost of maximal suspicion must remain, of course, conjectural. If, as Honigmann and Wilson persuasively argue, Shakespeare had been the ‘William Shakeshafte’ of Hoghton Tower, subseminarian and erstwhile acquaintance of the martyred Campion,^[78] then any lingering Catholic solidarity would logically involve hostility to the crusading champion of militant Protestant imperialism.^[79] Shakespeare may even have met Robert Parsons, during his teenage spell as Jesuit trainee, for Parsons had accompanied Campion some way in their secret mission to England in 1580. Further, Essex’s destruction of Lopez had additionally and gleefully secured the ruin of moves towards English peace with Spain: and the guarantee that the lives of hundreds more English commoners would now be lost could scarcely have cheered the dramatist of wartime underclass suffering, compassionately presented in both parts of Henry IV and in Henry V. In fact, as Mervyn James details, Essex was both the epitome and hero of the traditional aristocratic honor code: autocratic, turbulent, contemptuous of common law and commoners.^[80] Had Essex had his way, then, in John Guy’s words, “the earl would confidently have extended to England during Elizabeth’s war years -- and perhaps longer -- methods of government more readily adopted in Ireland: a direct (i.e. violent) approach to administration through resort to martial law, arbitrary taxation, and military rather than civil patronage.”^[81] It is, after all, one of the fundamental structural ironies of Richard II that the self-proclaimed proponent of constitutionality  -- “ I am a subject, / And I challenge law” (2.3.132-33) -- seizes the throne by naked force of arms, threatening immensity of violence:

     If not, I’ll use the advantage of my power,
    And lay the summer’s dust with showers of blood
    Rained from the wounds of slaughtered Englishmen. 
                                     (3.3.41-43)

46. Nor was Shakespeare’s perspective on Essex unshared. Many at court would have been delighted by any damage done to the anarchically competitive Devereux through his public representation as machiavellian Bullingbrooke. The Cecils, pressured by Essex into the role of primary antagonists, would quietly have enjoyed what they might have seen as payback, among other things, for Essex’s attempt to displace them in the Accession Day mini-drama. The Earl of Pembroke -- a possible former patron of Shakespeare, whose men had performed 2 Henry VI and Titus Andronicus -- was stung by Essex, despite family ties, into relations of “sharp acrimony” by late 1595.^[82]  Shakespeare’s former patron, Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, had been likewise alienated, instigating just before his death (in April 1594) a lawsuit against Essex, following assault by Essex’s retainers on in his deer park at Lathom.^[83]  Finally, a hostile exposé of Essex would also have pleased William Brooke, Lord Cobham, who became Lord Chamberlain between August 1596 and March 1597. Cobham’s recent appointment as Chamberlain in fact deepened the pro-and anti-Essex factionalism at court: for between Essex and Cobham’s son, Henry (brother-in-law and intimate of Robert Cecil) there existed “a notoriously personal animosity.” “Both sides were now on edge,” ^[84] in Hammer’s phrase. Shakespeare’s relations with the Brookes, of course, are famous for the playwright’s apparently offending them, through the pillorying of Sir John Oldcastle -- an ancestor of William Brooke’s wife -- who had to be renamed Falstaff. Yet, as Schoenbaum points out, the offence may have been unintended, and a disclaimer was safely in place for the Epilogue to part two of Henry IV. ^[85]  It is surely possible, I suggest, to see Richard II ’s indictment of the Brookes’ most hated enemy in the light of placation, as with the name change.^[86]  Indeed, a full-gun broadside against Essex would have been especially welcome in late 1596 and 1597, when the earl was desperately caricaturing Henry at court -- ultimately unsuccessfully -- to prevent his inheriting from his ailing father the wardenship of the Cinque Ports, traditional inheritance of successive Lords Cobham. (William Brooke died in March 1597, and Henry finally succeeded to the wardenship in September.) Lord Cobham had maintained his own company of actors in his younger years, so there was reason to believe he would take lively interest in theatrical representation of his towering court foe. Shakespeare’s company, moreover, had become particularly vulnerable on Cobham’s assumption of the Chamberlainship, for the company, passing to Lord Hunsdon, son of the previous Chamberlain, was no longer ‘The Lord Chamberlain’s Men’. Bereft now of the status of royal household patronage, and “piteously persecuted”, according to Thomas Nashe, by the Lord Mayor and Alderman,^[87] Shakespeare’s beleaguered company may reasonably have deemed it urgent to win the favor of the new Lord Chamberlain with a personally appealing coup de théâtre in a time of professional and economic peril. This explains, I think, the customary mild puzzlement that “If Lord Cobham bore a grudge against his predecessor’s company of players, he concealed it. All four of the calls to Court during the Christmas festivities of 1596-97 were for Lord Hunsdon’s Men, and they were still in favour at Shrovetide, when again they were the only company to perform for the Queen.”^[88] 
    
    
47. In conclusion, Richard II’s injurious representation of Essex in 1596 would seem to have married Shakespeare’s skeptical political vision and aggrieved humanitarian sympathies to an urgent professional expedience. The displacement of Essex, autocratic, scheming, and belligerent, might make possible ravaged England’s return to peace and prosperity: a pruning policy in accord with the transparently allegoric words of the gardener on ruinous monarchic indulgence, in a scene wholly invented by Shakespeare:

    We at this time of year
    Do wound the bark, the skin of our fruit trees,
    Lest, being over-proud in sap and blood,
    With too much riches it confound itself.
    Had he done so to great and growing men,
    They might have lived to bear, and he to taste,
    Their fruits of duty.
                           (3.4.58-64)    

Notes