IN THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES, the tenth and eleventh centuries, the church was more than eager to lend whatever doctrinal support it could find to prop up anyone who seemed able to maintain order in a very anarchical world. From the period of Charlemagne, in fact, it had been asserted that kings had a semi-divine character and that, like Saul and David, the kings of Judea in the Old Testament, they were the Lord’s anointed and so enjoyed a special sanctity. In the years following the death of Charlemagne this belief was understood to give the church a special authority over rulers because the high priests in the Old Testament, the prophets Samuel in the case of Saul and Nathan in the case of David, checked the kings and reproved them in the name of God, who had, in fact, been rather reluctant to accept Judean kingship, which seemed to challenge the utter supremacy of the God of Israel. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, however, there appeared an interesting political theology, which was designed to enhance the divine status of legitimate kings. They were said to have two bodies, or to be “mixed persons.”1 They were a natural body and a divine body, the representation and image of God and Christ. This goes well beyond the doctrine that kings are the vicars of God—that is, his designated agents or representatives on earth. This asserts that as kings they are God and Christ.
The act of anointment transformed a legitimate heir into a new being with two bodies. His natural body played a very significant part in this duality. He had to be the legitimate heir, preferably the son, of a reigning, anointed king, and he had to fulfil his feudal duties; that is, he had to abide by the rules of honor and inherited dignity, property, and status that prevailed in feudal society.2 Nevertheless it is impossible, or at least very difficult, to justify rebellion against the Lord’s anointed if he is simply a tyrant or an incompetent ruler, or fails in his political obligations. Only God can depose rulers, or possibly they might depose themselves.
When Shakespeare wrote Richard II the notion of the king’s being half divine and half natural was long forgotten, but a secular equivalent was the official theory of kingship in the Tudor era. The king or queen was still two bodies, one natural, the other corporate, symbolizing the people of the kingdom, the former a natural and the latter a public person. The public person never dies; the former is a temporary occupant. Rebellion is always and absolutely wrong, but the duties of the public body of the king are much preached. William Tyndale, one of the foremost Protestant theologians of the Tudor age, wrote in 1528 in “The Obedience of a Christian Man” that weak kings were worse than tyrants because “a tyrant though he do wrong to the good yet he punishes the evil and maketh all men obey.”3 The important thing is that all men must obey because it is absolute sin to rebel. The king is one person with two bodies, and one of them is entirely at God’s disposal since God alone can unseat a king who is a legitimate and anointed heir. It is therefore not surprising that Queen Elizabeth I forbade the abdication scene from Shakespeare’s Richard II being performed at all and that the rebellious followers of the earl of Essex were the original sponsors of its being put on.
The problems that Richard II poses are endless, because Shakespeare, while he is writing with Tudor views in mind, is also placing the drama in its own time, and he is well aware of the more profoundly biblical meaning of the king’s two bodies in the time in which the play takes place. He is naturally also fully aware, as was his entire audience, of the consequences of the rebellion against Richard and the crowning of Bolingbroke as Henry IV. The result was the Wars of the Roses, a perpetual civil war that lasted almost a hundred years and decimated the English nobility, probably a good thing in the long run. The war ended only with the victory of Henry Tudor, who became Henry VII, and who, having defeated the opposite side, married Margaret of York, a princess of the opposing party, and brought some precarious stability to England. His granddaughter Elizabeth was not eager to have all that turmoil raked up again unless it somehow justified Tudor legitimacy and political orthodoxy. She had nothing like the religious prop that King Richard and his Plantagenet ancestors had enjoyed. She was not the imago Christi or the shadow of God. They had gone on Crusades to capture the Holy Land from the heathens; she was a shaky Protestant queen with a lot of religious dissent to plague her. In fact, no ruler after Richard, who was the last Plantagenet king, could make the kind of claims he had made for his kingship.
A king who has as one of his bodies that of Christ cannot be deposed or killed very easily, or at all. The question is whether his own natural body, his purely human body and self, may not rebel against his other self. That is one of the central problems in Richard II. In modern terms it sounds very flat and trite: Can a government delegitimize itself even in the absence of overt rebellion, so that a takeover, whether violent or not, is simply a restoration of the original legal order? An obvious example might be the regime of Ferdinand Marcos, who, among other misdeeds, delegitimized himself by having an opponent openly murdered.4 At that point he was simply no longer plausibly acceptable and so was replaced, without any bloodshed to speak of. He simply went too far. That is neither tragic nor very dramatic nor all that interesting or unusual. No deep religious significance is involved, as is the case in the spiritual world of the king with two bodies.
To be a king with two bodies is surely a condition full of the most complex psychological problems. What is it like to be a person with two bodies? What does it mean for the king to be such a person? His obligations to his second, divine person are in some ways greater and more difficult to fulfill than the mere obedience that is demanded of his subjects. So today we must consider a very peculiar but far from uncommon sort of political obligation: that of a ruler, an anointed king specifically, to his divine self and office, and what he owes himself.
The other set of obligations are less unusual: those that a wronged subject may or may not have to such a king. And again—for this is, after all, Shakespeare—we get a deep look into the evolving psychology of the rebel. Remember what I noticed in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s story—how he was borne along by events, and how he changed as a person when he joined the active political resistance against Hitler? We find over and over again that once a person becomes involved in or decides to rebel against an established regime, that person may find that he or she is carried along by events in a world that has lost its contours and predictability. So we find in the play not only a conflict of political power and even values, those of feudal honor as against divine majesty, but also two sets of obligations, the king’s to his own divinity and the subject’s to the king, and finally two very different men whose psychology is decisively structured by their political fate and social situation.
There are also issues of loyalty that cut very deep here. The only people in the play who feel ties of personal loyalty to individuals are women, who remain loyally bound to their husbands and sons throughout. The ties of family loyalty are routinely disregarded by all of the younger members of the royal clan, and it is one of the things that the older generation, as represented by John of Gaunt, laments. For all the chief protagonists are closely related one to another. Edward III had seven sons. The oldest, Richard’s father, the Black Prince, was killed in battle in France and became an instant icon of all that was noble, brave, and chivalrous. A regency was established by his brothers until his son and heir, Richard, could take up the crown. Several of the brothers died natural deaths, and in the play only two survive, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster and Bolingbroke’s father, and the Duke of York. Richard has, as we shall see, little use for his relatives and spends his time with cronies of lowly social origin. As for ties of personal obligation to men who have done political service to an overlord, alliances and the like, they are all very brittle and subject to instant rejection when it is politically advisable to do so. This lack of political friendship is new, and it is evidently part of Shakespeare’s world, in which Machiavelli was the most celebrated author. The ways in which new princes acquire their power through war, and not by peaceful inheritance, is the subject of Machiavelli’s The Prince, and we are never allowed to forget that this is what Bolingbroke is. If anything is in short supply in this world it is loyalty. It is not scorned, but it survives only in the nonpolitical world of women, and it is not, I think, a biased reading to think that there is more genuine fortitude among the women in this play than among the men.
Finally, unlike most rebellion stories, this one has no heroes. Someone said that it was the perfect Cold War play. No one is perfect, no one wins. Eventually it ends. We can see why the characters act as they do, but we cannot fully accept the self-image of anyone. It is, in short, a play without illusions, without joy.
Nevertheless, it has in it some of the most beautiful poetry in the English language. It is also a difficult play, and that is why I shall now go over it carefully with you. I would also encourage you to interpret it differently. You may find yourself in good company, since there is always so much controversy about any Shakespeare play.
The only way to recognize the insoluble difficulties into which these views of authority, loyalty, and obligation throw the protagonists is to read the play very carefully. The Old Testament must also not be forgotten. For while here the reluctance with which God gave Israel kings is wholly forgotten, the fact that the Lord’s anointed defied him, suffered, were admonished by the prophets, and often ended badly was not forgotten. The final paradox of the natural body of the king is that it is the body of a sinner who listens neither to God nor to the priest, and who deserves to be visited by punishment.
The play begins with lying. The audience knows that Richard had in fact ordered the murder of his uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, and everyone else on the stage knows it as well, but the deed cannot be charged against him because he cannot in principle do wrong. His servants, however, certainly can. What we get is the high ceremonial and chivalrous tone of the court, as Richard calls on Bolingbroke and Mowbray to put their quarrel before him. The former accuses Mowbray of treason, diversion of the royal funds, and the murder of his and Richard’s uncle, Gloucester. He challenges him to a duel, Mowbray takes up the challenge, and while he admits to having made a failed attempt to assassinate Bolingbroke’s father, John of Gaunt, he denies having any part in the murder of Gloucester, and explains that the moneys that he retained were in fact a debt the king owed him. He then quite justifiably affirms his loyalty to the king. For the two contestants what is at stake is perfectly clear: Bolingbroke’s honor in defense of his uncle, certainly, but there is more. He is challenging Richard outright because the king has already transgressed the rules of honor in some way which we do not yet know. Still, to begin with, in keeping with the demands of the code of honor, Richard sets the date for the trial by arms. So far, so good. Richard appears to be a very proper king who performs all the functions of a feudal monarch appropriately and overtly; there is no one who would dare to oppose him.
In the next scene the realities begin to become overt. The Duchess of Gloucester upbraids her slain husband’s brother, John of Gaunt, for not avenging his death. Her love, her loyalty, and her sense of duty to avenge a slain husband and brother are poured out in a torrent of pain. But Gaunt will not act. Richard is the Lord’s anointed, and only God can deal with him. As far as Gaunt is concerned, that is that. He does not say anything in defense of Richard, but Richard is a divine instrument, and it is not possible to act against him.
In scene 3 we expect the duel between Mowbray and Bolingbroke to commence, but at the last moment Richard orders that it be stopped on the pretense that he wants no blood spilled. Instead, he banishes both, Bolingbroke first for ten years, and then, after Gaunt pleads with him, for six. We should note that in council Gaunt had agreed to Richard’s plan, which shows the degree of his deference to the crown. Mowbray, who had served Richard so loyally, is banished for life. Richard is, it turns out, not a chivalric king mindful of the laws of honor but a crafty, scheming Machiavellian prince. With one stroke he rids himself of a dangerous rival and inconvenient follower who has already once collected a debt and might ask for more favors or even blackmail him. Yet the two accept Richard’s sentence, both lamenting their fate. This is, however, not the limit of Richard’s transgressions against honor and family loyalty. In the fourth scene we find him with his cynical cronies, to whom he admits that he has been too extravagant to be able to wage his campaign in Ireland; to fill his treasury he will simply confiscate the property of his uncle John of Gaunt, who is dying. In short, he plans to rob Bolingbroke of his lawful inheritance, thus undermining the most fundamental institution of the feudal order, even his own legitimate inheritance. Richard is neither wise nor upright, but that does not invalidate his rule.
Act 2 opens with the dying Gaunt making his famous nostalgic speech about the England of the past and why and how Richard has betrayed it, lamenting that he will destroy England if he goes on that way. Richard is a shameful, blotted, scandalous character, as contrasted with his ancestors, who went on crusades to the Holy Land. He pleads with Richard, “Commit thy anointed body to the cure,” and he warns him, “Landlord of England art thou now not king; / Thy state of law is bondslave to the law.”5
That is a dreadful accusation, because a king who thinks he owns his kingdom is a despot and a tyrant. He is no longer a lawful ruler bound by the obligations of his crown—that is, by his political body, in Tudor terms. In medieval terms his natural body has betrayed his sacred one. He is also destroying the rules that establish his own legitimacy, as York, his last living uncle, warns him when he says, “For how art thou king / But by fair sequence and succession?” (2.1.198–199). That is heredity.
The weight of that warning is instantly clear when the nobility, led by the Duke of Northumberland, see the threat to their status and still in loyal fashion agree that the king must be saved from his base, flattering advisers and the crown restored to rectitude by making Richard act as feudal law and custom require. By scene 2 we also know that Bolingbroke has decided to return home to collect his inheritance by force.
In scene 3, the state of the conflict becomes evident in an angry exchange between Bolingbroke and his uncle York, who acts as regent while Richard is in Ireland. York speaks of the evil of defying the Lord’s anointed while Bolingbroke insists that there is no rebellion in coming home to claim his own inheritance; despairingly, York recognizes that Bolingbroke has a claim. York is not, I think, as interpreters say, an opportunist who bends with the wind. When he refuses to take sides, cannot act, he is caught in a nightmare in which he has obligations to both sides in the war, to his king and to the nephew whom the king has surely wronged.
With act 3 we see the decisiveness of Bolingbroke and his political intelligence. He does not merely have the king’s favorites executed, he gives reasons that anyone could respond to. He blames them for inducing Richard to discard his queen—it is generally thought for homosexual affairs, since the word adultery is not used—and for in general having misled and corrupted him. Cleverly enough he charges them with private vices which are just what the public reviles most.
This is in stark contrast to Richard, in the next scene, who as he returns to England weeps, sentimentalizes, and calls his enemies toads, spiders, nettles, and so on. But he does propose to fight. His reliance is only on God and his anointment, however, because by now his armies have deserted him. Not only he himself but also his loyal Bishop of Carlisle repeats that nothing can wipe away the anointment of God or reduce his kingship.
When he realizes that all have deserted him, he calls out “each one thrice worse than Judas” (3.2.132); this of course contains the most terrible implication of identifying himself with Christ, of being imago Christi. That is also the horror of being both wholly God and wholly human. Richard now recognizes this and laments, “You have mistook me all this while / I live with bread like you, feel want / Taste grief, need friends—subjected thus, / How can you say to me, I am a king?” (3.2.174–177). This ends his most famous speech, which begins with “For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings” (3.2.155–156), for the natural body does naturally die. Richard does not deny that he has an obligation to his kingly self; he merely says that it is impossible for any human being to fulfill it. One cannot be one person with two bodies. He does discharge his followers, but only because he has no choice. That may be part of his weak character; he gives up too soon without a fight, though his cousin Aumerle tries to keep him going.
Now in scene 3 we find Bolingbroke, York, and Northumberland before Flint Castle, where Richard is lodged. Northumberland already speaks of him as plain Richard and is rebuked by York for forgetting that he is King Richard, “a sacred king” (3.3.9). Bolingbroke makes light of the matter and sends a messenger to Richard asking only that his exile be ended and his inheritance returned to him and that he and the king should then return to a natural condition “of fire and water” (3.3.56) He seems ready to submit as a loyal subject once his demands are met. Richard does not believe that this is the case and he warns Northumberland that England will suffer endless strife if the Lord’s anointed is deposed. Though both Northumberland and Bolingbroke seem to be submissive enough, Richard is sure his reign is at an end: “Down down I come, like glist’ring Phaethon” (3.3.178). When Bolingbroke protests, “My gracious Lord. I come but for mine own,” Richard replies, “For do we must what force will have us do / Set on towards London, cousin, is it so?” and Bolingbroke replies, “Yea, my good Lord” (3.3.196, 207–209).
Now this is the crucial moment, because going to London means certain disaster for Richard, since the people there are very hostile to him and attached to Bolingbroke. It is at this point that Bolingbroke seems to decide that he will indeed take the crown from Richard and replace him as king of England. Many readers believe that this was his plan and that he plotted to dethrone Richard from the first. I do not think that the text justifies such an interpretation. Rather, I think, along with many others, that Bolingbroke is carried along by events, that he is the pawn of Fortune, that he has set a train of events in motion and suddenly is faced with making a crucial decision. He began with claiming only a return of what was lawfully his and then became a rebel. When Richard reveals his enormous human weakness and suggests that he is indeed a usurper, Bolingbroke seems almost as inadvertently to discover that he has overthrown the king and taken his place. It is not that Richard has shaken off his majesty; it is that, like so many people whose obligation to their rightful ruler weakens step by step, Bolingbroke comes rather unexpectedly to a point where he crosses the line from protest demands to open rebellion.
Scene 4 is, in simple language and with analogies to nature, the gardener’s account of what has happened. The point of these remarks and the Queen’s reviling him as the new Adam, the very reincarnation of sinful man in the garden, is that he represents the humble man of the people who explains why Richard undid himself.
Bolingbroke may now be popular and have the balance of power, but he has no legitimate claim to be king, and he knows that. He therefore returns to the murder of the Duke of Gloucester and the other crimes for which Richard must be held responsible. The Bishop of Carlisle warns him that none of this matters.
Richard appears, and he cannot shake off “regal thoughts,” because his divine self still sees only Judas Iscariot in his enemies: “Will no man say Amen / Am I both priest and clerk?” (4.1.172–173). By this he means that he is still both a priest and one who has been reduced to giving responses to the priest’s questions in church ritual. Bolingbroke and his men now want him not only to release all his subjects from their oaths to him but also to confess his crimes so that their position might be more justified. But in fact Richard cannot do that. He not only sees himself as Christ and the onlookers as so many Pilates, he believes that he will be a traitor if he confesses because he will be renouncing his obligations to his sacred self, which he cannot do. In a very real sense only God can release him from his oaths and offices. He tries to illustrate his dilemma with a mirror. His face is now only that of a human being and has lost all its former ability to inspire fear and reverence, but in his “tortured soul. / There lies the substance” (4.1.298–299). He smashes the glass that reveals his human self and continues to cling to what he cannot abandon without the gravest sin. It is often said that Richard is weak, hysterical, self-indulgent, and unstable. I think that is to miss the point. He was certainly a wasteful and foolish king, but once he loses power, he reveals not so much a personal character as an impossible situation. He is obliged to remain loyal, to keep his oath, to retain what he cannot give up, the anointment of the Lord and his sacred self. It is not his to discard. He is bound to assert it, to keep insisting on it. That is his obligation to his role, and he is unshakable in his determination to insist on his unique person. That is what infuriates Northumberland and makes Richard such a threat to Bolingbroke. Nor does Richard lack courage. He is defiant to Northumberland and ironic to Bolingbroke to the last, and both recognize that he remains a real danger, even locked up in a distant prison.
In scene 2 of the last act there is a curious interlude. It may show Bolingbroke’s astuteness in not carrying severity too far or his failure to be as cruel as a truly Machiavellian prince should be. I rather think the latter, for Aumerle’s survival is not in his interest. The other, and I think more compelling, meaning of the scene is that it may be intended to remind us of the varieties of human loyalty. The Duke of York, ever the loyal subject, rushes to the new King Henry IV to warn him of a conspiracy led by his own son, Aumerle. The Duchess rushes after him to plead for her son. To her, as to the Duchess of Gloucester, all that matters is family love, the loyalty that love inspires. Aumerle is her child, and she means to save his life no matter what he has done; to her all these politics mean nothing in comparison to her love for her son. My guess is that we find a more human king in Henry, and one who also worries about his son, who we know will eventually be a great king, Henry V. We see in Henry IV, in fact, a king who does not have Richard’s problem of a divine self, though the problems of treason have already begun to trouble his reign, as they would again and again.
As for Richard, he remains a reminder of real majesty, and Henry wants him out of the way. Richard also wants to die, because even in solitary confinement he cannot quite be a traitor to his majestic self and is tormented. When the king’s henchmen kill him he dies nobly. King Henry, however also knows that he must do something to atone for the murder, and he says that he will make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to expiate his sin, though in fact he never does; he remains a usurper and a regicide. He has the crown, and there are many men who are now bound to him by oaths of allegiance, but neither he nor anyone else claims that he is the Lord’s anointed or a sacred person. He does not have any of Richard’s problems of obligation to a sacred self, and his subjects do not feel the formidable reverence that Richard inspired. The Tudors and Shakespeare understood that perfectly. After the Plantagenets and the Wars of the Roses that Richard’s murder began, no king was truly sacred. The political theology of the Middle Ages was over once and for all. The two bodies that were now being claimed, one the people the other the king or queen, were separable in a way Richard’s was not.
In the history of political obligation this is an extraordinary chapter. Here we do not have Christians patiently enduring the powers that be because they are of God, like so much else that they must suffer. Here we have a Christian enhancement of kingship. It is not a scourge, but the very image of Christ. This is not merely an agent of God whom one must obey, for better or worse, but a positive incarnation of the sacred. The king is a unique being, and obedience to him is exactly the same as is demanded by God himself.
Since the king is also, at a less exalted level, supposed to maintain the order of feudal ranks and inheritances, he must expect to face rebellious barons, as King John did when the nobility extracted Magna Carta from him, a charter guaranteeing their rights and limiting his powers over them. There was Edward II, whom the nobility killed and replaced with his son. So Richard was not the first of the Lord’s anointed to face rebellion, but by breaking his line and assuming the crown Bolingbroke decisively destroyed the entire theology of the king’s two bodies. He thus altered the pattern of obligations, which, even though oaths are still made to God to obey the ruler, became basically secular, legal, and involved loyalties that were not as intense as those that Richard could arouse in people who believed in the medieval political theology, like the Bishop of Carlisle.
It also ended the dreadful tension for the king, who had to remain faithful not to an office or an oath but to his other self, which he could not shake off without being a traitor to it, which was poor Richard’s tragedy. He was both a man and a God, but he was not really Christ, and it made his life impossible.
What then of obligation? Richard had delegitimized himself by his disloyalty, his refusal to live by the code of feudal honor. A Machiavellian prince cannot be saved by an appeal to divinity alone; he must also be far more resolute and competent than Richard was. On the other hand, while Bolingbroke is a successful new prince, he lacks that aura of divinity that he or any ruler still needs to command the obedience and loyalty of the nobility. They are his allies, but they do not have a deep obligation to his crown. He lacks authority, and the result is endless civil war, which was an ever present threat in Elizabethan England. Neither anointment nor honor was sufficient any longer to sustain a ruler, and the conclusion is that the Age of Machiavelli had come and that obligation was another word for necessity.
1. Shklar’s recommended reading for this lecture was Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 24–60.
2. For some of the following discussion Shklar draws on Curtis Brown Watson, Shakespeare and the Renaissance Concept of Honor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960).
3. William Tyndale, Doctrinal Treatises (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1748), 180.
4. Ferdinand Marcos was president of the Philippines between 1965 and 1986. For most of the time Marcos ruled the country as a de facto dictator under martial law. His regime was largely held responsible for the killing of opposition leader Benigno Aquino, the assassination that led to the Philippine People’s Revolution, which finally disposed of Marcos.
5. Richard II, 2.1.97, 113–114. Act, line, and scene numbers are from The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller (London: Penguin, 2002); line numbers may vary slightly in different editions. Further citations are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.