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Advice from the University of York on Academic Writing Skills

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Subject Guides: Skills Guides: Academic & communication skills

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Academic skills you’ll need at university, along with communication skills that will be relevant throughout your life…

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Have a mooch through the alumni pages of the University of Birmingham and be inspired by what different English graduates are doing with their lives:

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Meet our students - University of Birmingham

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Explore student and alumni profiles from the University of Birmingham.

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Something for your teachers as well as for you!

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Stepping Beyond Teaching: Exploring Writing as a Career

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About the webinarSometimes it can be hard to see beyond the classroom walls. But there are exciting opportunities to explore and a number of ways to diversify your TEFL career.Many teachers go on to become bloggers, editors, coursebook writers and publishers. Some simply do so to supplement their income, others find a new full-time occupation.

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Webinar from those in posts, discussing their career paths in English

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Career Webinar: English, Literature, & Journalism

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Where might a degree in English take you?

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Where might a degree in English take you?

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What an English degree did for me, by Tulip Siddiq, Sarah Waters and more

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As universities close their English literature courses, we celebrate 40 influential British graduates

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Case studies of those who've studied English and done exciting things with their lives.

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Pretty inspiring stuff from OU about the possibilities a degree in English opens to you.

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Faculty of English, University of Oxford

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#EnglishCreates Careers: What can you do with a degree in English?

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Very interesting webinar with real-world anecdotes and advice about careers in English

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My useful English degree: Careers for English graduates | The English Association

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We support the teaching, learning, and enjoyment of English at all levels of education, from early years to further and higher education and beyond.

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Interactive map to explore the skills you're developing and how they relate to a range of careers

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Discover the essential skills required to do any job. The Careers Explorer can be used by companies to inform their hiring decisions, by researchers to study the relationship between skills and the economy and by individuals to explore which skills best suit their chosen career path.

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Lots of ideas and testimonials here about people who've studied English and done wondrous things with their lives!

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To help us keep this website secure, please wait while we verify you’re not a robot! It will only take a few seconds…

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Some careers information with salaries for those of you looking to go further than SCGSG with your English studies.

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15 Jobs With an English Degree (Plus Duties and Salary Info)

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Discover 16 jobs with an English degree that you can pursue, with salary information, requirements and main duties to help you decide which path to follow.

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Suggestions about how to secure work experience in English-focused careers

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Illuminating Careers: How to Gain Work Experience in English-Driven Fields | Springpod Blog

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Embarking on a journey in fields that thrive on English proficiency is an exciting prospect. From journalism to publishing, and beyond, a strong command of the English language opens doors to a wide array of career opportunities.

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Interview with awesome Kate Atkinson on her writing journey

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Becoming a crime writer...

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Ian Rankin on his writing journey, the outsized influence of Scottish crime writing, and more!

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Interesting Q&A with crime writer about inspiration and elements of crime writing

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Q&A with Detective Turned Crime Author, Graham Bartlett

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The winning submission will receive a cash prize of £200, and two runners-up will receive £50 each.

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The winning submission will receive a cash prize of £200, and two runners-up will receive £50 each.

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Pack a picnic (and a brolly)

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Gardens Theatre: Romeo And Juliet | Birmingham Botanical Gardens

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Two hearts. One fate. A timeless love reborn. Watch Shakespeares timeless classic: Romeo and Juliet whilst sat in nature as the sun sets.

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Interesting set of Podcasts exploring connections between literature and science

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Episode 5: Nature in Crisis; Creativity as Cure by LitSciPod: The Literature and Science Podcast

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Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric)
Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones. About the episode: This fifth episode of the third series of LitSciPod features an interview with Dr John Holmes, Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham. John discusses how poetry helps us to negotiate the legacies of Darwin’s discoveries and the Pre-Raphaelites’ shaping of the culture of Victorian science (and vice versa). He introduces us to the Synopsis Network, which explores art in natural history museums, to the Ruskin Land project in the Wyre Forest, and to his more recent work responding to COP26 from an humanities perspective. We also debate the importance of method to disciplines. At the end of the episode, you can hear John read ‘Editorial. By the President of the Therolinguistics Association’ from ‘The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics” by Ursula K. Le Guin. Episode resources (in order of appearance): • Catherine Charlwood, ‘“Such a pair!”: The Twin Lives of Humans and Trees’, Hay Festival 2019
• Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialisation of Light in the Nineteenth Century (1995)
• Susanne Bach and Folkert Degenring (eds), Dark Nights, Bright Lights: Night, Darkness, and Illumination in Literature (2015)
• Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures (2020)
• Isabelle Tree, Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm (2018)
• Russell Foster, Understanding the Impact of Sleep Loss in the Industrial Era (2018)
• Jules Michelet, Le Peuple (1846)
• John Ruskin, Unto This Last and Other Writings, ed. by Clive Wilmer (Penguin, 1985)
• The Symbiosis Network • Ruskin Land in the Wyre Forest, Guild of St George
• John Holmes, Darwin’s Bards: British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution
• The Kogi people, From the Heart of the World: The Elder Brother’s Warning (1990)
• The Kogi people, Aluna (2012)
• The Germ (1850)
• John Holmes, ‘Rebels art and science: the empirical drive of the Pre-Raphaelites’ Nature 562, 490-491 (2018)
• Charles Allston Collins, Covent Thoughts (1850-51)
• William Holman Hunt, The Light of the World (1851-53)
• The Fairy Creek Blockcade
• FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992)
• Alberta’s Energy “War Room” takes on a Netflix family cartoon
• Bigfoot Family (2020)
• Michael E. Mann tweet 17th October 2020
• Yu-Tzu Wu et al., Perceived and objective availability of green and blue spaces and quality of life in people with dementia: results from the IDEAL programme (2021)

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Opportunity to see the play in an amazing setting: July 7th

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Filmed in 2000 - interesting to see how it differs from the book!

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Sophie Hannah and Dr Mark Aldridge discuss Poirot

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Poirot – The Greatest Detective in the World | National Centre for Writing | NCW

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Mark Aldridge and Sophie Hannah discuss the 100-year history of one of Agatha Christie’s most beloved creations

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Engaging with the Arts = good for your health 

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Engaging with the Arts = good for your health 

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Proof if proof were needed...

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Engaging with arts and culture can slow biological aging as much as exercise, study suggests | CNN

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When it comes to slowing down our biological aging, engaging with arts and culture is as beneficial as physical activity, a new study suggests.

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Project Gutenberg publishes out of copyright texts in their entirety - great bit of AO4 and an entertaining read.

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Study In Scarlet, by Arthur Conan Doyle This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever.

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Not a long one but interesting for AO5.

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How Agatha Christie hides her plot secrets in plain sight

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Her artful misdirection of the reader is one of the key tricks that have wooed readers including TS Eliot

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Wider reading starting point. Great for AO4

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Sherlock Holmes to Sleuth: 10 of the greatest murder mysteries ever

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As the new Knives Out film, Wake Up Dead Man, is released on streaming, here are more ingenious – and confounding – whodunnits to watch and read.

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How our interpretations and responses to Shakespeare's work has shifted over time. Great for AO5 and AO3.

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From The Merchant of Venice to The Taming of the Shrew, it’s easy to see how Shakespeare’s plays can cause offence to contemporary audiences. Is it harder to teach Shakespeare today than in the past? Have ideas about what is offensive in Shakespeare changed over time?

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Lecture from Gresham College

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Are villains cardboard characters? If so, why do we enjoy them so much? Drawing examples from film and TV drama, as well as from popular fiction, this lecture will try to explain the satisfaction of villainy for the audience. Using the novels of Wilkie Collins and Thomas Hardy, it will look at the development of the villain in nineteenth-century fiction; and at examples of contemporary literary novelists, like Hilary Mantel, who are willing to unleash the energies of villainy.

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The novel in 90 minutes. No replacement for actually reading the book OBVIOUSLY!!!!

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Whodunnits - Hercule Poirot - The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - BBC Sounds

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Belgian sleuth Poirot retires to a village where a treacherous killer is lurking.

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Really interesting documentary about one author's journey into becoming a crime writer.

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In My Own Words - Series 2: Val McDermid

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‘Queen of Crime’ Val McDermid, creator of Karen Pirie and Wire in the Blood, reveals the real criminals and trauma that made her turn to crime writing.

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One of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies: family, betrayal and vile jellies.

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Lear divides his kingdom among his daughters. Family and state collapse into chaos and warfare. Lear and his youngest, Cordelia, are reunited; love reigns, then tragedy descends.

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Loads of reviews here and extracts - lots of bits to dip into. Comment below when you find something juicy

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Latest news, sport, business, comment, analysis and reviews from the Guardian, the world's leading liberal voice

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A Timeline of the genre

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Crime and Crime Fiction | The British Library

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Why was crime such a popular subject in 19th-century fiction? How did literature balance fear, social commentary and entertainment? Learn more here.

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The craft of crime fiction - great little discussion about the genre. Skip the first 5 minutes to miss the hard sell!

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A warren of bits and pieces. The algorithm is gonna get you.

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The Best of Crime, Mystery, and Thrillers

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Useful site with a variety of detectives and their tropes to explore.

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Great little exploration of the subgenre

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Great reading of Poe's seminal work.

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EMag Commentary on Browning's Monologues

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EMag Commentary on Browning's Monologues

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Interesting reading and analysis of the poems, includes some useful contextual information too.

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Lesson 04 Browning's Monologues - Emag Issue 85

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Unabridged. You're welcome.

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The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie | Hercule Poirot #4 | Full Audiobook

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BBC journalists choose their favourite 12 books of the year so far

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From multigenerational family sagas to speculative dystopias – the very best fiction of the year so far.

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Opening Lines - King Lear - Episode One - BBC Sounds

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John Yorke takes a look at King Lear, Shakespeare’s most brutal tragedy.

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Crime writer exploring ideas about the process 

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Crime writer exploring ideas about the process 

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English teacher turned writer thinking out loud about aspects of crime fiction.

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The Write Stuff | Barry Rainsford | Substack

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Building a platform around crime fiction. Want to be part of it? Click to read The Write Stuff, by Barry Rainsford, a Substack publication. Launched 9 days ago.

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interesting article from The Financial Times of all places!

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article from The Guardian considering the relevance of the novel today.

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It's now considered a masterpiece, but when The Great Gatsby was published a century ago the response was mixed, with one critic writing: "I don't even know whether it is fully intelligible to anyone who has not had glimpses of the kind of life it depicts." Back then, this life - which Fitzgerald had been living - was a gilded world reserved for the rich and well connected. His narrator, Nick Carraway, attends his nouveau riche neighbour's glittering gatherings in the summer of 1922, a time when many US families were living in poverty.

It was only when pocket-sized paperbacks of the book were given to US servicemen during the second world war (courtesy of the nonprofit Council On Books in Wartime) that The Great Gatsby became a hit. Perhaps the young men, far from their ordinary lives and pining for the girls they'd wooed in simpler times, connected with Gatsby (a figure left deliberately obscure by Fitzgerald so that any reader could imprint their own dreams on to him). As the war came to an end, maybe they saw themselves in Nick, the first world war returnee and observer who doesn't entirely fit into any of the social situations in which he finds himself.

Gilded life ... F Scott Fitzgerald. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Fitzgerald died in 1940 but his tale of nostalgia, love, class and America continued to connect with each new generation, inspiring artists and readers with its exquisite language and tragic, timeless arc. The people and politics at play in the book still resonate - the ugly far-right sentiments, the east-west coast divide, the negligence of the rich, the potent idea of trying to relive the past.

Today the wealth gap is just as significant as it was in Gatsby's time, but now everyone has a phone. No matter our background, we can observe decadent lifestyles via celebrities and influencers. Social media allows us all to understand Gatsby's very particular form of envy and social climbing. Who among us hasn't hated ourselves for covetously scrolling, pinching and zooming on the curated onscreen life of someone else? Gatsby's lonely ending, forsaken by all the guests who attended his meretricious soirees, is all too relatable in the age of tall poppy syndrome and cancel culture.

And the idea of men who have grown rich by dubious means flashing their cash and influence to overcompensate, peacock and doggedly pursue a personal dream is no longer unimaginable, it's the news. We have watched as the brutish, narcissistic and powerful talk in racist terms, lie with impunity and show zero regard for the fallout. Little wonder in the current climate that Fitzgerald's phrase about the Buchanans has been shared widely on social media: "they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness ... and let other people clean up the mess they had made".

Gatsby is 'gorgeous' to other characters and readers because he's the embodiment of 'what if?'

Other, more sentimental, truths in the novel also beguile as much now as they did in 1925 - there's a reason eternal romantic Taylor Swift hat-tips the novel in her songs (listen to the lyrics of Happiness and This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things). And it's easy to imagine how the split between the brand-building Gatsby's public and private personae might resonate with the pop star.

Gatsby is "gorgeous" to other characters and readers because he's the embodiment of "what if?", with his meteoric rise and belief in eternal hope. In this way he also represents the American dream: the idea that anyone can become anything. It's that "what if" fantasy that I wanted to reinterpret in my own novel, Gatsby, a reimagining of Fitzgerald's story for the 21st century, from the perspective of the people he serves least in the novel: the women.

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Fitzgerald's women are party "moths", onanistic mistresses, "small-breasted" athletes and beautiful heiresses whose voices "are full of money" - the author himself admitted The Great Gatsby's lack of fleshed-out female characters was a shortcoming when he wrote to his publisher Max Perkins to discuss why it had flopped on publication: "the book contained no important woman character, and women control the fiction market at present."

I wondered what the flaying social and public punishment might look like if Gatsby was female and dared to have ambition, how it might feel to receive the contempt we seem to reserve exclusively for women who stumble in the public eye. What might narrator Carraway have to say if she was operating in a world governed by clicks and comparison? Might Daisy be viewed differently if she was a handsome Peter Pan figure who could walk away from a mess as much because of his gender as his insulating wealth? In bringing Fitzgerald's players forward in time, flipping their genders and giving airtime to the marginalised voices, I've tried to create a new way to engage with a literary masterwork. Like the syncopated jazz of Gatsby's age, a familiar structure of notes reinterpreted into a new melody.

Gatsby by Jane Crowther is published by the Borough Press (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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From the jazz age to the Trump age: The Great Gatsby at 100

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Newly minted millionaires, corruption, nostalgia ... Fitzgerald's novel has never felt more relevant. Jane Crowther explores its resonance in popular culture from Taylor Swift songs to her own gender-flipped retelling

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Totally unironical - couple of guys discussing Goblin Market.

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Political Poems: ‘Goblin Market’ by Christina Rossetti, feat. Shirley Henderson and Felicity Jones

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Interesting read about gender and authorship and readership

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Books by women that every man should read: chosen by Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Richard Curtis and more | Books | The Guardian

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Studies show men avoid female authors. Ahead of the Women’s prize for fiction, chair of judges Mary Ann Sieghart finds out why – and we ask male authors to redress the balance

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For your reference and consideration

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Gilbert and Gubar's seminal work - maybe don't print this one out...!

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Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness - an essay on reading through the feminist critical lens

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Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness - Showalter

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The essay referred to in the AQA Anthology in full.

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Toril Moi - Feminist, female, feminine.pdf

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The 1968 lecture, 2 years before Sexual Politics was published. A helpful summary of some core concepts around feminist literary criticism.

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JSTOR essay exploring Nick as an unreliable narrator.

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Heaps of brilliant, reliable resources here to deepen and widen your literary knowledge

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Great article from the British Library

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Plot, characters, themes, context, settings - quick summaries to help synthesise your knowledge.

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GCSE Bitesize Revision | English Literature 5 - BBC Literary Archive

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2011 TV Analysis of The Great Gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald. Available to stream with the ERA Licence.

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Useful critique of modern interpretation; some interesting contextual details to note here.

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The greatness of F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel lies in its details. But they are often overlooked.

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A man divided: F Scott Fitzgerald and the birth of Gatsby

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A man divided: F Scott Fitzgerald and the birth of Gatsby

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Article from The Independent - useful contextual and critical views.

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Gifted, charismatic and impoverished, F Scott Fitzgerald fell hopelessly in love with rich socialite Ginevra King while still an undergraduate at Princeton. When the affair inevitably failed, her father was quick to admonish the aspiring writer. "Poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls." Had he heeded that advice, Fitzgerald may well have led a longer and happier life but he wouldn't have gone on to write the greatest novel of the 20th century.

Although he was desperate to break into the inner circle of the Waspish, protestant elite, Fitzgerald's limited means and Irish Catholic roots would cast him as a perennial outsider or "a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich man's school; a poor boy in a rich man's club at Princeton," as he later acknowledged. But his sense of exclusion would also provide his motivation and subject matter: "I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich and it has coloured my entire life and work."

After being rejected by Ginevra, a heartbroken, Fitzgerald dropped out of college and joined the army in the vain hope of seeing action overseas before the end of the war. As a young officer, Fitzgerald was stationed at Camp Sheridan in Alabama in March 1918 for basic training. History looked set to repeat itself when he unwisely became infatuated with wealthy southern belle Zelda Sayre, who could take her pick from the wealthy young officers who flocked to her family porch.

But Fitzgerald became her most persistent gentleman caller and he would later use the courtship as a model for Gatsby's youthful pursuit of Daisy. The rule that officers had to wear uniforms at all times, even while socialising, meant that he could disguise the extent of his threadbare poverty from Zelda. Gatsby later benefits from the same "invisibility cloak" with Daisy.

After being demobbed from the army in February 1919, Fitzgerald proposed to Zelda, who made it clear that she had no intention of being poor: "I'd just hate to live a sordid colourless existence." In the novel, Daisy dispatches Gatsby less brutally but ostensibly for the same reason.

From that moment the paths of Scott Fitzgerald and his creation, Jay Gatsby, separate into parallel arcs. While Fitzgerald heads to New York in an attempt to win fame and fortune, it's implied that Gatsby enters the murky underworld as bootlegger to build an enormous fortune in prohibition era Chicago. Both are driven by the same objective: to make themselves wealthy and therefore worthy enough to win the girl.

For Fitzgerald it was far from plain sailing. Having failed to secure a writing job with every newspaper in New York, Fitzgerald eventually settled for an advertising role which paid just $90 a week, hardly enough to think of marrying a girl like Zelda.

In the evenings, Fitzgerald wrote short stories with limited success. When Zelda rebuffed a further proposal in June, Fitzgerald fell into despair and a month-long drinking bender only paused by the introduction of prohibition on 1 July 1919.

Depressed to the point of suicide, Fitzgerald resigned his job returning to his midwest family home in St Paul, Minnesota, to rework a previously rejected manuscript into a new novel called This Side of Paradise, which he sent to a publisher more in hope than expectation. When they wrote back with their intention to publish, everything changed.

Zelda, delighted that the sudden prospect of fame and fortune pushed Fitzgerald through the threshold of eligibility, accepted his new proposal with brutal pragmatism. "I hate to say this but I don't think I had much confidence in you at first. It's so nice to know you can really do things."

This Side of Paradise was an overnight sensation that would make Fitzgerald the prince and chronicler of the jazz age. But Fitzgerald never forgot or forgave the terms of Zelda's conditional acceptance and confided in friends that he was struggling to recapture the thrill of their initial courtship.

From the earliest moments of their marriage, they were natural self-publicists. They upstaged gatherings with volatile behaviour and the power of their celebrity. As an Irish Catholic attempting to assimilate into the Wasp nest of American high society, F Scott Fitzgerald knew that social acceptance would be heavily contingent on his ability to be both wildly extravagant and entertaining.

But in private, their alcohol-fuelled rows convinced friends that their marriage would be short-lived. Friends also noticed how theit celebrity lifestyle and Zelda's expensive tastes made it difficult for Fitzgerald to find the time, space and sobriety to produce work of any real substance.

Fitzgerald was running up huge debts paying for hotels, jewellery, travel and extravagant parties, which he financed by churning out short stories for magazines. Financially, he seemed to be constantly running just to standstill.

Novels were lengthy investments of time and effort with no guarantee of financial success but commercial short stories were a sure thing that kept his creditors at arm's length.

Fitzgerald quickly came to resent cranking out light and frothy dross to a prescribed formula: "I've made half a dozen starts yesterday and today and I'll go mad if I have to do another debutante which is what they want."

In contrast, the extravagant Zelda welcomed the lucrative fees offered by the magazines although she later acknowledged the strain it placed on their relationship. "I always felt a story for the [Saturday Evening] Post was tops, a goal worth seeking. It really meant something you know - they only took stories of real craftmanship but Scott couldn't stand to write them."

The Great Gatsby's recurring theme of selling your soul for financial remuneration was beginning to stir in Fitzgerald's imagination. Exactly a century ago when their only daughter Frances was born, F Scott Fitzgerald was struck by his wife's welcoming words: "I'm glad it's a girl. And I'll hope she'll be a fool. That's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool." Three years later, he lifted them verbatim into the mouth of Daisy Buchannan in The Great Gatsby.

Fitzgerald was already mining his troubled marriage for material for the masterpiece that would expose the hollowness at the heart of the American dream. But for the time being, at least, Fitzgerald would have to keep cranking out mediocre short stories to pay for their lifestyle.

Although Daisy is infatuated by Gatsby, just as Zelda was smitten by Fitzgerald it becomes clear that her true soul mate is the establishment itself

Fitzgerald felt helpless and resented the way his living costs limited the quality of the work he could attempt. "I can't reduce our scale of living and I can't stand this financial insecurity. I had my chance in 1920 to start my life on a sensible scale and I lost it and so I'll have to pay the penalty. Then perhaps at 40 I can start writing again without constant worry and interruption."

In September 1922, the Fitzgeralds moved to Great Neck in Long Island to be close to New York, where Fitzgerald's disastrous first play, Vegetable,was being staged.

Its failure incurred enormous costs and Fitzgerald was forced to clear his debts by producing magazine short stories on an industrial scale, writing for 12 hours without a break and creating entire tales in a single sitting. He confided in a friend: "I really worked hard as hell last winter - but it was all trash and it nearly broke my heart as well as my iron constitution."

And yet somehow throughout this period Scott and Zelda were still partying hard, spending a staggering $36,000. The parties at Great Neck were to furnish Fitzgerald with much of the raw material for The Great Gatsby and the fictional setting of West Egg - the suburban stepping stone for those aspiring to join the establishment elite in East Egg.

But the decadence was unsustainable. Indebted and exhausted, the Fitzgeralds decamped to France to take advantage of the advantageous exchange rate and to finally give Scott Fitzgerald the time and space to write the serious novel he'd been craving to tackle for so long.

Zelda's hackles were raised because she could sense that she had become the inspiration for a cautionary tale of idealism corrupted by materialistic greed: "Scott has started a new novel and retired into strict seclusion and celibacy. He's horribly intent on it and has built up a beautiful legend about himself which corresponds somewhat to the old fable about the ant and the grasshopper. Me being the grasshopper."

Perhaps that resentment fuelled her affair with French aviator Edouard Josanne in July 1924 while Scott was working on a first draft of The Great Gatsby. The affair was undoubtedly a traumatic turning point which Scott later acknowledged. "That September, I knew something had happened that could never be repaired."

Fitzgerald even stopped drinking and experiencing what alcoholics call a moment of lucidity, redrafted the relationship between Gatsby, Daisy and Tom Buchannan into sharper focus. The character of Daisy is drawn in a new light - part Ginevra and Zelda, utterly charming but profoundly insincere - capable of capturing the heart of a naïve young man but completely unworthy of a wiser man's love.

Although Daisy is infatuated by Gatsby, just as Zelda was smitten by Fitzgerald it becomes clear that her true soul mate is the establishment itself, personified by her entitled and arrogant husband Tom Buchannan.

Fitzgerald casts Gatsby as a surrogate for himself - an idealistic and innocent bystander destroyed by his inability to truly understand the rich and their selfish instinct for self preservation .

By hosting extravagant parties held in his West Egg mansion, Gatsby hopes to entice Daisy back from the establishment enclave of East Egg.

Like the novel's narrator Nick Carraway, most readers are mesmerised by the giddying world of glamourous socialites quaffing champagne cocktails but as an outsider himself, Fitzgerald was also fascinated by the way the enormous wealth of the few depended on the impoverishment of the many and originally planned to call the novel Among Ash Heaps and Millionaires.

The brevity of The Great Gatsby suggests a genius writing at full gallop, making the most of his moment of lucidity to produce his masterpiece before succumbing to the financial allure of Hollywood

Drawing on his own personal experience, Fitzgerald specialises in drawing characters who yearn to break into the ranks of the rich and powerful. Through his vivid depiction of the Wilsons, the unhappily married couple who run the gas station in Ash Valley, Fitzgerald captures the sense of life literally passing them by.

Inspired by TS Eliot's The Waste Land, Ash Valley is the godforsaken no man's land symbolically stationed between wealth and want - on the road between East Egg and New York. Beneath the gigantic eyes of a judgmental advertising billboard, the Wilsons are made to feel their humiliating poverty very keenly. In this new era of mass advertising, the poor have been conditioned to conflate their worth with the possessions they can ill afford to buy.

Mr Wilson is even prepared to turn a blind eye to his wife's affair to buy the expensive car that Tom Buchannan dangles as bait. Through some rather heavy handed symbolism, Myrtle is even mown down chasing after Gatsby's car recklessly driven by Daisy.

Symbolically, Fitzgerald kills off all of the aspiring dreamers who naively believe they can make the transition to East Egg. A psychotic Wilson takes mistaken revenge on Gatsby before turning the gun on himself. Although the microcosmic casualty list stands at just three, Fitzgerald uses the word "holocaust" to allegorically imply the spiritual death of the macrocosmic millions of ordinary people laid to waste by the social mobility myth at the heart of the American dream.

Through the narrator Nick, Fitzgerald describes the nightmarish, soul destroying, drunken despair of the mortgaged millions trapped in the conformist suburban sprawl financing their personal versions of the dream on hire purchase.

"I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in a house - the wrong house. But no one knows the woman's name and no one cares."

West Egg represents aspiration as indebtedness, despair and self-destruction. Gatsby stands as a surrogate for the author: faintly ridiculous, slightly vulgar, ceaselessly energetic, but endearingly idealistic and innocent. Like Gatsby he too had believed that "the rock of the world was founded on a fairy's wing" but in killing off his "hero", Fitzgerald surrenders the idealistic innocence of his youth to the cynical pragmatism of real life.

At the end of the novel, Fitzgerald shares Nick Carraway's epiphany while looking over Gatsby's folly of a mansion. His compromised patchwork quilt career of glitzy short stories is just like "that huge incoherent failure of a house".

In the novel, the islands East egg and West Egg may only be separated by a small body of water of water but Fitzgerald makes it clear that in reality, the gap is an ocean. After five years of marriage Fitzgerald had belatedly realised that the only way to get to East Egg was to be born there. Elites may temporarily open their doors to diverting bootleggers or brilliant novelists, but ultimately they repel boarders: you will never belong.

By 1925, Fitzgerald could already sense that there wasn't going to be a fairy tale ending. The brevity of The Great Gatsby suggests a genius writing at full gallop, making the most of his moment of lucidity to produce his masterpiece before succumbing to the financial allure of Hollywood and his rapid descent into alcoholism.

Towards the end of his life, in a letter to his daughter Fitzgerald revealed how much he regretted prostituting his talent for short-term financial gain. "When I was your age, I lived with a great dream. The dream grew and I learned how to speak of it and to make people listen. Then the dream divided one day when I decided to marry your mother after all, even though I knew she was spoiled and meant no good to me. I was sorry immediately I had married her, but being patient in those days, made the best of it and got to love her in another way. You came along and for a long time we made quite a lot of happiness out of our lives. But I was a man divided - she wanted me to work too much for her and not enough for my dream."

But The Great Gatsby remains his "fragment shored up against his ruin" - a masterful depiction of how some sacrifice their lives to the pragmatism of making a living and how only the rich are spared that indignity.

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A man divided: F Scott Fitzgerald and the birth of Gatsby

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Between bouts of drinking, Fitzgerald found the lucidity to write one of the greatest American books of all time. At least partially, it was inspired by his own turbulent relationship, writes Sean Smith

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Speedy light-hearted introduction of themes

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Like Pale Gold - The Great Gatsby Part 1: Crash Course English Literature #4

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Helps us make sense of his motives and characterisations.

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Have a mooch through here and see what treasures you can unearth!

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A dramatic reimagining of the story.

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Drama on 3 - Gatsby in Harlem (Part 1) - BBC Sounds

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F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, reimagined by Roy Williams and starring Ncuti Gatwa

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Useful little guide to enhance your interpretation of the novel

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Bite size podcasts with top tips for English Literature students - explore and see what else you can find.

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The Great Gatsby: Language Choices and Form - A Level English Literature Learning & Revision

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Listen to this episode from Revise - A Level English Lit Revision on Spotify. In this episode, Anna gives an overview of the language choices in and form of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby for your A level English Literature exam. Perfect for AQA Specification A and B.

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If you can get a ticket to see this, do! If not, at least watch the trailer here

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The Great Gatsby Musical | London Coliseum | Spring 2025

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Experience The Great Gatsby Musical at the London Coliseum, Spring 2025. A dazzling, Jazz Age spectacle filled with love, longing, and the party of the century!

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A bit basic but some fundamentals here you should be aware of.

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The Great Gatsby - Higher English - BBC Bitesize

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Higher English The Great Gatsby learning resources for adults, children, parents and teachers.

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In case you forget yours :)

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An Article from The English Review

exploring the novel's presentation of the American dream, linked to the film Brooklyn

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The American Dream - Gatsby English Review Article

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Atonement: A Conversation with Ian McEwan

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Atonement: A Conversation with Ian McEwan

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Interesting interview article exploring Atonement and the drafting process

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A bit of context if you're interested. Don't get too caught up in this though; the play's the thing.

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BBC - History - British History in depth: The Reign of Richard II, 1377 to 1399

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Ian Bremner assesses the meteoric fall of Richard II.

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BBC Sounds - Queens of Crime - Available Episodes

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Listen to the latest episodes of Queens of Crime on BBC Sounds.

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For those of you serious about getting into creative writing, Arvon offers some amazing retreats.

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Arvon at Home Writing Week: Historical Fiction

Writing the past into life

Arvon at Home Masterclass: The Art of the Pitch and Proposal

Zoom masterclass with Janine Giovanni

Arvon at Home Writing Week: Writing for Children and Young Adults

Finding Your Narrative Voice

Arvon at Home: Live Guest Reading

Reading and Q&A with Amrou Al-Kadhi via Zoom

Arvon at Home Writing Week: Non-Fiction

Writing on Nature and Human Nature

Arvon at Home Writing Week: Fantastic Flash Fiction

From Inspiration to Publication

Arvon at Home: Live Guest Reading

Live reading and Q&A with Rebecca Watson via Zoom

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Creative Writing Courses in 2020 - Course Search - Arvon

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Writing the past into life Zoom masterclass with Janine Giovanni Finding Your Narrative Voice Reading and Q&A with Amrou Al-Kadhi via Zoom Writing on Nature and Human Nature From Inspiration to Publication Live reading and Q&A with Rebecca Watson via Zoom

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Interesting read about gender and authorship and readership

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Books by women that every man should read: chosen by Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Richard Curtis and more | Books | The Guardian

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Studies show men avoid female authors. Ahead of the Women’s prize for fiction, chair of judges Mary Ann Sieghart finds out why – and we ask male authors to redress the balance

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Interesting interpretation of the play and its relevance today

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Interesting interpretation of the play and its relevance today

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Woman’s Hour - The first all-women-of-colour cast and crew production of Richard II - BBC Sounds

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The star and co-director of Richard II, Adjoa Andoh. Women and leadership. Parental leave

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Documentary about the Historical Richard II

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Documentary about the Historical Richard II

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Richard II - England's Most Tragic King Documentary

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TL;DR (may contain spoilers): Richard wastes money, steals land, and kills political rivals; people are angry and rebel; Henry becomes king.; he kills political rivals.
Richard II Summary

King Richard II banishes Henry Bolingbroke, seizes noble land, and uses the money to fund wars. Henry returns to England to reclaim his land, gathers an army of those opposed to Richard, and deposes him. Now as Henry IV, Henry imprisons Richard, and Richard is murdered in prison.

More detail: 2 minute read
Act I

The play opens in King Richard's court, as Henry Bolingbroke, son of Gaunt (the Duke of Lancaster), challenges Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk. Henry accuses Mowbray of being involved in the recent death of the King's uncle (who is also Henry's uncle; Henry and the King are cousins). Richard gives in to their demands to work out their differences in one-on-one combat at Coventry.

As the tournament begins, the uncertain and impulsive Richard stops the contest. Instead Richard chooses to exile both Henry and Mowbray. He banishes Mowbray for life. And responding to Henry's father Lancaster's pleas, he limits Henry's exile to six years.

Charles Kean as Richard II, 1857

Act II

In line with his customary behaviour, Richard is misled by his friends into poor government of the country. Henry's father, Gaunt, dies, finally broken by his son's banishment, and by the state of the kingdom under Richard's rule. Richard takes possession of Gaunt's land and money. It turns out that he has also been leasing out royal land. Both of these monetary acquisitions have helped him to fund wars with Ireland. His nobles are dismayed, not only because of the waste of the kingdom's money but also for fear over the security of their own estates.

To make matters worse, Richard leaves on an expedition to Ireland. When Henry hears that his father has died and that Richard took his inheritance, he returns from exile with an invading army. The commoners and nobles are already critical of Richard. They welcome Henry in the north, led by the powerful Earl of Northumberland, Henry Percy. Henry marches through England, gathering his willing forces.

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle... This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.
- Richard II, Act 2 Scene 1

Richard II, 1903

Act III

Richard arrives back after the Irish war to find that his Welsh allies have dispersed. Furthermore, his cousin, Duke of York, unable to prevent Henry's triumphant return, has joined him instead. Some more of Richard's friends have also betrayed the King's cause. Others have been executed on Henry's orders. After taking refuge at Flint castle, Richard surrenders and agrees to go to London, where the lords will decide what should happen next.

Act IV-V

In view of the insurrections against him, King Richard is persuaded to step down in favour of Henry Bolingbroke, now King Henry IV. Richard hands over his crown in a ceremony. Henry subsequently imprisons him in Pontefract castle. Richard's queen is sent home to France. Some lords join in a plot against Henry but York, the father of one of the nobles, relates their machinations to Henry. Henry spares the son of York, but he is now aware of his tenuous position as king.

Henry implies to Exton that he would like to be rid of his threats, and Exton then murders Richard. He brings the body to London. Henry claims innocence, blaming Exton for misunderstanding his intentions. The play ends as King Henry banishes Exton, orders a funeral for Richard, and swears to make reparation for his cousin's death by going on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

Richard II, RSC, 1973

With mine own tears I wash away my balm, With mine own hands I give away my crown.
- Richard II, Act 4 Scene 1

King Henry IV's rule (and his dealings with his son, Hal, who eventually becomes King Henry V) are the subject of Shakespeare's plays, Henry IV Part 1 and Henry IV Part 2.

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Summary of William Shakespeare's Richard II: Richard wastes money, steals land, and kills political rivals; people are angry and rebel; Henry becomes king.; he kills political rivals.

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A blog from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust

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Shakespeare’s Richard II - Myth or Reality?

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Examining Shakespeare’s portrayal of Richard II.

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Some helpful notes here about Shakespeare's language choices in the play, particularly look at the significance of rhyme

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Reading Shakespeare’s Language: Richard II | Folger Shakespeare Library

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Folger Shakespeare Library is the world's largest Shakespeare collection, the ultimate resource for exploring Shakespeare and his world. Shakespeare belongs to you. His world is vast. Come explore. Join us online, on the road, or in Washington, DC.

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A light hearted but accurate summary of the play. You're welcome.

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Here it is, the entirety of my scene-by-scene re-telling of Richard II, all lumped together on one page and with all the extraneous commentary and video clips stripped out. (If you want all the extraneous bits, start here.)

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Richard II, Scene by Scene - Good Tickle Brain

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Here it is, the entirety of my scene-by-scene re-telling of Richard II, all lumped together on one page and with all the extraneous commentary and video clips stripped out. (If you want all the extraneous bits, start here.)

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Great lecture from the excellent Ben Crystal exploring Original Pronunciation - explains the non-rhymes in Richard II.

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watch the interview for insights into this production and performance.

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Discover unforgettable British theatre - any time, anywhere. More fantastic plays are added every month, so there's always something new to look forward to.

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Interesting video which gives background to the genre.

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Japanese Version of 'The Murder of Roger Ackroyd'

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Japanese Version of 'The Murder of Roger Ackroyd'

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Worth watching for the performance of Poirot alone...

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Kuroido Goroshi (2018) | Special Movie: KUROIDO GOROSHI.

March 1952, the only doctor in the village Shiba had found a dead body of Sanako. The cause of death is overdose of... | By Luxury KidsFacebook

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Special Movie: KUROIDO GOROSHI.

March 1952, the only doctor in the village Shiba had found a dead body of Sanako. The cause of death is overdose of...

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Useful Article

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English and Media Centre Magazine Article

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Fantastic version of 'And Then There Were None'

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Period murder mystery based on Agatha Christie's novel.

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Agatha Christie Documentary

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Agatha Christie: Lucy Worsley on the Mystery Queen

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Lucy Worsley discovers the origins of Agatha Christie's macabre magic.

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Academic article about the presentation of women in the play.

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Lecture series from Oxford's Emma Smith on all of Shakespeare's plays. Really useful for extending your knowledge of the bard and his works!

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Each lecture in this series focuses on a single play by Shakespeare, and employs a range of different approaches to try to understand a central critical question about it.

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Can a king possess the divine charisma of his office as his own personal quality, or power, or protection? Can the personal wickedness of a bad ruler contaminate the office? These are the questions taken up by modern interpreters of Richard II, who focus-not surprisingly-on the relation between Richard's view of the king's divine right and his problematic behavior. Proponents of the view that the play treats skeptically the Tudor doctrine of the divinely appointed king often identify the force of the critique with the unflattering characterization of Richard. For example, John Halverson claims that Richard "is never aware" of his contribution to the play's mockery of divine right; "he does sincerely believe in the divinity of his kingship, sincerely believes his downfall to be solely the work of traitors, and is sincerely sorry for himself"; his unintended exposure of "royal pretensions and royal ambitions" is thus, ironically, "a self-exposure," and this is what makes the play a "lamentable comedy" rather than tragedy. Richard is not only a mean-spirited knave but also a fool "who has cast himself in the role of tragic hero, a role that no one else in the play takes seriously," and whose "fall is directly due to his own folly" 352, 362.

It is easy to concur with the claim that if Richard is an advocate of divine right he is unconvincing. But is he an advocate? What if it can be shown that the play represents him not as an advocate but as a critic, not as one who means simply to assert the ideology but as one who mocks and undermines it? To go back a step, what would it take to show this? What shift of interpretive perspective is required to refocus Richard as not only the object but also the chief source of the play's mockery? We might begin by thinking about the play and its primary source, Holinshed's Chronicles, and by considering the most obvious distinction between narrative and theater, Holinshed's medium and Shakespeare's: the dramatist represents characters only through the words they speak to and about each other. That would seem to be a severe restraint, a challenge for the playwright to overcome. Unlike the chronicler, the playwright can't represent himself describing actions, commenting on character, and sympathizing or criticizing in his own voice. Characters can only be represented in and performed by their speech. But by the same token the playwright can represent characters representing themselves in a much more sustained and consistent manner than in poetry or prose mediated by a narrator. If the functions or powers of description, representation, and interpretation are to survive the passage from narrative to theater, they must be transferred to and wholly vested in dramatic speakers.

One of the ways Shakespeare met this challenge was to develop the art of representing self-representation, that is, the art of representing speakers who seem aware that in their words and actions they represent themselves to others, speakers who try to control the effects of their self-representation and who thus use their language the way actors do in an effort to impose on their auditors a particular interpretation of the persons they pretend to be. How, then, would a reading of Richard II that takes into account the emphasis on self-representation be affected by it? What would happen, in other words, if we tried to keep our attention consistently focused on the interpretation of himself that Richard performs for the benefit of his auditors-and, I add, for his own benefit, since I assume that a performer can't represent himself to others without at the same time representing himself to himself. My answer is that it would make it much more difficult to accept the prevailing view illustrated by Halverson's reading of Richard as a politically incompetent knave who is undone by his own folly and who is the butt of the play's irony. On the contrary, such a shift of perspective would show that, from the beginning of the play, Richard performs the role of the Bad Richard, bad both as a person and as a king, and that he does it with wry "in your face" gusto that shows him-again, from the beginning of the play-asking for trouble.

Before trying to support this reading I would like to suggest what I think is at stake in rejecting the view of Richard as a king committed to the doctrine of the divine right of kings. In spite of all the Shakespearean innovations and departures by which Halverson distinguishes Shakespeare's Richard from Holinshed's-the rhetorical extravagance, the irritating tendency to strike poses and hog the stage, the shift of emphasis from politically justified to gratuitously aggressive behavior-this insistence that the play's Richard is the unwitting victim of his own folly reinscribes him in the traditional chronicle portrait but without the occasional sympathy that made Holinshed's view of Richard interestingly ambivalent. Holinshed also represents Richard as the victim of his own folly but shuttles back and forth between sympathizing with or apologizing for him and lambasting his "insolent misgovernance" and loose living. The chronicle keeps its reader in touch with a prelapsarian Richard, the anointed king who "knew his title just, true, and infallible; and his conscience cleane, pure, and without spot of envie or malice," and who was "a right noble and woorthie prince" before succumbing to "the frailtie of wanton youth" and the influence of evil counselors. Compared with this, Halverson's essay illustrates a tendency to be-and to find Shakespeare-more judgmental and to expose beneath Richard's showy exterior the stereotypical core of a morality figure, the example of a bad king. This is what may be called a voyeuristic reduction. It implies that critic, playwright, and audience see and know the character better than he sees and knows himself; it elevates their moral power at his expense.

I propose to begin instead with the hypothesis that Shakespeare took up Holinshed's unthematized and unfocused ambivalence, sharpened its focus, and transferred it to Richard as the attitude-or set of attitudes-his language shows him to perform not only before others but also before himself. This hypothesis allows us to treat all assessments of reactions to Richard by his auditors onstage or off as mirrors or echoes of his reaction to himself. So, for example, Phyllis Rackin's account of the way the play's opening scenes work "to make Richard contemptible in the eyes of the audience" becomes a clue to the way Richard works to make himself appear contemptible to his onstage audience by treating them with a degree of contempt guaranteed to alienate them and weaken his position. In fact, by the time Gaunt warns him that he is "possessed now to depose [himself]" 2.1.114, we have begun to wonder whether he is not daring-or perhaps begging-his interlocutors to check him, soliciting punishment even as he tries to see how much he can get away with. However flippant his utterances are in these scenes, they are edged with anger that seems directed as much toward himself as toward his interlocutors.

This verbal aggressiveness may be illustrated by Richard's very first words:

Old John of Gaunt, time-honored Lancaster,

Hast thou, according to thy oath and band,

Brought hither Henry Hereford, thy bold son,

Here to make good the boist'rous late appeal,

Which then our leisure would not let us hear,

Against the Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Mowbray?

Richard begins with a string of blunt monosyllables that identify the addressee by place of birth "Old John of Gaunt," that is, John from Gaunt, or Ghent. These are rhythmically organized to accentuate "Old . . . Gaunt," so that they lean on the association of age with weakness or impotence. They are followed by the resonant polysyllables of the first qualifier, the ducal title, "time-honored Lancaster." The shift upward from "Old" to "time-honored" gives the expression of respect for seniority a wicked bite-makes it puffier, more suspect as a mystifying euphemism, because it appears to countervail the snide allusion to senility. Richard's second qualifier, "according to thy oath and band," quietly turns a purely rhetorical and ceremonial question into an admonitory nudge: "have you lived up to your promise?" Young Bolingbroke has been troubling the king's peace, and old Gaunt will be held responsible for his boisterous boy's good behavior. Finally, Richard's explanation for ignoring Hereford's "boist'rous late appeal" is so bizarre that editors have in effect rewritten it: they have insisted that "our leisure" in line 5 must mean want or lack of leisure. But given his obvious pleasure in what may be characterized as a kind of ceremonial trash-talking, Richard may well mean what he says-that is, "I chose not to let official business or unruly youngsters interrupt my leisure, my playtime." I find this both plausible and hilarious as a sequel to his insistence on the promptness, the obedience, he expects from Gaunt: "We expect you to hop to it when we give an order. We, on the other hand, will attend to these matters when we aren't busy doing something less important." In short, "Look how Bad we are. And what are you going to do about it?"

These lines foreshadow what will soon become evident: Richard is a tart and witty practitioner of the politics of oratory whose occasional mimicry of the way his interlocutors deploy the resources of the genre suggests more than a touch of cynicism. He goes out of his way to offend those by whom he has cause to suspect he is threatened, and indeed his obvious contempt for Gaunt seems linked to the latter's refusal to stand up to Richard's bullying. Richard goes on pushing and bullying until he finally succeeds in arousing organized resistance to his conspicuously arbitrary displays of power and violations of his subjects' rights. In current parlance, he "has an attitude": whatever trouble he gets is trouble he asks for. To recognize this is to view his apparently radical change of behavior in 3.2 with suspicion. If after returning from Ireland the "new Richard" is "hysterically indecisive" and "more embarrassing than sympathetic" Halverson 355, if he refuses to take action and instead flaunts his helplessness and luxuriates in self-pity, the thought that he is a knowing accomplice in his undoing even as he loudly proclaims himself an innocent victim makes it difficult to take his self-representation as a betrayed Christ-figure at face value.

The consequence of assuming he "sincerely believes his downfall to be solely the work of traitors, and is sincerely sorry for himself" Halverson 360 is the conviction that he must be remarkably stupid. We can save him from this by imagining that the speaker of Richard's words in 3.2 remembers no less than we remember about the same speaker's performances in 1.1, 1.3, 1.4, and 2.1. Then it will be easier to read or hear the royal victim's protestations of outrage as acts of parody, easier to imagine that he glories not only in expressing self-pity but also in displaying it, and by "it" I mean not the self-pity per se but its expression.

Once we grant Richard the minimal self-awareness of his seemingly calculated campaign to get himself victimized, it becomes obvious that his hyperarticulate flights of menace and lament in 3.2 and after are self-discrediting provocations, that is, rhetorical outbursts intended to embarrass those who are foolish enough to continue encouraging him to stay the course when he and they know it is a course he has thoroughly discredited. At least from the moment in which he directs them to "Mock not my senseless conjuration" 3.2.23, he seems obsessed, exhilarated, by a histrionic project guaranteed to try their dignity as well as their patience: he throws himself into a high-decibel mimicry and mockery of a bad-faith role we are all familiar with because it is a cultural readymade, a well-formed strategy of self-representation anyone can perform, the victim's discourse pithily expressed in Lear's self-pitying rationalization, "I am a man / More sinned against than sinning." This rationalization obviously defends against the speaker's apprehension that he may be more sinning than sinned against. Various versions of the victim's discourse are utilized by Gaunt and York, and Richard's parody may be directed against all those who have countenanced his crimes and disclaimed responsibility for their passivity or nonresistance. On another level, the parody may be directed against the hapless, helpless figure of Poor Richard one finds in the chronicles, as if Shakespeare's Richard is making fun of Holinshed's Richard. For anyone who finds allusions to-and not merely echoes of-the chronicle account in the play, this could contribute to a critique of the simplistic morality, the absence of any narrative penetration into or interpretation of the motivational infrastructure of events, that characterizes Richard's story in the chronicles.

This critical relation to the chronicle is evident in the most important of Shakespeare's departures. Richard doesn't have much to say for himself in Holinshed. Richard II corrects this in a way that suggests a correlation between haplessness and inadequate opportunities for self-representation. Shakespeare's Richard "does nothing but talk and talk and talk," Halverson complains 352, but he goes on to make a striking suggestion: the "astonishing eloquence [that] seems to have been Shakespeare's invention" is "the verbal equivalent of Richard's beautiful physical appearance"; "none of his sources credits the king with a reputation for fine speech, although they do regularly mention his handsome features and dress" 360. More forcefully, there is not only equivalence but also displacement, as if Shakespeare saw in the narcissism of fine appearance a less sensitive and nuanced medium of self-expression than the narcissism of fine speech-as if the performer's dressing himself up in speech can do more justice to the complex erotic charge of his investment in the visual and verbal media that represent him to himself and others. Critics have always observed that Richard is in love with the sound of his own speech-is a Poet King as well as a Player King-and I have been trying to bring out the elements of self-parody, self-critique, and self-loathing that constitute the richness of such love. In this connection I find it significant that the play virtually ignores a side of Richard that Holinshed associates with his fine appearance-that is, his participation in "the filthie sinne of leacherie and fornication" that "reigned abundantlie" in his court. It redirects attention from Richard's pleasures in sex to his pleasures in speech and from sexual aggression to verbal aggression. Where the chronicle associates Richard's misgovernance and fall with luxurious self-indulgence, the play associates it with luxurious self-representation.

Shakespeare thus replaces Holinshed's royal victim with a more complicated figure who seems to go out of his way to get himself victimized and then blames his victimization on others. It is as if the author of Richard II, trying to give an old story a new twist, decided to do this by having the character himself give the story of his decline and fall a new twist; as if Richard enters the play already knowing he had been-would be-deposed and decides to rewrite his story by preemptively taking his deposition into his own hands. This is not to deny that Bolingbroke is a usurper and regicide. But if Richard is actively complicit in his own undoing, if he is the usurper's silent partner or-to put it more forcefully-his seducer, if he contributes more aggressively to his deposition than Bolingbroke knows, then the portrayal of Bolingbroke is also radically altered. Bolingbroke remains a usurper and regicide, but he also, in a strange way, becomes Richard's victim.

In the discussion that follows I shall try to show that Richard entertains the idea of getting deposed well before deposition becomes a clear and definite option for Bolingbroke, who is neither consistently nor decisively committed to usurpation until Richard forces him in 3.3 to commit himself see 206-7 and 214-18. Though Richard doesn't move to abdicate until 4.1, when he adopts Bolingbroke as his heir 112 -18, he drops hints from the very beginning that suggest he finds his cousin impressively qualified to serve as his usurper, and he proceeds to goad and in effect seduce him into performing that service.

Richard's contrariness is evident in the episode that opens the play. His cousin Henry Bolingbroke has accused Thomas Mowbray, the duke of Norfolk, of treason and requested that the king let him justify the charge in trial by combat, a judicial ritual in which God supposedly is the umpire who picks the winner and thus reveals the truth. Richard at first tries to persuade the participants to back off, and when they refuse, he schedules it for a later date. On the second occasion he again intervenes and prevents the duel, but only after acting as if he will let it happen. Then he chastises the would-be combatants as prideful and envious disturbers of the peace, and banishes them, Mowbray for life and Bolingbroke for ten years, subsequently reduced to six. What does he stand to gain by stopping the duel and banishing the combatants?

According to the specific conventions of trial by combat, if Bolingbroke were to win it would be God's way of declaring Mowbray guilty. As we learn later, Richard's guilt and Mowbray's complicity in the murder of Gloucester are already assumed see 1.2; they don't have to be made evident to Gaunt, the duchess of Gloucester, the duke of York, or, presumably, Bolingbroke. Bolingbroke's accusation sends a message to Richard and others, but were Mowbray to be defeated he would, dead or alive, officially carry the blame he unofficially shared with Richard. On the other hand, were Mowbray to win, he would redeem his honor by "proving" Bolingbroke a liar, and he would thus protect Richard. Richard, then, stops a fight by which he would be protected, officially "cleared," no matter who won. That he stops it in a manner calculated to anger and dishonor the two combatants hardly seems motivated by political self-interest. Furthermore, Bolingbroke, the appellant, is on the face of it the more dangerous of the two. Why, then, does Richard banish Mowbray for good but give Bolingbroke some encouragement to return from exile? These moves reveal Richard's interest in not being protected either by Mowbray's victory or by Mowbray's judicial assumption of guilt if Bolingbroke won. In short, Richard seems to want to keep open the possibility-and maintain control-of his self-destruction. But why? Richard's actions in 1.1 and 1.3 are as Holinshed reports them, but Shakespeare makes it clear through Richard's language, especially in 1.4 and 2.1, that Richard's abuse of his royal office, while unconscionable, is not unconscious. He knows very well what he is doing when he milks the "royal domain" to support not only his Irish war but also his extravagance 1.4.44-53, and when he expropriates Bolingbroke's inheritance 2.1.167-219. He knows, in short, that he has abused and slandered the office as well as the idea of kingship; if he accepts the dogma that the king is God's deputy, he knows very well that God did not choose-or lacked the power-to prevent him from using his divine office to commit "murders, treasons, and detested sins" 3.2.44. Indeed, even as he uses these words to characterize those who, like "this thief, this traitor Bolingbroke," will be exposed and guiltily "self-affrighted" by the light of the returning sun-king 3.2.36 -54, his terms of accusation apply to himself. This diatribe against Bolingbroke is rhetorically excessive and self-delighting, savage and bitter in tone, as it wickedly flashes a lining of mockery mixed with self-mockery. For Richard has already shown himself to be-and heard himself called-a thief of his subjects' property and his uncle's life. It is as if he enjoys hinting to his supporters and sycophants that he is speaking of his depravity and theirs, and that the God who lets his deputy do what Richard does and speak as he now speaks must be willing to let him get away with murder. Thus if he ever was wedded to the idea that the occupant of the throne was morally constrained or uplifted by the sanctity of divine kingship, he has already divorced himself from it. The energy with which he mocks the rhetoric of sanctification testifies less to cynicism than to the bitterness of an apostate, an ex-believer.

When, for example, he invokes the assistance of stones and angels, Richard's utterance vibrates with a range of parodic and sarcastic tones, as in the statements following the diatribe against Bolingbroke:

Not all the water in the rough rude sea

Can wash the balm off from an anointed king.

The breath of worldly men cannot depose

The deputy elected by the Lord.

For every man that Bolingbroke hath pressed

To lift shrewd steel against our golden crown,

God for His Richard hath in heavenly pay

A glorious angel. Then, if angels fight,

Weak men must fall, for heaven still guards the right.

Broadly parodied in lines 57-58 is a well-known principle of nonresistance to the ruler-even a bad ruler-promulgated by the Elizabethan government: the idea that the ruler's subjects should not resist is here replaced by the idea that they couldn't possibly do so. The lines leave open the possibility that although only the Lord has the authority to depose an anointed king, He may delegate that to his deputy-who may bring it about by his own nonresistance, as Richard suggests when, in lines 59-63, he reduces the bishop of Carlisle's plea for action 27 -32 to an argument for remaining inactive and leaving the good fight to heaven.

By such mordant utterances Richard conveys the sense that if he was once convinced of the dogma that the monarch is the Lord's deputy and therefore secure from "worldly men," he no longer believes it and now condemns himself for having believed it. The more pressing question for Richard is whether it is by divine will that he has been able to get away with all he has been accused of, and, if so, what this says about the power of that divine will or about his relation to it. Since at several points in the first two acts he cheerfully demonstrates his lawlessness 1.4.44-53 and 60-65; 2.1.161-70 and 218-19, his subsequent appeals to the rhetoric of divinely ordained kingship in Acts 3 and 4 can hardly be accepted at face value. There are not enough clues in his language to enable us to determine whether he is defying or slandering God, trying to prove that God is helpless to stop him or that God legitimizes knavery. But there are many clues that, although he may deem himself beyond forgiveness, he is interested in punishment, and that he is prepared to subject any conviction of invulnerability to earthly powers to a serious test. In Ernst Kantorowicz's political reading of the play, Richard becomes "a traitor to his own immortal body politic and to kingship such as it had been to his day"; therefore he is complicit in the destruction not only of his "body natural" but also of "the indelible character of the king's body politic, god-like or angel-like." My point is that awareness of the betrayal is inscribed in Richard's language, that it is the source of his self-contempt and of his often sarcastic use of Christian rhetoric.

I want to emphasize that it is not merely poetic effusion we hear in such utterances as the diatribe against Bolingbroke discussed above, and it is not merely arrogance; rather it is a diffuse contempt aimed both at the ideology of kingship and at his performance as king. It is a contempt inscribed in the mocking irony of his setting himself up as Christ 4.1.177-80, 248-53, coming down as Phaëton the usurper of the sun-god's chariot 3.3.183 -84, and playing the role of a Faustus forced to stage-manage his own secular damnation. He shows contempt for an ideology of sacralized kingship powerless to restrain his abuses; contempt for those around him who, if they don't actually believe in the ideology, continue to invoke it, especially when they want to excuse or justify the inaction that lets him go on abusing and slandering it. His conspicuous disregard and rejection of defensive measures, indeed, his going out of his way to antagonize powerful enemies and give them the advantage, is the familiar symptom or index of a desire to seek the punishment one feels one deserves. The advantage of inducing others to cut him down to size is that he can blame them while enjoying the savor of his victimage. The disadvantage is that such a strategy can only increase his self-contempt.

This spiraling oscillation-between contempt for self and contempt for others, between the impulse to aggression against oneself and the impulse to aggression against others-is inscribed in Richard's rhetoric and politics. It patterns the course of his behavior and the trajectory of his career. It motivates his perverse, skillfully managed project: to begin the process of getting himself deposed, choose a likely candidate for the job, give him the motive and the cue to action, reward him with the title of usurper, and leave him with a discredited crown. The first item in this schedule is announced early in the play by Gaunt: "[thou] art possessed now to depose thyself" 2.1.114. But Richard's appreciation of Bolingbroke's qualifications has already found its way into his language in the play's opening scene:

How high a pitch his resolution soars!

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Were he my brother, nay, my kingdom's heir,

As he is but my father's brother's son,

Now by my scepter's awe I make a vow:

Such neighbor nearness to our sacred blood

Should nothing privilege him. . . .

This display of evenhandedness has another side to it, a side that appears when Richard first calls Mowbray and Bolingbroke "to our presence" in words that momentarily suggest the opposing knights will confront him rather than each other:

Face to face

And frowning brow to brow, ourselves will hear

The accuser and the accusèd freely speak.

Like the nefarious dangling participle that manuals of style always warn about, the parallel adverbial phrases unsettle the meaning because they are attracted as modifiers to "ourselves will hear" before they reach their rightful destination as descriptions of the way the opponents will speak. The oddly pluralized royal plural "ourselves" rather than "ourself" encourages this diversion: if only for a second, it depicts Richard self-divided into two opponents before the image is twice recomposed, successively modulating into phantasms of Richard vs. the others and of Bolingbroke vs. Mowbray. The central scenario of the play is epitomized in the oscillation between Richard against himself and against the others, and the wonderfully apt syntactical confusion in the utterance registers the scenario as-at this point-no more than a pressure on language, a sequence of accidental flickers, nothing so clear as an intention of the speaker.

The scenario moves a little closer toward the intentional status of a possible and nasty pun in 1.3 during the preliminaries to the duel. Richard concludes his response to Bolingbroke's ceremonial leave-taking with a smartly turned couplet, "Farewell, my blood-which, if today thou shed, / Lament we may but not revenge thee dead" 57 -58. The obvious message is that if Bolingbroke loses he will have unjustly-by the logic of judicial combat-shed the lineal blood his kinsman shares, so that there can be no royal redress. But the statement also lets "my blood-which, if today thou shed" be heard as "if you kill me," and this subversive hint is generated by the lines preceding the couplet:

We will descend and fold him in our arms.

Cousin of Hereford, as thy cause is right,

The speech rhythm accentuates the will to descend; the image of embrace, reinforced by the odd reference to "royal fight," darkly figures the desire coupling Richard and Bolingbroke in their dance toward deposition and regicide-and toward the subsequent regime of Henry IV, during which the usurper gradually comes to feel the embrace as a moral stranglehold. Of course the compelling power of these insinuations can be felt only by readers and auditors who know the whole story of Henry IV's reign. But since this story was enshrined in Tudor historiography, it is plausible to assume some familiarity with it on the part of at least some of the audiences for whom the plays were written. Or, to put it a little more rigorously, the plays presuppose and therefore construct-and will most richly reward-such an audience.

This effect of retrospective foreboding is again produced by Richard's language after he stops the fight and pronounces the sentences of banishment. In a puzzlingly gratuitous gesture, he commands both nobles to perform the following ritual:

Lay on our royal sword your banished hands.

Swear by the duty that you owe to God-

Our part therein we banish with yourselves-

To keep the oath that we administer:

You never shall, so help you truth and God,

Embrace each other's love in banishment,

Nor never look upon each other's face,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Nor never by advisèd purpose meet

To plot, contrive, or complot any ill

'Gainst us, our state, our subjects, or our land.

At this point nobody expects Bolingbroke and Mowbray, sworn enemies, to form an alliance. Why, then, does Richard so carefully give specific instructions about the sorts of things the exiles are not to do? More than a display of apprehensiveness, the speech carries the weight of an insult; it seems intended to rankle, as does the order that joins the two together in a symbolic tableau of cooperation. But it also actualizes and stabilizes the flickering image, evoked at 1.1.16 -18, of Richard and the two nobles "frowning brow to brow" as if the latter were in league against him.

Richard's parade of prohibitions winds eerily, riskily, toward the status of an invitation: as he lists the sorts of things they might well do were they willing to overcome their scruples and homebred hate when abroad, the prohibitions begin to sound like suggestions, proposals, or dares. "Our part therein we banish with yourselves"-that is, "you are now free to dissociate us from God; if you are dishonorable enough to join forces, no obligation to our part in the divine kingship need stand in the way of your returning to lay banished hands on our royal sword, crown, and body." My paraphrase is intended to accentuate what I detect as a wry acridity of tone in Richard's utterance, a histrionic pleasure in flaunting his control of ritual speech and action to the point of frustrating and antagonizing the participants, and ultimately-one already begins to suspect-of arousing resistance to his high-handed exploitation of sovereign privilege. Richard brings this self-subverting strategy to a first climax in 2.1 when he noisily seizes Bolingbroke's inheritance, dismisses in one airy couplet the duke of York's long, impassioned protest against this move, then blithely announces that he is placing the country in the shaky hands of that very protester while he himself dashes off to Ireland 161-232. All this is staged for the benefit of Northumberland and the other peers who are standing by, as if to invite and incite the uprising that is already in motion and that only as he seems to expect awaits "[t]he first departing of the King for Ireland" 301. When he returns from Ireland in 3.2 his success in mobilizing aggression against himself enables him to step comfortably into the victim's role he has solicited.

Someone else is also standing by in 2.1 and quietly watching Richard behave as if possessed to depose himself-so quietly, indeed, that critics often ignore her presence. The queen speaks one line at her entrance and is addressed once just before leaving when Richard briskly bids her be merry as he marches her offstage 2.1.231-32. Critics who puzzle over her strange and haunting rhetoric in 2.2 often write as if this is where she makes her first appearance, even though Bushy begins the scene by reminding her-and therefore the audience-of Richard's parting injunction in 2.1 that she should "Be merry," saying that she promised the king she would "lay aside life-harming heaviness" 2.2.2-3. We should take this as a cue to try to imagine what she may have observed or felt or thought in 2.1. Her foreboding in 2.2, her presentiment of giving birth to the monster, the "nothing" with which her "inward soul . . . trembles," is expressed in language so dense and tortured as to be conspicuously evasive.

What is it that she simultaneously hints at and resists? What does she flinch from as if trying not to acknowledge the nothing she knows, not to utter the name of the woe she bears? It must be more than the bad news Green brings 47-64, even though she calls Green "the midwife" who helps her soul bring "forth her prodigy" ( 65, 67. Following the uncanny force of the words that express her anxiety, the news of political danger seems anticlimactic. For if Bolingbroke is her "sorrow's dismal heir," the sorrow she gives birth to must be Richard. But what could that mean? In what sense is Richard the "woe" that she so tortuously insists is "nameless," the "grief" that haunts and impregnates her speech, the "unborn sorrow" she would like, perhaps, to abort? Lines 6 -9 suggest an answer:

. . . I know no cause

Why I should welcome such a guest as grief,

Save bidding farewell to so sweet a guest

As my sweet Richard.

That wistful and wishful-and perhaps already nostalgic-"sweet" may register her continuing loyalty and love in the face and against the grain of what she has just observed in 2.1. Richard's departure for Ireland troubles her less than the exchange of guests in which the sweet Richard has been displaced in her "inward soul" by the bitter Richard whom she now knows has willed to get rid of himself because he is possessed by and reduced to the self-loathing of despair. The queen balks at calling her "prodigy" Richard's child, for the nothing she grieves over is the void produced by his refusal to confront or let her share his "life-harming heaviness." Instead she speaks of an "unborn sorrow ripe in Fortune's womb" ( 10) and thence transferred to hers. The name of the "nothing [that] hath begot my something grief" and of the "something [that] hath the nothing that I grieve" ( 37-38) is the bitter Richard, and she can receive it as his child only "in reversion"-that is, she cannot inherit as her own the despair Richard withholds until his intercourse with Fortune produces the "dismal heir" ( 2.2.66) who will finally help him fulfill his deepest wish: to "be eased / With being nothing" 5.5.40 -41.

What, is my Richard both in shape and mind

Transformed and weakened? Hath Bolingbroke

Deposed thine intellect? Hath he been in thy heart?

The lion dying thrusteth forth his paw

And wounds the earth, if nothing else, with rage

To be o'er-powered; and wilt thou, pupil-like,

Take the correction, mildly kiss the rod,

And fawn on rage with base humility,

Which art a lion and the king of beasts?

Richard's passive-aggressive scenario of self-deposition is more consistent and decisive than his partner's answering scenario of usurpation. Of the two protagonists, Bolingbroke initially shows more respect for the ideology of kingship than does Richard. Whatever happens later, he enters the judicial process in 1.1 as a reformer intent on making those who wield or influence authority clean up their act. Though his three accusations clearly have Richard for their target, he has enough respect for the protocols of deference and piety to redirect them toward Mowbray. There is no reason to doubt that when, in 2.3 and 3.1, he claims to be weeding out the sycophantic "caterpillars of the commonwealth" ( 2.3.170), he is at least in part genuinely concerned to preserve the kingship from corrupt practices that jeopardize respect for the system of lineal inheritance on which all the major players-kings of England and dukes of Lancaster alike-depend. The guilt and remorse that haunt him from the end of this play until his death in Henry IV, Part 2 are hardly those of the hard-edged Machiavel that Bolingbroke has sometimes been taken to be; they are the signs of a tender conscience. He is aware that the trials he undergoes as king and as father may be God's punishment for his "mistreadings." In this he understands his predicament in traditional terms. That is, he is an orthodox reader of his story; he speaks and behaves as if he were in Holinshed's chronicle. The irony is that unbeknownst to himself he is in a very different kind of story in which the royal victim has in effect selected his victimizer, appointed his usurper, and coopted him into seizing a discredited crown. In this story, Bolingbroke plays the part of a character who at first isn't sure-or doesn't want to know-where he is going. Until Richard actively maneuvers him-and all but locks him-into the project of usurpation, he vacillates between gestures that threaten rebellion and gestures of restraint, loyalty, and obeisance. From the end of 1.3 through 3.3 he seems diffusely aggressive, ready for anything, but inconsistent as to the precise course he will choose. He jumps abruptly forward with imperious gestures, then nervously backtracks into deferential postures.

Some critics sensitive to the complexity of Shakespeare's portrayal have described Bolingbroke as the prototypical political climber: "the man who will go further than his rivals because he never allows himself to know where he is going"; the exemplar of the "tacit vice" of opportunism, the duplicitous ability to induce others to clarify and fulfill the purposes of which one keeps oneself only "vaguely aware." Bolingbroke's language represents a speaker who sometimes betrays anxiety about where he is going-where he finds himself desiring or tempted to go. To Gaunt's advice that he dull the pain of exile with idyllic rationalizations and fantasies, he protests, "O no, the apprehension of the good / Gives but the greater feeling to the worse" 1.3.307-8. The words gesture toward meanings beyond the rejection of Gaunt's half-baked recipes for grief-management. To imagine the good one desires but can't have, Bolingbroke remonstrates, only makes one feel worse. What if the good is kingship? Or what if it is virtue-loyalty, piety, respect for legitimate authority? What if "apprehension" means not only the imagination of the good but also the act of reaching for it, apprehending it, taking it ("here, cousin, seize the crown" [ 4.1.190])? And, since "to apprehend" means not only "to imagine" and "to take" but also "to fear," what if one fears the desire to reach for the good, and fears the consequences of taking it? On the other hand, if one is fearful of the desire to take the good, will one feel worse for having suppressed the desire? I am far from claiming that Bolingbroke audits the full range of meanings that resonate discordantly in the suspension of his utterance.

Rather, my claim is that all these meanings are relevant to and revealing of desires and anxieties that obtrude themselves again and again in his language. They betray a moral irritability, a desire for justification, a fear of his own susceptibility to the very opportunism critics accuse him of. In this respect, the resonance of "the apprehension of the good / Gives but the greater feeling to the worse" echoes through the long corridor of the plays about Henry's reign as a prophetic motto of Bolingbroke's ever more precarious journey through the declivities of his own conscience.

The first unguarded manifestation of apprehensive desire occurs in one of the play's cloudier moments. In 2.1, after Richard has laid claim to Bolingbroke's patrimony and departed, Northumberland confides to Willoughby and Ross that Bolingbroke is on his way home from Brittany with several peers and a small army in "eight tall ships" 289-99. In 2.3, shortly after he lands, Bolingbroke insists to Berkeley and York that the reason for his illegal reentry is "personally" to "lay my claim / To my inheritance" 139-40, since he has been denied the normal channels of legal representation by which an heir reclaims property that reverts to the crown. At 2.1.210-17 York warned Richard not to violate this procedure, but Bolingbroke's complaint at 2.3.117-40 shows that Richard ignored the warning. The problem is that according to Northumberland's announcement, Bolingbroke set sail from Brittany before the events in 2.1 transpired. Perhaps, as Peter Ure suggests, Shakespeare may have "telescoped the various events" in this episode "in the interests of dramatic timing"; perhaps readers and auditors are not expected to grasp legal complexities that are only hinted at in passing; perhaps they aren't being asked to worry about the inconsistency between Bolingbroke's asserted motive for returning and the fact that he couldn't have had that motive when he mustered his forces and left Brittany since Gaunt had not yet died; perhaps, if they do notice the inconsistency, they will chalk it up to Bolingbroke's hypocrisy and opportunism.

My own view is that in 2.3 Bolingbroke behaves as if he worries about the inconsistency and about a moment in which "the apprehension of the good" led to a brief and diffuse act of opportunism. For in spite of the aggressive embarkation Northumberland reports, Bolingbroke seems careful, even diffident, in his dealings with those who greet him on his return. His response to Northumberland's windy sweet talk 2.3.2-18 is curt. He shows himself to be concerned with the way he is perceived, addressed, and flattered or criticized. In thanking the nobles for their support, he is careful to keep his promises vague. He seems to resist-without entirely discouraging-the push of an incipient rebellion of nobles who would obviously like to see him go all the way and who thus, ironically, have the same designs on Bolingbroke that Richard has-an unwitting complicity that will, with Bolingbroke's help, turn against him in Henry IV, Part 1, after he has become king. Above all, he takes the opportunity offered by Berkeley's cool and York's censorious remarks to back away from any appearance of ambition greater than the desire to recover his rightful inheritance. However wild or undefined his intention may have been on setting sail before Richard seized his patrimony, the seizure gives him a defined ground of defiance and grievance. Against York's double charge that Bolingbroke is "a banished man" who has returned "Before the expiration of [his] time, / In braving arms against [his] sovereign" 2.3.114-16, Bolingbroke's demand for legal justice actually reproduces the logic of York's earlier protest against the seizure. York warned that Richard jeopardizes his own position as well as his cousin Bolingbroke's in violating the principle of lineal succession; Bolingbroke agrees: "If that my cousin king be king in England, / It must be granted I am Duke of Lancaster" 127 -28. Within these limits, Bolingbroke's sense of grievance is morally justified, and he can represent himself to himself as a man more sinned against than sinning. Richard's problem, then, given what I take to be his agenda, will be to make Bolingbroke transgress those limits and reach for more than his own.

My response to Bolingbroke's language coincides with the opinion of one critic that throughout the play Bolingbroke "is genuinely trying to say what he means." But what he means, what he intends to do, is often far from obvious-is marked by moments of confusion and indecisiveness that suggest it is not always obvious to him. When he sentences Richard's friends to death in 3.1, he goes back, in effect, to square one and blames them for all royal misdeeds, just as he had blamed Mowbray in 1.1. This time, however, he is more careful to dissociate the misdeeds from Richard and represent the king himself as the victim of the flatterers' corrupt practices. He is equally careful to control public reaction to the death sentences by a painstaking explanation, most of which is devoted to Bushy's and Green's victimization of him. Thus, according to this argument, he and Richard are in the same position, so that whatever he does on his own behalf he also does on Richard's, preserving both the king and the crown from the sources of corruption. However, the pressure behind this strenuous exercise in self-exculpation betrays itself in the introductory comment with which he justifies the death penalty: "to wash your blood / From off my hands, here in the view of men / I will unfold some causes of your deaths" 3.1.5-7. As Rackin points out, "Richard's association [in 4.1] of his betrayers with Pilate, the biblical archetype for a futile attempt to deny guilt . . . is prefigured here" 129. But in Bolingbroke's case as opposed to Richard's flamboyant assumption of the divine victim's role, the allusion slips out against the grain of the speaker's stated intention and hints at the futility of his attempt to persuade himself he is not guilty of an action aimed at weakening rather than-as he claims-safeguarding Richard's position. The solicitude he shows for the queen 38 -42 immediately after his indictment of Bushy and Green is part of the same pattern. It may be dismissed as another politic gesture intended to impress or placate his audience, but that does not prevent it from being at the same time a gesture of good faith he performs for his own benefit-or, more darkly, a preemptive washing of the hands by one who, like Macbeth, may be shaken by his apprehension of the good.

It is an apprehension he struggles to control in 3.3 against the mounting pressure of Richard's disturbing acquiescence. Even the impatient Northumberland tries to slow down the process and lower the stakes when Richard accuses him of backing an effort to seize the crown 3.3.74-122, but Richard sardonically and melodramatically persists in offering the lure of deposition 148-80. Bolingbroke's one long speech early in the scene 32 -63 registers his uncertainty. It begins with a calculated alternation between reassurance and threat expressly confined to the demand that his banishment be repealed and his lands restored. But as he continues he momentarily loses control of his imagery and has to rein it back in:

Be he the fire, I'll be the yielding water;

The rage be his, whilst on the Earth I rain

The runover line pausing on, then passing through, its ear-pun rain/reign enacts a loss of balance, but stumbles awkwardly back on its feet. Two lines later, after Richard shows himself on the battlements, Bolingbroke is still stumbling: Richard appears, says Bolingbroke,

As doth the blushing discontented sun

From out the fiery portal of the east

When he perceives the envious clouds are bent

To dim his glory and to stain the track

As Bolingbroke continues to develop the figure of elemental warfare, his words attribute questionable motives to the envious clouds that represent him, but it is unclear from his phrasing whether the dimming and the staining are Richard's misperceptions or are motives the speaker acknowledges.

The parley between Richard and Northumberland that follows goes on for more than a hundred lines before Bolingbroke speaks again, and during the remainder of the scene, which Richard monopolizes, Bolingbroke is allowed only five brief utterances. In the second of these he commands obeisance to the king, and in the third he protests once more that "I come but for mine own" 206. But Richard immediately denies him this fallback position: "Your own is yours, and I am yours, and all" 207. Bolingbroke still resists: "So far be mine, my most redoubted lord, / As my true service shall deserve your love" 208 -9. Richard will brook no further resistance. He pushes Bolingbroke into a corner and forces him to take all:

Cousin, I am too young to be your father,

Though you are old enough to be my heir.

What you will have I'll give, and willing, too,

For do we must what force will have us do.

That is, "what I will give you'll have, for do you must what force will have you do: convey me to London to prepare for the next phase of deposition." Bolingbroke surrenders: "Yea, my good lord" 219. This is the turning point of the play. The die has been cast-by Richard-and Bolingbroke has lost the moral struggle, and now commence the "inward wars" of the future King Henry IV.

"Here, cousin, seize the crown" 4.1.190: like this duplicitous speech act, the inverted rite of discoronation shows Richard having it both ways. He formally reenacts the self-deposition he has helped bring about, thereby publicly demonstrating his active relinquishment of the crown. At the same time he forces Bolingbroke to reenact the usurpation, thereby publicly dramatizing the act of illegal seizure while Richard presents himself to his audience as the usurper's Christ-like victim 4.1.190 -253. But shortly after this, he begins to shift from the victim's pose to the sinner's and to perform an act of degradation aimed as much at the crown as at himself. Thus what he proposes to remove from his person and offer Bolingbroke is a debased crown, a gift that has poison in it. Perversely staging and savoring both the pathos of victimization and the power of the self-deposing sinner, he stigmatizes Bolingbroke as a usurper even as he denies him the manly pleasure of being able to claim that he won the throne without Richard's help.

Bolingbroke's disadvantage in his competition with Richard had been established at the beginning of 4.1, before Richard's entry, with the play's return to the question of Gloucester's murder. The scene invites a contrast with Richard's brash management of the trial by combat in the opening scenes, producing the battle of the gages as a comic and soured replay. The contrast reflects poorly on Bolingbroke, who sits quietly through most of the scene and-unlike Richard-doesn't intervene in the volatile factionalism that bodes ill for future stability. The epidemic of gage-throwing reaches a thudding climax when, first, Aumerle runs out of gages and, second, Bolingbroke is once again-as in 1.1 and 1.3 -frustrated, this time by the shadow of Mowbray, the news of whose holy death abroad prevents another attempt to resolve the Gloucester question.

At the end of 5.3, after having pardoned Aumerle for his part in the conspiracy planned by Richard's supporters see 4.1.334-47, Bolingbroke threatens "the rest of that consorted crew" with death, but, as he twice suggests 5.3.148, 150, carrying out the threat is contingent on finding the conspirators. The next scene begins with Sir Pierce Exton quoting words uttered in his direction by Bolingbroke-"Have I no friend will rid me of this living fear?" 5.4.2-and deciding that he has just been invited to kill Richard. The quarto though not the Folio suggests that Exton may have been onstage when, at the end of 5.3, Bolingbroke issues his threats against the traitors; such a suggestion has a substantial impact on our response to Exton's decision, which is expressly voiced as his interpretation of Bolingbroke's words:

. . . he wishtly looked on me,

As who should say "I would thou wert the man

That would divorce this terror from my heart"-

Other accounts of this episode-those of Hall, Holinshed, and Samuel Daniel-clearly signal Bolingbroke's intention to have Richard secretly put to death so that, in Daniel's words, he would not "seeme to wil the act." But Shakespeare muddies things by placing Exton's remarks in the immediate vicinity of Bolingbroke's worry about the conspirators, and then appointing Exton the sole interpreter of Bolingbroke's "ambiguous instigation." This juxtaposition makes it more plausible that Exton may have misconstrued a request to get rid of the conspirators who are at liberty while Richard is safely in prison.

Nevertheless, the instigation remains ambiguous, and the question is how to interpret the ambiguity. Some see the episode as consistent with the representation of the character's "deviousness": "without explicitly avowing his intention," Bolingbroke gets someone else not only to do his dirty work for him but also to articulate the purpose he leaves unexpressed, another example of his refusal to allow himself "to know where he is going."

Making a slight but significant change in this strong reading, I add that for Bolingbroke such a refusal is no longer possible. After Richard has denied him the fallback position in 3.3 and teased him in 4.1 with "Here, cousin, seize the crown," he knows where he is going and where he has gone. The words with which he pardons Aumerle in 5.3 poignantly betray his own sense of moral precariousness "I pardon him, as God shall pardon me," 137. Thus the motivational haziness or terseness characteristic of his language after 3.3 is indicative less of political deviousness or even of moral self-protection than of his fear of where he finds himself going.

"Have I no friend will rid me of this living fear?": whatever Bolingbroke intends to say, the living fear of danger from others has come by this time to mirror the living fear of danger from himself. Were Bolingbroke to utter the wish Exton extrapolates from his glance-"I would thou wert the man / That would divorce this terror from my heart"-the mood would be counter-factual that is, "if only you could; but you can't", for nobody else, least of all a political supernumerary like Exton, could alleviate the terror or assure him that "God shall pardon me." And whatever he may have intended Exton to hear or do, the upshot in 5.6 is that he seems once again to lose control of the situation. The effort to wrap things up and assume high moral ground signified by the parade of rhymed couplets with which he pardons Carlisle in the final scene 5.6.24-29 is rudely interrupted by Exton's melodramatic entry and announcement: "Great king, within this coffin I present / Thy buried fear. Herein," he adds, angling for his gratuity, "all breathless lies / The mightiest of thy greatest enemies, / Richard of Bourdeaux, by me hither brought" 30-33. He gets no thanks from the great king, who oddly identifies Richard's plight with his own when he blames Exton for having "wrought / A deed of slander with thy fatal hand / Upon my head" 34-36. This is uncanny: it is as if Richard has penetrated Bolingbroke's conscience, possesses it, and now speaks through him. To hear this ghostly intrusion is to hear something startling in Exton's simple and direct reply, for it voices precisely the protest Bolingbroke would be justified in making to Richard: "From your own mouth, my lord, did I this deed" 37.

Perhaps, surrounded as he is by supporters, Bolingbroke is not politically embarrassed by Exton's entrance. Yet perhaps even the supporters who brought in a harvest of rebel heads would shy away from the ultimate crime of regicide. The evidence on this score is not decisive because the play's emphasis is elsewhere. In Bolingbroke's rejoinder to Exton it remains fixed on the continuing intrusion of the uncanny Ricardian overtones:

They love not poison that do poison need,

Nor do I thee. Though I did wish him dead,

I hate the murderer, love him murderèd.

The guilt of conscience take thou for thy labor,

But neither my good word nor princely favor.

With Cain go wander through shades of night,

And never show thy head by day nor light.

As we listen to this bitter reproach we may hear Bolingbroke's malediction on himself as well as on Exton. Sending Exton off with Cain recalls Bolingbroke's comparison of Gloucester's murder to that of sacrificing Abel in 1.1; Bolingbroke's words suggest that he now finds himself involved in the same kind of kin-murder as he had accused Richard of. But it is Richard whose voice usurps the grammatical first person and it is his despair that speaks through Bolingbroke's words, condemning both himself and Bolingbroke. "Here, cousin, seize the crown": and so Bolingbroke did, and now he resurrects his buried fear and receives his reward, or sentence. "Hath Richard / Deposed thine intellect? Hath he been in thy heart?"

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A Modern Perspective: Richard II | Folger Shakespeare Library

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Clear explanation of the key ingredients of Greek tragedy.

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Concise summary of the key elements of Greek theatre.

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An Introduction to Greek Theatre | National Theatre

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This is an exemplar essay and examiner's commentary from the exam board.

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This article from E-Magazine looks at Othello and race in Elizabethan London.

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A close reading of this Victorian Sensation novel.

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Introduction to Ancient Greek tragedy.

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Prof. Edith Hall breaks down the tragedy from the comedy of Greek Theatre in preparation for her first lecture 'The Theatre of Dionysus'.