It is a proof of the greatness of Shakespeare's vision, that Richard is presented to us both as the traitor and the betrayed. He is the anointed king false to his coronation oaths; he is the anointed king deposed by traitors. He is not fitted for kingship, but life has made him a king. Life, quite as much as temperament, is to blame for his tragedy. When life and temperament have thrust him from kingship, this wilful, passionate man, so greedy and heady in his hurry to be unjust, is unlike the monster that office made him. He is no monster then, but a man, not even a man like ourselves, but a man of singular delicacy of mind, sensitive, strangely winning, who wrings our hearts with pity by his sense of his tragedy—
"And here have I the daintiness of ear
To check time broke in a disorder'd string;
But for the concord of my state and time
Had not an ear to hear my true time broke."
Part of his tragedy is due to his being too late. Had he landed from Ireland one day earlier he would have found a force of Welshmen ready to fight for him. At the end of the play he discovers, too late, that he is weary of patience. He strikes out like a man, when he has no longer a friend to strike with him. He is killed by a man who finds, too late, that the murder was not Bolingbroke's intention.
As in all the tragedies, there is much noble poetry. John of Gaunt's speech about England is often quoted. Shakespeare's mind is our triumph, not a dozen lines of rhetoric. Less well known are the couplets—
"My inch of taper will be burnt and done,
And blindfold death not let me see my son."
and
"... let him not come there,
To seek out sorrow that dwells everywhere."
Those scenes in the last acts which display the mind of the deposed king are all exquisite, though their beauty is not obvious to the many. There is a kind of intensity of the soul, so intense that it is obscure to the many till it is interpreted. Writers of plays know well how tamely words intensely felt may read. They know, too, how like fire upon many souls those words will be when the voice and the action give them their interpretation. Richard II, like other plays of spiritual tragedy, needs interpretation. When he wrote it, Shakespeare had not wholly the power that afterwards he achieved, of himself interpreting his vision by many-coloured images. It is not one of the beloved plays.
Bolingbroke has been praised as a manly Englishman, who is not "weak" like Richard, but "strong" and a man of deeds. In Act IV he shows his English kindness of mind and love of justice by a temperate wisdom in the trying of a cause and by saying that he will call back from exile his old enemy Norfolk. The Bishop of Carlisle tells him that that cannot be. Norfolk having worn himself out in the wars in Palestine has retired himself to Italy, and there, at Venice, given
"His body to that pleasant country's earth,
And his pure soul unto his captain Christ,
Under whose colours he had fought so long."