THE PRACTICALITIES OF THE ABSOLUTE: JUSTICE AND KINGSHIP IN SHAKESPEARE'S

RICHARD II
Author(s): JAMES PHILLIPS
Source: ELH , SPRING 2012, Vol. 79, No. 1 (SPRING 2012), pp. 161-177
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41337583

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THE PRACTICALITIES OF THE ABSOLUTE: JUSTICE
AND KINGSHIP IN SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD II

BY JAMES PHILLIPS

Richard II, in the historical records and in William Shakes

play, is a king whose half-hearted tyranny proves fatal to him. A
deposed for being a tyrant, he does not consider himself su
therefore does not adopt in time the tyrannical measures tha
keep him in power. It is not as a tyrant that Richard believes
above the law. Rather than simply testimony to pre- Machia
innocence, his understanding of his rule has its place in t
ethico-political history of the absolute and the frustrated atte
its accommodation.1 The problem he and his subjects face is
recognize justice, how to give its absoluteness room for opera
the body politic even as it defies institutionalization.
The luster of kingship, inasmuch as it is not identical wit
sacral, is borrowed from the luster of justice: together, mod
thoritarianism and anti-authoritarianism have come between us and
the appearance of incontrovertibility this proposition enjoyed in the
medieval period. If we are on guard against certain prejudices of the
last five hundred years, we should be willing to view kingship as a
contradiction by means of which a commonwealth endeavors to leave
the door open for the absoluteness of justice. The contradiction - the
constitutionalization of an extra-constitutional power - is admittedly
still a makeshift. The causa finalis of kingship and the criterion by
which it can itself be judged is the justice in excess of the law: it is as
the conduit of the justice that the laws in their formalism, archaicism,
or conflict with one another fail to deliver that the king occupies a
place above the law. The king is subject not to the law but to justice.
The Magna Carta forbade English kings from denying justice, and
coronation oaths reiterated justice as a duty of the monarch. The king
is the deus ex machina of the legal system. His is the authority not of
what is but of what should be. Where such figurations of justice make
their entrance at the end of a drama, as in Ludwig van Beethoven s
Fidelio or Nikolai Gogol's The Government Inspector , the golden light
in which they are bathed is the promise of redress and rectification
rather than a perverse chocolate-box nostalgia for hierarchical order.

ELH 79 (2012) 161-177 © 2012 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 161

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In contrast to these works, with their final moments of effulgence,
Richard II is a slow dying down of the light of justice.
Richards inability to understand his role and to fulfill the expecta-
tions of a just king is not simple negligence. The just king and the tyrant
are one another's doubles. Both overstep the law. The just king suspends
the law when the latter by its generality ceases to be an instrument of
justice: such a king attends to the singularity of the case, intervenes,
and puts to rights. For Plato, the rule of law is a substitute for this
most exalted form of government: "The man with the real knowledge,
the true statesman, will in many instances allow his activities to be
dictated by his art and pay no regard to written prescriptions. He will
do this whenever he is convinced that there are measures which are
better than the instructions he previously wrote and sent to people
at a time when he could not be there to control them personally."2 A
body politic that acknowledges the exceptionalism and irreducibility
of justice and, in response, sets up a space within the administration
of its laws for free action can discover to its cost that in this space a
tyrant rather than a just king has established himself and taken root.
Where there was to be grace, there is impunity.3 Out of an awareness
of the excess of justice over legal formalism, the body politic has suc-
cumbed to injustice.
Among the volumes in the library of Sir Simon Burley, a parti-
san of Richard II whose execution was demanded by the Merciless
Parliament of 1388, was Henri de Gauchis French translation of De
Regimine Principům (1285) by Giles of Rome.4 This early apology of
monarchical absolutism addressed to King Philip IV of France was one
of the more influential political tracts of the Middle Ages. According
to Giles, the argument for absolutism lies in the very nature of justice.
The sovereign s freedom of action is not to be a temporary measure,
pragmatically conceded by the body politic in response to a state of
emergency. Pragmatism, when it is nothing more than a cynical pres-
ervation of the status quo and its vested interests, falls short of the
genuine common good that is justice. For a modern readership, wary
of dictatorships' exploitation of engineered states of emergency, Giles's
argument for absolutism may have lost much of its earlier self-evidence.
In the sixteenth century Jean Bodin was nonetheless still able to write
that it was the consensus of all the ancients and all perceptive students
of politics that kings were inaugurated for no other reason than to do
justice.5 The ultimate test of validity of a king's legal freedom of action,
if events should ever reach that point, is therefore whether or not the
king is just. Unlike the prevention of the commonwealth s disintegrat-

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ing in civil or social war, justice is not a worldly, establishmentarian
criterion.6 The motto of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I, fiat
iustitia, et per eat mundus ("Let there be justice, even though the world
perish"), expresses the stakes in what is not simply a power struggle
between Richard II and Henry Bolingbroke.
The rise of European absolutism, in its doctrinal aspect in Giles of
Rome, can be linked to the rediscovery and strained appropriation of
Aristotelian texts.7 In the third book of De Regimine Principům Giles
refers to the Politics while passing over in silence Aristotle's reserva-
tions and qualifications there with respect to monarchy What Giles
picks out and fastens on as an argument for monarchy is Aristotles
objection, more familiar from his ethical writings and the discussion
of equity (¿7ti£ÍK£ia), that justice requires greater flexibility than laws
afford.8 The king is able to take up the cause of justice where the laws
falter in their sheer universality and indifference to circumstances,
when judgment recognizes that the mechanical application of even a
good law would be unjust. If the king is to pursue the work of justice,
he must be unconstrained by the letter of the law - legibus solutus , in
the famous phrase from Justinian's Digest.9
Here the freedom of the absolute monarch is to be the outcome not
of one individuals successful deployment of power politics, but rather
of the commonwealth s assent to it as a constitutional elaboration of
the correspondence, unproblematic in itself, between justice and the
general good. Of course, it is the just king whose claim to instantiate
justice overshadows the like claim of the laws, and Giles therefore
devotes the first book of De Regimine Principům to the king s rule over
himself. Not making a law of ones passions is not the same as being
without passion - Giles's Aristotelianism is clear on this point - but it
does mean attending to a situation, appraising the different possibilities
it opens up, and choosing the most just course of action. The king is
not to be exempted from positive law only then to show himself subject
to the authority of his passions. This was the widely perceived stain on
Richard's kingship.10 Sharing Giles's apprehensions over the abuse of
the royal prerogative, John Gower sees fit to admonish Richard II in
the Confessio Amantis - a work which Richard had himself commis-
sioned on noting the dearth of literature in English - by suggesting
that if a king is to rule well, he must begin by ruling himself.
Justice is to rule over the king who, as its terrestrial conduit, rules
over the laws. But Giles does not propose that the most just man
should be made king. Is this because justice is hard to recognize and
therefore hard to acclaim? Or because it is harder to trust justice as an

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enduring character trait, dependable beyond a change in condition, an
elevation to the throne, than to recognize it as the quality of a deed?
Monarchy, for which Giles argues on the grounds of justice, is to pass
from father to son, since this genealogical continuity avoids the unrest
and fractiousness of an interregnum.11 As justice is not the criterion for
the election of the monarch, Giles has nothing more than exhortation
to oppose to the abuse of the freedom of the crown at the hands of an
unjust heir. The lawlessness of a tyrannical but otherwise legitimate
successor, one who disregards all reminders of the duties of kingship,
is the price that, following Giles, a body politic should be prepared to
pay, now and then, for the sake not only of a simple procedure for the
transfer of power, but also so that, constitutionally, room is kept open
in readiness for the freedom of a just king. The tyrant parodies Jesus
Christ whereas the just king imitates him. The tyrant, in his licence
above the laws, can appear to himself to be walking in the footsteps
of the Son of God: "Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or
the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil."12 The Chris-
tological conception of the royal prerogative is nonetheless a volatile
resource for propaganda, since it heightens expectations that will not
then be let down lightly - one had hoped for Jesus and comes upon
Barabbas in his stead. In the case of Richard II, the piety with which
in the Wilton diptych he is depicted kneeling at the feet of his patron
saints was not impugned in his deposition. The purely religious tenor
of the arguments with which he had sought to vindicate his aspira-
tions to absolutism - as England was the dower of the Holy Virgin,
its stewardship could not therefore be the affair of a social contract
between a king and his subjects - did not return to haunt him in his
fall. In Shakespeare's play, when Richard is brought to Parliament to
resign his crown and provokingly compares himself to Jesus and the
magnates to Judases, he is not answered in the same vein. Richard II
does not belong to the lineage of modern tyrants whose cynical and
irreligious exploitation of the freedom institutionalized within the
administration of justice is countered when the body politic translates
the experience of its rued gullibility into principle through the checks
and balances of a separation of powers. Notably, the oppressiveness of
Richard s reign did not have the effect of weaning the commonwealth
from a taste for the absolute.
As Richard s absolutism miscarried before it consolidated itself, the
body politic had no occasion to revise the fundamentals of its approach
to monarchy and to revert to any initial misgivings. It succeeded in
stopping him before the critical moment when it would have had to

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admit to itself that it had only ever wanted to play at leaving a space
open for the absoluteness of justice. It is not Richard but the body
politic that is theatrical, since he alone is wholly in earnest in his pro-
testations of drawing the absolute into worldly life. His seriousness
was not taken seriously. In Richards alleged assertion that the laws of
England were in his mouth, little was heard apart from the arrogance
and the infringement.13
A precedent to this abrogation of written law lay nearer to hand than
De Regimine Principům : according to both contemporary chronicler
Thomas Walsingham and his later counterpart Raphael Holinshed,
Shakespeare's principal source, Walter "Wat" Tyler had earlier made the
same assertion in his own name during the so-called Peasants' Revolt in
1381, the first grave test of Richards rule.14 Aged fourteen at the time
of the uprising, Richard prevailed over Tyler and the rebels at Smith-
field in large part because of the reverence that the people still felt for
the title of king. It is the aura and sanctity of kingship that distinguish
Richard from the upstart Tyler. Shakespeare's Richard, who is shown
only at the close of his reign, seemingly wishes to learn just how far he
can go, just how much he can fail as a human being, before the aura
and sanctity of the crown no longer save him. The play Richard II does
not treat the events of the Peasants' Revolt: Shakespeare had already
dramatized a popular uprising against written law and even writing in
general in King Henry VI: Part 2 , in which the butcher Dick wishes
that the laws of England might come out of Jack Cade's mouth and a
clerk is killed for knowing how to write his name.15 The compulsive
beheadings common to the Peasants' Revolt and Shakespeare's ram-
page are, in the play, an all-too-physical implementation of the rebels'
assault on intelligence as such. Yet the anarchic acephalousness and
bloodthirsty buffoonery of Cade's insurrection should not obscure the
restorative agenda of the revolt of 1381, as though anomie were the sole
alternative to written law. Richard Firth Green, in A Crisis of Truth:
Literature and Law in Ricardian England , analyzes the destruction of
legal documents and the murder of lawyers as attempts to restore the
force of verbal agreements and the communal bonds that a reliance
on the stability of written instruments had undermined, thereby leav-
ing the illiterate at the mercy of the literate.16 Although resentment
over the three poll taxes of 1377-81 was the immediate trigger of the
revolt, the role of literacy in the collection of the taxes drew attention
to changes in the organizational mechanisms of the culture. Written
instruments recommend themselves not only by virtue of their stabil-
ity, but also by means of the cynicism they instill with respect to oral

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agreements: trust among members of a community - whose disap-
pearance Geoffrey Chaucer mourns in "Lak of Stedfastnesse," with
its concluding enjoinder to Richard II - loses a mediating function to
written instruments and the oversight of the state. Wat Tylers assertion
that the laws of England would emanate from his own mouth perhaps
bears interpreting as the uprisings valorization of orality rather than
as a declaration of one individuals arrogance. Just as equity, which in
Aristotle is the irreducible complement of general laws, is distorted
when concentrated by Giles of Rome in the impunity of the king, the
force of oral law, which immanently unites a community in the form
of trust among its members, is distorted when concentrated in the
mouth of a single and hence transcendent legislator.17
The concentration of justice and law in his own person also informs
Richards misperception of the counterclaim of his rival. The threat
that Shakespeare's Richard sees posed by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke
is not the competing claim to the crown of a more just man. For
Richard, it is not right itself that in Henry asserts its title to rule; it is
not even a particular right, the right of succession of a nearer in kin
(Shakespeare makes nothing of Henrys perfunctory attempt to play
off against Richard the legend that Edmund Crouchback, Henrys
ancestor, was the elder son of Henry III but was passed over, on the
grounds of deformity, in favor of his younger brother from whom
Richard descended). What Richard at first sneers at in Henry is a
competing claim of a different order altogether - it is popularity as
the foundation of political power:

Ourself and Bushy, Bagot here and Green

Observed his courtship to the common people -
How he did seem to dive into their hearts
With humble and familiar courtesy,
What reverence he did throw away on slaves,
Wooing poor craftsmen with the craft of smiles
And patient underbearing of his fortune,
As 'twere to banish their affects with him.
Off goes his bonnet to an oyster- wench.
A brace of draymen bid God speed him well,
And had the tribute of his supple knee
With Thanks, my countrymen, my loving friends',
As were our England in reversion his, 1 &
And he our subjects' next degree in hope.

Richard refuses to acknowledge popularity as a basis of kingship and

holds all the more firmly to his right. But in his overly sharp distinction

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between popularity and legitimacy Richard forgets the constructed,
political character of rights: in his defence he invokes an unworldly
power that is powerless if it is entirely without purchase on the world.

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.
(. R , 3.2.54-62)

In the event, the angels miss their engagement. In Richards fall the
discourse of rights, which is a discourse that defines itself by its dif-
ference from the domains of fact, nature, positive description, and so
forth, exhibits its unearthliness as mere impotence rather than as the
proof that human beings can put into practice the conviction that they
are not beasts and mere nature. Richard loses the crown because he
does not find enough people willing to play along with the fiction (the
non-positive discourse) of his right to it.
Richard, however, is being obtuse when he ascribes Bolingbroke s
popularity to his courtship of the populace. He does not grasp that his
own injustices have served to mobilize various strata of the common-
wealth against him, that Bolingbroke s popularity also has a grounding
in the discourse of rights, whose authority the populace wishes to see
Bolingbroke champion in the face of Richards depredations. Richard
is a tyrant not because he does not respect any rights, but because
he respects none but his own. He is untroubled by the self-serving
speciousness of his position, as Richard H. Jones articulates it: "How
could the king, for example, insist on the untouchable sanctity of his
own inherent rights and not, at the same time, adhere to the obliga-
tion to respect, indeed to defend, the unquestioned inherent rights of
others? How could the fountainhead of justice itself frequently violate
the most cherished and widely recognized principles of justice without
undermining the very foundation upon which it presumed to stand?"19
Richard takes few pains even to appear just. His pivotal infraction in
the drama is the confiscation of Bolingbroke s inheritance. In a captious
mood because of his uncle s dying censures, Richard comes between
the law and its exercise:

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 Towards our assistance we do seize to us
The plate, coin, revenues and moveables
Whereof our uncle Gaunt did stand possessed.
(fí, 2.1.160-62)

When York protests, Richard does not relent and, as though simply to
press home that he will tolerate no curbs on the royal prerogative, he
goes further and declares the expropriation of the lands themselves:
"Think what you will, we seize into our hands / His plate, his goods,
his money and his lands" ( R , 2.1.209-210). At the end of the same
scene Henry is reported as returning illegally from exile, to land at
Ravenspurgh in Yorkshire, since the 1800s under the North Sea. The
body politic musters around Henry as the victim of expropriation,
identifying his particular cause with the general cause of the principle
of property, and thereby rendering his conflict with Richard a clash
not between the kings legitimacy and his own popularity but rather
a clash between the justice of two rights.20 The play does not decide
whether property rights have precedence over the royal prerogative
(an argument of the late seventeenth century), but it does see the
justice of Bolingbroke s claim to property call into question the justice
of Richard s claim to kingship. An unjust king invites deposition as the
semblance of a king.21
It is in the externality and objectivity of both poles of the dramatic
conflict that A. C. Bradley, a younger brother of the British idealist phi-
losopher, F. H. Bradley, observes a rare applicability of G. W. F. Hegel's
definition of Greek tragedy to the Shakespearean corpus, although he
omits a proper analysis, content with the explanation that Richard II is
an early work.22 In his posthumously published lectures on aesthetics,
Hegel fixes on Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet in order to illustrate the
difference of romantic (that is, modern) tragedy from Greek tragedy.
The conflict of romantic tragedy, as Hegel sees it, is internal to the
character: it is the opposition in which the passions of subjectivity
may happen to find themselves in relation to contingent external
forces.23 Richard II, as mutable as Hamlet, as indecisive, capricious,
and excessive, nonetheless need not be read as simply a first draft
for Shakespeare's most famous role. Richards tragic fate is not that
of a subjectivity that does not know how to make its way out into the
objective world. It is, in a Hegelian sense, more Greek: both poles of
the conflict in which Richard is destroyed are objective, figuring in
the substantive ethical life of the community as rights. That in which
Richard resembles the exaggerated subjectivity of Hamlet is in his
unworldliness. It is, however, an unworldliness that the body politic

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has constructed for itself. It is the unworldliness of sacral kingship,
of the double fiction wherein the body politic not only answers the
discourse of brute nature with a reality of its own creation (kingship as
a right rather than a fact), set apart from the exigencies and volatilities
of the lives of beasts, but also denies that this other reality is its own
work (kingship as divinely ordained rather than humanly conferred).
The medieval sovereign is said to be king by the grace of God ( rex
gratia dei).24 To use the terminology of a later period: the king rules
by divine right - it is a rule that is shored up not by divine power, but
by the commonwealth s acknowledgement of a right that pretends to
dispense with the commonwealth s acknowledgement as its basis. It is
the commonwealth in the paradoxical exercise of self-denial. To dispute
that the doctrine of the divine right of kings has never had any other
adherents than the personally interested, the hoodwinked, and the
cowed is not of itself to defend the doctrine. The question that can
be raised here is what is at issue in the commonwealth s simultaneous
incorporation and disavowal of the absolute in political life, for it is not
only in absolute monarchies that a place is set up for it at once at the
center and at the margins of the body politic. The justice of a king is
not the sole aspect under which the absolute is invoked in political life.
Averse to leaving the act of foundation exposed as merely human and
contingent, as revocable, the founders of republics, in ancient Rome
no less than in eighteenth-century France, cloaked the act of founda-
tion in the language of the absolute. This can be attributed to a fear of
the so-called state of nature, with the desire for justice being another
name for this fear. Richard s tragic fate is to expose the hypocrisy of
a body politic that makes room for the absolute and yet expects the
absolute to conduct itself in a moderate manner.
Richard is deposed for abuse of office. In the eyes of his enemies,
he has not conducted himself in a moderate manner and has demon-
strated his unfitness for the title of king. But Richard long resists the
idea that a distinction can be drawn between the office of king and
the man who holds it. The distinction makes a role of kingship and
thereby circumvents the freedom of the royal prerogative: so long
as the role of king is performed in a certain way, so long as certain
proprieties and restrictions are observed, the body politic is prepared
to feign recognition of the absolute in the person of the king. When
he is deposed, Richard calls for a mirror, as though curious whether
on being relieved of his office anything will be left of him, whether,
like Dracula, he will meet with no reflection in the glass.25 In call-
ing for a mirror while in Parliament, Richard displays the very self-

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indulgence that mobilized opposition to his reign. He is ludicrous,
and offending against expectations of the role of king he ceases to be
taken seriously.26 But it is more accurate to say that the absoluteness
of the king had never been taken seriously. The acknowledgement of
the absolute in the person of the king had only ever been ceremonial
and reversible, since what the body politic wants is merely a show of
the absolute. It wants to accommodate the absolute, but on its own
terms, and therefore will make do with a counterfeit of the absolute
in the person of a king who sticks to the role allotted him. Richards
bitter lesson is the dissembling conditionally of the commonwealth s
recognition of the absoluteness of kingship. He finds his trust in the
basis of his rule misplaced. That the historical Richard was himself
untrustworthy - for instance, once the immediate dangers of the
1381 uprising were past, he retracted the pardons he had granted the
rebels in his negotiations with them - is, from the perspective of the
absolutist claims of kingship, irrelevant, since reciprocity of trust does
not figure in these claims. Shakespeare's Richard reviles himself, not
for betraying the people s trust while king, but for betraying his own
majesty in surrendering the crown:

Mine eyes are full of tears; I cannot see.

And yet salt water blinds them not so much
But they can see a sort of traitors here.
Nay, if I turn mine eyes upon myself,
I find myself a traitor with the rest;
For I have given here my souls consent
T'undeck the pompous body of a king,
Made Glory base and Sovereignty a slave,
Proud Majesty a subject, State a peasant.
(fí, 4.1.244-52)

A king who abdicates, who draws a distinction between his person and
the office of kingship, between his weakness and its duties, compro-
mises the absoluteness of kingship.
In deposing Richard, the commonwealth refuses even to continue pay-
ing lip service to monarchy's absolutist claims. For Ernst H. Kantorowicz,
in his reading of Richard II in The Kings Two Bodies , Richard is
forced to witness a metamorphosis as kingship, from an "objective
truth and god-like existence, so brilliant shortly before, pales into a
nothing, a nomen" 27 Richard discovers that his kingship is but a word
and he simultaneously becomes a king of words, voluble in his distress.
His laments confess and likewise disavow the change in his fortunes:
they constitute the domain to which he withdraws and from which he

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is no longer willing to venture to try reversing the course of events.
Richard is not overwhelmed by powers no one could withstand - he
is not tragic in that sense. He appears fatalistic and conspires with his
predicament. He enjoys it. This is nowhere more clearly articulated
than in his reproof to Aumerle for the latters false comfort: "Beshrew
thee, cousin, which didst lead me forth / Of that sweet way I was in
to despair" (fí, 3.2.204-205). Walter Pater dubs Richard "an exquisite
poet if he is nothing else" and maintains that "the sense of 'divine
right' in kings is found to act not so much as a secret of power over
others, as on infatuation to themselves."28 W. B. Yeats, in a comparable
vein, writes that Shakespeare "saw indeed, as I think, in Richard II
the defeat that awaits all, whether they be artist or saint, who find
themselves where men ask of them a rough energy and have noth-
ing to give but some contemplative virtue, whether lyrical fantasy, or
sweetness of temper, or dreamy dignity, or love of God, or love of
His creatures."29 But the division between poetry and public life - a
tic of the aesthetic movement to which Pater and Yeats in his youth
could be said to have belonged - can hamper comprehension of the
political stakes of Richard s seemingly self-indulgent facundity. Richard
the poet-king is impractical because the absoluteness of kingship has
nothing to do with practicalities.30
Richard demands recognition of his right to rule while declining
to offer the self-interest of his subjects any grounds for wanting him
to remain in power. The gormlessness of his tyranny, his omitting to
compound his absolutist pretensions with an intimidation of his subjects
and appeals to their opportunism, allows the question of a political
recognition of the absolute to be posed with greater sharpness. Under
the influence of opportunism and fear a body politic may disregard the
question of a sovereign s right to rule and concern itself purely with the
fact of rule. Richard does not make matters so easy for his subjects.
He gainsays them the fact of rule. He wants to be recognized as king
even as he, by the ostensible unkingliness of his conduct, perplexes
those who are to recognize him.
Shakespeare's Richard II reads somewhat like a secularization of
Euripides s The Bacchae, which also turns on the recognition as a higher
power of that which defies assimilation to the prevailing understand-
ing of how a higher power is to be recognized. Pentheus denies the
new god Dionysus because in his revulsion over the dissoluteness of
the latters followers he is reluctant to translate the newness of the
new god into a reappraisal of the accepted marks of divinity. When
Dionysus leads Pentheus off to his death, the chorus twice implores:

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"í'tco 8ÍKOt cpavepóç" ("Let justice come into the open").31 Justice is
implored to come, sword in hand (í;i(pr|(pópoç), to slit Pentheus s throat.
Pentheus, who as King of Thebes administers the laws, is himself to
fall victim to justice, here a naked, inhuman force. The crisis for rec-
ognition that the coming of a new god creates is paradigmatic of the
situation in which justice manifests its irreducibility to law, because
judgment, unassisted by any convention or statute, must proceed by
its own lights. It is a situation in which judgment becomes absolute, in
which the just appears a matter of pure feeling and intuition. Pentheus
must decide between two impieties, since within the context of the
old world it is impious to perceive a divinity in Dionysus and within
the context of the world that Dionysus ushers in it is impious not to
perceive the transformation that has taken place. Pentheus s failure to
recognize Dionysus is all too plausible because there is nothing that
has gone before the recognition that would render it, strictly speaking,
a re-cognition, an identification of something known or experienced
earlier.32 Pentheus judges unjustly and is destroyed. Richard, with
nothing of the clout of a god, cannot punish unbelievers and is left
to bewail his impotence: he is a Dionysus of maudlinness rather than
intoxication. He likens himself to Christ, a new deity despised and
rejected, but the analogy is indifferently received.
The body politic rallies against Richard because it does not rec-
ognize in his extralegal acts the justice that would be their excuse.
By seizing Gaunt s estate Richard flouts the laws of inheritance, and
even though he speaks of the necessity of defraying the expenses of
his Irish wars, he is ultimately unsupported in the contention that
the utility of the expropriation for the commonwealth as a whole
eclipses the injustice to one individual, Bolingbroke.33 There may be
utility, but there is no justice in Richards act. A king shows himself
entitled to legal freedom of action when he conducts himself justly,
since justice is that which can override the laws because it is their
principle and their excess. Boiled down to a decision on the nature
of the state, Richards dethronement is the refusal to subordinate the
laws to utility (to let Ireland be lost rather than the laws trampled
down). Of course, Shakespeare's Richard prefers to defend his acts'
independence of the laws in terms of sacral kingship rather than in
terms of their usefulness to the commonwealth. In one respect, this is
understandable, since the question of the usefulness of an act admits
of debate, whereas if whatever the king does is just, no debate can
arise. Justice, which is absolute because it is above the laws as both
their principle and excess, is the model for the absoluteness of king-

172 Justice and Kingship in Shakespeare's Richard II

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ship, for the power that enforces the laws and also suspends them
on occasion in the name of clemency. Fixing on the absoluteness of
kingship, Richard spurns any checks on his rule without succeeding
in passing himself off as the absoluteness of justice itself, for if the
extralegal administering of justice is a royal prerogative, the feeling for
the difference between justice and injustice, independent of positive
laws, the feeling that guides us in situations where there is no other
criterion, is far more widespread.34 Richard is unable to carry the body
politic along with him because he is unable to establish the identity
of his extralegal acts with his subjects' feeling for the irreducibility of
justice to positive law. Justice, in that it does not let itself be identified
with any positive law because it is also the inspiration for reform of the
laws, is amorphous and uncanny, and it is by relying on its feeling for
this amorphous and uncanny power, rather than on law, that a body
politic sets about deposing its monarch, the nominal guarantor of its
legal system. Richard had sought to tame the uncanniness of justice
by personalizing it in himself. After reasserting the impersonality of
justice through Richards deposition, Bolingbroke feels the uncanny
demand of justice with renewed vigor, and in an attempt at expiation
he vows a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. When a king is deposed in
the name of a higher justice, the body politic for a moment pretends
to be a "dicocracy" (to invent a term), a rule by justice itself.35
Medieval monarchies, in their insistence on justice as the duty and
rationale of the sovereign, have in some structural respects a stronger
claim to being dicocracies than subsequent formations of the body
politic where the rule of law, democracy, empire, and so on, furnish
the understanding of the absolute by which political life is oriented.
To call attention to this structural feature of medieval kingship is
not to trivialize the practical injustices of monarchies in the Middle
Ages - Shakespeare s histories dwell on these injustices. The monarch
is expected to be just in the sense of an inconsistency in the applica-
tion of the laws, since it is on account of the injustices arising from a
consistent application of the law that the monarch has been set free
of the laws. In the unpredictability of justice a king may lose his way
(Richard would not concede that he had a way to lose). A king is not a
guarantee of justice. More than a portrait of petulance, Shakespeare s
Richard images the speciousness - the tenuousness as well as gorgeous -
ness - of the promise of justice that the body politic makes to itself
in setting aside the state of nature. As there is an element of insecure
make-believe, of the theatrical suspension of the Kantian as if to this
setting aside of the state of nature, there is something fitting to the

James Phillips 173

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amateur performance of the play, on 30 September 1607, on board
the ship the Dragon , as it lay off the coast of Sierra Leone in the early
days of European imperialism.

University of Neiv South Wales

NOTES

1 Hugh Grady calls William Shakespeares Richard "a deficient Machiavellian wh

needs to study the details of his Prince much more closely" ("Shakespeare's Links
Machiavelli and Montaigne: Constructing Intellectual Modernity in Early Mode
Europe," Comparative Literature 52 [2000]: 119-42, 134). Unwilling to cede Shak
speare's Richard to the Middle Ages and its different conceptions of the political, Gr
seeks to piece together a modernity for him by drawing on Michel de Montaigne
well as Niccolò Machiavelli.
2 Plato, Statesman , trans, f. B. Skemp, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith
Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1963), 300c-d.
3 See Plato, Statesman , 301c.
4 See Maude Violet Clarke, Fourteenth Century Studies , ed. L. S. Sutherland and
M. McKisack (Oxford: Clarendon, 1937), 120n2.
5 See Jean Bodin, The Six Books of the Commonwealth: A Facsimile reprint of the
English translation of 1606 corrected and supplemented in the light of a new comparison
with the French and Latin texts , trans. Richard Knolles, ed. Kenneth Douglas McRae
(Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1962), 500.
Donna B. Hamilton describes the alignment of justice with the preservation of
the body politic as follows: "Power to dispense with the law or, through equity, to
correct the law was given so that the king could better fulfill the ultimate intention of
the law, which was to protect and preserve the commonwealth" ("The State of Law in
Richard II ," Shakespeare Quarterly 34 [1983]: 12). For the locus classicus of this align-
ment of justice with preservation, see Plato, Protagoras, 323c: according to the myth
that Plato puts into the mouth of Protagoras, Zeus, apprehensive that human beings
would murder one another in their lack of political skill, sends Hermes to endow the
human race with a sense of justice. But the recognition that a feeling of indignation
at injustice is not identical with a desire to maintain the prevailing social and political
order is a truism, for instance, of movements for the abolition of slavery. On the basis
of a psychological description of indignation, Adam Smith similarly disputes that a
regard for the preservation of society lies behind our concern with justice, since the
feeling for justice leaps ahead of such calculation: "But though it commonly requires
no great discernment to see the destructive tendency of all licentious practices to
the welfare of society, it is seldom this consideration which first animates us against
them" ( The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie [Oxford:
Clarendon, 1976], 89).
' See Graham McAleer, "Giles of Rome on Political Authority," Journal of the His-
tory of Ideas 60 (1999): 21-36. In his efforts to assert the Augustinianism of Giles's
political thought in the face of the orthodox inteq^retation of its Aristotelian debts,
McAleer puts forward his own strained image of an Aristotle resigned to the supposed
naturalness of coercion and proceeds to disentangle Giles from it.
8 See Giles of Rome, The Governance of Kings and Princes: John Trevisa's Middle
English Translation of the De Regimine Principům of Aegidius Romanus, ed. David

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С. Fowler, Charles F. Briggs, and Paul G. Remley (New York: Garland, 1997), 377.
For the Aristotelian precedents, see Politics, 1286a7-20 and Nicomachean Ethics ,
1137a32-1138a3.

9 Digest of Justinian, trans, and ed. Alan Watson, 2 vol. (Philadelphia: Univ. of
Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 1:3.31. Ulpian is quoted as saying: "The emperor is not
bound by statutes."
10 It was not, however, perceived as a stain on kingship as such. John M. Theilmann
writes: "The men of 1399 did not want a limited monarch, they wanted Aristotle's just
king, a ruler who constrained his own actions in order to achieve the common good"
("Caught Between Political Theory and Political Practice: 'The Record and Process of
the Deposition of Richard IF," History of Political Thought 25 [2004]: 599-619, 601).
11 See Giles of Rome, De Regimine Principům, 329-32. This admission of the pre-
vailing biologically grounded right to succeed is at odds with Aristotle (see Politics,
1271al2-13 and 1286b23-25) and, needless to say, is not repeated in De Ecclesiastica
Potestate, where the freedom in relation to the positive laws of the realm that, some
twenty years earlier, Giles had attributed to the king he also attributes to the pope
in relation to canon law. Hereditary monarchies, according to Aristotle (see Politics,
1313al0-17), are liable to being overthrown when an heir, possessing the title of a king
but not the power of a tyrant, outrages others and makes himself despicable rather
than feared. Richard II is a case in point.
12 Matt. 5:17.
13 See the charge against Richard at his deposition in Select Documents of English
Constitutional History, 1307-1485, ed. S.B. Chrimes and A. L. Brown (London: Adam
and Charles Black, 1961), 189.
14 See Thomas Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, ed. Henry Thomas Riley, 2 vol.
(London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1862-64), 1:464, and
Raphael Holinshed, Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 3 vol.
(London: G. Woodfall, 1807), 2:740.
15 See Shakespeare, King Henry VI: Part 2, ed. Ronald Knowles (London: Arden
Shakespeare, 3rd series, 1999), 4.7.5 and 2.2.96-101.
16 See Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian
England (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 198-205.
17 For a discussion of the broader understanding of equity in sixteenth-century
England, see Lorna Hutson, "Imagining Justice: Kantorowicz and Shakespeare,"
Representations 106 (2009): 131-34.
18 Shakespeare, King Richard II, ed. Charles R. Forker (London: Arden Shakespeare,
3rd series, 2002), act 1, scene 4, lines 23-36. Hereafter abbreviated R and cited par-
enthetically by act, scene, and line number.
19 Richard H. Jones, The Royal Policy of Richard II: Absolutism in the Later Middle
Apes (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968), 7.
20 Northrop Frye interprets the play as a conflict between kingship de jure and de
facto, between Richards legitimacy and Henry Bolingbroke's power; see Northrop
Frye on Shakespeare, ed. Robert Sandler (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1986), esp.
55-59. But Frye is less than convincing in his presentation of Bolingbroke as an amoral
hypocrite untroubled by questions of justice: "We don't know much about what is
going on in Bolingbroke's mind at any one time, and that's largely because he doesn't
let himself become aware of the full implications of what he's doing. When he says at
first that he merely wants his rights, it's possible he means that" (58). The cynicism of
politics that Frye believes he detects in Bolingbroke is overstated with regard to both

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Bolingbroke and politics. See also Agnes Heller, The Time Is Out of Joint: Shakespeare
as Philosopher of Historij (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), esp. 163-89.
Like Frye, Heller views Henry as a Machiavellian new man, but reflecting on the
long-term consequences of Henrys success (the War of the Roses), she does not share
Frye s belief that a politically astute hypocrisy is the mark of a successful leader. The
classic formulation of Bolingbroke's Machiavellianism is Irving Ribner, "Bolingbroke,
a True Machiavellian," Modem Language Quarterly 9 (1948): 177-84. An early cor-
rection of it is Arthur R. Humphreys, "Shakespeare's Political Justice in Richard II
and Henry IV" in Stratford Papers on Shakespeare 1964 , ed. Berners A. W. Jackson
(Toronto: W. J. Gage, 1965), 30-50.
21 For a discussion of the legality of Richards confiscation of John of Gaunt's estate
and how it relates to his right to rule, see William O. Scott, "Landholding, Leasing, and
Inheritance in Richard II," Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 42 (2002): 275-92.
22 See A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King
Lear, Macbeth (London: Macmillan, 1985), 10-12.
-5 See G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1975), 1226.
-4 See Joseph Canning, A History of Medieval Political Thought 300-1450 (London:
Routledge, 1996), 17. Canning lists an early use of the expression in western Europe
from the reign of the Lombard king, Agilulf (590-616), and notes that Isidore of Seville
applies it to the Visigothic king, Svinthila (621-631).
25 To be a mere man is, for Richard, to be nothing. As Peter Ure puts it, "His tragedy
is in part that of one who cannot recognize a mean between kingship and not-being"
("The Looking-Glass of Richard II," Philological Quarterly 34 [1955]: 224). But this
is not Richard s personal shortcoming, since it is in keeping with an understanding of
the absoluteness of kingship.
26 Robert M. Schiller interprets Richards use of the mirror in the deposition scene
as "deliberately and effectively" demonizing Bolingbroke ("Magic Mirrors in Richard
II" Comparative Drama 38 [2004]: 172). Bolingbroke's subsequent responses suggest,
however, someone impatient of prolixity, rather than touched to the quick.
2' Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The Kings Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political
Theology (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), 29.
2S Walter Pater, Appreciations: Three Major Texts, ed. William E. Buckler (New
York: New York Univ. Press, 1986), 512, 514.
29 W. B. Yeats, "At Stratford-on-Avon" in W.B. Yeats: Essays and Introductions
(London: Macmillan, 1961), 106.
30 In 1934, wanting to raise money for his Theater of Cruelty, Antonin Artaud staged
a reading of Richard II - a commercialist gesture (the draw of Shakespeare's fame)
that can cancel itself out by an identification with the improvident king.
11 Euripides, The Bacchae, ed. E. R. Dodds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), lines
991, 1013.
32 To admit the newness of Dionysus is to admit, at least, the appropriateness of a
difficulty to recognition. No rule of thumb for dealing with future divine revelations
can therefore be learnt from Pentheus s tragic dilemma. In Barrie Kosky's 2006 Sydney
Theatre Company production of The Bacchae, embedded within the eight-hour play
The Lost Echo, the divine did not let itself be distinguished from the utmost squalor of
a dingy modern-day public toilet. By contrast, the National Theatre of Scotland's 2007
production expended no imaginative energy on reconfiguring the terms of Pentheus's
recognition dilemma for the complacencies of a post-sexual-revolution audience: by

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setting a strait-laced Pentheus at odds with the appeals of unobjectionable, indeed vapid
music and dance it as good as curled up in the shadow of the 1984 U.S. film Footloose.
Neither Dionysus nor Richard II is a figure to be comfortable with.
33 See Shakespeare, Richard II, 2.1.155-162.
34 The feeling for justice is even less concrete than the positive rules of morality. For
the nineteenth-century legal philosopher John Austin, the "uncertainty, scantiness, and
imperfection of positive moral rules" are themselves arguments for the rule of law as
a safeguard against anarchy ( The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, ed. Wilfrid
E. Rumble [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995], 246n).
35 Justness, as the virtue by which democracy is deemed preferable over certain
other forms of political organization, remains a criterion by which democracies are
themselves to be judged and, if found wanting, condemned.

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