Richard II Theme

Family

Families are complicated, even when the people involved aren't kings and dukes. Mix in a monarchy and you have a perfect recipe for some good old-fashioned family drama. In this play, several characters are trying to figure out how to act when cousins, sons, and fathers end up politically opposed. It doesn't help that the two guys fighting over the crown, Henry Bolingbroke and Richard, are cousins, both descended from Edward III, who everyone seems to think was a great king. Even though Richard is politically the legal heir to the throne (mostly because he inherited the crown from his father), Henry Bolingbroke seems to have more in common with his grandfather – and more of the qualities that make for a good ruler.

The play also asks us to think about whether family ties should be stronger or more important than political alliances. The women in the play choose family loyalty every time, while most of the men don't. Family is obviously a powerful category with major political consequences.

Power

Shakespeare is interested in royal power throughout his history plays. In Richard II, he dramatizes two very different attitudes about kingship. According to Richard II and his followers, kings should inherit the crown from their fathers, and they have a right to rule because they are God's chosen representatives on earth. According to Henry Bolingbroke and his followers, a king's right to rule is a privilege granted to him by his subjects, which means the right to rule depends on whether or not a guy is actually a good leader. Literary critics and historians point out that when Shakespeare was writing Richard II, European ideas about power and monarchy were beginning shift from a religious attitude, like Richard's, to a more secular (non-religious) point of view, like Henry's. The play is a reflection of this change.

Language and Communication

How much power do words really have? In this play, Shakespeare pits the power of language against the power of action. On the one hand, Richard more or less believes that his speech is power. In one sense, he's right: Richard can end a man's life just by banishing him or ordering a murder. So language is powerful, in the political sense. Later, once Richard is no longer king and his words don't have any political power, he manages to make his language forceful in a different sense: his words are often quite moving and poetic.
Henry Bolingbroke, on the other hand, makes it clear that he doesn't think much of language. Unlike Richard (who describes his fall from grace so poetically that we almost forget he was a bad king), Henry isn't a good storyteller. He thinks action is far more important than language, which is why he's so great at seizing opportunities and creating situations that will give him power.

Identity

Many of the characters in this play get their identities from their titles, which is why they obsess so much about their names. (This makes some sense given that members of the nobility are named after the land they inherit – like John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster.) The same is true of Richard II, who has inherited the title of King of England from his father. When Richard loses his title, he experiences a major identity crisis. Much like Shakespeare's character King Lear, Richard puts so much of his selfhood into his title that when he loses the crown, he finds it hard to define who he is. This is when Richard becomes the most interesting (and maybe even most sympathetic) figure in the play.

Loyalty

One of the basic issues the play investigates is how you go about determining who or what deserves your loyalty. Are you loyal to a king? To a country? To your relatives? To the law? To justice? To God? When different systems (like government, religion, and family) compete with each other for your allegiance, how do you choose sides? When Richard starts thinking of himself as above the law, he puts these systems in conflict with each other.
Different characters offer different answers to this question. Aumerle is loyal to Richard. York is loyal to the office of the king, no matter who occupies it. Gaunt is loyal to the kingdom. The Duchess of York is loyal to her son. And the queen is loyal to her husband. So who's right? Shakespeare leaves this for us to decide.

Gender

If you're reading Richard II and you're hoping to bump into a powerful, dominating female figure like Lady Macbeth, you've chosen the wrong play. Talk to any of the three leading women in Richard II and they'll tell you the same thing: regardless of social status or age, female characters have very little power, especially when it comes to politics. (This is a little odd given that Shakespeare wrote the play with Queen Elizabeth I on the throne, don't you think?)
In Richard II, the women tend to be associated with family, and they always, always put kinship bonds first. Yet even though the play's women are left out of politics, they serve an important function, because they allow Shakespeare to raise a big question: Is political loyalty more important than family loyalty?

Appearances

Many of Richard's failures can be chalked up to the fact that he's pretty easily fooled by appearances. If someone flatters him and tells him he's awesome, he believes them; he never stops to think about whether they might have an ulterior motive. It takes a lot of suffering for him to learn how to look through the surface and see the truth that lies underneath.
Several other characters in the play are also interested in figuring out how to interpret what they see. For instance, nature shows up again and again as something to be interpreted. Do the withered trees mean that the king is dead? Or that a new king is coming? Or that God is angry? Or nothing at all? Without a strong king, the kingdom is on shaky ground, so everyone is trying really hard to find meaning, a way to square the way things look with the way they are.

Suffering

Once Richard loses the crown, he becomes really good at playing the role of a suffering martyr. He may have murdered his uncle, almost bankrupted the kingdom, and suffer from way too much self-esteem, but it doesn't matter – he's so good at self-pity that it's almost impossible not to feel sorry for him.
Unlike many sufferers, Richard's development as a result of his suffering is actually pretty interesting to watch. The journey from all-powerful king who nobody ever criticizes to penniless prisoner is a long one. Challenged for the first time in his life, Richard has to think long and hard about what it all means. His suffering ends up allowing him to see things clearly – even more clearly, in some instances, than Henry Bolingbroke himself. His suffering also gives him an opportunity to do what he does best: make himself into a legend and turn his life into a story. (Translation: Richard's suffering allows him to go into full-on "drama queen" mode.)

Passivity

If Richard has a "fatal flaw," this might be it. The play is all about Richard's reluctance to actually do anything when he's directly challenged:

• Instead of going out and fighting France and earning money, he stays home and spends it and leases out royal lands.
• Instead of reacting when Henry Bolingbroke comes back, he takes his own sweet time returning from Ireland.
• When he finds out just how bad the news really is, he moves from overconfidence straight into despair.
• Instead of fighting or coming up with a plan, he tells Aumerle and his other allies to sit down and tell sad stories.

Richard is not what you would call a man of action. Henry Bolingbroke, on the other hand, is all about aggressive action. When he sees a chance to get the upper hand or gain power, he takes it. Shakespeare is asking us to think about whether a willingness to take action is what makes for a good king.

Pride

Richard uses the word "proud" more than any other character in the play. He uses it to describe Henry Bolingbroke, England's soil, and his own majesty. It could be argued that Richard's obsession with pride is what ultimately costs him his kingdom. Even though he ends up humiliated, he never really escapes the sense that he deserves more – that as God's chosen ruler on earth, he doesn't really need to do anything to feel proud. In other words, Richard thinks he's God's gift to the world. Unfortunately, this keeps him from listening to advice that might contradict or criticize him, and leads him to mismanage the kingdom so badly that he eventually loses it

Exile

It seems like every time we turn around, someone is getting booted out of England in this play. What's interesting is how the theme of exile is closely linked with patriotism. For Mowbray – and even more so for Henry Bolingbroke – being expelled from England makes them appreciate it more. Even Richard begins to appreciate England more when he's locked up in the slammer.
The thing is, this kind of patriotism wasn't a fully formed political concept in 1400s England, when the play is set. If you lived in England around that time, you probably thought of yourself as loyal either to a king or – perhaps later – to a religion. But Shakespeare wrote the play around 1595, when people were starting to think of themselves as loyal to their country. The play seems to anticipate the patriotism of Elizabethan England.