In last week’s NAP, I talked about carefully interpreting literature—especially not “falsifying through interpretations.” I did the opposite this week… In reading Joseph Frank’s biography of F.M. Dostoevsky, a major theme in Dostoevsky’s life that comes up throughout his work is the moral ill-effects of the Russian people’s loss of faith in Christianity due to the influence of European secularism. In virtually all of Dostoevsky’s novels published after Notes from the Underground (1862), religion as the foundation of morality functions as a dominant theme.

There is good reason to believe that the birth of secularism (a lack of belief in religion) coincided with the Enlightenment, in the 18^th century (we’ll dive much more deeply into these historical developments when reading Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age in the next few weeks). The tension between the secular-amoral and religious moralities, however, made me think of Shakespeare’s Richard II. Preceding exactly as I suggested last week how not to read (guided by a preconceived interpretation), I reread Richard II with the thematic relationship between religion and morality in mind.

The argument I will make in this post is that William Shakespeare’s late 16^th century history play Richard II dramatizes the loss of morality following political secularization. I found that Shakespeare thematizes the loss of political and social stability, which stems directly from the pragmatic-political character Bolingbroke’s trespass against King Richard II’s throne. The king as a symbol of the Christian God does seem to be a political belief very distant from current political concerns but I think that it is not commonly considered today just how closely the Christian basis of morality (the dissolution of which Shakespeare dramatizes in Richard II) affects the possibility of morality at all, at least as we usually understand it (as regarding good and bad behavior between human beings).

Shakespeare’s Richard II displays an idealistic faith in God’s support of his kingship. Henry Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV, who seizes the crown from Richard displays a pragmatic realism. Richard’s belief in the abstract validity of the right of the king comes to not match up to the reality of his political situation, as he loses power and Bolingbroke gains it. For instance, Richard’s statement that the “earth shall have a feeling and these stone/ Prove armed soldiers ere her native king/ Shall falter under foul rebellious arms” (Act 3, scene 2, lines 24-26) is an example of idealistic abstraction is opposite to Bolingbroke’s pragmatic skepticism (1.3.258). However, as the action of the play unfolds, Richard’s political weakness and Bolingbroke’s political strength flip, alongside the audience’s assessment of their moral character. The originally politically savvy Bolingbroke proves unable to fulfill the representative offices of the king. Richard, on the other hand, purges himself of his iniquities from the earlier sections of the play (the murder of his uncle and unjust taxations of the realm). As Richard is dethroned, he does exactly the right thing, morally speaking, whereas Bolingbroke sinks lower in the immoral consequences of his rebellion against the King. Richard immediately turns to renunciation of what is his as an act of penance, especially when he gives up the crown (4.1.233). Even the Queen is surprised by Richard’s “mildness;” he acts as if he has been physically killed (5.1.39). Richard, however, renounces his claim to earthly in return for religious salvation:

I am sworn brother, sweet,
To grim Necessity, and he and I
Will keep a league till death […]
Our holy lies must win a new world’s crown,
Which our profane hours here have stricken down
(5.1.20-25).

Richard foresees the particularly terrible sins that will be elicited by the end of the play as a result of the trespass of the religious-moral firmament: “murders, treasons, and detested sins” found in the ideological darkness rather than the light of the sun, the king (3.2.40).

Shakespeare shows his preference for the Christian morality of the wronged characters in the play (against Bolingbroke and the other politically powerful characters) in part by giving only wronged characters prophetic powers, reminiscent of the biblical prophets. There are three prophetic figures in the play:

• Mowbray, who is banished, later to be sanctified by dying in Christian wars against the Turks;
• The Queen, Richard’s wife, whose intuition is paradoxical to the empirical facts she knows, creating an accurate, prophetic “birth” of feeling;
• Richard himself, who predicts Northumberland’s rebellion, which occurs in Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays (1.3.198-199, 2.2.62-66, and 5.1.55, respectively).

Beside the prophetic moments, further support for Shakespeare’s preference for the Christian morality of the wronged characters is in evidence in the parallels between Richard’s suffering and the passion narrative of Christ. As Richard gives up the throne he immediately begins to speak of the monastery (3.3.145; 5.1.20). Richard immediately gives up his crown at the call of ‘Necessity,’ though he is aptly performative, saying exactly the ‘right’ thing, whereas Bolingbroke can’t even say explicitly that he wishes Richard to give up the throne yet.

Richard himself is the first to compare his situation with that of Christ in the passion narrative (4.1.164). The crowd’s mistreatment echoes this parallel (5.2.5). Richard’s death  cements his comparison with Christ and the Christian morality of sacrifice. Richard deemphasizes his earthly life and suppresses his ego:

Whate’er I am,
Nor I nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
With being nothing (5.5.38-40).

Richard’s dying words emphasize the rising of his soul and lowering of his body, reassertion of the divine right that has been taken throughout the play by human folly: “Mount, mount, my soul! Thy seat is up on high,/ Whilst my gross flesh sinks downward here to die (5.5.111-112).”

In contrast, Bolingbroke’s trespass is brought to its logical end in royal murder and treason. Bolingbroke ascension contrary to the normative order of kingship throws morality and natural generation (both in terms of landed heredity and familial ties) into confusion. Bolingbroke himself draws an evil biblical parallel between Bolingbroke’s transgression and the narrative of Cain. Bolingbroke tells Exton (who murdered Richard): “With Cain go wander through the shade of night/ And never show thy head by day nor light (5.6.43-44).” Bolingbroke ends on a note of regret rather than Richard’s Christian forgiveness and even emphasizes his separation from the generative forces of life because of his moral trespass: “Lords, I protest my soul is full of woe/ That blood should sprinkle me to make me grow (5.5.45-46).”

Indeed, the natural loss of moral order is much like an unavoidable natural disaster. Richard’s woe is an event of natural proportions akin to a disaster:

Ah, Richard! With eyes of heavy mind
I see thy glory like a shooting star
Fall to the base earth from the firmament (2.4.18-20).

When Richard is split from his wife, he highlights the double transgression at work here:

Doubly divorced! Bad men, ye violate
A twofold marriage: twixt my crown and me,
And then betwixt me and my married wife (5.1.71-73).

The impossibility of natural filial and romantic relationships comes to the fore in the last act of the play, especially in Act 5, scene 2, when York discovers the treachery of his son, Aumerle, against Bolingbroke and leads into the moral darkness of the approaching wars, which Shakespeare dramatizes in further plays.

Shakespeare dramatizes the conflict between secular, realistic wisdom, as represented in Richard II by Bolingbroke and the religious-moral vision of Christian renunciation represented by Richard, by showing the latter to be clearly morally superior. The moral-religious conflict that Shakespeare depicts in Richard II has not, however, died along with feudal political structures. For instance, in The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky is concerned with much the same religious-moral conflicts depicted here by Shakespeare, though in relation to a kind of Nationalism that we would recognize as largely modern. Dostoevsky suggests that morality cannot survive without continually being connected to the taproot of religion. Some of Dostoevsky’s great works, Notes from the Underground, Crime and Punishment, and Demons dramatize the struggle between the radical Russian intelligentsia of the time and the inherent moral faith of the Russian peasantry (interestingly, Demons dramatizes the conflict between these viewpoints in different characters, like in Richard II while Notes and Crime and Punishment center the conflict within a single psyche). In The Idiot and Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky depicts much more clearly the positive influences of morally upright characters.

In my next post, I’ll consider Dostoevsky’s Christian-nationalism as an evolution of the basic moral-religious conflict outline in Richard II.

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Works Cited:

William Shakespeare. Richard II. In The Norton Shakespeare: Histories. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt, et. al. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2016. 373-466.

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This post was written with the help of music. If you would like to be an amateur philosopher as well, try listening to the albums In Our Nature by Jose Gonzalez or Seven Swans by Sufjan Stevens.