Richard II

What happens to a king who believes his power is God-given when his people turn against him? Richard II is a psychological portrait of breathtaking intensity - a ruler who can compose beautiful speeches about the sacred weight of crowns yet fail utterly to understand why his subjects starve and his nobles rebel. When his cousin Bolingbroke returns to claim his inheritance, Richard finds himself stripped of everything, discovering too late that a crown sits atop a hollow foundation. Shakespeare's language reaches extraordinary heights here: the famous meditation on kingship, the bitter humor of a deposed monarch counting his servants, the terrible moment when Richard realizes he has been his own worst enemy. The play was so politically dangerous that the deposition scene was censored in Shakespeare's own time - a monarch watching his subjects decide he was unworthy. This is tragedy not of circumstance but of self-destruction, and it asks questions about power and legitimacy that still burn: who decides when a king has forfeited his right to rule?