Richard II

Richard II, who ascended to the throne as a young man, is a regal and stately figure. Yet he is wasteful in his spending habits, unwise in his choice of counselors, and detached from his country and its common people. He spends too much of his time pursuing the latest fashions, spending money on his favorites, and raising taxes to fund wars in Ireland and elsewhere. When he begins to lease parcels of English land to certain wealthy noblemen in order to raise funds for one of his wars, and seizes the lands and money of a recently deceased and much respected uncle to help fill his coffers, both the commoners and the king's noblemen decide that Richard has gone too far.
Richard’s cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, who is a great favorite among the commoners. Richard exiles Bolingbroke from England for six years due to an unresolved dispute over a murder. The dead uncle whose lands Richard seizes was Bolingbroke’s father. When Bolingbroke learns that Richard has stolen what should have been Bolingbroke’s inheritance, Bolingbroke determines retribution. When Richard unwisely departs to pursue a war in Ireland, Bolingbroke assembles an army and invades England. The commoners, fond of Bolingbroke and angry at Richard's mismanagement of the country, welcome his invasion and join his forces. Richard's allies in the nobility desert him one by one and defect to Bolingbroke as Bolingbroke’s army marches through England. By the time Richard returns from Ireland, he has already lost his grasp on his country.
There is never an actual battle; Bolingbroke peacefully takes Richard prisoner in Wales and brings him back to London, where Bolingbroke is crowned King Henry IV. Richard is imprisoned in the remote castle of Pomfret in the north of England, where he is left to ruminate upon his downfall. There, an assassin, who both is and is not acting upon King Henry's ambivalent wishes for Richard's expedient death, murders the former king. King Henry hypocritically repudiates the murderer and vows to journey to Jerusalem to cleanse himself of his part in Richard's death. As the play concludes, we see that the reign of the new King Henry IV is already corrupt.

a Richard II bibliography