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The Hollow Crown - Richard II [2012]

Welcome back to My Year Of Shakespeare, your favorite source for wholly unqualified Shakespeare analysis. This week we're watching the first episode of The Hollow Crown, the BBC golden-age-of-television version of the Henriad, starting with Richard II.

A Hurried Synopsis

I think it would be an agreeable assertion that, largely, Shakespeare's histories are about what it means to lead or rule. Richard II is about just rule — while Richard is the legitimate king by blood, he's viewed as a tyrant by his court, capricious with his subject's lives, not treating the position or the rules it develops with the gravity deserved. While the term wasn't coined until about 200 years later, he would flagrantly violate the social contract, seizing the ailing Duke of Lancaster's coffers to fund his campaign in Ireland; this resulted in him returning home to a rebellion from Henry of Bolingbroke who had rallied a rebellion against him - the logical consequence of such a violation. Richard abdicates in exchange for his own safety, isolated and imprisoned. Bolingbroke, in contrast, still has to deal with Richard's various supporters, purging the country of its enemies within. When one of Bolingbroke's overzealous supporters kills Richard, he causes his king to be a liar, an unbecoming position for a king.

The Adaptation

Man I'd watch Ben Whishaw and Rory Kinnear take turns reading the phone book. And Patrick Stewart is here too? 🧑‍🍳💋👌, no notes. I think Whishaw's absolute breakdown on the Welsh coast is among his finest work, up there with Fargo's fourth season.

I think staging and effects (were there effects? I'm sure there were, though none occur at present), it felt of a kind with the earlier seasons of something like Game of Thrones; Neither dazzling nor dreadful. The camerawork was perhaps at times a little unsteady - there's a handheld scene that just absolutely beefs it at the duel between Bolingbroke and Mowbray that looks like the cameraman nearly rolled his ankle trying to find Patrick Stewart while zoomed and I'm amazed they kept it in - but was largely serviceable,

The decision to explicitly parallel Bolingbroke and his supporter as betrayers by costuming the dead Richard with rags and putting him below to a crucifix corpus was subtle. I imagine it would be easy to misread that, shallowly, as a sanction of Richard's expropriation of Gaunt's goods or royal caprice; or maybe that's also correct — that a king has those rights, though he also has to live [or not] with the consequences of exercising them.