Day 24: Richard II, by William Shakespeare (BBC Hollow Crown adaptation)

The first time watching this one, I really didn't get it. Now with a few more viewings (including the subtitles for today's attempt) I have a better feel for the play. My first observation is a rather petty one - Richard being dressed in a nearly skin-toned suit for most of the film was a little bit off-putting. That said though, it does add to the uneasiness about the character in general, certainly by the end everyone around him seems to be sick of the melodramatics. It's difficult to feel any sympathy for him - he seems determined to give up and flake out of almost every situation he finds himself, including apparently (if the script is taken at face value) deciding he's been deposed at the first sign that his decisions have been challenged. It's a fair conclusion to draw, as it turns out, but technically Bollingbroke only asked for his lands back, not the crown - that was offered in a rather defeatist act that Richard keeps up for the rest of the play. I get the feeling maybe he didn't really want to be king in the first place, it just sort of happened that way.

Interestingly, when Bollingbroke gets banished, Richard says of him that he basically tips his hat to everyone no matter how low-class, and seems to imply that he himself wouldn't do such a thing. Later in Henry IV part i, the King Bollingbroke is to become pretty much says the same thing about Richard, and claims to have kept himself rarely seen and shrouded in mystery. I may be picking on a tiny thing here, but I can't help but feel there's a rather large chapter missing in the middle.

Once again I find myself wondering how much I really missed at school with my developing blind spot for History and English. When I was in primary school I loved to read, got stuck into every project we were given and usually chose ancient civilisations whether or not the subject matter was limited to historical themes, developed an interest in other languages that stuck with me all the way through to A-levels and already had a blossoming interest in not only Shakespeare but Chaucer. I won a school prize at the end of primary school for general improvement and was allowed to choose a book as a prize - that year we'd been introduced to the Canterbury Tales and I asked for a copy, which came in the form of a beautifully illustrated modern translation. The deeper I get into rediscovering Shakespeare, as well as discovering the wealth of modern work out there, it's a little bit like stepping back a lot further than I realised I needed to go to find that I didn't always shy away from all this. It's overgrown and sleeping, but there was at one point a real spark for everything I'm working to reclaim.