Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Dorothea Kehler

Critical Essay by Dorothea Kehler

SOURCE: “King of Tears: Mortality in Richard II,” in Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, Vol. 39, No. 1, 1985, pp. 7-18.

In the following essay, Kehler emphasizes the tragic and psychological aspects of Richard II as she traces the king's emotional journey from a conviction that he is invulnerable to a recognition of his mortality.

Love's Labor's Lost, which initially depicts an attempt to defeat death through fame, comes to a remarkable comedic close as Marcade enters to announce the French king's death, displacing courtship with mourning. Death also stalks Richard II, contemporaneous with Love's Labor's Lost, transforming it from a parvum opus, a lesser history play important chiefly as prologue to the masterly Henriad, to the self-contained story of a pitiful and terrifying confrontation with mortality. However much England's fate is bound up with its king's, however much dramatic importance accrues to Bolingbroke, our interest is focused...
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