SOURCE: “The Genre of Richard II,” in William Shakespeare's Richard II, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1988, pp. 7-35.

In the following essay, originally published in 1972, Nevo assesses Richard II as a tragedy, rather than as a history play, and contends that despite some shortcomings, the play contains a movement approximating that of Shakespeare's great tragedies.

Beyond the woeful or happy outcome brought about by the catastrophe Elizabethan dramatic theory did not distinguish between the structure of tragedy and comedy; neither were the dramatic practitioners possessed of a theory of genre which would enable them to distinguish with any rigor between tragedy and history. Polonius's familiar puzzlement is not only his own but the age's failure to achieve radical definitions. Thus the “chronicle” plays of the period, which deal with the fall of princes, great changes of fortune, tyrannical intrigues, and Machiavellian betrayals, based upon no clear...