SOURCE: “The State of the Law in Richard II,” in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 34, 1983, pp. 5-17.

In the following essay, Hamilton investigates the relationship between the king and the law, asserting that Shakespeare's Richard was perceived as a bad king by Elizabethans because he was viewed as “exercising the royal prerogative for his own self-interest rather than for the good of the commonwealth.”

Near the end of the speeches of warning and instruction that Gaunt delivers on his deathbed to the wayward Richard II, one encounters the passage,

Landlord of England art thou now, not king, Thy state of law is bondslave to the law.(1) 

(II.i.113-14)

Although it is evident that Gaunt is expressing displeasure with Richard, the substance of his complaint has not always been clear. A. P. Rossiter, for example, has described the passage as “hopelessly obscure.”² At issue is the relationship between king and...