SOURCE: “Richard II: Metadrama and the Fall of Speech,” in Shakespeare's History Plays: Richard II to Henry V, St. Martin's Press, 1992, pp. 121-35.

In the following essay, originally published in 1979, Calderwood maintains that Richard II represents not only the fall of a king, but the “fall of kingly speech” as well.

It is hardly surprising that a playwright like Shakespeare would project his concerns about drama not only into life but even into the fictional life of his plays, where the world may become a stage, history a plot, kings dramatists, courtiers actors, commoners audiences, and speech itself the dialogue or script that gives breath to all the rest.

In the Henriad the main metadramatic plot centres in the ‘fall of speech’. To the Divine Rightness of Richard's kingship corresponds a kind of language in which words have an inalienable right to their meanings, even a divine right...