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.”
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