SOURCE: Pye, Christopher. “The Betrayal of the Gaze: Theatricality and Power in Shakespeare's Richard II.” ELH 55, no. 3 (autumn 1988): 575-98.

In the following essay, Pye analyzes the relationship between political power and theatricality in Richard II.

I would like to begin this analysis of the relationship between theatricality and power in Shakespeare's Richard II by invoking one of those significant and nameless characters who inhabit the margins of Elizabethan political intrigue. In May 1582, during a renewal of Catholic “enterprises” against the English Queen, the crown uncovered its first threat from abroad in the form of a treasonous plot involving the Duke of Guise and the imprisoned Mary. Something caught the eye of Elizabeth's agent at the border. Arthur Kinney recounts that one of the crown's spies,

keeping watch along the border of Scotland, stopped a suspicious man who posed as a tooth-drawer, discovered he was a servant of [the...