SOURCE: Rutter, Carol Chillington. “Fiona Shaw's Richard II: The Girl as Player-King as Comic.” Shakespeare Quarterly 48, no. 3 (autumn 1997): 314-24.

In the following extended review of director Deborah Warner's 1995 production of Richard II starring Fiona Shaw in the title role, Rutter highlights the significance of this feminized, cross-gender, and comic stage interpretation of Shakespeare's play.

… Richard, that sweet lovely rose, … this thorn, this canker Bolingbroke. 

(1 Henry IV, 1.3.173-74)¹

Even before it opened at the National Theatre in June 1995, every major British newspaper had an opinion about Deborah Warner's Richard II. “Gimmick casting,” said the Independent on Sunday: “The sort of thing you might expect to see at the end of term in a boarding school.”² A “Kingdom under siege,” observed the Guardian.³ The Observer Review asked about “a career in crisis,” and three weeks later the Independent felt compelled to publish a “second opinion” to “defend … Richard II from...