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    King Richard the Second
    King Richard the Second
    King Richard the Second
    Audiobook (abridged)2 hours

    King Richard the Second

    Written by William Shakespeare

    Narrated by Sir John Gielgud and Full Cast

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    About this audiobook

    Richard the Second

     is a poet’s play, full of great speeches and fine writing rather than subtle character drawing and keen insight. Performed by Sir John Gielgud, Jeremy Brett, and a Full Cast.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCaedmon
    Release dateDec 20, 2006
    ISBN9780061124792
    Author

    William Shakespeare

    William Shakespeare was an English poet, playwright, and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest dramatist in the English language. Shakespeare is often called England’s national poet and the “Bard of Avon.”  

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    Reviews for King Richard the Second

    4/5

    535 ratings37 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Shakespeare's history of Richard III reads like a tragedy. Of course the tragic thing is that the hero is so despicable, yet it is hard to dislike him too much, he has such good lines. "Now is the winter of our discontent . . ." the play opens and the reader is swept up by the perfidy and creative conniving of Richard. As his plans thicken he seems to be succeeding, only to fail in the end as his apparent allies fail him and turn. Filled with some of the best poetry of the early Shakespeare this play is deservedly one of his most popular creations.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this play, and it was only enhanced by the audio version bringing it to life. It was an interesting follow-up to Tey's A Daughter of Time, which presents a very different picture of Richard and his character and motivations. I remember having tickets I couldn't use to McKellen's Richard years ago and I'm sorry I've never seen this play on stage.
    • 3/5
      Shakespeare's take on Richard III. Very dark historical play, but just a play. Mostly inaccurate historically though.Very long play, S's 2nd longest just behind Hamlet.
    • 3/5
      I'm still not a fan of reading plays, and yet as I started to read Richard II, I thought I might maybe revisit plays like Macbeth and Hamlet and read them properly, now I can appreciate them a bit more... so I suppose there's still hope for me yet. I still maintain that plays are understood and appreciated best when performed.

      Richard II was, for me, definitely not as compelling as Richard III. The language is still astounding, and I enjoyed reading about the political situation and then applying it while I read the play -- it's interesting in that sense -- but neither Richard II nor Bolingbroke are as compelling as Richard III with his confident villainy.
    • 2/5
      Not a big fan of Shakespeare's history plays. See some of the film and stage adaptations of this play...they're more entertaining.
    • 3/5
      I never thought I would enjoy this as much as I did, and the Ian McKellen adaptation of this just makes it even better.
    • 5/5
      I think that almost everyone knows Shakespeare's verson of the story of the monstrous King Richard III, how he plotted the murder of anyone who stood in the way of his gaining the crown of England. This was certainly not my first encounter with Shakespeare. I've read his work several times before. However, I seem to have missed the history plays, until now.I'm embarrassed to admit, that this is also the first time that I've felt the magic of Shakespeare. It's the first time I've been held in the thrall of the power of his words.I've always enjoyed his work, but I never understood what all the fuss was about. Now I get it.
    • 3/5
      My first Shakespeare history: I've been avoiding them for years. I care too much about keeping everything straight: the four characters named Richard, the handful of Edwards, the nobility calling each other by their titles sometimes, their Christian names other times. And then titles will change. And I care about the events and the lineages and I manage to get all wound up and muddled and frustrated.Of course it's better if you just read it as a play. And for that, it still has a profoundly different tone than the tragedies or the comedies. There's a lot of vitriol here. Not a lot of subtlety. Strong female characters. A LOT of characters. Children.It wasn't my favorite. It wasn't my least favorite. It was more of another notch in my complete-works-of-the-Bard-read stick.
    • 4/5
      Great drama, a somewhat... um... flexible attitude to history, and scarcely a character alive by the end. There are the famous lines ("Now is the winter of our discontent"; "A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!") and some that really ought to be more famous ("fair Saint George,/ Inspire us with the spleen of fiery dragons!"). Very entertaining.
    • 4/5
      I've just seen the wonderful Kevin Spacey / Sam Mendes production which opened at the Old Vic this year and is on a world tour. An amazing production and a superlative performance by Spacey.
    • 5/5
      It took awhile to get into Richard III - it's set during/just after the War of the Roses, and there's a lot of politics going on that are pretty obscure now. However, reading it as a tragedy with a touch of modern thriller makes it awesome. Richard is brother to the sickly king, and a very respected military officer, but he craves more power and admiration than that. He has to work his way through most of his family and acquaintances though, picking them off one by one, to capture the crown. He's a master of manipulation and psychology, yet throughout the play we see Richard's own psyche and facades crumbling beneath the weight of this single-minded obsession. Wonderful, thrilling play that is completely worth the work to get through
    • 4/5
      Richard III, the tragedy about the Yorkist Götterdämmerung, is Shakespeare's second longest play. Laurence Olivier's 1955 film version clocks in at 161 minutes. Ian McKellen's 1995 film abridges Shakespeare's play too much, at 104 minutes. Richard III is anything but boring: Shakespeare piles murder upon murder at the feet of Richard III, some of which he clearly wasn't remotely responsible for. What is important to remember, though, is that Richard III kills for dynastic and political reasons. While Shakespeare highlights Richard's envy and discontent, the murders are politically necessary to open Richard's path to power. The tragedy not only requires the murders, each murder triggers the next until it is Richard's turn to die.Shakespeare endowed Richard with a wicked charm, memorable physical disabilities and a singular connection to the audience that lets one both roots for and against this evil man. Richard's dominance and centrality in the play is also its weakness: the other actors' light only shines for a few lines at a time. The other actors' roles never develop beyond types (grieving mother, opportunists, ...). The performance rests almost completely upon the central actor's misshapen shoulders and the absence of a medieval get-away car.
    • 4/5
      Following the deaths of Edward IV and Edward V in 1483, Richard III becomes monarch of England. It is quite a bit into the play before we are introduced to Richard III, but when we are, we see him as a tyrant. What a vivid picture of his wickedness Shakespeare paints! One can't help but wonder if the people of England didn't sing, "Ding, dong, the king is dead, the wicked king is dead" when he died a couple of years after assuming the throne. I really think I'd love to see this one performed live. I may have to settle for a movie version, but I really think that live would be preferable.
    • 4/5
      Much better than I expected. I usually dislike Shakespeare's historical plays. This was not dull or silly, but beautiful.
    • 1/5
      I'm not big into the history plays.
    • 5/5
      Richard, literature's greatest monster of indignation? I can't help but compare him to Iago--really can't help it, because the Richard I saw Bob Frazer play at Bard on the Beach the other night and the Iago I saw him play back in 2009 have such suggestive similarities. Iago gets archetypalized, and all too often played, as the moustache-twirling villain--the spider, the blot, the malignancy who fools everyone, inexplicably. But there shouldn't be anything inexplicable about it. He's "honest Iago", and it's in that that his awfulness lies. Frazer plays him that way--the bluff young honest handsome quick-witted hero of the wars against the Turk, the least villainous of all the characters in the play until he ushers you in. You expect him to flush some kid's head down the toilet, maybe, but not destroy lives.Is it too much to posit that the difference between real evil and the "mere" twisted and wrong that is the distillation of human pain is the difference between foulness with a fair face and foulness that looks foul? I've been thinking a lot about the limits of responsibility lately, and toying with the probably extreme but seductive and satisfying viewpoint that nobody's responsible for anything, ever, in a transcendent or a moral way. I don't know if I really believe it, but it leaves us with a principle to be debated when we come back to the question of where we forgive and where we condemn--malice that comes out of success, esteem, trust, handsomeness, camaraderie, triumphs aplenty, like Iago's: that is evil. But it's hard to say what good the principle really is in our practical ethical dilemmas, given that we can never really know anyone well enough to pass that kind of judgment. I guess it leaves us with a theoretical but indeterminate principle of evil, in theory, for now.And that's where Frazer's Richard comes in. He is the malignancy, the blot, the Spider King. Quite literally that, rushing forward on his crutches like a bug up your face and then when you* sweep it frantically away and twist it, crumple and break it without anywise meaning to, that's when he shows you that the ugly and bent is not the weak and broken and jumps down your throat dripping with poison. But nobody is taken in. They hate him because he's ugly, but their desire to seem unafraid causes them to act nonchalant, even to find excuses in his royal blood to treat him as part of the band of brothers.They make him with their horror and hypocrisy, and he kills them all, of course. And of course the logic I've outlined makes this a perfect story for Shakespeare, and this being Shakespeare, Richard is of course doomed as well. He's a magnificent character, one of the all-time gross and great, and let me say again for the record that Frazer played him magnificently, with his liplicking and hatred and glee. I don't think this is a perfect play, by any means; it hangs so crucially on the protagonist (here I've spent this whole review talking about him, well, and Iago, I guess) and everyone else seems window-dressing; it would have been fascinating if the venial lords who convince themselves Richard's just another one of them, to be trusted just as far and no further than they are, had come to quickened threatening life, if this in its first half had been a play about machinations and not inevitable rise, and only then in the second act, as it is, a play about inevitable downfall, it would have been more compelling I think to a 21st-century audience. This leads into a more general discomfort with great-man history from my perspective, but one which again I think a more balanced picture of the political manoeuvrings would have done something to help address, since it is undoubtedly two that back then only the gentry counted, be they great or no. I think the comedic scenes in this one, especially the conscience-searching before the murder of Clarence, are especially good; I think the primes steal the scene in their brief appearance, and if that hammers home the logic of their murder in a grimy way, which is good, it also means they're removed from the stage, which is dramaturgically bad; I think the whole second act, where England descends into fascist dark and then the bullies come back from polo or whatever in France and fight and win, and we're glad that the doofy brute Richmond, and not his opposite number livid broken sad Richard, wins, is not inferior to Lolita in the ways it makes us complicit (while still giving us some sweet fight scenes and brooding-lord pageantry, climaxing in the incredible ghost scene, which I wonder if it's the first instance of the ol' "it was only a dream" cliche, don't you?). But it's imbalanced in the end by the concentrated enmity of the figure at its centre. Not a perfect play; but Richard goes on the long shortlist of literature's most perfectly turned characters.*you are the Lady Anne, you are Elizabeth Woodville, you are the men too, in the unmanned way an Elizabethan blood might have felt when stumbling into a nest of creepy-crawlies, but predominantly, let it be noted, you are the women, whose desire to protect makes them susceptible to Richard in the way that the men's asshole revulsion at the bent makes them not. Men created Richard the monster, perhaps, and women made his success as monster possible. In that light, his relationship with his mother, a hard woman, takes on an interesting light, as well as the fact that it's Queen Margaret's curse that brings him down. I don't endorse the idea of a perversion of women's 'natural role' that I see in this play, Master Will, but I do fear me it's there.
    • 5/5
      Thick as a brick, the Arden edition of "Richard II" is a sight to behold. It's my first Arden history, and I'm looking forward to more. A play entirely in prose needs a lot of textual analysis, but what makes this particularly wonderful is the depth of the notes on the historical context. To an audience watching this in 1600, the references were as familiar to us as an episode of "The Daily Show", replete with all of the tiny little nuances that we just cannot grasp.

      Forker's notes give us detailed quotes from Shakespeare's sources, and spend a lot of time examining the relationship of the text to history. Being of an older generation, many of his thoughts on individual words and grammar are particularly enlightening, although one could argue that readers uninitiated in the particularities of grammar (vocatives, absolutes, etc.) may need to consult a guidebook as they go. Forker commendably sometimes offers alternatives to phrases even when the obvious reading seems likely (or, at least, easy), but he has a frustrating grandfatherly habit of dismissing modern theatrical approaches to the plays when they aren't historically accurate. While I can appreciate his points sometimes, it seems churlish to expect directors of these plays - made, after all, for a populist audience - to prioritise historical veracity even when it would confuse audiences or obfuscate an already challenging text. But anyhow, I digress. That's a minor quibble for what is another sterling edition in this most wonderful of book series.

      As with all Ardens, this is for scholars and readers rather than families and actors. Genius work though. We live in an often-terrible world, and yet we near the completion of such an astonishing scholarly project as this. There is hope for us yet.
    • 4/5
      “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” might sum up this drama as well as anything. Shakespeare’s play tells the story of Richard II’s deposition by his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, who became Henry IV. There’s a lot of musing on the divine right of kings, as well as on the consent of the governed.Henry Bolingbroke’s rise begins with a dispute with Thomas Mowbray over the death of Thomas of Woodstock, the king’s uncle (and also Bolingbroke’s uncle), apparently at the king’s behest. The play ends as it began, with Exton’s murder of the deposed Richard because he inferred it was Henry IV’s wish.
    • 3/5
      While I was glad to read/listen to this historical play (I read the text in my Kindle omnibus "The Works of Shakespeare" while listening to this LibriVox full cast recording), I was annoyed by Richard II. I appreciated that the way that Shakespeare made his character seem more likeable in the final few acts and his speeches about 'woe to those who depose a king' were most likely written with an eye to pleasing Queen Elizabeth I, but to my modern (and American) sensibilities, it struck me as outrageous that Richard II never acknowledged that he had done anything wrong!

      The LibriVox audiobook was OK but not one of their better efforts. The voice of John of Gaunt in particular was difficult for me to listen to. I probably should have just read the text...
    • 3/5
      Like all real literature this is about death. While Dick is not necessarily the greatest king around he is at least smart enough to realize that the collapse of his reign is a chain of events that can only inevitably lead to his murder, as the continued existence of a "rightful heir" is a loose end no usurper can afford to leave lying around. So the play is mostly about him alternating trying to grapple with this fact with constructing daydreams of some "possible escape" (there is no escape). A solid tragedy but does not reach the same heights Shakespeare managed with more sympathetic characters than this guy who is portrayed as moostly the cause of his own problems.
    • 5/5
      I love this one. Not sure if this is my second or third reading -- GR says I read it last in Nov. 2014, but I feel like I read it last more recently -- but, again, this is a five star play for me. This time I started with Marjorie Garber's chapter on Richard, from her marvelous Shakespeare After All. Her analysis didn't provide any startling insights, but it added to my appreciation of the way Shakespeare's artistry works in this play. Anyway, I just find Richard fascinating. Sure, he's a dreadful king and a lousy nephew, but he's a wonderful character. So invested in his own performance as flamboyant monarch that when the "script" of events seems to suggest that a tragic fall is imminent, he seizes the role of doomed lord (or, as he often suggests, "Lord") and plays it to the hilt. He reminds me of Hamlet, though not so complex -- self-dramatizing even to the point of his own destruction, self-pitying, and introspective, and he is such a great contrast with Henry. Poet vs. pragmatist. And their uncle, the Duke of York, switching his loyalties from Richard to Henry as it seems expedient, throwing his son over in a red hot minute, acting the "sage counselor" but always putting his own interests first, is marvelous fun! This is one of my favorite plays.The Arden edition of this has excellent notes, and the performances of the actors in the Archangel audio recording are marvelous. I can't recommend Marjorie Garber's Shakespeare After All highly enough, and also, because, of course, plays are meant for watching, the "King Richard II" in the BBC's "The Hollow Crown" and The Royal Shakespeare Company's "King Richard II" with David Tennant, are well worth seeing.
    • 3/5
      This is the first proper History I've read, and I'm not really sure I get it. There's probably a lot I'm missing by not having the cultural knowledge Shakespeare's audience had. The fourth act is really great, though - enough so that I like the play.
    • 4/5
      The first of the Henriad plays, 'The Tragedy of Richard II' covers Richard II's "Jesus Year": The eponymous king was only 32- and 33-years old as the tragedy of his life played out, setting the stage for The War of the Roses. During his 22-year reign, he was spoiled, and he abused the royal prerogative, so his fate should be no surprise; but The Bard paints a portrait of a man who found his humanity before paying the ultimate price.
    • 4/5
      Richard spends so much of this play depressed that you'd think he was in The Bell Jar. This play had three stars until "Go thou and fill another room in hell" made me change my pants.
    • 4/5
      Richard II is the first play in the Henriad (second tetralogy). It is followed by the three plays, Henry IV, Part 1; Henry IV, Part 2; and Henry V. Shakespeare’s histories have always been his most intimidating works for me. Richard III and Henry V are obviously incredible, but some of the others, like this one, ramble on with so many different names that it can be hard to follow. I decided it was time to just dive in and start at the chronological beginning. The Wars of the Roses play out in eight different works beginning with Richard II; then Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2, Henry V, Henry VI Part 1, 2, and 3, and Richard III. This play introduces many of the major players that have a role throughout the rest of those plays. It's about the fall of a king, the shifting of power, unhappy subjects and the plotting that leads to the king’s downfall. There's a beautiful scene between Richard II and his wife in act five. She’s watching he husband lose his power and is heartbroken for him…“But soft, but see, or rather do not see, My fair rose wither: yet look up, behold, That you in pity may dissolve to dew, And wash him fresh again with true-love tears.” I recently saw a film version of this one and it was fantastic. It was such a wonderful portrayal and those individuals will stick in my mind as those characters. Also I saw it at the Old Vic in London and Kevin Spacey played Richard II a few years ago. It was a wonderful performance. I’ve found that Shakespeare works so much better for me in book form if I’ve had a chance to see it performed live first. BOTTOM LINE: A beautiful portrait of the tenuous nature of power and the bittersweet nature of victory. It can be hard to follow because of the sheer number of characters and shifting alliances. If possible I'd recommend seeing a play or movie version before reading it because it's easier to follow the text when you can put a face with the name.“I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;For now hath time made me his numb'ring clock;My thoughts are minutes, and with sighs they jarTheir watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch,Whereto my finger, like a dial's point,Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears.”
    • 2/5
      The tragedy of this is that Shakespeare devoted a whole play to this milquetoast whiner. It would have been more effective, to me, had his story been included as a small part of the Henry IV plays. Neither a great hero or a great anti-hero, I just found the guy to be annoying as hell.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed Shakespeare's "Richard II." The play has a great plot that is paced well and the language is really accessible in this one. Richard II has quite a few great monologues that made this one a fun read.The play follows the final years of Richard II's reign before he was deposed and eventually killed. Richard makes a series of mistakes, that seem somewhat minor in nature, but together lead to his eventual downfall.
    • 4/5
      Of most interest as a hint of what is to come in King Henry IV Parts I and II, although still an interest in its own terms, especially for characters like the Duke of York. Richard II begins with the King arbitrating a quarrel by two younger courtiers and ends with one of those younger courtiers, Henry IV, usurping as King. One flaw, at least to my eyes, it jumps from Henry IV returning to claim his lands, and pledging loyalty to King Richard II, to him usurping the throne without ever explaining if his initial attitude was disingenuous, if something changed, or what happened to bring about this transformation.
    • 4/5
      Tough one to rate: without knowing the historical background completely, most things that happen are a little opaque - which makes this particular edition a god-send. Richard's speeches, particularly in the second half, are brilliant.
    • 4/5
      I am reading Shakespeare's plays in chronological order.A cruel and childish king robs his nobles to engage in foreign wars. They rebel and depose him easily. He whines about it until he is assassinated. This doesn't sound promising, but it has Shakespeare's most moving poetry yet, and his first serious and largely successful attempt at creating a character with psychological depth. I found it a treat to read, and, like several of the plays I've read, I look forward to reading it again