Shakespeare's Richard II (Michael Pennington, 1990) 3/14 Video

This royal throne of kings, this scept'red isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,

Michael Pennington as King Richard II
Michael Cronin as Bolingbroke
Clyde Pollitt as John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster
Jack Carr - Thomas Mowbray, 1st Duke of Norfolk
Ian Burford - Lord Marshall
Philip Bowen - Duke of Aumerle
Paul Brennen - Sir John Bagot
Michael Fenner - Sir Henry Green
Colin Farrell as York

Director: Michael Bogdanov

"The Wars of the Roses" (English Shakespeare Company, UK, 1990) is a direct filming, from the stage, of Michael Bogdanov and Michael Pennington's 7-play sequence based on Shakespeare's history plays.

Robert Clarke ("The tragedy of King Richard II" 1896):

The magnificent ceremonial of chivalry, which Edward encouraged, is paraded in unshorn state before us; the visible sign of the great yesterday of conquest, still apparently commemorated in the grand figure of the Shakespearian John of Gaunt. The peculiar sting of Richard's exactions, to the mind of his angry nobles, is that they have been squandered in peaceful luxury—

"Wars have not wasted it, for warr'd he hath not,
But basely yielded upon compromise
That which his noble ancestors achieved with blows".

Of this indignant patriotism, in its loftiest form, Gaunt is made the mouthpiece (without a hint from the Chronicle). He thus may be said to stand, in our play, as Faulconbridge does in King John, as the younger Henry in some sort does in Henry IV. and Henry V., for England herself. The closing lines of King John breathe a spirit identical with that of Gaunt's prophecy, and have become hardly less famous.

Gaunt represents that loyalty, which, with all devotion to the king as the ' deputy of God', yet puts the country before the king. He will not lift his arm against him, but he will speak the daggers he may not use. How subtly is the relation between father and son drawn! In both we discern, though in different proportions, loyalty to law and vision for facts. The father votes his son's banishment; the son obeys. The father, wrung by the misery of England, utters the protest which the son effects. But with Gaunt ideal loyalty preponderates; in Bolingbroke, practical sagacity. Gaunt has more imagination, Bolingbroke more shrewdness. Note how finely this trait is suggested in their parting dialogue (i. 3}, where the father's store of imaginative resources in suffering—

" Look, what thy soul holds dear, imagine it
To lie that way thou go'st, not whence thou comest", &c.

is met with the reply of sorrowful common sense:

" O, who can hold a fire in his hand
By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?" &c.