Book Review: Richard II: A Critical Reader by Michael Davies & Andrew Duxfield

Abstract

play’s contemporaneity, for instance, in its attention to ‘the position of aliens or minorities in a given society’ (p. 197). The problems this cussed play raises ‘can help examine current-day issues of integration and immigration’ (p. 209). This is a varied and engaging set of essays including the encyclopaedically factual and the daringly interpretative. The insistence throughout on the play’s topicality begins to answer the editors’ opening question: ‘Is this a comedy, a tragedy, or something else entirely?’ While the answer to this is probably ‘all of the above’, it is the play’s being ‘something else entirely’, its strange familiarity and its forbidding alterity which allows it to ingratiate itself with its audience as a romantic comedy while leaving them with darker questions about racism, injustice and cruelty.