Richard II (Folger Shakespeare Library) -

William Shakespeare

Simon & Schuster

2005

352 páginas

11h 44m

ISBN-13: 9780743484916

King Richard the Second is a history play by William Shakespeare believed to be written in approximately 1595. It is based on the life of King Richard II of England (ruled 1377–1399) and is the first part of a tetralogy, referred to by some scholars as the Henriad, followed by three plays concerning Richard's successors: Henry IV, part 1, Henry IV, part 2, and Henry V. It may not have been written as a stand-alone work.

Resenhas (3)

5 (Perfeito)

"Always experimenting, Shakespeare composed 'Richard II' as an extended metaphysical lyric, which ougth to be impossible for a history play, but for Shakespeare everything is possible.

[The piece] studies the decline and fall of a remarkable poet, who happens also to be an inadequate human being, and a hopeless king. (...) His two roles are antithetical, so that his kingship diminishes even as his poetry improves.

(...) [He] wins not so much our sympathy as our reluctant aesthetic admiration for the dying fall of his cognitive music. (...) It is better to think of 'Richard II' as chronicle rather than tragedy, and of Richard himself neither as hero nor as villain but as victim, primarily of his own self-indulgence, yet also of the power of his imagination."

Harold Bloom: Shakespeare - The Invention of the Human, c. 16