Audiobook · read by volunteers
Richard II
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
Read by Kara Shallenberg (1969-2023), Gesine, John Gonzalez, Annie Coleman Rothenberg, Chip, hugh mac, Peter Yearsley, Mark F. Smith, deadwhitemales, Kayvan Sylvan · 5 chapters · 3 h 02
About the book
A king who believes his crown comes straight from heaven learns how fragile that belief can be. In Richard II Shakespeare shows a young monarch of great charm and little judgement, who banishes a rival, seizes his inheritance and is gradually undone by his own carelessness. Against him stands Henry Bolingbroke, practical and determined. The play is written entirely in verse, and some of its speeches, about kingship, exile and the hollow crown, are among the most famous in the language. It is also the first of eight plays that portray an English history stretching toward the Wars of the Roses. This LibriVox recording is a full-cast production in five acts, with ten volunteers bringing the characters to life in about three hours.
Introduction
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) wrote Richard II in the mid-1590s, probably around 1595. It stands at the start of a sequence of history plays that follows English kings across several generations, from Richard's fall in 1399 to events that lead toward the Wars of the Roses. Scholars often describe it as a more lyrical play than its successors, and it is written entirely in verse, with a poetic intensity that is unusual even among Shakespeare's works.
The title character is a complicated figure. He is vain and self-dramatising, yet in defeat he finds a haunting eloquence, and the play invites us to feel both sympathy and unease. The rival who takes his throne, Henry Bolingbroke, is not simply a villain, and the questions the play raises about the nature of legitimate rule and the right to remove a monarch were politically delicate in Shakespeare's own time. Its language, full of images of earth, gardens and royal sunlight, has long been admired.
This recording has five parts, one for each act, and lasts roughly three hours. It is a dramatised reading by a cast of LibriVox volunteers, edited by J. M. Smallheer and John Gonzalez, with different readers taking the roles. Hearing the play performed in this way helps bring out its rhythm and its drama, and it is a good way to begin exploring Shakespeare's history plays. Whether you know the play well or are meeting it for the first time, its blend of political drama and glorious speech makes it one of the most rewarding of the histories to hear performed.
Public domain
William Shakespeare died in 1616: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text