Shakespeare's Richard II, read as Bacon's own working model of legitimacy.
If you sat in the Tempest's classroom last semester, you already know what I am asking you to do again here, only with the poles reversed. Prospero had nothing and built an order from bare rock. Richard begins this play holding everything a man can hold by right — a crown, an army of law, a kingdom's revenue — and I want you to watch him lose all of it to a cousin who never once, in the whole play, declares that he is taking it.
That is the actual subject of this unit. Not tyranny, which is a coarser thing and easier to spot. This is about how legitimate authority erodes from the inside, at the exact speed its holder mistakes ceremony for substance — and how a challenger can assemble an entire kingdom's loyalty without ever saying aloud what he is doing until the moment it is already done. I wrote Bolingbroke's silences as carefully as I wrote any of his cousin's speeches.
Watch what the man does not say.
— F.B.
Bacon's own opening to the course — grounded in the real 1601 Essex Rebellion and his own role prosecuting the men who used this play as a rallying cry.
Read His Account →Here is what this course is actually for, said plainly. You are going to spend fifteen weeks learning to recognize a small number of patterns — the mistaking of ceremony for power, the coalition that never declares itself, the loyalty that migrates before anyone admits it has moved, the crown that costs more to hold than it did to take. That is not the point. The point is what happens the first time you watch it happen somewhere real: a leader who assumes their title still commands respect it no longer earns, a workplace where support for someone quietly drains away meeting by meeting before any formal vote is taken, an organization whose new leadership can't shake the sense that they took the job rather than earned it. You will have seen the shape of that before. Recognizing it doesn't tell you what to do about it — that depends on the situation, and on you — but it means you are choosing your response instead of being surprised by it.
Here is what's genuinely expected of you at this stage, and what isn't. You are not expected to have run an organization through a leadership crisis or watched your own authority erode in real time. What's expected is recognition — that by the end of the semester you can look at a real situation of shifting legitimacy, even one you don't fully understand yet, and correctly name what kind of thing is happening in it. You will re-encounter this exact mechanic many times over the next twenty years, at higher and higher stakes, and each time you'll understand it a little more completely than the last.
Set the authorship premise aside for a moment — practically, this is a course in reading the transfer of legitimacy accurately, arguing about it rigorously, and defending an original position under real questioning. By the end of the semester, a student should be able to:
A conventional literature unit tests whether a student read the play and can summarize a theme. That's a lower bar than this course is aiming for. The Laboratory model asks a harder question of the same material: can the student use it? The actual assessment, week over week, is whether a mechanic identified in Act II can be found again in a real corporate boardroom, a real political succession, or a real historical usurpation. That transfer is the skill.
Fifteen weeks spent tracing how a challenger takes a throne could easily produce a student who finds the taking clever and stops there. That risk is exactly why the course's architecture does not end at Week 12's deposition — it deliberately continues through the new king's unresolved guilt and instability in Weeks 13 and 14, and the Capstone Rubric enforces this with a hard structural gate: a "Bolingbroke Strategy" that ends at the crown, with no account of how the taking must now be lived with, cannot pass at the top tier no matter how sharp the coalition-building was. The course is teaching what an unlegitimized crown costs to hold, not just how to take one.
Each week follows the same five-phase cadence established in the Tempest unit, one phase per day:
Days are not built around lecture. Each opens with a short framing input — five or ten minutes, often that week's aphorism read aloud — followed by the actual work of the day.
A legitimate king governs through ceremony and favorites rather than counsel — and commits the one act that converts a loyal subject into a rival.
Richard halts the duel between Bolingbroke and Mowbray at the last possible moment and banishes them both — resolving nothing, while appearing to resolve everything. Students analyze how ceremony can be used to simulate justice without ever risking an actual verdict.
"Judges ought to remember that their office is jus dicere, and not jus dare; to interpret law, and not to make law."
Richard does not judge the quarrel between these two men. He ends it, which is a different act entirely, dressed to look identical. A king who confuses stopping a conflict with resolving it has only postponed the bill.
Richard governs almost entirely through Bushy, Bagot, and Green rather than his broader nobility. Students map the difference between an inner circle that filters information upward and a genuine council that challenges it.
"The greatest trust between man and man is the trust of giving counsel."
I sat in rooms built for counsel and rooms built only for agreement, and I promise you a king cannot always tell which room he is in by the furniture. Richard surrounded himself with men whose only function was to agree quickly.
To fund the Irish war, Richard leases the crown's own revenues to tax farmers — monetizing sovereignty itself. Students study what happens when a leader converts a long-term institutional asset into short-term liquidity.
"Money is like muck, not good except it be spread."
Richard did not spend badly out of ignorance. He spent badly because he mistook the crown's revenue for his own household's, and a man who cannot tell the difference between the two will eventually sell what was never his to sell.
On his deathbed, John of Gaunt delivers his famous indictment of Richard's misrule to a king who is not listening. Students examine why institutions so reliably ignore their most credible internal critics until it is too late to act on the warning.
"Young men are fitter to invent than to judge, fitter for execution than for counsel."
Gaunt says what an old man is permitted to say and a young king is not yet capable of hearing. This is not a flaw unique to Richard. Every institution keeps its Gaunts around and consults them last.
Upon Gaunt's death, Richard confiscates his estate — the inheritance rightfully belonging to the exiled Bolingbroke — to finance the Irish campaign. Students identify this as the play's actual precipitating event: the single act that converts a loyal subject into an existential threat.
"Kings had need beware how they side themselves, and make themselves as of a faction or party."
A king who needs money badly enough will eventually take it from the one place the law says he cannot. Richard did not create an enemy that day. He created a wronged man with a legal claim and an army's worth of sympathy.
A challenger builds a winning coalition without ever declaring what he is actually doing — and the legitimate king's own regent cannot find solid ground to stand on.
Bolingbroke returns from exile insisting he has come only to reclaim his confiscated lands, not the throne. Students study the deliberate ambiguity of stated intent as a coalition-building tool — how a claim can be technically modest and functionally total at once.
"All rising to great place is by a winding stair."
Bolingbroke never once tells a lie in this play's early acts. He simply never tells the whole truth, and lets every man who joins him supply the rest of the sentence himself.
Richard's regent, the Duke of York, is left to defend the crown with no army and a legal grievance he privately knows is just. Students examine what happens to institutional neutrality once a legitimacy crisis makes every position a choice.
"It is good, in causes of faction, to lean to no side but keep men in suspense."
York wants the one thing a genuine crisis never offers, which is a way to be loyal to two things at once. Watch how long a reasonable man can hold two positions before the situation itself forces the choice for him.
Noble after noble joins Bolingbroke's cause, each citing the last defection as evidence the tide has already turned. Students model how legitimacy migrates through sequential permission — no single defector wants to be first, and almost none wants to be last.
"There is little friendship in the world, and least of all between equals."
No lord in this play defects alone. Each one needs to see another go first, so that his own defection can be read as prudence rather than betrayal. Watch the order they fall in — it tells you more than their reasons do.
Bolingbroke executes Bushy and Green without ever confronting Richard directly. Students analyze the strategic logic of removing an opponent's enablers before the opponent himself is dealt with.
"The most tolerable sort of revenge is for those wrongs which there is no law to remedy."
He does not yet touch the king. He removes the men who made the king's misrule administratively possible, and calls it justice rather than what it also is, which is the clearing of a path.
Bolingbroke stages a scene in which Richard "descends" and surrenders the crown as if by his own will. Students build a multi-agent simulation of the negotiation, stress-testing what each side actually controls versus what each side needs to appear to control.
"Princes are like to heavenly bodies, which cause good or evil times; and which have much veneration, but no rest."
I use this same line in the Tempest unit's own Dialectic week, and not by accident. Every genuine transfer of power stages a scene of consent over a fact of force, in every century I have studied. Find where the staging ends and the fact begins.
The deposed king unmakes himself in his own language, the new king inherits a throne he can never fully legitimize, and the play ends without resolving what it started.
Richard, formally deposed, calls for a mirror and studies his own face, asking whether the man he sees is still a king. Students examine the gap between an institutional identity and the person who was only ever standing inside it.
"No pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage ground of truth."
Richard spent his whole reign being told what he was by the crown he wore. This is the first moment in the play he is forced to ask the question himself, without the crown answering for him.
Parliament stages a formal ritual around Richard's abdication, even though the actual mechanism is force. Students study why power transitions consistently require their own ceremony and legal fiction, even at the exact moment force has already decided the outcome.
"Custom is the principal magistrate of man's life."
Nobody in that hall believes Richard is stepping down freely, and every one of them still performs the ceremony as though he is. A crown taken by force still wants a crown's proper paperwork.
A plot against the new king is uncovered, and the Duke of York chooses to report his own son rather than shield him. Students analyze how a new regime tests and secures loyalty in the unstable period immediately after a legitimacy crisis.
"Suspicions amongst thoughts are like bats amongst birds, they ever fly by twilight."
A throne taken by force does not become secure the moment it is occupied. It becomes secure, if it ever does, in exactly these small unglamorous tests — a father choosing the new king over his own son, and the new king watching to see if he will.
Henry IV wishes aloud for someone to rid him of the "living fear" of the imprisoned Richard, Exton acts on it, and Henry publicly repudiates the murderer despite plainly benefiting from the act. Students study plausible deniability as a governing tool used by a still-insecure ruler.
"Dissimulation is but a faint kind of policy or wisdom."
Henry gets exactly what he wanted and punishes the man who gave it to him, and both of those things are true at once. I do not think this makes him a hypocrite so much as a king who has just learned what the job actually requires.
Students select a modern, real-world case — a hostile boardroom takeover, a political succession, an institutional leadership crisis — and orally defend a multi-step "Bolingbroke Strategy" for how a challenger builds an undeclared coalition and takes power, citing specific mechanics from the text. The Capstone gate requires the strategy to account for the instability that follows an unlegitimized claim, not merely the taking of it.
"Win the Queen: if this be not the beginning, of any other course I see no end."
I wrote that line to a real man, years before this play was ever staged, warning him against the exact ambition I have just spent fourteen weeks describing to you in a king who never lived. He did not take the advice. Neither, in his own way, did Richard. Let your students notice that I was right about both of them, and helped neither.
Daily cadence notes, a 3-tier Epoch calibration rubric, week-by-week facilitation notes, and the Tone Question guardrails for the whole unit.
Read →One worksheet per week, matched to that week's specific Laboratory exercise.
Read →The Week 15 Bolingbroke Strategy defense — five scoring categories and a hard gate on the Epoch III requirement.
Read →Every week's modern term traced back to Bacon's own coinage — including where the two genuinely diverge.
Read →All 75 days mapped from the 5-phase weekly cadence — what happens Monday through Friday, every week.
Read →Real historical sources and scholarship specific to this play — Holinshed's Chronicles, the 1601 Essex staging, and the genuine scholarly debate around it.
Read →