Reading Packet

Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 2nd edition, 1587

• A primary source, not a scholar's argument — the widely available English history that gave Shakespeare his account of Richard's reign, deposition, and death.
• Because it was common published material any literate Englishman could own, the play's basic facts were not secret history — audiences already knew how the story ended.
• Read a passage on Richard's fall directly and compare it to the play's own compression and invention — where the playwright followed the record, and where he departed from it, is itself worth a student's own eye.

State Papers Domestic, Elizabeth I · The National Archives, Kew · SP 12/278, fols. 85r–86v

• The actual sworn testimony of a senior member of Shakespeare's own company, given to the Privy Council eleven days after the Essex rebellion's collapse.
• Phillips testified under oath that Essex's supporters paid the company forty shillings above their usual rate to stage "the play of the deposing and killing of King Richard the Second," and that the players initially resisted, calling it "so old and so long out of use."
• This is not a later historian's account of the episode — it is the primary document the entire episode is reconstructed from. Read it directly before reading anyone's interpretation of it.

Shakespeare Quarterly 59, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 1–35

• A detailed modern reconstruction of the Essex circle's actual planning, arguing carefully for what the 1601 performance meant to the men who commissioned it and what it could plausibly have meant to Elizabeth's government.
• Engages directly with the primary record — Phillips's testimony, the subsequent trials — rather than repeating the popular version of the story secondhand.

London Review of Books, July 2003

• The most serious scholarly challenge to the assumption that the play staged for Essex's supporters was even Shakespeare's Richard II at all, rather than an older or different play on the same subject.
• Worth reading precisely because it complicates a story this course tells with some confidence — a genuine live disagreement among serious historians, not a settled fact dressed up as one. Test the claim, including the one this unit's own testament piece relies on.

Shakespeare Quarterly 48, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 432–448

• The standard scholarly treatment of the deposition scene's absence from the first three printed Quartos (1597, 1598, 1598) and its first appearance in print only in 1608, after Elizabeth's death.
• Also worth knowing: other scholars, notably Leeds Barroll, have pushed back on the idea that this absence proves deliberate government censorship at all, arguing the case is closer to "a myth" than settled fact. Bring both readings into the room — this is exactly the kind of disputed claim Nullius in Verba asks a student to test rather than accept from either side.