I wrote a mirror. Some men mistook it for a signal.
I wrote this one earlier than the others, and for a plainer reason. Holinshed's Chronicles were common property to any Englishman who could read them — our own history, not a foreign report smuggled out of a colony. I did not need a shipwreck to hand me this material. I needed only to ask what our own chronicles already half-answered: what does it actually cost a kingdom when a legitimate king governs by ceremony instead of judgment, and what does it cost the man who finally takes the crown from him, even when he is right to?
I built the deposition scene to be the center of the play, and the printers knew it before any censor had to tell them. For as long as the old queen lived, that scene was left out of every printed copy sold in London — not because the story was secret, everyone alive had heard some version of it, but because watching a king unmake himself in his own words, on a stage, in front of paying subjects, was never a comfortable thing for a living monarch to permit. I did not write it to be comfortable. A king who cannot be shown being unmade has usually forgotten that he can be.
Richard is not a fool, whatever the easy reading makes of him. He is a man who inherited a genuine legitimacy and spent it as though it replenished itself, the way I have watched inherited fortunes and inherited offices spent by men who never had to build either. Bolingbroke I built more carefully still — I gave him almost no soliloquies, because the truest instrument I ever saw wielded near a throne was not eloquence but withheld intention. He tells the truth in every scene of this play. He simply never tells the whole of it, and I wanted the audience to feel exactly how much room that leaves for other men to fill in the rest themselves, and call it their own conviction rather than his design.
I gave York his impossible middle, because I have stood in that middle myself more than once and know it has no solid ground in it at all. And I gave Richard his mirror at the end, not his sword, because a man who has spent his whole life being told what he is by the office he holds discovers, once the office is gone, that he does not yet know how to answer the question for himself.
What I did not build into this play, and what happened to it anyway, is the part I have the harder duty of setting down. In the days before certain men chose to raise arms against the crown I served, they paid to have this very play staged, this very scene performed, the night before they moved. They wanted the old queen's subjects to watch a legitimate king unmade and to carry the image into the morning with them. She knew exactly what had been done, and told her own men so plainly enough that the words reached me before the trial did. I had loved the man at the center of that conspiracy once, and served under his patronage, and I stood among his prosecutors regardless, because a scene I built to be studied had been borrowed by other men to be used, and I would not compound one error by excusing the second on account of the first.
I do not offer that as a confession the play was wrong to write. A mirror does not become guilty because a man picks it up and swings it at someone. But I will not pretend the distance between the two uses is as wide as I might once have liked to believe, and I would rather a student of mine learn that from me plainly than discover it on their own, later, at a worse cost than the lesson requires.
That is what I built, and what became of it. Over the fifteen weeks ahead of you, you will take this history apart piece by piece, and I want you to know before you begin that nothing in it was accidental and nothing in it was merely decorative. A trial halted before it could return a verdict. A council built to agree quickly rather than to counsel well. A treasury spent as though it could not run out. A dying man's warning heard by no one in the room built to hear it. An inheritance seized, and a wronged man made overnight into a threat. A return that never once declares what it has actually come for. A regent with no ground left under his own neutrality. A coalition that grows one silent permission at a time. A path cleared of favorites before the man himself is touched. A surrender staged to look like consent. A mirror held up to a face that no longer knows what it is looking at. A ceremony performed around a fact that ceremony did nothing to decide. A father who reports his own son. A wish granted and its granter punished for granting it. And a crown that costs more to keep than it ever cost to take.
Every one of these is a working part of a single machine, the same as the last one was. I built this one to be studied as carefully as I built that one — more carefully, in fact, having since learned exactly what can happen when it is not.
— F.B.