SOURCE: “‘By the Choice and Inuitation of Al the Realm’: Richard II and Elizabethan Press Censorship,” in Shakespeare Quarterly 48, No. 4, Winter, 1997, pp. 432-48.

In the following essay, Clegg maintains that it is unlikely Richard II’s deposition scene was censored because of any parallels with Queen Elizabeth's reign, or because of a danger of dramatizing a rebellion during the 1590s. Rather, Clegg suggests the possibility that the scene was censored because of its implication that Parliament may act without the ruling monarch and can in fact dictate terms to the monarch.

Shakespeare's Richard II has come to serve as a touchstone for discussions of state authority in early modern England, either, as Annabel Patterson has suggested, as “one of those puzzling incidents of noncensorship”¹ or, as literary histories (old and new) have maintained, as a representative event in a narration of control and subversion. The play's representation of...