SOURCE: “Shakespeare's Richard II as Landlord and Wasting Tenant,” in College Literature, Vol. 25, No. 1, Winter, 1998, pp. 21-34.

In the following essay, Klinck studies Shakespeare's portrayal of Richard as both the landlord of England and as a tenant who commits “waste” in the Elizabethan legal sense of the term, and maintains that the idea of Richard as a wasting tenant is a figurative notion.

If waste be made by a tenant for a term of life of houses or of gardens …, although it be of one house or twenty apple-trees in a garden, the tenant will lose the whole messuage; and so he will lose the whole garden.

(Bereford 274)

That the law of real property occupies a prominent place in Shakespeare's Richard II has been frequently remarked.¹ For example, Bolton argues that the play “makes central use of property law as it stood in the late fourteenth century” (55) and...