SOURCE: Hockey, Dorothy C. “A World of Rhetoric in Richard II.” Shakespeare Quarterly 15, no. 3 (summer 1964): 179-91.

In the following essay, Hockey surveys the rhetorical effects and devices of Richard II, suggesting that the drama represents a significant development in Shakespeare's use of dramatic language.

From two equally interesting, but contradictory, views on the style in Richard II have come two quite different interpretations of the play. One, suggested by Hardin Craig as early as 1912 and incorporated into a fuller interpretation of the play by E. M. W. Tillyard in 1944, reached the boards in the 1951 Shakespeare Memorial production of the Lancastrian cycle. In his edition of the play Professor Craig attaches particular importance to the emergence in Richard II of a plain style, related to the more ornate style elsewhere in the play much as prose is to poetry in the later plays. Richard, his Queen, Gaunt, and Mowbray...