SOURCE: Liebler, Naomi Conn. “The Ritual Groundwork.” In Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre, pp. 51-111. London: Routledge, 1995.

In the following excerpt, Liebler examines the way ritual actions in Richard II are honored, abruptly curtailed, subverted, or ignored. The critic focuses on the joust between Bolingbroke and Mowbray at the opening of the play, the formal deposition of Richard at Westminster, and the continuing degradation of the sacred bonds of kinship.

“What is a ceremony?” I asked. “It is a proper way to behave. You do this and that, so the gods do not punish you,” said Amah.

Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

Tragedy is part of a genealogy of related encodings that begins in ritual, myth, and folklore, whose interests are the same and whose vestiges remain visible even in the most complex and sophisticated plays. Since drama is communal production, “the critical intensification...