Paula Blank, College of William & Mary

And formally, according to our law,
 Depose him in the justice of his cause.

King Richard II (I.iii.29-30)¹

The deposition of Shakespeare's Richard II has been controversial since the play's original publication, and critics have generally concurred that the omission of "the Parliament Sceane, and the deposing of King Richard"² in Elizabethan editions of the play was a result of censorship. Whether or not the playwright himself was complicitous in the act is still uncertain.³ In this essay I will make the case that Shakespeare's Richard II explores the practice of self-censorship, whether or not Shakespeare self-censored the notorious "scene of the crime"; that Shakespeare's version of Richard's story brings specific sixteenth-century notions of "free speech," concerning the relationship of the king to his Parliaments, to bear on the problem of writing, and rewriting, the deposition of the king. The...