"(Un-)naming the king and the discursive fashioning of power and the self in Richard II"

This article discusses the linguistic and discursive strategies of the fashioning of royal identity and power in English Renaissance. A reading of Shakespeare’s Richard II offers precisely one such example, showing a peculiar affinity with the “mirror-for-princes tradition”. Textual analysis is set against the highly complex Elizabethan ideological and political frame of reference, and the play is examined alongside its sources with the aim of evaluating the ideological and cultural implications embedded in a highly connoted use of the language of 'royal un-naming'. Thus, a double aim is achieved: 1) the dialectics between the theatrical event - as highlighted in Richard II - and its historical context is re-defined in an attempt at redrawing the boundaries of different, albeit interactive, textual typologies. Various levels of textual and extra-textual theatricality are therefore explored; 2) the rhetoric of nullification of the late-medieval kingly identity is analysed in this play alongside the affirmation of the monarch's human identity outside dominating cultural discourses.