Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (1851), by John Faed; oil on canvas, 53 x 68 inches, collection of Mr. and Mrs. Sandor Korein
Look here upon this picture, and on this: Shakespeare’s Richard III and Richard II, the first written in 1592 or 1593, the second in 1595. The title characters are very different: Richard III dominates his play, which is constructed as a series of dramatic tableaux heavily indebted to Senecan rhetoric modulated through Kyd, Marlowe, and other popular dramatists of the early 1590s, while Richard II exists as part of a network of character relationships and social structures. Apart from a brief moment of self-knowledge on the eve of the battle of Bosworth, Richard III is a type of the tyrant, Richard II an exploration of individual psychology.
What brought about this change in Shakespeare’s technique? The answer lies, according to Bart van Es in Shakespeare in Company, in the pivotal year between Richard III and Richard II: 1594.1 In that year Shakespeare became a shareholder in his company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (from 1603, the King’s Men). Van Es writes:
The pre-1594 plays tended still to fall back on the established imagery and scenic patterning of contemporary playwrights—Shakespeare’s tragic heroes were insulated within a cocoon of self-defining rhetoric. It is my contention that the relationship of Shakespeare with his performers [post-1594] facilitated the creation of a new kind of drama—a kind of drama that was itself concerned with relationships.