The most lyrical of Shakespeare’s history plays, Richard II traces the deposition of a king who is a poet and dreamer rather than a ruler. Richard II’s gorgeous self-dramatisation — his gift for metaphor, his inability to act — makes him a strangely sympathetic figure even as Bolingbroke strips him of everything. The play opens the tetralogy that ends with Henry V.
Written around 1595, it is essential to the sequence. This free EPUB is cleanly formatted for any e-reader.