King Richard II By William Shakespeare: Character Analysis

In a play, there are actors, and there are characters. The actors are only their characters, only have the “power” of their characters, when other characters in a play or an audience acknowledge them as such. An actor is only Prince Charming when they are in a Cinderella affiliated performance, and once they leave the stage, they are themselves again and retain no benefits from their fake prince role. But, some actors can get caught up in a role when they implement methods such as method acting and end up blurring the line between themselves, their identity, and their characters “power” as a character has no true identity. A similar situation occurs in the play The Tragedy of Richard II by William Shakespeare. In the play, staging is a means of claiming power by using an audience to provide acknowledgment of said power. Power comes from others but is confused for identity which comes from oneself resulting in the downfall of King …show more content…
Richard being king since childhood, had always identified himself as a king. To refer back to the actor analogy, King Richard is the method actor who went too deep into his role. Normally, when an actor relinquishes their role, they just return to their own identity. King Richard has no identity to return to so when the title of king is lost, so is the identity that came with it. He spent so much time as “[God’s] deputy anointed in His sight” that he never spent much time as a person (1.2.40). King Richard never spent much time as just Richard, so now when faced with being just Richard, he does not know who he is. He looks at himself in the mirror and questions “Was this face the face/ That every day under his household roof/ Did keep ten thousand men? Was this the face/ That like the sun did make beholders wink?” as if he does not know his face. The character (King Richard) only exist within the premise of the play, and once the play is over a character loses all of its