“Cousin, I Am Too Young”: Age and Authority in Shakespeare’s Richard II

According to his Lancastrian opponents, the historical Richard II lost his crown primarily due to his excessive youthfulness. This view shaped subsequent accounts of his reign, including Shakespeare’s controversial play about him. The Tragedy of King Richard the Second repeatedly addresses the question of the king’s age as perceived by, and in relation to, his subjects and political opponents. As my article demonstrates in detail, Shakespeare’s characters do not speak of age merely sporadically and in politically neutral ways. Instead, they regularly invoke it as a site of rhetorical contestation, informed by an early modern consensus that defined age largely in practical and social terms, was markedly gerontocratic, and made mature adulthood an important prerequisite to successful governance. Read in this context, i.e., with a focus on the intersection between age and rank as conceptualized by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, the various age-related passages in the play reveal both Richard’s failure and Bolingbroke’s success with regard to their age-political self-fashioning.