Deposed, imprisoned, alone, Shakespeare’s Richard II supposes, “Nor I nor any man that but man is / With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased / With being nothing” (5.5 39-41).  What is this “nothing” that Richard claims he is?  And is Richard – whom Bolingbroke continues to consider a threat to his ascent, and who will, in the moments before his own death, kill two people – really, in any sense, “nothing”?  This paper proposes that Richard’s ontological provocation incites – perhaps even necessitates – a radical reassessment of subjectivity.  With recourse to the work of affect theorists John Protevi and Brian Massumi, the paper argues that in the first half of Shakespeare’s Richard II, Richard’s political role as king defines his subjective experience and limits his sense of bodily potential – of the potential of his own body, and the potentials of the bodies around them.  When his kingdom is overthrown, Richard II, as a subject, collapses, as the new political conditions no longer make such a subjectivity tenable.  The effect of his downfall is, however, a kind of liberation.  During his negotiations with Bolingbroke, and especially during his imprisonment at the end of the play, Richard senses what a body that has for so long called itself a king can also do, or become.  Richard’s realization that he is “nothing” is an encounter with what Protevi and Massumi term the virtual: the potential for political systems, and their subjects, to transform.

—Michael Shelichach, The Graduate Center, CUNY