Richard II: The Essex Rebellion and Shakespeare’s Dangerous Performance
On the afternoon before the Essex rebellion, supporters of the Earl commissioned a performance of Shakespeare’s Richard II. The play concerned the deposition of a reigning monarch. Within twenty-four hours its patrons would attempt to overthrow the political order of Elizabethan England. The episode reveals how closely Shakespeare’s theatre could become entangled with the dangerous politics of the court.
The play before the rebellion
On Saturday 7 February 1601, a group of gentlemen associated with Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, arranged a special performance of Shakespeare’s Richard II.
The play was presented by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the company to which Shakespeare belonged.
The following day Essex and his supporters attempted to raise London against Elizabeth I’s government.
The rebellion collapsed almost immediately.
Essex was arrested, tried and executed.
Among those implicated was Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s literary patron.
The performance of Richard II became part of the subsequent investigation into the conspiracy.
The authorities wished to know why a play concerning the deposition of a king had been commissioned immediately before an attempted rebellion.
The deposition of Richard II
Shakespeare’s Richard II dramatises the overthrow of an anointed monarch.
Richard’s political failures allow Henry Bolingbroke to gather support among disaffected noblemen.
Bolingbroke returns from exile, challenges the King’s authority and eventually forces him to surrender the crown.
The deposition scene presents the transfer of sovereignty as a public ceremonial act.
Richard is compelled to acknowledge that the political authority he once possessed has passed to another man.
He declares:
With mine own tears I wash away my balm,
With mine own hands I give away my crown.
The speech transforms the destruction of royal authority into an extraordinary theatrical spectacle.
The King participates in the ceremony of his own removal.
For an Elizabethan audience, the political implications were unmistakable.
The play asked whether a reigning monarch could legitimately be deposed.
Essex and the Queen
Robert Devereux had once been one of Elizabeth I’s most favoured courtiers.
His military career, personal charisma and aristocratic connections made him a powerful figure within the court.
But his relationship with the Queen deteriorated during the later 1590s.
His disastrous campaign in Ireland in 1599 damaged his reputation and brought him into conflict with the government.
He returned to England without permission and subsequently lost much of his political influence.
By early 1601 he had become increasingly isolated.
His supporters feared that the political faction associated with Robert Cecil intended to destroy him.
The rebellion emerged from this atmosphere of personal grievance, political rivalry and desperate ambition.
The performance at the Globe
The Essex supporters approached Shakespeare’s company and requested a performance of Richard II.
The company was reluctant because the play was no longer attracting the audiences it once had.
The gentlemen therefore offered an additional payment to secure the performance.
Augustine Phillips, a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, subsequently gave evidence concerning the arrangement.
He explained that the players had been promised an additional forty shillings.
The payment is particularly important.
It demonstrates that the performance was not simply an ordinary choice made by the company.
It had been specifically requested and financially encouraged by men associated with Essex.
The theatre had become an instrument within a political operation.
Gelly Meyrick and the conspirators
One of the men involved in arranging the performance was Sir Gelly Meyrick, a close associate of Essex.
Meyrick belonged to the Earl’s household and participated in the preparations for the rebellion.
He was subsequently accused of helping to organise the theatrical performance.
The prosecution regarded the choice of Richard II as politically significant.
The play concerned the deposition of a monarch.
The conspirators were preparing to challenge Elizabeth’s government.
The juxtaposition made the performance a matter of serious concern to the authorities.
But the theatrical company itself was not treated as having participated in the rebellion.
Phillips’s evidence explained the commercial circumstances under which the actors had agreed to perform.
Southampton and Shakespeare
Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, was among Essex’s closest aristocratic supporters.
His relationship with Shakespeare is documented through the dedications of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.
Shakespeare dedicated the two poems to Southampton in 1593 and 1594.
The connection places the playwright within the literary patronage of a nobleman who subsequently became involved in one of the most dangerous political conspiracies of Elizabeth’s reign.
Southampton’s family also belonged to the wider Sussex and Hampshire aristocratic environment associated with Lewkenor.
The Wriothesleys maintained their principal residence at Titchfield.
During Elizabeth’s Sussex progress of 1591, the Queen travelled from the Cowdray and West Dean region towards the Hampshire coast and the Southampton household.
The same progress involved the Lewkenor family, whose house at West Dean was prepared for the Queen’s dinner.
The geographical and aristocratic connections therefore bring Southampton and Lewkenor into the same broad courtly environment.
The Cecils and the politics of succession
The Essex rebellion was inseparable from the struggle for influence surrounding Elizabeth’s ageing monarchy.
Robert Cecil had become one of the principal figures in the Queen’s government.
His father, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, had served Elizabeth for decades and had been one of the most powerful ministers of her reign.
Lewkenor’s own career included connections with the Cecil administration.
In September 1594 he wrote to Burghley concerning the return of a treatise.
His literary and political interests therefore intersected with the administrative world that Essex increasingly regarded as hostile.
The struggle between Essex and Cecil was not simply a personal quarrel.
It concerned access to the Queen, the distribution of patronage and the future political direction of England.
Shakespeare’s Richard II, with its account of factional rivalry and the deposition of a monarch, offered a dramatic language through which such conflicts could be imagined.
The theatre as political instrument
The Essex performance is one of the clearest surviving examples of Shakespeare’s theatre being deliberately employed within a political context.
The conspirators did not merely attend a play whose subject happened to resemble their ambitions.
They requested a particular work and paid extra to secure its performance.
The choice reveals the political power attributed to historical drama.
Shakespeare’s plays could bring the actions of kings, rebels and courtiers before a public audience.
They could transform disputed political questions into emotionally compelling scenes.
And they could invite spectators to consider the relationship between lawful authority and the resistance of subjects.
The Essex supporters evidently believed that the story of Richard’s deposition possessed contemporary significance.
The rebellion of 8 February 1601
The morning after the performance, Essex and his supporters attempted to raise London against Elizabeth I’s government.
The conspirators hoped to secure support among the citizens and force a confrontation with the political faction surrounding Robert Cecil.
But the plan was poorly organised.
The expected popular support failed to materialise.
Essex and his followers moved through the streets attempting to gather supporters, only to discover that the authorities had already taken measures against them.
The rebellion collapsed within hours.
Essex returned to his London residence, where he was surrounded and forced to surrender.
The attempted uprising had failed without achieving its principal political objectives.
The investigation into the players
The authorities subsequently investigated the circumstances surrounding the performance of Richard II.
Augustine Phillips, one of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, was questioned about the arrangements.
His testimony established that the company had been approached by gentlemen associated with Essex.
The players had initially been reluctant to perform the play because it was no longer commercially attractive.
But the additional payment persuaded them to accept the commission.
Phillips’s evidence is particularly valuable because it reveals the ordinary commercial considerations underlying an event that subsequently acquired enormous political significance.
The actors were professional performers.
They had been asked to present an existing play and were paid to do so.
The authorities did not prosecute Shakespeare or his fellow actors for participating in the rebellion.
Gelly Meyrick and the fatal commission
Sir Gelly Meyrick was among those implicated in the arrangements for the performance.
He had served Essex and was closely involved in the preparations for the rising.
The prosecution treated the commissioning of Richard II as part of the conspirators’ wider political activity.
The play’s subject was the deposition of a reigning king.
The following day Essex’s supporters attempted to challenge Elizabeth’s government.
The relationship between the two events was therefore central to the prosecution’s interpretation of the conspiracy.
Meyrick was convicted and executed.
The episode demonstrates the extraordinary risks associated with political theatre in Elizabethan England.
A historical drama could become evidence in a prosecution for treason when its performance was connected with the actions of political conspirators.
Elizabeth I and Richard II
Elizabeth herself is reported to have recognised the contemporary significance of Shakespeare’s historical king.
William Lambarde recorded a conversation in which the Queen referred to Richard II and the dangers of political disloyalty.
Her reported words have become among the most celebrated statements concerning the relationship between Shakespeare’s history play and Elizabethan politics:
I am Richard II, know ye not that?
The remark is remarkable because Elizabeth identifies herself with a monarch whose authority had been challenged and whose reign ended in deposition.
The Queen understood that the history of Richard II could be interpreted as a warning about the instability of royal power.
Her statement also demonstrates the extent to which historical drama and contemporary politics could become inseparable in the minds of those who experienced the events.
Southampton’s imprisonment
Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, was arrested for his participation in the rebellion.
He was tried alongside Essex and sentenced to death.
Unlike Essex, Southampton was spared execution.
He remained imprisoned in the Tower until the accession of James I in 1603.
The new King ordered his release.
Southampton subsequently recovered his position within the political and aristocratic world of the Jacobean court.
For Shakespeare, the episode involved a nobleman to whom he had dedicated two major poems.
Southampton’s fate therefore connected the playwright’s literary patronage with one of the most dangerous political crises of Elizabeth’s reign.
Lewkenor and the Essex world
Sir Lewes Lewkenor’s career intersected with the same aristocratic and political environment.
His family connections extended through Sussex and Hampshire, including the households associated with the Earl of Southampton.
His parliamentary service at Midhurst in 1597 placed him within the political world of Elizabeth’s later reign.
His correspondence with Lord Burghley reveals his relationship with the Cecil administration.
And his literary interests brought him into contact with the historical and political subjects that Shakespeare transformed into drama.
The Essex rebellion therefore belongs to the wider political landscape reconstructed through Lewkenor’s biography.
The relationships between noble patrons, government ministers, professional actors and ambitious courtiers were often closely intertwined.
The political meaning of deposition
The central question of Richard II concerns the legitimacy of political resistance.
Richard is an anointed king whose authority possesses a sacred dimension.
Yet his failures of government provoke opposition among powerful noblemen.
Bolingbroke returns from exile claiming to seek the restoration of his inheritance.
His political ambitions gradually extend towards the crown itself.
The play therefore examines the unstable boundary between the defence of lawful rights and the overthrow of legitimate authority.
That distinction was central to the political culture of Elizabethan England.
Essex’s supporters presented their grievances as a struggle against corrupt advisers.
But their actions threatened the authority of the Queen herself.
The movement from protest to rebellion resembled the transformation of Bolingbroke’s campaign from a demand for inheritance into a challenge to sovereignty.
From rebellion to historical tragedy
The Essex rising demonstrates how quickly political action could become historical narrative.
Within days, the conspirators had been arrested, examined and brought to trial.
Their words and actions were preserved in depositions and official accounts.
The performance of Richard II became one element in the documentary record of the rebellion.
Lewkenor’s Estate of English Fugitives repeatedly warns that the actions of traitors will survive in the chronicles of their age.
He writes:
our chronicles, and all the stories of our time, will for ever, to the shame of their stock and parentage, record them for traitors
The statement captures the transformation of political conduct into historical reputation.
Men may act in pursuit of honour or advancement, but the judgement of posterity may condemn them.
Shakespeare’s history plays repeatedly explore that process.
The actions of kings and rebels become the material from which later generations construct their understanding of political legitimacy.
The players as chroniclers
In Hamlet, Shakespeare gives the players a remarkable description:
the abstract and brief chronicles of the time
The phrase identifies the theatre as a form of historical record.
Actors preserve and reinterpret the conduct of public figures.
Their performances may influence the reputations of rulers and courtiers long after the events themselves have passed.
The Essex performance of Richard II provides an extraordinary example of that relationship.
The conspirators called upon Shakespeare’s players immediately before entering the historical record as rebels.
The theatrical representation of an earlier deposition became part of the history of a later attempted rebellion.
Lewkenor’s concern with the judgement of chronicles therefore intersects with Shakespeare’s conception of the theatre as a public instrument of memory.
The cumulative Richard II case
The relationship between Lewkenor and Richard II is strongest in the political and theatrical environment surrounding the Essex rebellion.
The performance of 7 February 1601 demonstrates that Shakespeare’s historical drama could be deliberately commissioned for a political occasion.
Southampton’s involvement connects the event with Shakespeare’s documented literary patronage.
The Cecil administration, the struggle for influence at court and the question of royal succession belong to the same political world in which Lewkenor served.
His Estate of English Fugitives examines the consequences of treachery, the obligations of allegiance and the manner in which political actions become recorded in history.
Shakespeare’s Richard II transforms those concerns into a tragedy of sovereignty, rebellion and the destruction of royal authority.
The Essex performance then brought the drama back into contemporary political life.
The relationship between history and theatre had become circular.
Political events supplied the material of drama.
Drama became an instrument of political action.
And that action entered the chronicles of the age.
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Sources and Further Reading
The examinations and trial records concerning the Essex rebellion of February 1601, including Augustine Phillips’s testimony regarding the commissioned performance of Richard II.
William Lambarde, account of his conversation with Elizabeth I concerning Richard II.
The correspondence and state papers concerning Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, and Robert Cecil.
Sir Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), concerning treachery, allegiance and the judgement of history.
William Shakespeare, Richard II, particularly the deposition scene and Bolingbroke’s return from exile.
The Master of the Ceremonies, October 2026 manuscript, chapters concerning the Essex rebellion, Southampton, the Cecils and the political theatre of Elizabeth I’s reign.