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King Richard the Second

After Tate's fiasco, apparently Richard II was not produced again until December 10, 1719, after the establishment of the Hanoverian dynasty, when Theobald's adaptation was given at Lincoln's Inn Fields. He endeavored to bring Shakespeare into more conformity with classical rules, by laying all scenes at or near the Tower and omitting all of the first and second acts. He worked up a sub-plot concerned with Aumerle's love for Lady Percy, Northumberland's daughter, and with his conspiracy to restore Richard. The elder Percy discovers the plot and, in spite of the pleading of his daughter and York, informs Bolingbroke. The final scene must have been very thrilling. First Aumerle is led across stage to execution. Richard has a tender passage of farewell with his queen, and then is set upon by the guards and killed. His dying words are, 'O Isabella!' Soon thereafter Lady Percy kills herself in grief for Aumerle, and York kills himself for Richard. Theobald borrowed nothing from Tate, and more than half the text is Shakespeare's. This version was acted seven times its first season and remained on the acting-list for two years more.

Nearly twenty years later, February 6, 1738, the play was given at Covent Garden, in Shakespeare's text, practically unaltered, revived at the request of some literary ladies. It ran ten times the first season and four the next. The audience is said to have read allusion to current politics into the lines of I. ii. For the rest of the eighteenth century there were no more notable productions, though it seems likely that the play was in the repertory of provincial theaters. David Garrick contemplated producing Richard II, but never did so. An adaptation by Goodhall, published in 1772, was never acted.