Edward Clarke on Richard II and the takeover of the city by a horde of overseas students

I was seated in the round space of Shakespeare’s Globe the other day and I started thinking of the square spaces of Oxford’s quads. As the performance of Richard II came to an end, the play suddenly presented me with a cracked image of life in Oxford these summer days.

Henry Bullingbrooke once usurped King Richard’s birthright to become Henry IV and now it seems that forces of foreign teenagers have gathered to seize possession of our town. So oppressed do I feel by their orange backpacks on Cornmarket Street, I must submit and give my brogues for a pair of flip-flops. Let them muster by McDonald’s, I’m getting out of here next week!

If we really are in the process of being deposed, for God’s sake let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of millions of Harry Potter enthusiasts in Christ Church, queues of Tolkien fans in the Eagle and Child, and summer schools or conferences in nearly every college. What would Tolkien have thought? The great Irish poet W.B. Yeats said of Richard II: “To suppose that Shakespeare preferred the men who deposed his king is to suppose that Shakespeare judged men with the eyes of a Municipal Councillor weighing the merits of a Town Clerk.”

I almost feel today, as a tutor of English literature, besieged not only by summer school students but by false standards of excellence and the flaunted utility of STEM subjects, the defeat that Yeats saw in Shakespeare’s Richard II: “The defeat that awaits all...who find themselves where men ask of them a rough energy and have nothing to give but some contemplative virtue.”

Then again, we should not so idealise Shakespeare’s Richard II. He was certainly a flamboyant and mesmerising metaphysical poet, but he was also selfish without much self-knowledge – at least at the beginning of his play.

The contemplative virtue of Oxford today is probably dependent on those foreign teenagers. Without the income generated from their temporary usurpation the colleges would struggle to carry on at all during the academic year. I see Richard II as a prototype or early incarnation of most of Shakespeare’s later protagonists. He is reborn many times, as Jaques in As You Like It, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Prospero in The Tempest, who all come to know themselves with different degrees of spiritual profundity on a soul-making ladder of cosmic proportions. One spirit travels through many characters, as some religions believe the soul is reincarnated over and over in a process of metempsychosis.

Of all forms of existence the human is the one in which spiritual development is possible, and Richard II did come to some limited self-knowledge by the end of his play. Our city is a macrocosm of human souls and so capable of spiritual development too.

As I gathered the 50 or so energised and perhaps enlightened foreign students whom I had taken to see Richard II, to bring them back to Oxford after the performance, it occurred to me that they had all taken the opportunity not to let another summer slip away, and, therefore, I was not squandering half of mine in trivial pursuits.