He thought God made him king. He was wrong.

William Shakespeare's King Richard II is a tragedy of language failing against action, poetry colliding with politics. Richard is England's anointed king—eloquent, self-dramatizing, and fatally convinced that divine right makes him untouchable. When he seizes his cousin Bolingbroke's inheritance to fund an Irish war, he sets in motion his own destruction. Bolingbroke returns with an army, and Richard discovers that beautiful speeches about the sacred nature of kingship mean nothing against military force. The play tracks Richard's fall from absolute monarch to prisoner, watching him transform from a callous ruler into something more self-aware and tragic as he loses everything. Shakespeare explores the gap between legitimate authority and actual power, between the language of divine kingship and the reality of political force. Richard speaks some of Shakespeare's most gorgeous verse about mortality, identity, and loss—but his poetry can't save him. It's a meditation on what happens when the theater of power meets its reality, when someone who has always performed being king must discover who he is when the crown is gone. Essential for anyone interested in Shakespeare's political thought, the nature of authority, or the beautiful, dangerous insufficiency of words.