I never took a full-fledged course in Shakespeare. Rather than pine for something interesting I missed, I'm taking a class at UCLA Extension, taught by the knowledgeable Dr. Russell Stone.

I thought I would be one of the older people in the course, but there seem to be many older than me. They may have had my same motivation, which the clown Touchstone offers in As You Like It:

"It is ten o'clock;
Thus we may see, how the world wags;
'Tis but an hour ago since it was nine;
And after one hour more 'twill be eleven;
And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe,
And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot;
And thereby hangs a tale."

Thus before we reach what Hamlet learns at the end, "All is silence," we can grasp and grow. We just finished reading and discussing Richard II and Richard III. While these plays don't even approach my love of Hamlet, I've come to appreciate them for different reasons. Because I write fiction and plays, I couldn't help but be curious about the structure of the Richard plays.

One of the mandates of creating an engaging protagonist is to make the main character if not sympathetic then at least empathetic for the reader or audience. While most writers look to create likeable characters, there are many a novel, play, and film where a major character, while unlikeable, is nonetheless fascinating. Usually these characters are antagonists, such as Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York, The Joker in The Dark Knight, Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, and Colonel Hans Landa of the SS in Inglourious Basterds.

Still, some daring writers make the protagonist deeply unlikeable but nonetheless compelling. An example is Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood and Violet in the Pulitzer-Prize-winning play August: Osage County, now at the Ahmanson Theatre.  Interestingly, both of these characters first appear as sympathetic and become ruthless, powerful, and unrelenting as you get to know them.

Shakespeare's Richard III is different. Richard, the Duke of Gloucester and then later king, right from the beginning has everything for an audience to hate. He's a hunchback and feels cheated for having a deformity. Women don't find him appealing, and his brothers have it all easier. He says "Since I cannot prove a lover / To entertain these fair well-spoken days / I am determined to prove a villain / And hate the idle pleasures of these days." He tells us right up front he's laid plots, lied, given drunken prophecies and stories about dreams, all to get rid of his brother Clarence and his brother King Edward IV.

As audience, we're privy to Richard's soliloquies and we see his plans set in motion and hate him for it. When he has his two nephews, the sons of his late brother the king and mere boys, murdered, he is beyond vile. We pray for his comeuppance. Yet when he's compromised at the end, we see Richard as vulnerable and sad and come to even sympathize with him a little. This is masterful.

In contrast, Richard II is already king at the opening of Richard II. He's been king since the age of ten and is now in his early thirties. The play opens as he has to settle an argument between two dukes: the king's cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, the Duke of Herford, and Thomas Mowbray, the Duke of Norfolk.  King Richard seems arrogant and inept. That's made more clear when he stops the duel and banishes the two dukes. Both have been thorns in his side, and Bolingbroke is too popular with the people for Richard's taste, so banishing them gets rid of two problems at once--or so he thinks.

We soon see, too, Richard has been a terrible king. He's spent too lavishly, and to pay for his expensive tastes, he has taxed both his rich and poor subjects too much. He's not evil like Richard III but he's gravely misguided, scornful of many around him , and he doesn't listen to good advice--particularly from his dying uncle, Gaunt, Bolingbroke's father. After Gaunt dies, Richard seizes the man's riches to pay for a war that he wants, and Richard zips off to Ireland with the army.

Now Bolingbroke, seeing that Richard has absconded with Bolingbroke's inheritance--and there's no army now in England to stop anyone--returns from exile, apparently to seize the kingship. The net effect of all this is that Richard is neither likeable nor compelling. He's as fascinating as paint drying. The structure seems at first to be a formula to keep audiences away in droves.

Yet there are a few things going for it. The entire play is blank verse--no prose for the proletariat--and at times, the language soars in its poetry. Richard, once he sees everything is going against him, transforms. He's a bit like Hamlet in that he ponders things. While he's often unwilling to face some harsh realities, there are times where he's brilliant in his insight. Toward the end of Act III, he says, "Our lands, our lives, and all, are Bolingbroke's... / [T]hrow away respect, / Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty; / For you have but mistook me all this while. / I live with bread like you, feel want, / Taste grief, need friends."

I also sensed that in this play, this Richard is more nuanced, more mysterious, than Richard III, who tells the audience constantly what he thinks and plans. Richard II, once he loses the control of his country, tries to deal with and understand the turn in his fate. The audience has to participate more; they are not spoon-fed.

Shakespeare may have learned from these two plays to create his King Lear. Lear is king at the start of the play, and is as arrogant and narrow-minded as Richard II, if not more because he loves being flattered. Yet when his fortunes turn, he, too, is poetic, and we root for him to transform completely and make things right with Cordelia. Lear's oldest daughter, Goneril, is as ruthless and amoral as Richard III, and her plotting is just as clear as his. In the end, King Lear mixes the drive of Richard III with the ability to think and feel of Richard II.

There's much to learn from Shakespeare.