In the Mean Season: Richard II and the Nostalgic Politics of Hospitality

In Shakespeare’s Richard II, the language of absent hospitality refracts the dire economic and food crises facing mid-1590s England, and it interrogates the contemporary response to the problem of dearth through its use of images of desolation, dearth, and grief. As absent hospitality proves to be a consequence of tyranny, the idealised past is invoked as a model for political action, to reclaim what is lost for the future. The respective future-oriented nostalgias of Gaunt and Northumberland articulate that possibility of reclamation, which Richard II ultimately rejects in its suspicion of past, present, and future.