* AlternateCharacterInterpretation:
** Henry Bolingbroke has a lot of contradicting analyses. Romantics portrayed Richard as a brilliant, sophisticated, and sensitive monarch TooGoodForThisSinfulEarth and Bolingbroke as an opportunistic knave who took advantage of the country's thirst for change to seize a crown that wasn't his. Some recent readers view Bolingbroke more favorably, emphasizing his very justifiable grievances with the King, which spiral out of his hands into a general coup against Richard; other interpretations of the play hold that Shakespeare writes the conflict between Richard and Bolingbroke as a case of GreyAndGrayMorality. The 2018 Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival production depicts the regime change as being the replacement of the old trappings of monarchy and the divine right of kings with a modern military dictatorship.
** American readers may be especially well-disposed towards Bolingbroke because they see him as a part of a long string of English precedents -- from Magna Carta through the beheading of Charles I and the Glorious Revolution against James II -- that served to end the arbitrary power of kings, and establish that properly aggrieved subjects could throw off the king's rule.
** Northumberland in the Hollow Crown is much more ambitious than typically depicted and is more TheChessmaster who pushes Bolingbroke into usurping the Crown. This makes his later fate in Henry IV plays all the more LaserGuidedKarma as Richard predicts.
* FoeYayShipping: Richard and Bolingbroke. It's relatively subtle (less so in Series/TheHollowCrown version, where it's pretty blatant), but man, is it there. The Hudson Valley production puts a notable spin on it by [[CrossCastRole casting an actress]] to play Richard.
* HoYay: It's Creator/WilliamShakespeare, so everyone's pretty [[AmbiguouslyGay malleable]], but, ye gods! Richard and Aumerle. In the 2013 RSC production with David Tennant they actually make out.
* IncestSubtext: As mentioned above, Richard has FoeYayShipping chemistry with Bolingbroke and HoYay with Aumerle, both of whom are his first cousins (although relationships between cousins was no big deal among either Elizabethan English people or medieval royalty; the homoeroticism would have been a much bigger deal).
* JerkassWoobie: ''Richard''. He has made some very bad decisions. But he gets well fucked over and by the time of his soliloquy you really just want to hug him and give him back his shiny things.
* MisaimedFandom: For a play that criticizes the attitude that a monarch's right to rule is ordained by God (or at least, that this prevents or excuses the King from being bad), an inordinate number of productions portray the capricious and incompetent Richard as TooGoodForThisSinfulEarth.
----