Richard II is a tour de force in verse with every character speaking poetry from beginning to end, but the play has many languages: its poetry is only one of them. Believed to have been written in 1595, Richard II is poised midway through the decade in which Shakespeare rewrote English history for the years 1398 to 1485. This play, whose second Quarto (1598) was the first of his published play-texts to have Shakespeare's name on its title-page, is also a key text for exploring his development as a writer. In 1679, thinking particularly of York's speech in 5.2 (lines 23-40), Dryden suggested that Shakespeare was able to 'infuse a natural passion into the mind', the implication being that he operated at a level deeper than the superficial 'noise' of bombastic poetry. Following the recognition of dramatic (as opposed to purely verbal) imagery in the early 1950s, in 1966 John Russell Brown stressed that understanding Richard's character involved more than merely analysing what he said: the importance of audiences being able to reach thoughts beyond words and read a subtext from them was seen as crucial to the 'stage reality' of Richard himself. For Russell Brown, Richard's silences and 'his last unthinking, physical reactions' were also part of languages that needed to be read.