Regime change: It's the ultimate test of any political system, then or now.

		"Richard II" Quantum Theatre WHERE: MacHemp Building, Bingham and 9th Street, South Side. WHEN: Tonight through June 27; 8 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays. TICKETS: $15 to $25 ($15 students); 412-394-3353. Related article Richards to remember

In 1590s England, everyone who cared about affairs of state was obsessed with regime change because Queen Elizabeth I was old and had no immediate heir. In 1587, she'd put to death her most obvious successor, Mary, Queen of Scots. Which of her cousins, variously removed, would follow her?

You weren't allowed to speculate publicly. Like foreign affairs and state religion, the succession was reserved to the crown. And you certainly weren't allowed to tackle such a burning political issue on stage. But Shakespeare found a way: He wrote about history, in which regime change is a regularly recurring fact of life.

Theaters still do that. Now staging the epic sweep of "Richard II" (tonight through June 27) in an evocative, earthen-floored space on the South Side, Quantum Theatre certainly has the present and past simultaneously in mind, just like Shakespeare.

In "Richard II," set 200 years before he wrote it, Shakespeare portrayed a leader born to power who frittered it away in a disastrous foreign war, running up huge deficits.

The problem, of course, is that a person born to power (whether Richard II or George W. Bush) isn't necessarily a capable ruler. Having to gain power by seizing it might promise better results, because that necessitates political skill, but the track record of such despots, from Franco to Saddam Hussein, is disappointing. There's no guarantee that democracy will send the best people to the top, either, though it may be the lesser of several evils, offering popular participation as a bonus.

Richard was thought to rule by divine right. As an institutional warrant, that does offer comforting certitude. We see the democratic equivalent in the patriotic fervor that defends anyone cloaked in the divinity of office. Patriotism forgives a lot. The ruined statue proclaiming Ozymandias all-powerful may be ludicrous, but Ozymandias didn't think so.

No matter the system, the crux is the mechanism of change. In a democracy, you wait two or four or seven years and roll the electoral dice. But in a hereditary monarchy, it can be a long wait. What if the need for change is pressing?

Fortunately, there's a loophole. Since it was God who supposedly handed the crown to the incumbent, it fell to God to take it away.

"God's is the quarrel," says Shakespeare's John of Gaunt. "Correction lieth in those hands which made the fault ... Put we the quarrel to the will of heaven."

And how would God manage regime change? Possibly by direct intervention -- a wayward arrow or fall from a horse -- but most often by raising up a rebellion and letting it succeed.

Rebellion against the divinely ordained king is sin, of course. (For the contemporary equivalent, sample the righteous anger of some defenses of President Bush on the PG letters page.) So how does your average medieval baron know whether a given rebellion has been blessed by God to topple a monarchical mistake?

He doesn't. He has to guess. Like the citizen or power broker today, he has to balance specifics (personalities, degree of danger) against principles (maintaining order in the state). "What subject can give sentence on his king?" demands the Bishop of Carlisle. Order must come first, he insists.

Of course, one man's order is another's usurpation -- think of the 2000 election period. In Richard's day, royal absolutism was a recent overlay on the texture of feudalism. It was controversial among the Elizabethans, too.

Even under absolutism, kings must themselves obey the rights of inheritance. That's what Anglo-Saxon divine right is all about -- property rights. The crown itself is property. "How art thou a king," the Duke of York asks Richard, "but by fair sequence and succession?"

Should Richard deny "fair sequence" to Bolingbroke, kingship itself would be jeopardized and the very succession of the days of the week: "Let not tomorrow then ensue today. Be not thyself."

The specific problem in 1397 was Richard's incompetence. A rebellion is itself evidence of failure, since order is the monarch's chief good. Specifically, Richard was accused of mismanaging a disastrous war, running huge deficits, governing through unpopular intermediaries and upsetting the long established order of establishment oligarchy.

A stray arrow wouldn't be enough, because there was no obvious heir. Richard had no children. Next in line was his cousin, Mortimer, several times removed, but his claim passed through the female line. He didn't pursue it aggressively, and besides, he died, leaving a child too young to compete.

Next in line was Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Hereford, inheritor of the dukedom of Lancaster from his father, John of Gaunt, the richest man in England, even richer in his own right than the king -- so rich that Geoffrey Chaucer worked for him as a clerk.

The dynamic of political regime change has no defter study than "Richard II." As Shakespeare writes it, Bolingbroke moves gingerly, never actually demanding the crown. Power diffuses itself artfully, now concentrated in Richard, now scattered among his barons and minions, gradually oozing toward Bolingbroke. Status is constantly in flux. Decisive acts might stem the tide, but opportunities slide by. Coincidence and accident play their parts.

If this doesn't also describe the diffusion of power in Washington today, you aren't paying attention.

The regime does change. Then comes the inevitable logic of that time: The only way to make change permanent (until the next change) is to kill the deposed king, lest he foment counter-rebellion. That turns the despised Richard into an object of sympathy. You can read "Richard II" as Shakespeare's early study for a tragedy of self-definition like "Hamlet," just as "Richard III" is a study for a tragedy of overreaching ambition like "Macbeth."

We are kinder to ex-kings today. We trust the mechanics of democracy enough to let former presidents graduate into diverse lives as international ambassadors, motivational speakers or golfing celebrities.

But what about ex-despots? Saddam Hussein's position is now very much that of Richard after his deposition, out of sight but not out of mind, awaiting his fate. There have already been those to wish him conveniently dead rather than alive to challenge whatever narrative the victors contrive.

Written about a 14th-century political crisis, "Richard II" also resonates in the 21st. And in the 16th, when it was written, history was all about politics. "Know ye not that I am Richard II?" Queen Elizabeth I famously said.

One monarch stands for others; one crisis of succession sets a model. Elizabeth's government was nervous enough about the deposing of the pasteboard king on stage to forbid the deposition scene from being acted. They didn't want a nosy citizenry inscribing the present on the past.

But we do that -- else why dig up the past to see what it yields? "Richard II" joins "Mary Stuart," another great drama of regime change, now at the Public Theater, in the debate on responsibility and politics.