SOURCE: Davis, Jo Ann. “Henry IV: From Satirist to Satiric Butt.” In Aeolian Harps: Essays in Literature in Honor of Maurice Browning Cramer, edited by Donna G. Fricke and Douglas C. Fricke, pp. 81-93. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Press, 1976.

[In the following essay, Davis studies Henry Bolingbroke as an unsympathetic object of satire in Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2.]

“For now a time is come to mock at form”

2 Henry IV, IV.v.118

The changing role of Henry Bolingbroke provides a vehicle for describing the logical development of form in the second tetralogy. The play sequence moves from the tragedy of Richard II, where Henry is a satirist, to the Henry IV plays which are structured for maximum exposure of Henry as object of satire primarily by means of parody and caricature. In fact, it is Henry's failure as a satirist that produces the multiple plots of Henry IV Parts 1 and 2. If the tetralogy is viewed from this formal perspective, Falstaff and his world exist as a corollary to Henry's becoming a satiric butt. The scene is thus set for both the expulsion of the objects of the satire and the return to an ordered ideal society first described by Gaunt in Richard II and finally epitomized in the new King Henry V.¹

Henry Bolingbroke's dramatic status in the plays has anomolous features. For one thing, he is the only major figure whose “story” does not constitute a play: Richard and Hal have separate plays named after them which they dominate in word and in deed. And although Shakespeare named the two middle plays after Henry, neither is Henry's “story”: he appears very little in either, and popular opinion has given both plays to Falstaff. For another thing, Henry appears to be a changed man in the Henry plays. In Richard II, Henry is essentially taciturn and satiric; his presence dominates but his words do not: for example, in the deposition scene where his presence dominates, he speaks only about one line out of every ten. But as king in the Henry plays, he has become verbose, a butt for much satire: in 1 Henry IV, I.i. and III.ii, he speaks seven out of every ten lines. This marked verbal contrast, consistent throughout, reinforces his transformation from satirist to satiric butt. His windy and rhetorical delivery in the Henry plays reinforces his transformation from the silent but efficient king, a producer and director of action, into a whining, suspicious senex, a stock commedia dell' arte character.

Generally the function of satire is to uphold the order of a civilized community, to promote the public good. Through his satire of ceremony,² Henry in Richard II exposes the hollowness and ineffectiveness of state rituals which are played out by rote and which provide a color for insincerity and intrigue. As satirist, however, Henry does not go beyond exposure and deflation. The corrective impulse is absent in him. Thus rather than using satiric weapons to change outmoded rituals or to correct corrupted ceremony, Henry maintains the form and ritual which he has already exposed to ridicule. By revealing Henry's limitations as a satirist, Shakespeare forces us to judge not only the weakened rituals of Richard's court but also the rule of power separated from meaningful state ritual epitomized in Henry's rule.

In Richard II, Henry first accomplishes this satire of ritual primarily through invective and verbal deflation in Act I, and he retains the ability to mock and expose in usually brief verbal slashes throughout the play. However, with his return to England, Henry begins to control the action and to stage scenes which expose to contempt and mockery the ritual and ceremony which governed Richard's court. Thus the design of the play makes Acts III, IV, and V satiric reflections as they parallel in form ceremonies which made up the pattern of the early acts of the play.

Once we are furnished with background information in I.ii—that the Lancastrians believe Richard guilty of his uncle Gloucester's death—we realize the extent to which Henry has used and satirized the ritual of trial by combat in scene i. Not able to challenge the King, Henry has challenged the King's friend and has indirectly accused the King of mismanaging money, undermining law, and suborning murder. The mode—pre-combat ceremony—has become a tool which Henry manipulates to excoriate the King.

In his first appearance after his unlawful return from banishment, Henry's terse response ironically directs attention to the cloying, sugared rhetoric of Northumberland's fulsome flattery, and, as in the deposition scene, demonstrates Henry's limited tolerance for the insincerity of ceremonious utterances. But Henry can court allies, and he goes on to promise young Percy, Ross, and Willoughby “recompense” in “fortune” and “treasury” when his own “fortune ripens.” He woos York with blatant and overblown appeals to sentimentality, calling him “my father,” and swearing to one and all that he returns to claim only “his own.”

Henry here demonstrates his satiric contempt for mankind. He offers each what is of prime importance, promising fortune to the greedy and ambitious and extravagant familial sentiment to the sentimental York. Henry's vocabulary in the scene is permeated by the language of economics and litigation. The form and ritual of allegiance is exposed and satirized as the basic motivation, gain, is paramount to any question of “right.” Henry's satiric pandering to ceremony and ritual scarcely glosses over his recognition of the base motivations for allegiance.

The Flint Castle scene makes explicit both visually and verbally Henry's contempt for ceremony and ritual. As satirist he exposes the powerlessness and falsity of ritual separated from meaning. Learning that Richard is inside Flint Castle, Henry orders Northumberland to observe the niceties of state ritual and to report to Richard that

Henry Bullingbroke
On both his knees doth kiss King Richard's hand,
And sends allegiance and true faith of heart
To his most royal person; hither come
Even at his feet to lay my arms and power.

(III.iii.35-39)³

The form of ceremonious obedience is then exploded both by Henry's provisos:

Provided that my banishment repeal'd
And lands restor'd again be freely granted.

(40-41)

by Henry's threats:

If not, I'll use the advantage of my power,
And lay the summer's dust with show'rs of blood

(42-43)

and by his visual reinforcement of those threats:

Go signify as much, while here we march
Upon the grassy carpet of this plain.

(49-50)

The form is proper ritual; the reality is the marching army: ritual is overwhelmed, exposed and mocked by power. The crowning satiric touch of contempt is Henry's order:

Let's march without the noise of threat'ning drum.

(51)

And like an anxious stage director Henry orders his men to report the audience reaction to the dominant satiric images he has arranged:

March on, and mark King Richard how he looks.

(61)

When Richard descends to the court, Henry burlesques the familiar ritual of hierarchial order; he kneels and orders his followers to “show fair duty to his Majesty” (188). Richard recognizes the satiric contempt implicit in the contrasting visual images:

Up, cousin, up, your heart is up, I know,
Thus high at least, although your knee be low.

(194-95)

With Henry now in effective control, the last two Acts of the play parody the earlier ones. Act IV mirrors Act I with satiric deflation run wild. We are prepared for this having witnessed the short legal shrift Henry gave Bushy and Green in III.i. Now the ritual of accusation and defense in the Bolingbroke/Mowbray confrontation of I.i. is here parodied and burlesqued until any semblance of meaningful ritual is held up to derision. The same crime, Gloucester's murder, is under contention; instead of Mowbray being accused, it is now Aumerle, with Richard named as co-conspirator. Henry, blatantly rigging the scene, satirizes the state ritual by exaggeration. The evidence is contrived, as Surrey demonstrates. But it is exaggeration moving toward burlesque that puts the knife into the heart of state ritual. At least nine gages are exchanged in a hurly-burly of accusations and defense. Ritual is reduced to absurdity as the stage is littered with gages; Shakespeare runs out of names for gage-throwers, resorting along the way to “another Lord”; and Aumerle even has to borrow a gage, having run out of them. Henry perfects the absurdity when he rules that the accused Aumerle must await the recall of the banished Mowbray, a signal inconvenience since Mowbray is dead.⁴

The comic tone of this encounter is the most devastating blow Bolingbroke could arrange for state ritual—for ritual, not believed in, not taken seriously, is especially vulnerable to derision. Here it is not only stripped of meaning but reduced to nihilistic absurdity, and power exults over the debased form of ritual.

Henry, in his process of becoming king, would rather dispense with ceremony and ritual altogether. He reduced it in the Bushy/Green execution scene and set it up for scorn in the multiple gage scene. Since the decision is foregone, Henry would now atrophy ritual by making the rapid leap from subject to king, from floor to throne without any trappings of ceremony. Accordingly, officious York simply announces that Richard yields his scepter to Henry, and Henry moves to sit on the throne.

But Henry now first begins to emerge as the object of satire as the Bishop of Carlisle interferes and lists Henry's crimes against the state and Richard, with the simplest form of satire: invective and curse. The least Carlisle asks for is that Richard be present, and the least is what Bolingbroke grants.

The ceremony of formal deposition is an unfamiliar one. Henry's power drive has led him to satirize in order to expose, but the absence of a new system or new ethic results in the confirmation that Henry doesn't want to correct, only to possess. His nihilistic and destructive satire of ritual demonstrates his greatest weakness: he does not have a substitute for the very forms he satirizes. When his own planned and unceremonious assumption of the throne is aborted, Henry is thwarted by his own limitation: without belief in rituals he cannot ad lib and invent one. Since for him there is no intrinsic meaning in ritual, he cannot imagine how one goes about deposing a king publicly and ritualistically. Thus the scene which he has so carefully managed and controlled up to now is stolen from him. In the arena of state ritual he is the one now deposed, no longer director and star. It is Richard who usurps direction and management of the scene in which he stars.⁵ One simple indication is that when Richard is on stage, Henry delivers only eleven brief questions and statements entirely dependent upon Richard's dramatically determinant words and actions.

The direction of events is not changed—both Richard and Henry know this: Henry has the power; Henry will be king. But Richard's elaborate and ritualistic speeches tear away the hypocritical facade and satirize the idea that Henry's assumption is legitimate.

Henry's attempts to bring Richard to the point at hand are prosaic. Only when Richard calls for the glass, studies his face, and recognizes its transience as a power image does Henry attempt any statement not directly related to the business of deposition. But even Henry's satiric flouting of Richard's grief

The shadow of your sorrow hath destroy'd
The shadow of your face.

(IV.i.292-93)

is elaborated by Richard and thus transformed for Richard's purposes:

                                                                      Say that again.
The shadow of my sorrow! Ha, let's see.
'Tis very true, my grief lies all within,
And these external [manners] of laments
Are merely shadows to the unseen grief
That swells with silence in the tortur'd soul.
There lies the substance; and I thank thee, King,
For thy great bounty, that not only giv'st
Me cause to wail, but teachest me the way
How to lament the cause.

(293-302)

Henry, who by choice has been more director and producer than leading man, clearly has problems with his temperamental star's liberties with the script.

These events are capped with the triumphant role of Henry, reported by York, with people cheering him while they treat Richard with contempt and throw dust on him. Satirists frequently deal with their victims in like manner, exposing them to public ridicule and often physical abuse. Jonson in Poetaster has his satiric victim fed an emetic to make him throw up his hard words, Shakespeare in Twelfth Night has Malvolio shut up in a dark place, and Scala in The Pedant (1611) gives his victim a thrashing. This reported triumph parallels and inverts Henry's departure for banishment earlier; in this case it is Richard who is being driven out and flaunted. York in this scene has adopted Henry's attitude toward ritual and meaning, but he is not conscious of satire when he tells his wife

To Bullingbroke are we sworn subjects now,
Whose state and honor I for aye allow

(V.ii.39-40, emphasis added)

and announces that he is pledge for Aumerle's

                                                                                truth
And lasting fealty to the new-made king.

(44-45)

Obviously if sworn oaths were lasting and eternal, York would not now have a “new-made King.”

Earlier in the play York epitomized the concerned and loving father; Henry pandered to York's sentimentalized view of paternity to enlist York's sympathy and aid. Now, however, the sham of ritual has undermined other forms of order in Henry's realm. A scene of comic hysteria follows York's discovery of Aumerle's “treason”: father berating son, mother opposing father, lost boots, beaten servants, unanswered questions, and a pell-mell race out the door reduce potentially serious matters to burlesque, and York's absolute rejection of his son is submerged in knock-about comedy.⁶

Aumerle reaches Henry first and is granted a pardon even before he has explained his crime with the proviso that it be an intended crime and not a committed one. They are interrupted by York's frenzied banging on the door, demanding entrance, calling Aumerle traitor, and warning Henry to protect himself. Henry quickly draws his weapon only to be assured by the capitulating words and actions of Aumerle that he has nothing to fear. Relaxed, Henry re-asserts his control of the scene, admits York who falls into the room panting. York exposes the rebellion and Henry grants Aumerle pardon again, because of York's loyalty. Henry is then confronted with an unexpected quirk: the father rejects the King's pardon of his son, demanding Aumerle's death. Henry is prevented from replying by the third hysterical entrance as the Duchess of York arrives and pounds on the door, identifying herself: “a beggar begs that never begged before.” Henry recognizes the burlesque of the scene and, taking up the jingling couplets, replies,

Our scene is alt'red from a serious thing,
And now chang'd to ‘The Beggar and the King.’
My dangerous cousin, let your mother in,
I know she is come to pray for your foul sin.

(V.iii.79-82)

It is easy for Henry to recognize and identify the caricature of the scene, which parodies his own satiric kneeling to Richard at Flint Castle. Soon all three Yorks are kneeling and making their contradictory pleas. Three times Henry tells his aunt to rise, but she remains kneeling and the caterwauling surges on. Any seriousness in the scene having long collapsed, the verse continues in an epidemic of jingling rhyme:

DUCH.
For ever will I walk upon my knees,
And never see day that the happy sees

(93-94)

AUM.
Unto my mother's prayers I bend my knee.
YORK.
Against them both my true joints bended be.

(97-98)

The visually and poetically ridiculous is stressed in York's contribution to the kneeling contest and his attempt to have Henry separate word and meaning by using French so he can later break his word.

YORK.
Speak it in French, King, say ‘pardonne moy.’
DUCH.
Dost thou teach pardon pardon to destroy?

(119-20)

The comic extravagence is capped by the Duchess' exaggerated thanks, “a god on earth thou art” (136).

The final scene is almost atavistically ritualized. Henry, the King as earthly god, sits on England's throne as one after another of his followers, all anxious “to thrive in this new world” (IV.i.78), rush in to present him verbally with bloody sacrifices, the mangled corpses of his enemies. Henry is no longer the complete satirist attacking state ritual, and the world of the play shifts, taking on a new focus. The extravagance Henry as satirist employed in his devaluing state ritual returns to haunt him. And Henry's world of satires and burlesques begins now to generate a life of its own, mocking the mocker. Exton brings on stage the body of murdered Richard and explains, “From your own mouth, my lord, did I this deed” (V.vi.37). Whereas Richard had to deal with indirect accusation of murder in public, Henry is ironically forced to deal with his responsibility for murder directly in public, in the midst of other blood offerings he had been approvingly accepting.

Henry is caught in an old play he no longer directs. Like Richard who had to banish Mowbray, Henry banishes Exton, but he also publicly judges and announces sentence on himself: a ritualistic penitential voyage to the Holy Land. His gestures are empty of meaning, but he cannot abandon the form of ritual which was part of Richard's court. The world of the play takes its revenge on Henry by forcing him to adhere to the form which he as satirist had despised, and his pledge of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, a ritualized expiation, is transformed in the succeeding plays into a reiterated joke awaiting the punch line.

In Richard II, Henry has comparatively few lines for a major character. His infrequency of utterance stands as a satiric counterpoint to the verbosity of Richard, for whom verbal expression and state ritual are inseparable. Henry, the silent king, focuses on the reality of power: even the drums of his great army are silent. In denying Richard as his King he must deny and satirize the ritual and ceremony which surround Richard as an outward expression of his supposed power. The satirist Henry has no soliloquy—his public expressions and his control of the play's action provide for him self-expression. The satirist needs no moments of introspection.

This is still the “old world”; no new Adam has emerged to unify ritual and meaning and thus to provide England with a viable replacement of meaningless ritual.

In the Henry plays Henry himself becomes the butt of satire and is thus never allowed to capture our emotions or our respect. Henry becomes not a flamboyant Richard but develops as Senex, the miserly, critical, and suspicious old man, parodied by Falstaff, whose greed and amorality are reflected throughout the kingdom. Prudence and economy in speech and action characterize Henry in Richard II, but in the Henry IV plays Henry has lost the ability to be economic of words or prudent in action, as his lengthy speeches and rash denunciations of Hal illustrate. His brevity of speech and sardonic manner in Richard II are changed into longwinded petulance and suspicion. Rather than satirizing state ritual, Henry tries to make his kingdom now conform to order, ritual, and ceremony, an impossible task since he himself has reduced ritual to meaninglessness.

Bolingbroke has disappeared into his role and lofty rhetoric; he now has little objective distance from himself or others. The plays' structure, repetitive imagery, and parallel characters force the reader to view Henry as satiric butt and prevent us from accepting his self-evaluation as a rightful—and long-suffering—ruler.

Henry's major scenes in Part I are confrontations: in I.iii. with Hotspur; in III.ii. with Hal; and in V.iv. with Douglas. He is no longer certain of control, and his personal weakness, epitomized in Hotspur's refusal to obey him and Douglas' beating him in single combat, reinforce the satire directed at him in the play. Like Falstaff condemning those who steal from him, Henry, the regicide and usurper, condemns those who would steal his land and power. Like the coward Falstaff who feigns death in order to live, Henry has many men counterfeit his appearance to draw off attacks that would be directed at him, causing Douglas to threaten to kill his whole wardrobe. The satiric scope of the play refuses to let the audience view Henry as noble or honorable by reducing him to the level of the unprincipled Falstaff. The rebels plot to steal the kingdom as the tavern crew plots to steal purses (and, in turn, to rob one another: I.ii.162-166 and III.i.97-119) as Henry has stolen the kingdom from Richard. All Henry's appeals to honor, right, privilege of office, and ceremonial recognition of place are satirized by the contrapuntal presence of rebels and tavern thieves. A satiric leveling process is dramatized, and the vital dramatic function of the tavern gang and the rebels is to expose Henry, to puncture his hypocrisy, to condemn his immoral action. Henry's moral outrage at the idea of rebellion directed against him is thus exploded by parody in Falstaff's moral indignation at having his pocket picked.

The verbal extravagance of Hotspur parallels that of Falstaff and both undercut and puncture the king's long-winded, self-serving rhetoric. These are the three big talkers of the play; none is a successful hero, and the King is no longer a sun god but a vile politician.

While the satire focused on these three brings the play world's morality to its knees, Hal begins to emerge as the man who can unite ritual and substance. He rejects the parts offered him by Falstaff, Henry, and Hotspur: he will not rob the exchequer for his friends; he will not shun the company of common men and make a sham of duty; he will not emulate Hotspur's idea of honor. Form separated from meaning is nihilistic. Hal satirizes false notions of reputation and honor by allowing Falstaff to take public credit for defeating Hotspur in single combat, while he seeks to merge the form and meaning of ritual in his private elegy and respectful ritual over his dead opponent's body.

By 2 Henry IV, King Henry has been reduced to only three appearances, the first of which does not come until the middle of the play. Henry has ceased to be an important character in his own play; he exists as a reminder of the play world's old Adam, satirized and certainly overshadowed by those exaggerated parodies of his worst qualities, Falstaff and Shallow.

In his first appearance, Henry rails at the dull god sleep for eluding him. And he closes the scene with one of his frequent reminders of his intention to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem (III.i.107-08). With appropriate gallows humor, the play delivers both to Henry in his final scene, when he is given permanent sleep in a palace room called Jerusalem chamber.

As satiric butt in the two Henry plays, Henry resembles the senex iratus, the irritable old man of Greek New Comedy, who remained an active dramatic figure in the Renaissance. Giacomo Oreglia's description of the Pantalone illustrates the similarities:

The comic attributes of Pantalone arise above all from the contradictions of senility: he is very avaricious yet a lover of pomp and splendor, wily yet rash; slanderous and quarrelsome, subject to sudden explosions of fury and vehement outbursts of curses and invective … at times [he] even becomes the rival of his own son. … A hypocrite, … [he] symbolizes in the Commedia the contrast between the old and new generation.⁷

Henry's avarice is what causes Hotspur to renounce his allegiance to Henry in their dispute over who gets the “honorable spoil” (I.i.74). Henry himself and the rebels provide constant reminders of Henry's overweening lust for royal power, and Henry soldered followers to him by promising them monetary reward in Part I, on the expectation that his own treasury would be enlarged. Henry sees his son as his rival for the crown: in Part II, he falls asleep with the crown on his pillow and grows furious when he discovers that it is gone and Hal has taken it. His assumption that Hal wishes him dead reveals more about his own nature than about Hal's.

The senex never trusts his son and constantly complains about his son's ingratitude. In a Pantalone's complaint, the senex whines,

Oh son … how have you repaid all that I have done for you, the sleepless nights you have caused me, the bezants I have paid for you, the labours I have undertaken for you? With what ingratitude you repay a father who has done so much for you!

(p. 82)

Similarly, when Henry learns that Hal has taken the crown, he explodes with fury and vehemently attacks his sons, all sons:

                                                  See, sons, what things you are!
How quickly nature falls into revolt
When gold becomes her object!
For this the foolish over-careful fathers
Have broke their sleep with thoughts, their brains with care,
Their bones with industry;
For this they have engrossed and pil'd up
The cank'red heaps of strange-achieved gold;
For this they have been thoughtful to invest
Their sons with arts and martial exercises;
When like the bee tolling from every flower
[The virtuous sweets],
Our [thighs] pack'd with wax, our mouths with honey,
We bring it to the hive, and like the bees,
Are murd'red for our pains.

(IV.v.64-78)

Henry follows this with a long, self-pitying speech to Hal in which with almost ghoulish relish he describes what England will be like when Hal is crowned. Because Henry is no longer a successful satirist and because all his descriptions of a disordered kingdom that mocks at form apply to his own reign, his satire blows back in his face.

Northrop Frye's description of the comedic form points out the necessary role of the senex: “the hero's society rebels against the society of the senex and triumphs, but the hero's society is a Saturnalia, a reversal of social standards which recalls a golden age in the past before the main action of the play begins.”⁸ Following this pattern, Hal stays at a distance from his father's society, absenting himself from court and refusing to sit on his father's Council (1H4. III.ii.33-35). Though he does not actively contend with his father for power, his father views him as an anxious rival. Hal does triumph, achieving the crown in a natural manner, and he does reverse the standards which have prevailed in his father's reign. Henry and Falstaff are removed. England's golden age, remembered by Gaunt in Richard II, is recalled. Hal becomes a father/king to his brothers and country and takes as his new father and advisor the morality figure, the Lord Chief Justice. A world of justice, a paternal ruler, and military victory against foreign enemies is assured.

Thus in these three plays Henry has moved from satirist to satiric butt, and he and the agents involved in his exposure are finally expelled from the play world allowing a truly new world and a new man, Henry V, to take over a world which reunites ritual and meaning, another “Eden, demi-paradise” (R2. II.i.42).

Notes

1. The universally accepted chronology for the four plays reflects, in part, tacit critical assumptions that they are in various ways evolutionary as a group. There is a great deal of criticism which regards these plays as purposively integrated in both conscious and subconscious ways. See, for example, the most recent extensive treatment of both tetralogies, Moody E. Prior, The Drama of Power (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1973). Prior, on pp. 4-9, expresses caution about tetralogy groupings and proposes a five play sequence from Richard III to Henry V. “In these five plays every significant variant among the possibilities of sovereign power is represented” (p. 9). With regard to form, Prior tends to stress the “individual dramatic units.” He regards Richard as the focus for Shakespeare's exploring a “new idea of tragedy” (p. 181); he also views the widespread preoccupation with Falstaff as producing misguided readings of 1 Henry IV as satire (p. 209).

   I am suggesting that focussing on Bolingbroke's changing role reveals a coherent and evolutionary development in formal design in the second tetralogy. I have found the following books particularly helpful in developing my thesis: E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (1944; rpt. New York: Collier, 1962); C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1959); Alice L. Birney, Satiric Catharsis in Shakespeare (Berkeley, Cal.: Univ. of Cal. Press, 1973).

2. Tillyard's treatment of Richard III deals extensively with the ceremonious aspects of the play; see pp. 280-299.

3. My text is G. Blakemore Evans, ed., The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974).

4. Shakespeare has reproduced the facts of this plethora of challenges from Holinshed who contains no hint of irony in his account. The relevant passage may be conveniently found in Richard Hosley, ed., Shakespeare's Holinshed (New York: Capricorn Books, 1968), p. 91. But Shakespeare superimposes on it the dramatic exchange on Norfolk's death (a death which Holinshed states as a bare fact two pages later). Henry's “Why, Bishop, is Norfolk dead?” (IV.i.101) may be delivered in a tone of either mock-innocent amazement or genuine surprise. The play does not provide specific information about Henry's state of knowledge here. Neither does Shakespeare tell us in I.i. that Bolingbroke has knowledge of Richard's complicity in Gloucester's murder, but the whole design of the play as well as of the scene stresses Henry's continuing knowledge and control. On those compelling grounds, I prefer mock-innocent amazement. In either case the ironic climax is egregious.

5. Ann Righter, in Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London: Chatto and Windus, 1962), after discussion of the metaphor of the world as a stage, asserts that “Shakespeare seems to have been concerned with the play metaphor to a degree unusual even among his contemporaries” (p. 81). Richard III is of course a self-proclaimed actor and director, and Waldo F. McNeir, in “The Masks of Richard the Third,” SEL [Studies in English Literature], 11 (1971), 167-186, explores Richard III in that light. On Richard II, see Georges A. Bonnard, “The Actor in Richard II,” ShJ, 87 (1952), 87-101, and Leonard Dean, “Richard II: The State and the Image of the Theater,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association], 67 (1952), 211-218.

6. Waldo F. McNeir's treatment of this episode is illuminating: “The Comic Scenes in Richard II, V.ii. and iii.,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 73 (1972), 815-822.

7. The Commedia dell' Arte, trans. Lovett F. Edwards (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), 78, 80.

8. Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), p. 171.