Although in thinking of Richard II we may think first of the central dramatic contest between Bullingbrook and Richard, that central action is in fact framed by conflicts between fathers and sons, between Gaunt and Bullingbrook at the opening of the play and between York and Aumerle at the end, and that action, as we shall see, is articulated by Richard himself as a contest between father and son.

The emphasis on conflicts and contests between male parents and their offspring may be detected from the opening lines of the play, lines in which Shakespeare characteristically anticipates the matter of the whole.¹³

Old John of Gaunt, time-honored Lancaster,
Hast thou, according to thy oath and band,
Brought hither Henry Herford thy bold son,
Here to make good the boist'rous late appeal,
Which then our leisure would not let us hear,
Against the Duke of Norfolk, Thomas
 Mowbray?
                                  (I.i.1-6)

With swift economy, these lines represent the qualities of both Gaunt and Bullingbrook—the father aged, "time-honored," revered; the son, "bold," "boist'rous," more obviously potent; the father presumed to be in charge even though the action of the son has precipitated the scene; the son the only remaining Lord Appellant against Richard, the father supposed to exert authority in loco regis. This opening invokes the line of authority in this patriarchal and monarchical society, in which son is subject to father, and even kings, however they may act at other times, at least pretend to speak respectfully to their fathers' brothers.¹⁴ But these lines also testify to strain within, for Richard appears to assume that the son is subject to the father and that youth reveres age, even though what follows bears out how difficult these principles are to maintain against the rising strength of the son, and even though—or especially since—Richard himself has not honored such principles.

Already in this first scene, we see that precisely the sort of apparently well-ordered relationship here sketched engenders emulation and rivalry. Gaunt clearly asserts the principle of filial obedience as he addresses his son: "When, Harry? when? / Obedience bids I should not bid again" (I.i.162-63). And Bullingbrook, in firmly refusing to withdraw his challenge, gives as one of his reasons his position vis-a-vis his father: "Shall I seem crestfallen in my father's sight?" (I.i.188). The language implies an obligation to maintain the family honor in the sight of the one from whom such obligations are derived, but also a sense of pride verging on rivalry, for it is precisely in his father's sight—or in comparison with his father—that the son must assert his potency.

The quality of the opposition between Gaunt and Bullingbrook is figured in their dialogue in I.iii; as Bullingbrook prepares for exile, father and son take characteristically opposed viewpoints. Gaunt urges mind over matter, the control of one's circumstances by one's attitude to them, asserting in effect the power of the imagination over events, and taking a position on the power of language and naming remarkably like that of Richard, a king who-exerts control not by action but by verbal representation:

Think not the King did banish thee,
But thou the King. ….
Go, say I sent thee forth to purchase honor,
And not the King exil'd thee; …
                          (I.iii.279-80, 282-83)

Bullingbrook energetically and impatiently rejects such counsel, asserting a characteristically pragmatic approach: the power lies not in the mind, not in the name, but in the reality of the event:

O, who can hold a fire in his hand
By thinking on the forsty Caucasus?
Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite
By bare imagination of a feast?
                                  (I.iii.294-97)

Given the similarity between Gaunt's and Richard's positions, Henry's preference for action over words is ultimately a matter of opposition to both father and king. Gaunt's final words in this scene—"Come, come, my son, I'll bring thee on thy way" (I.iii.304)—are an affirmation of relationship and support which again reasserts the pattern of authority and dependency, and so underscores both the close kinship and the opposing stances of father and son.

Bullingbrook's farewell to his father before the abortive contest with Mowbray appears more orthodox, as Bullingbrook describes his father as an inspiring force to his labors, but this affirmative language is also tinged with the phallic overtones of war, as the father is made new in the son, as his name and spirit, by implication in decline, are regenerated and refurbished by a son whose accomplishments may well exceed those of his father:

O thou, the earthly author of my blood,
Whose youthful spirit, in me regenerate,
Doth with a twofold vigor lift me up
To reach at victory above my head,
Add proof unto mine armor with thy prayers,
And with thy blessings steel my lance's point,
That it may enter Mowbray's waxen coat,
And furbish new the name of John a' Gaunt,
Even in the lusty havior of his son.
                                    (I.iii.69-77)

Gaunt's "When, Harry? When? / Obedience bids I should not bid again" (I.i.162-63) meets with failure not only because even in Renaissance England grown men did not obey their fathers' commands like model children,¹⁵ but because Bullingbrook, although in one sense the embodiment of his father's spirit, also occupies an antithetical position in the play. Gaunt is the articulator of a harmonious and providential order, most obviously in his evocation of "This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England" (II.i.50), but also in his stern stand against the Duchess of Gloucester's pleas for vengeance for her husband's murder, in his assertion that "God's is the quarrel," and his refusal to "lift / An angry arm against His minister" (I.ii.37,41). And it is Gaunt's son who clearly stands as the force that challenges that order, as the breaker of divinely sanctioned descent, the usurper of the crown from the anointed king. In rising against Richard, Bullingbrook also rises against his own father, for Gaunt supports Richard's kingship, if not his management, and seeks to stand a surrogate father to him, hoping on his death bed to "breathe my last / In wholesome counsel to his unstayed youth" (II.i.1-2), and, loving him, as Richard's other uncle York says, as much as his own son.¹⁶

Fathers and sons, chiefly represented in this play by York and Aumerle, Gaunt and Bullingbrook, are also joined by others. Gaunt and Bullingbrook have scarcely left the stage when the Earl of Northumberland introduces "my son, young Harry Percy" (II.iii.21); and Bullingbrook himself later inquires, "Can no man tell me of my unthrifty son? /'Tis full three months since I did see him last" (V.iii.1-2). Hal's prodigality, more fully developed in Henry IV, figures here as part of the complex of paternal-falial relationships, for like Bullingbrook before him, Prince Hal has his own notions of honor, an honor that must be maintained vis-a-vis his father, though clearly against his counsel. By placing this scene in the midst of the interaction between York and Aumerle, Shakespeare points up that Henry too has a rebellious son, one who deliberately flouts his father's conception of honor by taking as his lady "the common'st creature" from "the stews" (V.iii.16-17) and so enacts a king of parodic counterpoint to Aumerle's more serious challenge to paternal and kingly authority.

In the early encounters between Gaunt and Bulling-brook, as in the later encounter between York and Aumerle, and even in Bullingbrook's allusion to his own son, we see a father clearly articulating a principle of order—obedience to himself, fealty to the King, submission to God—which he is impotent to enforce, and which also is plainly flawed, in practice if not in theory. The tension between the verbal articulation of these principles on the one hand and the action and characters on the other further weakens any sense that Shakespeare's play might exist simply as an expression of the kind of Tudor doctrines of order described by Tillyard; rather it depicts the flawed quality of human action throughout the generational and social order.

Richard II is filled with rebellious acts, not only of subjects against the King, but of sons against fathers. We may see in such proliferation not simply a spreading of images of disorder but also a prompting to question the basis of order. The rebellion or impudence that so perturbs fathers in this play may be seen as a mimetic exaggeration that points up the falsity of honor as it is defined first by Richard and then by Henry. Even the nature of sonship is somewhat unstable: for all that I have spoken of fathers and sons, it is worth noting that Aumerle appears in the first half of the play as a character in his own right, as an independent supporter and adviser of Richard, and only in Act V emphatically and paradigmatically as a rebellious son, as one whom his father sees as in need of chastisement. Such a transformation makes one question whether the moral chaos of England can convert a grown man into a boy, as his father calls him, whether misrule disorders human development, or whether fathers characteristically view rebellion as regression, a notion supported by Henry's reference to his son as "young wanton and effeminate boy" (V.iii.10).