Amid this plethora of fathers and sons, one character stands notably sonless. But it is he who most clearly expresses the connection between such relationships and the heart of the play:

Cousin, I am too young to be your father,
Though you are old enough to be my heir.
                               (III.iii.204-5)

As his own formulation suggests, Richard is neither wise enough nor potent enough to retain his crown. He has fathered no children, a point underscored by Northumberland's response to the Queen's plea that she and Richard be banished together: "That were some love, but little policy" (V.i.84). Richard's chief reproductive act is to people the little world of his mind with a generation of still-breeding thoughts in little world of his mind with a generation of still-breeding thoughts in the soliloquy of Act V. That his native kingdom is the realm of fantasy is implied by his using the image of physical reproduction to represent what is after all a form of cognitive generation:

My brain I'll prove the female to my soul,
My soul the father, and these two beget
A generation of still-breeding thoughts;
And these same thoughts people this little
 world.
                                     (V.v.6-9)

Moreover, the unusual character of Richard's world is shown by his making the brain, the rational cognitive force usually associated with the male, subordinate to the feminine soul (anima). Richard appears then not so much as father, as controlling force, but as female, as the maternal figure, who on his return from Ireland kisses the earth: "As a long-parted mother with her child / Plays fondly with her tears and smiles in meeting" (III.ii.8-9).

If Richard, who should be king and father, represents himself as mother to his realm, we might expect Bullingbrook to emerge as father. But characteristic of the schematic parallels and contrasts so common in Richard II, it is Bullingbrook who first speaks intimately and lovingly of the earth: "Then England's ground, farewell, sweet soil, adieu; / My mother, and my nurse, that bears me yet!" (I.iii.306-7). Of course Bullingbrook's approach to the ground of England is in general much more vigorous: though he leaves as a son, he returns as a gardener, one whose first action is to deal ruthlessly with "Bushy, Bagot, and their complices, / The caterpillars of the commonwealth, / Which I have sworn to weed and pluck away" (II.iii.165-67). As we see in the Gardener's speech it is precisely Richard's inability to engage in the husbandman's characteristically controlled violence, to "cut off the heads of too fast growing sprays, / That look too lofty in our commonwealth" (III.iv.34-35) that has led to his "fall of leaf" (III.iv.49):

                [We] at time of year
Do wound the bark, the skin of our fruit-trees,
Lest being over-proud in sap and blood,
With too much riches it confound itself;
Had he done so to great and growing men,
They might have liv'd to bear and he to taste
Their fruits of duty.
                                (III.iv.57-63)

Wishing that he could "purge this choler without letting blood" (I.i.153), Richard fails to demonstrate the pruning and severing skills necessary to physician, gardener, and king. Having no natural son to challenge him, Richard also lacks the power to dominate his rival; whereas Bullingbrook, Richard's contemporary, is old enough to "know the strong'st and surest way to get" (III.iii.201). Richard has neither the years nor the wisdom to be Bullingbrook's father. Thus Bullingbrook, though not Richard's son, becomes his heir, rising up against him more powerfully and unambiguously than against his own father, with consequences for the whole structure of familial and civil relationships.

For all that Richard II raises questions about the right and the power to rule, it does so, as I've been arguing, through relationships between fathers and sons, relationships that are on the one hand starkly schematic and on the other morally and psychologically ambiguous. Shakespeare's play shows us two prodigal sons, King Richard and Prince Hal, prodigal in their wasting of time and resources and in their failure to follow the advice of their elders, and it shows us two rebellious sons, Aumerle and Bullingbrook. It gives us loyal and ineffectual fathers—Gaunt, York, and even in a sense, Richard. Both Aumerle and Bullingbrook are disobedient sons who act out the desires or visions of their fathers: Aumerle, though he is denounced by his father for treason, in fact enacts the kind of loyalty to Richard suggested by York's earlier speech to Bullingbrook ("I am no traitor's uncle" [II.iii.88]) and by his poignant description of the desecration of Richard in V.ii. And Bullingbrook embodies all too clearly Gaunt's fears of the consequences if Richard ignores Gaunt's fatherly advice. This is a play then in which sons are 'disloyal' in a way that their fathers either do or would explicitly disapprove, but in which sons, rising against their aged fathers, nevertheless prove true to their fathers' earlier desires, allegiances, or predictions.

Of the unthrifty prodigals, Hal and Richard, one returns to the fold and ultimately becomes king; the other, following evil counselors, is deposed. Of the rebellious sons who rise against the King, the one, Aumerle, is rejected and chastised by his father; the other, Bullingbrook, is chastised and crowned. Such messages as there are here are surely ironic ones, for the consequences of rebellious acts are sharply divergent.

The very schematic quality of Richard II emphasizes its paradigmatic and potentially moralistic aspects; yet despite the clarity of its oppositions—Bullingbrook against Gaunt, Bullingbrook against Richard, York against Aumerle—the play also complicates these oppositions in its intricacies of language and character. Bullingbrook, who in his own person challenges the received order, rising up against the values represented or affirmed by his father, also affirms the principle of orderly descent: "If that my cousin king be King in England, / It must be granted I am Duke of Lancaster" (II.iii.123-24). And Gaunt, the most eloquent spokesman for harmonious order, is also the depicter of disorder and the father of the usurper, a usurper whose first act in returning to England is to claim his father's title. Gaunt's superficially clever manipulation of events through language, more probably a device to comfort his son than the result of conviction, in fact becomes truth:

Think not the King did banish thee,
But thou the King.
                                 (I.iii.279-80)

Bullingbrook, a son who in becoming king achieves the language of paternal authority, points to ways in which the laws of inheritance, of orderly succession, favor him; his father's words show how disorder and incipient rebellion are always with us, in fact or in potentiality. In a complicated passage that suggests an uncanny resemblance between generations, between past and future, Gaunt unwittingly prophesies "how his son's son should destroy his sons" (II.i.105), but not foreseeing by what means, not seeing that the accusation he makes against Richard will serve against his own son as well.¹⁷

In Richard II the issues of filial and paternal conflict are intertwined with questions of political order and power. Shakespeare sets before us in both tragic and comic fashion the effects of rebellion and murder—in the disarray caused by Bullingbrook's rebellion and in the absurd farce of the Langleys' disordered familial structure. Neither 'comic relief nor comical ineptitude, V.ii and V.iii portray in effect the moral chaos of treachery and rebellion, the results of the getting as distinguished from the begetting of power. Yet while setting such painful consequences before us, Shakespeare does not suggest that it should simply be otherwise or that it could easily have been so. For in representing in parodic form the disorder of the realm, V.ii and V.iii also point to the inevitable quality of human fallibility. King Henry, who seizes effective control of the realm in that great scene in which Richard maintains control of images (IV.i) is, like his predecessor, king over disorder and human conflict.

This truth is borne out not only in the familial scenes of V.ii and V.iii, the absurdity of which Henry alerts us to but cannot transform,¹⁸ but also in IV.i, in which the throwing down of gages likewise threatens to become farce. The accusations against Aumerle by Bagot, Fitzwater, Percy, and yet "Another Lord" recall the mutual accusations of Mowbray and Bullingbrook in Act I, an encounter in which the King has the power to stifle conflict but not to resolve it. The scene suggests not so much a new era as a repetition of the past: Richard attempts to bury the crime of Gloucester's murder, allowing the accusations to be brought to knightly combat and then averting a verdict all too likely to implicate him; Bullingbrook is more eager to reach the truth, but he too finds that the quest ends in a cul de sac, for Norfolk, who might resolve the challenge by speech or action, is dead. In both cases the truth remains hidden, while the act itself, though buried in obscurity (Bagot refers to "that dead time when Gloucester's death was plotted" [IV.i.10]), casts a long shadow.

Our questions, then, about right and wrong in Richard II are forced aside by images not of guilt and innocence but of guilt and guilt, images that echo throughout the play. The murder of Richard at Bullingbrook's behest and of Gloucester at Richard's are associated with the primal crimes of fratricide and patricide, by language that recalls the death of Abel at the opening of the play (I.i.104) and the sin of Cain (V.vi.43) at the end,¹⁹ in Mowbray's reference to Henry as of Richard's blood (I.i.58-59) and Henry's attempted disclaimer (I.i.70-71). The ambivalent words with which Henry greets the news of Richard's death are appropriate to such an intimate crime:

Though I did wish him dead,
I hate the murtherer, love him murthered.
                                  (V.vi.39-40)

Although Henry's speech may be read as simple hypocrisy, it also underscores the blood relationship between the two kings and reminds us of the rivalry that forces one to challenge and overcome the origins to which one is inescapably bound:

Lords, I protest my soul is full of woe
That blood should sprinkle me to make me
 grow.
                                 (V.vi.45-46)

In seizing Richard's crown, Henry has overcome both father and brother, the father whose kingdom he inherits, the brother who is his father's brother's son. He commits an act of obvious impiety, yet also of ritual strengthening, for the blood he sheds makes him grow. In the murder of Richard has he "furbish[ed] new the name of John a' Gaunt … in the lusty havior of his son" (I.iii.76-77)?

In using the paradigms of father and son, of brother and brother to represent rebellion in the family and in the state, Richard II suggests that the political patterns we see are part of essential, fallen human nature. In language that points to repeating cycles of murder, Bullingbrook begins by accusing Richard indirectly of the murder of a brother and ends, in effect, by committing that act himself. To the perpetrator Exton Henry assigns not only the guilt of murder but also Henry's own guilt of fratricide as he bids him "With Cain go wander thorough shades of night" (V.vi.43). When the Duchess of York ends V.iii by saying, "Come, my old son, I pray God make thee new" (V.iii. 146), she not only raises the issues of guilt and expiation, sin and regeneration, which have been present from the first scene of the play; her words also suggest the old Adam, in whose likeness the gardener and we all are made, the "old man" in us that, in the formulation of St. Paul, must be made new by the sacrifice of Christ.²⁰ In using such theologically weighted language in his concluding scenes, Shakespeare returns this play, with its many configurations of fathers and sons, to the archetypal rivalry between brothers and to the original father and his sons. In so doing he gives us a picture of unchanging, cyclical guilt, of unavoidable human frailty, of the effects of sin, perpetuated through generations. This framework suggests that the king who depicts himself in IV.i as martyr and Christ figure is not sinless but rather involved in an infinitely regressing cycle of blame. And it reminds us that our judgments of the two rulers of the play, balancing authority and acumen, right and obligations, cannot be expected to yield a victim and a perpetrator, but a dynamic relation of guilt and guilt.

The near-tragic farce of V.ii and V.iii, which outlines in parodic form the familial and theological aspects of the conflict, playing them in another key, underscores the centrality of these issues in the play as a whole. The taking of the kingdom and the murder of the king are not just political and moral actions but also familial; they take place not only on the large scale of political power but on the intimate scale of domestic conflict, as figured in the violence York would do to his own son, in the violence he fears his son's actions will do to the kingdom. In this complex of relationships there are no easy answers. Just as it is not clear that the King is right and the usurper wrong, so it is not clear that father or son or brother deserves to dominate, but Shakespeare uses these familial conflicts to enrich and intensify our response to a drama which is political and moral but also deeply psychological, reciprocal, Notesand eternal.²¹

Notes

¹ I acknowledge with pleasure Sheldon P. Zitner's witty and astute account of these scenes in "Aumerle's Conspiracy," Studies in English Literature, 14 (1974), 239-57.

²Richard II, V.iii.79-82. The text quoted throughout is The Riverside Shakespeare, ed G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

³ See the discussion of this point by Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres (New York: Methuen, 1986), esp. Chap. 1.

⁴ Cf. Zitner, 243-44, 253-54; M. W. Black, "The Sources of Shakespeare's Richard II" John Quincy Adams Memorial Studies, ed. J. G. McManaway et al. (Washington, 1948), p. 208; Variorum edition of Richard II, ed. Matthew W. Black (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1955), p. 216n; and Joan Hartwig, "Parody in Richard II" Shakespeare's Analogical Scene: Parody as Structural Syntax (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1983). Waldo McNeir, "The Comic Scenes in Richard II," Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 73 (1972), 815-22, suggests that these scenes of Richard II mark a new level of maturity on Shakespeare's part, an ability to mingle comedy and serious purpose to create meaning. While concurring with McNeir's sense of the importance of V.ii and V.iii to the play, I would disagree with his view of the Duchess as chiefly a figure of fun.

⁵ I use the term parody in the sense outlined by Joan Hartwig, who describes scenes that are bound to the rest of the action less by narrative action than by analogy (p.3). She points out that parody, "derived from the Greek word 'paroidia,' … originally meant a song placed beside or against" (p. 5), and that, like emblem, parody "simplif[ies] in order to expose complexities" (p.10).

⁶ Some attention has been paid to the emphasis on familial relationships by David Sundelson, Shakespeare's Restoration of the Father (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1983); Robert B. Pierce, Shakespeare's History Plays: The Family and the State (Columbus: The Ohio State Univ. Press, 1971); James Winny, The Player King (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968), pp. 74-82; and Harry Berger, Jr. "Psychoanalyzing the Shakespeare Text: The First Three Scenes of the Henriad," in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 210-29. Sundelson, whose chapter is entitled "Fathers, Sons, and Brothers in the Henriad," emphasizes not father-son relationships but rather the quasi-fraternal rivalry of Richard and Bullingbrook; Pierce affirms the importance of familial issues but finds the Aumerle scenes "rather frivolous self-parody" (pp. 157-58); Berger's very helpful essay does not treat the Aumerle scenes but deals with the opening of the play in ways that have contributed significantly to my thinking about it.

⁷The Riverside Shakespeare, note to Richard II V.ii.90-93.

⁸ York places special emphasis on titles and designations of kinship: he calls not only Aumerle but also Bullingbrook "foolish boy" (II.iii.97) and denies kinship with him (II.iii.87-88) for presuming to disobey Richard and return to England in the King's absence; Bullingbrook, by contrast, insists on the title and the relationship it implies, repeating "My gracious uncle" (II.iii.85 and 106). York also rebukes Northumberland for omitting Richard's title:

                       The time hath been,
Would you have been so brief with him, he
 would Have been so brief [with you] to shorten you,
For taking so the head, your whole head's
 length.
                                (III.iii.11-14)

⁹ See Graham Holderness's discussion in Shakespeare's History (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985), Chap. 1.

¹⁰ Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York: The Free Press, 1967), pp. 87-88, makes the point that Aumerle acts out his father's sympathies.

¹¹ York's word, happily for my argument, is "neuter" (II.iii.159); earlier in this scene he verbally asserts the power of the King, but soon admits that he lacks the physical force to do so: "this arm of mine / Now prisoner to the palsy" (II.iii.103-4).

¹² The Duchess's accusation of her husband also points to another central issue of the play—the efficacy of words and of gestures, the question whether, as in Richard's notions of kingship, words are potent, meaningful, and magical, or whether they are merely words, whether such gestures as York engages in are merely superficial verbal formulae, or whether they are the outward signs of an inner reality.

¹³ See Berger's discussion of the implications of this opening scene, pp. 214-18.

¹⁴ Berger, p. 215, notes the ironic edge to Richard's language in I.i.1-7, in a speech that balances obvious bluntness against ostensible reverence.

¹⁵ Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), pp. 122-34, cites the extraordinary standards of obedience exacted by parents in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; more recently, Bruce Young, "Parental Blessings in Shakespeare's Plays," Studies in Philology, 89 (1992), 179-210, deals with the more positive aspects of the hierarchical relationship between parent and child. The situation which Young describes, in which the parental power to impart blessing "did not necessarily imply unconditional submission to a parent's wishes … [nor] that the child's agency and identity were entirely subsumed within those of the parent" (p. 192), closely corresponds to the relationship between Bullingbrook and Gaunt in I.i.

He loves you, on my life, and holds you dear
As Harry Duke of Herford, were he here.
                                 (II.i.143-44)

¹⁶ Gaunt says to Richard:

O had thy grandsire with a prophet's eye
Seen how his son's son should destroy his
 sons,
From forth thy reach he would have laid thy
 shame,
Deposing thee before thou wert possess'd,
Which art possess'd now to depose thyself.
                                   (II.i.104-8)

¹⁷ Hartwig argues, p. 119, that Henry, in contrast to Richard, is in control of the scene, but Henry is in fact at the mercy of the insistently kneeling Duchess, whom he repeatedly urges, "Good aunt, stand up." As Hartwig subsequently acknowledges, the only way to get the Duchess to rise is to accede to her request, so that henry is represented "as a ruler whose powers are temporarily contained by comic routine" (p. 121).

¹⁸ Bullingbrook's association of Gloucester's blood with Abel's (I.i. 104), like his association of Exton's crime with Cain's, implies that the crime was committed by a brother; the first statement indicts Richard, the second, Henry himself. In each case the crime was authorized by a father's brother's son.

¹⁹ See Romans 5:12-21.

²⁰ My thanks to William Oram and Gillian Kendall for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay.

Source: "Loyal Fathers and Treacherous Sons: Familial Politics in Richard II" in Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 94, No. 3, July, 1995, pp. 347-64.