SOURCE: "Richard II: 'Let Not Tomorrow Then Ensue Today'," in These Valiant Dead: Renewing the Past in Shakespeare's Histories, University of Iowa Press, 1991, pp. 69-94.

[In the essay below, Jones discusses how Richard's neglect of the heroic past of his father contributes to his failure as king.]

Like the three parts of Henry VI, Richard II dramatizes the forcible replacement of an ineffectual king, son to a heroic father, by an apparently more able leader and ends by emphasizing the unstable condition of the new ruler's regime. In both cases, for those who do remember, the son's shortcomings are all the more sharply outlined by the recollected light of the father's virtues. But, as we have seen, the progressively deteriorating situation through the earlier trilogy is marked by growing "neglection" of the heroic past. And in Richard II, as the "skipping king" gives way to "grim necessity" in the person of Bolingbroke, their heroic predecessors and the past in which they flourished seem even more radically lost. It is not just that things are getting worse as sons fail to emulate exemplary fathers or harden their fathers' dangerous willfulness into willed villainy, which was the sorry case in the second and third parts of Henry VI. It is as though the succession that linked son to father is broken altogether; as though the glorious past not only fades and is forgotten but has no functional relationship with "this new world" in which former heroic models would seem alien and out of place. At the end the new king, already "full of woe," looks far away to the Holy Land in what we know to be a futile hope for a redemptive crusade. Neither he nor anyone else, however, any longer looks back to the valiant dead who preceded him or attempts to redeem the present time by awakening the spirit of the past.

Those valiant dead, "the Black Prince, that young Mars of men" (II, iii, 101) and his father, Edward III, are prominently recalled through the first half of the play. But it is significant that they are remembered almost exclusively by the aged survivors of the Black Prince's own generation—by his brothers, "old John of Gaunt, time-honored Lancaster" (I, i, 1) and the duke of York, "now prisoner to the palsy" (II, iii, 104), and by the widowed duchess of Gloucester. Insofar as the departed heroes "live" at all, they live in memories that are now expiring, not as models who are revived by a new generation. And the roles these few survivors play, as well as the nature of their recollections, enforce the sense that the past they remember (and still in some measure attempt to represent) is being lost, that it serves no vital function for a present in which they themselves feel lost at best.

Again, comparison with 1 Henry VI, in which the situation is in many ways so similar, suggests the different sense we get of the change taking place in Richard II. In the earlier play the duke of Bedford, surviving brother to the dead hero, despite his funeral-procession lament that "arms avail not, now that Henry's dead," still carries his brother's heroic spirit into the bereaved and worsening present. When he dies, he does so, despite age and illness, in a way that consciously lives up to his heroic heritage as he understands it from history. Brought before the walls of Rouen "sick in a chair," he refuses to be carried from the scene of battle to "some better place":

For once I read
That stout Pendragon in his litter sick
Came to the field and vanquishèd his foes.
Methinks I should revive the soldiers' hearts,
Because I ever found them as myself.

(III, ii, 94-98)

And his onstage auditors accord him the tribute such a valiant final gesture deserves:

Undaunted spirit in a dying breast!
. . . . .
Let's not forget
The noble Duke of Bedford, late deceased,
But see his exequies fulfilled in Roan.
A braver soldier never couchèd lance,
A gentler heart did never sway in court.

(99-135)

"Let's not forget"! As we noted earlier, it is, appropriately, Talbot who speaks here, and his words insist on the continuity that should keep the "undaunted spirit" embodied by Bedford alive from age to age.

By contrast, the dying Gaunt's final scene features his famous set piece in which the model portrait of England is held up only to be shattered by the "shameful conquest" the debased England of the present has made of its true self. Like the queen who later terms Richard's undoing "a second fall of cursèd man" (III, iv, 76), Gaunt's description of the England-that-was as "this other Eden, demi-paradise," suggests a fundamental loss, a basic change in the condition of things, not just a worsening situation.¹ It is true that Gaunt, buoying himself for the purpose with a host of formulaic old saws, intends (despite York's discouragement) to breathe his last "in wholesome counsel to . . . [Richard's] unstaid youth" and therefore at least persuades himself to hope that reform—the restoration of things as they were and should be—is still possible. And it is true that his inspired expiring vision of "this scept'red isle" in its "proper" image seems cast, as he develops it for eighteen lines, in a virtually eternal present rather than being thrust retrospectively into the past. Could such a "fortress built by Nature," such a "happy breed of men," ever fall or falter? The verbs and participles all suggest a continuous present, and therefore even those "royal kings" whose "renownèd .. . deeds" and chivalric crusades must necessarily belong to English history if Gaunt were to give them names (Edward III? Richard I?) are invoked not as past heroes but as timeless beings created out of England's continuously "teeming womb" (II, i, 40-56). But when the anguished turn finally comes, when "this dear dear land/ . . . Is now leased out .. . / Like to a tenement or pelting farm" (57-60; emphasis added), the transformation from the posited model to the present cruel reality seems so extreme as to be an irreversible change in kind, not a temporary decline. The felt difference between king and landlord, between sceptered isle and tenement is not merely one of degree, as Gaunt expresses it. And he finally does relegate to the past the England that had seemed so permanently ordained by Nature: "That England that was wont to conquer others / Hath made a shameful conquest of itself ' (65-66; emphasis added).

We need not suppose that Gaunt, for all his deathbed sense of himself as a "prophet new-inspired," clearly foresees an ever-fallen future or fully gives up to an irretrievable past his idea of England as "this earth of majesty." The latter vision is too compelling for him, and though he knows that the current scandal will not vanish with his expiring life (67), it would be overstating the point here to suggest that he consciously dooms his "blessed plot" to perpetual bondage as a pelting farm. But our perspective on Gaunt's image of England as it "was wont" to be includes the fact that he, the guardian of that vision, is dying and that there is no young successor to renew or sustain it in "this new world." Richard, for whose ears Gaunt is presumably saving his remaining breath, does not even hear this grand epitaph to the sceptered isle he is now leasing out so shamefully. The prophet spends himself on this vision before the careless king and his entourage arrive. We will return to the significance of the actual final exchange between the dying uncle and his royal nephew in a moment.²

Those other voices of memory, the duchess of Gloucester and the duke of York, give us the same sense that the heroic past is lost—indeed, that it is being violently rooted out—in the present. The duchess's plea that Gaunt should avenge his brother, her murdered husband, begins with this elegy for the faded sons of noble Edward:

Hath love in thy old blood no living fire?
Edward's seven sons, whereof thyself art one,
Were as seven vials of his sacred blood,
Or seven fair branches springing from one root.
Some of those seven are dried by nature's course,
Some of those branches by the Destinies cut;
But Thomas, my dear lord, my life, my Gloucester,
One vial full of Edward's sacred blood,
One flourishing branch of his most royal root,
Is cracked, and all the precious liquor spilt,

Is hacked down, and his summer leaves all faded,
By envy's hand and murder's bloody axe.

(I, ii, 10-21)

Whatever "living fire" survives in her "old blood" expires, like Gaunt's, early in the play. The report of her death in II, ii merely gives official confirmation to her own clear assertion that her leavetaking in this second scene, as she returns to the "empty lodgings and unfurnished walls, / Unpeopled offices, untrodden stones" of her widowed Plashy, is a final one, both to Gaunt and to the world that has destroyed and forsaken her:

Farewell, old Gaunt. Thy sometimes brother's wife
With her companion, Grief, must end her life.
. . . . .
Desolate, desolate will I hence and die!
The last leave of thee takes my weeping eye.

(54-74)

Even her memory of noble Edward and his seven sons focuses on the dried branches and faded leaves of those she recalls. And with her early passing, as with Gaunt's, we see such memories themselves fading away.

Unlike his brother and his sister-in-law, York survives his nephew Richard and accommodates himself to the "new world" of his other nephew, Bolingbroke. York recalls the lost heritage of his generation more fully than do these other two, and the nature of his survival and accommodation tells us even more about the rupture with the past than do their deaths. As with Gaunt, comparison with York's counterpart in the Henry VI plays helps to clarify the sense of just what has been lost here. Like York, who lives on as "the last of noble Edward's sons" after Gaunt's death, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester survives his brother Bedford and, again like York, both recalls the past and attempts to maintain its virtues in a present that dismays him. Indeed, Gloucester's dismay at the foreseen effect of Henry's foolish marriage to the dowerless Margaret is expressed in terms that might largely apply to the loss of the past in the present that York deplores in Richard II:

O peers of England, shameful is this league.
Fatal this marriage, cancelling your fame,
Blotting your names from books of memory.
Rasing the characters of your renown,
Defacing monuments of conquered France,
Undoing all as all had never been!

(2HVI I, i, 96-101)

Blotting memory, erasing renown, defacing monuments—these are, as we have seen, the awful opposites of the proper emulation that awakens remembrance of the valiant dead and renews their deeds. And when Gloucester sums up this negation as "undoing all as all had never been," he might well speak for York as that harried elder likewise recalls his heroic brother's deeds and laments their undoing by his nephew's inglorious hand:

I am the last of noble Edward's sons,
Of whom thy father, Prince of Wales, was first.
In war was never lion raged more fierce,
In peace was never gentle lamb more mild,
Than was that young and princely gentleman.
His face thou hast, for even so looked he,
Accomplished with the number of thy hours;
But when he frowned, it was against the French
And not against his friends. His noble hand
Did win what he did spend, and spent not that
Which his triumphant father's hand had won.
His hands were guilty of no kinred blood,
But bloody with the enemies of his kin.

(II, i, 171-183)

But if York's grievance includes Gloucester's dismay that the son spends what the father gained, he sees another dimension in the "undoing" that confronts him. For Gloucester, "undoing" was precisely the loss of lands won, the negation of accomplishment which amounts (rather more figuratively than literally) to erasure of the accomplisher's renown. And despite Warwick's responsive tears because the extent and strategic location of the lost territories put them practically "past recovery" for his sword, nothing has so altered his and Gloucester's world that what has been carelessly thrown away could never conceivably be recovered. But as York points out with such anguish, Richard's obliteration of Hereford's right to inherit the Lancastrian property (not just his seizure of the property itself) sunders the very process of succession that gives the present (including Richard himself) its identity, its being, in terms of the past:

Take Hereford's rights away, and take from Time
His charters and his customary rights;
Let not to-morrow then ensue to-day;
Be not thyself—for how art thou a king
But by fair sequence and succession?

(195-199)

The order that the horrified York sees being broken here is not just a static Chain of Being or Degree but the temporal continuity that defines the present structure by inheritance from the past. And with "sequence and succession" thus shattered, the present he sees suffers more than a loss of memory or of lands. It loses "itself," its means of determining who is king or subject, what is right or wrong (or the only means of doing so that York knows and credits), and he therefore feels helplessly lost in it:

God for his mercy! What a tide of woes
Comes rushing on this woeful land at once!
I know not what to do.

(II, ii, 98-100)

Confronting in the person of his other nephew the rising tide of power politics that Richard's heedless action has unloosed, York can only yearn wistfully for the time when his might could enforce what he saw to be right:

Were I but now lord of such hot youth
As when brave Gaunt thy father and myself
Rescued the Black Prince, that young Mars of men,
From forth the ranks of many thousand French,
O, then how quickly should this arm of mine,
Now prisoner to the palsy, chastise thee
And minister correction to thy fault!

(II, iii, 99-105)

"O, then . . . !" But the vigorous action of that lost time and its lost leader, the Black Prince, are as alien to the present time as the palsied arm of York is incapable of setting it right. By the fading light of his past, York still believes that might does not make right ("to find out right with wrong—it may not be" [145]). But seeing only wrongs and no right around him and confessing that his "power is weak and all ill left," this last relic of a vanished era first pronounces himself a "neuter" and then only pauses on the brink of breaking his "country's laws" as he has always known them before falling in with his inexorably advancing nephew: "Things past redress are now with me past care" (152-171). Again, the contrast with Gloucester, though it obviously reflects character as well as situation, is instructive. When he eschews his fallen wife's warning against the snares of his enemies, Gloucester may be naively overconfident that others will act, as he does, in accordance with the law:

I must offend before I be attainted;
And had I twenty times so many foes,
And each of them had twenty times their power,
All these could not procure me any scathe
So long as I am loyal, true, and crimeless.

(2HVI, II, iv, 59-63)

But if others break the laws to bring him down, the steady firmness with which he adheres to justice and with which he meets his undoing when it comes is threatened by no realization that the foundation of law itself is lost. The latter is York's case, and in a world bereft of Time's charters themselves (and thus "past redress") he drifts despite his reluctance into Bolingbroke's rapidly expanding camp. Once there, he attempts, as we shall see, to construct a new basis for succession and hence for right action. But this "last of noble Edward's sons" never again looks back to take his bearings by noble Edward's time or recalls "the Black Prince, that young Mars of men." For him, as for everyone else, that heroic past is now lost indeed.

That these elders are the primary spokesmen in the play for history so recent that it highlights their own youth, and that they dwell on invidious comparisons between their heyday and what they perceive to be a scandalous present, is scarcely surprising, however significant it may be for our view of the change under way.³ What is more surprising and certainly more instrumental in that change is the nature of Richard's responses to their recollections and his very different attitude toward the past. To a certain extent, this difference fits stereotypical expectations about generational conflicts over old ways and new on his side as well as theirs. Before he is shocked into articulating the profound implications of Richard's appropriation of his cousin's inheritance, York, as prone to conventional phrasing as his brother, expresses his skepticism about the effect of "wholesome counsel" on Richard's "ear of youth" in just such stereotypical terms:

No; it is stopped with other, flattering sounds,
As praises, of whose taste the wise are fond,
Lascivious metres, to whose venom sound
The open ear of youth doth always listen;
Report of fashions in proud Italy,
Whose manners still our tardy apish nation
Limps after in base imitation.
Where doth the world thrust forth a vanity
(So be it new, there's no respect how vile)
That is not quickly buzzed into his ears?
Then all too late comes counsel to be heard
Where will doth mutiny with wit's regard.⁴

(II, i, 17-28)

Any individualizing traits disappear in the formulaic youth who "doth always listen" to the enticing call of newfangledness (with the customary taint of "proud Italy" on it) and to the flatterers who sweeten their "venom" with praise. But nothing in the dialogue actually given to Richard or to that hapless trio dubbed "caterpillars" by his enemies fills out (or even necessarily fits) this stencilled portrait (though producers may choose to follow its pattern for costuming and staging). And in fact, Richard's most significant features extend beyond the stereotype.

Carelessness, of course, is a common feature of wayward youth, and the young king's flagrant carelessness certainly impresses his observers onstage and off—nowhere more so than in the sequence immediately following Gaunt's death. The flippancy of his momentary adaptation of Gaunt's own hackneyed proverbial mode as a response to the solemn occasion ("The ripest fruit first falls, and so doth he; / His time is spent, our pilgrimage must be") is underscored by his abrupt dismissal of the subject altogether: "So much for that!" (II, i, 153-155). And his obliviousness to the gist of York's outbursts when he promptly confiscates Gaunt's (now Hereford's) property ("Why, uncle, what's the matter?") is underscored even more pointedly when Richard names the disaffected old man (whose "tender patience" he has just pricked "to those thoughts / Which honor and allegiance cannot think") lord governor of England during his pending absence in Ireland because York "is just and always loved us well" (186-221). Of special significance, however, is one dimension of Richard's carelessness, prominent in this sequence and consistent throughout—and that is his utter disregard for the past in general and his own heritage in particular.

Here we find a facet of the young king that seems surprising enough to border on paradox. One delusive prop of his carelessness, of course, is his faulty (and by mid-play faltering) assumption that his royal blood is somehow inviolable and invulnerable:

Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm off from an anointed king.
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord.

(III, ii, 54-57)

But though he makes so much of his "sacred blood," it is as though, for him, it has no source, as though it were simply a given of his condition, a unique endowment of the "anointed king . . . elected by the Lord." When the duchess of Gloucester twice echoes the term that Richard first uses in the opening scene (119), it is with quite natural reference to the line (the root and its branches) through which such royal blood flows, so that the seven sons are as "vials" preserving their father Edward's "sacred blood" (I, ii, 12, 17). It is never so for Richard, whose royalty acknowledges no root.

This "neglection" is all the more remarkable in Richard as the son and grandson of those far-famed heroes who are otherwise so often remembered through the first part of the play—that is, through his own tenure as king in the play. His total unresponsiveness to (and evident incomprehension of) York's anguished evocation of the Black Prince's noble image is perfectly characteristic in this respect. In similar circumstances, we heard Henry VI express his full (and understandable) consciousness both of his heroic father and of his own deviation from his heritage, defending the latter with an apparent mixture of saintliness and petulance:

I'll leave my son my virtuous deeds behind,
And would my father had left me no more.
For all the rest is held at such a rate
As brings a thousandfold more care to keep
Than in possession any jot of pleasure.

(3HVI, II, ii, 49-53)

But unlike Gaunt's charge that Richard should have been deposed before he was ever crowned and that he is now effectually deposing himself, York's account of the radical difference between father and son (so barbed, with its explicit reference to the murder of Gloucester, that York virtually apologizes for his lèse majesté) stirs, as we have seen, nothing more than unconcern and evident puzzlement in the young king (II, i, 184-188). Rather than touching a nerve, York is addressing a blank spot in Richard's makeup. In a play that is filled (up to the deposition) with reminiscences, Richard never looks back to the past and only once alludes even obliquely to his unique heroic heritage (who else among Shakespeare's kings could boast of both a father and a grandfather of such mythic stature?).⁵

This is the passive side of Richard's curiously "unhistorical" stance—his total neglect of those valiant dead who should lend such luster to his precious royal blood. The active side, manifest both in attitude and action, amounts to the virtual opposite (not just negligence) of heroic renewal that restores life to (and gains vitality from) remembered precursors. Instead of awakening remembrance by emulating their deeds, Richard, like death itself, destroys and buries his "fathers" and forefathers, "undoing all as all had never been." The fullest display of this inversion comes in Gaunt's final scene. Both coolly (before he arrives [I, iv, 59-64]) and heatedly (after Gaunt delivers his "wholesome counsel" more in anger than in sorrow), the young king wishes his old uncle dead. And their exchange illustrates Richard's odd conception of his "royal blood," which detaches him (and it) from any familial or historical connection, as well as his willingness to shed the blood that would be "his" if he acknowledged such connections. In this respect he is, if less self-consciously and therefore less villainously, "himself alone," like that other Richard.

Gaunt alters their scene from banter ("Can sick men play so nicely with their names?") to a serious thing by reversing their roles and naming Richard the deathly ill patient, careless of his condition. Then, characteristically looking back more than ahead, the dying "prophet" wishfully reconstructs a history that might have been if "noble Edward" had been a prophet indeed:

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 possessed,
Which art possessed now to depose thyself.

(II, i, 104-108)

This heated (surely not "frozen," as Richard terms it) admonition, by contrast with York's, which follows hard upon, stings Richard's "royal blood" to "fury"—not, evidently, because it sets him against his father's heritage (York's will do that just as emphatically) but because it dwells on deposition and verbally strips Richard of his "right royal majesty": "Landlord of England art thou now, not king" (113). Richard's fiery and insistently "regal" response includes the single reference he makes to his father in the entire play:

Darest [thou] with thy frozen admonition
Make pale our cheek, chasing the royal blood
With fury from his native residence.
Now, by my seat's right royal majesty,
Wert thou not brother to great Edward's son,
This tongue that runs so roundly in thy head
Should run thy head from thy unreverent shoulders.

(117-123)

But note that even here Richard mutes the implicit connection between the royal blood that has its "native residence" in his countenance and his descent from "great Edward's son." It is primarily as Gaunt's brother rather than his own father that the Black Prince gains whatever sway he has in Richard's conscience here.

Gaunt's reply, rather than simply remarking on the impotent absurdity of threatening a dying man with execution, spells out the full implications of Richard's stance toward his heritage:

O, spare me not, my brother Edward's son,
For that I was his father Edward's son!
That blood already, like the pelican,
Hast thou tapped out and drunkenly caroused.
My brother Gloucester, plain well-meaning soul—
Whom fair befall in heaven 'mongst happy
souls!—May be a precedent and witness good
That thou respect'st not spilling Edward's blood.
Join with the present sickness that I have,
And thy unkindness be like crooked age,
To crop at once a too-long-withered flower.

(124-134)

Gaunt insists on the connection that Richard had grudgingly acknowledged here and elsewhere ignores altogether—on the confluence of the blood that runs from father to son and brother to brother. And by identifying Richard as the young pelican who drinks his parent's blood, Gaunt reinforces the duchess of Gloucester's argument that spilling a "vial" of Edward's blood (or accepting a brother's death without retaliation) is equivalent to both patricide and suicide:

Ah, Gaunt, his blood was thine! That bed, that womb,
That metal, that self mould that fashioned thee,
Made him a man; and though thou livest and breathest,
Yet art thou slain in him. Thou dost consent
In some large measure to thy father's death
In that thou seest thy wretched brother die,
Who was the model of thy father's life.

(I, ii, 22-28)

Just so, in Gaunt's figurative terms, by killing one uncle and willing another's death, Richard has "tapped out" his own father's blood. Rather than renewing the Black Prince through youthful emulation as a proper "model of . . . [his] father's life," Richard, as Gaunt makes clear, unnaturally behaves "like crooked age" and joins with sickness to crop the "too-long withered flower" that carries the same blood and is of the "self mould" as his father.⁶

If Richard thus inverts the ideal of renewing his heroic father (or "fathers") through active remembrance in the present, that ideal finds its spokesman early in the play in the person of Bolingbroke, Richard's opposite in so many ways. "Lusty, young, and cheerly drawing breath" as he enters the lists against Mowbray, Boling-broke addresses his father in terms that insist both on the paternal source of his blood and on his commitment to revive old Gaunt in his own "lusty havior":

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)

The father inspires the son and the son revives the father. In keeping with the "twofold vigor" of this spirit, which serves as an evidently positive counterpart to Richard's negligence of his heritage, all early references Bolingbroke makes to his "high blood's royalty" are placed in the proper context of "the glorious worth of. . . [his] descent" (I, i, 71, 107). But all such reference (and deference) to his lineage ceases when he assumes royal power in what can only be his "own" right. When it serves his purpose as he moves toward the throne, he uses the language of Gaunt and the duchess of Gloucester that identifies son with father and brother with brother. He speaks thus as he "becomes" Lancaster and confronts the still resistant York:

As I was banished, I was banished Hereford;
But as I come, I come for Lancaster.
And, noble uncle, I beseech your grace
Look on my wrongs with an indifferent eye.
You are my father, for methinks in you

I see old Gaunt alive. O, then, my father,
Will you permit that I shall stand condemned... ?
. . . . .
I lay my claim
To my inheritance of free descent.

(II, iii, 113-136)

The terms may be "right" so far as they go, but they are also self-serving enough to seem sophistical, glossing over as they do the hard fact that Bolingbroke does not so much "lay his claim" as force it "in braving arms" (143). York, before he capitulates to "things past redress," cuts through his nephew's case clearly enough with his simple, single-edged maxim: "To find out right with wrong—it may not be" (171, 145). Shortly thereafter, on the very brink of usurpation, Bolingbroke salutes Richard (through Northumberland's embassy) with the sort of reference to their heritage that Richard himself never makes, though here, despite his posited humble posture, the virtual equivalence suggested in their "royalties" stemming from the same "royal grandsire" may tell us more about the opaque usurper's designs than he himself ever does:

Thy thrice-noble cousin
Harry Bolingbroke doth humbly kiss thy hand;
And by the honorable tomb he swears
That stands upon your royal grandsire's bones,
And by the royalties of both your bloods
(Currents that spring from one most gracious head),
And by the buried hand of warlike Gaunt,
And by the worth and honor of himself,
Comprising all that may be sworn or said,
His coming hither hath no further scope
Than for his lineal royalties, and to beg
Enfranchisement immediate on his knees.

(III, iii, 103-114)

But once Richard's "linear royalty" has actually been violated (along with this profuse oath disclaiming that purpose), all such terms disappear from the lines of the new king and his party—and indeed from the play itself.

It would not suit the promoters of Bolingbroke's "new world," of course, to awake remembrance of a heritage that could only highlight their unwarranted seizure of the crown. Northumberland and his eager recruits had first faulted the "most degenerate" King Richard in terms used by Henry VI's partisan Lancastrian critics (Gloucester, Clifford) as well as by his Yorkist foes:

For warred he hath not,
But basely yielded upon compromise
That which his noble ancestors achieved with blows.

And they then spoke (in no very specific way, to be sure) of renewal and restoration rather than rebellion:

We shall shake off our slavish yoke,
Imp out our drooping country's broken wing,
Redeem from broking pawn the blemished crown,
Wipe off the dust that hides our sceptre's gilt,
And make high majesty look like itself.

(II, i, 252-295)

How much Northumberland actually foresees at this point of the new world he is helping to usher in is as much a matter of speculation as the "silent king's" original aims. But in any case, once he is installed, neither Bolingbroke nor his foremost henchman shows any more recollection of high majesty's "noble ancestors" than Richard ever had.

The only attempt made to legitimize the new regime comes in a form that virtually parodies the equivalence of uncle with father and brother with brother by confluence of "blood" that had been an article of faith for the older generation and at least a matter of lip service for the younger Bolingbroke. Richard had relinquished himself to Bolingbroke's compelling force with a characteristically sardonic observation on their relationship: "Cousin, I am too young to be your father, / Though you are old enough to be my heir" (III, iii, 204-205). When the transfer of the crown is publicly staged, official credence is given to the absurdity that Richard's bitter quip had mocked. Perhaps York, the last vestige of noble ancestry, persuades himself that Time's charters can be restored by construing Richard as his cousin's father. In any case, it is York who offers the formal pronouncement to that effect, thereby converting the duke of Lancaster into Henry IV:

Great Duke of Lancaster, I come to thee
From plume-plucked Richard, who with willing soul
Adopts thee heir and his high sceptre yields
To the possession of thy royal hand.
Ascend his throne, descending now from him,
And long live Henry, fourth of that name!

(IV, i, 107-112)

The "glorious worth" of Bolingbroke's once muchtouted descent (I, i, 107) is thus transmuted, so that in ascending the throne he now descends from Richard alone, and their true fathers and majestic grandfather are never mentioned again.

The strain of stifling the past he remembered so nostalgically and thus redefining Time's "charters and his customary rights" surely shows in York's desperate fealty to "the new-made king" he has finally helped to "ascend" (V, ii, 45-47). Again, comparison with York's prototype in the Henry VI series may suggest the more radically unsettling nature of the "fearful change" under way in Richard II. Like York, Gloucester had placed loyalty to the state above family ties when he acquiesced in his wife's arrest and conviction for the treasonous dealings to which her "aspiring humor" had prompted her. But, for all his grief, the quiet firmness with which Gloucester meets this ordeal bespeaks the simple clarity of the case as he sees it in terms of the established laws he honors and upholds: "Eleanor, the law, thou seest, hath judgèd thee. / I cannot justify whom the law condemns" (2HVI, II, iii, 15-16). By contrast, the frenzy with which York turns on his son Aumerle for supporting the former king against his "heir" suggests the tension underlying the old man's adaptation to "the green lap of this new-come spring." He has just schooled his duchess in the redefining and renaming that "this new spring of time" requires:

Duchess: Here comes my son Aumerle.
York: Aumerle that was;
But that is lost for being Richard's friend,
And, madam, you must call him Rutland now.

(V, ii, 41-43)

Essential mother that she is, the duchess simply ignores such official transformations and addresses the young man by the only title that really matters to her: "Welcome, my son" (46). But when York shows Henry the document that proves his renamed son's "treason," Rutland demonstrates his capacity to "bear himself well" in a world that thus reconstitutes itself by unwriting (or effectively erasing and ignoring) its past:

Remember, as thou read'st, thy promise passed.
I do repent me. Read not my name there.
My heart is not confederate with my hand.

(V, iii, 51-53; emphasis added)

And York shows the fury of his own conversion by arguing for Rutland's execution in terms that reverse the "old" (and now evidently forgotten) idea, once espoused so vibrantly by Bolingbroke, that the father is regenerated "even in the lusty havior of his son":

Mine honor lives when his dishonor dies,
Or my shamed life in his dishonor lies.
Thou kill'st me in his life; giving him breath,
The traitor lives, the true man's put to death.

(70-73)

"Thou kill'st me in .. . [thy] life." York's eldest brother might bring that same charge against his son Richard, who by sheer neglect fails to renew his father's glory in his own life and fails (as York had lamented) even to retain what the Black Prince had won. And Richard's "fathers" by extension, Gaunt and Gloucester, could make the charge more directly—even literally, in the latter's case. As we have seen, both the active and passive aspects of Richard's patricidal attitude toward his heritage are emphasized in his earlier, careless phase when, as king, he more than anyone else should have sustained the vitality of England's "royal blood." With the loss of his all-too-hollow crown comes the growth in awareness of his own mortality and humanity that makes this play as much The Tragedy of Richard the Second as it is the "history" of one reign's sorry end and another's troubled beginning. For all his growth in self-awareness, however, Richard gains through his suffering absolutely nothing in the way of historical consciousness or interest in the past. He may be able to predict accurately enough, on the basis of his own experience with them, the future strife between Northumberland and Henry (V, i, 55-68), but he never looks back beyond (or behind) his own experience. Where memory is concerned, even as a source of the suffering that brings what wisdom he attains, his focus remains limited entirely to himself:

Or that I could forget what I have been!
Or not remember what I must be now!

(III, iii, 138-139)

Yet I well remember
The favors of these men. Were they not mine?
Did they not sometime cry "All hail!" to me?
So Judas did to Christ; but he, in twelve,
Found truth in all but one; I, in twelve thousand none.

(IV, i, 167-171)

Learn, good soul,
To think our former state a happy dream;
From which awaked, the truth of what we are
Shows us but this. I am sworn brother, sweet,
To grim Necessity, and he and I
Will keep a league till death.

(V, i, 17-22)

In this limited retrospect, which ignores the longer and broader historical past entirely, Richard remains at one both with his earlier self and (in this regard alone) with the new regime, which has no stake in remembering anything that preceded Richard, the "father" from whom it claims "descent." The deposed king's consuming interest is in the "book" that is himself, though his aversion to what is "upon record" extends, not unnaturally, to the written account of his own folly which, for all his reluctant willingness to "undo" himself publicly, Richard refuses "to read a public lecture of (IV, i, 203-232, 273-275). Even when his final reflection focuses specifically on the subject of time, the brief and generalized summation of his past and present ("I wasted time, and now doth time waste me") turns quickly into a philosophical conceit likening Richard to a clock and away from any examination of the backward abysm which remains for him more blank than dark (V, v, 41-66).

It is appropriate, therefore, not only to his "tragic" conception of his experience but to his unhistorical sense of himself that Richard so readily chooses the de casibus mode for his "story," both at the first wave of adversity, when he would "sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings" (III, ii, 155 ff.), and at the last parting from his tristful queen, whom he bids eke out her exile by telling "the lamentable tale of me" (V, i, 40-50). De casibus tragedy, with its "tales / Of woeful ages long ago betid," is Richard's closest approximation to looking back in time. But with its perfectly repetitive pattern, it is perfectly unhistorical in essence, since time brings no meaningful succession of persons or events, acting only as the constant agent of dusty death and destroying every king alike regardless of his accomplishments. De casibus tragedy shares only its emphasis on recurrence with heroical history. Otherwise, the two modes are antithetical, with one featuring the single and inexorable force of Death, who scoffs at state and grins at pomp, while the other celebrates the immortal fame that lives "despite of death" (I, i, 168) and is renewed (repetition's positive aspect) through emulation that "awake[s] remembrance of these valiant dead." It is fitting that Richard, who ignores and thwarts remembrance of his heroic heritage and has to be chidingly reminded by the bishop of Carlisle that to "fight and die is death destroying death" (III, ii, 184), should give his story over thus to Death's own monotonous genre.

If both winners and losers, for differing reasons, let sleeping neglection blot out England's proud history, none can escape the actual consequences of the past or silence all retrospect. With its inspirational and vitalizing potential stifled, recollection of recent history asserts itself in the destructive form that sows discord through this play and its two sequels bearing Henry's title. The very scene in which Henry publicly "accepts" the crown begins with a nasty reprise of the opening quarrel between Mowbray and Bolingbroke, based as it was on contradictory versions of past deeds and centering on the death of Gloucester. But whereas the mutual and comprehensive accusations of the earlier dispute ("all the treasons for these eighteen years / Complotted and contrivèd in this land / Fetch from false Mowbray their first head and spring" [I, i, 95-97; emphasis added]) were shrouded in vague allusions (probably because of Richard's presence), the crescendo of charges and countercharges that mars King Henry's debut is laden with the sort of reportorial detail by ear- and eyewitnesses that should compel ready belief:

I heard you say, "Is not my arm of length,
That reacheth from the restful English court
As far as Calais to mine uncle's head?"
Amongst much other talk that very time
I heard you say that you had rather refuse
The offer of an hundred thousand crowns
Than Bolingbroke's return to England;
Adding withal, how blest this land would be
In this your cousin's death.

(IV, i, 11-19)

Such a vivid account seems to open a window onto "that very time," so that we gain direct access to the otherwise darkened past. But Bagot's glib memory virtually refutes itself, stumbling over the specific details with which it should be piling up credit. The "time when Gloucester's death was plotted" simply cannot be "that very time" when Aumerle allegedly opposed Bolingbroke's return from banishment since, as even an otherwise uninformed audience knows from the play itself, the former "time" preceded the latter by a quite considerable gap. And, as the gauges begin to fly, those precise reporters who do not contradict themselves flatly contradict one another:

Surrey: My Lord Fitzwater, I do remember well
The very time Aumerle and you did talk.
Fitzwater: Tis very true. You were in presence then,
And you can witness with me this is true.
Surrey: As false, by heaven, as heaven itself is true!

(60-64)

Whatever was history's truth is hopelessly mangled in competing recollections of it. If the object of heroical history is to invigorate the present by awakening remembrance of the past and thus to make the best of the past live anew in the present, here we see a use of the past that has precisely the opposite effect. Whatever his own meager imagination intends when he coins the phrase, Bagot appropriately introduces this whole series of reconstructions by referring his auditors back to "that dead time"—dead insofar as its true life can never be revived through such a maze of self-serving revisions, and dead insofar as it haunts the present like a destructive ghost in the varying shapes these wranglers give it, rather than inspiring the present to emulate its vital image. Nor are such mundane ghosts in the service of a sure and "true" providential justice, as were those who announced the high All-seer's impending doom in Richard III just before all wrongs were Anally righted. Rather, these visions and revisions continue to confound the factions of "this new world" throughout Henry's troublesome reign as Shakespeare will dramatize it. Put to uncreative purposes by uncreative minds, such faulty (and in every sense partial) recollections scarcely deserve to be called "fictions of history." Only Henry's "unthrifty son" and his less thrifty foil will use memory imaginatively enough to transform it into the "true" realm of fiction.

The strong positives and negatives emphasized in this account of Richard II may seem to suggest a simple moral reading of the loss that it dramatizes ("Don't forget your father or the Bolingbroke will get you!"). Surely Richard's "waste" of past time and the consequent eclipse of the noble heritage that might inspire the present is seen negatively, but scarcely in such complacently didactic terms. One complicating factor is the actual (or "historical") status of that noble heritage itself as the play presents it to us. We are given no reason to doubt the well-chronicled heroics of the Black Prince or to question the magnificence of his "mountain sire." But we are given every reason to suppose that the image of their era has been improved in the aged memories that invoke it here. Both Gaunt and York, as we have seen, are fond of easily phrased proverbs and clichés.⁷ York's description of the Black Prince thus falls into prefabricated patterns that can scarcely accommodate the whole truth ("In war was never lion raged more fierce, / In peace was never gentle lamb more mild" [II, i, 173-174]).⁸ Any view of a better past that is converted through Richard's negligence and Bolingbroke's opportunism into a worse present ought to take into account the possible degree to which the play shows us a happily idealized past that is increasingly ignored by an unpleasantly "real" present.

But this question of a fictive ideal juxtaposed with problematic realities is, as we have seen, more central to the companion play, King John, than it is to Richard II, where, if it is opened, it is not really developed. Here the more essential concern is the loss of meaningful contact with the positive force that the past should have in the present and the fundamental problem this loss presents for the "new world" that tries to establish itself (as yet not very creatively) without the support of time's charters and customary rights. Fittingly, the character who both christens Henry's reign as "this new world" and swears by his intention to thrive in it is one of those petty wranglers whose partial versions of past events foster discord in it (IV, i, 78). If the play watches the whole process with an auspicious and a dropping eye, it is because it feels the potent appeal of the heroic heritage that is remembered sentimentally before fading out of view here and at the same time shares the realism of the new regime, even to the point of exposing the fissures that will shake that regime itself.⁹ Those fissures are partly visible through the self-serving reconstructions of the past that destabilize the present and future. Only in the last play of the series that Richard II begins will Shakespeare offer a viable realization of the past's inspirational force that also fully acknowledges the fictive element in its history.

Notes

¹ Studies that emphasize the idea of the Fall in this play include those of Stanley R. Maveety, "A Second Fall of Cursed Man: The Bold Metaphor in Richard II" JEGP 72 (1973): 175-193, and Clayton G. MacKenzie, "Paradise and Paradise Lost in Richard II," SQ 37 (1986): 318-339. John Wilders, The Lost Garden: A View of Shakespeare 's English and Roman History Plays (London: Macmillan, 1978), does not give Richard II special attention for using the Fall as a model for an ideal past—a model he presents as common to the histories, which he tends to treat as of a kind with the tragedies in this regard.

² For a stringent antidote to my essentially benign (if not altogether credulous) reading of Gaunt's remembrance of a better England, see Donald M. Friedman, who sees the self-interested war lord showing through the guardian of values: "John of Gaunt and the Rhetoric of Frustration," ELH 43 (1976): 279-299.

³ One might recall (and Shakespeare may have recalled) in this regard Castiglione on old men's characteristic praise of their past and blame of the present at the beginning of Book Two of The Book of the Courtier.

⁴ York's formulaic phrasing may be placed in the context of studies that focus on outmoded language and its failures in this play and in the entire second tetralogy. See Joan Webber, "The Renewal of the King's Symbolic Role: From Richard II to Henry V" TSLL 4 (1963): 530-538; Anne Barton, "Shakespeare and the Limitations of Language," ShS 24 (1971): 19-30; James L. Calderwood, Metadrama in Shakespeare's Henriad: "Richard II" to "Henry V" (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979); Joseph A. Porter, The Drama of Speech Acts: Shakespeare's Lancastrian Tetralogy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); and Ronald R. MacDonald, "Uneasy Lies: Language and History in Shakespeare's Lancastrian Tetralogy," SQ 35 (1984): 22-39.

⁵ John Blanpied maintains that Richard's deviation from "the ideal model (his grandfather, Edward III)" is part of his self-conscious performance of the role of king: Time and the Artist, 122. Richard often does "perform," of course, but I see nothing studied in his negligence of the past or in his evident incomprehension of York's concern in this regard.

⁶ For a general account of father-son relationships and their significance in this play and the other histories, see Robert B. Pierce, Shakespeare's History Plays: The Family and the State (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971).

⁷ See note 4 above on the elders' outmoded language. The question of the past's fictive status would also complicate the views of historical eras in the play posited by Tillyard, Shakespeare 's History Plays; Peter G. Philias, "The Medieval in Richard II," SQ 12 (1961): 305-310; and Robert Hapgood, "Three Eras in Richard II," SQ 14 (1963): 281-283. One could cite Peter Ure's note in his New Arden edition of the play (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956) on York's questionable recollection of saving the Black Prince (II, iii, 98-104) as evidence that the old duke fabricates his memories; but, as with some other recollections that clash with Shakespeare's available sources, there is no tip-off in the play that this one is faulty.

⁸ York's formula nicely "revives" the double thrust of the Black Prince's own order for the effigy on his tomb, which was to show him "fully armed in the pride of battle . . . our face meek and our leopard helm placed beneath our head": cited from a variety of sources by Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), 294. Compare Henry V's prescription in Henry V, III, i, 3-6:

In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility,
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger.

⁹ Of the many accounts of the play's ambivalence about the experience it dramatizes, I would refer a reader first of all to Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York: Free Press; London: Collier-Macmillan, 1967), 81-95.