SOURCE: “John of Gaunt and the Rhetoric of Frustration,” in ELH 43, No. 3, Fall, 1976, pp. 279-99.

[In the following essay, Friedman studies the form and content of Gaunt's dying speech and argues that the speech reveals Gaunt to be deeply frustrated with his inability to insure the existence and stability of his particular view of “England's essence.” Friedman emphasizes that Gaunt's speech is more than the national panegyric it is often taken to be and that Gaunt does not simply serve as an objective commentator on England's glories.]

This teeming womb of privilege, this feudal state,
Whose shores beat back the turbulent sea of foreign anarchy.
This ancient fortress, still commanded by the noblest
Of our royal blood; this ancient land of ritual.
This precious stone set in a silver sea.(1)

John of Gaunt's deathbed speech on the glories of England, in the first scene of Act Two of Richard II, has long appealed to anthologists; indeed, the establishment of its status as a set-piece of patriotic fervor began as early as 1600, when it appeared, in a truncated form,² as one of the two excerpts included under the rubric, “Albion,” in England's Parnassus. Since then it has served on any number of ceremonial occasions, in pageants, orations, and even films,³ as the very type of the national panegyric. Understandably, those who have put it to such uses have not inquired very closely into its dramatic context, nor even into the context of the entire speech, from which the most often-quoted lines are usually excerpted.

It is less understandable that recent criticism of Richard II has maintained, with very little variation, the traditional estimate of the meaning and effect of Gaunt's speech. That interpretation of Richard II, and of the second tetralogy as a whole, which stresses the importance of Tudor political orthodoxy and the providential course of history in Shakespeare's design has been challenged by critics like E. W. Talbert, Wilbur Sanders, and Norman Rabkin,⁴ who find that Shakespeare's treatment of the problems of the nature of kingship, the ideal of the commonwealth, and the rights of oppressed subjects, is more consistent with a complex sense of the moral relationship between public and private selves than previous critical views have allowed. They have been moved to offer their challenge by the realization that within the traditional interpretations of the political orthodoxies supposed to have been shared by Shakespeare there lie areas of anomaly, if not conflict. The doctrine announced in “An Homily against Disobedience and wilful rebelion,” one of the “Certain Sermons” “appointed to be read in churches” under Elizabeth I, holds that resistance to a monarch can be justified by no circumstances whatever; in this view. Bolingbroke's usurpation stands utterly condemned, despite Richard's manifest unfitness for rule, his flagrant abuses of royal privilege, and even his complicity in the murder of his uncle. Thomas, Duke of Gloucester. Yet, according to the notion Shakespeare is commonly held to have derived from Hall's chronicles and through his reading of Holinshed,⁵ the history of England from the deposition of Richard II to the advent of the Tudors provides a demonstration of God's punishment of the nation for its sins, and of the restoration of His grace in the establishment of national unity by the reconciliation of York and Lancaster under Henry VII. Within this interpretive framework, Bolingbroke is the scourge and minister of divine providence, and his acts of usurpation and murder are to be seen as the foundation of the triumphant achievements of Tudor rule.

The issues are further complicated by the superimposition of these sixteenth-century political ideas upon the events, the institutions, and the theories of medieval history. We do not know, for example, to what extent Shakespeare was aware of the fact that his contemporaries understood the doctrine of “the divine right of kings” a good deal more categorically than did fourteenth-century Englishmen, for whom the boundaries of that right were hedged round very firmly by venerable principles of contractual obligation and by the distinctions implicit in the theory of the king's “two bodies.”⁶ In any case, our judgment of Shakespeare's viewpoint in the play is affected by such an awareness, as it is by recent discussions of the continuing vigor of contractual political theories in Shakespeare's time.⁷

All of this makes it difficult to sustain the argument that the second tetralogy, and Richard II in particular, were intended as dramatic illustrations of orthodox Tudor political doctrine. Even without entering debates over matters which belong essentially to constitutional history and the history of ideas, our confidence in Shakespeare's orthodoxy would be shaken, if only by his problematic presentation of Richard himself. Opinion has long been divided over the question of whether the king is to be seen as a frivolous tyrant or a sainted martyr, a trial sent by God upon the English to purge their sins, or a victim of a treacherous rebellion for which the nation must undergo a lengthy and bloody penance. The problem of interpretation extends to the structure itself of the play; it is, again, a commonplace of criticism that the King Richard of the first two acts, Henry IV's “skipping king,” revealed in all his empty and ineffectual ceremoniousness and in the cold venality of his callous greed, is a very different figure from the Richard of the last three acts, who emerges from his isolated and deprived state a figure much advanced in dignity and self-knowledge. Or, at least, critics have agreed that Richard ends by winning from the audience a sympathy and even admiration that his behavior in the first half of the play rendered impossible. Whereas these puzzling aspects of the play at one time excited speculation about its genre or the tragic stature of its protagonist, as well as about the precise stance of its political philosophy, they now seem to be in themselves signs of Shakespeare's interest in politics conceived much more broadly, and evidence of his characteristic mode of examining concepts and institutions as they are embodied in individuals who serve them. In Sanders’ phrase, “the focus is on political man, not political theory.”⁸

If we subscribe to the idea that Shakespeare does not usually present us with a spokesman for a political or moral viewpoint without asking us to evaluate the spokesman as well as the viewpoint—to consider, in other words, the effect an idea has on the person who holds and supports it, and to judge the idea partially on the basis of that effect—then we should be constantly alert to the interplay between personality or character and the values it espouses. That is, of course, the normal condition of a critical response to any form of drama; but in the case of Shakespeare's history plays that necessary alertness has been somewhat blunted. The plays’ connections with the actual events of recorded history give them a spurious air of reality; in a different way, our knowledge of Elizabethan political theory and propaganda has made it more, rather than less, difficult to preserve our critical scepticism about the sources of political ideas as they appear in the histories. Richard II, for all the reasons that have made it a cause of debate and indecision, seems to me an obvious reminder of the need for scepticism in its interpretation.⁹ Indeed, just as Richard the king has been the focus of much probing inquiry, so have Bolingbroke, Northumberland, and even the loyal but helpless Duke of York.¹⁰ Only John of Gaunt, so far as I have been able to discover, has remained immune from the dialectic investigation of motive and principle; this essay proposes to test the strength of that immunity by examining his famous dying speech a little more closely than has been the custom.

The first anthologist to recognize the power of Gaunt's vision of England's glory, the editor of England's Parnassus, was also the first to detach the lines beginning, “this royal throne of kings …” from their context, not only by omitting the preceding lines in which Gaunt predicts the disastrous outcome of Richard's follies in a series of proverbial apothegms, but also by neglecting to print the concluding line of the speech, which contain the climax and point of the duke's ecstatic reverie, his condemnation of Richard's financial policies and their destructive effect on the idealized England to which Gaunt owes allegiance. In Gaunt's speech Shakespeare is drawing upon several rhetorical and dramatic traditions; two of the most prominent are the deathbed prophecy and the national panegyric, and these at least are fairly represented by the lines usually excerpted (40-55). In commenting on the tradition of patriotic encomium, the Arden editor of Richard II, Peter Ure, points out that Gaunt's speech evokes comparison with a number of literary parallels, including passages from Virgil and Plutarch and a variety of Elizabethan patriotic writings.¹¹ His citations fall roughly into three groups, each of which illuminates a recurrent theme. England's watery isolation, for example, is mentioned not only in other plays by Shakespeare (3 Henry VI, King John), but also in Daniel's Delia (Sonnet XLIV), in Hakluyt, and in Greene's Spanish Masquerado. This providential arrangement, whereby England is preserved from foreign invasion, is connected logically to Gaunt's conclusion that the nation can be conquered only by its own sins, an argument found in The Troublesome Raigne of King John, in works by Churchyard and Borde, in the propagandistic Briefe Discoverie by G. D., and in Daniel's Civile Warres. From Peele's Edward I and in A. Marten's Exhortation (in the Harleian Miscellany), Ure cites remarks on the “reputation of English chivalry,” particularly in reference to national participation in crusading adventures. As models for the panegyric speech as a whole, Ure turns to two translations from, or versions of, a passage in Du Bartas’ Creation du Monde: excerpts from John Eliot's Ortho-epia Gallica or Eliot's Fruits from the French and Joshua Sylvester's Devine Weekes and Workes are printed as appendices in the Arden edition.¹² When we turn to these passages, however, it appears that the differences between Gaunt's speech and these English versions of Du Bartas are such that while they do not bring into question the proposition that Shakespeare was writing within an established rhetorical tradition, they do nevertheless illustrate the ways in which he adapted that tradition to a specific dramatic purpose.

The distinction may be drawn consistently between these versions of Du Bartas and the passage in Richard II as that between direct, unmediated praise of a subject whose claims to value are enumerated clearly, and a laudatio whose qualifications and modes of defining the object of praise have the effect of characterizing the orator as revealingly as his subject. Thus, when Eliot (speaking of France) and Sylvester (converting Du Bartas’ lines to England) begin to list the causes of national glory, they mention not only the far-ranging warriors, but “artizans” and “learned wits,” the standard adornments of aspiring civilizations. Similarly, the land itself is distinguished by its actual, material characteristics: great rivers, cities which “Shires doo seem,” and soil that is “fertill-temperate-sweete”; even the civility of government is accorded mention, a quality which is praised for having raised the walls of cities “to loftie skies,” cities that Sylvester describes as “Civil in manners, as in Buildings trim.” Both versions conclude by reminding the reader that this treasure has been preserved by the defences of nature, and Sylvester adds the cautionary remark that traitors alone can breach England's triple wall of “Water, Wood, and Brasse.”

It is obvious that if Shakespeare began with these lines, or others like them, in mind, he very quickly adjusted the tone and structure of the panegyric to the exigencies of character and situation that govern Gaunt's deathbed scene. The old man is no disinterested commentator on the glories of England; he is deeply implicated in the question he poses about the preservation or destruction of the national character. Furthermore, the qualities which for him form the essence of value in the imagined realm he surveys are those which he feels are the special province of his own bloodline. Richard's fiscal machinations threaten not simply the wealth and stability of the kingdom, but the very process of creation whereby noble and powerful men generate the substance of the realm. That substance, for Gaunt, consists in reputation, the regard in which England is held by other, lesser, nations, and in maintaining the hereditary continuity between England's chivalry and its integrity in a civil order. In such a conception there is no room for artists or sholars. Neither clear rivers nor fertile fields play a part in Gaunt's vision, because he is not concerned with the economic sources of England's wealth and prosperity, but only with the obligations they impose on their guardians. For the same reason he offers no praise of great cities, institutions, works of architecture or the other arts—any of the commonly recognized signs of excellence in a civilization. What Gaunt sees is truly a disembodied vision of national greatness, more neoplatonic in its separation of essence and being than Richard's equally radical conception of the kingdom as the physical extension of his royal self.

So much can be surmised by comparing the central lines of Gaunt's speech to models, of similar rhetorical mode, to which Ure and other editors have allied it. Let us return to the context of those lines, in an attempt to understand the reasons for the anthologists’ pruning. If, for the moment, we take the lines 40-55 to stand, in a sort of equation, for the political orthodoxy the play as a whole has been thought to support, then the omitted lines should be examined for evidence of the subtle analysis of personal motive which Sanders and others have called attention to. And when we compare the two groups of lines we notice that they have been clearly differentiated by Shakespeare, not only by the subjects they treat, but also by their characteristics of rhythm, diction, and rhetorical organization. Furthermore, the several parts of the speech mark a development in Gaunt of a sense of his position vis-à-vis the king. Whereas in his interview with the Duchess of Gloucester in I.ii, Gaunt had felt himself able only to deplore Richard's part in the murder of her husband, and his speeches in I.iv express in the main a saddened acquiescence in the banishment, on very obscure grounds, of his own son, the opening of II.i suggests an access of energy in the dying old man, as if in answer to his determination to arrest that course of action in the king which Gaunt has previously declined to oppose. What Richard later mocks as Gaunt's “nice” playing on his name begins in fact with Gaunt's serious “playing” with the notion that his dying breath may have the power of counsel that the king has refused to hear in the normal course of political affairs. To York's wearied practically—“Vex not yourself, nor strive not with your breath; / For all in vain comes counsel to his ear”—Gaunt replies that “the tongues of dying men / Inforce attention like deep harmony,” because “Where words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain.” Gaunt is invoking not only the respect and sentiment that surround the deathbed utterance, nor only the mysterious prophetic powers that are supposed to descend upon the dying, but also what he takes to be the irresistible worth, the persuasive force, of words spoken in pain and at great cost; they must be listened to because they are the ultimate expression of disinterested counsel, the unquestionable altruism of the good adviser who knows he cannot benefit from his own advice. Thus he is sure that “though Richard my life's counsel would not hear, / My death's sad tale may yet undeaf his ear”; the privative verb¹³ is a measure of Gaunt's confidence in his ability to change the king, to restore a natural faculty which Richard has corrupted in himself. York, ever hewing close to the testimony of actual experience, reminds him that the king's ear has been “stopp’d with other flattering sounds,” particularly by “lascivious metres” and new, Italianate vanities “buzz’d into his ears”; the king cannot possibly hear good counsel because the faculty that should take in and appreciate the sounds of wisdom has become the place “where will doth mutiny with wit's regard.”¹⁴ Despairingly, York advises Gaunt to spare his breath, the breath so precious to a dying man.

But his remark has the unexpected effect of arousing Gaunt to the delighted contemplation of the possible play on the word “breath”:

Methinks I am a prophet new inspir’d,
And thus expiring do foretell of him.

(31-32)

He will immediately breathe out in prophecy the vision with which he has been inspirited. We are led to expect the language of an exalted seer at this point; but what we hear is a series of short, packed maxims:

His rash fierce blaze of riot cannot last.
For violent fires soon burn out themselves;
Small showers last long, but sudden storms are short;
He tires betimes that spurs too fast betimes;
With eager feeding food doth choke the feeder;
Light vanity, insatiate cormorant,
Consuming means, soon preys upon itself.

(33-39)

Peter Ure notes that the lines rely on the “rhetorical device of auxesis,” known also to contemporary rhetoricians as incrementum or progressio.¹⁵ But whether we consult Hoskyns or Puttenham, or even Quintilian,¹⁶ we find that this figure is understood to describe a succession of increasingly powerful examples, leading to a climactic point or condition. These lines do not seem to exemplify the characteristic qualities of auxesis, because although they illustrate in a number of ways the propensity of passion and appetite to destroy themselves, there is no progress toward that lesson in the encapsulated, end-stopped movement of the passage. This would hardly be worth remarking were it not for the fact that the lines that follow, the famous ones on “this England,” do proceed according to the principle of auxesis; and I take it that the difference between Gaunt's stern comments on Richard's self-consuming folly and his visionary praise of the ideal commonwealth of the English past is meant to be marked for the reader, the audience and the actor, by the different rhythms to be heard in that passage, and in this, which may be called an example of false auxesis.¹⁷

I take it, also, that we are being called upon to observe the kinds of rhetorical energy that are summoned up in Gaunt by the differing subjects of his discourse. As he contemplates Richard's actual behavior as king, his regard is that of the detached moralist, funded richly with the wisdom of experience and with the moral laws which received tradition has provided to characterize and judge the experience. The king's actions are seen as abstractable, infinitely repeatable examples of moral behavior; even though the images themselves, particularly those having to do with appetite and eating, are immediate and concrete, Gaunt's involvement with them is that of the orator coloring his discourse with the vividness appropriate to the act of condemnation. Ironically enough, his prophetic inspiration in these lines is markedly short-breathed; the lines do not move smoothly and incrementally to a climactic point; they reach their concluding indictment, rather, by way of a succession of apothegms, almost entirely self-enclosed, and in their proverbial diction contributing to our sense of impersonal, generalized evaluation.

If the point seems labored, it is because the contrast with the succeeding lines, while so sharp, has gone so often unnoticed. This is all the more difficult to account for when one notices that Gaunt begins to speak of England in absolute disjunction from his initial subject; or at least so it appears, for we do not learn until line 66 that England is being adduced as the most important instance of self-conquest. But before we reach that apprehension our attention is concentrated on the rhapsodic phrases in which Gaunt shapes the portrait of a civilization which is passing, even as he dies. And that attention is held, in large part, by the rhetorical and rhythmic structure of this panegyric; “held” is probably the best word because its structure is based on suspense, on a deliberate auxesis of non-completion, reflected most clearly in the syntax of the passage. The laudatio that begins, “This royal throne of kings,” does not attain its grammatical predicate for nearly twenty lines; and the shock with which we discover that the summary point of the wavelike succession of idealizing clauses is the assertion that England “is now leas’d out … like to a tenement or pelting farm” is not the kind of climax toward which progressio normally moves.

Our attention is held, too, by the impact of successive and accumulating adjectives, which serve as nuclei for those clauses, many of which take up no more than half a line, as Gaunt struggles to express the feelings of awe, fealty, and yearning which, again, make so telling a contrast with the language of execration in which he has just indulged. Here, it seems, the paradoxical nature of his prophetic “breath” reveals itself in rhythmic phrases that are even shorter-lived than his previous maxims, but which he cannot bring to rhetorical fulfillment. It is as if the heroic suspension of grammar is meant to figure the sheer effort of will Gaunt is expending in this speech; and, as a consequence, the versification and syntax of the passage on England are intended as signs of the profoundly personal fervor of the speech, that intimacy of evaluative purpose that was lacking in the judgmental lines on Richard's fatal instability. For what is hymned in lines 40-59 is the nation of permanent and impregnable worth that Gaunt sees as the dedicatee of his life's devotion.

What first seizes his imagination, and ours, is the intrinsic connection between England and monarchic power: the “Royal throne of kings,” an isle that is “scept’red,” an earth “of majesty.” The land itself¹⁸ and the dominion over it become metaphorically interchangeable, as the nouns and adjectives shift positions, defying normal rules of subordination. The only transition that Gaunt provides from his condemnatory remarks on Richard to this rapt enumeration of England's virtues is unspoken, the tacit comparison between the king that Richard has shown himself to be and the ideal of kingship represented in the lengthy, multiplex characterization of the realm.¹⁹ Thus, while the surface of the speech reflects at first the image of the fusion of realm and regal power, the phrase that follows, “this seat of Mars,” tells us that that fusion, in Gaunt's mind, is not God-given, not divinely instituted, not a political institution founded in earth as a microcosmic imitation of universal governance. Rather, its source and stay is in armed might, the martial prowess which later in the speech will be associated with England's crusading past. But here, as there, Gaunt's mind blurs the perception of harsh political reality by shifting from “this seat of Mars” to “This other Eden,” making a transition without a link, a sequence of epithets that would seem to be contradictory rather than complementary. For Richard, his kingdom is indeed another Eden, “demi-paradise,” and he its vice-regental ruler, by divine fiat; it is a matter of principle, of inviolable law, not subject to the truths of history or the exigencies of government. Gaunt's thought moves more deviously, trying to validate its vision of value by placing the god of war and the name of paradise side by side, as if the mere naming will wipe out the distance between their irreconcilable meanings.

Nevertheless, for Gaunt, the experienced warrior and statesman, Eden does not represent the ease and benevolence of man's unfallen state, the otiose paradise that lies barely beneath the many comparisons of England to a garden.²⁰ It is, rather, a “fortress” built “by Nature” to preserve the race of Englishmen, “this happy breed,” against both foreign invasions (“the hand of war”) and the equally pernicious incursions of alien manners. It is hard to tell whether “this little world” is made valuable by being a world complete to itself, or by its being little, special, reserved for the few choice spirits fortunate enough to be born English. By a similar token, the “precious stone set in the silver sea” derives its value from the valuer and from what surrounds it; although it is “precious,” the island is still a “stone,” and it is the sea which is silver.²¹ In short, what defines England's value as Eden for Gaunt is its exclusiveness, as signalled by nature's choosing to defend it by a “wall” of water, a “moat defensive to house”; there is nothing here of paradise as the sign of God's bounty to man, the emblem of man's benevolent dominion over nature, the symbol of natural subordination and the fruitful pursuits of obedience and sanctified labor. In a way, Shakespeare's Gaunt anticipates Milton's characterization of Eden as a precarious repository of great treasure, besieged and threatened by a greedy and revengeful adversary; but here Satan appears in the guise of the “envy of less happier lands.” The difference, of course, is that Gaunt knows his enemy very well, and the accents of his speech record not only his passionate appreciation of his fortress island but also his fierce determination to keep it inviolate. This love is commingled with a kind of inflamed miserliness the will to hoard what is good, to keep it from being shared by greedy foreigners, or even tainted by their influence. The very mention of those “less happier lands” moves Gaunt once again to the pulsing, chanting rhythms of the earlier lines:

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England …

(50)

Here again, paraphrasis (or interpretatio) gives the effect of trying to define an essence by enumerating all its names, an attempt that fails because his understanding of the national essence goes no further than attaching the name to the earth itself. But just as the mention of paradise had led Gaunt to the thought of England's protective isolation, so the naming of the land itself leads him to another of its qualities, one vitally important to his concept of monarchic power—its dynastic fertility: “This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings.”²² England's earth brings forth kings, is their creator, mother, and nurse; thus Richard's view of the kingdom as his absolute possession, given by God's hand, is contraverted by Gaunt's image of a womb spawning those who will protect it, a “happy breed of men,” whose individual identity is submerged in a collective purpose, a kind of perpetual knightly order sworn to the defense of its fortress island and of its own privilege. Furthermore, he thinks of their quality not only in the light of their isolated brotherhood, but also because they have been

Fear’d by their breed, and famous by their birth,
Renowned for their deeds as far from home,
For Christian service and true chivalry,
As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry.

(52-55)

Reputation is the key to Gaunt's intensity here, and it is as hard to tell whether it is more important to him that they are “fear’d” or “famous” as it is to say which he values more, the deeds they have done or the renown they have earned. At least it is clear that “Christian service and true chivalry” are evocative terms to describe the martial activities of Gaunt's ancestors. It is important to note here, I think, that Gaunt's memory is going back to the time of Edward I, but conflating it simultaneously with the history of the reign of Edward III, his father. The first Edward's reputation for saintliness and Christian devotion is called upon to color the lingering pride and excitement of the exploits of Edward III and the Black Prince in their careers as adventurers in the wars against France. It might be said cynically that Gaunt's father had managed brilliantly to divert public discontent by his incessant, and sporadically successful, foreign campaigns; but it is also true that Edward's warlike brood did constitute a magnificently appealing image of dynastic potency, and that the king was forgiven much because of his ability to stir the patriotic feelings of his subjects. In this respect, Gaunt has superimposed on the memory of a time when England was, briefly, feared as a military power, a highly-colored portrait of a crusading band doing Christ's work at the furthest reaches of the medieval world. The pattern of thought cannot be called disingenuous, but it does show how the creation of an “idealised picture”²³ should be understood as a discovery of the speaker's own desires and motives. These are not the words of a Christian knight,²⁴ but those of a feudal nobleman to whom the reputation of Christian chivalry is central to his conception of himself.²⁵

It is difficult to distinguish the value Gaunt places on the renown of English arms (a renown brought to its apogee by his father and the brothers whom the Duchess of Gloucester calls the “seven vials of his sacred blood”), from the value he attaches to the deeds that have earned that renown. The shadowiness of his principles of evaluation is epitomized in the curiously opaque, repeated, ambiguous epithets of the lines that follow:

This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world.

(57-58)

As the lines proceed the meaning of “dear” becomes increasingly problematic: are the souls “dear” to Gaunt because of their personal associations with the heroic past he is lamenting, or because of their self-sacrificing service to the cause of Christ? Is the land dear in itself because of its meaning for him, or is he characterizing its worth as a possession? Or is it finally dear, as he says, because of its “reputation through the world”? Is this, in short, an instance of Shakespeare's questioning, as he does so clearly in Troilus and Cressida, the foundations of all systems of valuation in specific personal motivations? We cannot ignore the obvious play on monetary and intrinsic worth,²⁶ and our understanding of the point of Gaunt's furious indignation depends very heavily on which meaning emerges more strongly. His ambiguous use of “dear” is emphasized by its crammed repetitions, and the lines in which they occur move rapidly to the rhythmic climax of the whole speech, as Gaunt's frenetic, expiring energy discharges itself into the agonized words, “is now leas’d out.” The interplay between the puzzle of Gaunt's attribution of value and his outrage at the demeaning of that value recapitulates the questions about motivation that underly the entire panegyric, and raise them once again in a more accessible form: is Gaunt crying out against the desecration Richard has wrought upon England, or is he protesting that the king has disposed ignobly of the worth of the realm the old man has regarded as his own? Commentary on the speech has assumed almost universally that Gaunt is making a “plea for … vanished majesty,”²⁷ that his “great speech of lament … is a compelling vision of the past and a passionate denunciation of the present,”²⁸ and that the famous lines are intended as the last, exemplary utterance of a noble way of life that is passing. Clearly this estimate cannot be gainsaid. Gaunt does speak for a conception of national honor and potency which Richard has eroded by his prodigal wasting of the substance of his realm, and the reaction of generations of the play's audience is not the least of the testimonies to the power of the speech to arouse feelings of patriotic pride. But we must also remember that the values of feudal, chivalric civilization do not act in the play only as abstractions. They are tied quite firmly to the characters and voices of specific people; and our responses to those values must take into account our evaluation of their spokesmen. Commenting on the place in Richard II of the doctrine of divine right, Sanders says, “When Shakespeare puts the advocacy of this doctrine in the mouth of the kind of king we have seen Richard to be, he is subjecting it to a severe, if implicit, critique.”²⁹ The point of my analysis of Gaunt's speech on England is that it is not immune to the same kind of scrutiny Sanders demands for Richard's defense of his position.

The need for such scrutiny, it seems to me, becomes clear when the climax of Gaunt's praise of his native land turns out to be, not the expected summary statement of England's glory, but the outburst of contempt and frustrated indignation we hear in:

Is now leas’d out—I die pronouncing it—
Like to a tenement or pelting farm.

(59-60)

What offends Gaunt to his soul is not simply that England's reputation for deeds of arms and for crusading valor has been diminished, it is impossible to tell to what degree Shakespeare assumes knowledge in the audience of the historical Richard's unpopular policy (of accommodation with France), but that the kingdom—“this earth, this realm”—has been sold, leased, given to those who, presumably, have no title to it. The inmost core of Gaunt's outrage appears to be not the dulling of national fame, but the fact that possession of the land has passed from the hands of its traditional owners. I would suggest, further, that Gaunt conceives those owners properly to be the feudal nobility of the time of his father and great-grandfather, and more particularly, the sons of Edward III who continue in his mind to represent the palmy days of England's ascendancy.

The abstract dignity of Gaunt's vision of the English nation is fleshed out by his sense of family solidarity, a consideration which underlies many of the prominent debates about principle in the play. The Duchess of Gloucester's appeal to Gaunt for vengeance is based on his sharing of “Edward's sacred blood”; Gaunt himself later in his deathbed scene, upbraids Richard thus:

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;

(104-06)

and York, later still in the same scene, reminds Richard that he is king only “by fair sequence and succession.” Indeed, if the play at large treats the problems that arise from a divinely-sanctioned authority being vested in an inadequate human vessel, those problems are also reflected in the analogous problems of the continuities of blood and familial traits being interrupted and diverted by the acts of a family member who believes himself to be greater than, or apart from, the flesh that has created, and serves, him. The mystery that broods over much of Richard II is the insoluble paradox of incarnation; and the sparse, but tellingly placed, allusions to Christ's passion are only the most obvious and resonant instances of Shakespeare's thinking about essentially metaphysical questions: how and where does value reside in human beings and their institutions?

But if the play provides a number of centripetal views on the force of family feeling, some of them are qualified by yet another concern: the intimate bonds among names, or titles, reputation, and possessions, particularly of hereditary lands. Again, these may be considered as minor reflections or resonances of the central examination of the relationship between the king's identity and his “name,”³⁰ but they have a cumulative force of their own. For example, in York's expostulation to Richard, just mentioned, he associates the seizure of Hereford's “charters, and his customary rights” with making a breach between Richard and the king's self, before he mentions the act's potential for alienating “a thousand well-disposed hearts.”

Similarly, the drumfire of place-names and titles that rolls through the play, from the martial ceremonies of the first Act through Bolingbroke's declaration, “But as I come, I come for Lancaster” (II.iii.113), is supplied with dramatic point in the opening scene of Act III, in which Bolingbroke disposes of the “favorites,” Bushy and Greene. His self-justifying speech, intended to wash the blood of his victims off his hands “here in the view of men,” is curiously like his father's dying speech in its structure and procedures. Bolingbroke begins by giving reasons for not making the speech he then proceeds to make:

I will not vex your souls,
Since presently your souls must part your bodies,
With too much urging your pernicious lives,
For ’twere no charity.

(III.i.2-5)

What follows, of course, is a catalogue of the sins of the King's entourage, a catalogue which, again, seems to follow the figure of auxesis as it moves through increasingly grave accusations toward the most serious of all. Bolingbroke begins by reproaching them for offering the king bad counsel, thus focusing in a judicial setting the discontent and disapproval that hovered ubiquitously throughout the first acts of the play; he goes on to imply, in language both suggestive and inexact, their responsibility for sexual improprieties that have come between Richard and his queen. But as the speech rises toward its climax, Bolingbroke turns from their crimes against the monarch and the realm to the gravamen of his indictment. Bushy and Greene, he claims, have corrupted Bolingbroke's relationship with Richard, and have in some way been instrumental in his banishment. Worst of all, they have:

fed upon my signories,
Dispark’d my parks and fell’d my forest woods,
From my own windows torn my household coat,
Rac’d out my imprese, leaving me no sign,
Save men's opinions and my living blood,
To show the world I am a gentleman.

(III.i.22-27)

Bolingbroke's position as he perceives it, or as he wishes it to be perceived, is analogous to Richard's when he discovers and probes the gap between the name and the identity of the king. But for the usurper, whom we see here for the first time unmistakably assuming the powers of the monarch, the distinction to be made between his title and the thing it signifies is a familiar and accepted one. He realizes the necessity of preserving the substance that justifies and supports his “name”; and his every effort in the play is aimed at preserving the link between them. “Men's opinions” and his “living blood”—in other words, the hereditary continuities of family and society's acknowledgment of their reality—are for Bolingbroke only the weak and barely satisfactory remaining guarantees of his right to “Lancaster.” Bushy and Greene are sent to their deaths because they have taken from him what more is needed to establish his claim in the world, the “imprese,” the outward signs of his inherited right. To put it too simply, whereas Richard assumes that his “name” entitles him to the possession of the realm because king and kingdom are inseparable concepts, Bolingbroke regards the possession of his father's lands as the necessary validation of his title and identity. Whatever may be said about John of Gaunt as a symbol of the passing feudal order and his son as the representative of the modern, instrumental political state, father and son share a sense of the kingdom as a property that must be defended, the material essence of their titles and rights. Just as their armies are real armies, compared to the angelic legions Richard summons in his helplessness, so the realm, the earth, the England to which they pay homage are primarily the actual estates of the Duchy of Lancaster, from which they derive their economic and social sustenance.³¹

Both speeches move toward the revelation of a political reality that underlies an act of state—Gaunt's attempt to define the ideal of English nationality, and Bolingbroke's public demonstration of the proper administration of justice, in conformity with the model suggested by the well-spoken gardener of III.iv. But Bolingbroke's willingness to “cut off the heads of too fast growing sprays” does not answer his father's vision of “This other Eden, demi-paradise,” because the necessary act of control runs counter to Gaunt's sense of the burgeoning, Nile-like fertility of “This royal throne of kings.” The old man's dream of king and kingdom living symbiotically, supporting and nurturing each other, holds within it the seed of disintegration—the concept of the realm as hereditary property. That seed is brought to fruition by Bolingbroke's care for his estates, which is so easily transferred to the mismanaged commonwealth itself. In an obvious sense, the fact that the land can be seized means that the royal investiture is not inviolable. Indeed, Richard makes it more difficult for Bolingbroke to grasp the crown, symbol of rule, than it is for him to take hold of the kingdom itself.

It is typical of the play to remind us of the distance between sign and the thing signified. For Richard, as for Troilus, the widening gap between name and thing reveals a metaphysical abyss into which “the unity and married calm of states” disappears, leaving only formless chaos that resists understanding. For the Lancastrians the matter is relatively simpler, because they accept the necessity of grappling title to substance as the law of their political being. Richard, like Lear, must assume that his title is indistinguishable from his identity, just as his will is indistinguishable from the act that it wills. Effect must follow cause simply because the king's word creates the condition that it names. When the causal chain is broken, in Richard II or in King Lear, by the refusal of other wills to be defined by the monarch, or by the monarch's surrender of the power to enforce his will, the king is left with the impossible condition of a title without authority, a language that cannot be understood. In contrast, Bolingbroke, and the other political realists, take it as given that effects must be made to follow causes, that they are subject to the will that can manipulate the realities of power, that political action demands constant expenditures of energy to preserve one's realm and to expand it. What seems in Bolingbroke to be practical, realistic, hard-headed political behavior may be seen more profitably as the inevitable consequence of his way of conceiving how things happen, how they get done, how appetite is linked to its satisfaction.

That “way of conceiving” is linear, apparently logical, unproblematic and external. It connects actions and their consequences without speculating about motives or their sources. It also operates in Richard II in clear contrast with the king's introspection, his uncertainty about identities, his inability to understand power in any but a unitary sense, as authority coterminous with its title. But the way of the political realist, it seems to me, is commented upon by a characteristic of the play which is seen best in the interinvolvement of ritual behavior and rhetorical patterns. It is a commonplace to observe that in the opening scenes of Richard II the ceremonial acts of regal power are interrupted, stopped short of fulfillment, by what appears to be Richard's capriciousness, which is then taken to be the outward sign of his incapacities as king. But the form of interrupted ritual appears at many points in the play, and it involves more characters than Richard alone. Bolingbroke's setting of the abdication scene in IV.i is diverted from its course by Richard's determination to play out a scenario of his own choosing. Similarly, the first part of that scene contains the charges and counter-charges of treason against Aumerle, and it is clearly intended to mirror the earlier challenges between Bolingbroke and Mowbray. But the outcome of the later scene does not, as we might expect, display Bolingbroke as the efficient and effective arbitrator of complex political situations; rather, he can do no more than Richard did in the earlier instance. Mowbray, who alone can discover the truth of guilt, is dead, and Bolingbroke must send the appellants off “under gage” until the cause shall be tried, a trial we never witness.³² Before he has entered fully into his power, the new king must deal with the treachery of his kinsman, Aumerle, finds cause to lament the unfilial behavior of the Prince of Wales, and ends the play by vowing a penitential journey to Jerusalem to atone for the royal blood that has been shed to make him “grow.” In short, the linear and practical logic of Bolingbroke's political astuteness has not freed him from the trammels in which Richard foundered. The divorce between name and essence into which Richard inquired so curiously is seen to be symptomatic. The recurrent theme of ritual gone awry is sounded again in the repeated pattern of intentions that do not achieve their desired ends. It is repeated, too, in the rhetorical structure of the two speeches which we have examined, in the figure of auxesis which does not arrive at the climax toward which it seemed to be moving. The play is filled with examples, on different levels and in different modes, of frustrated motives, aborted ceremonies, pulses that lose their initial rhythms.

It is almost as if the various languages spoken in the play have been conceived as tongues speaking of the kingdom's malady, a malady which is focused in the characterization of Richard, but which resides at large in the process of dissolution of the bonds between value and that which is valued. The nature of those bonds poses a question that Shakespeare addresses again and again, at every stage of his career—in both historical tetralogies, in King Lear, in Troilus, in Much Ado, in the pastoral comedies, in the romances, in the sonnets. In Richard II the notion of intrinsic value appears in the guise of the doctrine of divine right; the sceptical, psychological notion of the preeminence of the valuer and his motives over the thing valued is embodied in the forces of practical political wisdom. The uneasy relation of the two concepts is reflected multiply in the various forms of frustration which the play exhibits; and in John of Gaunt's speech we may see a complex enactment of frustration—the calculated unfulfillment of its rhetorical conventions, Gaunt's own frustration at being unable to realize and preserve his idea of England's essence, and the frustration of the audience's will to link an ideal value with its most eloquent exponent. It is this last experience that approaches most closely our sense of the way Richard II works generally in its examination of the dissolving connections between name and meaning, word and thing signified, incarnation and spirit.

Notes

1. The Ruling Class, by Peter Barnes (London, 1969), p. 3. In the Prologue to his play, Mr. Barnes appears to have anticipated the argument of this essay by having the 13th Earl of Gurney revise Shakespeare's lines in this fashion.

2. Only lines 40-55 are quoted; these are the lines usually excerpted.

3. See, if for no other reason, Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (Universal, 1942); note the date of the release.

4. The traditionalists may be fairly represented by E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (London, 1944); Lily Bess Campbell, Shakespeare's “Histories”: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (San Marino, 1947); and Irving Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (Princeton, 1957). For what I have called the challenges to their point of view, see E. W. Talbert, The Problem of Order: Elizabethan Political Commonplaces and an Example of Shakespeare's Art (University of North Carolina Press, 1962), pp. 146-200; Wilbur Sanders, The Dramatist and the Received Idea: Studies in the Plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 1968); and Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York, 1967). I did not have the opportunity to read Robert Ornstein's A Kingdom for a Stage: The Achievement of Shakespeare's History Plays (Cambridge, Mass., 1972) until this essay had been completed, and I am gratified to note that his approach to the histories supports generally, although not in every particular, the position argued here. See especially his introductory chapter. “The Artist as Historian,” and pp. 103-04.

5. Although the 1586-87 edition of Holinshed was the major source for Richard II, Shakespeare's reading of Hall's Chronicles influenced the structure of the history cycles generally.

6. The definitive work is Ernst Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies (Princeton, 1957).

7. Sanders, for example, surveys contemporary opposition to the doctrine of absolute obedience, pp. 143-57.

8. Sanders, p. 152.

9. See Sanders, p. 157.

10. On York, see Rabkin, pp. 87-89; on Bolingbroke, see Rabkin, pp. 89-90 and Brents Stirling, Unity in Shakespearean Tragedy (New York, 1956), pp. 37-39; and on all three see Talbert, pp. 158-93, and Sanders, pp. 158-93.

11. King Richard II, ed. Peter Ure (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), pp. 50-53. All citations to the play are taken from this edition.

12. Ure, pp. 206-07.

13. See Ure, p. 48, n.

14. This line is glossed most often with a reference to the doctrines of traditional faculty psychology in which the struggle between will and the rational understanding is the basis of moral choice. But it should also be noted that this use of “mutiny with” in the sense of “mutiny against” is unique in Shakespeare's work. The modern sense of “with” suggests a more sinister and perverted interpretation of Richard's behavior; his “wit” (understanding, intelligence) approves and cooperates with the mutiny of his will against what he knows is good advice. By a similar token, most editors gloss Richard's remark (I.i.5) that his “leisure” has kept him from hearing Bolingbroke's charge against Mowbray by explaining that the king means to say his “lack of leisure”; doesn’t it seem more in keeping with Richard's character in the early part of the play that he should mean exactly what he says?

15. Ure, p. 49, n.

16. For references and quotations, see Lee A. Sonnino, A Handbook to Sixteenth-Century Rhetoric (London, 1968), pp. 111-12; and Sister Miriam Joseph, C. S. C., Shakespeare's Use of the Art of Language (New York, 1947), pp. 330-31. Thomas Wilson, in The Arte of Rhetorique, defines the figure differently from the majority of contemporary rhetoricians, describing it as built upon contradictory sentences.

17. G. Wilson Knight, in The Sovereign Flower (London, 1958), accounts for the structural characteristics of the speech from the actor's viewpoint: “John of Gaunt's speech on England must start with the voice of an old, sick man; the repetitions accumulate; power breaks through, he rises from his chair or couch; the impact of the later thundering lines depends on the contrast with the opening; the end, though bitter, is quiet, as he sinks back” (p. 247).

18. See Richard D. Altick, “Symphonic Imagery in Richard II,” PMLA, 62 (1947), pp. 341-44.

19. It is typical of the speech as a whole thus to allude to a traditional rhetorical figure while refusing to reproduce it in obvious form, so that we are made to feel the effect of the figure without being able to relax into the recognition of a familiar verbal formula. In this instance, one might discern comparatio in either of its senses, or prae-expositio; both are figures of comparison, but the latter, as Quintilian explains, compares what ought to have been done with what actually was done. Similarly, while the central passage of the speech proceeds according to the general rules for amplificatio, it does not conform to any one of the many particular figures usually grouped under that head. We have already seen how Shakespeare exploits the normal expectations of auxesis; a contemporary rhetorician might also have cited the passage as an example of paraphrasis or expolitio, for its accumulation of varying epithets and descriptive clauses, or of exuscitatio, for its transformation of Gaunt's own feelings into an indirect exhortation of its audience.

20. Altick, p. 344.

21. See M. Mahood, Shakespeare's Wordplay (London, 1957), p. 80. Shakespeare may be inverting the familiar technique by which an inferior stone is set off and made to seem more valuable by being placed on a glittering “foil.”

22. It may be of interest to note that the many critical comments on Richard's effeminacy receive some support from his address to his native soil in III.ii; there he speaks of the earth as a child, and of himself as its mother. The contrast with Gaunt's vision of England as a “teeming womb” is clear, and bears also on the difference between Richard's sense of being his realm's sole author and Gaunt's tacit view that the land is both the active and final cause of the hereditary line of royal blood.

23. The phrase is M. M. Reese’s, in The Cease of Majesty (London, 1961), p. 232.

24. It is commonly agreed that Shakespeare's Gaunt is a markedly different character from the “turbulent and self-seeking magnate” described in Holinshed. Ure (xxxiv-xi) summarizes J. Dover Wilson's argument that Shakespeare's Gaunt is based on Froissart, and A. P. Rossiter's theory that Gaunt is modeled on Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, in the anonymous play Woodstock. The argument of the present essay would suggest that a good part of Holinshed's figure remains in Shakespeare's character.

25. Notice, for example, that in lines 53-56, “Renowned for their deeds as far from home, / For Christian service and true chivalry, / As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry / Of the world's ransom, blessed Mary's son,” the phrase “as far” compares the fame of English chivalry to the fame of Christ's sepulchre, as well as specifying the geographical range of its exploits. The point is made by Mahood, p. 81.

26. See Mahood, p. 80.

27. Reese, p. 232.

28. Sanders, p. 191.

29. Ibid., p. 187.

30. Comments on this problem in the play are legion; among the most recent, and the most suggestive, is Herbert B. Rothschild, Jr., “Language and Social Reality in Richard II,” in Essays in Honor of Esmond Linworth Marilla (Louisiana State University Press, 1970), pp. 56-58.

31. There is a minor irony implicit in the play's multiple references to the Lancastrian hereditary succession, references which begin with the very first line of the text, “Old John of Gaunt, time-honored Lancaster.” The title had been in existence for a little more than a century; Edmund Crouchback, brother of Edward I, was created the first Earl of Lancaster in 1267, and his son Thomas was executed as a traitor in 1322. Thomas's younger brother, Henry, succeeded in 1324, and was in turn succeeded by his son, Henry, Earl of Derby (1337), Earl of Lancaster (1347), and close friend of Edward III, who created him Duke of Lancaster in 1351. When Duke Henry died in 1361 he left two daughters as co-heiresses of his estate. Edward III, seizing the opportunity to provide handsomely for one of his seven sons, had married John of Gaunt to Lancaster's daughter Blanche. Gaunt became Earl of Lancaster and was advanced to the Dukedom in the following year, after the death of Maud, his wife's sister. Thus the royal stock was grafted to the Lancastrian inheritance, and the speeches of Gaunt, York, and Bolingbroke about “fair sequence and succession” may receive some color from the fact that their association with the title had extended for a single generation only.

32. See Ruth Nevo, Tragic Form in Shakespeare (Princeton, 1972), p. 63.