SOURCE: “Richard II,” in The Cease of Majesty: A Study of Shakespeare's History Plays, London: Edward Arnold Publishers Ltd, 1961, pp. 225-60.

[In the following essay, Reese examines the plot and characterization in Richard II to support the contention that although Bolingbroke's rebellion is wicked, the rebellion itself is a symptom of the kingdom's disease, a sickness that has generated from Richard's complicity in the death of Gloucester and his general inability to effectively rule his kingdom.]

Richard II always occupied a special place in the Elizabethan mind. Until he relinquished his crown of thorns to Charles I, he was the archetypal English martyr; no other mediaeval king aroused such compassion for his fate, not even Edward II, who like himself was deposed and cruelly murdered. That he was the last of the Plantagenets, the last direct descendant from the Conqueror, gave him a particular sanctity. The unbroken line that was severed in his fall has never been restored.

Nor did it seem that the harshness of his fate was merited by the sum of his misdeeds. Like Henry VI, he was the peace-loving son of a father whose glory had been to scourge the French, and the Black Prince's memory was a heavy burden to him. His enemies saw him in an image that was not his own. After the fair beginnings when he rode out to face Wat Tyler, his councillors expected of him things that he was unfitted to perform, so that there was always a conflict between his own inclinations and other men's notions of his royal duty. He was neither a bad man nor an outstandingly bad king. The most frequent charge against him is that he was content to be flattered and misled by light-minded favourites. The chroniclers are almost unanimous about this. Hall says that in himself he was ‘not of the most evil disposition, was not of so simple a mind, nor of such debility of wit, nor yet of so little heart and courage, but he might have demanded and learned good and profitable counsel, and after advice taken, kept, retained, and followed the same: But howsoever it was, unprofitable counsellors were his confusion and final perdition’. Holinshed thought that he was ‘of nature good enough, if the wickedness and naughty demeanour of such as were about him had not altered it’. He was vain, ‘being desirous enough of all honour, and more ambitious than was requisite’, and so he listened too easily to flattery. This was the view of Richard generally accepted in the sixteenth century. His story in A Mirror for Magistrates is introduced with the suggestion that he was ‘a King that ruled all by lust’ and

alway put false flatterers most in trust,
Ensuing such as could my vices claw:
By faithful counsel passing not a straw.

In Woodstock we meet the same complaint:

Shall England, that so long was governed
By grave experience of white-headed age,
Be subject now to rash unskilful boys?

II ii 169.

Shakespeare's Bolingbroke says to Bushy and Green,

You have misled a prince, a royal king,
A happy gentleman in blood and lineaments,
By you unhappied and disfigur’d clean:

Rich. II III i 8.

and later, in a long analysis of Richard's public failings, Bolingbroke remembers how

The skipping king, he ambled up and down
With shallow jesters and rash bavin wits,
Soon kindled and soon burnt; carded his state,
Mingled his royalty with capering fools,
Had his great name profaned with their scorns,
And gave his countenance, against his name,
To laugh at gibing boys and stand the push
Of every beardless vain comparative. …
So, when he had occasion to be seen,
He was but as the cuckoo is in June,
Heard, not regarded.

I Hen. IV III ii 60.

This attitude has to be regarded with caution, since it was the practice of rebels to clear themselves of treason by professing that they were only trying to rescue the king from counsellors who had led him into evil ways, but in Richard's case it seems to have been something near the truth. Holinshed, not a friendly reporter, says that ‘if there were any offence, it ought rather to be imputed to the frailty of wanton youth, than to the malice of his heart’. His faults came from a fundamental instability of character. He had exalted notions of his prerogative, and his vanity was further nourished by the personal beauty to which all pay tribute.¹ So long as things were going his way, he would be self-satisfied and self-indulgent; but when he was crossed, darker qualities revealed themselves and he was liable to the frightening explosions of passion that were a legacy of Plantagenet medical history.² However, his worst crimes were not disastrous politically, for the elimination of enemies like Arundel and Gloucester was a necessary concession to the iron laws of survival. If he had always been able to bring himself to that pitch of resolution and cunning, he might not have lost his throne. The fatal blunders were things petty, needless and exasperating, the actions of one who was not so much a tyrant as a political child. Viewed from a distance, they do not seem to have added up to very much, and Richard, who was only occasionally vicious, was deposed because his incalculable vacillations and moodiness were, in a king, more serious faults than a bloody mind.

But time and martyrdom washed away the traces, and only the charm and the pathos stood in people's memory. In two generations of misrule the whole nation had atoned for the wrong done to the Lord's anointed, and in the Tudor mind Richard was a sacrificial victim. The fault seemed so trivial, the penalty so unaccountably large, that these events were explicable only through the action of Fortune's sightless wheel, in whose motion consisted the mediaeval idea of tragedy. Much of Richard's fascination for succeeding generations lay in the rapidity, suddenness and magnitude of his fall. So much more painfully than he deserved—for his were not the abominations of Edward II—he plunged from greatness, while his rival just as swiftly climbed on high.

Thus it was not altogether an accident that the reign had acquired a particular significance in English history. In some respects the Middle Ages may be said to have ended with Richard, and although they would not have used those terms about it, the men of the sixteenth century were able to perceive that something had passed which they would never know again. A new order came in with the Lancastrians, a dynasty launched in blood. For some historians, as Hall, Daniel and Shakespeare himself, Richard was the natural starting-point of their exposition.

In this man's reign began this fatal strife
(The bloody argument whereof we treat)
That dearly cost so many a prince his life,
And spoil’d the weak, and ev’n consumed the great.

Daniel, Civil Wars, i 23.

Even in the chroniclers who covered a much longer stretch of history—Holinshed, for instance, and Polydore Vergil and Warner—the usurpation and its consequences were treated with a new intensity and a marked insistence on pointing the moral. Richard was the prescriptive sovereign driven from his inheritance; the proud man suddenly ‘dejected’ by Fortune's arbitrary motions; and the king whose reign initiated a sequence of events, initially tragic, which turned eventually to joy. To quote Daniel again:

Yet now what reason have we to complain,
Since hereby came the quiet calm and joy,
The bliss of thee, Eliza? Happy gain
For all our losses, when no other way
The heav’ns could find, but to unite again
The fatal sever’d families: that they
Might bring forth thee; that in thy peace might grow
That glory which few times could ever show.

i 3.

All these attitudes are implicit in Shakespeare's play; and no writer who chose to handle this reign can have been unaware of the contemporary immediacy of his theme. ‘I am Richard II. Know ye not that?’³ In 1595, when the play was written, deposition was practical politics. Richard was a king who had been turned off his throne. That was an unassailable fact, and no one could write about it without giving some indication whether in his opinion it had been rightly done. No subject that Shakespeare ever touched was on a workaday level more urgent: the use to which his play was later put is proof of that. The judgment that he passed on Richard and his supplanters must in some sort be a judgment on the Queen and her office, and also on all those men who for a variety of reasons would have been willing to see her removed. He was giving a verdict on a contemporary situation upon which, for all that anyone knew in 1595, the future peace of the country might depend.

Shakespeare's answer (if we may use so crude a word about an argument conducted in strictly dramatic terms and with matchless artistry) is that Richard's fate was settled before the play began. The crucial question forced upon the audience in the opening scene is this: who was responsible for Gloucester's death? Various hints and indications, here and in later scenes, put Richard's complicity beyond all doubt. He has been guilty of an unroyal crime and his just punishment is assured.⁴ If that punishment should be deposition and death, it will not be too severe; but, since majesty dies not alone, his guilt is a stain on all his people. Thus the question about the rights and wrongs of rebellion is already answered. Bolingbroke may be a better man than Richard—in some respects he obviously is—but his cause is tainted from the start. He is touched by the general sickness, of which his rebellion is just a sympton. He cannot escape being corrupted by the low and selfish motives of men like Northumberland, and the immediate judgment upon his actions is that they have not prospered: by the end of the play his reign is set towards disaster.

This reading of the play is supported by Shakespeare's repeated suggestion that Bolingbroke was not the author of his actions.⁵ It has often been noted that the play lacks a central climax, that the actual transference of power from Richard to his enemy is bloodless and perfunctory. In effect Richard is defeated while he is absent from the stage; and on his return he accepts his fate with the petulant resignation of a child of Fortune whose guardian angels have mysteriously deserted him. His guilt has robbed him of the power of action. Bolingbroke, meanwhile, seems to be the passive instrument of fate. When at a critical moment in the play York reminds him that ‘the heavens are o’er our heads’, he meekly answers,

I know it, uncle; and oppose not myself
Against their will.

III iii 18.

There is irony in this, for neither of them yet knows that the will of heaven will turn out to be the opposite of what at that moment they have in mind. York's later comment on the whole affair is that ‘heaven hath had a hand in these events’, and Bolingbroke himself would always protest that he did not deliberately seek the throne.

Though then, God knows, I had no such intent,
But that necessity so bowed the state
That I and greatness were compelled to kiss.

2 Hen. IV. III i 72.

To a large extent this is also admitted by the hostile Percies, who at the time were his accomplices. Northumberland

heard him swear and vow to God
He came but to be Duke of Lancaster;

I Hen. IV. IV iii 60.

and Worcester says that, after Henry had sworn at Doncaster ‘that you did nothing purpose ’gainst the state’,

in short space
It rain’d down-fortune showering on your head,
And such a flood of greatness fell on you.(6)

I Hen. IV. V i 46.

Shakespeare is implying that the rebellion succeeded because Bolingbroke was the chosen instrument of Richard's predestined fall. But he does not mean that the rebellion was therefore justified. It was the diseased product of a diseased condition. Personal ambition was a prominent part of it, and it contained its own nemesis in the subsequent rivalry of the accomplices. The argument of the play is that rebellion is always wicked; and when the ruler is a guilty man, rebellion is one of the consequent manifestations of his guilt.

Fortunately that is not all that the play is about. Determinist patterns of this kind do not make good drama unless the characters are men of feeling and seem to possess some freedom of choice and action. Character and destiny co-operate in Bolingbroke's ruthless drive towards the crown: Shakespeare does not deny either the self-interest or the superior capacity which hastened its accomplishment. York is human enough to display all the hesitations of a commonplace but conscientious man on the edge of intolerable uncertainty. His dilemma is real and is one of the cruxes of the play; its significance is not diminished because we know what the result is going to be. So too with Richard. The end may be known and inescapable, but his every action shows that he is a man unfit for power. Once this is established, the play's mood insensibly changes. We must not say that it ceases to be political, as Richard's adherence to his inalienable royalty is a political fact of the highest importance. But there is a shift of emphasis from an England made sick by disloyalty and misrule to the personal predicament of the King. The play is also a drama of character.

In the opening scene Richard establishes his exalted conception of the crown he wears. He receives the two disputants with remote detachment and remains strangely cool and silent throughout their angry exchanges. His display of disinterested royalty is all very proper and correct. Bolingbroke's blood relationship with the King will not earn him any favours, for ‘impartial are our eyes and ears’ and nothing shall ‘partialize the unstooping firmness of my upright soul’. But dissembling is over when Bolingbroke raises the question of Gloucester's death and the soul which ‘from the tongueless caverns of the earth’ cries out for justice. This so nearly touches Richard that he can no longer impose a dispassionate solution of the quarrel. He pleads for a bloodless settlement but weakens the effect by a half-hearted, self-conscious little joke, ‘Our doctors say this is no time to bleed.’ Although he reminds them that he is a lion to tame leopards, and that kings are not born to sue but to command, ultimately he has to allow the two enemies to fight it out. Already the high conception of the royal prerogative is at odds with the event.

We know the worst about Richard by the time that Gaunt is dead. The brief I ii tells the audience beyond doubt that he was the cause of Gloucester's murder—‘correction lieth in those hands which made the fault’. Gaunt's orthodoxy during this episode is significant. He offers the importunate Duchess no hope of instant vengeance, bidding her place her trust in God, ever the widow's champion and defence. ‘God's is the quarrel.’ If wrong has been done (and even this qualification is important: Gaunt knew things about Gloucester that the widow did not), God will avenge it in His due season. Gaunt is the spokesman of the traditional order, and his assumptions are the same as Richard’s. Kings may sometimes err, and it is the duty of their counsellors to give rebuke: a duty which he will shortly exercise with no small eloquence. But rebuke will always stop short of sedition. Gaunt will never ‘lift an angry arm against [God’s] minister’.

In the lists at Coventry the hollow deference of the combatants builds up Richard's image of himself, but their presence there in arms says something different. Once he had failed to impose a peaceful settlement of their quarrel, there was no easy solution to be had. In a later play Mowbray's son was to declare that

When the king did throw his warder down,
His own life hung upon the staff he threw.

2 Hen. IV IV i 125.

Perhaps this was being wise after the event. The decision that Richard made, after a show of consultation with his council, at least had the merit of getting both men out of the country. But the manner and the method were at fault. Richard's vanity and love of drama needed the colour and bustle of the lists, the pomp of the heralds, the valedictions and mounting tension, broken at the climax by the theatrical gesture of intervention. Thus does the sun shrivel lesser luminaries. There is malice in the lifelong banishment of Mowbray and a typical offhand insensitivity in the King's remark to the stricken Gaunt, ‘Why, uncle, thou hast many years to live.’ He is credulous to suppose that a promise exacted in his presence will necessarily prevent the two men from meeting and conspiring in the years to come. It is ingratitude and folly to inflict the heavier sentence on Mowbray, who has been waging Richard's quarrel as well as his own. Finally, it is fatal weakness, a mere sentimental gesture, to reduce the sentence on the dangerous and popular Bolingbroke, who at once judges the concession at its true worth:

Four lagging winters and four wanton springs
End in a word: such is the breath of kings.(7)

I iii 214.

In the next scene two veteran statesmen, York and the dying Gaunt, ruminate sadly upon the disgrace of the kingdom under Richard's feckless rule. York says that the King will hear no good advice, only flattery and the venom sound of lascivious metres, and his time and treasure are wasted in empty imitation of foreign fashions. Perhaps there is little more in these strictures than old age's dislike of pleasures it is no longer able to enjoy, but Gaunt's indictment is conceived on a larger scale. His matchless invocation of ‘this other Eden’ creates an idealised picture which he sets in contrast with the actuality of an England dying from misrule.⁸ It is a plea for the vanished majesty which even now, if it is not too late, may cure the country's fatal ills. But when Richard enters, his obdurate callousness provokes Gaunt to words that ‘hereafter thy tormentors be’. Twice (II i 105, 127) he directly accuses Richard of contriving Gloucester's death, and in their wry jesting about health and sickness warns him that he is no less sick than himself.

Now, he that made me knows I see thee ill;
Ill in myself to see, and in thee seeing ill.
Thy death-bed is no lesser than thy land
Wherein thou liest in reputation sick:
And thou, too careless patient as thou art,
Committ’st thy anointed body to the cure
Of those physicians that first wounded thee.

II i 93.

Richard may know that what he says is true, but his illness is indeed past cure. He receives the news of Gaunt's death with a perfunctory couplet and a curt ‘So much for that’. Then he announces the decision that must have been already in his mind, to seize the dead man's property to finance his Irish wars. This is too much even for York's deep-rooted loyalty, and he reminds Richard that to deprive Bolingbroke of his rightful inheritance is to bring into question the principle of ‘fair sequence and succession’ to which his own crown is due:

You pluck a thousand dangers on your head,
You lose a thousand well-disposed hearts,
And prick my tender patience to those thoughts
Which honour and allegiance cannot think.

II i 206.

But Richard has scarcely been listening.

Then all too late comes counsel to be heard,
Where will doth mutiny with wit's regard.

II i 27.

In this scene Richard is given one last chance. If he had risen to the idea of duty that Gaunt, and even York in his fumbling way, had indicated to him, at least it could not have been said of him that his fall was the just desert of an incurably frivolous mind. But in fact he has paid so little attention to York's warnings that he casually leaves him as regent during the campaign in Ireland: ‘for he is just, and lov’d us well’.

It is apt that at the close of the scene the mutinous nobles catalogue his misdeeds, and Northumberland sees life peeping ‘even through the hollow eyes of death’: meaning that Bolingbroke is already on his way. Shakespeare does not mitigate the case against Richard's ‘insolent misgovernment and youthful outrage’, as Holinshed called it. To prefer flattery to sage advice, to be enthusiastic for sensuous verse and all the novelties of fashion, may simply be the natural weaknesses of youth. But Richard will never become any wiser. He will not outgrow the political obtuseness that commands a duel and then theatrically forbids it; makes an enemy of Bolingbroke but leaves him alive to nurse his resentment; goes off to Ireland⁹ when by his own folly he has just provoked a crisis at home; and commandeers the Lancastrian estates so that every landowner in England is made apprehensive about his property. Next time we see him, he has come to meet ‘the sick hour that his surfeit made’.

Shakespeare will presently use the little emblematic scene in the garden at Langley to remind us that Richard's duty was to govern and he had failed in it. The well-cared garden is a vision complementary to Gaunt’s. But politics gradually become less important, giving way to the personal tragedy of Richard. Although his tragedy would be less dreadful if he were not a king, it is no longer all-important that he is a king. The issue is always greater than himself, for his fate is England's as well as his, but we forget this in the contemplation of an individual solitarily facing his destiny. From the moment of his appearance at Berkeley the end is clear.

That Richard should seem to be an accomplice in his own fall was congruous with the accepted tragic pattern, which required that sort of inevitability. Like James II, the historical Richard lost his throne because in the crisis he gave no lead to those who would have fought for him. Potentially he had a strong body of supporters, and with the least show of determination he could have confined Bolingbroke's ambitions to the recovery of his confiscated lands. His fleet was at Waterford, and Aumerle tried to persuade him to return to Ireland and gather an army. But he appeared to be incapable of action. He deserted his forces in Pembrokeshire and listlessly submitted to deposition and death. In the last months of his reign he was just a mumbling neurotic.

For a playwright these events were not in themselves dramatic, and Shakespeare has made his own reading of them. Richard's will is numbed, and he can only put his faith in his divine right and talk emptily about betrayal. He is indomitable when he thinks of what he ought to be, helpless when he realises what he has become. His strength is exhausted in recrimination and idle menace, and the very facility of his emotion robs him of the power of action. This, near enough, is the Richard of the sources, the man who destroyed himself by extremes of apathy and passion. But ‘sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things’. In the play he rises almost to tragic stature in the possession of his kingly memories. Although he is always self-regarding in his griefs, he has sufficient insight to realise what he has lost, and his suffering is transmuted into an outraged patriotism and an affront to the idea of royalty. Anointed and consecrate, he feels as no one else can the dreadfulness of what is being done to him, of what, in the final moment of his renunciation, he is doing to himself. His poetic imagination transforms his fall into a sacrificial rite.

In this way the idea of royalty is exalted to a peak where the unworthiness of a particular king cannot damage it.¹⁰ The unkingliness revealed in the second half of the play is much more serious and fundamental than the frivolities and recklessness of Richard's prime. At the first touch of failure he capitulates utterly. As soon as misfortune releases his capacity for self-display, he is happy to wanton with his grief before his cause is really lost. ‘O that I were as great as is my grief.’ It is the image of sorrow rather than sorrow itself that takes hold of him, and he tortures his imagination to throw up language that shall be worthy of his sufferings. He rebukes Aumerle for turning him even for a moment from ‘that sweet way I was in to despair’. He is the unloved stranger ‘in this all-hating world’, and defeat so sharpens his artistic susceptibilities that he loses himself in wondering contemplation of his ever-worsening predicament. Each new situation stimulates him to a richer poetic elaboration as his fertile fancy seizes on the possibilities inherent in the jostling conceptions of kingship and its ruin, trust and its betrayal, parting and the impregnable solitude of the man whose mind is its own kingdom. He has no thought for Green and Bushy in their ignominious death. Their fate, earned in his love and service, simply moves him to a marvellous descant upon the wretchedness of kings. The Queen's sorrow at their parting stirs him to compassion—for himself. When she tearfully reproaches his broken manhood, he can only bid her, ‘tell thou the lamentable tale of me’.

Endlessly setting ‘the word itself against the word’, Richard sits like a gilded spider, spinning his variations on the theme of sorrow. He has Prince Arthur's trick of attributing feeling to inanimate objects, as though to ask all creation to shed tears for him. He would rather talk to things than to men. Men have been stonily unresponsive, but his fancy tells him that the earth has hearkened to his ‘senseless conjuration’. Tongue, as has often been noted, is one of the key words of the play.¹¹ In crisis the Lancastrians are strangely silent. ‘When words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain’, Gaunt gnomically declares, and at Coventry he asks his son, ‘To what purpose dost thou hoard thy words?’ Henry replies:

I have too few to take my leave of you,
When the tongue's office should be prodigal
To breathe the abundant dolour of the heart.

I iii 255.

Richard's ‘Mark, silent king’, addressed to Bolingbroke in Westminster Hall, acknowledges this difference between them. For it is in words that Richard tries to immure himself against reality. His transforming imagination cannot make any difference to his real predicament but he does receive from it some personal consolation. In fact it gives him the only sort of strength of which he is capable, since it is in defeat that he at last becomes a king. His fancy has created for himself a picture of a man who has once been royal. The face of the real man, the sentimental weakling who fooled away a throne, is seen for the last time in the mirror that shivers to pieces in Westminster Hall. In its place stands the self-created portrait of one who can find even in his own ruin a special significance that sets him apart from other men. The artist has discovered how to heal his wounds.

It is in its way a beautiful performance, and we have to admire the limpid, spineless verse that can turn any idea to melody; the grave, reflective imagery, drawn not from any understanding of the human heart but from folk-lore and fable, an idealised love of an England that never was, and a mystical cult of kings. We must acknowledge, too, the artistic tact which prevents this endless celebration of grief from becoming too harrowing to our sensibilities.¹²

Let him not come there,
To seek out sorrow that dwells everywhere.

I ii 72.

But this is no way to keep a throne. The king who left for Ireland was at least erect and scornful in his follies, and he is barely recognisable, when next we see him, as the man who fondles the earth ‘as a long-parted mother with her child’. It is in vain that Carlisle tells him that even God's deputies are beyond aid if they will not help themselves.¹³ In his abasement, just as earlier in his pride, he is still impervious to counsel.

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

III ii 54.

The words are splendid but they bring short comfort to the speaker. As bad news comes fast, his irresolution, feeding gratefully on the luxuries of despair, prepares us for the capitulation in the following scene.

When this scene opens, the crown is still not irrevocably lost. Bolingbroke is still cautious. He will accept the arbitrament of heaven, and he tempers his bluster with references to his ‘stooping duty’ and his ‘allegiance and true faith of heart’. If the event should run that way, he would still be the yielding water to Richard's fire. Fittingly, York is dazzled by Richard's show of majesty.

Yet looks he like a king: behold, his eye,
As bright as is the eagle’s, lightens forth
Controlling majesty.

III iii 68.

For a moment it seems as though Richard has seized his cue, for his long address to Northumberland (72-100) is the most controlled and effective of his utterances to his enemies. He rebukes Northumberland for failing in the duty of his knees; reminds him of the divine protection which guards anointed kings; and lays on the rebels responsibility for all the blood that will be shed if they persist in their treason. It is an argument to give pause to all waverers, and even Northumberland is sufficiently impressed by it to protest that, once granted his ‘lineal royalties’, Bolingbroke will ask nothing further than ‘enfranchisement immediate on his knees’. These fair demands allowed, Bolingbroke would have had no moral right to continue his defiance; York would have seen the path of duty clear before him, which was all he ever wished to see; and the more prudent and honest of Bolingbroke's followers would have melted from his side.

Fatally, Richard chooses this moment to fall again to dramatising his position. Is it not humiliating, he asks, that a king should have to speak fairly to a rebel in arms? Aumerle tries to steady him:

Let's fight with gentle words,
Till time lend friends, and friends their helpful swords.

III iii 131.

He is advising a show of compliance until an appeal to royalist sentiment shall enable Richard to restore his position. But he is too late. The doomed King has already yielded, captivated by the fancy of contrasting his present helplessness with the majesty that once sentenced Bolingbroke to banishment.

O! that I were as great
As is my grief, or lesser than my name,
Or that I could forget what I have been,
Or not remember what I must be now.

III iii 136.

When Northumberland returns with a message from Bolingbroke, we are at one of the crises of the play. His estates restored, the message may promise submission and good behaviour. The odd thing is that we never know. Without ever stopping to enquire, Richard decides that it is a demand for his surrender, and he is heard resigning himself to the exchange of his crown for all manner of obscure destinies, vowing to flatten the corn and fret a grave in the dust with his wanton tears.

Gradually Richard sees his sacred authority broken by the pressure of events. In brave words he calls upon ‘my master, God omnipotent’¹⁴ to gather armies of pestilence against his enemies, but the bitter lesson he has to learn is that his assumption of irresistible power no longer squares with the facts. There are earthly forces which he ‘must’ obey. In these moments of insight he turns in self-disgust from the wordy conceits that would make ‘this ill do well’, sees himself as a mockery king of snow, acknowledges his need of bread and all material sustenance. Then the agony of his present suffering is so intense that he cries out to be released from the prison of his memories and truly ‘forget what I have been’. He begs his followers to throw away the ‘respect, tradition, form, and ceremonious duty’ that now mock him with their insincerity. But these moods do not last for long. It is not in his nature that they should. His faith in the divine sanctions of his office is strong enough to brace and exhilarate him even when he knows beyond doubt that God and the angels will not come to save him.¹⁵

But the nature of this faith undergoes a change which is the key to Richard's behaviour in the last two Acts of the play. When it was still possible to put up some resistance to Bolingbroke, his attitude merely revealed the futility of an exaggerated conception of Divine Right. Shakespeare is merciless to this conception. No good will come of empty invocations, for in a crisis men respect facts and only facts. The question then arises, has Divine Right any further validity when its fondest assumptions have plainly collapsed in the test of action? Bolingbroke answers that it has none. In the deposition scene he merely considers himself to be treating with a defeated enemy, and he stands by in silent contempt while Richard enacts his martyrdom. His own kingship will be founded on other sanctions. But Richard gives a different answer. With the insight granted to him as a man and as the anointed holder of a sacred office, he knows that his defeat has not altered anything. God still holds kingship in His special care and will demand atonement for the wrong done to His deputy elect. Richard is enabled to understand that his personal tragedy is simply his personal tragedy. The principle of royalty lives on.

His new faith, then, is no longer a sentimental hope of being somehow rescued from disaster. It is all the stronger because those facile expectations have been defeated and his own immediate and personal fate has almost become irrelevant. Deposition will be followed by death, and to all that he is now reconciled. But he is still assured of his inalienable kingliness and of the vengeance it will one day exact.

This assurance enables him to steal the scene in which he is brought before Bolingbroke to be formally deposed. Bolingbroke had planned this scene as a solemn ritual of confession and abdication, and in Northumberland he had a collaborator happy to execute the details with his own special brand of malice and efficiency. Even York had been persuaded that the act was necessary, and the intention was that Richard should make a public surrender, ‘so we shall proceed without suspicion’. It was no part of the plan that he should succeed in making all the spectators accomplices in a crime.

Carlisle is the first to spoil the effect with his passionate protest against the condemnation of the figure of God's majesty by subject and inferior breath. When Richard is brought in

To do that office of thine own good will
Which tired majesty did make thee offer,

IV i 177.

he is by turns theatrical and pathetic. It is characteristic of his broken mind that he should not be absolutely certain of his touch, and the conceited expression of his grief is an indulgence that he cannot easily outgrow.¹⁶ But it is no longer the mere image of sorrow that feeds his glowing fancy. Convinced now that no miraculous intervention will save him, he can stand and face his destiny. It is not true self-knowledge that he has attained, for that will always be beyond him, but it is some sort of reconciliation. He has accepted his fate. His concern now—the by-play with the mirror is a typically histrionic expression of it¹⁷—is to learn what sort of man he is who is both a king and not a king. It is a personal indulgence in a theme which he will find leisure to develop in the loneliness of prison. To his enemies he insists unwaveringly on his royalty. The volatile temperament that ought, once defeat was certain, to have collapsed into futile impotence has somehow achieved a mysterious virtue in the discovery that, in all the things that matter, he is still a king. Throughout the scene he clings passionately to that essence of his being. Northumberland tries in vain to make an end of these unrehearsed effects and confine Richard to the part allotted to him. Richard has no difficulty with Northumberland.¹⁸ The ‘haught insulting man’, mere ladder for Bolingbroke's ascent, is disposed of in language of new-found directness. Hesitation has vanished with the hope that God would send a thunderbolt from the skies. Richard is now so certain of his true nature that he can condemn his own participation in the crime that is being committed:

For I have given here my soul's consent
To undeck the pompous body of a king.

IV i 249.

The ‘sort of traitors’ includes himself.

The irony that follows the breaking of the mirror is a new element in his character. He can even turn the incident against himself, so much superior to Bolingbroke has he now become. ‘This sport’ he teasingly calls his examination of the ‘flattering glass’. He is not just playing with words when he cries that his real grief ‘lies all within’, for it is of a kind that his silent enemies cannot comprehend. The ‘external manners of laments’ is all that they can be expected to understand. Blandly—as though he were in need of instruction!—he thanks Bolingbroke

For thy great bounty, that not only giv’st
Me cause to wail, but teachest me the way
How to lament the cause.

IV i 300.

He penetrates the insincerity of Bolingbroke's ‘fair cousin’ with the wry conceit that, since a king now stoops to flatter him, he need not beg a request. The request, when it comes, is merely for ‘leave to go’: no matter where, so long as it is from their sights. With a final savage pun on convey he departs—to death—absolute master of the situation. Fifteen lines later the scene is over, but not before the audience have been admitted to an ecclesiastical conspiracy which shows that the true king's cause does not sleep.¹⁹

In the little episode with the Queen, Richard is still eloquent with self-pity, and the idea of parting furnishes new embroidery for his grief. But he still understands his real predicament.

I am sworn brother, sweet,
To grim Necessity, and he and I
Will keep a league till death.

V i 20.

He is no longer beating his beautiful, helpless wings in a cage. He knows what his fate is to be and has decided how he will meet it. But the Queen cannot realise what has happened to him. When he bids her regard his former state as ‘a happy dream’, she cries in amazement that Bolingbroke has deposed his heart and intellect. She reverts instinctively to Nature's primacies and reminds him that he is a lion, the king of beasts, and how

The lion dying thrusteth forth his paw
And wounds the earth, if nothing else, with rage
To be o’erpower’d.

V i 29.

He answers her reproaches in a single phrase, neatly turned:

A king of beasts indeed; if aught but beasts,
I had been still a happy king of men.

V i 35.

‘I had been still’: he no longer has any illusions about the present and he is not now to be seduced by idle hopes. But—and it is one of the reasons why he does fall—he cannot avert his mind from the presence in his fate of an element of the casual and undeserved. It leads him to savour his fall as an epitome of human tragedy. Therein he is true to his conception of himself. If to ordinary people he seems to overstate the case, that is just the difference between himself and them. They are ordinary people, he is not.

From York's account, he behaves with the same detached submissiveness when he rides into the City at the tail of the triumphant Henry.

But dust was thrown upon his sacred head,
Which with such gentle sorrow he shook off,
His face still combating with tears and smiles,
The badges of his grief and patience.…

V ii 30.

‘The setting sun, and music at the close.’ When we meet him for the last time, in the prison at Pontefract, Richard is reflecting on Edward's thought,

But what are kings, when regiment is gone,
But perfect shadows in a sunshine day?

Marlowe, Edward II V i 26.

Know that I am a king: O, at that name
I feel a hell of grief! where is my crown?
Gone, gone! and do I still remain alive?

ibid. V v 91.

Richard's fancy is as fertile as ever, but the rhythms of his speech are more direct and colloquial, and—at least until he detects a resemblance between his tear-stained face and a clock—less burdened with lyrical conceits. Christian paradoxes are too subtle to give him comfort. ‘Thoughts tending to ambition’, which delude him with such ‘unlikely wonders’ as forcing his way out of prison, die in their own pride as they remind him of his impotence. He grasps finally at the consolation afforded to beggars in the stocks, that they are not the first of Fortune's slaves, others having endured the like. It is poor consolation for anyone with Richard's sense of dedicated separateness. Even without an audience his imagination has been creating roles for himself to play, and these succeeding fancies (the doubting Christian, the prison-breaker, the philosophic beggar) have been the thoughts with which he has idly peopled the world. With such brave fancies the human mind often seeks to relieve the instant pressure of pain and sorrow. But inevitably the hurt forces itself back into the consciousness, and in the end Richard sees himself playing the king again,

and by and by
Think that I am unking’d by Bolingbroke,
And straight am nothing: but whate’er I be,
Nor I nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleas’d, till he be eas’d
With being nothing.

V v 36.

‘Nothing’ to Richard is not being king, but it is also death. Only that ‘nothing’ can ease the nothingness that his life has become.²⁰ Impregnable now in his self-possession, he can face the truth about himself when the world breaks in upon his musings.

How sour sweet music is
When time is broke and no proportion kept!
So is it in the music of men's lives.
And here have I the daintiness of ear
To check time broke in a disorder’d string:
But for the concord of my state and time
Had not an ear to hear my true time broke.

V v 42.

Richard sees himself as the artist whose intuitions, rare and precious as they are, have not fitted him for the business of his life. ‘I have wasted time, and now doth time waste me.’ The harmony that is in himself has failed to achieve harmony in the state,²¹ and so long as he is a creature of Time, his mind will know no peace. He welcomes death because it will release him from the time which he has broken.

But this perception has brought him only to the threshold of true self-knowledge. If we think of the insight granted to Lear and Timon, we shall realise how little Richard has really achieved. He has learned that the individual has somehow to accommodate himself with his own particular world, just as Lear and Timon learned that responsibility was not to be exchanged for sentimental indulgences. But with this partial knowledge he is satisfied to die. It has not given him the strength to rebuild his life. He could not, as Lear might have done, go back into the world and conquer it. Can we doubt that, given another chance, he would have failed again?

Henry VI, who also was a king, offers a fairer comparison than the heroes of tragedy. Hazlitt rightly says that the characters and situations of Richard and Henry were ‘so nearly alike, that they would have been completely confounded by a commonplace poet’. Although Henry was too passive and acquiescent to be really tragic, his quiet courage moves a deeper pathos than Richard's more spectacular renunciations. Richard views his royal office primarily as the source of privilege and personal gratification, and he becomes peevish when the higher powers fail to protect his enjoyment of it. He never for a moment recognises that Divine Right imposes duties. But to Henry the office meant, first of all, responsibility. If he was called to any privilege, it was to the privilege of ruling with strength and justice. When men failed in their allegiance, their impiety saddened him but he did not regard it as a personal betrayal, for no man had so little vanity or so few illusions.²² Knowing well the sort of man he was, he was ready to give up the crown whose rights and responsibilities he was incapable of exercising. We may feel that it was a spiritless performance, and Shakespeare does not hide the element of selfishness in Henry's readiness to abandon the duties of office in order that he may pass the time in what Hazlitt severely describes as ‘monkish indolence and contemplation’. He was indifferent to its external pomps,

a prince's delicates,
His viands sparkling in a golden cup,
His body couched in a curious bed,

3 Hen. VI II v 51.

and his cry to be relieved from his anxieties comes from the heart. It is not so with Richard's extravagant resignation of

my jewels for a set of beads;
My gorgeous palace for a hermitage;
My gay apparel for an alms-man's gown;
My figur’d goblets for a dish of wood;
My sceptre for a palmer's walking staff;
My subjects for a pair of carved saints,
And my large kingdom for a little grave.

III iii 147.

This is perilously near fustian, and we must not be blind to the absurdity of the picture that Richard proposes: no man would have had less relish for the cloistered life. The distinction that Shakespeare makes between Richard and Henry is integral to his idea of kingship, and he lets us know that Richard was a man who never achieved complete self-understanding. Character and upbringing only fitted him to think of himself as a king. It was his great strength, and ultimately his means to some kind of victory over his enemies. Looking back at the past, he created an image of himself as more royal than he had ever been; exaggerating his gifts as an artist in the hope of gilding his failure as a king. He knew that he had failed, without ever understanding why. He never discovered that his office implied a duty.

And so the final Richard is not a fully regenerated figure. Some find consolation in his fighting end, but the last minutes of his life show some deterioration from his best manner. The recollection of his political failure drives him back to vain regrets. ‘While I stand fooling here’, he says at the end of an elaborate conceit, but this is not a new-won gift for self-criticism. He has made this sort of remark before, and it has always seemed a mock-humble invitation to applaud the lyric flight still hovering on his lips. He does not really think that this kind of thing is ‘fooling’. It has been the breath of life to him, and it has done more than anything else to cushion his fall. In renewed self-pity he calls the love that inspired the prison music ‘a strange brooch in this all-hating world’, and the entry of the Groom starts him again on the worst sort of railing, its conclusion being that the horse Barbary should be added to the growing list of Judases. He dies in violence, promising ‘never-quenching fire’ to his assassins. In the end he has been false to his vision of ‘nothing’, and his death is proud and ignorant and hopeless. On a like occasion Henry VI sought forgiveness for his sins and a pardon for his murderer.

In Richard II Shakespeare is not making a general condemnation of the artist as king. Given other qualities, the man of sensibility and imagination is likely

had he been put on,
To have prov’d most royally.

Ham. V ii 411.

But Richard lacked stamina and a certain kind of discipline and dedication, and his imagination was incapable of directing itself outwards. The sophisticated aesthete may make a good enough king provided only that he does not try to substitute sensibility for action. Richard's fault was a self-engrossing imagination that peopled the world just as he wished to find it.²³ It did not direct itself upon things as they really are, and the creations of his fancy were always more real and vivid than the craggy truths of experience. It was the nature of his particular Calvary to have to learn, so far as he ever could, that the world had not conformed to his imaginings. But Shakespeare's way of telling the story leaves him with some sort of victory over his enemies, and he wins it through a final triumphant feat of the imagination that transforms experience into the betrayal of a Christ. It may be, too, that we are meant to understand that even an adolescent, egocentric imagination may sometimes be justified in its intuitions. Richard's facile conception of Divine Right is irritating and ineffective when he appeals to it to sanctify his whims and excuse himself from taking action. But disillusionment does not destroy his faith in his peculiar and ultimately invincible sacredness as the figure of God's majesty. To Bolingbroke's pragmatism he opposes this mysterious sense of his own anointed separateness. The image that he creates of himself as a man essentially royal is fatuous if tested simply by his performance when the crown was his; but it proves itself to be finally valid both in the comfort it brings to Richard himself in his humiliation and in the strange uneasiness it causes to his enemies. Richard's political epitaph is the edged ambiguity contained in Exton's ‘thy buried fear’.

Through the other main characters in the play Shakespeare revealed the intolerable dilemmas in which men may be put by the existence of a man like Richard. First there is York, a statesman of the old school, an essentially honest and middle-of-the-road sort of man whose defection to Bolingbroke may seem to approve the Lancastrian succession and so explain the play's contemporary reputation as a handbook for usurpers. Shakespeare certainly cast York for a special role of his own contriving, for he took liberties with the historical character.²⁴ Of all the seven sons of Edward III, Edmund of Langley was by nature and inclination the least fitted to bear responsibility at a critical time. ‘A soft prince’ is how Stow describes him. A Castilian bride was witness to some rather confused ambitions in Portugal in his younger days, but, as was only sensible in a prince with four elder brothers, he did not aspire to any great importance at home. As an enthusiastic huntsman he preferred sport to politics, and it was largely the accident of survival that led to his being appointed keeper of the kingdom when Richard left for Ireland. At the crisis he surrendered to the superior power of Bolingbroke as the quickest way of putting an end to an unhappy situation. So, up to a point, Shakespeare suggests, but for his own purposes he imagines York's extreme conscientiousness and the agony of his moral and political indecision.

York in the play shares Gaunt's uneasiness about Richard's dangerous irresponsibility, and the confiscation of the Lancastrian estates moves him to thoughts that he dare not entertain. But his criticism of Richard does not impugn his personal loyalty. It was his duty to give frank counsel, and Richard counted none the less on his love and allegiance in leaving him in charge of the kingdom. It was impossible, however, to rely on his capacity. He meets trouble with the fussy impotence of a Capulet trying to organise the household for a feast—in fact we can almost detect the worried accents of a Quince. His futility and indecision have made Bolingbroke's task half-accomplished even before Richard returns from Ireland. Disasters overwhelm him until he wishes he were dead, and his ‘Go, fellow, get thee home; provide some carts’ is a classic in the annals of military helplessness. Undoubtedly his conscience troubles him.

If I know
How or which way to order these affairs
Thus thrust disorderly into my hands,
Never believe me. Both are my kinsmen:
The one is my sovereign, whom both my oath
And duty bids defend; the other again
Is my kinsman, whom the king hath wrong’d,
Whom my conscience and my kindred bids to right.

II ii 108.

He speaks in disjointed mutterings that are Shakespeare's clue to his predicament, and it is plain that his scruples have so far undermined a nature congenitally irresolute that he will be incapable of action.

Well, somewhat we must do. Come, cousin,
I’ll dispose of you. Gentlemen, go muster up your men,
And meet me presently at Berkeley Castle.
I should to Plashy too:
But time will not permit. All is uneven,
And every thing is left at six and seven.

II ii 116.

His encounter with Bolingbroke in arms momentarily revives his sense of outrage, and his language significantly gains in strength as he speaks of the deep sinfulness of rebellion. But the brave mood does not last. His resistance is already weakened by his feeling that Bolingbroke has a case, and he surrenders to something he now can do nothing about, the rebels’ superior strength.

Well, well, I see the issue of these arms:
I cannot mend it, I must needs confess,
Because my power is weak and all ill-left;
But if I could, by him that gave me life,
I would attack you all and make you stoop
Unto the sovereign mercy of the king;
But since I cannot, be it known to you
I do remain as neuter.

II iii 152.

Since he has been left to protect the country from the King's enemies, this is really no neutrality at all, and he then proceeds to involve himself further by offering a night's hospitality at his castle. When Bolingbroke announces that he intends next day to move against Bushy and Bagot at Bristol, York first says that he will go with him; but the next minute, because ‘I am loath to break our country's laws’, decides that he will not. He closes the scene with characteristic disingenuousness and resignation:

Nor friends nor foes, to me welcome you are:
Things past redress are now with me past care.

II iii 170.

Before Flint Castle his spirits again revive and he seems to be hopeful that after all the true pieties will prevail. The very appearance of the King gives another fillip to his muddled optimism, and he persuades himself that the sight will dazzle men whose loyalties are less deeply rooted than his own.

Yet looks he like a king: behold his eye
As bright as is the eagle’s, lightens forth
Controlling majesty: alack, alack, for woe,
That any harm should stain so fair a show!

III iii 68.

But if in the past he has failed the King, now the King fails him. He can only stand in silence while Richard makes his wordy surrender, and thereafter his course is plain. He is no longer tortured by a divided allegiance. The habit of obedience is so strongly bred in him that his peace of mind is at once restored when there is only one man to claim it. A king there must be, and since it is not Richard it is Bolingbroke. Once this is settled by Richard's capitulation, York is as anxious as Bolingbroke himself to dispose of the necessary formalities. It is he who first proclaims the new king as ‘Henry, of that name the fourth’, and he who leads in Richard to seal the deed of abdication. He may not altogether like what has happened, but he belongs to that very large class of Englishmen whose perfectly sincere regard for principle will always at a crisis accommodate itself to facts.²⁵ If he has been weak, it is because the whole nation is already sick and because Shakespeare believes that even an honest man's will is paralysed by the least contact with rebellion.

There are, too, certain excuses for his behaviour. Ties of kindred and an inborn respect for legitimacy bound him in loyalty to Richard, so long as Richard had the strength and virtue to command it. He would never have initiated rebellion on his own account. But as soon as Richard's misrule and disregard of counsel provoked a rebellion he could not suppress, York transferred his obedience to the man who was strong enough to take the crown without provoking a civil war. Not being a philosopher, York did not enquire into the causes of these events. He felt the pity of Richard's fall, but at the same time he thanked providence that a strong man was at hand to spare the country the miseries that must otherwise have followed. In this attitude was born the idea, naturally encouraged by Lancastrian apologists, that Henry was an instrument of providence; and York's moving account of Richard riding into London at the heels of his conqueror ends with the reflection that

Heaven hath a hand in these events,
To whose high will we bound our calm contents.
To Bolingbroke are we sworn subjects now,
Whose state and honour I for aye allow.

V ii 37.

His de facto loyalty is at once put to a grievous test, and like his brother Gaunt, who had seen his son go into banishment in the name of peace, he too would sacrifice a son. Despite its comic bathos, the episode of Aumerle's conspiracy is a frightening revelation of the new order at work. With the scuttling of ancient loyalties, new and sinister motives are in control and there is a large element of panic in York's vehement insistence that Aumerle has earned a traitor's death. Throughout the play York is an important symbolic figure. He acts without courage or nobility, but his unhappy situation discloses the pitiless demands which the dogmas of the Tudor state could make upon personal honour and the claims of kindred.

Shakespeare's treatment of Bolingbroke is more equivocal. Standing always outside the bright light that falls on Richard, this man keeps his character and motives in shadow. That his usurpation was a crime Shakespeare never doubts, and Henry V, the mirror of England's greatness, would so regard it on the eve of Agincourt. But the play lends some substance to the traditional view that he did not seize the throne by deliberate calculation. This tradition was accepted by Daniel, who published the first four books of his Civil Wars early in 1595. They were registered during the previous autumn, and there can be little doubt that Shakespeare had read them. Daniel holds that, although the usurpation was wicked, providence was acting through Bolingbroke:

Then, fortune, thou art guilty of his deed
That didst set his state above his hopes erect,
And thou must bear some blame for his great sin. …
That he who had no thought so high to climb,
(With favouring comfort so allur’d along)
Was with occasion thrust into the crime,
Seeing others’ weakness and his part so strong.

Civil Wars i 94-5.

This was Bolingbroke's own version of events, and Shakespeare at least allows it to be a possible interpretation.²⁶ We may, if we wish, think him innocent of far-reaching design. To some extent it was probably Shakespeare's intention that we should.

But that is not all. While he realised their immediate effectiveness in the theatre, the casual operations of Fortune never completely satisfied Shakespeare as a motive force of drama. Plot and character are indivisible. He searched the mind and heart of Richard to discover reasons for his fall, and in the same way, without drawing a fully-rounded character, he could not help sketching the outlines of the man whom Destiny summoned to be a king.

The picture already has the Machiavellian touches which Bolingbroke was to develop on the throne. Like Cromwell, he realised that he rises highest who knows not whither he is going. His actions have the flexibility permitted to men who do not have to declare their ultimate direction. It makes him dangerous from the first. Coleridge's keen ear detected the metrical deficiency in his opening line, and found it sinister:

Many years of happy days befall
My gracious sovereign.

I i 20.

He remarked, too, the ironic courtesies that fall from Bolingbroke throughout this scene, and wondered by what right he should claim that Gloucester's blood cries ‘to me for justice and rough chastisement’. The chosen of providence he may be, but he knows better than to leave everything to chance. Hazlitt found him a subtle opportunist, ‘patient for occasion, and then steadily availing himself of it’; seeing advantage from far off but reaching for it only when he is sure that it has come within his grasp. We can see how tightly he reins his passions, how shrewdly his words and actions are subdued to the needs of the moment. If he is angry at his banishment, he does not publicly show it. He will not give his enemies that much satisfaction, and compared with Mowbray's unrestrained cry of grief, his response is controlled and deliberate. His two couplets,

Your will be done: this must my comfort be,
The sun that warms you here shall shine on me:
And those his golden beams to you here lent
Shall point on me and gild my banishment,

I iii 144.

make an impersonal comment on the poetic falsity of the lines in which Richard has pronounced his sentence (‘Till twice five summers have enrich’d our fields. …’). When at length he does give way to grief, there is only his father to witness it. On the other hand crocodile tears were readily available on demand. From Richard's wry description (I iv 24-36) we learn how skilfully, on his way to exile, he cultivated the arts of popularity, doffing his bonnet to every oysterwench and ‘wooing poor craftsmen with the craft of smiles’.

His promise that he returns as Lancaster, with no other object than to recover his lost estates, does not square with his high-handed treatment of Richard's creatures, ‘the caterpillars of the commonwealth’ whom he swears to ‘weed and pluck away’. If Green and Bushy have indeed

fed upon my signories,
Dispark’d my parks, and felled my forest woods,
From mine own windows torn my household coat,

III i 22.

Bolingbroke, as party to the issue, should not be their judge. His sentence of death is, so far, an act of personal vengeance. But the rest of the speech, professedly delivered ‘to wash your blood from off my hands’,²⁷ goes farther than that. It is an assumption of sovereign power. His charges against his prisoners may be warranted, but it is not his place to sentence them; nor is their execution necessary to the recovery of his confiscated lands. This act of power, so personal and so deliberate, shows the true worth of the ‘stooping duty’ which, soon afterwards, he humbly lays at Richard's feet. In fact his usurpation has already begun.

By all practical tests he justified himself, moving into unfamiliar positions with instinctive aptitude. Natural authority is evident in his handling of the quarrel in Westminster Hall,²⁸ astuteness in his attempt to stage-manage Richard's removal as a voluntary abdication. He is clever enough, too, to realise that, if the beneficiaries are shrewdly chosen, a reputation for mercy can be bought quite cheaply. He can afford to be lenient to Carlisle, who is honourable and essentially a man of peace; or to Aumerle, who is too unstable to be really dangerous and anyway has a zealous father to act as watchdog. On the other hand, he is ruthless to men he has cause to fear, and unlike Richard he does not threaten idly. ‘Destruction straight shall dog them at the heels’: and in the last scene his lieutenants report a succession of unmistakable victories. His evasiveness with Exton is a recognisable act of ‘policy’ in which everyone could see the resemblance to the story of the Queen and Secretary Davison. To lodge ‘the guilt of conscience’ in the bosom of a subordinate was to show a ready mastery of the arts of contemporary kingship.

Is then the deposition of Richard to be excused by the superior efficiency of the usurper? On the surface it seems that it may be, for evil counsellors have been removed, a capricious king has been succeeded by a man who has shown himself firm and temperate, and the change of government is acceptable to York, the honoured survivor of an older order, whom Bolingbroke himself greets, with uncharacteristic effusiveness, as ‘thou sheer, immaculate, and silver fountain’. It would seem that England may expect fairer days. But Shakespeare forces us to enquire further into the true nature of Bolingbroke's success and Richard's failure. If Richard's futility in the everyday business of kingship could not in the end deprive him of his essential royalty, it may be that Bolingbroke's competence in these matters cannot suffice to make him truly a king. There is always something lacking in his address. Possibly it is because Richard's surrender brings him so easily to the throne, but he never meets the moral challenge to his position. He does not directly answer York on the issue of treason. Asked why he comes ‘in gross rebellion … braving arms against thy sovereign’, he offers the routine reply that he only wants his dukedom. York admits the justice of the cause but flatly tells him that this is not the honest way to win it:

I have had feeling of my cousin's wrongs,
And labour’d all I could to do him right;
But in this kind to come, in braving arms,
To be his own carver and cut out his way,
To find out right with wrong, it may not be;
And you that do abet him in this kind
Cherish rebellion and are rebels all.

II iii 141.

It is, of course, the crux, and Bolingbroke's actions stand irretrievably condemned. But he is saved the necessity of reply by York's sudden submission to the parade of arms he has just rebuked. ‘I cannot mend it.’ For the moment the point goes by default, and in the practical sense the issue is already over. But the moral question remains unanswered, and we soon realise that Bolingbroke has no intention of ever answering it. The only excuse he finds it necessary to offer for his appearance in arms is, over and over again, that he wants his hereditary rights. He still utters no further explanation when, with these rights obtained, he is moving calmly towards a richer prize. It can be interpreted as a conquest achieved by naked power and cunningly masked ambition, or as the march of necessity towards the throne that Richard has abandoned. Whichever way it be, no usurpation has ever been so matter-of-fact, so little attended by the justifications that such occasions in decency demand. It is not only that Bolingbroke lacks his father's traditional sense that it must be left to God to punish a ruler's crimes. Except where it concerns his own deprivations (or his affected interest in the fate of his uncle Gloucester), he is largely indifferent to Richard's misrule. There is no scene in which he rallies his followers by appealing to their sense of a common wrong; even his patriotism, suitably uttered upon occasion, is conventional and detached; and his denunciation of Green and Bushy is, on his own admission, a bid to give a semblance of justice to an act of power. We discover in the end that he has taken Richard's throne without ever directly accusing him of anything.

Thus he is morally unequipped to meet Richard's final challenge in Westminster Hall. His contribution to this scene is epitomised in the brief observations which punctuate his silence. ‘Are you contented to resign the crown?’; or, ‘Go, some of you convey him to the Tower.’ That is the extent of his interest in what he had designed to be a purely formal ceremony. All the rest—Richard's reluctance at the last to surrender his care-burdened crown, the agony of his self-betrayal, the clinging to the potent shadow of his royalty—has apparently no meaning for him. Gaunt would have understood; but the son, unconscious representative of a new order of things, does not. His silence condemns him. If he does not understand what Richard is laying down, he cannot know what he himself is taking up.

By the end of the play Shakespeare has shown how insecure Henry's position really is, in spite of his practical efficiency. His ‘unthrifty son’ causes him anxiety by absenting himself from a victory celebration because ‘he would unto the stews’. This may be only a private grief, but in his official self he cannot feel safe so long as Richard is alive. ‘Have I no friend will rid me of this living fear?’ Faithfully Exton executes his oblique commission and comes back with the body:

Great king, within this coffin I present
Thy buried fear.

V vi 30.

He means to assure Henry that the man he feared is now safely dead. To his limited perceptions that is the end of the matter. But the words contain another meaning, and for the first time in the play Henry's intuitions reach beyond the immediate event. It is borne upon him that there is more to kingship than simply stepping on to a convenient throne. He will never, so long as he lives, exorcise the secret fear of the man he has deposed and killed. Stone dead always has a fellow.

‘To find out right with wrong, it may not be’. Here lies the rather pessimistic conclusion of the whole matter. The failure of the King implicates his people in a general suffering from which no act of state can rescue them. Even on the most favourable reading of Bolingbroke's motives or York's surrender to necessity, it is evident that none of the arguments available to them—pragmatism, expediency, innocent intentions, the misdeeds of Richard—is good enough. In their consequences their actions are indistinguishable from the open selfishness of Northumberland and his kind. Thus the symbolic little scene in the Duke of York's garden (III iv) is more than an indictment of improvident kingship. It specifically condemns all the participants in the drama: the King perhaps foremost, but the favourites too, who have devoured while seeming to support him, and ‘the great and growing men’ who might have lived to bear the fruits of duty. The theme of the tangled garden is here brought to a passionate climax as the two Gardeners discuss affairs of state. They have no reality as people, and nowhere else in his drama did Shakespeare pretend that countrymen speak as these two do. They are emblematic figures, spokesmen for the moment of their disordered and suffering country, like the son-slaying father and the parricide son who break into Henry's reveries at Towton. All that England has lately endured, by usurpation and misrule, treachery, irresponsibility and civil war, here fuses in Shakespeare's imagination into the image of the sea-walled garden where neglect has choked the flowers and herbs with noisome weeds. The Gardeners’ talk holds no comfort for the future. Rue, sour herb of grace, is the only plant that will grow in the disordered garden.

In Richard II there are deeper implications than the simple issue between a good king and a bad king. In this unhappy conflict neither side is perfect, for both act selfishly and passionately; and government is clearly shown to be an act of participation in which ruler and ruled bear a proportionate responsibility. The tragedy of misgovernment is that it draws the whole people into the widening circle of its consequences; just as healthy plants are choked by weeds and ultimately share their corruption. Richard's guilt spreads like a blight through the fair garden, poisoning what had once been wholesome, until in the end all his subjects are touched by it. It contaminates the malcontents who raise their arms against him, and the flattering playboys who encouraged the follies it was their duty to correct. But better men are caught up in it too, like the warm-hearted impulsive Aumerle, reduced by these events to a typical ‘mixed-up kid’,²⁹ or the well-meaning York, who speaks the language of a traditional wisdom but fails wretchedly in the crisis. When death has removed Gaunt, the ideal of the good counsellor, his choric role passes to the Gardeners, whose dispassionate analysis spares neither the King's neglect nor the ‘too fast growing sprays’ and ‘superfluous branches’ which together have made the green garden an unprofitable wilderness.

Through the mirror of the ruined garden Shakespeare shows that the real victim of Richard's tragedy is England. When a king misgoverns, or is deposed, the country suffers. This conclusion is evident in the images of inheritance and generation that run through the play,³⁰ in Carlisle's dreadful prophecy, in Henry's apprehension of his ‘buried fear’; and it would have been the stronger for the knowledge of every man in an Elizabethan audience that the predicted sorrows did in fact occur.

I weep for joy
To stand upon my kingdom once again.
Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand,
Though rebels wound thee with their horses’ hoofs.

III ii 4.

Throughout the play a wide range of speeches, imagery and associations is focused on this single passionate idea of England and the suffering she brings to herself through dissension and civil war. ‘This earth shall have a feeling,’ Richard says, and as the beautiful English landscape lies before us—its ‘high wild hills and rough uneven ways’, the castle fringed by ‘yon tuft of trees’, the pale-faced villages, the parks and forest woods, the proud-topped eastern pines, the unseasonable stormy day ‘which makes the silver rivers drown their shores’, old folks by the fireside in tedious winter nights, the summer's dust, and bay trees withered in the heat—‘the fresh green lap of fair King Richard's land’ becomes a sentient being, to bleed at the touch of marching feet and recoil from the ‘boist’rous untun’d drums … and grating shock of wrathful iron arms’. These pictures of the fair countryside, threatened with a tempest of blood, give the play, despite the gravity of the political argument, its essentially lyrical atmosphere. If Richard is the most poetic of Shakespeare's kings, it is because his theme is England.³¹ The Sonnet mood permeates the play, with its dedication to the idea of Beauty, its intense love of the world, and its sorrow that all things lovely must sometime die.

The setting sun, and music at the close,
As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last,
Writ in remembrance more than things long past.

II i 12.

But in the play the enemy is not Time, it is man himself.

POSTSCRIPT

The changing fashions in the interpretation and popularity of Richard II make an interesting footnote to the play. In Shakespeare's own time, as we know, it was thought to offer dangerous inducements to sedition: an impression that may rather have been due to the nature of the historical facts than to Shakespeare's personal handling of them. Anyhow it was a subject more wisely avoided, and it was still powerfully mistrusted when Tate made his unfortunate venture at the time of Oates and ‘exclusion’. Once it had outgrown this unwelcome topicality, the play had to endure a long period of contempt and disinterest. The eighteenth century was bored by it. Johnson's well-known comment, that Richard II cannot be said ‘much to affect the passions, or enlarge the understanding’, was echoed in the same generation by George Steevens, who observed that, although critics might admire it, ‘the successive audiences of more than a century have respectively slumbered over it, as often as it has appeared on the stage’.

Even more singular, by contrast with the play's reputation today, is the opinion of a critic writing early in the present century: ‘As a stage drama it has never appealed to the ordinary theatre-goer owing to the nature of its interest being too subjective, too much concerned with subtle passions and affections, and too little with those grand elemental emotions which constitute the milieu in which nine-tenths of humanity live, move, and have their being.’³² This remark at any rate explains why Richard II did not particularly appeal to the more heroic days in which the writer lived, and it shows by implication why it has become popular in our own. The eighteenth century's neglect of the play persisted into the Victorian age. The great actor-managers either ignored it or misunderstood it. At Sadler's Wells in the middle of the century Samuel Phelps went through most of the canon (incidentally keeping close to Shakespeare's text and making this unusual experiment pay), and this was one of the six plays he did not attempt. The other five were the three parts of Henry VI, Troilus and Cressida³³ and Titus Andronicus: astonishing company in which to find Richard. Irving, who made a problem play of The Merchant of Venice and usually was very sensitive to complexities of character, apparently failed to realise the opportunity that Richard would have given him. Charles Kean and Beerbohm Tree both mangled the text to make room for needless pageantry, and earlier Hazlitt had objected to Edmund Kean's interpretation, presented in a corrupted version in the year of Waterloo, because the actor made Richard ‘a character of passion, that is, of feeling combined with energy; whereas it is a character of pathos, that is to say, of feeling combined with weakness’. Kean was wrong to make his gestures ‘fierce and heroic, instead of being sad, thoughtful, and melancholy’. Hazlitt knew how Richard should be played if he was to be played at all. For some two hundred years, it seems, Shakespeare's dramatic interpreters failed to realise the poet in Richard, the bright but inward-looking imagination, the streak of perverseness and femininity. They thought of him as a choleric tyrant who could not make good his lofty pretensions, and being out of patience with that sort of thing, they made nothing of the character.

It was left to the athletic Benson to discover Richard's rare and subtle sensibility, his infatuation with each succeeding idea of kingship, ruin, sorrow and betrayal. Our own age, mentally less robust than many that have preceded it, knows more about its Richards and is better able to sympathise with them. Psychological drama has made us familiar with those ‘subtle passions and affections’ which a more confident generation rejected as unworthy of its attention. After two world wars, and the collapse of numerous assumptions which for our grandparents bore the reassuring stamp of eternity, we are possibly more interested in failures than successes. In this climate a man like Richard can flourish. We are likelier to appreciate the engrossed subjectivity of his vision, and there is no fear now that he will appear before us as something too heroic. The danger is rather that the moody but gifted dreamer, absorbed in his thick-coming fancies, may lean too heavily on our sympathy and upset the balance of the play.

We must not allow Richard to bewitch us. The play is roughly contemporary with Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream, when Shakespeare was in a mood to mistrust excess. He was unsure of the realms to which even his own imagination might beckon him, and in his drama at this time he shows us men betrayed by strained emotion and excess of fancy. Quick bright things find their way to destruction. The likeness between Richard and Romeo is much more than verbal, for there is some defect in each which prevents his story from being genuinely tragic. Romeo and Juliet is in the main a comedy of bungled social relationships, of a needless family quarrel, and a boy and a girl who demand more of the world than their particular world can at the moment give them. At the climax Romeo's arraignment of the everlasting stars is as brash and inappropriate as Richard's assumption of a personal Calvary. Richard II is more complex and much harder to assess, chiefly because it is impossible for us to feel about him as the Elizabethans did. His failure affected them as it can never affect us, and the true nature of his fault, as of the pathos he inspired, is not easily grasped by generations for whom government has lost its mystery and resistance may sometimes be a solemn duty. Intolerable as a king, Richard can yet charm us as a person, for we are better able than the Elizabethans to separate the man from the office. When political failures can be removed from power without injury to the structure of government, it is possible to retain some sympathy for them personally and look forward with considerable interest to reading their biographies.

So we shall never quite be able to see Richard through his creator's eyes. In our time men of his sort are very common indeed, and perhaps they get a more respectful hearing than they deserve. Shakespeare would warn us that this is dangerous. While the play draw its strength from the pathos of Richard's fall and the lovely, lingering echoes of his plaintive verse, it fails to reach the heights because the heights were always out of Richard's reach. Great art, it was said long ago, needs a great soul to nourish it. Men like Richard win the tribute of an idle tear, may rise, at their finest, to a certain pallid splendour, but they do not breed great tragedy, nor even stirring history. Richard was not merely an amateur of politics, he was also—as Shakespeare revealed him—an amateur of life.

Notes

1. His mother was the admired ‘Fair Maid of Kent’, Joan, daughter of Edmund of Woodstock, youngest son of Edward I.

2. His father sacked Limoges in an epileptic fury. Richard himself ordered the complete destruction of the palace of Sheen because his first wife died there; and at her funeral he assaulted the Earl of Arundel.

3. See above, pp. 159-60.

4. In adopting this reading, Shakespeare carries straight on from Woodstock, which ends with Gloucester's murder at Richard's command. In their search for moral causation, other writers, including Hall and the Mirror for Magistrates, attributed Richard's fall to this act, but historically it was not a very plausible interpretation. Gloucester was a violent, disloyal and unpopular man (Holinshed calls him ‘the chief instrument of mischief’), and his death was not unjustified by the morality of the age. There were many other reasons for Richard's fall.

5. Cf. 2 Hen. IV IV i 54-8: the whole country was in a fever of which Richard, ‘being infected, died’.

6. Lines 41-56 give a complete retrospective summary of what happened in 1399. It does not, of course, matter that the Percies are now saying that his usurpation was deliberately planned: they are no longer on his side. What is significant is their repeated witness that he said at the time that he was only coming to recover his family estates. On the other hand, Henry made a different admission when speaking frankly to his son. See 2 Hen. IV IV v 182-4.

7. In view of what is to come, it is ironical that Richard's declared reason for stopping the duel is that the country's soil shall not be stained ‘with that dear blood which it hath fostered’.

8. See D. A. Traversi, Shakespeare from ‘Richard II’ to ‘Henry V’, 20-2.

9. In historical fact his expedition to Ireland was made necessary by a dangerous revolutionary situation which he met with a policy of intelligent reconciliation. The seizure of Lancaster's estates may have been decided upon as a desperate means of paying for the expedition. Incidentally, Richard was shrewd enough to take with him as hostages the future Prince Hal, as well as the sons of other English noblemen.

10. Traversi suggests (Shakespeare from ‘Richard II’ to ‘Henry V’, 20) that Shakespeare seeks to reconcile the apparently contradictory material of the play by exalting the royal office in such a way that the fall of a king revealed to be morally and politically worthless ‘may leave the monarchic principle itself substantially untouched’.

11. Usually it speaks of sorrow and is burdened with a heavy tale. Banished Mowbray's is engaoled in his silent mouth, Gaunt's is a stringless instrument, Scroop's is care-tuned, the Gardener's harsh and rude. Only the loyal Groom hints that actions speak louder than words: ‘What my tongue dares not, that my heart shall say.’ Much of the imagery of the play acts as an undertone to the King's sorrow, echoing the stricken outburst of Marlowe's Edward II:

    Whilst I am lodg’d within this cave of care,
    Where sorrow at my elbow still attends,
    To company my heart with sad laments,
    That bleeds within me for this strange exchange.

    V i 32.

12. It is a gift that Constance lacked. But King Philip's chiding ‘You are as fond of grief as of your child’ might, with crown substituted for child, be appropriate to Richard's behaviour in the middle scenes of the play.

13. III ii 27-32, 178-85.

14. Again he recalls Edward II:

    Full often am I soaring up to Heaven,
    To plain me to the gods.

    V i 21.

15. In his introduction to the Arden edition Peter Ure holds (lxii sq.) that Richard's tragedy is his failure to free himself from the burden of kingship even when its powers and responsibilities are lost. But surely it is this which saves Richard's sanity. The agony of his material loss becomes bearable when he discovers in his imagination, which is inviolable, that he is still royal, although fated to be deposed and die.

16. A purely technical consideration is important here. The lament was the characteristic mediaeval form of tragic statement, and to the Shakespeare of 1595 it was not yet conceivable that Richard might be deposed without an appropriate demonstration of grief. In the corresponding scene in Edward II (V i) the King indulges in similar fancies, taking off the crown and putting it on again, alternately grieving at his harsh fate and calling on God to make him ‘despise this transitory pomp’. Thus Richard's exaggerated language does not mean that his inner resignation has already deserted him. He does not expect to be saved; and he is reconciled.

17. Ure points out that the long soliloquy in V v really begins at this point.

18. Nor, of course, has Shakespeare. We shall meet again this unattractive symbol of the new political order, and for the moment Shakespeare is content to indicate his sullen ruthlessness in a few unmistakable touches. As in Edward II, a distinction is made between the court, with its civilised standards and Italianate influences, and the world of ‘accomplished barbarism’ represented by Northumberland. It would not have impressed Northumberland that Richard was the man who introduced the handkerchief into England. Similarly, his dainty clothing was one of Mortimer's principal grievances against Gaveston.

    In one respect, however, Northumberland comes off better than he might, for Shakespeare makes no use of the incident, fully described in Holinshed, of Northumberland's promise to Richard, then at Conway, of a safe-conduct to Bolingbroke for the purpose of negotiation. When Richard set out, Northumberland ambushed him and took him to Flint as a prisoner.

19. In one of those telling anti-climaxes which Shakespeare manages so well but which scare producers into making ill-considered cuts. This tiny pendant is essential to the scene, to show that Richard's apprehension of his kingship is not mere vanity.

20. Cf. Timon:

    My long sickness
    Of health and living now begins to mend,
    And nothing brings me all things.

    Tim. V i 191.

21. The story of Henry V, the political success, complements that of Richard II, the political failure. Henry's personal harmony lay in a conception of honour which he was able to realise politically in a life of action.

22. See 3 Hen. VI III i 76-101.

23. And even in prison he was still doing it.

24. As he also did with Gaunt. The real Gaunt was not the time-honoured counsellor who in the play irks Richard with his ‘intolerable consanguinity’. Holinshed writes of him as a ‘turbulent and self-seeking baron’, and he was almost as much a nuisance as his brother Gloucester. But Shakespeare needed a character who should be the traditional honest adviser, and he invested Gaunt with the homespun loyalty and candour which the author of Woodstock attributed, just as unhistorically, to Gloucester.

25. Can we doubt that Shakespeare himself belonged to it?

26. See above, pp. 229-30.

27. So that, he means, he cannot be accused of responsibility for their death. Cf. his insistence that Richarad shall make a public abdication, ‘so we shall proceed without suspicion’. He is clearly anxious to create the impression of a man who has always acted correctly. But for Hotspur's version of his behaviour at this time, see 1 Hen. IV IV iii 54-105.

28. In contrast to Richard's ineffectiveness in I i.

29. The historical Aumerle was much less simple, and his treacheries were legion—he even betrayed Richard in 1399. The brave soldier at Agincourt hardly seems to be the same person.

30. See C. F. E. Spurgeon, Shakespeare's Imagery, 238-41.

31. Although his grief is self-centred, he consistently identifies his own suffering with England’s, and he more than once points out that, when his own personal tragedy is over, the country's suffering must continue.

32. Oliphant Smeaton, Shakespeare: his Life and Work (Everyman), 137.

33. Troilus and Cressida, which was even more neglected than Richard II, has also found an audience in recent times.