SOURCE: “Paradise and Paradise Lost in Richard II,” in Shakespeare Quarterly 37, No. 3, Autumn, 1986, pp. 318-39.

[In the following essay, MacKenzie explores the manner in which the language and figures of English mythology and “anti-mythology” are developed into the visions of England as paradise and as an “English paradise lost” in Richard II. MacKenzie observes that while Gaunt refers to England as a mythological and Biblical paradise, the play also refers to England as a “fallen paradise” in Biblical, iconographical, and classical terms.]

With his country in the grasp of a king whose manoeuverings have verged on misrule, his son banished and his own life nearing its end, John of Gaunt pays homage to the English realm, describing it as

This other Eden, demi-paradise.

(II.i.42)

Shakespeare's generation appears to have found the word “paradise” particularly evocative. One Elizabethan translator (1583) refers to the Low Countries as “the Paragone, or rather, yearthly Paradise, of all the Countries in Europe.”¹ To Captain Bingham (1583), Newfoundland is “The paradise, of all the world.”² It is the opinion of Erasmus³ that Sir Thomas More's Utopia was intended to represent England and, as if in evidence. W. Lightfoot, in The Complaint of England (1587), describes his country as one “much resembling the happinesse of Paradise.”⁴ And S. Jourdan calls Bermuda “one of the sweetest Paradises that be vpon the earth.”⁵

In each of these cases, “paradise” is a rather vague component in the rhetoric of superlatives. Gaunt's allusion is much more precise, far more aware of its Biblical derivation. As with Cleopatra's “demi-Atlas of this earth” (Antony and Cleopatra, I.v.23), Gaunt uses “demi-” in the sense of “second” rather than “half.” The idea of England as a second, Biblical, paradise was not unfamiliar to the Elizabethans. Thomas Stocker frames his praise of England in Biblical terms when he writes in the “Dedicatorie” to his 1583 translation of A Tragicall Historie of the troubles and Civile warres of the Lowe Countries: “For, where can wee read either in the olde Testament, or yet in any other prophane Historie, that euer GOD, dealte more bountifully, with any Nation then with us [i.e., the English], either for thynges needefull and necessarie, or delightfull and pleasaunt for this life. So that it maie verie well be saied of us, that we enioye a lande, flowyng with Milke and Honie.”⁶ Robert Greene anticipates Gaunt's second-Eden strain in his propagandist work The Spanish Masquerado (1589): “Seeing then we are euery way blest and fauoured from aboue: that the Lord our mercifull God maketh England like Eden, a second paradice: let us fear to offend him.”⁷ Greene may perhaps have had in mind the popular post-Reformation scheme of the Papistry as the Beast of the Apocalypse, the Church of England as the True Church, and England itself as the New Jerusalem.⁸ In a letter to the Times Literary Supplement (28 November 1952), A.S.T. Fisher offers Joshua Sylvester's English panegyric as a possible source of Shakespeare's Eden/paradise line:

All haile (deere Albion) Europes
Pearle of price,
The Worlds rich Garden, Earths rare Paradice.(9)

Peter Ure¹⁰ has established a persuasive connection between the two authors, but there are problems of chronology that neither he nor Fisher can resolve.

While Gaunt's reference to a second Eden is pointedly Biblical, specific traditions of England as a paradise may be found in non-Biblical quarters. Josephine Waters Bennett, approaching the question of “paradise” from a predominantly Classical perspective, has traced the origins of the legend of Britain as an isolated island divided from the rest of the world, and has provided evidence for, as she puts it, “a more nebulous and vague association of Britain with the mythical islands of the Western Ocean, such as Thule, the Fortunate Isles, or Hesperides, the Islands of the Blest, and Homer's Ogygia.”¹¹ Bennett notices, in passing, Shakespeare's reference to the “other Eden, demi-paradise” in Richard II (p. 125).

Gaunt's expression of the mythology of English paradise has invited both literary comparison and critical comment. A second mythology in Richard II—the mythology of the “fallen paradise”—has remained rather more obscure, but maintains a compelling presence in the play. The dramatist approaches the idea of a “fall” and a postlapsarian world through vistas that are both varied and complementary:

Which blood, like sacrificing Abel’s, cries,
Even from the tongueless caverns of the earth. …

(I.i.104-5)

Cry woe, destruction, ruin, and decay—
The worst is death, and death will have his day.

(III.ii.102-3)

Ah, thou, the model where old Troy did stand. …

(V.i.11)

Each of these examples, in its way, conveys to us the sense of a “fall.” Yet the first is Biblical, the second covertly iconographical, and the third Classical. Together they express a central mythology of an English transgression and of a paradise lost—a mythology that may derive many of its ideas and some of its terminology from other sources but that, in Shakespeare's vision, asserts an essentially English identity. It will be the task of this essay to explore the ways in which Richard II develops and expands the figures of the English mythology and of its opposite, the English “anti-mythology,” into visions of, respectively, an English paradise and an English paradise lost.

I

Caroline F. E. Spurgeon has noticed that “the ideas of birth and generation, also of inheritance from father to son, are a good deal in Shakespeare's mind in this play.”¹² Such ideas are amenable to much closer scrutiny than the vast scope of Spurgeon's book permits. As in any play, certain lines and passages remain pivotal to the action and crucial to our understanding of the work. One such passage occurs in the second act, where, drawn together by circumstance and a common political disposition, three noblemen discuss the state of the kingdom. The times are dangerous and men must be careful, but one nobleman at last abandons caution and hints at the return of Harry Hereford:

even through the hollow eyes of death
I spy life peering.

(II.i.270-71)

It is, of necessity, a cryptic clue but still identifiable as lying within a popular iconographic tradition. To understand that tradition and to explain the significance of Northumberland's image, it will be necessary to digress for a moment.

There is a print in Hans Holbein's Icones Historiarvm Veteris Testamenti (1547) that portrays Adam and Eve after their expulsion from Eden.¹³ Adam is clearing a root from a bare stretch of earth and he is assisted, almost shadowed, by a skeletal Death figure. In the background, Eve nurses her first-born son. This is the plate's verse accompaniment from the Lyons edition:

Mauldicte en ton labeur la terre.
En labeur ta uie useras,
Iusques que la Morte te soubterre.
Toy pouldre en pouldre tourneras.

The allusion is to Genesis 3.17 and 19.¹⁴ The gift of Eden was happiness and immortality; the punishment of transgression, sorrow and death. Giovanni Lambi neatly summarizes the tragedy when he says that “vnto the first Parents Adam and Eve, for penance of sinne death was giuen, which will neuer be separated from the whole posterity.”¹⁵ But the world of fallen Adam is not entirely without consolation. Even as he works, shadowed by Death, his child lies in the arms of mother Eve. There is the actuality of physical generation, of new hope, of a life not without purpose, symbolically portrayed by Holbein through the suggestion of tillage and the promise of sown seed. It is likely, even probable, that Shakespeare was familiar with this print. Holbein, as we know, had strong connections with England. He spent much of his life in the court of Henry VIII and is believed to have executed a Dance of Death mural in Whitehall Palace, though the destruction by fire of a great deal of the building in 1698 leaves the matter in some doubt.¹⁶ The publication of an English version of Icones Historiarvm Veteris Testamenti as early as 1549 attests to the likelihood of the work's popularity in England.¹⁷

Shakespeare could have had access as well to any number of emblem engravings that might have suggested to him the notion of “life in death.” Emblematists like Richard Lubbaeus (1579),¹⁸ Nicolas Reusner (1581),¹⁹ and Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert (1585),²⁰ create, as their vehicles of expression, images of children holding or resting upon skulls. Others turn, as Holbein almost does, to a mixture of human and vegetal symbols. Claude Paradin, in Les Devises Heroiques (1561), depicts sprigs of wheat growing from bones and adds the motto “Spes altera vitae,”²¹ which may be translated as either “Another hope of life” or “The hope of another life.” Joachim Camerarius,²² in 1595, repeats Paradin's emblem and uses the same ambiguous Latin adage. In the Antwerp issue of Emblemata (1564), Joannes Sambucus²³ uses, as his final device, a plant flourishing out of the top of a skull. The Spaniard Juan de Horozco y Covarrubias (1591)²⁴ executes two emblems worthy of closer observation. In the first, a newborn plant rises out of a pile of skulls and is entitled “Enla Mverte esta la Vida” (p. 194^r). The second reveals a skull balanced on top of a shrub and bears the inscription “Enla Vida esta la Mverte” (p. 252^r). Some forty years later, George Wither published A Collection of Emblemes (largely an assemblage of prints from earlier periods) and chose as his twenty-first emblem a skull with sprigs of wheat growing out of the eyes and mouth: “When we are Borne, to Death-ward straight we runne; / And by our Death, our Life is new-begunne.”²⁵ This couplet provides a fitting conclusion to Wither's commentary on what is, in essence, an image of life peering through the hollow eyes of death.

The idea of life “new-begunne” can be interpreted in two ways. Both are important. Firstly, in the notion of rebirth, be it visually represented as plant growth or as childhood, there is the implicit suggestion of the physical regenerative capability of the human race. Secondly, by confirming the paradox of spiritual life in physical death, the emblematists make a clear theological distinction between the earthly humanity of this world and the religious spirituality of the next. Life on earth becomes a spiritual abysm from which only physical death may grant relief. These two concepts are neither new nor surprising, and they would perhaps rank as insignificant to the myth-structure of Richard II, and the English mythology in particular, if Shakespeare had not taken their elements and composed, in conspiracy with England's legendary past, a new and thrilling harmony:

even through the hollow eyes of death
I spy life peering.

The sense is both physical and spiritual. Harry Hereford is the flesh and blood son of his father. But more than that, Northumberland understands him to be, as well, the spiritual progeny of his father. The iconographical incompatibility of physical life and spiritual life is here abandoned. In the dramatist's view of the English paradise on earth, the two become mutually dependent.

Here is how Hereford addresses his father as he prepares for that most chivalric of medieval rituals, the challenge tournament:

O thou, the earthly author
of my blood,
Whose youthful spirit, in me regenerate,
Doth with a twofold vigour lift me up
To reach at victory above my head,
Add proof unto mine armour with thy prayers,
And with thy blessings steel my lance's point,
That it may enter Mowbray's waxen coat
And furbish new the name of John
o’ Gaunt,
Even in the lusty haviour of his son.

(I.iii.69-77, emphasis added)

The resurrection motif is dominant. Young Hereford explicitly links the process of spiritual regeneration with physical regeneration in a conception of splendid mortality resurrecting itself from generation to generation. It is the very essence of the English mythology. Witness, also, the way Gaunt talks of England as “This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land / Dear for her reputation through the world” (II.i.57-58, emphasis added). Spiritual purity and earthly achievement mingle in a curious unity. Images of worth and “preciousness” are connected with the English earth in the play's early stages and, in this case, the word “dear” as a value arbiter is associated with both the souls and the land of England. Josephine Waters Bennett has explored the notion of England as “Elizium” citing, as one of her examples, Procopius of Caesarea who recounts a third-century legend that the souls of the dead were ferried across the Channel to Britain.²⁶ Shakespeare's sense of “souls” in Gaunt's usage is somewhat different. His souls are earthly souls and the word, as a synonym for the living individual, is repeated again and again in the play—though this is not to deny the presence of more conventional theological usage. It is the traditional quality and character of English life on earth that gives Lancaster's myth-paradise a sense of spiritual continuity.

II

Although the need for individual replenishment is one dictated by the Biblical curse of mortality in a postlapsarian world (a reality not even the English myth-paradise can avoid), many of the play's “old world” characters conceive of such replenishment as celebrative in so far as it sustains England's heroic military spirit. The most powerful metaphoric expression of that regenerative splendor is to be found in the imagery of earth-fertility. Here is Gaunt:

This blessed plot, this earth,
this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of
royal kings,
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
Of the world's ransom, blessed Mary's Son.…

(II.i.50-56, emphasis added)

The fecundity of the English realm is a notion evoked again by Hotspur's allusion to the “teeming earth” (1 Henry IV, III.i.28) and traceable at least as far back as Geoffrey of Monmouth's line: “quicquid mortalium usui congruit, indeficienti fertilitate ministrat.”²⁷ More relevant, perhaps, is Raphael Holinshed's 1587 edition of the Chronicles, in the first volume of which the writer describes how Albion, son of Neptune, “hearing of the commodities of the countrie, and plentifulnesse of soile here, made a voiage ouer, and finding the thing not onelie correspondent unto, but also farre surmounting the report that went of this Island, it was not long after he inuaded the same by force of armes.”²⁸

Lucretius images the earth as a “mother” in De Rerum Natura.²⁹ But what prompted Shakespeare's link between earth's fertility and crops of chivalric heroes is not clear. It may have been a common equation in Elizabethan times. Sylvester echoes, if not anticipates, such an idea in his own English encomium:

Thrice-happy Mother, which aye bringest-forth
Such Chivalry as daunteth all the Earth,
(Planting the Trophies of thy glorious Armes
By Sea and Land, where ever Titan warmes).(30)

The Duchess of Gloucester, in an emblematical touch, adapts the earth-fertility image used later by Gaunt when she describes Edward's seven sons as “seven fair branches springing from one root” (I.ii.13) and her husband, in particular, as a “flourishing branch of his [Edward III’s] most royal root” (I.ii.18). Richard Altick³¹ considers this a reference to the familiar medieval genealogical symbol of the Tree of Jesse, but it seems more useful to look back to the rather undisciplined profusion of agronomical imagery in the Henry VI trilogy. There, kings and would-be kings are “planted,” “reaped,” and “rooted up.”³² The germ nurtured in those plays flourishes, at last, in Richard II's English Garden of Eden, a paradise that exists within a fallen world, turning its own physical mortality to spiritual advantage. When George Chapman writes of England, “though the whole world besides moves, yet this isle stands fixed on her own feet and defies the world's mutability,”³³ he might almost have been inspired by the same vision of a regenerating and therefore perpetual distinction that informs the whole mythology of English paradise in Richard II.

If, then, we understand the English spirit as one purchased and upheld by mortal reputation, Richard's failure to preserve such a spirit could be construed as a spiritual death. In a powerful figurative inversion, the physically dying Gaunt makes just such an assumption and turns the image of death on Richard himself:

O, no! thou diest, though I the sicker be.

(II.i.91)

And a few lines later:

Thy death-bed is no lesser than thy land
Wherein thou liest in reputation
sick.

(II.i.95-96, emphasis added)

Since, according to Gaunt and others, Richard has abdicated his position as the spiritual inheritor and progenitor of the English chivalric tradition, old Lancaster himself becomes one of the final defenders of that order. In his chorus-like reference to the fallen paradise, the theme of the earth as a womb assumes a new and chilling dimension. No longer a place of birth, it becomes a place of death, a grave—and because the possibility of spiritual regeneration seems lost, the dying Gaunt endows the image with a sense of macabre futility: “Gaunt am I for the grave, gaunt as a grave, / Whose hollow womb inherits nought but bones” (II.i.82-83). If the teeming womb of the English paradise denoted both physical and spiritual renewal of the English mythology, then the hollow womb of the fallen paradise comprehends the awful finality of its antithesis.

Even on the edge of death, it appears that Gaunt does not entertain the possibility of his son's early return, or of the revival, as Northumberland's image of “life peering” might promise, of the old heroic spirit. No doubt he, like York, would have disapproved of Hereford's rebellion but, in the event, the prophecy of spiritual nadir holds as good for Bolingbroke and his regime as Gaunt thought it did for Richard. True, the youthful usurper is remarkably adept at deploying the terms and precepts of the English mythology of earthly paradise to his own advantage, as when he woos York with the lines: “You are my father, for methinks in you / I see old Gaunt alive” (II.iii.117-18), but this is no more than the calculated rhetoric of politics. Bolingbroke is the archetype of an altogether new order, an order that threatens a “crimson tempest” (III.iii.46) if it does not have its way, and yet, by having its way, ensures the same. The king well appreciates the irony:

But ere the crown he looks for live in peace,
Ten thousand bloody crowns of mothers’ sons
Shall ill become the flower of England's face,
Change the complexion of her maid-pale peace
To scarlet indignation, and bedew
Her pastures’ grass with faithful English blood.

(III.iii.95-100)

In the spiritual desolation of the fallen paradise, images of physical regeneration assume grotesque dimensions. Richard's equation of blood and dew perverts the earth-fertility terminology of the English myth-paradise, and is tied to his later warning about those who “plant unrightful kings” (V.i.63, emphasis added). The figurative corruption suggested here is indicative of the imagistic evolution that compasses the transition from Gaunt's glorious, regenerative womb in the mythology of English paradise, to the bloody regeneration of civil war's horrors, predicted with appropriate reproductive force in 3 Henry VI: “What stratagems, how fell, how butcherly, / Erroneous, mutinous, and unnatural, / This deadly quarrel daily doth beget!” (II.v.89-91, emphasis added). The earth-fertility images of Gaunt's second Garden of Eden succumb to the images of the barren womb, to Carlisle's foreboding prophecy that “The blood of English shall manure the ground” (IV.i.137), and, ultimately, to Bolingbroke's regret that “blood should sprinkle me to make me grow” (V.vi.46).³⁴

While many characters show an awareness of paradise lost, the blame for the fall is variously placed. The Lancastrian camp quite naturally see Richard as the culpable party, the man whose misdemeanors in the English garden have led to the decline of that garden and to the execution of a crime (the Duke of Gloucester's murder) whose consequences are so vast and tragic that the outraged Bolingbroke speaks of it in terms of the primordial homicide: “Which blood, like sacrificing Abel’s, cries, / Even from the tongueless caverns of the earth, / To me for justice and rough chastisement” (I.i.104-6). The style of the first scene is frequently one of hyperbole, and the sentiments often hollow and ceremonious, but we would be wrong to neglect the import of such lines. The murder has brought death into Richard's court, and he strives in vain to nullify its consequences, first by advising against a bloody contest, and then by banishing the antagonists. But Gloucester's blood (the “sacred blood” at I.ii.17; the “precious liquor” two lines later) comes to embody all that is worthy and sacrosanct in the paradisiacal mythology, and its spillage confirms the fall of the English paradise as the murder of Abel confirmed the fall of man. The Gardener's scene (III.iv) is of significance here. It is not new to remark upon the paradisiacal connotations of the episode. S. K. Heninger observes that “underlying the entire scene is the standard of order which prevailed in the Garden of Eden, God's prototype of natural harmony. The Gardener is ‘old Adam's likeness’ (III.iv.73). The meaning of the scene depends upon the cosmological imagery which compares the ideal conditions in Eden to the actual conditions promoted by Richard.”³⁵ Heninger seems justified in interpreting the scene as fixing the blame on Richard. In berating Richard's monarchy (11. 54-66), the Gardener not only favors the conquering Bolingbroke but actually sounds a little like him.³⁶ And it is revealing that, while the garden itself represents to the Gardener a place of toil and close attention, it is, to the Queen's Lady (and, by association, to the Queen herself), a place of games (III.iv.3), of dancing (1. 6), of story-telling (1. 10), and of singing (1. 19). The Queen may repudiate these frivolous pastimes now, but, measured against the Gardener's sobriety, their suggestive eminence in former times attests to a certain royal delinquency.

The opposite view, proposed by Richard's followers, conceives of Bolingbroke as the decimator of paradise and of Richard as an innocent victim.³⁷ The usurper himself contributes to this thesis by framing Richard's murder in terms of the Biblical precedent. At the end of the play, he tells Exton:

With Cain go wander thorough shades of night,
And never show thy head by day nor light.

(V.vi.43-44)

The assassin has acted on Bolingbroke's own words in committing an act of darkness that blemishes Henry's newly acquired sun-king identification.³⁸ The indelible balm of the anointed king in the mythology of paradise becomes the indelible blood on the hands of the guilty usurper in the mythology of fallen paradise. Let us not think, though, that the murder of the king is the cursed transgression that surrenders paradise. It is no more than a symptom, as Cain's transgression was, of an already fallen world. From the Royalist standpoint, paradise was lost the moment Bolingbroke set foot on forbidden English soil, bringing with him the infection of civil war. Thomas Combe might almost be speaking of Bolingbroke's England when he writes, in The Theater of fine devices, “Then ciuill discord set their hearts at warre, / And caused each man his owne good to marre.”³⁹ So, overhearing the Gardener in III.iv, the Queen lends to his suggestion of Richard's deposition the force of the Hebraic Fall of Adam:

Thou, old Adam's likeness, set to dress this garden,
How dares thy harsh rude tongue sound this unpleasing news?
What Eve, what serpent, hath suggested thee
To make a second fall of cursed man?
Why dost thou say King Richard is depos’d?
Dar’st thou, thou little better thing than earth,
Divine his downfall?

(III.iv.73-79)

Thomas Cooper tells us that, amongst other things, the name Adam “doth signifie man, or redde earth,”⁴⁰ and when Queen Isabel calls the “old Adam” Gardener a “little better thing than earth,” she doubly echoes the Biblical fall of man from a prelapsarian state of immortality to a transient and earth-bound mortality. We here experience, once again, the devaluation of Gaunt's glorious English earth, a devaluation now connected not with Richard but with Lancaster's own son. In the fallen world of both the Scriptures and England, the human body is valued at no more than the dust from whence it came (Genesis 3.19), destined, at last, for the “earthy pit” (IV.i.219) of the grave.

III

For different reasons, King John has been twinned with Richard II by at least two twentieth-century critics.⁴¹ In the development of English myth and antimyth images in Richard II, the link is important. King John does not allude to Eden or to paradise lost, and the play lacks the sense of a “fall” initiated by a single transgression; but the Bastard's scheme of an English soul in an Anglicized heaven (King John, V.vii.70-73) and the equation of England's goodness with Arthur's fleeing spirit (King John, IV.iii.142-50) perhaps prepare us for the more complex and coherent schematization in Richard II. Another important link, in this respect, is King John’s consistent use of the theme of encirclement (King John, II.i.216-21; II.i.381-84; IV.ii.208-10; IV.iii.135-38; V.i.39-41; V.vii.15-17). The theme is of importance in Richard II as well.

John of Gaunt, for example, in the course of his English panegyric, speaks of England as

This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands.

(II.i.46-49)

The sea as a protective “wall” is a useful complement to the mythology of England as an isolated Eden, and is repeated by the First Servant at III.iv.43 (“our sea-walled garden”). In his book The Lost Garden, John Wilders recognizes that the “sense of a lost paradise and of a country falling into ruin after an ideal past is conveyed most powerfully in Richard II.”⁴² In his seventh chapter, Wilders relates the “gardens” in Shakespeare's history plays to Eden, and suggests that the “old Persian word pairidaeza, from which the English word ‘paradise’ is derived, signified a walled garden, park, or orchard and there is evidence that Shakespeare thought of such places when he created the temporary retreats from the world into which some of his characters take refuge” (pp. 133-34). The obvious significance Wilders attaches to the idea of paradise as a “walled” garden, park, or orchard will be helpful, as well, to our examination of Neptune's role in relation to the English second Eden. We should, though, be cautioned by Octavio Alvarez who, in his book The Celestial Brides: A Study in Mythology and Archaeology, derives the word paradise from the Avestan Pairidaeza, which he translates as “Enclosure of Women.”⁴³ Despite these clear semantic contrarieties, both Wilders and Alvarez understand “paradise” as an enclosure of some sort. Shakespeare's “sea-walled” England harbors that same fundamental connotation. Yet we would be wrong to consider Neptune's sea-wall a wholly beneficent property of the ideal English myth-paradise. Within a few lines, the old Lancaster appears to contradict his earlier statement (II.i.46-49) by talking of an

England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of wat’ry Neptune.

(II.i.61-63)

In Gaunt's imagined paradise, the sea is presented in the paradoxical guise of both threatener and protector of the English realm.

Shakespeare's approach to the ambivalence of Neptune differs significantly from two of his possible sources. Here, for example, is an excerpt from Sonnet XLIV in Samuel Daniel's Delia:

Flourish faire Albion, glory of the North,
Neptunes darling helde betweene his armes:
Deuided from the world as better worth,
Kept for himselfe, defended from all harmes.(44)

But, when writing about England in a context of civil war, Daniel reads a passive hostility into the sea god's English office:

“Why Neptune; Hast thou made vs stand alone
“Diuided from the world, for this, say they?
“Hemd-in, to be a spoyle to tyrannie,
“Leauing affliction hence no way to flie?(45)

Daniel associates a benevolent Neptune with English well-being, and a malevolent Neptune with civil war. Raphael Holinshed's usage is similar. Early in the first volume of his Chronicles, the writer extolls the greatness of Neptune in his capacity as protector of all who travel by sea—possibly preparing the way for the sea odyssey of the Trojan Brutus which immediately follows.⁴⁶ Yet, in the same chapter, when the unpleasant Lestrigo aims at the deposition of good King Lucas by stirring up civil rebellion, Neptune is seen to assist him in his wicked intent.⁴⁷

If Shakespeare's use of Neptune was suggested by either or both of these historians, then it appears he went to some lengths to adjust the sea god's duality to his own needs in II.i. Unlike Daniel and Holinshed, he does not consider the deity's English function as one corresponding to the internal felicity or otherwise of the realm. Neptune, as the surrounding sea, is a constant and potential source, simultaneously, of both good and evil. This is in keeping with the god's Classical image. Neptune, it will be recalled, was dissatisfied with his share of Saturn's empire and attempted, with others, to annex a portion of the earth and heavens.⁴⁸ Foiled in this strategy, he was forced by Jupiter to build, or repair, the walls of Troy as punishment—a task for which Laomedon refused to pay him. His grudge against Troy for this slight is recalled in The Iliad: “My task was to build a wall for the Trojans round their town, a strong and splendid one to make the place impregnable … but when the happy hour for payment came, the unconscionable Laomedon refused outright to give us any wages. … That is the man whose people you [Apollo] are now so anxious to oblige, instead of joining us and seeing to it that these insolent Trojans shall be utterly wiped out, together with their children and their loving wives.”⁴⁹ Yet, even as he talks, his own wall defends the race he would destroy.

This dual sense of the protective Neptune (his Trojan wall) and the threatening Neptune (his hope of Troy's destruction) is manifest in John of Gaunt's interpretation of the god's English role. On the one hand, the sea is the encircling defender—in Gaunt's words, the “wall” (II.i.47)—against foreign invasion; on the other, he is the would-be appropriator, the envious siegeman, with designs on the earthly heaven of England. A number of factors might suggest (wrongly, as it turns out) an equation of Bolingbroke and Neptune. Bolingbroke returns from his banishment with a sea-borne army to invade a land he was pledged to defend and to depose a king who, by definition of his divine sanction, was “iust, trewe, and unfallible.”⁵⁰ And he brings with him, to use York's phrase, “a tide of woes” (II.ii.98). Bolingbroke's return is consistently framed in terms of sea imagery, and the words “beat back” are used to describe, firstly, how England's shore “beats back the envious siege / Of wa’ry Neptune” and, secondly, how York will try to “beat back Bolingbroke” (II.ii.144).

Kathyrn Montgomery Harris has noted Gaunt's ambiguous approach to the sea and has proposed that “This ambivalence is functional. When England is ‘this other Eden’ the sea protects; when leased out by Richard ‘like to a tenement or pelting farm’ (II.i.60), the sea is a threatening, envious bond.”⁵¹ This is surely not the sense of the passage in question. Old Lancaster clearly conceives of the Neptunian ambivalence as being a wholly integral element of the mythology of the English paradise, and he makes a sharp distinction between the glorious England bound in by envious Neptune (II.i.61-63) and Richard's wretched England “bound in with shame” (II.i.63). John of Gaunt's treatment of Neptune represents the principles of security and threat within the English paradise, and it is a paradise made all the more valuable by the possibility of its loss. This seems a variation on a familiar emblem book theme, instanced aptly by Thomas Combe:

Iupiter, as the learned Homer writes,
Mingleth the good and bad in such a sort,
That men obtaine not pleasures and delights,
Without some paine to waite vpon the sport.(52)

The Biblical Eden possessed, in the fruit of the tree of knowledge, the latent means of its own destruction. To equate Bolingbroke and Neptune would be to equate the serpent and the fruit, the agent of doom and the principle of threat.

The encirclement motif finds variation later in the play, where the image is again Classical. In the fifth act, Queen Isabel offers this emotional statement of her grief:

Ah, thou, the model where old Troy did stand;
Thou map of honour, thou King Richard's tomb,
And not King Richard; thou most beauteous inn,
Why should hard-favour’d grief be lodg’d in thee,
When triumph is become an alehouse guest?

(V.i.11-15)

The critic John Erskine Hankins cites, as the source of the phrase “the model where old Troy did stand,” Proverbs 25.28: “He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down, and without walls.”⁵³ This does not appear to be an accurate interpretation of Shakespeare's line, if one bears in mind the two encirclement metaphors that immediately follow. Sir Henry Newbolt is much closer to the truth when he argues that “Troy symbolized ruined greatness which only the outline of its walls is left to tell of.”⁵⁴ Through its association with the grave and the “barren earth” at III.ii.153, “model” acquires the additional connotation of a “mould” which remains extant after the processes of decay have returned to dust man's mortal body. As such, it is indicative of Troy's walls rather than of “a city that is broken down, and without walls.”

Since a number of European nations derived their origins from ancient Troy (the British from Brutus; the Italians from Aeneas; the Danes and Normans from Antenor), we might reasonably expect that the story of Troy would be of particular interest to them. The most famous of the secular English emblem books published in the sixteenth century, Geoffrey Whitney's A Choice of Emblemes (1586), has at least four wood cuts that relate in some way to Troy.⁵⁵ The destruction of that celebrated city could well be construed as a crime against legendary excellence, for not only did the English commonly see in the saga of Troy the origins and greatness of their own race, but Trojan civilization was considered a cultural, moral, and military perfection.⁵⁶ With this in mind, let us return to the Queen's line, “Ah, thou the model where old Troy did stand.” Assuming, for reasons already offered, that the line identifies Richard with the Trojan wall and that his tragedy is figured in terms of old Troy's inner destruction at the hands of the Greeks, we may observe that the significance of the Queen's image is both national and individual.

Our understanding of the “national” connotation of the old Troy image must be informed by an appreciation of the Tudors’ very high estimation of Trojan worth. We must accept, as well, the commonly understood equation of king and kingdom which is given notable expression in this play (at II.i.95, for example). As Troy's walls embraced the jewel of Trojan civilization, so Richard's regal body may be seen as embracing the jewel of England's heroic spirit. By its association with the loss of a great and ancient society, the mythology of the English fallen paradise aspires to a tragic dimension that might not otherwise have been within its reach. The reverberations are felt in the two metaphors that follow—Richard as a tomb and Richard as a beauteous inn occupied by grief. The theme of the king as an encircling receptacle is here re-emphasized with accumulating force. Far from embodying the glorious spirit of the English mythology, Richard's national body now harbors the decimation, spiritual nadir, and grief of a lost English Eden.

On an individual plane, while Richard does, to some degree, revel in the “luxury of religious inwardness and resignation,”⁵⁷ it is hard to believe that the experience of deposition left him spiritually and mentally unscathed. That sense of inner destruction we feel in the mirror scene:

’Tis very true: my grief lies all within;
And these external manner of laments
Are merely shadows to the unseen grief
That swells with silence in the tortur’d soul.

(IV.i.295-98)

The individual's soul in the fallen world of England becomes as the soul in the fallen world of the Bible. A tortured and silent prisoner trapped within a body whose fleshy walls are not able to reflect the inner decimation, the soul can only find its freedom in physical death. An emblem of Francis Quarles, published far too late to have influenced Shakespeare's usage, reveals a melancholy, human-formed soul trapped within the rib cage of a smiling skeleton.⁵⁸ In a bizarre inversion of iconographic symbol, Quarles presents physical life as a skeleton and spiritual life as a human figure engaoled within the bony bars of mortality. Queen Isabel's words search for a similar, if less dramatic, effect. Coming, as it does, only nine lines after an allusion to Richard's journey to “Julius Caesar's ill-erected tower” (V.i.2), her Trojan reference evokes the picture of a physical wall encircling the desolation within.

Richard himself is not oblivious to the prospect and consequences of a fallen paradise. Robbed of his kingship and the subject of increasing physical confinement, Richard begins to acknowledge the certainty of the lost second Eden by redefining his own approach to the soul and spirituality. His praise of the English earth on his return from Ireland will be well remembered:

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.
As a long-parted mother with her child
Plays fondly with her tears and smiles in meeting,
So weeping-smiling greet I thee, my earth,
And do thee favours with my royal hands.

(III.ii.4-11)

And a few lines later:

This earth shall have a feeling, and these stones
Prove armed soldiers, ere her native king
Shall falter under foul rebellion's arms.

(III.ii.24-26)

The earth as a mother, fruitful and friendly, is one of Gaunt's idioms for England as a second paradise. Richard appeals to the same, identifying himself (albeit a little ambiguously) as the son of the earth and its indigenous king. But more than this, he credits the “ubiquitous symbol of earth,”⁵⁹ as Richard Altick has called it, with a certain moral quality, a “soul” perhaps, that enables it not only to distinguish but also to defend the righteous. The waves of soldiers Richard imagines the earth will spawn to protect his monarchy are a fanciful variation on the theme of a regenerating heroic spirit. Physical life and spiritual well-being are not contradictory in this native mythology. But in the darkness that tends to envelop Richard's spontaneous flights of optimism, his understanding of “life” and “death” in spiritual and physical terms moves closer to that of the sixteenth-century emblematists and, in fact, closer to what we might consider a Biblical conception of the world after the Fall. In such a world, notions of physical life and spiritual life, as we have seen, are no longer complementary. King Richard expresses the disjunction of the two ideas in a number of ways. Worthy of note are his desire for a “new world's crown” at V.i.24 (in 3 Henry VI, at I.ii.29-30, Richard, afterwards Duke of Gloucester, observes of the earthly version: “How sweet a thing it is to wear a crown, / Within whose circuit is Elysium”); his “Christianization” of some elements of Gaunt's encomium at III.iii.145-53, culminating in a mocking surrender of “my large kingdom for a little grave, / A little little grave, an obscure grave” (ll. 153-54); and, finally, his anticipation of spiritual freedom at the moment of death: “Mount, mount, my soul! thy seat is up on high; / Whilst my gross flesh sinks downward, here to die” (V.v.111-12). The earthly crown is rejected, the earth symbolizes no longer a reproductive mother but a grave, and the soul becomes the mournful prisoner of life itself. Shakespeare's technique of adjusting figures of the English mythology to serve the anti-mythology is once again evidenced in Richard's tragic expression of the English paradise lost.

IV

The most arresting figure of the English mythology and the anti-mythology schemata that Richard elects to utilize is that of Death. We are not able to talk of an explicit equation of Death and the English soldier, as we are in King John. The overriding air of pessimism and doom in Richard II apparently negates the search for a myth-hero or any of the imagistic accoutrements that might go with such a person. Death seems to have been all but monopolized by the anti-mythology, but this is not to suggest that its advent is always distasteful. Hearing of the return of Bolingbroke, the Queen actually recommends Death because he “gently would dissolve the bands of life” (II.ii.71). Isabel's ideal Death, like Constance's “amiable lovely death” (King John, III.iv.25), is certainly not the prancing ruffian of a typical danse macabre series or the fiend that Sir Walter Raleigh says “hateth and destroyeth man.”⁶⁰ But he does have something in common with a rarer and gentler conception of Death as illustrated in, say, Holbein's print of “The Old Man”⁶¹ or in Georgette de Montenay's cut of an old man stepping out of a symbolically hollow world, assisted by a sympathetic-looking skeleton.⁶² In both these instances, it is old age and a willingness to die that makes Death less frightening. (A similar notion may be deciphered in King Lear where, on occasions, it seems that death is a privilege rather than a right, a reward that must be earned by Lear and Gloucester through suffering.) Such death, though, must always fall within the domain of the anti-mythology since the desire for life and the celebration of the same are crucial to the processes of the English mythology. Nonetheless, the more dramatic references to Death in the lost paradise aspire towards some degree of fear and threat. Here is King Richard:

for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court; and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp;
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear’d, and kill with looks;
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life
Were brass impregnable; and, humour’d thus,
Comes at the last, and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!

(III.ii.160-70)

According to Matthew W. Black, editor of the New Variorum edition of the play, Douce (1807) was the first to suggest that the seventh print in Holbein's Imagines Mortis may have inspired these lines.⁶³ Douce's observation is an intriguing one. The cut in question reveals a personified Death preparing to lift the crown off the head of an unsuspecting emperor. Helen Morris, who seems unaware of Douce's observation, writes in her paper “Shakespeare and Dürer's Apocalypse” that in the Holbein cut, Death as a skeleton “is clearly seen perching ‘within the hollow crown / That rounds the mortal temples’ of the Emperor.”⁶⁴ It is unlikely, though, that Shakespeare's image is any more than suggestive of the print. Matthew Black, again in the New Variorum edition, cites Collier as making the point that “death is represented as taking off an emperor's crown; and not sitting and keeping his court in it” (p. 198), and Margaret Beck (p. 198) has similar reservations. Be this as it may, Dance of Death images do figure powerfully in the play:

My inch of taper will be burnt and done,
And blindfold death not let me see my son.

(I.iii.223-24)

I will despair, and be at enmity
With cozening hope—he is a flatterer,
A parasite, a keeper-back of death,
Who gently would dissolve the bands of life,
Which false hope lingers in extremity.

(II.ii.68-72)

Cry woe, destruction, ruin, and decay—
The worst is death, and death will have his day.

(III.ii.102-3)

How now! what means death in this rude assault?

(V.v.105)

The first edition of Imagines Mortis was published by Johin Frellon at Lyons in 1538, and, by 1542, a third edition (Latin) had appeared.⁶⁵ The danse macabre was not the creation of Hans Holbein—its origins extend back to antiquity.⁶⁶ As an art form, it was popular in the Middle Ages, but its history need not be elucidated here: Emile Mâle⁶⁷ has made a detailed study of the danse macabre in his work L’Art Religieux de la fin du Moyen Âge en France, and H. Noel Humphreys⁶⁸ has traced the probable medieval influences of the art form on Holbein's work in Hans Holbein's Dance of Death—though few would deny that the German artist raised the genre to a level of artistic excellence that is generally considered unsurpassed. As noted earlier with respect to his Icones Historiarvm, given Holbein's artistic prominence in the English court of Henry VIII, and the amazing popularity of Imagines Mortis in the sixteenth century, it seems quite probable that Shakespeare was acquainted with the work.

Pertinent to Shakespeare's usage is Holbein's unnerving sense of skeletal Death as an accepted figure within living society. In the first print of Icones Historiarvm Veteris Testamenti, Death strums his lute on the edge of Eden, waiting in hope for the transgression that will bring about his awful dominance of a fallen world.⁶⁹ Thereafter, he mingles with the living, apparently unnoticed—a fearful and threatening reminder of Eden lost. He spends much of his time shadowing potential victims and, at the moment of death, he assails his subject in a spirit of grim humor and cruel determination. In Shakespeare's words, he allows a king “a breath, a little scene, / To monarchize, be fear’d” and then “Comes at the last, and with a little pin / Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!” Thomas Combe writes in 1593 that “The Prince, the poore, are laid in graues alike,”⁷⁰ and Andrew Willet, in Sacrorum Emblematum Centuria Una (1592?), echoes these Biblical sentiments when he affirms “we are all of earthly traine, and must away.”⁷¹ Richard's contempt for things earthly is reflected in his reference to the “hollow crown” in which the antic Death keeps his court. The word “hollow” is connected with falsehood as early as I.iv.9 when Aumerle describes to the king his “hollow parting” with Hereford. It gathers a dark momentum through its association with the “hollow eyes of death” at II.i.270, and with the grave at III.ii.140, and may be related to the notion of the hollow womb in the fallen English paradise. By the time it serves Richard's antic Death allusion, it has been well established as a key term in the nomenclature of a fallen English Eden.

It has become customary to remark upon Richard's strange “victory” in the closing scenes of the play. Harold F. Folland believes that “Richard, behind and through his apparently helpless self-dramatization, continues to fight his case against Bolingbroke so as to achieve a moral victory which has enduring political consequences. And in passing the royal power on to Henry, Richard subtly alters its character by dimming its numinous light.”⁷² Lois Potter is of the view that, even in death, “Richard dominates the scene in his silence as he had dominated it before with words.”⁷³ The case for Richard's triumph is particularly persuasive in the deposition scene, where Richard consistently trumps awkward attempts to discredit him, responding to his captivity with a blend of defiance and wit:

K. RICH.
God save the King!
Will no man say amen?
Am I both priest and clerk? Well then, amen.

(IV.i.172-73)

BOLING.
Name it, fair cousin.
K. RICH.
Fair cousin! I am greater than a king;
For when I was a king, my flatterers
Were then but subjects; being now a subject,
I have a king here to my flatterer.
Being so great, I have no need to beg.

(IV.i.304-9)

BOLING.
Go, some of you convey him to the Tower.
K. RICH.
O, good! Convey! Conveyers are you all,
That rise thus nimbly by a true king's fall.

(IV.i.316-18)

Lurking on the periphery of Bolingbroke's new court, Richard scoffs at its pomp, ridicules its usurped authority, deflects its censure. In a scene that witnesses the “official” transference of power or, in loyalist terms, the ceremonial fall of paradise, the significance of Richard's presence to the rebel assemblage perhaps has something in common with Hans Holbein's smiling, skeletal Death shadowing Adam in the world after the Fall. Within two scenes, Bolingbroke must endure the indignity of an abortive attempt on his life and, a scene after that, the irony of the Duchess of York's grateful praise: “A god on earth thou art” (V.iii.136). If murderous conspiracy aimed at his life proves nothing else, it demonstrates that Bolingbroke is in no way immune to the machinations of the world, lacking both the omnipotent power and the immortality of the Duchess's “god on earth.” Standing in his court, mocking his majesty with world-weary humor, Richard, like a skeleton of former glory, both reminds us of what Bolingbroke is yet to become and figuratively, as Death the antic jester, confirms an Hebraic scheme of the fallen world—a scheme once muted by the repetitive, and therefore death-defying, greatness of the English mythology. Bolingbroke may applaud his new order, but it is an order irresistibly claimed by the anti-mythology whose grim inversions will reduce great aspirations to futile regrets.

Holinshed provides a number of different accounts of King Richard's death, including the rumor that he “was tantalised with food and starved to death.”⁷⁴ It is revealing that the dramatist should select the story that he was murdered by Sir Pierce of Exton. Though Richard may achieve a revelatory understanding of his own mortality, such knowledge can do little to mitigate the surprise and horror of his own death. His final moments are a frenetic far cry from the gentle expiry of old Lear. The dramatic scenario Richard had constructed for himself at III.ii.160-70 finds a grim fulfillment in a murder that, for its violent movement, has much in common with the grotesque animation of the Dance of Death itself. As Exton enters, Richard's cry of “How now! what means death in this rude assault?” (V.v.105) would grace the lips of many a danse macabre victim striving vainly to elude the skeletal grasp in Holbein's series. In the undignified battle for life in the Pomfret cell, and in the stark symbol of the coffin in the last scene of the play, Shakespeare's visual designs become theatrical emblems in a vast and tragic mythology of English paradise lost.

Notes

1. Thomas Stocker in the “Epistle Dedicatorie” to his own translation of A Tragicall Historie of the troubles and Ciuile Warres of the lowe Countries, otherwise called Flanders (1583), sig. A2^r. The work has been attributed to Marnix van Sant Aldegonde, but more recently is thought to be the work of A. Henricpetri.

2. The line is to be found in Bingham's prefatory poem to G. Peckham's A Trve Report, Of the late discoueries, and possession, taken in the right of the Crowne of Englande, of the New-found Landes (1583), p. 10.

3. Pointed out by Edward Surtz, ed., Utopia (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1964), p. 59n, who quotes Erasmus as saying that More's Utopia “represented chiefly Britain” (Ep. 4.21).

4. Cited by Peter Ure in his Arden edition of King Richard II, 4th ed. (London: Methuen, 1956), note to II.i.42.

5. The quotation is from “The Epistle Dedicatorie” to Silvester Jourdan's A Plaine Description of the Barmvdas, now called Sommer Ilands (1613), sig. A3^r.

6. Stocker, sig. A2^v.

7. Quoted by Peter Ure, ed., King Richard II, in his note to II.i.42.

8. The scheme is discussed by John E. Hankins in his paper “Spenser and the Revelation of St. John,” PMLA, 60 (1945), 364-81.

9. Du Bartas. His Diuine Weekes And Workes with A Compleate Collectiõ of all the other most delight-full Workes, trans. Joshua Sylvester (1605), p. 462.

10. “Two Passages in Sylvester's Du Bartas and their Bearing on Shakespeare's Richard II,” Notes and Queries, 198 (1953), 374-77.

11. “Britain Among The Fortunate Isles,” Studies in Philology, 53 (1956), 117.

12. Shakespeare's Imagery (Cambridge: Univ. Press, 1935), p. 238.

13. Ed. Henry Green (facsimile rpt. Manchester: A. Brothers, for the Holbein Society, 1869), sig. B1^v. This book portraying Old Testament figures was first published at Lyons in 1538. See illustration on page 335 of this article.

14. The Bible: That Is, The Holy Scriptures conteined in the Old and New Testament (1603). This is the Genevan version. Genesis 3.17: “Also to Adam he said, Because thou hast obeyed the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree (whereof I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eate of it) cursed is the earth for thy sake: in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the dayes of thy life.” And Genesis 3.19: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou returne to the earth: for out of it wast thou taken, because thou art dust, and to dust shal thou returne.”

15. Giovanni Battista Lambi, A Revelation of the Secret Spirit, trans. R.N.E. (1623), p. 2.

16. See Arthur B. Chamberlain, Hans Holbein The Younger (London: George Allen, 1913), II, 186.

17. Chamberlain, Hans Holbein The Younger, I, 228.

18. Emblemata Moralia et Oeconomica, De Rervm Vsv et Abvsv (1579, first publ.; Arnhemi: Apud Ioannem Iansonium Bibliopolam ibidem, sumptibus Theodori Petri Bibliopolae Amstelrodamiensis, 1609), sig. E1^v.

19. Emblemata (1581), p. 50.

20. De Rervm Vsv et Abvsv (Antwerpiae, 1585), p. 19. This is a translation of Bernard Gerbrand Furmer's work of the same name which first appeared in 1575.

21. Les Devises Heroiques, De M. Claude Paradin, Chanoine de Beaujeu, Du Signeur Gabriel Symeon, & autres Aucteurs (1551, first publ.; Anvers: De l’Imprimerie de Christophle Plantin, 1561), p. 151^r. See illustration on page 336 of this article.

22. The emblem is reproduced by Henry Green in Shakespeare and the Emblem Writers (London: Trübner, 1870), p. 530.

23. Emblemata, cum aliquot nummis antiqui operis, Ioannis Sambuci Tirnaviensis Pannonii (Antwerpiae, 1564), p. 240.

24. Emblemas Morales (Segouia, 1591), p. 194 and p. 252. The work was first printed in 1589.

25. A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne (1635), ed. Rosemary Freeman (Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1975), p. 21. See illustration on page 336 of this article.

26. “Britain Among The Fortunate Isles,” p. 123.

27. Historia Britonum, ed. J. A. Giles (London: D. Nutt, 1844), p. 2. G. H. Gerould, in his article “King Arthur and Politics,” Speculum, 2 (1927), 34, believes that Geoffrey issued his history between 1136 and 1138.

28. Raphael Holinshed, The First and Second Volumes of Chronicles (1587), p. 3.

29. See W.H.D. Rouse's translation of De Rerum Natura, 3rd ed. revised by Martin Ferguson Smith (1937; rpt. London: William Heinemann, 1975), V. 258-60 and 783-820.

30. Sylvester, trans., Du Bartas. His Diuine Weekes And Workes, p. 462 (“The Colonies”).

31. “Symphonic Imagery in Richard II,” PMLA, 62 (1947), 346.

32. A few examples will perhaps serve to demonstrate the dramatist's interest in this imagistic direction. In 1 Henry VI, Mortimer talks of those who “laboured to plant the rightful heir” (II.v.80). York, in 2 Henry VI, vows to “reap the harvest” (III.i.381) sown by the ambitious Jack Cade. In 3 Henry VI, Warwick insists “I’ll plant Plantagenet, root him up who dares” (I.i.48), Richard describes how Clifford “set his murd’ring knife unto the root” (II.vi.49) of Rutland, and King Edward tells his son that “of our labours thou shalt reap the gain” (V.vii.20). These themes extend into Richard III where, for instance, Richard is described as a “rooting hog” (I.iii.228), and the Duke of Buckingham predicts that “Though we have spent our harvest of this king, / We are to reap the harvest of his son” (II.ii.115-16).

33. The Plays and Poems of George Chapman, ed. Thomas Mare Parrott (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1914), p. 447.

34. John Erskine Hankins, Shakespeare's Derived Imagery (Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas Press, 1953), p. 157, cites an interesting parallel in La Primaudaye's The French Academie: “If we consider how our common mother the earth, being prodigal in giuing vnto vs all things necessary for the life of man, hath notwithstanding cast all of vs naked out of her bowels, and must receiue vs so againe into her wombe, I see no great reason wee haue to call some rich, and others poore; seeing the beginning, being, and ende of the temporall life of all men are vnlike in nothing, but that some during this little moment of life haue that in abundance and superfluitie, which others haue onely according to their necessitie.” Though, as Hankins suggests, this may be the immediate source of the Earth as Mother theme, La Primaudaye's emphasis on material wealth, or the lack of it, does not reflect the context of Shakespeare's Mother-Earth usage.

35. “The Sun-King Analogy in Richard II,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 11 (1960), 321.

36. The Gardener talks of the “wasteful king” (III.iv.55) and compares Richard to an incompetent husbandman who ought to have taken more care of his garden. Bolingbroke, an act earlier, is openly bitter that his rights and royalties have been snatched from him and given to “upstart unthrifts” (II.iii.122), and describes Bushy, Bagot, and their accomplies as “The caterpillars of the commonwealth, / Which I have sworn to weed and pluck away” (II.iii.166-67).

37. For the idea of Richard as a martyr, see John Palmer, Political Characters of Shakespeare London: Macmillan, 1945), p. 118; Karl F. Thompson, “Richard II, Martyr,” SQ, 8 (1957), 159-66; Donald M. Friedman, “John of Gaunt and the Rhetoric of Frustration,” ELH, 43 (1976), 279-99.

38. The idea of the sun-king identity has been explored by many critics: Paul Reyher, “Le Symbole du Soleil dans la tragédie de Richard II,” Revue de l’Enseignement des Langues Vivantes, 40 (1923), 254-60; Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Shakespeare's Imagery, pp. 233-38; Samuel Kliger, “The Sun Imagery in Richard II,” Studies in Philology, 45 (1948), 196-202; Wolfgang Clemen, The Development of Shakespeare's Imagery (London: Methuen, 1951), p. 59.

39. Guillaume de La Perrière, The Theater of fine devices, containing an hundred morall emblemes, trans. Thomas Combe (1593, first publ.; R. Field, 1614), Emblem X. La Perrière's original French edition first appeared on the continent in 1539.

40. Thesavrvs Lingvae Romanae & Britannicae, tam accurate congestus, vt nihil penè in eo desyderari possit, quod vel Latinè complectatur amplissimus Stephani Thesaurus, vel Anglicè, toties aucta Eliotae Bibliotheca (1565, first publ.; John Torkington, 1584), sig. 7A2^r.

41. M. M. Reese writes in The Cease of Majesty (London: Edward Arnold, 1961), p. 262: “Stylistically Richard II and King John are linked in several ways, notably in the marked absence of prose, but also there are striking differences.” And E.A.J. Honigmann, ed., King John, 4th ed. (London: Methuen, 1954), p. lxviii.

42. The Lost Garden: A View of Shakespeare's English and Roman History Plays (London: The Macmillan Press, 1978), p. 135.

43. (Stockbridge, Mass.: Herbert Reichner, 1978), p. 2.

44. (1592), sig. G2^v.

45. The Civile Wares betweene the Howses of Lancaster and Yorke (1595, first publ.; Simon Waterson, 1609), Bk. I, st. 67.

46. Holinshed, The First and Second Volumes of Chronicles, 1587, p. 3: “Now to speake somewhat also of Neptune as by the waie (sith I haue made mention of him in this place) it shall not be altogither impertinent. Wherefore you shall understand, that for his excellent knowledge in the art of nauigation (as nauigation then went) he was reputed the most skilfull prince that liued in his time. And therefore, and likewise for his courage & boldnesse in aduenturing to and fro, he was after his decease honoured as a god, and the protection of such as trauelled by sea committed to his charge.”

47. Holinshed, p. 4. Neptune apparently wished to see his thirty-three sons (of whom Lestrigo was one) occupy the great kingdoms of the world.

48. For a full account of the mythology associated with Neptune, see J. Lemprière, Lemprière's Classical Dictionary of Proper Names mentioned in Ancient Authors, rev. ed., F. A. Wright (1949; rpt. London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), “Neptunus.” Lemprière first published his dictionary in 1788.

49. Homer, The Iliad, trans. E. V. Rieu (1950; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978), p. 392.

50. The words are attributed to Richard by Edward Hall in The Vnion of the two noble and illustre famelies of Lancastre & Yorke (1548), fol. 6^r.

51. “Sun and Water Imagery in Richard II: Its Dramatic Function,” SQ, 21 (1970), 158.

52. The Theater of fine devices, Emblem LVII.

53. Shakespeare's Derived Imagery, p. 217. In The Bible: That Is, The Holy Scriptures (Geneva version), the same verse reads as follows: “A man that refraineth not his appetite is like a city which is broken downe & without wals” (Proverbs 25.28).

54. Quoted by Peter Ure, ed., King Richard II, note to V.i.11.

55. A Choice of Emblemes (Leyden, 1586), pp. 30, 37, 45, and 163.

56. In recognition of Old Troy's excellence, Henry Peacham, in Minerva Britanna: Or A Garden of Heroycal Devices (Wa. Dight, 1612), p. 34, expounds the valor of Trojan youth in battle and proposes, as well, the greatness of Trojan culture and art. In the same work, William Leigh writes of a vision in which he saw a Nymph dressed in white and mourning on the ruins of Troy, “So grieu’d to see that Britaine should enjoy / Her Pallas, whom she held and honour’d so” (sig. B4^r). The British acquisition of Troy's Pallas is a coup indeed!

57. G. Wilson Knight, Shakespeare's Dramatic Challenge (London: Croom Helm, 1977), p. 32.

58. Emblemes (1634), p. 272.

59. “Symphonic Imagery in Richard II,” p. 343.

60. Sir Walter Raleigh: Selections from his Writings, edited with an introduction and notes, by G. E. Hadow (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1917), p. 116. The extract is from The Historie of the World (1614).

61. See Hans Holbein, The Dance of Death, introduction and notes by James M. Clark (London: Phaidon Press, 1947), in which “The Old Man” print from the 1538 Lyons edition is reproduced on p. 71.

62. Georgette de Montenay, Emblematvm Christianorvm Centvria (1571, first publ.; Tigvri, 1584), p. 89^r. See illustration on page 335 of this article.

63. Matthew W. Black, ed., A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Life and Death of King Richard the Second (Philadelphia and London: Lippincott, 1955), p. 198.

64. Shakespeare Studies, 4 (1968), 252.

65. Arthur B. Chamberlain, in Hans Holbein The Younger, I, 212-14, lists some of the many editions of the Imagines Mortis that appeared in various parts of Europe in the sixteenth century. It is worth noting that the work was originally (1538) called Les Simulachres & Historiees Faces de la Mort, avtant elegammet pourtraictes, que artificiellement imaginées, but by the end of the sixteenth century it was already popularly known by the Dance of Death title.

66. Pierre Quoniam, Le Louvre (Paris: Editions des Musées Nationaux, 1977), p. 30, describes a first century A.D. goblet, in the Musée du Louvre, which has a Dance of Death motif on its outer surface.

67. L’Art Religieux de la fin du Moyen Âge en France (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1908), pp. 375-422.

68. Hans Holbein's Dance of Death (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1868), p. 5.

69. See Henry Green, ed., Icones Historiarvm Veteris Testamenti, sig. B1^r.

70. The Theater of fine devices, Emblem XXVII.

71. Sacrorum Emblematum Centuria Una, quae tam ad exemplum apte expressa sunt, & ad aspectum pulchre depingi possunt, quam quae aut a veteribus accepta, aut inventa ab aliis hac extant (1592?), sig. F2^r.

72. “King Richard's Pallid Victory,” SQ, 24 (1973), 390.

73. “The Antic Disposition of Richard II,” Shakespeare Survey, 27 (1974), 41.

74. Quoted by Geoffrey Bullough in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, III (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), 413.

In the documentation of pre-1800 references, London is assumed as the place of publication unless otherwise indicated. All quotations from Shakespeare are taken from Peter Alexander's edition of William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1978). I am very grateful to Professor T. F. Wharton, formerly of the University of Glasgow and now of Augusta College, Georgia, who read through early drafts of this essay and offered much encouragement and a great deal of expert advice.