SOURCE: “The Phaëton Allusion in Richard II: The Search for Identity,” in English Literary Renaissance 17, No. 3, Autumn, 1987, pp. 277-87.

[In the following essay, Merrix investigates the implications of Richard's reference to the Phaëton myth, arguing that this allusion incorporates various themes appropriate to the characterization of Richard, including the search for self, pride and its fall, and the chaotic results of “ambivalent leadership.”]

When confronted by Bullingbrook at Flint Castle, Richard II cries: “Down, down I come, Like glist’ring Phaëton, / Wanting the manage of unruly jades” (3.3.178-79).¹ Discussion of the allusion to Phaëton in relation to Richard runs from a mere reference by Maurice Evans² to an elaborate analysis of its relation to art and poetics in English poetry by Parker Tyler.³ The allusion is used by Shakespeare in three other plays: The Two Gentlemen of Verona (3.1.153-58) where Silvia's father, the Duke of Milan, terms Valentine a Phaëton who “aspires to guide the heavenly car / And with thy daring folly burn the world”; Romeo and Juliet (3.2.3) where Juliet in her famous apostrophe to night notes that if “a waggoner as Phaëton” were whipping the “fiery-footed steeds, / Towards Phoebus’ lodging,” he would “bring in night immediately”; and 3 Henry VI, where the allusion appears twice (1.4.33); (2.6.12). In the first reference Lord Clifford compares the capture and proposed execution of the Duke of York with “Phaëton tumbling from his car and making an evening at the noontide prick.” The second reference is also used by Clifford, this time in relation to Henry VI's political impotence: “Henry had thou sway’d as kings should do, / Or as thy father and his father did … / [Then] thou this day hadst kept thy chair in peace.”

In their Classical Myth and Legend in Renaissance Dictionaries, Starnes and Talbert assert that in “three, probably four, of these quotations [they ignore Romeo and Juliet] the story of Phaëton is used to symbolize ambition for power to rule, or given the power, inability to handle the ‘unruly jades.’”⁴ They agree with Robert K. Root⁵ that while “Shakespeare could have drawn his knowledge of the myth from Ovid … there are no striking verbal similarities.”⁶ They go on to suggest that another possible source for Shakespeare is the Dictionarium of Charles Stephanus, which originally derives from Comés’ Mythologiae. After summarizing the story of Phaëton, referring to Ovid, Lucian, and Comés, Stephanus concludes with this moral interpretation of the “fabula”: “Howsoever it be, the fable doth present unto us a picture of an inconsiderate and ambitious Prince, who being touched with an eager desire of Majesty, before his times ascends the Throne, but shortly after, letting loose the reins by his undiscreet Government, he sets his subjects all in a combustion, and endangers his own downfall.”⁷

T. W. Baldwin suggests that Shakespeare may have used Erasmus’ De Copia for the allusion, although Baldwin ignores Richard II and discusses the allusion in relation to The Two Gentlemen of Verona: the Phaëton reference explains Valentine's attempts to overreach himself.⁸ Erasmus’ reference is quite brief, although he does combine Icarus and Phaëton as allegorically representing pride, thus confirming the traditional yoking of the two figures: “it is quite obvious … that the tale of Icarus falling into the sea warns that no one should rise higher than his lot in life allows, and the story of Phaëton that no one should undertake to perform a task that is beyond his powers.”⁹

That Phaëton/Icarus became symbolic for pride was a commonplace; as such, Phaëton was an apt example for immature royalty whose pride preceded their fall. The figure was especially popular in the emblem books. In Andreas Alciati's Emblemata, for example, the pictura in the Phaëton emblem (Emblem LVI) shows Phaëton falling headfirst from his father's chariot as the horses buck and rear wildly. The inscriptio reads “In temerarios,” and the subscriptio compares Phaëton's fate to that of ambitious princes, although the medieval wheel of Fortune is mingled with princely ambition:

Sic plerique rotis fortuna ad Sidera Reges
Evecti, ambitio quos evuenilis agit.
Post magnam humani generis clademque suamque
Conctorum paenas denique dant Scelerum.(10)

Although the Phaëton allusion appears in three other Shakespearean plays, its use in Richard II is unique in the canon. Of all the characters associated with the allusion, only Richard identifies himself with Phaëton. Moreover the Phaëton story as told by Ovid in the Metamorphoses and in Golding's translation suggests a far more complex meaning than ambition or inability to govern. Indeed, it plays a vital role in characterizing Richard II. It is the longest episode in Ovid and, while it involves pride and its fall, its major meaning is Phaëton's search for identity. As G. Karl Galinsky notes in his analysis of the Metamorphoses, Phaëton's quest is not only “an external search for his parentage, but … a psychological quest for his [own] identity.”¹¹ Thus Ovid carefully excludes elements usually related to the myth, especially Phaëton's traditional metamorphosis into the constellation Auriga. In Ovid, Phaëton's metamorphosis is really an anagnorisis, his recognition of his limitations and his failure to rule his charges. Although his body is burned, it is not tranformed and is buried in a grave. The typical grotesque metamorphoses are transferred to his sisters, who become trees, and to his best friend, Cygnus, who becomes a swan. Because it incorporated such themes as the search for identity, pride and its fall, and the physical and social chaos that results from ambivalent leadership, Ovid's myth was a nearly perfect vehicle for Shakespeare to use in Richard II.

In Ovid's version of the myth Phaëton has grown up assuming he is the son of Sol. When doubts are expressed about that by Epaphus he becomes insecure. Since he has not really known his father he creates fantasies about his father's superhuman nature and, by extension, about himself. When his father tries to dispel that image (he tells Phaëton that he himself is frightened when he drives his chariot through the sky) Phaëton refuses to listen to such warnings. To accept a lesser father would be to become a lesser son. Since he is unable to give up what Galinsky calls the “ego-ideal of being like what he thought his father to be,” he insists on driving the chariot, “a tangible symbol of the power and greatness which he associated with his father” (p. 51), and which he wishes for himself.

Inherent in Richard II are the major traits exemplified by Phaëton. His pride and stubborn refusal to heed advice about his limitations are clearly evident throughout the play prior to his fall. Especially significant is his reaction to the warnings of Gaunt and York, both of whom like Epaphus in Ovid raise doubts about his identity. Gaunt first accuses Richard of “seeing ill” or failing to recognize himself or his enemies and of being “Landlord of England … not king.” Gaunt reminds Richard that his “state of law is bond slave to the law” (2.1.93-114).¹² The second doubt about Richard's identity, following Richard's seizure of Gaunt's lands, comes from York who suggests, rhetorically of course, that Richard may not be the son of the Black Prince:

His face thou hast, for even so look’d he,
Accomplish’d with [the] number of thy hours;
But when he frowned it was against the French,
And not against his friends. His noble hand
Did win what he did spend, and spent not that
Which his triumphant father's hand had won.
His hands were guilty of no kindred blood,
But bloody with the enemies of his kin.
O Richard! York is too far gone with grief,
Or else he never would compare between.

(2.1.176-85)

The contrasts exemplified by York are heightened by the descriptions of Richard's father in Froissard and Holinshed where the Black Prince is indeed given godlike attributes. First of all, unlike his son, Edward battled bravely against the French King John at the battle of Poitiers (September 1356). Froissard asserts that he “had the courage of a lion” and “took great delight that day in the fight” (DNB, VI, 513) and Holinshed enthusiastically describes Edward's actions: “And the prince himselfe did not onelie fulfill the office of a noble cheefteine, but also of a right valiant and expert souldiour, attempting what soever any other hardie warriour would in such cases have done.”¹³

Edward's actions following the battle reflect his magnanimity. In his “meeke and comfortable oration” to the captured King John, he praises the French King for his valor and honor; and he attributes his own victory to the will of God. Most significant, however, and serving to highlight the differences between father and son, is the episode involving Edward's attempt to reestablish King Peter of Castile to the throne usurped by Peter's bastard brother, Henry of Trastamare. When Peter reneged on a promise to pay half the soldiers’ wages, the prince broke up his own plate so that the soldiers might be paid: how unlike Richard who seized others’ goods and farmed out the lands to raise money for his ventures! Holinshed's commemoration must have driven home to Shakespeare the gulf between the Black Prince and his son:

On the eight of Iune being Trinitie sundaie (the parlement yet continuing) that noble and famous prince Edward the kings sonne departed this life within the kings palace at Westminster. His bodie was conueied to Canturburie with great solemnitie, and there honorablie buried. He died in the 46 yeare of his age: a prince of such excellent demeanour, so valiant, wise and politike in his dooings, that the verie and perfect representation of knighthood appeared most liuelie in his person, whilest he liued, so that the losse of him stroke a generall sorrow into the harts of all the English nation. For such was his towardnesse, or rather perfection in princelie gouernement, that if he had liued and attained to the crowne, euerie man iudged that he would suerlie haue exceeded the glorious renowne of all his ancestors. (II, 703)

It is important that we recognize another relationship common to Phaëton and Richard. Since neither young man has really known his father, neither has had a real role model to follow. Phaëton has never seen Phoebus and Richard was only nine when the Black Prince died. Thus both knew of the fathers only through what was said about them or what was conjured up in their imaginations. Yet both were forced to assume the reins of power before being prepared to rule. Fearing the growing influence of John of Gaunt, Parliament quickly named Richard heir apparent upon the death of the Black Prince and prevented any of Richard's uncles from being appointed to the council which ruled for him following the death of Edward III. Richard thus had only stories of past glory, similar to those recounted by York, to relate to.

Phaëton had even less knowledge of his father, so that he is forced to fabricate exploits for his companion, Epaphus. During one of these episodes when Phaëton fulsomely glorifies his father (magna loquentem), Epaphas spreads the seeds of doubt and creates the circumstance leading to Phaëton's destruction. Phaëton's demand to drive the horses upon meeting his father, an irrational and arrogant act, is roughly analogous to Richard's seizure of Gaunt's lands: both acts reflect the immaturity and petulence associated with childhood. Both acts upset the natural order of things, one physical, the other political.

In seizing Gaunt's lands, of course, Richard breaks the law of primogeniture and separates himself from the law of the realm, a law that he himself is bound by, as York later reminds him: “for how art thou a king / But by fair sequence and succession” (2.1.198-99). In breaking this law, Hooker's Jus gentium and Sir John Fortescue's Jus polliticum, Richard also assumes a new identity operating under a new law, that which Fortescue termed Jus regale—a tyrant who would not have the realm “governyd bi any Ooer rule or lawe, but bi his owne wille.”¹⁴

Like Phaëton, Richard ignores the warnings from his counselors, primarily because he has identified himself with divine rather than earthly power, a divine power symbolized by the sun, the Plantagenet badge. The relationship is established by the bravado analogy he uses in replying to Aumerle's warning of Bullingbrook's increasing power. He starts by noting that when “the searching eye of heaven is hid … thieves and robbers range abroad unseen.” But when the sun “fires the proud tops of the eastern pines / And darts his light through every guilty hole, / murthers, treasons, and detested sins … Stand bare and naked, trembling at themselves.” Richard completes the analogy of Bullingbrook as thief and himself as the sun:

So when this thief, this traitor Bullingbrook,
Who all this while hath revell’d in the night
…
Shall see us rising in our throne, the east,
His treasons will sit blushing in his face,
Not able to endure the sight of day,
But self-affrighted tremble at his sin.

(3.2.47-53)

This analogy continues until his fall. He insists that God will send “glorious” angels to fight for him and muster “Armies of pestilence.” These and other assertions of divinity are frenzied attempts at self-euhemerism—quite similar to those of Phaëton’s—which become even more frequent after his fall, when he employs the Christ analogy. His identification with divinity blocks out all warnings by his counselors (both Carlisle and Aumerle urge him to confront Henry). Like Phaëton, he cannot bear to be merely mortal. Power resides not in military strategy—in earthly action—but in sovereignty, in Divine Being. Obviously, then, when that power he has identified with fails him, as it does when Salisbury informs him of losing the Welsh soldiers, he begins to doubt his new identity, his Jus regale, and ultimately attempts to establish still another one. The ambivalence occurs immediately. He notes that the loss of twenty thousand men is “reason to look pale and dead,” but when Aumerle urges him to “remember who you are,” he quickly reasserts himself: “I had forgot myself, am I not king? / Awake thou coward majesty! Thou sleepest. / Is not the king's name twenty thousand names?” Yet his call to arms is to his “name,” his “great glory,” and he bids his favorites not to look “to the ground” but on high: “are we not high? / High be our thoughts.” The crisis of identity intensifies following his descent from Flint Castle and the subsequent deposition scene. When Northumberland attempts to address him, Richard responds: “I have no name, no title … And know not now what name to call myself.” From this moment on (4.1) Richard no longer uses the royal “we.” His loss of identity and attempts to recreate himself explain the references to Christ; the hermit allusion (3.3.144-57); the mirror episode in which he questions the old analogy: “Was this the face / That like the sun, did make beholders wink?” (4.1.283-84); and, at last, the nihilistic final surrender prior to his murder:

Thus play I in one person many people,
And none contented. Sometimes I am a king;
Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,
And so I am. Then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better when a king;
Then am I king’d again, and by and by
Think that I am unking’d by Bullingbrook,
And straight am nothing. But what e’er I be,
Nor I, nor any man that but man is,
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eas’d
With being nothing.

(5.5.31-41)

Several references specifically linking Richard to Phaëton occur prior to Richard's final fall at Flint Castle. In Golding, Phaëton is both “yong in yeares and wit.”¹⁵ Richard's youth and impatience are stressed by York when Richard visits the dying Gaunt: “Deal mildly with his youth, / For young hot colts being rag’d do rage the more” (2.1.69-70). More significant is the short episode between the Welsh captain and Salisbury (2.4) a parallel to an episode in Ovid. In Ovid, Phaëton's runaway chariot wreaks havoc on the earth:

“the Moone was in a maze to see his brothers Waine
Run under hirs: the singéd clouds began to smoke amaine.
Each ground the higher that it was and nearer to the Skie,
The sooner was it set on fire, and made therewith so drie.
That every where it gan to chinke. The Medes and Pastures greene
Did seare away: and with the leaves, the trees were burnéd cleene.
The parchéd corne did yeelde wherewith to worke his owne decaie.

(p. 46)

The Welsh captain gives a similar description of his country, noting that such “signs forerun the death or fall of kings”: “The bay trees in our country are all wither’d, / And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven, / The pale faced moon looks bloody on the earth” (2.4.8-10). Another parallel occurs in the “shooting star” image: in Ovid, Phaëton “Shot headlong downe, and glid along the Region of the Ayre / Like to [a] Starre in Winter nightes.” And his father, Sol, “With ruthful cheere and heavie heart … made great mone. / And would not shew himself abrode, but mournd at home alone” (p. 49). Salisbury foreshadows Richard's similar fate:

Ah, Richard! with the eyes of heavy, mind
I see thy glory like a shooting star
Fall to the base earth from the firmament.
Thy sun sets weeping in the lowly west,
Witnessing storms to come, woe and unrest.

(2.4.18-22)

The efficient cause of Richard's fall, like Phaëton’s, is his failure to control his unruly jades. But these same jades were made “unruly” by giving them too much rein. Just as Phaëton “let the bridels slacke,” permitting the horses to run wild, so Richard permitted his subjects to rule him. As the Gardener notes following Richard's fall:

[We] at time of year
Do wound the bark, the skin of our fruit trees,
Lest being over-proud in sap and blood
With too much riches it confound itself;
Had he done so to great and growing men,
They might have liv’d to bear and he to taste
Their fruits of duty. Superfluous branches
We lop away, that bearing boughs may live;
Had he done so, himself had borne the crown.

(3.4.57-65)

In Ovid, Phaëton is urged by his father to drive his chariot in the proper course: “For be thou sure, / And if thou mount above thy bounds, the starres thou burnest clean. / Againe beneath though burnst the Earth: most safetie is the meane” (p. 44). In Richard II a similar mean is suggested, again by the Gardener in the order to his servant:

Go thou, and like an executioner
Cut off the head of [too] fast growing sprays,
That look too lofty in our commonwealth:
All must be even in our government.

(3.3.33-36)

The physical fall of Richard at Flint Castle best exemplifies Richard's problem with his identity. When Bullingbrook asserts that the castle holds no royalty, he is assured by Percy that “it doth contain a king.¹⁶ King Richard lies / within the limits of yon lime and stone” (3.3.23-25). The question now is whether Richard is really a king—a leader capable of managing his “unruly jades.” At Flint Castle Bullingbrook urges all to “mark King Richard how he looks” and returns to the celestial analogy when Richard appears on the walls:

See, see, King Richard doth himself appear,
As doth the blushing discontented sun
From out the fiery portal of the east,
When he perceives the envious clouds are bent
To dim his glory and to stain the track
Of his bright passage to the occident.

(3.3.62-67)

York responds immediately: “Yet looks he like a king!”

But appearances are deceiving. In Golding, Phaëton's head is “annointed” with “heavenly salve”: “which done, upon his haire / He [Phoebus] put the fresh and golden rayes himselfe was wont to weare” (p. 44). Thus Phaëton “appears” to be a driver of the sun although he is not. For Phaëton and for Richard appearance is not identity because identity involves function. It is not enough to look like a king or the driver of the sun. One must be the king or the driver. Phaëton has assumed a false identity and fails when he attempts to drive his horses by appearance only. Richard, too, has assumed a false identity—the God-protected and thus omnipotent king—and fails when he attempts to rule his subjects by appearance rather than by law. Neither Phaëton's “heavenly salve” nor Richard's “annointed balm” can substitute for true identity which emerges through performance. When this realization dawns, Phaëton and Richard are both confused and helpless. Phaëton “wisht he that he never had his fathers horses see, / it yrkt him that he thus had sought to learn his piedegre. / It grievde him that he had prevailde in gaining his request.” He also “wisht not what was best to doe, his wittes were ravisht so. / For neither could he hold the Reynes, nor yet durst let them go” (p. 45). Richard voices similar uncertainty after failing to confront Bullingbrook:

Or 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!

(3.3.136-39)

Richard loses the power of metaphysical authority to elicit respect and fear for his earthly rule. Thereafter he has only purely political alternatives: to rule wisely according to the law of the realm or foolishly under his private tyranny. In the end he either does not act at all or acts as one totally unfamiliar with rule. As Eileen Allman notes, Richard's separation of name from act “immobilizes the land and speaks for rebellion as health.”¹⁷ Thus when Richard attempts to act on the basis of his lost name—the ruler properly appointed by God—he fails because he is not prepared for the one-dimensional world he has created.

With the realization that he is not truly king, Richard like Phaëton falls. The fall from false sovereignty is accompanied by the literal descent from the castle walls to the “base court” below. His identification of himself with Phaëton is thus complete: each has assumed an identity based on the belief that appearance alone would guarantee success. But “jades,” whether equine or human, must be managed. Richard's pun (manage = manège, the art of horsemanship) grimly signals his anagnorisis. From this point on he attempts to find other identities: hermit, Christ, beggar, and finally nothing. “King Bullingbrook,” whose identity emerges from his ability alone will now manage England's jades, including even Richard's roan Barbary, a fact that astonishes the deposed king: “Would he not stumble? Would he not fall down, / Since pride must have a fall, and break the neck / Of that proud man that did usurp his back?” (5.5.87-89) But Bullingbrook rides true because he has no doubts about his identity, as he informs York who confronts him upon Bullingbrook's arrival back in England: “As I was banished, I was banished Herford / But as I come I come for Lancaster” (2.3.113-14). Moreover, for now, he rides the “meane” and will keep tight rein on all his subjects in the Commonwealth, and maintain “all even” in his English Garden. Just as the Gardener “lops off” superfluous branches, Henry IV lops off the heads of Salisbury, Spenser, Blunt and Kent at the end of the play.

The Phaëton myth as told by Ovid in Golding's version contains the major thematic, structural and imagistic elements associated with Shakespeare's Richard II. The parallels in Golding's translation are more clearly related to Shakespeare's play than those from any other source. Such evidence convinces me that Shakespeare had Golding's version in mind when he used the Phaëton allusion.

But the major contribution of Ovid's Phaëton story is the question of identity which, I believe, Shakespeare used in his characterization of Richard. As we can see in Shakespeare's choice of stories from the Metamorphoses, specific classical figures are employed because they exemplify the type of characterization he seeks. An obvious example is Shakespeare's reworking of the Venus and Adonis myth. Since the original Adonis in Ovid's story was much too eager for love, the regular Ovidian story is heavily supplemented by the Salmacis and Hermaphroditus story (Book 4) which dramatizes the more appropriate reluctant male (Hermaphroditus). Ovid's Phaëton myth, with its thematic search for identity by an immature youth, was ideal for Shakepeare's treatment of Richard II.

Notes

1. All quotations from the plays are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston, 1974).

2. “Metaphor and Symbol in the Sixteenth Century,” Essays in Criticism, 3 (1953), 267-84.

3. “Phaëton: The Metaphysical Tension Between the Ego and the Universe in English Poetry,” Accent, 16 (1956), 29-44.

4. De Witt T. Starnes and Ernest William Talbert, Classical Myth and Legend in Renaissance Dictionaries (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1955), p. 119.

5. Robert K. Root, Classical Mythology in Shakespeare (New York, 1965), p. 97.

6. Starnes and Talbert, p. 119.

7. Quoted from Starnes and Talbert, p. 120. The translation is by Holyoke and Littleton.

8. William Shakespeare's Small Lataine and Lesse Greeke (Urbana, Ill., 1944), II, 195.

9. Quoted from the Collected Works of Erasmus, Vol. 24, ed. Craig R. Thompson, p. 611. De Copia is translated and annotated by Betty I. Knott.

10. Quoted from Starnes's and Talbert's reproduction, p. 118.

11. Ovid's Metamorphoses: An Introduction to the Basic Aspects (Berkeley, Cal., 1975), p. 49.

12. Gaunt's lines are glossed by the Riverside edition to mean “your legal status is no longer that of a ruler by divine right but that of a subject under law.” But the line (set off by a stop in the Folio) surely is a reminder that Richard's law should be Jus polliticum (Fortescue) like any other king’s, rather than a comment about Richard's changed legal status. In either event Gaunt asserts that Richard has taken on a new role. After this it is Richard who asserts the prerogative of “divine right.”

13. Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1808), II, 666.

14. The Governance of England, ed. Charles Plummer (Oxford, 1885), p. 111. Hooker asserts that the power of the king over all is limited and that “unto all his proceedings the law itself is a rule.” See also Burleigh's comment on Elizabeth: “I would be loath to live to see a woman of such wisdom as she is, to be wrongly advised … that her prerogative is above the law.” Quoted from Edna Z. Boris, “The Tudor Constitution and Shakespeare's Two Tetralogies,” College Literature, IV (1977), 197-209. The Burleigh quotation is from Elizabeth Jenkens, Elizabeth the Great (New York, 1959), p. 280.

15. Shakespeare's Ovid: Arthur Golding's Translation of the “Metamorphoses,” ed. W. H. D. Rouse (New York, 1966), p. 44. Subsequent quotations are from this edition.

16. Henry's surprise about Richard's presence in the castle is unhistorical since Richard had been ambushed by Northumberland and forced to go to Flint. Shakespeare thus further manipulates history to create doubts about Richard's identity.

17. Player-King and Adversary: Two Faces of Play in Shakespeare (Baton Rouge, La., 1980), p. 22.