SOURCE: “The ‘Parasitical’ Counselors in Shakespeare's Richard II: A Problem in Dramatic Interpretation,” in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 33, 1982, pp. 142-54.

[In the following essay, Gaudet examines the discrepancy between Shakespeare's portrayal of Richard's advisors—Bushy, Bagot, and Greene—and the way the three are typically perceived (as “caterpillars of the commonwealth”). Gaudet demonstrates that Shakespeare presents the advisors as passive attendants in order to highlight Richard's own blameworthiness.]

In act II, scene III of Richard II, Bolingbroke characterizes his return from exile as the advent of justice to a disrupted land. As patriotic subject, he has sworn “to weed and pluck away” the King's favorites, Bushy, Bagot, and Greene, whom he labels “caterpillars of the commonwealth.”¹ Almost immediately—Bolingbroke's words are followed by a brief interlude protending disaster—we see Bolingbroke in Act III, scene i expeditiously sentencing to death two of those “caterpillars,” Bushy and Greene. Their guilt is taken as manifest in Bolingbroke's charges, and they are led out “To execution and the hand of death” (III.i.30).

I

Bolingbroke's harsh and summary justice is certainly vindicated by the historical judgment that Shakespeare inherited. Shakespeare's written sources consistently associate Richard's downfall with the injustices and prodigality urged upon him by his lubricious favorites. Edward Hall in The Union of the Two Noble & Illustre Families of Lancastre & Yorke (1548) records that Richard distributed the confiscated estates of Gaunt to “his paresites and flattering foloers”; Hall has Richard confess in his speech of resignation that he was “partely ruled and misauised by the euell & sinister councell of peruerse & flatteryng persons.”² The ghost of Richard in The Mirror for Magistrates (1559) similarly acknowledges that he “alway put false Flatterers most in trust.”³ Raphael Holinshed in his Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1587) essentially repeats the version of Hall. He affirms the “great and priuie hatred” of the commons for Richard's favorites and adds an extended description of the sumptuousness of Richard's court, which concludes “Thus was king Richard depriued of all kinglie honour and princilie dignitie, by reason he was so giuen to follow euill counsell.”⁴ Even Samuel Daniel in The Civil Wars (1595), an account more sympathetic to Richard and ambivalent about Bolingbroke's motives and the justness of his actions, includes Richard's flatterers as a possible cause of his overthrow: “And such, no doubt, about this King arose, / Whose flatterie (the dangerous nurse of vice) / Got hand vpon his youth, to pleasures bent. …”⁵ This commonly accepted view marked the favorites as insinuating subverters of royal integrity on whom Richard squandered what was not his to give.

What had previously been asserted or chronicled in narrative was given dramatic form in the anonymous play The First Part of the Reign of King Richard the Second or Thomas of Woodstock. Here one finds a direct and unambiguous portrayal of the favorites' villainy. The forces of good center on Woodstock, the Duke of Gloucester, whose historical character as a severe and grasping politician, fiercely jealous of his prerogatives, has been transformed into a symbol of English plainness, honest values, and hereditary rights. In contrast, the plotting favorites with their Continental foppery represent all that is to be shunned in an English commonwealth. When they appear on stage we see them enacting the very things with which they are charged: screwing the law to their own advantage, devising new instruments of taxation to support their lavish habits, jailing loyal citizens who resist extortion, and contemptuously acknowledging deception and flattery as their means of thriving. The play leaves no doubt that it is these wanton minions who have corrupted English justice and abased the King. As Woodstock sees, they must be purged, if king and country are to be restored to health:

When the head akes, the body is not healthfull.
King Richard's wounded with a wanton humor
Luld & securd by flattering Sicophants
But tis not deadly yett, it may be curd,
Some vayne lett blood, wher the corruptione lyes. …(6)

We accept Woodstock's view that blood-letting is necessary to rid England of its “ranckorous weeds,” not because his perspective is consistent with the Chronicles, but because the reliability of his judgment is demonstrated within the play in the actions and attitudes of the favorites.

The presentation of character in Woodstock is essentially declarative; that is, characters unambiguously announce to the audience through their actions and words what they are and what they intend. This validation of word by action and the reinforcement and generalization of action by word also constitute the dramatic method of Marlowe in Edward II and of Shakespeare in the first tetralogy. In the opening scene of 1 Henry VI, for example, Shakespeare directly portrays the rivalry between Gloucester and Winchester and then introduces a messenger who attributes the heavy military losses in France to the factious wrangling of English nobility at home. The messenger's charge is validated by a preceding action; that action is shown to be recurrent, moreover, and is commonly known. Such a concurrence of staged action and report determines an audience's perception of civil conflict as a fact within the play; at the same time, it deepens and extends our sense of that conflict. Similarly, the covert intentions that Winchester announces at the end of the first scene are further corroborated by the Tower incident (I.iii) and periodically reinforced by asides or direct admission.⁷

II

In contrast to the blatant treatment of the favorites in Woodstock and the declarative method of characterization in the first tetralogy, Shakespeare's dramatic technique in Richard II, for major and minor characters alike, is more allusive. It represents a more complex mode of experience for the audience. This is particularly true of Shakespeare's portrayal of Bushy, Bagot, and Greene. There is a conspicuous lack of any action or speech by the favorites that might depict their guilt and substantiate the charges leveled against them; there are no explicit and unqualified indicators that declare their meaning for an audience. Yet it is virtually a critical given that in Richard II Shakespeare presents the favorites just as they appear in the Chronicles and in Woodstock. With few exceptions, commentators have viewed them as defilers of a king and have labeled them as they are judged by Bolingbroke and their other political opponents in Richard II—as evil advisers, personified vices, parasitic growths, and flattering serpents.⁸

This emphasis on attributed guilt—based on allusions by Gaunt, direct charges by Northumberland and Bolingbroke, and the Gardener's “choric” vindication of the favorites' execution—is usually associated with appeals to the expectations of Shakespeare's audience. Critics assume that an audience already familiar with the guilt of the favorites from preceding accounts would automatically have seen Shakespeare's courtiers as misleading parasites. Since their mere presence on stage would have served as a visual reminder of their subversive influence, it is said, Shakespeare had only to offer a brief summary of their deeds to persuade the audience of their responsibility for Richard's corruption.⁹

Certainly, an audience brings to a play's subject and situation a core of thoughts and feelings that a dramatist must take into consideration. But just how restrictive are those expectations? To what degree do they limit a dramatist in his shaping of a particular experience? Is he not free to play with his audience's assumptions—to tease, challenge, perhaps modify them? Commentators who seek to explain away Shakespeare's failure to stage the favorites' malevolence seem to imply that Shakespeare's audience held a rigid and uniform view of English history and came to the theatre expecting their preconceptions to be met. And yet, if this were so, how would an audience steeped in its Holinshed have responded to the considerably altered portrait of the Duke of Gloucester in Woodstock? And which image of the Duke would that audience have expected to find confirmed in Richard II? While recognizing that there are contradictions enough in the historical sources and their literary adaptations to preclude narrow audience expectations, and while allowing that Shakespeare could make other significant changes to create and sustain a dramatic impression, we have nevertheless insisted on Shakespeare's tradition-bound handling of Bushy, Bagot, and Greene. Before seeking explanations that are external to the text, we might well question what the absence of staged guilt could signify within the play; and we should begin by observing the specific dramatic stimuli which Shakespeare has provided for our understanding of the favorites and their role in Richard II.

III

What becomes evident when one starts with the sequence of dramatic moments leading up to the death sentence of Act III, scene i is that the internal dramatic evidence does not support the received critical opinion of Shakespeare's “parasites.” Shakespeare has fashioned a series of shifting impressions in which he acknowledges the traditional image of courtiers whose acquiescence flatters and encourages Richard, but at the same time clearly removes from the favorites the blame for Richard's decadent kingship. The principal case against Bushy, Bagot, and Greene is in the form of assertion and accusation. These are essentially partisan censures that can be taken as true only if we are willing to disregard the political motives in which they originate and only if we accept allegation as proof. Further, in the few scenes in which the favorites actually appear, Shakespeare seems to have cultivated a tension between what they are said to be and how an audience experiences them. Not only does he suppress any direct revelation of their “evil”—this could have been rendered quite economically in a single line or gesture—but he makes specific changes that shift the responsibility for corrupt policy to Richard himself. By dramatizing the favorites as passive attendants to the King, Shakespeare isolates Richard's willfulness: he listens to no counsel, good or bad. And by removing the traditional external cause of Richard's misgovernment, Shakespeare underscores the equivocal nature of Bolingbroke's rise to power and the strategic eliminations that herald his ascendancy.

Our first distinct impression of the favorites comes in Act I, scene iv. A director may choose to introduce Bushy, Bagot, and Greene as members of the court party in scenes i and iii, but their presence is not stipulated by the text, nor is it important. Our attention is directed to more pressing matters in Richard's handling of the Mowbray-Bolingbroke contest. With this preliminary crisis over, Shakespeare begins to define the dimensions of Richard's kingship. It is at this point that the play invites us to notice the favorites. Bagot and Greene are a silent audience while Richard and Aumerle, released from the restraints of official politeness, offer sneering assessments of Bolingbroke's political aspirations. Since Shakespeare has not specifically excluded traditional assumptions, the mere presence of the favorites associates them with the politic duplicity of Richard and Aumerle, just as their silence implies concurrence with Richard's proposals to tax the nation and confiscate Gaunt's estate.¹⁰ However, they are not the pernicious schemers of Woodstock: they do not flatter with words, and they do not proffer bad advice. In fact, the one explicit gesture that Shakespeare gives to Greene indicates political common sense. He recalls Richard from his hatred of Bolingbroke to more immediate necessities of state: “Well, he is gone; and with him go these thoughts. / Now for the rebels which stand out in Ireland …” (I.iv.37-38). Greene seems to be reminding Richard, as Carlisle and Aumerle counsel later, that kingship cannot be maintained through the pursuit of personal obsessions.

Shakespeare further differentiates the favorites by emphasizing Richard's initiative and control. Richard's reply to Greene's advice is a direct confirmation of his political shortcomings as described in the Chronicles. He refers to his sumptuous court, his depleted coffers, and his plans to finance the Irish wars by farming the realm and instituting blank charters; but, contrary to the Chronicles and Woodstock, these are presented as Richard's devices, not devices recommended by his favorites. Likewise, it is Richard who meanly prays for Gaunt's death and anticipates the looting of his wealth.¹¹ In his initial dramatization of Richard's abuses, Shakespeare has departed from his sources in a significant way. Instead of showing us a weak king, manipulated into wrong choices by parasitic minions, Shakespeare has focused on errors that the headstrong Richard insists on making for himself.

The following scene begins with echoes of the Chronicle accounts of Richard's excesses. Gaunt proposes to spend his dying breath in “wholesome counsel” to Richard's “unstaid youth” (II.i.2). York replies that “all in vain comes counsel to his ear” because “it is stopp'd with other flattering sounds” (II.i.4 and 17). His accusation accords with what we have just been shown in the previous scene. The image of youthful vanity, indiscriminate in its love of novelty, is both a description of the favorites and an indictment of Richard. If sound counsel is in vain, it is because Richard insists on his own way: “Direct not him whose way himself will choose” (II.i.29). His worst excesses in the play are not the result of anyone's advice; they are shown to be self-conceived. Richard is self-violating. Gaunt echoes this when he speaks of “Light vanity, insatiate cormorant,” which “soon preys upon itself” (II.i.38-39). In depicting the sickness of his king and nation, Gaunt asserts that Richard is a “careless patient” who has committed his cure to “those physicians that first wounded thee”; he warns him against the “thousand flatterers” that “sit within thy crown” (II.i.97-100). In performance, a glance or gesture in the direction of the silent favorites would underline Gaunt's contempt for fawning courtiers whose compliance convinces a king to think of himself as greater than he is. But Gaunt's rebuke applies equally to Richard, who has erred in his choice of companions; and since the “compass” of the crown is “no bigger than thy head,” we are also drawn to think of the self-induced flatteries with which a man deceives himself. Although Gaunt clearly dislikes the favorites, his main concern is not their flattery but Richard's irresponsibility—his destruction of English prosperity, the shame with which he has stained his family name, and his guilt in the shedding of a noble kinsman's blood.

The favorites are important in these early scenes only in so far as they reflect on Richard. They are simply there, silent and passive, a scenic reminder of Richard's misplaced values. Shakespeare has not dramatized their flattery as a calculated attempt to create personal advantage by misleading a king; their behavior is rather a tacit acceptance of Richard's will, a form of passive encouragement. The fact that Richard has surrounded himself with attendants who acquiesce rather than counsel or contradict corroborates the judgments of York and Gaunt and is consistent with Shakespeare's emphasis on Richard's willfulness.

Unfortunately, many directors overdo the staging of the favorites as a means of providing in performance the traditional associations that would have been accessible to many members of Shakespeare's audience. The usual production of the play has them as effete, homosexual peacocks—their speech honeyed with courtesy, their manners shrewdly obsequious—who take sadistic glee in Richard's abuse of power and exchange mocking smirks in the presence of Gaunt and York. This depiction of the favorites distorts Shakespeare's stagecraft. It places the accent where he has not placed it, on the ground rather than the figure, and it overrides the dramatic variations by which Shakespeare seeks to control his audience's assumptions. The focus and energy of these scenes should center on Richard, on a king who seeks flattery to confirm his own image of himself and who reacts with childish ferocity to those voices of external reality that would qualify the fanciful and self-soothing play of his inner world. Theatrically, the favorites are meant to serve only as a tonal background for Shakespeare's definition of Richard.

IV

The closing segment of Act II, scene i is crucial for our understanding of how Bushy, Bagot, and Greene are used by Richard's opposition. With the separation of Ross and Willoughby from Richard's court, Shakespeare introduces a pattern of visual impressions that prepare an audience for the inevitability of the King's fall. In alternating scenes, the forces of Richard are characterized by dispersal (II.ii, II.iv) while groups are forming around the figure of Bolingbroke (II.iii, III.i). At the same time that he dramatizes this rush for political change through visual signs of power lost and power gained, Shakespeare also leads his audience to reflect critically on what the new agents of power represent. His dramatic technique has encouraged us to sympathize with Gaunt and York in their censures of Richard. These characters are not motivated by self-interest. Gaunt speaks for England; York argues for Bolingbroke's rights; and both seek to preserve the dignity and principles of kingship. Their fears of Richard's willful folly are validated by his behavior; and their opposition to the King is expressed as open counsel. By the end of this scene, however, honest and blunt counsel has been replaced by a world of political conspiracy that is covert, self-interested, and hypocritical.

Willoughby and Ross are a vestige of Gaunt's traditionalism, but less firm in their convictions and more susceptible to fear. In an act of political seduction, Northumberland cunningly maneuvers them to circumvent the restraints of duty and conscience and to join him in armed support of Bolingbroke. Northumberland's chief persuasive device is his vilification of the favorites. In contrast to all that we have seen, he casts Bushy, Bagot, and Greene as actively malicious, responsible not only for Richard's past offenses but also for those violations that he feels are sure to come:

The king is not himself, but basely led
By flatterers; and what they will inform,
Merely in hate, 'gainst any of us all,
That will the king severely prosecute
'Gainst us, our lives, our children, and our heirs.

(II.i.241-45)

As we witness the transformation of the favorites into the major issue for Richard's enemies, our perspective is ironic. Shakespeare presents Northumberland's statement as a verbal inducement, intended to edge Ross and Willoughby toward an action to which he himself is already committed. By identifying Richard's injustices with an external cause and representing his political jealousy as solicitous concern for Richard's proper kingship, Northumberland deludes his peers into moving against the King without seeming to do so.¹² Since earlier scenes have shown that the problem rests not with the flatterers but with the King, an alert audience will greet Northumberland's resolve to “Wipe off the dust that hides our sceptre's gilt, / And make high majesty look like itself” (II.i.294-95) as an ominous forecast of Richard's undoing. By emphasizing Northumberland's distortion of the favorites' role, moreover, Shakespeare casts a pall over the new political order before it has even begun. Whatever its justification and promise, it will be a setting in which power works through concealed motives and rationalized means.

V

At this point Shakespeare shifts our attention to the intimate trio of the Queen, Bushy, and Bagot. This has the effect, dramatically, of isolating Northumberland's verbal charges between two scenes of direct portrayal that offer contrary images and assessments of the favorites. This kind of scenic framing offers Shakespeare another means of underlining the partisan nature of Northumberland's claims. Contrary to the views of those who find evidence of artifice and corruption, Act II, scene ii can provide a rather different sense of the favorites—once we leave aside any predisposition to find here the “parasites” of the Chronicles.¹³ This invented scene begins with a stage image of apparent harmony and coherence within the court. In the absence of Richard, his favorites attend the Queen. The fact that she is confiding to Bushy and Bagot the heavy sadness of her “inward soul” suggests a relationship of trust. Bushy's conventional wisdom and courtly formality may seem pale by comparison with the irrational power of the Queen's intuition, particularly since Shakespeare emphasizes the strength of the Queen's argument. We have foreknowledge that sinister events are in motion even before Greene's entrance proves her correct. Yet this does not mean that we should discount Bushy's advice as facile or untrue. As the play amply reminds us in the person of Richard, sorrow can exaggerate and distort; it can breed spectral fears that are in excess of the facts. Just as Richard later would “hate him everlastingly / That bids me be of comfort any more” (III.ii.207-8), so the Queen now turns on those who would hinder her will to despair by counseling hope, not in rejection of the favorites but in anger at her own pain.

The favorites' desire to seek safety at the end of the scene is presented as a realistic assessment of their situation in the face of a general desertion from Richard. We are told that Greene has defended the King by declaring as traitors Northumberland and the rest of the “revolted faction.” His resistance has been answered by Worcester's angry resignation of his office and by the flight of Richard's household servants. The Queen has accepted death as inevitable; there is fear of a general “revolt on Herford's side” (II.ii.89); and York, flustered and defeatist, is not sure where his allegiance lies. Faced with this confusion, the favorites take stock of their position: there is no news from the King in Ireland; it would be impossible for them to levy an army sufficient to withstand Bolingbroke; their “nearness to the king in love / Is near the hate of those love not the king” (II.ii.126-27); and the deadly hatred of the wavering commons, whose “love / Lies in their purses” (II.ii.128-29), would tear them to pieces. In voicing their awareness of how they are valued, they allude only to guilt by association with the King; in no way does Shakespeare have them exhibit or reflect on any other guilt with which they are charged. As it is presented, their decision to seek refuge—Bushy and Greene at Bristow Castle and Bagot with Richard in Ireland—is not cowardly desertion but a prudent response to impending catastrophe, a response that the dramatic context clearly invites us to accept. We have already seen Northumberland's deliberate misjudgment. York's vacillation and capitulation (II.iii) and the vengeful intent of Bolingbroke, vowed in Act II, scene iii and executed in Act III, scene i, further prove that the favorites' instincts, like the Queen's intuition, are right.

Although it is frequently abbreviated in performance, the scene establishes several significant impressions to prepare an audience for the play's climactic action. While it does not deflect the overt dramatic movement, the eclipse of Richard's kingship by the swelling fortunes of Bolingbroke, it does create an emotional atmosphere of sorrow and loss that is in affective tension with Bolingbroke's ascendancy; and this, in turn, indirectly contributes to our perception of the favorites. Before we see Bolingbroke, confident and efficient in his return, we see the disturbing effects of that return on those closest to Richard. The advent of Bolingbroke is thus dramatized ambivalently. He may provide the occasion of hope for many, whom we do not see, but he is also the bringer of pain to characters whom we experience directly, including York, who sees “a tide of woes … rushing on this woeful land at once” (II.ii.98-99). The differing perspectives of Bushy and the Queen on the nature of sorrow anticipate the paradox of Richard's inner kingdom of sorrow in which he weaves macabre fantasies of abuse, abasement, and death, while penetrating with an unaccommodating bluntness the factitious posturings of “patriotic” rebels. The fact that the Queen's grieving proves to have been in anticipation of something that does occur raises the possibility that Richard's sorrow, self-indulgent as it may be, is also an intuitive perception of the inevitable.¹⁴ But just as Richard's affective response is hopelessly inadequate to the irresistible force of Bolingbroke, so in this scene those closely associated with Richard react to the onslaught of Bolingbroke by giving themselves up to despair. It its situation and atmosphere of disintegration and in its tone of sorrow, the scene is a prelude to Richard's capitulation in Act III, scene ii. Finally, in a foreshadowing action, the intimate community of Richard's inner court is shattered as the Queen and courtiers separate, and Bushy, Bagot, and Greene bid what they know to be their last farewell. A representation of dissolution as prologue to the consolidation of Bolingbroke's power is a pattern that is repeated twice in alternating scenes: first, the dispersal of the Welsh troops and the talk of ominous portents (II.iv) precedes Bolingbroke's assumption of the royal function of justice (III.i); and then in Act III, scene ii Richard disbands his own army and resigns his will to despair before his confrontation with Bolingbroke in the next scene. In each of the three instances in which this pattern occurs, the images of disorder are the immediate result not of Richard's misrule but of Bolingbroke's armed and unlawful return from banishment.

VI

In the remaining scenes that concern the favorites, Shakespeare focuses on the equivocal and self-righteous nature of the judgments the Bolingbroke faction pronounce on their opposition. Bolingbroke's fierce vow to purge England of its parasites comes at the end of a scene which hints that Bolingbroke is a man who knows the manipulative and concealing power of language and ceremonial forms.¹⁵ York terms his kneeling duty “deceivable and false” (II.iii.84), since he has broken the oath by which he had accepted his banishment and is violating England with “ostentation of despised arms” (II.iii.94). In reply, Bolingbroke plays the guileless innocent: “My gracious uncle, let me know my fault: / On what condition stands it and wherein?” (II.iii.105-6). To the charge that in “braving arms against thy sovereign” he is committing “gross rebellion and detested treason” (II.iii.107-11), Bolingbroke offers semantic evasion: “As I was banish'd, I was banish'd Herford: / But as I come, I come for Lancaster” (II.iii.112-13).

York has warned Bolingbroke that to “Be his own carver, and cut out his way, / To find out right with wrong—it may not be” (II.iii.143-44). Despite York's warning, in Act III, scene i Bolingbroke assumes Richard's function of justice, prefiguring his usurpation of Richard's kingship; and in a crude travesty of the judicial process he carves out his vengeful will against Bushy and Greene. Functioning as both accuser and judge, Bolingbroke enumerates their wrongs, not as charges to be tested and weighed, but as “causes” of their deaths. Like Pilate, he cleanses his hands “in the view of men,” more concerned with his public face than with the conduct of true justice. Bushy and Greene are allowed no defense; their guilt has already been determined in advance of Bolingbroke's public charade. Even if Shakespeare had dramatized their guilt, we might still question Bolingbroke's ruthless efficiency; but his “justice” seems all the more spurious in the absence of dramatic corroboration to persuade the audience of the truth of his charges.¹⁶ We have not seen the favorites misleading and disfiguring a king. On the contrary, Shakespeare has gone to great pains to dramatize Richard as willfully insulated against all counsel.

Our experience of the play also contradicts Bolingbroke's charge that Bushy and Greene have

                              with your sinful hours,
Made a divorce betwixt his queen and him,
Broke the possession of a royal bed,
And stain'd the beauty of a fair queen's cheeks
With tears, drawn from her eyes by your foul wrongs.

(III.i.11-15)

The only Queen's tears that we have witnessed have been caused by Bolingbroke (II.ii). And later, in the scene in which Richard and his Queen are separated forever, it is Bolingbroke and Northumberland who impose a double divorce on Richard, “ 'twixt my crown and me, / And then betwixt me and my married wife” (V.i.72-73).¹⁷

Bolingbroke's final charge, devised by Shakespeare, reveals what is really at issue here. Its climactic position, its length, and Bolingbroke's vehement sense of personal abuse hint at a more private anger, at the injured pride and jealousy that have been the consequence of his earlier exclusion from the King's favor. Again, because they are dramatically unsubstantiated, Bolingbroke's accusations are made to seem contrived. Shakespeare has not shown the favorites slandering Bolingbroke to Richard, causing his banishment, or consuming his estate. Nor do their final words betray any awareness of guilt. They go to their deaths courageous and unswerving in their commitment to Richard—in contrast to the pliancy of York and the servile flattery of Northumberland. They identify Bolingbroke with “the stroke of death” and assert that “the pains of hell” will “plague injustice” (III.i.31-34), thereby recalling the warning of Mowbray (I.iii.204-5) and anticipating Carlisle's admonitory prophecy that England will become “the field of Golgotha and dead men's skulls” (IV.i.144).¹⁸ While the scene affirms Bolingbroke's decisiveness, his “rough chastisement” casts him as a figure of grim Necessity who edges silently toward power, undisturbed by the querying voice of conscience that would hold a less calculating man accountable to himself.¹⁹

VII

The political allegory of the Gardener in Act III, scene iv is generally taken to vindicate Bolingbroke's strategic execution of the favorites and to embody in absolute terms the political and moral ideal of the play.²⁰ The Gardener depicts his function and setting as symbolic when he draws an analogy between his well-trimmed garden and the untended garden of the state. Richard has been a negligent gardener in a kingdom that is “full of weeds” and “Swarming with caterpillars” (III.iv.44-47). The parasites “that seem'd in eating him to hold him up, / Are pluck'd up root and all by Bolingbroke” (III.iv.51-52). In recalling for us Bolingbroke's promise “to weed and pluck away” the “caterpillars of the commonwealth” (II.iii.165-66), this scene would seem to confirm the favorites' guilt and to identify Bolingbroke as a model of ideal government.

In its detachment from the continuity of the plot, the scene does in fact invite us to reflect on what is taking place; and the Gardener serves a choric function in so far as he reminds us of Richard's political irresponsibility and establishes a mood of inevitability and regret in preparation for Richard's deposition in the following scene. But to accept the Gardener's notion that what the English polity needs is an efficient gardener and to see this notion as the symbolic or thematic center of the play is to violate the play's complex art by reducing it to a simple and ominously limited analogy that separates firm government from questions of moral and legal right and depicts the ideal politician, not as a solicitous governor, but as an executioner.²¹ If we were to apply the Gardener's “moral” too bluntly to the events of the play, we might well conclude that Richard, already tainted in some way by the blood of Gloucester, should have “Cut off the heads of too fast growing sprays” (III.iv.34), such as the “overproud” Bolingbroke. The Gardener's simplistic formula is at odds with the ambiguous world of concealed motive and undeclared intention that Shakespeare has been cultivating throughout the play.

The Gardener's miniature allegory conflicts with other elements of the play, then. But even within the scene in which it occurs it does not come to us as an unmediated truth; its external assessment of the political situation is placed in tension with the private emotional perspective of the Queen. Her prediction that the Gardener and his men will “talk of state, for everyone doth so / Against a change” (III.iv.27-28) associates the subsequent discussion with popular opinion, which is hostile to Richard and his favorites and enamored of Bolingbroke. The limited applicability of the Gardener's analogy is further indicated by other aspects of the scene. Shakespeare's use of the Queen as an on-stage audience encourages us to view the Gardener's political speculations as they affect her and to sympathize with her anger at the presumption of such a detached judgment on her husband. Her frustration and grieving echo the disturbed probing of Richard's inner world in the preceding scenes, just as her unborn sorrow in Act II, scene i is the play's overture to the expressive inwardness of Richard. By including the Queen as a representative of the affective and intuitive dimensions of experience, Shakespeare seems to imply what is lacking in the Gardener's hearsay judgment. The result is an interplay of perspectives, a dialectical tension that underscores the central contraries of Richard and Bolingbroke.²²

The Gardener, in his association with allegory and emblem and in the preceptive form of his judgment, is reminiscent of the modes of rhetoric and characterization to be found in the moralized history of The Mirror for Magistrates and in the relatively uncomplicated, univocal perspective of the Chronicles. But in Richard II Shakespeare does not moralize history in simple ways. His insights into the nature of politics and historical events do not come to us in the form of disembodied political ideas or as the cool censures of moral platitude. They are presented dramatically through the complicated interaction of flawed human beings who are both responsible for and controlled by particular events. Richard II is not solely about the fall of an inept dreamer-king; nor is it solely about the illegal rise to power of an efficient opportunist. It embodies a world in which right and wrong are seldom conveniently distinct, a problematic world in which royal dignity mingles with willful folly, in which patriotism is the guise of ambition, and in which no man is without his dark corners. Richard's rhetoric of sorrow can embarrass us with its silly extravagance, but it can also startle us with its desperate frankness. We can admire Bolingbroke's efficiency and reserve, but be troubled by his secretiveness and his ability to separate action from ethics and feelings.

Shakespeare's artistry is too subtle to be encompassed by the single-minded view of the propagandist. Instead it cultivates ambivalence, enigma, and obscurity of motive, only to leave ironic tensions unresolved. It immerses the audience in the “felt” dilemmas of those caught up in changing times and in the insoluble ironies of historical process, and it reminds us that simple judgments, such as the Gardener's, are rarely adequate.

VIII

All this the world well knows: there have been numerous critical studies of the ambiguous, problematic world of Richard II.²³ Yet commentators have continued to stress the “parasitic” image of the favorites, imposing a simple judgment on one aspect of the play and, in so doing, siding with Northumberland and Bolingbroke.²⁴ Why has Shakespeare suppressed any clear sign of their guilt that would vindicate Northumberland's fears and Bolingbroke's executions? Why has he tempered the accepted view by making them faithful servants of the King, by avoiding any hint that they are motivated by mean self-interest, and by shifting the initiative for political decision-making to Richard? By “neutralizing” their characters, making them passive attendants to an almost autistic king, and by presenting their “evil” solely through the accusations of their political enemies, Shakespeare has turned Bushy, Bagot, and Greene to his own use as dramatic reflectors. With no real influence on the political world of Richard II, and with little intrinsic interest as dramatic characters, they are nonetheless important as indicators or signifiers, as one of the means by which Shakespeare manipulates his audience's response to the main contending forces of the play.

In the early scenes (I.iv, II.i), the favorites serve as “objective correlatives” for certain aspects of Richard's personality—his vanity, his lavish excesses, his need for a positive reflection in the world's eye. This is how they are portrayed in the speeches of York and Gaunt. With Northumberland's formulation of the favorites' guilt, Shakespeare creates a perceptual tension, underlined by his emphasis on Northumberland's subversive cunning and his dramatization of the favorites as political victims, which should draw an audience's attention to the equivocations and expediency of Northumberland and, by extension, Bolingbroke. Politically, the favorites are ciphers whose principal guilt is simply being there, being “in favor”—although, as the Duchess of York somewhat sardonically points out after Bolingbroke's coronation, royal favorites are nothing new. “Who are the violets now / That strew the green lap of the new-come spring?” (V.ii.46-47). Bushy, Bagot, and Greene are those “lesser things” who take form from their environment and who, as pawns in a dynastic struggle, are eventually caught “Between the pass and fell incensed points / Of mighty opposites.”²⁵ Bushy and Greene die because Bolingbroke needs their deaths to symbolize his new role in the kingdom; and he needs them invested with importance and defamed so that he can justify their deaths. Bagot, on the other hand, is spared their fate because Bolingbroke needs him alive, as an instrument of his policy, to ferret out Richard's sympathizers.

Had Shakespeare chosen to dramatize the traditional image of the favorites in Richard II and to corroborate the hostile judgments of Richard's enemies, our perception of the main characters would be significantly altered. Richard, dominated and misled by his minions, would be less responsible for his misgovernment, and his dethroning would be correspondingly less acceptable to an audience; Bolingbroke, validated in his view of the favorites, would be justified in sentencing them to death, but hardly warranted in proceeding further against the King. This would be a simpler drama, closer to the polarities of Woodstock. In fact, Shakespeare has given us another play, far more complex in its multiple impressions of Richard, and far more equivocal about the forces that overthrow him. Shakespeare has deliberately modified the traditional characterization of the favorites to reinforce the play's ambivalent mode of experience, with its emphasis on the intricacies, deceptions, and follies of human politics. The oblique rendering of Bushy, Bagot, and Green in Richard II should not be dismissed as carelessness, nor as a reliance on audience expectations; it is rather an indication of Shakespeare's evolving artistic control in the adaptation of historical materials for the stage. It shows, in particular, his growth in the handling of character with subtlety and allusiveness and his ability to orchestrate all the elements of a play to sustain a central dramatic impression.

Notes

1. William Shakespeare, King Richard II, ed. Peter Ure, New Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1956), II.iii.165. All further references to this work appear in the text.

2. Hall's Chronicle, ed. H. Ellis (1809; rpt. New York: AMS, 1965), pp. 5 and 12.

3. William Baldwin et al., The Mirror for Magistrates, ed. Lily B. Campbell (1938; rpt. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1960), pp. 113-14.

4. Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 2nd ed., 1587, ed. H. Ellis (1807; rpt. New York: AMS, 1965), III, 843 and 868.

5. The Civil Wars, ed. Laurence Michel (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1958), Bk. I, sts. 30-31, p. 79.

6. Woodstock, I.i.152-57, as quoted in Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), III, 463.

7. See, for example, Winchester's aside in III.i.141 and the revelation that he had purchased his elevation to Cardinal (V.i.51-62), in The First Part of King Henry VI, ed. Andrew S. Cairncross, New Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1962).

8. Among others, see E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (1944; rpt. New York: Collier, 1962), pp. 267 and 298; Irving Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (1957; rpt. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1965), p. 153; A. P. Rossiter, Angel With Horns (London: Longmans, Green, 1961), p. 32; David Riggs, Shakespeare's Heroical Histories: “Henry VI” and Its Literary Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971), p. 118; and F. W. Brownlow, Two Shakespearean Sequences (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), p. 47.

9. See, among others, Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare's “Histories”: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (1947; rpt. San Marino: Huntington Library, 1965), p. 169; Tillyard, p. 298; Rossiter, pp. 32-33; and Bullough, p. 361. The absence of direct dramatic evidence for the favorites' guilt is often linked with the tendency to see the opening of Richard II as artistically flawed, due to the obscurity in which the historical circumstances are veiled. Rossiter, p. 29, argues that Shakespeare was depending on his audience's knowledge of Woodstock. His emphasis on the necessity for information external to the play in order to understand what is taking place within the play has been widely repeated: e.g., Ribner, p. 46; Bollough, p. 359; Nicholas Brooke, Shakespeare's Early Tragedies (London: Methuen, 1968), p. 110; and Robert B. Pierce, Shakespeare's History Plays: The Family and the State (Ohio State Univ. Press, 1971), p. 169, n. 4.

10. A possible exception to their silence but an acknowledgment of their assent is the favorites' “Amen” which ends Richard's mock prayer. A director could, with justification, either cut the line or create a very different effect by having Richard provide his own cynical closure. The “Amen” does not appear in the Folio text and is unassigned in the quarto editions. It is given to the favorites by Howard Staunton in his edition of 1858. See Matthew W. Black, ed., The Life and Death of King Richard the Second, New Variorum Shakespeare (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1955), p. 95.

11. Richard's intention to use Gaunt's wealth to finance his Irish war further minimizes the favorites' involvement in Richard's corruption by departing from the account in Hall: “geuyng to other that whiche was not his, distributed the dukes landes to his paresites and flatterering [sic] foloers” (p. 5).

12. Shakespeare may be hinting at the political jealousy of those who are preferred by those who are not, a theme alluded to in The Mirror for Magistrates and developed in Daniel's Civil Wars. See Campbell, Mirror, p. 94, and Daniel, Bk. I, sts. 32 and 100 (pp. 79 and 96).

13. Among those who criticize the favorites' coldness and treachery in this scene are Derek Traversi, Shakespeare: From “Richard II” to “Henry V” (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1957), p. 12; E. W. Talbert, Elizabethan Drama and Shakespeare's Early Plays: An Essay in Historical Criticism (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1963), p. 398, n. 90; and Leonard Barkan, “The Theatrical Consistency of Richard II,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 29 (1978), 9.

14. Francis Fergusson, Shakespeare: The Pattern in His Carpet (New York: Delacorte, 1971), p. 96, comments that in the first two acts Richard takes “his own greedy feelings as right and true,” but changes in Act III to become what he calls an early example of Shakespeare's “suffering-and-seeing characters.” However, it is not clear whether Richard's sorrow creates the very thing it fears or genuinely anticipates what is to come in time.

15. See Robert Ornstein, A Kingdom for a Stage: The Achievement of Shakespeare's History Plays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), p. 116, and Brownlow, p. 103.

16. There are those, such as Campbell, Histories, p. 203, who do not seem to be bothered by Bolingbroke's rough separation of politics and ethics, but who speak approvingly of his energetic efficiency. Both Tillyard, pp. 294-95, and James Winny, The Player King: A Theme of Shakespeare's Histories (London: Chatto & Windus, 1968), p. 51, see in Bolingbroke's impeachment of Bushy and Greene a literal account of actual indignities.

17. In spite of contrary evidence in the play, Bullough, p. 371, and A. R. Humphreys, Shakespeare: “Richard II,” Studies in English Literature, No. 31 (London: Edward Arnold, 1967), p. 45, insist that Bolingbroke's accusation should be taken as fact.

18. On more than one occasion, Bolingbroke is associated ironically with death: e.g., II.i.270-71; III.iii.42-44; V.i.66-68. The play's final scenes complete the ironic portrayal of Bolingbroke's justice, which pretends life but wreaks death. The living king will be plagued by the specter of a dead king; and Bolingbroke's soul is “full of woe / That blood should sprinkle me to make me grow” (V.vi.45-46).

19. Daniel, Bk. I, sts. 87-100, emphasizes Bolingbroke's hidden and ambiguous motives and his lack of self-examination: “and what he had in hand / Left it to his diverted thoughts unskand” (st. 92). Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York: Free Press, 1967), p. 92, finds in Bolingbroke a lack of “inwardness, the capacities to suffer and dream,” and argues that, although this lack accounts for Bolingbroke's success, Shakespeare “perenially distrusts success and the men who achieve it.”

20. The standard view of the Gardener as a detached, objective, and authoritative commentator who gives us the pattern and moral of the play can be found, for example, in Tillyard, pp. 283-91; Ure, pp. li-lvii; and Edward I. Berry, Patterns of Decay: Shakespeare's Early Histories (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1975), p. 106. Although Brownlow, p. 108, concentrates on the savagery of the Gardener's legalistic ideal, he persists in seeing the Gardener as a figure of “removed objectivity.”

21. The analogy between the care of a garden and the care of the state was clearly established in commonplace literature. See, for example, William Baldwin, A Treatise of Morall Phylosophie (London: Edward Whitchurch, 1548), sig. Q5^v: “Euen as a good Gardyner is very diligent about his gardeyn, waterynge the good and profitable herbes, and rootynge out the vnprofytable weedes: so shoulde a kyng attende to his common weale, cheryshyng his good and true subiectes, and punyshyng suche as are false, and vnprofitable.” Baldwin's image is one of solicitude first and trimming second. Shakespeare has shifted to a more severe image of chopping to reflect Bolingbroke's aggressiveness and York's reference to him as “his own carver” (II.iii.143). This seems to be borne out in York's ominous warning to Aumerle: “Well, bear you well in this new spring of time, / Lest you be cropp'd before you come to prime” (V.ii.50-51).

22. If Shakespeare had intended the Gardener's vision to stand as an uncontested “choric” comment on the play's action, it is more likely that he would have given him a scene to himself. Instead, he chose to juxtapose the Gardener's legalism and the Queen's emotionalism. The pairing of characters with opposed ways of seeing seems to be a recurrent underlining technique for the central contraries of Richard and Bolingbroke—e.g., Gaunt and the Duchess of Gloucester; the Queen and Bushy; the Queen and the Gardener; York and the Duchess of York.

23. See, among others, Talbert, pp. 300-321; H. M. Richmond, Shakespeare's Political Plays (New York: Random House, 1967), pp. 123-40; Wilbur Sanders, The Dramatist and the Received Idea: Studies in the Plays of Marlowe & Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 158-93; and Ornstein, pp. 102-24.

24. Ornstein, p. 108, and Brownlow, pp. 100-101, are exceptions. They remark in passing that what is said about Richard and the favorites does not correspond with what we are shown. This assertion is repeated by Eric Sahel, “Ambiguïtés politiques de Richard II,” Études Anglaises, 33 (1980), 26.

25. Hamlet, ed. Frank Kermode, The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), V.ii.61-62.