SOURCE: “‘A Liberal Tongue’: Language and Rebellion in Richard II,” in Shakespeare's Universe: Renaissance Ideas and Conventions, edited by John M. Mucciolo, Scholar Press, 1996, pp. 37-51.

[In the following essay, Norbrook considers the ways in which the original Elizabethan audience (in particular, those individuals involved in the Essex rebellion) might have responded to Richard II. Norbrook surveys the knowledge Elizabethans had of their country's past and asserts that the play reflected contemporary concerns regarding the necessity of a guaranteed forum for national debate and criticism (Parliament) and the danger of the growth of royal absolutism.]

A consistent theme of W. R. Elton's teaching, at once daunting and bracing, has been that for all the volume of commentary generated by Shakespeare's plays, there is still a great deal to be done in understanding their initial contexts. Richard II is a case in point. It is generally accepted that it is the play of which the Lord Chamberlain's Men staged a special performance on 7 February 1601; the following day, eleven members of that audience took up arms in Essex's rebellion. The interpretation of that evidence, however, is much more problematic. I believe that the play has been widely misinterpreted—or at least very selectively interpreted—by a misunderstanding of its contexts in political and intellectual history. But it will be a long time before those contexts have been fully recovered; we still lack a full study of the politics of Essex and his circle; and the analysis of political discourse in the 1590s is not nearly as well developed as for the mid seventeenth-century period. In the limited space available, I shall try to question the validity of some long-current contexts and offer some alternatives, on the basis of which I shall attempt, in a necessarily very tentative way, to reconstruct some of the ways in which the audience of 1601 might have responded to the play.¹

The play's opening line can put us on the right track. But all too often it has done the reverse. ‘Old John of Gaunt, time-honoured Lancaster’: the ethos is of age and tradition, looking back to a medieval past. From the nineteenth century onward, the medieval era has conjured up an image of an organic community, of a harmonious hierarchy united by a simple religious faith, with deferential peasants and mystically sanctioned rulers. That image of the middle ages became hardened during the reaction against the French Revolution, and it was in that period that conservative readings of the first tetralogy as expressing nostalgia for a lost social unity became current.² E. M. W. Tillyard's reading of the histories, while more historically grounded, drew on similar patterns of analysis.

The nostalgic readings gained a new lease of life with the publication in 1957 of Ernst Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies. Kantorowicz reads Richard II as dramatizing the theory that the monarch has two bodies, one natural and mortal, the other artificial, mystical and immortal. The tragedy of the play lies in the emerging split between these two bodies. Stage by stage Richard's sacramental unity becomes violently severed until in the deposition scene his body becomes ‘now devoid of any metaphysis whatever’.³ This pattern of explanation throws the emphasis firmly on Richard, and Kantorowicz acknowledges a debt to Walter Pater's analysis of the poet-king. His political sympathies are clearly with Richard. One of ‘Richard's so-called “tyrannies”’, his claim that the laws of the realm were in his head, in fact ‘merely referred to a well known maxim of Roman and Canon Laws’.⁴ His accusers, then, were merely betraying their provincial ignorance. That emphasis is characteristic of Kantorowicz's strategy in his book, which is to uncover a buried vein of metaphysical mysticism in what had traditionally been seen as the hard-headed empiricism of English common law. His reading of Shakespeare is strongly marked by the conservative German tradition, and The King's Two Bodies retains traces of his early allegiance to the mystical monarchism of the poet Stefan George.⁵

Kantorowicz's reading has exercised a powerful influence on recent new historicist criticism: it brings together favoured themes of the body, power and display, and comes with a strong recommendation from Michel Foucault.⁶ Although in the article that named the ‘new historicist’ movement Stephen Greenblatt drew attention to the need to set interpretations of Richard II in their political contexts,⁷ this principle has not been very consistently followed, and it is possible to detect strong residues of older conservative readings in later new historicist work.⁸ Greenblatt's own subsequent downplaying of the possible radicalizing effects of Shakespeare's histories on their audiences reflects the growing influence of Foucault's scepticism about agency.⁹ But he was, I believe, right in his original insistence that the 1601 performance was a significant pointer to elements in the play's political rhetoric; the emphasis on mystical bodies has distracted attention from very different aspects of the play and of Elizabethan political discourse in general.

For if the Elizabethans did feel nostalgic for the medieval past, it was not necessarily for mystical bodies that they yearned. ‘Old’ and ‘time-honoured’ would not have conjured up unequivocally monarchist associations for the rebel party of 1601. And, indeed, for any reader of Holinshed.¹⁰ The reign of Richard II as there described is no timeless idyll of metaphysical unity, but a period of sharp contestation: popular rebellion, attempts at religious reformation under Wyclif, and struggles to maintain or increase the status of Parliament. In those struggles, London plays a key role: Richard tries as far as possible to hold Parliaments out of that city for fear that they will be swayed by growing extra-parliamentary pressure on the MPs. The House of Commons begins calling for annual Parliaments, to which Richard retorts that he would rather submit himself to the King of France than to his own subjects. A group of lords try to keep Richard under strict control to the point of threatening to depose him.¹¹

If the late fourteenth century offered an object lesson for readers of the 1590s, it was not because subjects were nostalgic for absolutism but because they feared its recurrence. Those chivalric spectacles that look so quaint and archaic today had a sharp political edge: as Richard McCoy has shown, Essex and his circle vindicated traditional aristocratic ideas of honour against the monarchy's attempt to centralize honour in loyalty to the monarch. Essex tried to revive feudal offices that had served to restrict monarchical power.¹² An increasingly important body of antiquarian thought was beginning to formulate the concept of feudalism and to heighten public awareness of longlapsed constitutional precedents for challenges to royal power.¹³ The remedies of annual Parliaments and aristocratic councils were to be looked to increasingly under the early Stuarts. When the Civil War broke out, Parliamentarian leaders consciously looked back to the Middle Ages; for them, absolutism was an innovative phenomenon to be resisted by an appeal to deep-rooted constitutionalist traditions.¹⁴ Sir John Hayward's The Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII, which opened with Bullingbrook's challenge to Mowbray, was republished in 1641, 1642 and 1643. The Parliamentarian leaders saw themselves as offering a comparable trial by battle, and indeed individuals were still ready to engage in trial by combat.¹⁵

This aristocratic constitutionalism could blend with classical republicanism: Roman history too could be read as a struggle between independent aristocrats and tyrannical sovereigns. Republican discourse was circulating in England in the 1590s: Hayward's history, the first major synthesis of classical Tacitean discourse with English history, appeared two years before the Essex rebellion, with a dedication to the Earl.¹⁶ The leading republican theorist of the later seventeenth century, Algernon Sidney, was to remember how his ancestors had been betrayed by monarchical deceit:

Henry the Fourth was made king by the earl of Northumberland, and his brave son Hotspur … but [he could not] think himself safe, till his benefactor was dead.¹⁷

Sidney was proud of his connections with the earls of Northumberland, a traditionally independent aristocratic dynasty. The seventh earl had been executed in 1572 for his part in the northern rebellion, and the family were forbidden to venture into their traditional territories north of the Trent. (For members of the family, the scene in 1 Henry IV where the Percies are awarded that territory would have been very poignant.) The eighth earl was accused of treason and found dead in suspicious circumstances. The ninth earl, brother of the conspirators and husband of Essex's sister, distanced himself from Essex, but his heterodox views made him suspect, and he was to be imprisoned by James for many years under suspicion of involvement in the Gunpowder Plot. Unsurprisingly, the tenth earl, Algernon Sidney's uncle, sided with Parliament in the Civil War. He allegedly opposed the punishment of those responsible for the execution of Charles I in 1649, declaring that ‘the example might be more useful and profitable to kings, by deterring them from such exorbitances’.¹⁸

In this context, it is very interesting to note that two of the three commissioners of the 1601 performance were Charles and Jocelyn Percy, brothers of the ninth Earl of Northumberland. Far from being nostalgic for the loss of sacramental absolutist monarchy, they would have feared its recurrence. And we have fascinating evidence of how one member of their circle responded to the next play in the tetralogy. A notebook has recently come to light containing detailed notes apparently taken at a performance of 1 Henry IV; amongst the lines singled out are Worcester's reminding Henry that he owes his own crown to men like himself and Northumberland (I, iii, 10-13), and Henry's account of the stratagems by which he gained popular favour, ‘opinion’, even in the presence of the king—but this commentator has pointedly changed the last word to ‘Queene’. The notebook also contains heterodox religious opinions, questioning God's existence, and the author may have been Thomas Harriot, a close associate of the ninth earl, or else a member of the Essex circle. Greenblatt's brilliantly intuitive link between Harriot's subversiveness and Shakespeare's plays may turn out to have had concrete grounding.¹⁹ Though written before Hayward's history, the play does, as Richard Tuck suggests, display something of the critical scepticism found in Tacitist discourse.

The young Percies, then, would have had a particular interest in seeing their house at a period when it was a kingmaker; and Richard II presented their rebellious activities in a somewhat more favourable light than its successors. Shakespeare and his company had close links with Essex's circle in the 1590s, Essex himself being a regular playgoer, and the revival of this by now ‘old’ play would have been a reassuring evocation of a familiar cultural world. We may still wonder why the Essexians did not choose a more directly and overtly rebellious play like Woodstock, which handles resistance to Richard and his favourites in a more starkly critical mode. Richard II is more oblique in its handling of the motives for rebellion. Yet insofar as there is a sense of caution, of evading direct statement on such key issues as Richard's implication in Gloucester's death, that sense of blocked communication could have served to heighten the political tension. The rebels had long been urging Essex to overcome his reservations about rebellion and take a stand to redeem the country's honour; here was a play that demonstrated a slow and painful process of formulating opposition.²⁰ The issue of blocked communication is at once internal and external to the play: the most sensitive moment, Richard's self-deposition, seems to have been omitted for political reasons from the early quartos.²¹ The chronicles were full of stories of monarchs who tried to consolidate their power by stifling Parliaments and other outlets for public discussion. The preservation of a guaranteed space for debate and criticism was a major concern of those worried about the growth of royal absolutism, whether in the fourteenth century or the sixteenth. Shakespeare's play embodies that concern, both in the story it tells and in its medium, opening up in a public theatre areas of debate that absolutists wanted to keep veiled as mysteries of state.

The opening part of the play involves continual anticlimax, a repression of political and military action which serves only to fuel the underlying conflicts. Bullingbrook's combat with Mowbray, whose political consequences would have been known by an informed audience to be explosive, is deferred in the first scene and again in the third. Actual conflict is sublimated into a war of words: Bullingbrook threatens to bite off his tongue and spit it out at Mowbray (I, i, 190). Despite his attack on mere words as womanish (I, i, 48), however, Mowbray, like all the protagonists, is an able rhetorician, and he will lament that exile makes it no longer possible for him to use his language. Shakespeare has given this feudal society an anachronistic inflection of civic humanism, a concern with the dignity and political importance of full and open speech. (Modern critics' model of language in the plays as a ‘fall’ from plenitude into rhetoric suppresses the centrality of language as a mode of action in pragmatically-oriented humanist rhetoric.)²² Mowbray pleads for ‘free speech’, which Richard allows him (I, i, 55, 123). But we are aware of ironies: Richard and Mowbray cannot afford to speak too freely since they are engaged in a cover-up. And the fact that Richard ‘allows’ free speech is one of the points at issue: how far should such freedom be a grace offered from above, rather than a constitutional right?

For the more Richard tries to stifle dissent, the more he undermines himself. His own position is vulnerable because he increasingly places his own and his favourites' private interests against the common good, his party dwindling to ‘some few private friends’ (III, iii, 4). Only as he is falling from power does he realize that his mystical conception of kingship needs a material foundation, that his role as head of the body politic depends on ‘the blood of twenty thousand men’ (III, ii, 76). By contrast, in the opening scenes his opponents rediscover a threatened sense of corporate identity.²³ The first scene had opened with an address to Gaunt, the second opens with his pondering ‘the part I had in Woodstock's blood’, which acts with his widow's reproaches to stir him to resistance; and the Duchess loses no opportunity to reinforce the appeal to blood and to a sense of common identity: ‘Yet art thou slain in him’ (I, ii, 25). Gaunt's language registers a struggle to overlay such sentiments with a discourse of patience and submission; to which the Duchess starkly retorts, ‘Call it not patience, Gaunt, it is despair’ (I, ii, 29); her ‘old Gaunt’ (54) rings reproachfully against the play's opening words. Gaunt's struggle continues in the ensuing scene. Bullingbrook celebrates the energy he gains from ‘the earthly author of my blood’ which gives him ‘a twofold vigour’ (I, iii, 69-71). Gaunt goes along with his banishment, but his language registers the crisis of language and agency into which he has been plunged:

But you gave leave to my unwilling tongue
Against my will to do myself this wrong.

(I, iii, 245-6)

Bullingbrook, however, is by now starting to break loose from such restrictions, and there is exhilaration in his concluding self-description as ‘a true-born Englishman’ (I, iii, 308). His stance is modulating from an exclusively aristocratic to a generally national one; the play's strong sense of nationalism is another anachronism with a strong contemporary resonance. There was a certain appropriateness in eighteenth-century editors' spelling ‘Bullingbrook’ as ‘Bolingbroke’, associating Shakespeare's protagonist with the spokesman for a form of monarchism that was deeply influenced by classical republicanism.²⁴ In the ensuing scene we see the courtiers contemptuously discussing his courting of the people at large. Richard's description of the commoners as ‘slaves’ (I, iv, 27) confirms the opposition's claims that the absolutist faction want to enslave them (II, i, 291); contempt for the commons is a consistent characteristic of the court party (cf. II, ii, 128ff, III, iii, 89, V, i, 35).

It is in this context of escalating opposition that the Essexians would have read a speech that has tended to dwindle to a mass of patriotic clichés: Gaunt's ‘sceptred isle’ speech. The tension between submission and resistance that has so beset him finds a resolution in his determination to make a final appeal to the king through rhetoric rather than arms, and he musters all his rhetorical forces. But York is sceptical: flattery has deafened the king's ear. And though Gaunt feels a prophetic afflatus, there is a certain irony in the fact that it comes before the king has arrived, so that his greatest appeal to a common patriotic spirit serves to vent his own feelings rather than to sway the king. The reference to Eden does conjure up a nostalgic mood, but it should also be noted that greater emphasis is placed on the island's prowess in war, a somewhat un-Edenic activity crucial both to the feudal aristocracy and to the ‘war party’ around Essex. It is because of their skill in war that Gaunt reveres the kings of the past. As the huge sentence with its suspended verb builds up, we feel the strain of Gaunt's dying powers, as if the very intensity of his rhetoric is serving to destroy him: ‘I die pronouncing it’ (II, i, 59).

Shakespeare has boldly placed this set-piece speech, which he must have known would quickly enter anthologies, at a potentially anticlimactic point: how will Gaunt be able to follow it up when Richard does arrive? Richard's first words apply the ‘aged’ label, but with a perfunctory insensitivity that graphically registers how the same words can perform widely different speech-acts: ‘What comfort, man? How is't with aged Gaunt?’ (II, i, 72). After parodying Richard's brittle symmetries in skirmish of bitter punning, Gaunt launches into a speech that pushes at last beyond the threshold of obedience: he imagines Edward II as deposing Richard, and indulges at least in imagination in rebellion. As ‘landlord’, Richard has reduced a political realm, one in which law and public accountability predominate, to a mere household economy where the subjects lack political rights.²⁵ Richard cuts off his speech, overruling the ‘ague's privilege’ that transgresses normal rules of speech, and gives Gaunt's words a vivid, self-destructive materiality:

Wert thou not brother to great Edward's son,
This tongue that runs so roundly in thy head
Should run thy head from thy unreverent shoulders.

(II, i, 121-3)

Again discourse is brought to the brink of violence but holds back: Richard pays grudging tribute to feudal bonds. But this provokes Gaunt into his climactic charge: at last he holds back no longer and directly accuses him of complicity in Woodstock's murder. The audience have been waiting for this moment since the opening scene. In civic humanist spirit, Gaunt's finest rhetorical hour is not the lyrical meditation of the ‘sceptred isle’ speech but his last moment of strenuous active engagement.²⁶

And it is at this point that Northumberland enters the play, bearing the news of Gaunt's death with a characteristically acerbic irony:

My liege, old Gaunt commends him to your Majesty.
What says he?
                                                            Nay nothing, all is said;
His tongue is now a stringless instrument[.]

(II, i, 147-8)

This further ‘old Gaunt’ reminds the audience of Richard's recent irreverence, the Duchess's rebukes, and the play's opening words. The Percies in the audience would have had a special interest in Northumberland's role: would the open opposition now begin? But there is yet another moment of anticlimax: York now takes on the role Gaunt had earlier occupied, struggling desperately not to topple over the verge into rebellion. But for him it is even harder: his often-protested patience (II, i, 163, 169, 207) is coming to seem more and more like cowardice. York makes one last appeal to common bonds between Richard and his peers, to the common memory of Edward III: ‘His face thou hast’ (II, i, 176). He engages in a series of sharp antitheses between Edward's patriotism and Richard's absolutism; but the sharpness of those antitheses, undercutting any possible resemblance, itself becomes seditious, and York breaks off:

O Richard! York is too far gone with grief,
Or else he never would compare between—

(II, i, 184-5)

If you continue as you are, he resumes, ‘Be not thyself’: Richard's personal identity must depend on being bound up with a larger community. Such paradoxes are not enough to contain York's sense of facing a discursive crisis that he does not know how to resolve. His final sentence begins ‘Now afore God—God forbid I say true!’ (II, i, 200): to call on God for him not to speak truly is a desperate recourse. If you continue, says York,

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

(II, i, 206-8)

This speech brings out explicitly what the whole opening part of the play has implied: that quite apart from external censorship, absolutism depends for its maintenance on self-censorship, on keeping subversive thoughts away from the threshold of consciousness. In the following scene we have another glimpse of that process, as York momentarily confuses the queen with the Duchess of Gloucester, whose death the servant has forgotten to announce. The audience are reminded that the Duchess had despairingly abandoned an invitation to him as she bowed out of the play (I, ii, 62ff). York is troubled by his inability to formulate a response to her fidelity to Gloucester's memory. The Duchess's abandoning of her request to ‘commend’ her to York has re-echoed in Northumberland's heavily ironic ‘old Gaunt commends him to your majesty’.

But Northumberland is by now emerging as the agent of a different policy, crossing the threshold to active resistance. The aristocrats who linger after the king's departure in Act II scene i emphasize the continuity of agency from one generation to another:

Well, Lords, the Duke of Lancaster is dead.
—And living too, for now his son is duke.

(II, i, 224-5)

Northumberland's role is to translate seditious thoughts into effective action. When Ross laments that

My heart is great, but it must break with silence,
Ere't be disburdened with a liberal tongue

(II, i, 229-30)

it is Northumberland who tells him to ‘speak thy mind’ (II, i, 230). Ross's ‘liberal’ does not of course have its modern sense, and carries with it rather the pejorative charge that would have been the response to Richard's careless speaking of his ‘liberal largess’ (I, iv, 44); but the play does have an emotional and intellectual pressure toward wishing for more open communication. To encourage his friends, Northumberland remains within a very traditional discourse of obedience: like York, he claims that ‘The king is not himself’ (II, i, 241), that he is merely led by flatterers. We may however suspect disingenuousness at least on the part of Northumberland, who reveals himself as a determined political manipulator; certainly the Richard of the play takes the initiative rather than being manipulated by courtiers, who often find it hard to get a word in edgeways (cf. III, ii, 213ff). Northumberland's role is to sharpen the contrast between common feudal bonds and allegiance to the king, and he does so in an economical antithesis: Richard has exiled ‘His noble kinsman—most degenerate king!’ (II, i, 262; cf. York at II, ii, 114). Northumberland titillates his fellows by claiming that ‘I dare not say’ what his hope is; but Ross appeals to the common bonds of aristocratic solidarity:

We three are but thyself, and, speaking so,
Thy words are but as thoughts; therefore be bold.

(II, i, 276-7)

The transition is about to be made from purely verbal to military opposition.

Northumberland's imagery as he urges decisive action is one of opening out, of bringing the private once more into a public realm:

If then we shall shake off our slavish yoke,
Imp out our drooping country's broken wing,
Redeem from broking pawn the blemish'd crown,
Wipe off the dust that hides our sceptre's gilt,
And make high majesty look like itself,
Away with me in post to Ravenspurgh;
But if you faint, as fearing to do so,
Stay, and be secret, and myself will go.

(II, i, 291-8)

Northumberland's language negotiates between loyalty to the monarchy and a wider patriotic loyalty, one in which public resistance is preferable to secret compliance. The suppressed pun on ‘guilt’ at line 294 (to be echoed at V, i, 69) associates the king with the dust that hides the monarchical sceptre. But the imagery of shaking off yokes, of opening out wings, points beyond a narrowly monarchical conception of national interest, while leaving the precise constitutional implications tautologically vague (‘make high majesty look like itself’).

What ensues as the play moves to its climax is certainly not a straight-forward celebration of rebellion, and Northumberland does not emerge in a light that would have been unequivocally appealing to his descendants. Though Shakespeare plays down the full extent of his role in the rebellion, he emerges as a cool and ruthless operator, ready to flatter Bullingbrook's nascently regal ‘discourse’ as ‘sugar’ (II, iii, 6-7), outrageously quick to redefine treason for the new political order (IV, i, 150). Nevertheless, it is important that he does offer the audience a perspective on events distinct from any simple dualism between Richard and Bullingbrook. While modern critics tend to concentrate on his personal moral duplicity, an audience of the 1590s would have been equally alert to his role in trying to maintain a discourse of the aristocratic, and occasionally of the common, good, independently of whichever monarch may be in power. When he laments ‘civil and uncivil arms’ (III, iii, 102), the play on words seems to be echoing the opening line of Lucan's Pharsalia (‘Bella … plus quam civilia’), whose republican sympathies were gaining it interested readers in the 1590s; Marlowe's translation of Book I had been printed the year before the Essexians' performance.²⁷ Northumberland's discourse thus has a tinge of civic humanism; and in the deposition scene he is more keen than Bullingbrook to keep attention on constitutional issues as opposed to Richard's personal emotions. It is Northumberland who keeps urging Richard to read out the 33 articles—the evidence of what Kantorowicz termed Richard's ‘so-called tyranny’—so that the commons ‘May deem that you are worthily depos'd’ (IV, i, 227, cf. 272). Northumberland's language here directly echoes that of Holinshed: the articles were read ‘to the end the commons might be persuaded, that he was an vnprofitable prince to the common-wealth, and worthie to be deposed’.²⁸ The ‘and’ in that sentence is pregnant with a whole set of decidedly unmetaphysical political assumptions. The play's closing speech is given to Bullingbrook's desire to wash away his guilt; Northumberland has bowed out of the play on a characteristically less emotive note: ‘My guilt be on my head, and there an end’ (V, i, 69). We are made to condemn the harshness of the separation of king and queen, and Northumberland's justification with the conventionally suspect, Machiavellian term ‘policy’ (V, i, 84). That is, appropriately, his last word in the scene. Feudal rebellion has merged with a more modern form of political agency. Even those of the audience who did not approve of Northumberland would have had to acknowledge the dangers of a lack of ‘policy’.

When Charles and Jocelyn Percy watched Richard II, then, they would have found much to fire them in emulation of a medieval past that was far from cravenly monarchical. And they would not necessarily have been daunted by the pathos of Richard's fall, any more than their nephew the tenth earl was moved by the cult of the royal martyr to unequivocal condemnation of the execution of Charles I. By concentrating on the aristocracy's role in the play, it is possible to see how limited is the perspective that sees it as offering a straightforward choice between Richard and Bullingbrook. That is not to say, however, that the aristocratic viewpoint is finally endorsed. In Richard II, the voices of other social groups are by and large excluded, being reserved for the Henry IV plays. The effect is to heighten the sense of an archaic, hieratic political order that has so swayed some critics. But there are hints of alternative perspectives.

It is in the garden scene that members of the lower orders make their only extended appearance. Critics have emphasized this scene's formal, archaic quality. It is indeed particularly dense with sacramental rhetoric. But it is important to note how that rhetoric is placed. It is here associated with the Queen; it is consistently the favoured discourse of the Yorkists. And in this scene it is placed in direct contrast with different conceptions of political order. Of course we are made to sympathize with the queen's grief and shock; but this should not blind us to structural problems in the scene's discourse. The queen initiates the contrast as soon as she sees the gardener and his servants: she decides to hide and eavesdrop, convinced that

They'll talk of state, for everyone doth so
Against a change; woe is forerun with woe.

(III, iv, 27-8)

For the queen, this talk of ‘state’ by the lower orders is a subversion of order. The gardeners, however, have their own conception of order, which looks back to Gaunt's ‘this England’ speech, though it lacks his feudal militarism. They insist on the predominance of public over private interest, and on the need for active intervention to remedy abuses even at the cost of violence:

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

(III, iv, 32-6)

The word ‘commonwealth’ here, along with the emphasis on evenness, and the reference to decapitation of favourites, carries an oblique tinge of republican discourse. The rhetoric is literally radical: the role of the head gardener is to ‘root away’ the weeds, a role which he himself compares to Bullingbrook's (37, 52). It is one of the under-gardeners who initiates direct political discussion, converting the literal discussion of the garden into a political allegory and asking why they should work while their leaders let the realm go to ruin. The head gardener has enough of a sense of hierarchies of discourse to ask him to ‘Hold thy peace’; but he goes on to develop the allegory, contrasting the gardeners' skill with the courtiers' incompetence, and building up to prophesying that the king will be deposed.

At this point the queen angrily intervenes:

O, I am press'd to death through want of speaking!
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? Say, where, when, and how
Cam'st thou by this ill tidings?

(72-80)

The queen's opening words return the play yet again to the theme of suppressed discourse; though in this case the queen has imposed the limitation on herself. Her grief at the news is displaced by anger at its bearer for breaking her rigidly hierarchical conceptions of language: it is not for such underlings to meddle with mysteries of state. She finds his tongue ‘harsh’ and ‘rude’: understandable though her response is under the circumstances, it does recall Richard's preference for euphemistic harmony over unwelcome truth. The queen lives in a world of absolute oppositions between rulers and people as between good and evil, and she recasts the gardener's horticultural discourse in authoritarian terms. Like all the Yorkists, the Duchess speaks disparagingly of the lower orders; and she appeals to a theological conception of political order, with any intervention by the commons presented as a fall of man. Her interpretation of the garden thus contrasts sharply with the gardener's less mystical, more interventionist garden/state allegory. And the gardener stands his ground. He describes Richard's fall not in a traditional mode of the Fall of man or de casibus tragedy, but in a secular language of balance of power: reinforced by ‘all the peers’, Bullingbrook is bound to triumph in the end. Richard falls not because God has withdrawn his favour but because he has neglected the proper political means. Let her go to London—the centre of England's public sphere—and she will find the truth. The Queen's response is to curse the gardener's plants. The gardener, however, gracefully deflects this destructive speech-act, planting an emblematic bank of rue. If the scene thus ends on a pathetic and organic register, it has arrived there by a far more complex route.

This scene is entirely of Shakespeare's invention, and it bears scrutiny as an allegory not only of political discourse but of the role of Shakespeare's company in politics, of their disposition of their flowers of rhetoric. Several critics have noted that the gardener's reference to cutting off heads may allude to a story in Livy about Tarquin's sending an execution order through an agricultural code so that the messenger would not understand it. In this case, however, it is the messenger who understands more than the queen. The scene opens on a note of courtly recreation: the queen asks her ladies to divert her, and they offer to engage in whatever activity pleases her. In place of aristocratic festivity, the gardener offers a more didactic form of entertainment, one ultimately too didactic for the queen, who considers that it interferes in mysteries of state and halts the narrative. This scene immediately precedes the deposition scene, which was of course not printed in full in the Elizabethan quartos. Richard II contains an oblique prophecy of its own censorship: the play is aware that it is touching on sensitive areas of political discourse, areas that displace a top-down hierarchy. And yet it protests that those above may need that commoners' discourse at least as much as the commoners need them.

In this play, however, the commons remain spectators, not agents. Emphasis is placed on aristocratic agency—the gardener's own analysis of the power structure refers only to the aristocracy, not to the commons. To some degree, that omission reflects changes between Shakespeare's own time and the period he represents, that growth in the public sphere in which the theatre formed a significant part. It might have been better for the aristocratic rebels of 1601 to have taken this point. Though they enjoyed some passive support from the London populace, their coup sought legitimacy from feudal traditions rather than from wider consultation, and was ultimately short on ‘policy’. When, on the morning after the play's performance, Essex rode through the city asking for the Londoners' support, counting on their admiration for his aristocratic dash and charisma, he failed to reckon with the fact that they might find him impulsive and irresponsible. In the play the citizens are presented as fickle and politically immature, turning easily from Richard to acclaim Bullingbrook in his passage through London. When Essex and his followers made their entry to the city, in a display of their aristocratic authority, the citizens of 1601 stayed in their houses, and watched, and waited.²⁹

Notes

1. Most studies of the play's audience have been cast in ahistorical terms or have assumed the play's designs on the audience to be highly orthodox: Phyllis Rackin, ‘The Role of the Audience in Shakespeare's Richard II’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 36 (1985), 262-81 (267), assumes that the audience will experience rebellion as a ‘terrible crime’. For more historically specific readings see J. H. Hexter, ‘Property, Monopoly, and Shakespeare's Richard II’, in P. Zagorin (ed.), Culture and Politics from Puritanism to the Enlightenment (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 1-24; Ernest W. Talbert, The Problem of Order: Elizabethan Political Commonplaces and an Example of Shakespeare's Art (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1962) and Graham Holderness, Shakespeare's History (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, New York: St Martin's Press, 1985). Leeds Barroll, ‘A New History for Shakespeare and his Time’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 39 (1988), 441-64, gives a salutary rejoinder to some exaggerated accounts of the play's political subversiveness, but his scepticism on some points seems to me exaggerated. Barroll argues that the rebels ‘misconstrued’ (454, italics his) Shakespeare's play. A misconstruction which came from figures at the centre of a powerful international network of political intelligence and cultural patronage, on the basis of several years of continuing familiarity with the work of Shakespeare's company, might have some claims to being an alternative, rather than an italicized ‘mis’, construction. Quotations from Richard II are from the New Arden edition, ed. Peter Ure (London: Methuen, 1961).

2. See especially the writings of the strongly legitimist writer Adam Müller, who formulated long before Tillyard a theory of the second tetralogy as registering a historical shift from feudalism to the modern state, with a concomitant division in the monarchy. Richard II, in his view, represented the warning example of a monarch whose excessive rigidity led to revolution (Louis XVI offered the obvious parallel). See Roy Pascal, Shakespeare in Germany 1740-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937), pp. 31-3, 153ff; and on comparable developments in English criticism, Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism 1730-1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

3. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 40.

4. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies, p. 28 n.5

5. For fuller discussion see David Norbrook, ‘The Emperor's New Body? Ernst H. Kantorowicz, Richard II, and the Politics of Shakespeare Criticism’, forthcoming in Textual Practice.

6. See Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), pp. 33-4.

7. Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Introduction’ to The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance (Norman, Oklahoma: Pilgrim Books, 1982), pp. 3-6.

8. The first detailed application of Kantorowicz's paradigm, Marie Axton's The Queen's Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), clearly demonstrated that there were rivals to the ‘two bodies’ theory, a nuance lost in later accounts such as Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres (New York and London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 77-8, and Christopher Pye, The Regal Phantasm: Shakespeare and the Politics of Spectacle (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 64, 73, 85ff, 101.

9. For the claim that ‘the audience does not leave the theatre in a rebellious mood’ see Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V’, in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), p. 41; and for a subsequent modification, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 55. Greenblatt was perhaps reacting against the overstated terms in which he had at first presented the play's subversiveness, for correctives to which see Barroll, ‘A New History’.

10. See Annabel Patterson, Reading Holinshed's Chronicles (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1994).

11. Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, ed. Henry Ellis, 6 vols (London, 1808), II, 735ff, 717, 721, 734, 775, 791ff.

12. Richard C. McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1989), ch. 4. See also Mervyn James, ‘At a Crossroads of the Political Culture: The Essex Revolt, 1601’, in Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 416-65.

13. J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957; reissue, 1987).

14. J. S. A. Adamson, ‘The Baronial Context of the English Civil War’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 40 (1990), 93-120 (95 n.13).

15. George Wither's poetic defence of the regicide, The British Appeals (London, 1651) saw the Parliamentarians' victory as a divinely-approved trial by combat.

16. Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572-1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 106-7.

17. Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government, in J. Robertson (ed.), Sydney on Government: The Works of Algernon Sydney, pp. 240-1, cited by Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the English Republic 1623-1677 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 46.

18. Ibid., pp. 48, 44.

19. Hilton Kelliher, ‘Contemporary Manuscript Extracts from Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1’, English Manuscript Studies 1100-1800, 1 (1989), 144-81. Amongst the passages cited are I, iii, 6-14, II, i, 80-82, III, ii, 40ff.

20. James, ‘At a Crossroads of the Political Culture’, p. 447.

21. Janet Clare, ‘Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority’: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), pp. 47-51. Barroll, ‘A New History’, pp. 448-9, points out that there is no firm evidence of censorship and argues that the lines missing in the earlier quartos may have been added later by Shakespeare in an expansion of Richard's ‘psychic identity’. But the scene also contains elements which were not purely psychological in interest, such as Northumberland's insistence on satisfying the commons that the king was worthily deposed, an elaboration on Holinshed.

22. See James L. Calderwood, Metadrama in Shakespeare's Henriad: ‘Richard II’ to ‘Henry V’ (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1979), and Joseph A. Porter, The Drama of Speech Acts: Shakespeare's Lancastrian Tetralogy (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1979), both of which read the plays in terms of a fall from an older, unified linguistic order, an analysis which leads them to concentrate on Richard at the expense of other figures in the play. Calderwood, Metadrama, p. 191 n.12, argues that the pre-modern linguistic world resembled the ‘primitive’ thought of Tasmanian aborigines. Tuck, Philosophy and Government, exemplifies a much more sophisticated development of speech-act theory in the analysis of discourse.

23. On the importance of blood and lineage among Essex's followers, see James, ‘At the Crossroads of the Political Culture’, pp. 435ff.

24. Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles (London: Routledge, 1990), p 47 n.14.

25. On the way this line has often been glossed in a misleadingly absolutist sense see Donna B. Hamilton, ‘The State of Law in Richard II’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 34 (1983), 5-17.

26. For an excellent analysis of this scene see George D. Gopen, ‘Private Grief into Public Action: The Rhetoric of John of Gaunt in Richard II’, Studies in Philology, 84 (1987), 338-62.

27. Shakespeare may also have engaged with Lucan via Daniel's The Civil Wars, whose opening echoes Lucan's: see George M. Logan, ‘Lucan—Daniel—Shakespeare: New Light on the Relation between The Civil Wars and Richard II’, Shakespeare Studies, 9 (1976), 121-40. See also McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood, pp. 116-18.

28. Holished, op. cit., II, 859. Holinshed goes on to call the articles ‘heinous’, a word echoed by Richard at IV, i, 233. It is characteristic of the Ricardian emphasis of modern editions that Ure, pp. 138, 191, should cite the ‘heinous’ parallel but omit the ‘worthily’.

29. As Giles Fletcher revealingly put it, the citizens held back from rebellion ‘being faithful subjects, and careful of their estates’ (James, ‘At a Crossroads of the Political Culture’, p. 453); on the later shift toward more Parliamentary forms of opposition, see pp. 462ff.