SOURCE: “Richard II: Metadrama and the Fall of Speech,” in Shakespeare's History Plays: Richard II to Henry V, St. Martin's Press, 1992, pp. 121-35.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1979, Calderwood maintains that Richard II represents not only the fall of a king, but the “fall of kingly speech” as well.]

It is hardly surprising that a playwright like Shakespeare would project his concerns about drama not only into life but even into the fictional life of his plays, where the world may become a stage, history a plot, kings dramatists, courtiers actors, commoners audiences, and speech itself the dialogue or script that gives breath to all the rest.

In the Henriad the main metadramatic plot centres in the ‘fall of speech’. To the Divine Rightness of Richard's kingship corresponds a kind of language in which words have an inalienable right to their meanings, even a divine right in so far as God is the ultimate guarantor of verbal truth. In this sacramental language of Richard's imagination God is an invisible third partner to every dialogue, the final verbal authority, even as He is the invisible third partner in every trial by combat, the final judgemental authority. Richard's sentimental, magical investment in royal semantics metaphorically reflects Shakespeare's own artistic investment in the poetic mode and in a language of ontological rightness, a language of ‘names’. Not that Richard in any blunt sense ‘is’ Shakespeare—though he is surely his imaginative possession—for it is Shakespeare, after all, who supplies us with a critique of Richard's position. Metaphors are metaphors, in short, not allegorical equations.

For God as the third partner in dialogue Bolingbroke substitutes material force, human need, ‘votes’. The determinant of meaning is now, like the occupant of a throne, whoever gets there first with the most. When Richard and Bolingbroke meet at Flint Castle, the royal name so tenuously held by Richard is without meaning, and the forceful meaning of Bolingbroke is without the royal name. Words and meanings generally are now disjunct. In the ‘base court’ (appropriately) the third partner to Richard's and Bolingbroke's dialogue, the verbal authority, is not God but Bolingbroke's twenty thousand silent soldiers, who help seize the word ‘king’ and give it the new meaning of ‘Henry IV’. This ‘debasement’ of kingship involves the secularising of language as well, the surrender of a sacramental language to a utilitarian one in which the relation between words and things is arbitrary, unsure, and ephemeral.

Bolingbroke's usurpation of the name ‘king’ brings into dramatic being both the lie and metaphor. Falstaff, the corporealised lie, is also a low-life metaphor for kingship, as at a higher level is Hotspur, ‘king of honour’. Prince Hal begins his ascent toward the throne as an apparent lie, the wastrel truant. And in the person of Henry IV the lie is on the throne of England. Even the dramatist Shakespeare must seem a liar, now that truth, meaning, and value are no longer naturally resident in words. Thus he and Hal, the interior dramatist, begin their plays as seeming liars and seek to transcend the fallen, lie-fraught world of Henry IV by restoring value and meaning both to kingship and to the King's English.

In the Henry IV plays the redemption of the word is commercially figured as the paying of verbal debts, by Hal, ‘who never promiseth but he means to pay’ (V.iv.43), and by Shakespeare, whose successful dramatic form depends on his fulfilment of structural promises. A lie is the price of bribing the temporarily rebellious Falstaff to re-enter the illusion of history in I Henry IV: ‘For my part, if a lie may do thee grace, / I'll gild it with the happiest terms I have’ (V.iv.161-2). And a more heinous lie is the price of subduing the rebel forces at the ‘battle’ of Gaultree Forest in II Henry IV. In this break-faith world one word is made good—Hal's promise to redeem time when men think least he will, particularly the implicit promise of his quiet reply to Falstaff's ‘Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world’—‘I do, I will’ (II.iv.526-8). A fuller redemption of speech is accomplished in Henry V. There the divinely guaranteed truths of Richard's reign and the ubiquitous lies of Henry's are succeeded by rhetoric, the language of conquest. The rhetorical word is no longer instinct with value, as in Richard's time, nor divorced from it, as in Henry's, but triumphant over it. In rhetoric, words take on an achieved, pragmatic value as instruments of persuasive action, even as English kingship takes on an earned, human value by virtue of Harry's victory at Agincourt. But Shakespeare's verbal achievement is no more enduring than Harry's brief reign; it is a fugitive solution to linguistic and dramatic enigmas that will vex the playwright to the end of his career. …

As the deposed Richard II sits alone at Pomfret Castle musing on his losses, his only apparent consolation is an abundance of metaphors bestowed upon him by a generous playwright. The most extravagant of these is his sustained conceit identifying himself as Time's ‘numbering clock’:

I wasted time, and now doth Time waste me,
For now hath Time made me his numbering clock.
My thoughts are minutes, and with sighs they jar
Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch,
Whereto my finger, like a dial's point,
Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears.
Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is
Are clamorous groans, which strike upon my heart,
Which is the bell. So sighs and tears and groans
Show minutes, times, and hours. But my time
Runs posting on in Bolingbroke's proud joy
While I stand fooling here, his Jack o' the clock.

(V.v.49-60)

The ironies of the time-waster now wasted by time, though they eloquently express the pathos of Richard's plight, seem a small semantic return on a poetic investment of twelve lines. However, if the plight of the unemployed sovereign in prison figures that of his sovereign, the poet-playwright Shakespeare, then at that level of interpretation this clock may tell us more than timely truths.

In the first place, as ‘teller’ (l. 55), that is, as true reflector or measuring device, the clock as such is notoriously prone to error, especially in an England that had yet to establish Greenwich as a final temporal authority (even though another great temporal authority, Elizabeth, was born there). In the second place, though Shakespeare probably considered time as part of the natural cosmic order, he could hardly help knowing that of all temporal units the ‘minutes, times and hours’ he emphasises here are the most arbitrary—since days, months, seasons and years are at least based on periodicity in nature. This stress upon the arbitrary and distorting features of temporal representation is reinforced by the fact that Richard's bodily clock reflects his internal state, so that the external representation of time (the ‘outward watch’ of eyes, finger, heart) is governed by the subjective experience of time. The overall effect of the conceit is to bring home to us the extent to which time is humanly created rather than mimetically measured, and hence how fundamentally cut off from time man is. The temporal Ding an sich is presumably out there somewhere, but it is available to man only through the deflecting prism of his symbolic representations. The clock thus asserts the disjunction of man and nature (time) at the very moment that it serves imperfectly to unite the two.

The wayward artificiality of the clock as a teller of nature's truths is mirrored verbally by the strained, rhetorical self-consciousness (for example, ‘Now sir’) of Richard's conceit telling of the clock. All of Richard's metaphors during the latter part of the play and especially at Pomfret Castle exhibit this air of uneasy contrivance. As metaphors they appear to assert an equation of tenor and vehicle—usually of Richard and the world outside his prison—much as the clock presents itself as a true teller of time. But they are metaphors in which Richard no longer believes, and which therefore imply a chasm between him and the world in the very attempt to bridge it:

I have been studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world.
And for because the world is populous
And here is not a creature but myself,
I cannot do it. Yet I'll hammer it out.
My brain I'll prove the female to my soul,
My soul the father, and these two beget
A generation of still-breeding thoughts,
And these same thoughts people this little world
In humours like the people of this
world.

(V.v.1-10; my italics)

What Richard hammers out as a labour of will rather than of belief is a series of metaphoric likenesses whose ambiguous success in connecting him to the world outside is indicated by the fact that they will prove ‘still-breeding’—ever-and-never-breeding at once, always-bearing and yet stillborn.¹ Ultimately, however, Richard's thoughts can populate only ‘this little world’, the nursery of his own mind, unable to pass beyond likeness and become authentic citizens in the larger world outside. Metaphors, after all, are not the thing itself.

Symbols had not always seemed so isolated from reality. Indeed, on Richard's unexamined assumptions, language had been bonded to nature and the world order by virtue of God's certification of him as a Divine Right king. The original power of the divine Word remained actively at work in the King's English, just as divine authority descending by way of primogeniture was immanent in Richard himself. But it is the purpose of the play to divest Richard of these views—to drive a wedge between words and their meanings, between the world order and the word order, between the king and the man who is king, and between names and metaphors. Thus we find in Richard II not merely the fall of a king but also the fall of kingly speech—of a speech conceived of as sacramental and ontological, in which words are not proxies for things but part of the things themselves. With the fall of this King's English there falls also a view of reality contained within it, a view so similar to the ‘world picture’ attributed to Elizabeth's reign that the parallels might well seem vexing to anyone who worked in words. ‘I am Richard II’, Elizabeth told William Lombarde, ‘Know ye not that?’ In 1595 Elizabeth had not yet played Richard II to Essex's Bolingbroke, but her language—the English on which playwrights like Shakespeare drew—was already beginning to play Richard II to Sir Francis Bacon's Bolingbroke. I have outlined this general shift from verbal fideism to scepticism during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries [elsewhere]. Shakespeare comes at these matters dramatically. Like Richard in Pomfret Castle, he addresses himself not to linguistic theory, but to homelier things like names and metaphors.

Losing his name, Richard loses everything. Cast out of his medieval world of pre-established order and significance, he is isolated in Pomfret Castle where he attempts, with stiff rhetorical flourishes, to hammer out meanings that had once simply been there for his taking. His resort to metaphor is inevitable once the old names are gone, for metaphor is the language of the unnamed. The process is familiar. Lacking a vocabulary for the unnamed, we steal from the already named. Each successful new metaphor is a creative insight and for a time gives off a spark of aesthetic pleasure. So long as tension exists between tenor and vehicle—so long as there is an element of the negative in our awareness that it is not what it literally claims to be—the metaphor remains metaphoric. With wear, however, this tension slackens, and the metaphor collapses into an inert name—or more familiarly ‘dies’. Thus few people today hear the ‘call’ of the word vocation or feel the ‘fusion of self and god’ in enthusiasm. The fact that baron once meant roughly ‘blockhead’ had been forgotten even by Shakespeare's time, when noble reminders still abounded. Language, in short, is a cemetery of dead metaphors, as linguists are fond of saying; or as poets like Emerson prefer, it is fossil poetry.

In a sense metaphor is an improper use of words, a violation of the linguistic system. Its depth structure is that of the proposition ‘A is B’—‘Honey is sweet’—whether the tenor is present or only implied in the surface structure. But whereas none of the properties of sweetness is incompatible with honey, a metaphor cannot be a metaphor unless some, perhaps most, of its properties are incompatible with its subject. ‘For what else is your Metaphor’, Puttenham asks, ‘but an inversion of sense by transport.’² For this reason a metaphor may initially look like a terminological error, a misnaming. When Mistress Quickly cries out to the street-fighting Falstaff ‘Ah thou honey-suckle villain!’ and again ‘Thou art a honey-seed’, we may spend some long moments puzzling over the honeylike properties of plump Jack before realising that Mistress Quickly is playing hostess not to metaphor but to malapropism. She means, not ‘honey-suckle’ and ‘honey-seed’, but ‘homicidal’ and ‘homicide’ (II Hen. IV, II.i.55, 59).

In Mistress Quickly's usage, error must be distinguished from apparent metaphor. Normally, it is the other way round: metaphor must earn its title to truth in a contest against error. Any new metaphor must be tested, must win its way to acceptance, its truth competing for favour against the odds of its own more obvious falseness. When in I Henry IV Falstaff calls Mistress Quickly an otter, Hal challenges the term—‘An otter, Sir John! Why an otter?’—thus forcing Falstaff to defend the truth of his metaphor: ‘Why, she's neither fish nor flesh; a man knows not where to have her’ (III.iii.142-5). Mistress Quickly bustles forth a convincing denial—‘Thou or any man knows where to have me, thou knave, thou!’ (III.iii.147)—but the point is that the question of truth has arisen.

The question of truth is precisely what does not arise in the case of dead metaphors. Here, the vehicle is no longer an illuminating similitude but literally the name of the tenor. No one questions whether ‘far-seeing’ is an appropriate term for the broadcasting of images by radiowaves to receivers that project them onto a picture tube. When the semantic batteries in a metaphor have gone entirely dead, as those of ‘television’ have for most people and certainly for those to whom it is merely ‘TV’, the metaphor ceases to be a metaphor and becomes a name. As such, it passes securely beyond challenges as to its truth, rightness and acceptability. Had Falstaff said ‘Francis Bacon is a baron’, Hal would no more have thought to challenge the dead metaphor—‘A baron, Sir John! Why a baron?—than he would to challenge the proper name, ‘Why “Francis Bacon”?’ To either question the only possible answer, even for a master of improvisation like Falstaff, would be a shrugging ‘That's simply the name’. There is no relevance to search out, no insightful comparison or ‘before unapprehended relation of things’. A name is a name is a name.

Now for Richard II kingship, his kingship, is as much beyond question as a proper name. It has the automatic warrant of Divine Right, which means not that Richard conceives of himself as the right king but that he conceives of himself simply as the king. For him ‘King’ and ‘Richard’ are not two words but one indissoluble name. The old metaphors linking kingly office and divine office are not analogical truths in Richard's imagination but anagogic ones, not metaphors but identities. The king is not like, he is the ‘deputy elected by the Lord’, ‘God's substitute’, ‘the Lord's lieutenant’, and so on. And because ‘King’ and ‘Richard’ are one entity, Richard is all of these things—and so he must carry his title with him to the grave, all successors disallowed.

This seems to be why Shakespeare, despite having established (in Act I, scene ii especially) Richard's criminal failures, even his murderousness, as king, then dramatises his deposition not so much as a trial of Richard's conduct as a trial of his concept of the royal office. At issue is whether King and Richard are in fact one word and whether the metaphors so royally taken for granted are literally true. Thus Shakespeare charts Richard's dramatic experience by the coordinates of name and person, thrusting him from a belief in the monistic divinity of name—

Arm, arm, my name! A puny subject strikes
At thy great glory

(III.ii.86-7)

—to a recognition of dualistic separability—

What must the King do now? Must he submit?
The king shall do it. Must he be deposed?
The King shall be contented. Must he lose
The name of king? O' God's name, let it go!

(III.iii.143-6)

—to an ultimate loss of name and a consequent dissolution of personal identity and meaning—

                                                            I have no name, no title;
No, not that name was given me at the font,
But 'tis usurped. Alack the heavy day,
That I have worn so many winters out
And know not what name to call myself!

(IV.i.255-9)

Ernst Cassirer remarks that, among primitives, ‘the being and life of a person are so intimately connected with his name that, as long as the name is preserved and spoken, its bearer is still felt to be present and directly active’.³ In Richard's case the ambiguity of the life-giving powers of the name is given full expression. Richard ‘lives’ only so long as his name is honoured; once that is gone, he becomes in his own word ‘nothing’, even before his death at the hands of Exton. In Pomfret Castle he realises that the name of king is merely arbitrary, that he has an identity apart from the name. Yet this knowledge, instead of sustaining him, instead of making him feel that he has lost ‘merely’ a name and not life itself, destroys him. There are no ‘mere’ words, it seems, only meaningful ones. Exton kills a man who is, in his namelessness, already dead.

Richard's world is dead too. It is a world conceived of in metaphors that had died into names, as Richard discovered too late. The metaphors he has taken literally were also taken literally in the sixteenth century, and implicit in them was a world view. Pattrick Cruttwell remarks:

Shakespeare is not really a philosopher; he had no philosophy of his own. He didn't need to have one; it was given him. He had simply to describe human life as honestly, vividly, and completely as he knew, and then, through the very terms of reference by which alone he could describe it, a philosophy emerges.⁴

The philosophy that emerges, Cruttwell says, is the ‘integrated medieval view’ that E. M. W. Tillyard has more famously, if somewhat metachronically, called the Elizabethan world picture. This world view, inherited from medieval culture, was intimately bound up with Elizabethan language, also inherited from medieval culture. The conception of a world essentially animistic, full of anthropomorphic life, dancing, ceremony, order, harmony—a hierarchical world of Platonic dualities and microspheres fashioned on the principles of analogy and parallelism—this world was not merely a set of theories in which men believed; it was what most of their key words implicitly meant. The world picture was a word picture. It was not for nothing that reality was thought to be composed of ‘elements’ and nature conceived of as a ‘book’.

But in Richard's dramatic experience—as in England's historical experience during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—the Book of Nature becomes incomprehensible. Things no longer answer to their assigned names. Once upon a time, in a fairytale world, ‘four lagging winters and four wanton springs [could be made to] end in a word, such [was] the breath of kings’ (I.iii.214-15). Once upon a time the king's name was twenty thousand names, and the king and God were consubstantial. That fairytale time had its historical counterpart in Shakespeare's England, as the fictive Richard had his real-life spokesman in, among others, William Tyndale, who said that

he that judgeth the King judgeth God, and he that layeth hands on the King layeth hands on God, and he that resisteth the King resisteth God. … The King is in this world without law, and he may at his lust do right or wrong and shall give accounts but to God only.⁵

These claims echo again and again through the Tudor homilies, especially in that ‘Concernyng Good Ordre and Obedience to Rulers and Magistrates’ (1547) and that ‘Against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion’ (1574).⁶ That kingship confers quasi-divine status and inviolability upon its holder is owing in part to God's direct appointment of kings, an appointment renewed through primogeniture, and in part to God's establishment of hierarchical order throughout the universe. As the visible symbol of human order, the king mediates between ‘earthly men’ and both God and God's grand design. If he falls, all else falls with him, as Ulysses, the domino theorist of Troilus and Cressida, so eloquently details it.

Bishop Carlisle, the Ulysses of Richard II, sounds a similar theme. Just before the deposition of Richard, when Bolingbroke says ‘In God's name, I'll ascend the regal throne’, Carlisle cries ‘Marry, God forbid!’ and in effect reads the Tudor homilies to him:

… shall the figure of God's majesty,
His captain, steward, deputy elect,
Anointed, crowned, planted many years,
Be judged by subject and inferior breath,
And he himself not present?

(IV.i.125-9)

The Earl of Northumberland applauds Carlisle's performance—‘Well have you argued, sir’—but adds, ‘and for your pains / Of capital treason we arrest you here’ (IV.i.150-1). So much, it would seem, for Divine Right!

And so much, also, for a sacramental language in which words have a kind of divine, inalienable right to their referents. Unlike Richard, Bolingbroke has never subscribed to such a language. From the opening scene of the play he has regarded words as mere vocal conveniences whose substance lies not in themselves but in what they designate. Thus he employs words as promissory notes in gathering followers in his venture for kingship, and reinforces what few words he does utter with material force. At Flint Castle, where Richard descends to the base court with many words and few soldiers, Bolingbroke listens politely and says little: his twenty thousand soldiers are all the eloquence he requires. If Richard is a regal name that is gradually divested of its meaning, Bolingbroke is a kind of material force or meaning in search of the name that will give him public expression.

The name Bolingbroke seeks is, of course, ‘king’, and the bond between word and meaning is analogous to that between kingship and the holder of that office. If the king's name or title normally goes unquestioned, it is not, Richard discovers, because it is divinely guaranteed but because it is humanly conferred and assumed. Names fit their referents not because of an underlying correspondence or substantive unity but by virtue of informal convenants among speakers. Kings and meanings rule by custom. It follows, as Bolingbroke well knows, that the name of ‘king’ will as readily answer to the meaning of ‘Henry IV’ as to that of ‘Richard II’. The next step in this reduction of language from the sacrosanct to the purely arbitrary is registered by Falstaff's remark to Prince Hal at the opening of I Henry IV: ‘I would to God thou and I knew where a commodity of good names were to be bought’ (I.ii.92-4). Like money, language is now reckoned a merely useful social instrument. Its meaning and value are no longer intrinsic but manufactured in response to the vicissitudes of the marketplace. In the inflationary times of II Henry IV the value of the word will fall still further. But that is to get ahead of the story.

When words are divorced from things, when names are seen to have neither a magical nor an inherently natural connection to their referents, then meaning comes into question, both in language and in kingship. What, during the reign of Bolingbroke, does the name of ‘king’ mean? Richard II has presented us with the gradual estrangement of the name ‘king’ from the meaning which, in the person of Richard himself, it has expressed, a meaning underwritten by God. If the royal name still presumes to mean ‘the Lord's lieutenant’ or ‘God's substitute’, then the proposition ‘The King is Henry IV’ can only be a lie, as Hotspur and the other conspirators feel. If, on the other hand, the proposition is true, if Bolingbroke is ‘King Henry IV’, then the old meanings are, and must always have been, not literal but only metaphorical. If so, the king is not a participant in divinity but an actor in a secular role, as Richard appears to realise in his tiring-room at Pomfret Castle:

Thus play I in one person many people,
And none contented. Sometimes am I king,
Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,
And so I am. Then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better when a king;
Then am I kinged again—and by and by
Think that I am unkinged by Bolingbroke,
And straight am nothing.

(V.v.31-8)

Richard's world of names has cracked apart to reveal the metaphor that was inert but not entirely dead within. Between ‘king’ and such meanings as ‘God's substitute’ stands, not an equals sign, but an ‘as-if’. If what is true of the king's name is also true of the King's English—or, in Shakespeare's time, of the Queen's English—then the implications for the poet-playwright are inauspicious indeed.

Why, we may wonder, should Shakespeare fashion in Richard II not merely the fall of a king but also the fall of kingly speech? Kings have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for words. Henry VI, Richard III and John, all fall without our feeling that a world of words topples with them. Yet there is clearly a sense in which Richard's verbal experience can be seen to reflect issues of paramount interest to the poet-playwright. Indeed, Richard has often been called a poet-king, not because he speaks excellent verse—as the ‘unpoetic’ Bolingbroke does also—but because his attitude toward language is poetic. After his return from Ireland, he ignores his captains' calls to action, preferring instead to ‘sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the deaths of kings’ (III.iii.155-6). That is, rather than enter on actions that would assert his authority in England, Richard lapses into forms of lyric narcissism. These sentimental verbal kingdoms are gratifying to him because within their imagined borders he holds uncontested sway; no Bolingbroke may enter there.

It is not quite accurate, however, to say that the poetic Richard whiles away his time with symbols and ceremonies at the expense of reality and action, which fall under the aegis of Bolingbroke, because in Richard's view language participates in reality, and words constitute actions. Yet Richard's journey through the play from Windsor Castle to Pomfret Castle, from Highness to nothingness, dramatises the breakdown of this conception of symbolism and language. He experiences in miniature the whole cultural metamorphosis of language, the long historical process in which the marriage of word and thing, signifier and signified, was put asunder and man's thought divorced from his world. For Bacon, Hobbes, the Royal Society and modern linguists, this process is a melioristic one—not a breakdown of the union between word and thing but a liberation of the word from the thing.⁷ For the poet, however, such a process is analogous to the Fall—or, in Richard II, to the deposition of a Divine Right king. For if language even in its post-Edenic, fallen form were sacramental—if its words either contained divinity, as in the figure of Christ the Logos, or even represented divinity, as in the figure of the Divine Right monarch—then the man who held dominion over language—whether king, priest, magician, or poet—would in some degree hold dominion over things and men's minds as well. Merely by practising his craft the poet would participate in the divine order, bringing the Book of Art into direct alignment with the Book of Nature, and acquiring by virtue of his mastery of words something of the creative authority deeply embedded in them from the beginning. He would then rebut the philistine claim that poetry is a pleasant lie, not by saying with Sidney that the poet nothing affirmeth and hence cannot lie, but by saying that his loving attendance upon language affirms a divine order and truth already implicit in words.

But for poet as well as king, it is not so. In Richard II Shakespeare dramatises his awareness that his verbal medium is founded not on names but on metaphor. More precisely, within a language of names, seemingly bonded to Elizabethan reality and warranted by God, lies the altogether human presence of metaphor, its once creative energy long since hardened into conventional definition.⁸ This descent from names to metaphors implies a fall from truth also. For it is the nature of metaphor to assume the appearance of the lie, since both, as the Houyhnhnms put it, ‘say the thing that is not’.

The linguistic issue is dramatised in terms of the royal ‘name’. In Richard's Divine Right view, ‘king’ is part of his own proper name—inherently legitimate, inviolable, even unquestionable. Usurped by Bolingbroke and applied to himself as ‘Henry IV’, the name of ‘king’ becomes ambiguous—at best, a term abruptly redefined in meaning, at worst, a lie that invades all of the King's English and breaks the bonds of meaning. What, then, of the young Prince Hal, the future king? Applied to the wastrel prince, the title of king must appear a lie too. Or, from the perspective of the tavern world, it must seem a delicious joke whose punch line will burst riotously on England shortly after Hal's coronation.

Hal is himself willing to exploit the appearance of a lie, as his first soliloquy informs us, but in the long run his view of his relation to kingship is metaphoric, and in this regard he distinguishes himself from both Richard and Bolingbroke. For him, the title will no longer possess the Divine Right status of a personal name, as it did for Richard, because he maintains a metaphoric doubleness of focus between vehicle and tenor, name and person, never forgetting that there are ironic distinctions between His Highness Henry the Fifth and the man whom the drawers called ‘a Corinthian, a lad of mettle, a good boy (by the Lord, so they call me)’ (I Hen. IV, II.iv.11-13). If the royal title is not part of his personal name, neither is it merely a piece of stolen property, like ‘King Henry the Fourth’. As with all metaphors, Hal must somehow demonstrate the truth of his kingship in the teeth of his apparent—in fact, his heir apparent—falseness. For a Divine Right he must substitute an earned human right to the crown. Only then can kingship be invested with meaning.

And Shakespeare? He, no less than Prince Hal, is called in doubt by Bolingbroke's usurpation and the fall of speech. If the king is a lie in the political realm, the lie is now king in the verbal world—and he who practises in that world must needs seem a liar. So the would-be king Hal and the would-be playwright Shakespeare must acknowledge themselves apparent liars to begin with, and somehow wrest truth from that false appearance. Both must transcend Bolingbroke and achieve authentic sovereignty in their separate realms of politics and art.

Notes

1. Eric La Guardia, ‘Ceremony and History: the Problem of Symbol from Richard II to Henry V’, in Pacific Coast Studies in Shakespeare, ed. Waldo F. McNeir and Thelma N. Greenfield (Eugene, Oregon, 1966), p. 74.

2. George Puttenham in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (London, 1904), 2:160. Puttenham's view that figures are trespasses of speech, and my own emphasis in this chapter on metaphor as a violation of the linguistic system, should be qualified to take account of the fact that language so abounds with figurative speech that we can hardly call it a deviation from the norm. Metaphor is a trespass in so far as it is non-logical; it says what literally is not. But a very great deal of language is non-logical in this sense. Moreover, some metaphors, truly creative, name the previously unnamed—get a line on aspects of experience and reality that lie quite outside the received vocabulary of a culture. Others, however, simply rename the already named; they are not exploratory but inventive, products of Coleridge's fancy rather than Imagination.

3. Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth (New York, 1946), p. 52.

4. Pattrick Crutwell, ‘Physiology and Psychology in Shakespeare's Age’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 12 (1951), 75-89.

5. Quoted by Philip Wheelwright in The Burning Fountain (Bloomington, Indiana, 1954), p. 215.

6. To be sure, the increased stress in the sixteenth century on the divinity of kingship need not entail an increased belief in the concept, much less an exceptionally godlike crop of kings. The homily ‘Against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion’ (1574) was issued not as a spontaneous expression of belief in the divinity of Elizabeth but as a propagandistic response to the Northern uprising of 1569. With the horrors of the civil wars still alive in public memory, both commoner and king wanted sacred as well as secular support for the established order. Even so, need is the fuel of belief, none more powerful, and it is quite impossible to dismiss the enormous prestige that monarchy had for men like Ascham, Spenser, Hooker and Bacon, or to ignore the ubiquitous metaphors linking order in the state with divine orderings of the universe and the laws of nature.

7. Ernst Cassirer regards this linguistic development as a three-phase movement from a ‘mimetic’ through an ‘analogical’ to a ‘symbolic’ relationship between signs and meanings. He sees this process as a teleogical maturing of language, an achievement of ‘inner freedom’. See his The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (New Haven, Conn., 1953), vol. 1, Language, pp. 186-98.

8. In discovering the metaphor within the name, Shakespeare could be said to have recognised something like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, according to which each distinct language encapsulates a world view that is untranslatable. (See Benjamin Whorf, Four Articles on Metalinguistics [Washington, DC, 1949] and also Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. John B. Carroll [Cambridge, Mass., 1956]).