SOURCE: “The Genre of Richard II,” in William Shakespeare's Richard II, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1988, pp. 7-35.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1972, Nevo assesses Richard II as a tragedy, rather than as a history play, and contends that despite some shortcomings, the play contains a movement approximating that of Shakespeare's great tragedies.]

Beyond the woeful or happy outcome brought about by the catastrophe Elizabethan dramatic theory did not distinguish between the structure of tragedy and comedy; neither were the dramatic practitioners possessed of a theory of genre which would enable them to distinguish with any rigor between tragedy and history. Polonius's familiar puzzlement is not only his own but the age's failure to achieve radical definitions. Thus the “chronicle” plays of the period, which deal with the fall of princes, great changes of fortune, tyrannical intrigues, and Machiavellian betrayals, based upon no clear generic principle of either tragedy or history, based, indeed, at best upon a de casibus interpretation of events indifferent to the distinction, present a bewildering medley of hybrids, a spectrum of mixed or intermediate tints. And whether any given instance is an example of “tragicall historie” or historical tragedy or of English Seneca requires a more systematic philosopher than Polonius to determine. Both Richard III and Richard II, though integral parts of their respective historical tetralogies, are called “tragedies” in the Folio and in the Quartos upon which it was based.

Shakespeare, therefore, found few clear conceptions of genre ready to hand. Nor did he possess a theory of tragic character. He invented as he went along; and as he proceeds from the histories to the tragedies, his exploratory, creative deployment of his art discovers and establishes the distinctions that he needs. The chief distinction between history and tragedy rests in the restructuring the narrative undergoes in order to bring out the protagonist's personal responsibility for events and his personal response to them. It is his distinctive aspiration, will, or purpose that becomes salient. In the history plays the protagonists are exhibited as struggling for freedom to initiate events. Even that artist in villainy, Richard III, has not fully escaped from the destined role of a scourge of God. If they are made vivid, it is by a degree of idiosyncrasy in their response to their destined roles, but they are nevertheless governed by an overall ironic process of history. If we may imagine them as figures in bas-relief compared to the sculptures in the round of the tragedies, they may also thus be compared with the tapestry figures of pure chronicle. But in Richard II the providentialist view of events which dominated Shakespeare's historical sources gives way to a rival concern. In Richard II Shakespeare's tragic idea takes the form of a development in the dimension of character that is decisive for future directions.

The play's overt conflict is between the strong and successful Bolingbroke and the vain and vacillating Richard; and looked at from the point of view of the management of events, the play is well made, Richard's decline and Bolingbroke's rise crisscrossing effectively in the center. But the simple fall-rise pattern does not exhaust the potentialities of the dramatic material as Shakespeare presents it. The play is not contained without remainder, so to speak, within the historical pattern. The remainder inheres in the characterization of Richard, in which the play's distinction lies. It is this study of the complex figure of the tragic hero that exerts pressure upon the shape of the play, so that from within the episodic chronicle form we perceive the emergence of what we can recognize, in the light of our knowledge of the later tragedies proper, as the distinctively tragic structure. The play does not exhibit the consummate articulation of phases of the great tragedies. The first two acts are episodic and the study of tragic character does not really get under way until the peripeteia of act 3. And when it does it is almost, though not quite, independent of the content of acts 1 and 2. But the play does possess a movement which approximates to that of the great tragedies. Coleridge's remark concerning Richard's “continually increasing energy of thought, and as constantly diminishing power of action” takes on an added significance when to Coleridge's psychological interest in character portrayal is added an interest in the structure of tragedy that directs us to search for the principle informing this movement.

As act 1 proceeds we perceive, through the considered juxtaposition of scenes, the predicament in which Richard is placed. The act is composed primarily of two scenes of elaborate formal challenge between rival claimants for justice. At three points, however, the façade of highly ceremonial assertion and counterassertion between Bolingbroke and Mowbray is rent to provide a glimpse of the historical actualities that lie behind these rituals. The inserted dialogue (1.2) between Gaunt and the Duchess of Gloucester points to the hidden and ambiguous source of all the trouble: the murder of Woodstock; the final scene of the act indicates, possibly, the real import both of Richard's fear of Bolingbroke (his courtship of the common people) and of Bolingbroke's challenge of Richard. (Though Holinshed, and Bolingbroke himself, in 2 Henry IV [3.1.72-74] deny the imputation of forethought: “Though then, Heaven knows, I had no such intent, / But that necessity so bow'd the state, / That I and greatness were compell'd to kiss.”) And the dialogue between Richard and Gaunt after the sentence of banishment makes clear the nature of the political arrangement that has taken place behind the scenes to make the present solution feasible. To Gaunt's lament for his son's exile Richard replies:

Thy son is banish'd upon good advice,
Whereto thy tongue a party-verdict gave:
Why at our justice seem'st thou then to lour?

(1.3.233-35)

And Gaunt's reply admits his complicity:

Things sweet to taste prove in digestion sour.
You urg'd me as a judge, but I had rather
You would have bid me argue like a father.
O, had it been a stranger, not my child,
To smooth his fault I should have been more mild.
A partial slander sought I to avoid,
And in the sentence my own life destroy'd.
Alas, I look'd when some of you should say
I was too strict to make mine own away;
But you gave leave to my unwilling tongue
Against my will to do myself this wrong.

(1.3.236-46)

What is presented then is the tangential relationship between the dramatized conflict of wills and the complex reality of history, where political morality or amorality is still further complicated by the blood relationship between the various contenders for power. Feudal rituals mask the ulterior political realities of collusion and guilt. In the predicament thus presented, power and justice are divided and disjoined. And it is in these circumstances that the King must play his allotted role. Richard must rule, in his circumstances, either by what the Elizabethans, following Machiavelli, called virtù, or by that older dial of princes called virtue. He must govern by either power or justice, since the breach between them already exists.

When we ask what is wrong with Richard's interruption of the lists, an act for which he has been richly and variously scolded by his severer critics, we are forced to the conclusion that it represents no more, but also no less, than simple political expediency, in circumstances which leave little other alternative. Later in the play we are given a parallel scene in which we watch Bolingbroke, at the height of his power and success, encountering a similar situation. And the comparison is instructive.

Once again the question at issue is Gloucester's death. Bagot is now the chief witness and Aumerle the accused, as Mowbray was accused by Bolingbroke in act 1. Once again the situation shapes itself in terms of the challenges and counterchallenges of honor, with the civil dissension inherent in the situation made manifest by the successive involvement on one side or the other of Fitzwater, Surrey, and Percy. The question, by an evident irony, circles back to the original contender, Mowbray, and we are only prevented from finding ourselves, so to speak, back at base, by Mowbray's death meanwhile in exile. But what is significant is that Bolingbroke, too, can do no more than shelve the whole matter, leaving the contenders under gage, “Till we assign you to your days of trial.” The intransigeance of the original ugly fact is a perpetual stumbling block to the house of Edward's sons, those “seven vials of his sacred blood” which has been shed. Thus the ultimate source of evil in this play and those which follow it (in the chronology of history, not by date of composition) is clearly identifiable. It is Woodstock's murder—a crime which sets up the chain reaction of violence and counterviolence, of guilt and the incurring of guilt, that scourges England through half-a-dozen reigns. But if Woodstock's death is the ultimate cause of these events, it is nevertheless not what is dramatized in Richard II. The play leaves this original act of Cain in impenetrable obscurity; but it presents Richard, at the outset, in precarious command of a dangerous and complex situation. He cannot place his dubious position at hazard upon the outcome of the duel, and he certainly cannot circumvent the challengers without the behind-the-scenes political arrangements we observe. This is Richard's predicament; and what the first two acts are engaged to exhibit is his disastrous incapacity to establish his ascendancy.

Richard's handling of the difficult situation presented in act 1 is, I have suggested, not unmarked by a shrewd political acumen. But it is marred by levity. His speech to the combatants, in the high vein of prophetic patriotism which is struck again and again, and with the utmost seriousness, throughout the play, has impressive dignity:

For that our kingdom's earth should not be soil'd
With that dear blood which it hath fostered;
And for our eyes do hate the dire aspect
Of civil wounds plough'd up with neighbours' sword,
And for we think the eagle-winged pride
Of sky-aspiring and ambitious thoughts,
With rival-hating envy, set on you
To wake our peace, which in our country's cradle
Draws the sweet infant breath of gentle sleep.

(1.3.125-33)

But behind the regal bearing and the regal gesture is revealed Richard's dismal lack of that inalienable personal power which a later age would come to call charisma, and which alone could carry him through. He has not that in his face which either Mowbray or Bolingbroke would feign call master. And this is made manifest by their refusal, insolent in Bolingbroke's case, conciliatory in Mowbray's, to obey him, notwithstanding the brave show of “lions make leopards tame” or “we were not born to sue, but to command.” The dramatic conduct of the first scenes throws into relief the “high pitch of the contender's resolution,” rather than any high pitch of the King's. And though divinity hedges him (Gaunt will raise no hand against the Lord's anointed despite the appeal of his widowed sister-in-law) we are left with the overriding impression of a precariousness in his exercise of authority. The main source of this impression lies in the frivolity of Richard's attitude to Gaunt. The first note of this frivolity is heard in the flippant “pluck'd four away” with which Richard announces his commutation of Bolingbroke's sentence, and the scarcely veiled effrontery of “Why, uncle, thou hast many years to live.” It is the note, or the major chord, upon which act 1 closes:

Now put it, God, in the physician's mind
To help him to his grave immediately!
The lining of his coffers shall make coats
To deck our soldiers for these Irish wars.
Come, gentlemen, let's all go visit him,
Pray God we may make haste and come too late!

(1.4.59-64)

This is the mainspring of the development in act 2. For if in act 1 was revealed Richard's lack of virtù—he plays neither lion nor fox with sufficient conviction—in act 2, against the powerful remonstrance of the dying Gaunt, is revealed his lack of virtue. And much is to be learned from the way in which this lack of virtue is in fact revealed. As we have seen, act 2 is the phase of tragedy which presents the tempting or testing of the protagonist in terms of personal decisions which have to be made. Richard's “Can sick men play so nicely with their names?” and “A lunatic lean-witted fool, presuming on an ague's privilege,” contrasting with the passion of Gaunt's “Landlord of England art thou now, not king,” represent not merely a callous indifference to mortal illness, but a deliberate refusal to entertain the seriousness of the issues. Thus it is Richard's flippancy, exhibited in the deathbed confrontation with Gaunt, that indicates the nature of his “temptation.” The difficulty is that the king's frivolity is exhibited only in the passage with Gaunt and made only by implication to bear the whole brunt of the indictment against him. It is by narrative hearsay that we are informed of Richard's unstaid youth, light vanity, the thousand flatterers which sit within his crown, the throne's bankruptcy, the shame of the leasing out of English land, and the burdensome exactions and taxes under which groan commons and nobles alike—charges which are made to account for the defection of Willoughby, Ross, and Worcester. But these defects and abuses are given no self-reflection or reverberation or internalization in Richard's mind, nor are they mediated by some powerful private motivation with which he must engage. Marlowe did better with his Edward in this respect.

Whether this summary fashion is due, as Rossiter thought, to Shakespeare's leaning too heavily (by allusion) upon Woodstock is less to the purpose than the perception that in the encounter between uncle and nephew is encapsulated the morality content of the older play. There Richard's three uncles exhort him to virtue, and Tresilian, Bushy, and Green to vice; the familiar form of the medieval debate constitutes the whole structural frame of Woodstock. It is noteworthy that in Richard II this psychomachia is reduced to one stage of a process, in keeping with the new kind of structure and the new kind of tragic issue toward which Shakespeare is evidently feeling his way. But the treatment suffers from too radical an abridgement. The effect is of a dramatic thinness, or flatness, or absence of relatedness. The discontinuity, the gaps, so to speak, between given, fixed aspects or attributes of character (regality, levity) are not only too great but also too empty of reflection to allow that play of inference which alone constitutes psychological density and creates our sense of character. Shakespeare overcomes this dramatic thinness in an impressively skillful manner through his presentation of the role of York. But this is still in the earlier episodic mode, not capable of the effects of integration later achieved.

York, upon Bolingbroke's return, becomes a vessel of ambivalence, swaying between fealty and justice, dynastic legitimacy and virtue. This is the conflict which Richard's frivolity imposes upon his subjects; it is also a continuation of the conflict implicit in the play's predicament. For as Bolingbroke presents his case to York it becomes abundantly clear that whichever principle York chooses he must do violence to another no less imperative.

Will you permit that I shall stand condemn'd
A wandering vagabond, my rights and royalties
Pluck'd from my arms perforce, and given away
To upstart unthrifts? Wherefore was I born?
If that my cousin king be King in England,
It must be granted I am Duke of Lancaster.
You have a son, Aumerle, my noble cousin;
Had you first died, and he been thus trod down,
He should have found his uncle Gaunt a father,
To rouse his wrongs and chase them to the bay.

(2.3.118-27)

The dichotomization of values is complete, and York mirrors the conflict which is externalized, in the plot, in the struggle between the two contenders for the crown. But he does not mirror a dilemma within the soul of the protagonist, as, for instance, does Enobarbus; he merely substitutes for it. Maynard Mack has spoken of “umbrella” speeches or episodes, those mirrors of analogy in the mature Shakespearean drama “under which more than one consciousness shelters.” These are screens, he says, citing Lear's Fool, Poor Tom, Enobarbus, and the sleepwalking Lady Macbeth, on which “Shakespeare flashes, as it were, readings from the psychic life of the protagonist.” York is incipiently such a figure, but it is not until the end of the play, as I shall presently show, that the readings flashed onto the screen he provides are from the psychic life of Richard himself.

In act 2 we watch the actualization of Gaunt's prophecy: the callous indifference of Richard to his death, the seizing of Bolingbroke's inheritance, the defection of Willoughby, Ross, and Worcester, and the mournful forebodings of the Queen. It is the expropriation of Bolingbroke, of course, that makes possible his return as claimant for simple justice. But the fatality of this act, which in fact precipitates Richard's downfall, is obscured by the secondary issues, so that its effect is dissipated in a catalogue of political abuses of which the expropriation of Bolingbroke appears to be only one. We are thus catapulted straight into the peripeteia of act 3—the unkinging of the King—with no transition other than the episodic reference to the Irish expedition by Bushy, Green, and Bagot. These scapegoat figures, caterpillars of the commonwealth, serve the ends of historical apologetic for the sweet English rose, but they usurp attention that should be concentrated upon the figure of the tragic hero. What Shakespeare, it seems, has not mastered in this play is the foregrounding of the fatal choice—the act, portentous in the inescapability of its consequences, fully expressive of the protagonist's nature (though it may be unpremeditated) which precipitates both disaster and the recognitions that constitute the emergence of tragic consciousness in one who is, paradoxically, both agent and victim of his fate.

Because Shakespeare has thus failed to bring out and make salient the tragic error, act 3 appears to set off, so far as the character of Richard is concerned, in a completely new direction. The effect of discontinuity, of too sudden a shift of focus, is the result of an insufficient anchoring of present responses in purposes, feelings, desires, intentions previously entertained. By the time Shakespeare comes to write Lear, in which so much that is implicit in Richard II is developed, and Macbeth, in which so much that is implicit in Richard III is developed, he will know how to exploit a tragic error committed at the outset of the events. Richard's tragic life begins, in effect, only in act 3 itself; unlike Lear and Macbeth, he is not yet possessed of that great tragic asset, a past—is not yet haunted and hounded by the memory of that which is done. It is precisely, indeed, toward a realization of the nature of his temporal existence that he is made to struggle in act 3. And it is this which gives one the sense of being in the very forge and workshop of Shakespeare's art. For it is the “inside of the event” that we are given throughout these central perturbations in act 3, the very process of Richard's discovery of self. Those critics who complain of “self-dramatization” overlook the fact that for a character to have a self to dramatize is one of the more remarkable achievements of European literature. The question is important enough to warrant a moment's digression.

In Richard III Shakespeare had achieved a density of characterization by the essentially simple device of impersonation, which was his inheritance from the Devil-vice figure of the moralities. Richard not only acts the villain; he delights in the exercise of his skill as an enactor of villainy. He is both actor and régisseur of his own part, and the fascination of the performance hinges upon the very ambiguity of the notion of playacting, interchangeably illusion and reality. All reference in Shakespeare to playacting, direct or implicit, has this effect, creating a metatheatre in which levels of representation interact. The same principle accounts for the density of Falstaff. And in the multiplication of possibilities of interplay between the projection, the performance, the assessment, and the awareness of a role lies the inimitable impression of exuberance and zest which mark both characters, each in his own mode. The moment, however, we are tempted or invited to probe behind a public role to a private reality, to press beyond the imitation of a histrionic toward the imitation of an historic mode of existence, we find that such characters become dynamic in a totally new way. A principle of growth, of modification, of real human development is introduced into figures which, whatever their versatility, are tied to the irreducible fixity of Crookback or Fatbelly. Falstaff as comic character cannot truly survive the sense of self which is beyond the sense of role. Hence the notorious fracture, so to speak, of the whole conception, in 2 Henry IV. In Richard, on the other hand (since by a paradox of terminology, it is the tragedies which explore the “historic,” or inward, as opposed to the “histrionic,” or outward, mode of existence), we perceive, in his soliloquy after the dream, the very point of emergence of a new possibility: a dialogue of self and soul.

Give me another horse, bind up my wounds:
Have mercy Jesu! Soft, I did but dream.
O coward conscience! how dost thou afflict me?
The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight.
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.
What do I fear? myself? There's none else by,
Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.
Is there a murderer here? No; yes, I am:
Then fly. What from myself? Great reason why?
Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?
Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O no! Alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself.
I am a villain: yet I lie, I am not.
Fool, of thyself speak well: fool, do not flatter.
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain;
Perjury, in the high'st degree,
Murder, stern murder, in the dir'st degree;
All several sins, all us'd in each degree,
Throng to the bar, crying all, Guilty! Guilty!
I shall despair. There is no creature loves me;
And if I die no soul shall pity me.
Nay, wherefore should they? Since that I myself,
Find in myself no pity to myself?

(Richard III, 5.3.178-204)

It is rudimentary, though powerful; it is the merest sketch—too little and too late. But it is of the highest significance. And it is the germ which will develop through subsequent plays, adding to dramatic character an entire inner dimension of tragic self-discovery.

It is thus not further evidence of Richard's failure as a king that we are invited to perceive throughout act 3. His failure as a king has been sufficiently established, as has Bolingbroke's cool confidence and masterly practicality. We are invited to perceive, stage by stage, through the direct disclosure of monologue and through inferences that the detail of the language enables us to make, a total curve of experience. The emotions that constitute that experience—shattered confidence, the sense of inadequacy, impotence, humiliation, grief—find cumulative expression throughout Richard's speeches in acts 3 and 4 and culminating expression in the speech at Pomfret. And their delineation of emerging self-awareness and the struggle for self-possession is masterly. We have been misdirected to find in these speeches the luxuriatings in misery of a “poet manqué, who loved words more dearly than his Kingdom,” or a dilettante sentimentalist, “morbid, vacillating, impotently reflective and emotional,” “whose tragedy expresses itself in terms that clearly point to the weakness [acute self-consciousness] that has been, in part, its cause.” These speeches are properly to be construed not as educing the cause of his fall before the onslaught of Bolingbroke, but as the consequences of that fall, suffered, known, experienced, and reflected in the mind. Self-dramatization (Eliot's notorious stricture upon Othello) is the very medium of the art of tragedy, the method whereby it articulates its progress. It is as fallacious to regard it as an idiosyncrasy which demands particularistic psychological explanation as to construe the sculptured immobility of the discus-thrower as an indication of his curious inability to throw a discus. How shall we become aware of a character's thoughts save by his utterance of them, of a character's emotions save by his expression of them, of a character's possession of self save by his manifestation of a consciousness of self, or of a character's tragic identity save by his tragic agon, his pressing to the limit the experience of adversity in existence. The tragic hero is locked in struggle with himself, like Jacob with the angel.

As Moulton perceived, this fall of Richard is constructed on Shakespeare's favorite plan: “its force is measured, not by suddenness or violence, but by protraction and the perception of distinct stages” (Shakespeare as Dramatic Artist). Aristotle's anagnorisis—the transformation of ignorance into knowledge through recognition of identity—provides the paradigm for all such transmutations in tragedy. What distinguishes the Shakespearean kind is the richness, depth, inwardness, and range of awareness which the expressive, self-revelatory, self-exploratory speech of the hero enables him to articulate. In Greek drama what is recognized is identity. In Shakespearean drama what is recognized is self. Characteristically the self-exploration is given substance and definition by the terms of the psychomachia set forth in act 2. And though this, as we have seen, is less than sufficiently “done” in this play, nevertheless particular analysis of the self-exploration of Richard shows that the observation holds good here too.

Richard's vacillations are a function basically of that failure to summon up the maximum resources of the will, that lack of self-confidence, which characterizes men who are weaker than the opponents they encounter. But the substance of his vacillations consists of desperate recurrent attempts to achieve or fix an image of himself with which he can live should his native role slip from his grasp.

When we first encounter Richard upon his return from Ireland, weeping for joy to stand upon his kingdom once again, the speech is in direct emotional continuation of his address to the combatants in act 1, in which he adjured them to protect the peace “which in our country's cradle / Draws the sweet infant breath of gentle sleep” (1.3.132).

Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand
Though rebels wound thee with their horses' hoofs.
As a long-parted mother with her child
Plays fondly with her tears and smiles in meeting,
So weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth,
And do thee favours with my royal hands;
Feed not thy sovereign's foe, my gentle earth,
Nor with thy sweets comfort his ravenous sense,
But let thy spiders that suck up thy venom
And heavy-gaited toads lie in their way,
Doing annoyance to the treacherous feet,
Which with usurping steps do trample thee.

(3.2.6-17)

These speeches are in marked contrast with the historically oriented nationalism of Gaunt's prophecy:

This royal throne of kings, this scept'red isle …
This happy breed of men, this little world …
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Fear'd by their breed, and famous by their birth,
Renowned for their deeds as far from home,
For Christian service and true chivalry,
As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry
Of the world's ransom, blessed Mary's son;
This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leas'd out—I die pronouncing it—
Like to a tenement or pelting farm.

(2.1.40-60)

Richard, unlike Gaunt, is invoking an ancient, sacramental magic. It is prenational, a-historical; it is the sacred, animistic bond between king and land—the corpus mysticum which includes and transcends both political kingdom and physical earth, as kingship includes and transcends both the king's eternal “body politic” and his personal, natural self. From this he draws the strength of his asserted belief that “Not all the water in the rough rude sea / Can wash the balm off from an anointed king.” He is also invoking a lover's relationship, caressing, tender, maternal, erotic. His personifications persistently link rebellion with suggestions of sexual violation—a rape of the land:

And when they from thy bosom pluck a flower,
Guard it, I pray thee, with a lurking adder,
Whose double tongue may with a mortal touch
Throw death upon thy sovereign's enemies.

(3.2.19-22)

Gaunt's patriotism, on the other hand, takes the form of a national pride in the virtues and achievements of an historical nation-state, its martial valor, its renown abroad, its strength and independence. It is noteworthy that his rhetoric consistently distinguishes between “land” and “state”—indeed in the famous lines, “This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, / This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings” (2.1.50-51), he makes perceptible transition from the merely native to the consciously national. That Gaunt's patriotism is anachronistic, far more Elizabethan than feudal, is less to the purpose than the perception that Richard, by contrast, is drawing upon constitutional and legal doctrine and quasi-erotic sentiment to supply the strength and confidence which “worldly men” derive from the exercise of political arts. Richard's identification of himself with his kingship and with the land he is part of and possesses constitutes the inherited and as yet untried conception of himself to which he retreats at the first crisis. It is this that circumstances will test, undermine, and finally shatter; and in the ruin of which, in the catastrophe, he will find independent individual dignity.

While Carlisle and Aumerle make their plea for the practical energies of virtù, Fortune and Scroop, playing the torturer by small and small, announce first the defection of the Welshmen, then the general insurrection in favor of Bolingbroke, then the execution of Bushy, Green, and the Earl of Wiltshire. Richard's reactions consist of a series of violent fluctuations between dread of worse to come and renewed hope for the power of the king's name, or the power of his uncle York. These fluctuations come to rest in a stoical attempt to withstand the tidings of calamity by reducing its significance to mere worldly loss, which can be endured with a virtuous fortitude:

The worst is worldly loss thou canst unfold.
Say, is my kingdom lost? Why, 'twas my care,
And what loss is it to be rid of care?
Strives Bolingbroke to be as great as we?
Greater he shall not be. If he serve God,
We'll serve Him too, and be his fellow so.
Revolt our subjects? that we cannot mend;
They break their faith to God as well as us.
Cry woe, destruction, ruin, and decay—
The worst is death, and death will have his day.

(3.2.94-103)

But the culmination of the whole series of reactions, finely discriminated from this speech of rehearsal, is the great elegy with which Richard greets the blow of the news of his friends' death. Indeed it is this blow and its accompanying emotional perturbation (immediately following his carefully constructed stoicism) that transforms the protective pose of Christian fortitude into a great lament upon the theme of vanity. He believed his friends treacherous, and discovers their loyalty in the same breath as he discovers their death. The irony is pointed up by Scroop's equivocation: “Peace have they made with him indeed, my lord” (3.2.128). From the multiplicity of meaning radiating outward from the small word “peace” Richard's meditation upon death takes its rise. Peace of body, of mind, of conscience, the illusory peace of life—“as if this flesh which walls about our life were brass impregnable”—the peace of the grave in the hollow ground are its grand themes.

Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs,
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.
Let's choose executors and talk of wills.
And yet not so—for what can we bequeath
Save our deposed bodies to the ground?
Our lands, our lives, and all, are Bolingbroke's,
And nothing can we call our own but death;
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
For God's sake let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been depos'd, some vain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping kill'd,
All murthered—for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court, and there his antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd, and kill with looks;
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life
Were brass impregnable; and humour'd thus,
Comes at the last, and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence; throw away respect,
Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty;
For you have but mistook me all this while.
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends—subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king?

(3.2.145-77)

His own deprivation, his own mortification, is the prelude to the melancholy procession of monarchs from the Mirror for Magistrates in all the poignant specificity of their individual deaths. But he is one of them, and the idea of the common destiny of all earthly kings is salient. The thought reaches its climax in the figure of King Death keeping his court within the hollow crown that rounds the mortal temples of a king; the metaphor articulates illusion, juxtaposing king and mock-king, king of flesh and king of shadows, in a flash of meaning Lear will later expand. Richard's self-awareness emerges from this dialectic of king and subject with the double puns upon “Crown” (symbol of sovereignty and mere skull) and “subjected” (made a subject and thrown down) focusing his realization of the relationship between the illusory name of king and the real nature of man, subject to elementary needs and sorrows. The very pronouns articulate the progress of this arduous shift of perspective. The speech begins with the generalizing and representative royal plural: “Let's sit,” “Let's choose,” “What can we bequeath,” proceeds through the immensely distanced “allowing him,” “infusing him,” to the “me” and the “I” and the “you” of a fully exposed personal existence in the final lines.

Richard's lament yields to the scarcely concealed contempt with which the practical Carlisle urges him, “My lord, wise men ne'er sit and wail their woes,” and to Aumerle's encouragement to him to remember York's force. His insight gives way to the older habitual posture. He rejects his recent outburst as an “ague fit of fear” and brashly looks forward to the winning of his own as an easy task. But the final blow is decisive. Richard's “sweet way to despair” is sweet not only because it suggests to him the consolations of an indulgence in the grief which is now all that is his own, but also because it is, in terms of a medieval contemptus mundi, a kind of hope. The “Kingly woe” which he resolves to obey is endued with connotations of a piety—the piety of the kingdom within—which has the power to make folly the wisdom of the world. The perspective is one which makes Bolingbroke's rise to power, crowned by vanity and haunted by guilt, a grimly ironic comment upon Carlisle's “wise men.”

To call Richard's behavior here vacillation is of course to classify it correctly for practical purposes. For dramatic purposes, however, what is important is what we are enabled to infer of the nature of his ordeal and the inner strategies it gives rise to. The peripeteia which reverses his status and his situation, which makes him no king, produces self-awareness of the acutest and most poignant kind. And it would seem to be crass indeed to interpret the highly original if still somewhat stilted rendering of this self-awareness as “Richard's fatal weakness.” It is often done. “He cannot bring himself to live in a world of hard actuality; the universe to him is real only as it is presented in packages of fine words”; “Aumerle tries almost roughly to recall him from his weaving of sweet, melancholy sounds … but he rouses himself only momentarily and then relapses into a complacent enjoyment of the sound of his own tongue.” A juster analysis will surely perceive the subtlety with which the personal struggle is rendered. As he watches his power dwindle and knows himself without the innate capacity to rule, it is precisely “the hard actuality” of his situation that he perceives. And in his probing of this actuality he conceives the possibility of an alternative “address to the world” which represents another kind of sovereignty. Both impose claims upon his imagination, and each frustrates the other. “What shall the King do?” is the question that torments him. And “What shall the King do?” in circumstances in which the King's power to initiate action is lost becomes the far more radical and searching question, “What shall the King be?”

The constitutive principle throughout act 3 is that of rapid alternation, and with each thrust and counterthrust further resources of language are brought into play. Richard's appearance upon the walls of Flint castle has the imposing dignity of royal spectacle. As York points out:

Yet looks he like a king. Behold, his eye,
As bright as is the eagle's, lightens forth
Controlling majesty; alack, alack for woe
That any harm should stain so fair a show!

(3.3.68-71)

And his address to Northumberland takes the cue with magnificent aplomb:

We are amazed, and thus long have we stood
To watch the fearful bending of thy knee,
Because we thought ourselves thy lawful king:
And if we be, how dare thy joints forget
To pay their awful duty to our presence?

(3.3.72-76)

In his speech the themes of legitimate descent, divine protection, the ravages of war to come are recapitulated and climaxed by one of the most moving of the recurrent image clusters:

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

(3.3.95-100)

The speech is in direct counterpoint to Bolingbroke's preceding threat:

If not, I'll use the advantage of my power
And lay the summer's dust with showers of blood
Rain'd from the wounds of slaughtered Englishmen—
The which, how far off from the mind of Bolingbroke
It is such crimson tempest should bedrench
The fresh green lap of fair King Richard's land.

(3.3.42-47)

It should not be lost upon the sensitive ear that Richard's version of the rape of the land has the advantage in resonance, seriousness, and poetic power. The metaphor which is slighting in “the fresh green lap of fair King Richard's land” recurs in “the flower of England's face,” but with an excess of personal dignity in the change of bodily reference; and then is almost completely personified in “the complexion of her maid-pale peace,” so that the England which will be drenched by the rain of blood is presented as the object of Richard's personal love and as a lovely object of contemplative pity. The imagery in this play is still more “poetic” than “dramatic,” but an instance of the specifically poetic medium taking on a dramatic dimension is the way in which the imagery of earth, flesh, peace, blood, and growth is also used to discriminate between contrasting martial and tender modes of being. The gamut of expression thus provided constitutes the characterizing, or dramatizing, function of the imagery, and so enters into the dynamic of the play.

Richard's wholeheartedness, his role as his land's lover, gives way to bitterness at the thought of what his situation forces him to do. For this reason he overstates his accession to Bolingbroke's demands:

Northumberland, say thus the King returns:
His noble cousin is right welcome hither,
And all the number of his fair demands
Shall be accomplish'd without contradiction;
With all the gracious utterance that thou hast
Speak to his gentle hearing kind commends

(3.3.121-26)

and at once plays with a repudiation of what he feels to be intolerably debasing:

We do debase ourselves, cousin, do we not,
To look so poorly, and to speak so fair?
Shall we call back Northumberland and send
Defiance to the traitor, and so die?

(3.3.127-30)

The wild desire for an heroic death (“to send defiance to the traitor, and so die”), checked by Aumerle's prudence, then issues in Richard's passionate insight into the tragic discrepancy between the king's two bodies, between himself and his role, between the man that he is and the king that he ought to be.

                                                            O that I were as great
As is my grief, or lesser than my name!
Or that I could forget what I have been!
Or not remember what I must be now!
Swell'st thou, proud heart? I'll give thee scope to beat,
Since foes have scope to beat both thee and me.

(3.3.136-41)

The previous speech, which ended with the cry, “Subjected thus / How can you say to me, I am a king?” registered his shocked realization of impotence, generated by the perception that such impotence in the face of death is the lot of common humanity. Here Richard exhibits a further stage in his awareness of himself as separate from the role history has cast upon him. The immediate result is the renunciation speech, which is flattened out of all significance if it is seen as merely another ecstasy of self-pity. The speech registers in fact a complex triple movement of feeling:

What must the King do now? Must he submit?
The King shall do it. Must he be depos'd?
The King shall be contented. Must he lose
The name of king? a God's name, let it go.
I'll give my jewels for a set of beads;
My gorgeous palace for a hermitage;
My gay apparel for an almsman's gown;
My figur'd goblets for a dish of wood;
My scepter for a palmer's walking staff;
My subjects for a pair of carved saints,
And my large kingdom for a little grave,
A little little grave, an obscure grave;
Or I'll be buried in the King's highway,
Some way of common trade, where subjects' feet
May hourly trample on their sovereign's head;
For on my heart they tread now whilst I live:
And buried once, why not upon my head?
Aumerle, thou weep'st (my tender-hearted cousin!),
We'll make foul weather with despised tears;
Our sighs and they shall lodge the summer corn,
And make some pretty match with shedding tears?
Or shall we play the wantons with our woes,
As thus, to drop them still upon one place,
Till they have fretted us a pair of graves
Within the earth, and, therein laid—there lies
Two kinsmen digg'd their graves with weeping eyes!
Would not this ill do well? Well, well, I see
I talk but idly, and you laugh at me.
Most mighty prince, my Lord Northumberland,
What says King Bolingbroke? Will his Majesty
Give Richard leave to live till Richard die?

(3.3.143-73)

The detailed, almost ritualistic specification with which he itemizes the idea of renunciation of the world suggests the intensity with which he is attempting to make a virtue of his necessity. The culminating item, however, “And my large kingdom for a little grave,” initiates a collapse of this high aim. It is marvelously dramatic. The would-be saint at this point collapses into the would-be martyr, and the self-pity which overcomes him is the surest sign of an unchastened self-love, an unreadiness for and even rejection of the idea of renunciation. In the third stage of the speech this excess of self-pity itself gives way to something else as the king becomes aware of Aumerle's evident emotion. His address to Aumerle, faithful king's man to the end, is indeed what it is invariably taken to be—a sentimental excursion. But it should not, I believe, be glossed exclusively to the King's disadvantage. On the contrary, if it is the verbal equivalent of the embrace of a man's arm around a friend's shoulder, it suggests the sustaining power of a gesture of sympathy, and it is in fact bracing in its effect, enabling Richard to return to the cruelty of fact: “What says King Bolingbroke? Will his Majesty / Give Richard leave to live till Richard die?” (3.3.172-73). Once again pronouns chart the spiritual progress. The royal “we” of the opening speech gave place to the titular third person used of himself at the start of the renunciation speech (“What must the king do now?”); this in turn gave way to the first person of the renunciation itself, as king was deposed into person. “Richard,” royal and baptismal name, designates the now ironic identification of person and king, the two aspects of himself seen, so to speak, from without. But the descent to the base court of the deposed sun-king is rendered by the unreserved and unmitigated first person singular.

The descent to the base court marks the completion of the tragic reversal. Power has in fact passed from Richard to Bolingbroke and from now on Richard is no longer controller or initiator of events, but merely the object of Bolingbroke's designs. Though this transfer of power is not formalized until the abdication scene, it has in fact occurred; and Richard's role in act 4 is subtly different from all that has preceded it. In act 4 Richard is the victim of Bolingbroke's inexorable progress, and his protest takes the form of the inverted coronation-rite. His newly sharpened awareness of self now becomes a bitter sense of self-betrayal and consequent self-disgust. We are given our bearings upon this phase of Richard's progress by his increasing recourse to sarcasm, the only weapon of revenge, the only violence, of a weak man:

Alack, why am I sent for to a king
Before I have shook off the regal thoughts
Wherewith I reign'd? I hardly yet have learn'd
To insinuate, flatter, bow, and bend my knee.

(4.1.162-65)

The one power he still has over Bolingbroke is the power to force him to be the witness of his violation of royalty, to force him to take responsibility, full human responsibility, for the lèse majesté which he sees as a replica of the ultimate sacrilege:

Though some of you, with Pilate, wash your hands,
Showing an outward pity—yet you Pilates
Have here deliver'd me to my sour cross,
And water cannot wash away your sin.

(4.1.239-42)

Had he retired in dignified silence from the stage of history, as many of his critics apparently would have wished him to do, it would certainly have been more comfortable for the new king than the woeful pageant that we have. But the abdication scene, in which Richard stage-manages the exchange of the crown and the ritual unkinging of himself, provides the context in which the mirror episode acquires its reverberating significance.

In the mirror Richard seeks to solve the mystery of identity, of who and what he is. Truth and vanity, face and mask, self and role, substance and shadow—these dichotomies are all contained in the grand symbol of the mirror. Comparison with Richard III is instructive. For where Richard III watched his crooked shadow in the sun, understanding what he was in that outward figure, Richard II peruses his image in the glass, “That it may show me what a face I have / Since it is bankrupt of his majesty” (4.1.266-67). For his bafflement concerning his name and his nature has just received its most moving, passionate expression:

                                        Alack the heavy day,
That I have worn so many winters out,
And know not now what name to call myself!
O that I were a mockery king of snow,
Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke,
To melt myself away in water drops!

(4.1.257-62)

The disintegrating experience of a total breach between name and self is matched by the powerful snow-king metaphor of disintegration. The bitterness is wonderfully expressed by the transference of the sun metaphor to Bolingbroke and the transference of Bolingbroke's cold qualities to himself. Throughout the play, indeed, the orchestration of the sensuous contraries expressive of Richard's fluctuating states of mind—hot and cold, sweet and sour, pale and red, high and low, solid and melting (or brittle and liquid), harsh and tuneful—is entirely admirable.

In the shattering of the mirror is the symbol shattered, and Bolingbroke's acid comment, “The shadow of your sorrow has destroy'd the shadow of your face,” extracts a yet further significance from the episode. Richard responds to the truth of Bolingbroke's pragmatism with a countertruth in which resides the grandest irony of all, did Bolingbroke but know it—the irony of the inner reality of anguish and guilt of which the pomp and power of kingship's outer action is but the shadow:

'Tis very true, my grief lies all within,
And these external manners of laments
Are merely shadows to the unseen grief
That swells with silence in the tortur'd soul.
There lies the substance.

(4.1.295-99)

The sequence of scenes which runs from 3.4 to 5.1 is of absorbing interest from the point of view taken in these pages, that is to say from the point of view of the discovery of Shakespeare's tragic form. The act division reflects the fall-rise plot construction: the garden scene, coming immediately after the surrender at Flint castle, provides a suitable comment upon Richard's government of his kingdom, and therefore signals the change of regime which is to follow. Act 4 initiates the rise to supreme power of Bolingbroke and begins therefore with his examination of Bagot and the renewed confrontation between the rival barons, echoing act 1. Act 4 ends with Richard's abdication and the plans for Bolingbroke's coronation, leaving for act 5 the final moves in the transfer of power: Richard's incarceration in the Tower, the queen's exile to France, Aumerle's conspiracy, which presents Bolingbroke with his first treason (foreshadowing things to come), and the death of Richard. Act division therefore faithfully reflects the construction of the play in terms of the overthrow of Richard's legitimate monarchy and the usurpation of Bolingbroke. But an eye trained by Shakespeare's later practice perceives at once that both 3.4, the gardener scene, and 5.1, the leave-taking scene between Richard and his weeping queen, in fact contain the sort of material that was to become, in the later tragedies, Shakespeare's characteristic fourth phase. This is the phase in which the tragic experience is rendered by some form of despair or repudiation of his world on the part of the protagonist, and modified by bearings taken from a vantage point outside and beyond the hero. It is the phase in which the great fall is wryly domesticated, and lit, so to speak, by transverse beams of pathos and irony. Both the pathos and the irony are methods for presenting the heroic image refracted in the medium provided by the viewpoint of simple, often anonymous, common folk.

In Richard II these resources are not deployed to the full as they will be later, where they are wonderfully juxtaposed and counterpointed so as to make the richest harmonic effects possible. Here they remain discrete and relatively unimpressive. The Gardener, effectively elegiac, is too explicitly allegorical for his comment upon “what men do, not knowing what they do” to have the maximum impact of dramatic irony. Later Shakespeare will transpose the key of such comment into the inspired fool's wisdom of gnomic gravediggers, or the earthy wisdom of an Emilia, while the contrapuntal darkened vision of Richard, “A king of beasts, indeed—if aught but beasts, / I had been still a happy king of men” (5.1.35-36), becomes “the wren goes to 't” and “a dog's obeyed in office” of Lear. In Richard II the content of the darkened vision has not been so objectively grounded in the very action of the play; nor has it the coordinated, accumulated reverberation of Lear's black apocalypse. In Richard II the ceremony and policy which veil human savagery are not rent entirely asunder as they are in Lear. Evil is fully accounted for in terms of political expediency, political error, political opportunism. Faces and fortunes are shattered, but the protagonists are not cut to the very brains. In Lear evil bursts all bounds and creates a vertiginous abyss. Nevertheless in Richard's somewhat decorative “lamentable tale,” with which even “the senseless brands will sympathize” (5.1.40-50), is the germ of “I should e'en die with pity to see another thus”; and in his “I am sworn brother, sweet, / To grim necessity” is foreshadowed “I am bound upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears / Do scald like molten lead.”

In neither Richard's case nor Lear's is the hero's tragedy complete at this stage. The inexorable process that forces a man to face the worst the fates hold in store for him comes after he has entertained a delusive hope of accommodation with what he takes, in his ignorance, to be the worst. This total knowledge of the worst constitutes the tragic catastrophe. It is, in a sense, Aristotle's anagnorisis taken to its furthest limit and unfolded in its fullest relatedness to what has gone before. In the final turn of the tragedy the Shakespearean tragic hero offers us more than a repentant acknowledgment of his own share of responsibility for the events. He may do this. But he does very much more than this. He bears witness to his own personal self-definition, to some distinctive form of human integrity, some inalienable individual perception of value of which his life is the gauge. The prison scenes at Pomfret perfectly illustrate the process.

The first part of the soliloquy, in which Richard sets his brain and his soul to breed thoughts, provides striking confirmation of what we have already discovered to have been dramatized in the play: Richard's oscillation between “the better sort” of thought and the worse; between the conflicting impulses which have constituted his struggle to achieve and maintain either virtue or virtù, the inner or the outer kingdom:

                                                  The better sort,
As thoughts of things divine, are intermix'd
With scruples, and do set the word itself
Against the word,
As thus: “Come, little ones”; And then again,
“It is as hard to come as for a camel
To thread the postern of a small needle's eye.”
Thoughts tending to ambition, they do plot
Unlikely wonders: how these vain weak nails
May tear a passage through the flinty ribs
Of this hard world, my ragged prison walls;
And for they cannot, die in their own pride.
Thoughts tending to content flatter themselves
That they are not the first of fortune's slaves,
Nor shall not be the last—like silly beggars
Who, sitting in the stocks, refuge their shame,
That many have and others must sit there;
And in this thought they find a kind of ease,
Bearing their own misfortunes on the back
Of such as have before endur'd the like.

(5.5.11-30)

Thoughts of things divine are undermined by his doubts of his capacity for them. Thoughts of grand defiance die in their own impotent pride. The elaborate figure in which the brain is female to the soul is Shakespeare's way of rendering what is actually the first passage of formal introspection in the play. The result of Richard's thus turning his eyes inward is the detachment with which he views his own attempts at resignation. These are thoughts which merely “flatter,” which seek “a kind of ease” by the attempt to mitigate pain through dissipation in the thought of others' misfortunes. But in no thought can he find rest. These reflections bring him back to the great theme of role versus self, and to the ultimate nothing that awaits all men:

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 king'd again, and by and by
Think that I am unking'd by Bolingbroke,
And straight am nothing. But what e'er I be,
Nor I, nor any man that but man is,
With nothing shall be pleas'd, till he be eas'd
With being nothing.

(5.5.31-41)

“What, in ill thoughts again?” an Edgar might well have said; and indeed the transition to the idea of discord in the soul is implicit in the speech even before the music symbolizes it. The music, whose broken time apparently breaks into his train of thought, in reality focuses it. The idea of time broken, musically and metaphorically, in the music of men's lives, has the clearest relevance to his preoccupation with his own mismanagement of opportunities. And with the music, Richard's musing summary of his progress of the soul takes on a new urgency and energy of analysis:

                                        How sour sweet music is
When time is broke, and no proportion kept!
So is it in the music of men's lives.
And here have I the daintiness of ear
To check time broke in a disordered string;
But for the concord of my state and time,
Had not an ear to hear my true time broke:
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;
For now hath time made me his numb'ring clock; …
But my time
Runs posting on in Bolingbroke's proud joy,
While I stand fooling here, his Jack of the clock.

(5.5.42-60)

It may not be without relevance to note that Marvell, whose “Horatian Ode” is in many ways a mid-century reincarnation of the drama of Richard II, uses the image of the Jack-of-the-clock in his “The First Anniversary of Cromwell's Return from Ireland” for the merely hereditary kings who are not masters of time and men's minds:

Thus (Image-like) an useless time they tell,
And with vain scepter, strike the hourly Bell;
No more contribute to the state of Things,
Than wooden Heads unto the Viols strings.

(ll. 41-44)

The image has a Machiavellian resonance. In his letter to Soderini, “On Fortune and the Times,” Machiavelli expounds the doctrine that a man may hope to master Fortune—the concatenation of forces which the Prince faces—by virtù properly understood and practiced:

And therefore the cautious man, when it is time to turn adventurous, does not know how to do it, hence he is ruined; … For my part I consider that it is better to be adventurous than cautious, because fortune is a woman, and if you wish to keep her under it is necessary to beat and ill use her; and it is seen that she allows herself to be mastered by the adventurous rather than those who go to work more coldly.

The point I wish to emphasize is one that is not usually stressed: the latter half of Richard's monologue is very definitely in the direction of the world. Richard may be a wiser and better man at the end of the play than he was at the beginning, though much of what he learns the great commonplaces of all times teach. But struggle as he may towards resignation or renunciation, the unregenerate bent and drag of his nature is toward his lost royalty, and no divine thoughts have succeeded in sweetening the sour taste of deposition, the bitter realization of what he has lost and of what he has allowed himself to become.

What happens between the entrance of the groom and the end needs for its full understanding the “reflector” scenes between York and Aumerle which immediately precede Pomfret, and to which I have previously referred. York has been throughout the very image of a divided spirit. He remonstrates with Richard in his brother's and his nephew's defense, yet he sharply reproves Northumberland for want of reverence to the King at Flint Castle. He is torn between kinsmen, between loyalty and justice:

Th' one is my sovereign, whom both my oath
And duty bids defend; th' other again
Is my kinsman, whom the King hath wrong'd,
Whom conscience and my kindred bids to right.

(2.2.112-15)

He can choose no path which will annul the contrary alternative. While he is the spokesman of compassion for Richard in his description of the well-graced royal actor leaving the stage,

                                                            men's eyes
Did scowl on Richard. No man cried “God save him!”
No joyful tongue gave him his welcome home,
But dust was thrown upon his sacred head.

(5.2.27-30)

the description prefaces his assertion that “To Bolingbroke are we sworn subjects now.” The revelation of Aumerle's conspiracy in favor of the deposed but after all still legitimate king produces an extremity of reaction in York that has puzzled commentators. I believe it fruitful to see the York episode as dramatically functional, as preliminary to Richard's death to which it points by contrast. For what is enacted in the conspiracy scene is the total breakdown of the man, his complete loss of inner coherence, the disintegration of his identity as man and father. He is so eroded by his inner warfare with inescapable treason that he can deliver his own son to the sword. The violence of his outburst in the teeth of the impassioned voice of nature in his wife's pleading is evidence of the breakdown. If the whole episode is a replica in little of the fate of the kingdom delivered over to civil strife, and an anticipation of Henry IV's problem with his wayward son, York's part in it at least is the immediate prelude to the recovery of self-possession by the dispossessed king. For this is the final outcome of the catastrophe.

The encounter with the groom and the story of the horse recall Richard to himself and renew his fighting spirit and his power of self-assertion. The defiant reflex of the will is produced by the combination of the simple affection and loyalty of the groom, which makes a “brooch in this all-hating world,” and the defection of roan Barbary—potent chivalric symbol of martial valour, and, proudly carrying Bolingbroke, exquisitely fitting symbol of the King's eclipse:

So proud that Bolingbroke was on his back!
That jade hath eat bread from my royal hand;
This hand hath made him proud with clapping him.
Would he not stumble? Would he not fall down,
Since pride must have a fall, and break the neck
Of that proud man that did usurp his back?
Forgiveness, horse! Why do I rail on thee,
Since thou, created to be aw'd by man,
Wast born to bear? I was not made a horse,
And yet I bear a burden like an ass,
Spurr'd, gall'd, and tir'd by jauncing Bolingbroke.

(5.5.84-94)

“I was not made a horse”—it is an unexpected turn, therefore splendidly expressive: “The devil take Henry of Lancaster, and thee! / Patience is stale, and I am weary of it.” Richard, dispossessed of crown, queen, kingdom, hereditary role, and even the lordly creature that bore him on its back, reduced to something as near as the impure tragedy of the histories will get to unaccommodated man, finds in himself undreamt-of-resources of willed defiance and sells his life dearly, in kingly fashion. It is the simplest kind of catharsis, a restoration of a lost heroic value. But it enables Exton to salute the sovereign that he kills with “As full of valour as of royal blood.” King Richard is eclipsed, but the fact, or the dream, or the image of truly royal prowess, finally redemptive of folly and vanity, survives.