SOURCE: Palmer, John. “Richard of Bordeaux.” In Political Characters of Shakespeare, pp. 118-79. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1961.

[In the following essay, Palmer challenges critics who view Richard II as the tragedy of one man, and explores the fall of Richard as a king and political figure.]

Shakespeare's Richard II is too often read as the tragedy of a private individual. Attention is focused upon Richard's personality and upon elements in his character which would have been just as interesting if he had never been called upon to play the part of a king. We are fascinated by the unfolding of his brilliant, wayward and unstable disposition, his pathetic lapses from bright insolence to grey despair, the facility with which he dramatises his sorrows and takes a wilfully aesthetic pleasure in his own disgrace. The political implications of the play are correspondingly neglected. And this is only natural. In all simplicity—and in essentials no tragedy was ever simpler—Richard II is the story of a sensitive, headstrong, clever, foolish man, graceless in prosperity, in calamity gracious. But this simple story has a setting and the setting is high politics. The fact that Richard is a king not only enhances the pathos of his fall, but sets him in a political environment in which the dramatist is not seldom interested for its own sake.

Men living under Elizabeth would think it strange that anyone should need to insist that Richard II is a political play. To Shakespeare's audience its political significance was immediate and tremendous. It went to the heart of a burning question. Ministers of State wrote letters about it. It was years before the censor of books would allow the most famous of its scenes to be printed. It was played on one occasion as a propaganda piece and became the subject of a state trial. Queen Elizabeth, inspecting the Tower records with William Lambarde at Greenwich, was moved to exclaim: ‘I am Richard II, know ye not that?’ and to add with displeasure that ‘this tragedy was played forty times in streets and houses.’

We are shortly to concentrate on the political aspects of the play which are significant for all times and places. First, however, it seems necessary to ask why Richard II should have struck Shakespeare's contemporaries so forcibly not merely as a political play, but as by far the most topical political play of the period.

The ordinary Englishman who saw Shakespeare's tragedy in 1595 had lived in peace under a strong Government—and, what is even more important, an incontestably legitimate Government—for over a hundred years. But he still remembered the government of the house of Lancaster, which had been neither strong nor legitimate, and the hideous interim of civil war before Henry of Richmond married Elizabeth of York and provided England with a dynasty acceptable to God and man. In the years following 1595 the whole kingdom was on tenterhooks. Who was to succeed Elizabeth Tudor? The Virgin Queen was as coy of her successor as she had been of the suitors who years before, in despite of the gossips and in the teeth of her physician, might have helped her to solve the problem in the way of nature. Many were called but none was chosen. All that the Englishman held most dear had found a satisfying symbol in the Tudor monarch, ruling by divine right, holding a sacred office, to question whose authority was treason, to trouble whose peace was an impiety. But the Tudor monarch was about to die childless. Was England to fall back into the old disorder, horror, fear and mutiny which had followed the usurpation of Bolingbroke?

Shakespeare chose this moment to write a play in which a legitimate king is deposed and the dreadful consequences of a disputed succession to the crown foretold with eloquence and particularity. This play, moreover, which was topical enough in 1595, when Robert Cecil was invited to witness it at Channon Row, became yet more topical when in 1601 Essex had it ostentatiously performed at the Globe theatre on the eve of his rebellion. This was miching mallecho and meant mischief. There was no treason in the play, as Elizabeth and her Privy Council well knew, but there was undoubted treason in this particular performance. Essex had already cast himself for the part of Bolingbroke and had even gone so far as to accept in 1599 the dedication of a prose history on the reign of Henry IV in which he was addressed in effect as heir apparent to the throne. The prose history was suppressed and the gentleman who procured the performance of Shakespeare's play in 1601 was afterwards hanged. Neither Shakespeare nor his company, however, was molested. Shakespeare was no more responsible for the scandal caused in London by his Richard II in 1601 than for the scandal caused in Paris by his Coriolanus in 1935. He had written in each case a political play recognisably true of any period for the kind of situation and the type of public persons presented. Elizabeth disliked the play and very properly, according to her lights, regarded its performance before a select body of conspirators as a hanging matter. But for once the right persons were hanged—not the author, nor even the players, but certain members of the audience, who thus paid the penalty, which some might consider excessive, for confusing a work of art with a political manifesto.

Apart from the special circumstances which gave a topical interest to the play in the last years of Elizabeth, Shakespeare's Richard was bound to make a very strong appeal to his contemporaries on more general grounds. Richard of Bordeaux had towards the end of the sixteenth century become a legendary figure. His deposition had acquired a mystical significance. For over two centuries he had stood to poets and historians, both in England and in France, for a supreme example of that tragical fall of princes which appealed so strongly to the imagination and conscience of the post-mediaeval world. To the legitimists he was a martyr and his enforced abdication a sacrilege. To the Lancastrians his removal was a necessary act of providence. To all alike he was a tragic symbol of the instability of human fortune. Those who took the mystical view of his fall did not hesitate to compare his passion with that of Christ. Even those who, in deference to the house of Lancaster, affected to regard his deposition as a salutary act of state, were deeply affected by this saddest of all stories of the deaths of kings and tended to regard its protagonists as blind agents of a divine purpose rather than conscious masters of the event. Bolingbroke and Richard, in the Tudor imagination, played their parts as in a mystery, Richard accepting his humiliation as a cup that might not pass away and Bolingbroke, unconscious instrument in bringing about a second fall of man, achieving his triumph as a thing pre-ordained. This sacramental approach to the tragedy, which Shakespeare inherited and to which he gave exquisite humanity in the person of Richard, was an essential element in its contemporary appeal.¹

To most of Shakespeare's countrymen this contemporary aspect of the play is still alive. The English, in dealing faithfully with their kings for over a thousand years of history, have contrived to retain a mystical respect for the royal office without in any way forgoing their right of judgment on the royal person. The waters of the rough rude sea of English politics have washed the balm from half a dozen anointed kings without in any way detracting from the consecration of their successors. God save the King—but God help him if his subjects should find him troublesome. When the occasion arises—and it has arisen no less than four times since Richard died at Pomfret—the English people can always be trusted to demonstrate that a sincere reverence for monarchy is compatible with a distinctly uncivil treatment of the monarch. Nothing in fact so signally illustrates the force of English sentiment for royalty than its successful survival of so many royal persons who have left their country for their country's good. The emotions aroused in an Elizabethan by the enacted deposition of a king have outlived two revolutions and the importation of two foreign princes.

The central situation in Shakespeare's play thus retains much of its original appeal. But even if this were not the case, the political interest of the play and its relevance to the public life of our own or of any time would be scarcely affected. For Shakespeare's handling of the sacramental aspect of royalty is only one component of his tragedy. His main purpose is to exhibit in Richard the qualities which unfitted him to rule, to show his exquisite futility in dealing with public affairs, to present a playboy politician coping ineffectually with men seriously intent on the business of getting what they want, to contrast the man of imagination who lives unto himself with men of the world who adapt themselves to the event. A play with such a theme is necessarily a political play. Richard II, for all its lyrical quality, is concerned with public affairs and with the kind of men who in every generation delude themselves into the belief that they are making history. Over against Richard, whose personal disaster touches the heart of the spectator, Shakespeare has set in juxtaposition a group of politicians and an analysis of political events which claim the attention no less forcibly.

With these preliminary observations in mind let us consider for a moment the opening scene of the tragedy.

Henry, surnamed Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford and son to John of Gaunt, has publicly accused of high treason no less a person than Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk. Richard summons them to a hearing. The two men decline to be reconciled and the King is reluctantly obliged to make arrangements for a trial by battle. Such is the bare outline of this short scene of some two hundred lines. It serves its dramatic purpose well enough if we see in it no more than a robustious squabble between two angry noblemen who refuse to be pacified by their sovereign. The essential ingredients of this short scene are crystal clear on the surface—a king who is plainly not master in his own house; two haughty subjects who huff it in the royal presence, professing a reverence for Majesty which nevertheless stops short of obedience; a suggestion that this Richard, who is not sufficiently sure of himself to call his troublesome subjects to order, is quick to see through their assurances of respect; a promise of exciting and turbulent events shortly to follow. Here, surely, is matter enough to fill the first two hundred lines of any play.

But there is more to it than that. Look a little more closely at the political environment into which the dramatist, with his customary abrupt felicity, introduces the hero of his tragedy.

Bolingbroke accuses Mowbray of complicity in the murder of the Duke of Gloucester. He knows perfectly well, however, that Richard himself is by many held responsible for Gloucester's death. In accusing Mowbray, Bolingbroke is covertly attacking the King's government. He is playing the party game of His Majesty's Opposition, using the gestures of the period. Mowbray, of course, knows what Bolingbroke is driving at. So does everybody else. But nobody would think of admitting it. The real issues are not even mentioned. Bolingbroke, attacking the King, accuses his opponent of treason to the King, Mowbray, who is of the King's party and who, if he did not murder Gloucester himself, was at least an accessory to the crime by negligence, affects to be defending himself against a merely personal charge. All that full-blooded talk by Bolingbroke about the devotion of a subject's love and by Mowbray about his spotless reputation is no more than the impassioned rhetoric of two rival politicians assuming in public the attitudes required of them by the situation. The other persons present are equally aware of the facts, but they, too, are expected to assume that Bolingbroke and Mowbray really mean what they say. These are two loyal gentlemen and their good faith must in decency be accepted. Each of them is lying and everyone present knows that they are lying, but each, according to the rules of the game, must be believed. The scene thus reveals itself on examination to be a notably accurate presentation of a familiar—and indeed typical—situation in public life, in which the outward professions of the persons concerned bear little or no relation to their real purposes and passions.

Mowbray has the better platform manner. It has a certain dignity:

A jewel in a ten-times-barr'd-up chest
Is a bold spirit in a loyal breast.
Mine honour is my life; both grow in one;
Take honour from me, and my life is done.

Bolingbroke is less fruitily impassioned, but no less ready to maintain with conviction that his actions are wholly determined by the loftiest motives. He calls on heaven to be the record of his speech. His divine soul is ready to answer in heaven for the truth and justice of his cause.

Shakespeare here presents the normal behaviour of notable persons discussing a political or diplomatic issue in public. The uninstructed onlooker enjoys the quarrel for its own sake. But the spectator who knows that all this high-and-mighty bickering has no more bearing on the facts of the dispute than the mutual recriminations of rival candidates for a parliamentary seat or the notes exchanged between foreign ministers in a time of international crisis, has, in addition to his enjoyment of the superficial cut-and-thrust of the formal encounter, the extra pleasure of understanding what it is all about. He sees through the pretences of the performers to the real subject matter of the performance.

Shakespeare leaves no doubt in the mind of an alert and intelligent spectator as to the facts of the dispute, but he does not rely on the ability of his audience to grasp them at a first performance. He does not, in fact, let us know immediately, if we did not know it before, that Richard was himself implicated in Gloucester's death. He lets that cat out of the bag at a later stage. Shakespeare has the fact well in mind, but it was not essential for him to stress it in the opening scene, where our attention is rightly concentrated on the more superficial aspects of the quarrel and on Richard's manifest inability to quash it. The subtler political implications of the incident are unfolded progressively. Shakespeare was too skilful a dramatist to demand the attention of his audience for more than one important thing at a time.

There is another aspect of this first scene which can only be fully appreciated at a later stage. Its main dramatic purpose is to show Richard facing a political situation with which he is unable to cope successfully. Towards the end of the play we are to see Bolingbroke confronted with a situation precisely similar at all points. We shall then see the usurper dealing promptly and effectively with this mediaeval equivalent of a cabinet crisis. He calls his refractory noblemen to order and successfully handles in five minutes an incident such as had cost Richard his throne.

There is yet another level on which this first simple episode of the play may be appreciated. On the political facts, almost every word uttered by Bolingbroke and Mowbray is a wilful misrepresentation. They nevertheless play their parts with complete conviction and everybody present accepts their posturing as the outcome of a genuine passion for truth and justice. This raises a point which crops up repeatedly in Shakespeare's political plays: how far does he deliberately satirise in his politicians the inconsistency of their professions with their performance? Mowbray is presented as a fine figure of a man and we shall shortly be quoting with admiration some of the moving things he has to say as a patriotic English gentleman. Did Shakespeare intend thereby to emphasise only the more effectively that he was a lamentable impostor?

It is on this third level of appreciation that Shakespeare provides us with surprising examples in many plays of his effortless grasp of the realities of political life. Mowbray and Bolingbroke are not presented as consciously fraudulent persons. They play the game according to the rules of their time and class. Mowbray loves his country, is loyal to the King and entirely convinced of his own honesty. Bolingbroke no less sincerely sees himself as a faithful public servant. He is morally sure of himself and prepared to hazard his life in defence of an honourable cause. Both are equally mistaken in themselves; and the facts, as presented by the dramatist, are not in accord with the pretensions of either party. But no satire is intended. The two men are presented without malice. They are political persons and that is how political persons behave.

The spectator's interest in the scene is naturally concentrated on the part played by Richard himself. The King has little to say, but every word is significant. He promises himself a bad quarter of an hour. The appeal is ‘boisterous’ and the appellants will be difficult to manage:

High-stomach'd are they both, and full of ire,
In rage deaf as the sea, hasty as fire.

He accepts the rules of the game and plays it with dignity. To Mowbray, who asks leave to present his case against a kinsman of the King, Richard gravely rejoins:

Now, by my sceptre's awe I make a vow,
Such neighbour nearness to our sacred blood
Should nothing privilege him, nor partialise
The unstrooping firmness of my upright soul:
He is our subject, Mowbray; so art thou:
Free speech and fearless I do thee allow.(2)

After listening patiently to the accuser and the accused, he attempts with an assumption of playful good humour to reconcile the parties:

Forget, forgive; conclude and be agreed;
Our doctors say this is no month to bleed.

He appeals personally to Mowbray:

RICHARD:
                                                                                Rage must be withstood:
Give me his gage: lions make leopards tame.
MOWBRAY:
Yea, but not change his spots:

Neither will consent to a peace and Richard finally accepts the inevitable. He closes the proceedings with a set speech in which the formal decencies of a false situation are solemnly maintained:

We were not born to sue, but to command:
Which since we cannot do to make you friends,
Be ready, as your lives shall answer it,
At Coventry, upon Saint Lambert's day:
There shall your swords and lances arbitrate
The swelling difference of your settled hate:
Since we cannot atone you, we shall see
Justice design the victor's chivalry.

Shakespeare makes it very plain that Richard is fully alive to all the political implications of the situation. In his first words to the contending parties he drily dismisses their professions of respect:

BOLINGBROKE:
                                                  Many years of happy days befal
My gracious sovereign, my most loving liege!
MOWBRAY:
Each day still better other's happiness;
Until the heavens, envying earth's good hap,
Add an immortal title to your crown!
RICHARD:
We thank you both: yet one but flatters us,
As well appeareth by the cause you come;
Namely, to appeal each other of high treason.

The reproof is shrewd and neatly turned. Richard's position requires him to accept the pleadings of the parties. But he is not going to let anyone imagine that he attaches the slightest value to their professions and, in asking Bolingbroke to state his case, he covertly warns his cousin to remember that, in attacking Mowbray, he is sailing dangerously near the wind:

What doth our cousin lay to Mowbray's charge?
It must be great that can inherit us
So much as of a thought of ill in him.

Bolingbroke prefers his charges and concludes with a vigorously complacent picture of himself as appointed by heaven to chastise an injurious villain by whose contriving his uncle Gloucester had sluiced out his innocent soul through streams of blood:

Which blood, like sacrificing Abel's, cries,
Even from the tongueless caverns of the earth,
To me for justice and rough chastisement;
And, by the glorious worth of my descent,
This arm shall do it, or this life be spent.

Richard is thereby provoked to a further disclosure of his private mind. Bolingbroke is professing his loyalty, but he is in fact challenging the King's man. In a bitter, penetrating aside Richard exclaims:

How high a pitch his resolution soars!

He already divines in Bolingbroke an ambition which reaches instinctively beyond its immediate purpose, and, in assuring Mowbray that he may fearlessly answer the charges brought against him, Richard puts the predestined usurper in his place with a crushing exactitude:

Mowbray, impartial are our eyes and ears:
Were he my brother, nay, my kingdom's heir,—
As he is but my father's brother's son—
Now, by my sceptre's awe I make a vow,
Such neighbour nearness to our sacred blood
Should nothing privilege him.

This king is already showing qualities of mind that put him in a different class from the noble persons surrounding him. He is contemptuous of the game which he is required to play, but plays it becomingly and with a sidelong smile. He may blunder fatally in his handling of persons and events, but there is never any doubt of his intelligence. It is equally clear from the outset that he has the courage of his fitful genius. He sees through these proud, turbulent and practical men of affairs, and he is not afraid to let them know it.

Mowbray's answer to the charges brought against him by Bolingbroke clearly illuminates the harsh political background against which the tragedy of Richard is to be unfolded. Mowbray has been accused of peculation and murder. He admits to having pocketed a quarter of the sum which was earmarked to pay the King's soldiers at Calais, but this, he pleads, was only to recoup himself for expenses incurred on a previous account. Let that pass. On the accusation of murder, he seems unnecessarily candid—until we realise that he is merely stating facts that were common knowledge:

                                                            For Gloucester's death,
I slew him not; but to mine own disgrace
Neglected my sworn duty in that case.
For you, my noble lord of Lancaster,
The honourable father to my foe,
Once did I lay an ambush for your life,
A trespass that doth vex my grievèd soul;
But ere I last receiv'd the sacrament
I did confess it, and exactly begg'd
Your grace's pardon, and I hope I had it.

What could be fairer than that? Mowbray's ingenuous apology is a fair measure of the accepted political standards of the time. He was not guilty of Gloucester's murder, he merely did nothing to prevent it. He had tried to murder Gaunt, but he had apologised to the party concerned and hoped that the incident was closed. It is necessary to keep these facts in mind if we are fairly to judge Richard's less amiable reactions to some of the later speeches and to the conduct in general of his noble kinsmen.

The second scene of the play, which is devoted to a conversation between John of Gaunt and the Duchess of Gloucester, has no other purpose than to underline the political implications of the first. The widowed Duchess urges Gaunt to exact retribution for her husband's death. She belongs to that long line of noble dames used by Shakespeare in his political plays to remind the spectator that there are human, and even moral, considerations which should not be altogether ignored in public life. Gaunt has decided to let the matter rest and, in defending his decision, explicitly insists that Richard himself was a party to the crime:

But since correction lieth in those hands
Which made the fault that we cannot correct,
Put we our quarrel to the will of heaven.
God's is the quarrel; for God's substitute,
His deputy anointed in His sight,
Hath caused his death; the which if wrongfully,
Let heaven revenge; for I may never lift
An angry arm against His minister.

The Duchess is unconvinced:

Call it not patience, Gaunt; it is despair:
In suffering thus thy brother to be slaughter'd,
Thou showest the naked pathway to thy life,
Teaching stern murder how to butcher thee:
That which in mean men we intitle patience
Is pale cold cowardice in noble breasts.

The political wisdom of the bastard feudalism of fourteenth-century England could not be more lucidly expressed.

The scene between Gaunt and the Duchess, which discloses the political realities of the dispute between Mowbray and Bolingbroke, is followed by the famous scene in which we are invited to enjoy for its own sake the pagentry of the royal lists at Conventry, where these impressive champions, plated in habiliments of war, commit their several causes to heaven and proceed with high solemnity to face the ordeal by battle. It is a gallant show and Shakespeare is too good a dramatist to spoil its effect by insisting unseasonably that it is also, in effect, an amusingly veracious study in the public deportment of men in high places. Richard ceremoniously invites the champions to declare their business. The defendant in armour and the appellant in armour respond according to the protocol. Each professes his truth and nobility of purpose. Each takes a devoted leave of his sovereign. Mowbray still has the better platform manner:

However God or fortune cast my lot,
There lives or dies, true to King Richard's throne,
A loyal, just, and upright gentleman:
Never did captive with a freer heart
Cast off his chains of bondage and embrace
His golden uncontroll'd enfranchisement,
More than my dancing soul doth celebrate
This feast of battle with mine adversary.
Most mighty liege, and my companion peers,
Take from my mouth the wish of happy years.
As gentle and as jocund as to jest,
Go I to fight; truth has a quiet breast.

The more vigilant spectator may detect a subtle difference in Richard's addresses to the two men. Surely there is a touch of irony in his words to Bolingbroke:

Cousin of Hereford, as thy cause is right,
So be thy fortune in this royal fight;

and a touch of affectionate approval in his valediction to Mowbray:

Farewell, my lord; securely I espy
Virtue with valour couchèd in thine eye.

But these are hints to the wary. The simple onlooker is absorbed by the knightly courtesy of it all and is as eager for the fight as the champions themselves.

Then comes the grand surprise. The charge is sounded. But stay, the King has thrown his warder down! Defendant and appellant are bidden to lay aside their spears and Richard withdraws with his council while the champions disarm. Presently he emerges and announces his decision. The King, to save his peace, banishes them both—Bolingbroke for ten years and Mowbray for life:

                                                                                Draw near,
And list what with our council we have done.
For that our kingdom's earth should not be soil'd
With that dear blood which it hath fosterèd;
And for our eyes do hate the dire aspect
Of civil wounds plough'd up with neighbours' swords;
And for we think the eagle-wingèd 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;
.....Therefore, we banish you our territories.

It is a veritable sensation in court.

It should be noted that the King's decision is no sudden freak of temperament but a considered act of state. Richard is acting with the approval of his council and Gaunt himself is a consenting party to the arrangement. When the old man laments that he may not live to see his banished heir again, Richard pertinently reminds him:

Thy son is banish'd upon good advice,
Whereto thy tongue a party-verdict gave.

Richard's interruption of the ordeal by battle at the eleventh hour has often been cited as evidence of his impulsive disposition. But the scene has a greater and very different significance if we suppose that Richard had decided beforehand to quash the proceedings. For him the whole elaborate to-do, with its heralds and trumpets, solemn appeals to heaven, ceremonious farewells and heroic attitudes, was matter for a May morning. He knows that these doughty champions are inflating themselves to no purpose. The actor playing Richard should watch them with a twinkle, impishly awaiting the moment when he will knock the bottom out of all these political high jinks. There is a merry side to the puerility of Richard, the boy-king who would never grow up. The whole scene is in the nature of a practical joke.

We should like to have been present at the cabinet meeting which found so discreet a remedy for a situation which was as embarrassing for Gaunt, leader of the King's opposition, as for the King, leader of his own government. If Mowbray had killed Bolingbroke, Gaunt would have lost his son. If Bolingbroke had killed Mowbray, the King would have lost a loyal servant. All the sleeping dogs, which it is the whole art of politics to let lie, would in either case have been set barking to the discomfiture of both parties. Shakespeare must have been sorely tempted to show us the King and his ministers discussing at length the real issues of the dispute. But he chose to concentrate upon his grand surprise of the interrupted combat and to fix the interest of his public on the gorgeous preliminaries of the tournament. He preferred to present Mowbray and Bolingbroke to the simple spectator as bona fide champions and to reveal them to the more judicious as figures of fun only at the eleventh hour.

The dramatist, in the final result, has it both ways—the tournament for what it is worth and, for those who look below the surface, the political comedy as well. It is the reward of an artist who sees things as they are that his rounded achievement defies all the categories. It can be enjoyed as a true and faithful presentment of men and things, as an emotional experience and as an act of judgment. The general effect is a combination of all three.

Shakespeare, having sprung his grand surprise on the audience in the lists at Coventry, instinctively refrains from bringing his champions to earth. From silver trumpets to brass tacks would have been too steep a fall. Bolingbroke and Mowbray maintain their heraldic attitudes to the last. Mowbray in particular is permitted to make a dignified and sincerely affecting retirement from public life:

The language I have learn'd these forty years,
My native English, now I must forgo:
And now my tongue's use is to me no more
Than an unstringèd viol or a harp,
Or like a cunning instrument cased up,
Or, being open, put into his hands
That knows no touch to tune the harmony.
I am too old to fawn upon a nurse,
Too far in years to be a pupil now:
What is thy sentence then but speechless death,
Which robs my tongue from breathing native breath?

He is to the last a faithful subject. He had every right to protest that his sentence was unjust. Richard would undoubtedly have preferred to banish Bolingbroke for life and Mowbray for ten years. But he had been obliged to secure Gaunt's consent to the arrangement and Mowbray had to be sacrificed to the opposition. Mowbray understands and accepts the situation. He cannot explicitly defend himself without exposing the King to further embarrassment. He submits loyally to the decision, though he cannot refrain from suggesting that it was unmerited:

A heavy sentence, my most sovereign liege,
And all unlook'd for from your highness' mouth:
A dearer merit, not so deep a maim
As to be cast forth in the common air,
Have I deservèd at your highness' hands.

Bolingbroke presses his case to the end:

Confess thy treasons ere thou fly the realm;
Since thou hast far to go, bear not along
The clogging burthen of a guilty soul.

But Mowbray is not to be pricked, even at this bitter moment, into making things difficult for his master and confines himself to warning Richard against his enemy:

No, Bolingbroke, if ever I were traitor,
My name be blotted from the book of life,
And I from heaven banish'd as from hence!
But what thou art, God, thou, and I do know;
And all too soon, I fear, the king shall rue.

One cannot help reflecting that, if Richard, for his time of need, had retained by his side so devoted a servant as Thomas Mowbray, Bolingbroke would less easily have compassed his designs.³

Bolingbroke's manner of accepting the King's award is highly characteristic. He persists, as we have just noted, in re-affirming the justice of his cause and receives his sentence with a forced humility in which there lurks an element of sly defiance:

Your will be done: this must my comfort be,
That sun that warms you here shall shine on me;
And those his golden beams to you here lent
Shall point on me and gild my banishment.

You will look in vain, however, for any suggestion that Bolingbroke yet aims higher than a subject should. Richard is alive to his ambition; Mowbray warns the King that he is dangerous. But Bolingbroke gives no sign of his purpose—and for an excellent reason. He is that most dangerous of all climbing politicians, the man who will go further than his rivals because he never allows himself to know where he is going. Every step in his progress towards the throne is dictated by circumstances and he never permits himself to have a purpose till it is more than half fulfilled. From first to last his friends and enemies alike are always more clearly aware of his intentions than the man himself.

This is especially true of Richard, who divines in Bolingbroke the secret, unsleeping treachery of one who plays instinctively for his own hand. Richard's distrust is covertly conveyed in the present scene by his suddenly requiring both parties to swear upon his royal sword that they will not conspire against him in exile. The admonition, administered to Mowbray as well as to Bolingbroke, is in fact addressed to Bolingbroke alone:

You never shall, so help you truth and God!
Embrace each other's love in banishment;
Nor never look upon each other's face;
Nor never write, regreet, nor reconcile
This louring tempest of your home-bred hate:
Nor never by advisèd purpose meet
To plot, contrive, or complot any ill
'Gainst us, our state, our subjects, or our land.

Bolingbroke swears the oath and Richard appears to be satisfied. He even indulges his essential good nature by remitting four years of Bolingbroke's sentence out of consideration for the sorrowing Gaunt. Bolingbroke's comment on Richard's mercy is to observe how fine a thing it is to be an absolute monarch:

How long a time lies in one little word!
Four lagging winters and four wanton springs
End in a word: such is the breath of kings.

Bolingbroke maintains his enigmatic silence even after Richard has departed. His friends press round him with expressions of condolence, but he is not to be drawn into speech. Gaunt is moved to protest against his almost inhuman reticence:

O! to what purpose dost thou hoard thy words,
That thou return'st no greeting to thy friends?

Bolingbroke's answer is to play for sympathy as an unhappy man condemned to exile. Gaunt is thereby diverted into uttering words of comfort, exquisitely moving but addressed, we feel, to the wrong person:

All places that the eye of heaven visits
Are to a wise man ports and happy havens.
Teach thy necessity to reason thus;
There is no virtue like necessity.
Suppose the singing birds musicians,
The grass whereon thou tread'st the presence strew'd,
The flowers fair ladies, and thy steps no more
Than a delightful measure or a dance.

It is difficult to imagine Bolingbroke consoling himself with the accents of divine philosophy or to picture him as taking any pleasure in singing-birds. He quits the stage on a political peroration:

Where'er I wander, boast of this I can,
Though banish'd, yet a trueborn Englishman.

So for a moment we take leave of Henry, surnamed Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford and son to John of Gaunt. During his temporary absence from the scene let us look a little more closely into his character and place in the tragedy.

There are two apparently opposite views of Bolingbroke's conduct in this first of the three plays in which he figures. But the opposition is superficial and it disappears as we begin to grasp his fundamental qualities. Coleridge, significantly enough, puts forward now one and now the other, without seeming to be in any way aware of their inconsistency.

Critics who keep exclusively to the first view describe Bolingbroke as a long-headed conspirator, consciously bent on obtaining the crown from the outset, concealing a fixed purpose under a show of false humility, deliberately advancing step by step to the achievement of his purpose. Coleridge, when he writes of the ‘preconcertedness of Bolingbroke's scheme’ and the ‘decorous and courtly checking of his anger in subservience to a predetermined plan’ appears to favour this interpretation. Hazlitt, too, comes very near it when he describes Bolingbroke as ‘seeing his advantage afar-off, but only seizing on it when he has it within his reach, humble, crafty, bold and aspiring, encroaching by regular but slow degrees.’

Critics who whole-heartedly espouse the second view see in Bolingbroke a man who, in the words of Dr. Dover Wilson, ‘appears to be borne upward by a power beyond his volition.’ According to this reading of the character there is no premeditation in the conduct of Bolingbroke, no indication of a deep design. He takes in Shakespeare's tragedy the part assigned to him in the chronicles which saw in the deposition of Richard something more than a story of successful ambition at the expense of an unsuccessful king. It is a view of Bolingbroke in relation to Richard which comes from Holinshed himself, who wrote: ‘In this dejecting of the one and advancing of the other, the providence of God is to be respected and his secret will to be wondered at.’

Shakespeare has created in Bolingbroke a character which fits perfectly into this mystical view of the tragedy, but which can at the same time be enjoyed as faithfully portraying a political opportunist in almost any period or environment. Shakespeare's Bolingbroke, in following his fortune, instinctively adapts himself to the moment. His intentions remain obscure, even to himself, till they are in effect fulfilled. He thus conveys the impression that he is just as much the victim of necessity as master of the event, and Coleridge, who diagnoses premediation, can without essentially contradicting himself also describe him as ‘scarcely daring to look at his own views or to acknowledge them as designs.’

For confirmation of a reading in which instinctive premediation is reconciled with an equally instinctive yielding to circumstance we have the final word of Bolingbroke himself. It is the word of a dying king. He looks back over the troubled years of his reign and, though pregnantly conscious of the ‘indirect crook'd ways, whereby he had achieved the crown, he nevertheless meditates on the blindness with which he once pursued his infant fortune, and he goes on to state explicitly that he had acted throughout undesignedly, as a man thrust on by force of circumstance:

Though then, God knows, I had no such intent,
But that necessity so bowed the state
That I and greatness were compell'd to kiss.(4)

The noblemen who assisted Bolingbroke to win the crown also take this view. More than once, telling the story in retrospect, they comment on the way in which circumstances conspired to smooth his way to the throne, so that at the last he only needed to accept what destiny had thrust into his hands. Worcester, for example, meeting the King years later at Shrewsbury, describes the whole process as it struck the men who had contributed to the event:

                                                            You swore to us,
And you did swear that oath at Doncaster,
That you did nothing purpose 'gainst the state;
Nor claim no further than your new-fall'n right,
The seat of Gaunt, dukedom of Lancaster:
To this we swore our aid. But in short space
It rain'd down fortune, showering on your head;
And such a flood of greatness fell on you,
What with our help, what with the absent king,
What with the injuries of a wanton time,
The seeming sufferances that you had borne,
And the contrarious winds that held the king
So long in his unlucky Irish wars,
That all in England did repute him dead:
And from this swarm of fair advantages
You took occasion to be quickly woo'd
To grip the general sway into your hand.

This reading of Bolingbroke is consistent with all that we have yet seen of him in the first Act of Richard II. It will become even more explicit as we follow him through the play.

It is Shakespeare's way to concentrate on one thing at a time. The stage is now clear for a firm handling of the political issues which lay behind the King's sentence of exile.⁵ The hints already conveyed that Richard divines the character and intentions of Bolingbroke more clearly than Bolingbroke himself now blossom into direct and vivid statement. Richard, King by divine right, has noted in his rival the arts whereby a man may aspire to rule by popular favour. He has observed Bolingbroke's courtship of the common people:

How he did seem to dive into their hearts
With humble and familiar courtesy.
What reverence he did throw away on slaves,
Wooing poor craftsmen with the craft of smiles
And patient underbearing of his fortune.
Off goes his bonnet to an oyster-wench;
A brace of draymen bid God speed him well
And had the tribute of his supple knee,
With ‘Thanks, my countrymen, my loving friends’;
As were our England in reversion his,
And he our subjects' next degree in hope.

Unfortunately Richard's perceptions have little relation to his conduct. Bolingbroke is dangerous, but Richard, in the Elizabethan sense, is secure. He anatomises in Bolingbroke the qualities that crave wary walking, but carelessly embarks upon a career which is to cost him his life and crown. The Irish are in rebellion. He will cross the sea in person to suppress them, leaving his kingdom open to invasion and his subjects to foot the bill:

We will ourself in person to this war:
And, for our coffers with too great a court
And liberal largess are grown somewhat light,
We are enforced to farm our royal realm;
The revenue whereof shall furnish us
For our affairs in hand: if that come short,
Our substitutes at home shall have blank charters;
Whereto, when they shall know what men are rich,
They shall subscribe them for large sums of gold,
And send them after to supply our wants.

This is bad enough, but worse is to follow. News is brought that John of Gaunt is sick. Richard blithely embraces the occasion:

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!

Richard's treatment of the dying Gaunt is one of the prime causes of his downfall. It is also the least amiable episode of his career. Shakespeare, writing the famous scene in which Gaunt with his dying breath celebrates the glories of England, tarnished by an unworthy king, seems deliberately bent on setting us against his hero. Why this exaltation of Gaunt at Richard's expense? No character in Shakespeare has a finer end. The prologue is rich in promise:

O, but they say the tongues of dying men
Enforce attention like deep harmony.
The setting sun, and music at the close,
As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last;

and the promise is nobly fulfilled in lines quoted by generations of Englishmen, that can never be worn threadbare:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessèd plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings:
This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out,—I die pronouncing it,—
Like to a tenement or pelting farm:
England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds:
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

For this prophet, new-inspired, Richard has neither respect nor mercy. Clearly he is deeply moved by the speech, but that only makes him all the more savage in retort. He rounds on the sick man in a flash of temper:

And thou a lunatic lean-witted fool,
Presuming on an ague's privilege,
Dar'st with thy frozen admonition
Make pale our cheek, chasing the royal blood
With fury from his native residence.
Now, by my seat's right royal majesty,
Wert thou not brother to great Edward's son,
This tongue that runs so roundly in thy head
Should run thy head from thy unreverent shoulders.

It may be urged in extenuation that Richard had small reason to spare the father of Bolingbroke. When York protests:

I do beseech your majesty, impute his words
To wayward sickliness and age in him:
He loves you, on my life, and holds you dear
As Harry, Duke of Hereford, were he here:

Richard retorts with a touch of shrill hysteria:

Right, you say true: as Hereford's love, so his;
As theirs, so mine; and all be as it is.

There is, however, neither haste nor temper to excuse his reception of the news, a minute or so later, that Gaunt is dead. His comment is touched with feeling for the common lot of man:

The ripest fruit first falls, and so doth he;
His time is spent, our pilgrimage must be.
So much for that;

but there is no yielding on the personal issue. Gaunt is dead. So much for that—and Richard at once announces that he will seize his uncle's plate, coin and revenues.

Critics who insist that Shakespeare has an ethical purpose in his tragedies tend to regard this scene, in which Richard shows us the worst of his character, as a deliberate preparation for the retribution which is to follow. But the world in which Shakespeare's characters move is not a moral gymnasium. It is a world in which men and women reveal their hearts and minds, engage our sympathy and evoke our perpetual wonder at the intricate working of simple or subtle souls. The dramatist, in this present instance, while he uncompromisingly exposes the flaws in Richard's character which lie at the heart of his tragic failure, is not bringing him to judgment, but presenting him with a compassionate understanding of his frailty. Richard does not forfeit our sympathy. We feel that his rash, fierce blaze of riot cannot last and this mitigates our censure. Nor is his conduct altogether unjustified. Richard saw in this Galahad of the sceptred isle a political enemy masquerading as a patriot, a cantankerous nobleman whose son had already made mischief in the land and was to make more. Richard's behaviour, heartless and unseasonable enough in all conscience, is that of a spoiled child of fortune, as he then was, resenting a rebuke peculiarly exasperating in that it was, in the specific instance, deserved but, from such a man, misplaced.

The question still remains: why does Shakespeare weight the scales so heavily against Richard in this scene? Why give to Gaunt, at the very moment when Richard is to behave so badly, the finest speech in the play? Why did Shakespeare permit himself an outburst of lyrical ecstasy whereby he risked putting his hero irretrievably in the shade and thus killing his play dead in the first Act?

The answer is to be found in the mood and structure of the tragedy. Gaunt, in his dying speech, is but one of many voices to which a single tune is given: the voice of Mowbray, mourning his exile from England; the voice of Gaunt, declaring his love of England; the voice of Richard, saluting with his hand the dear earth of England. To all these voices is given in turn the chorus-theme which serves as background to the political figures of the story. In every one of Shakespeare's political plays we feel the constant presence of a country and a people. In Richard II it assumes a lyrical form, flowering through the texture of the verse on all possible occasions. Shakespeare, coming to Gaunt on his deathbed, saw a magnificent opportunity and seized it without misgiving. He was confident, if he gave the matter a conscious thought, that our sympathy with Richard would survive this splendid interlude and he even contrived that it should reveal the character of his hero to better effect than the more cautious approach which common prudence would have dictated to a journeyman playwright.

The political implications of Richard's decision to seize his uncle's property have now to be considered. But here we must pause to make the acquaintance of a new character, the most important person in the play after Richard and Bolingbroke, and one of the most interesting in the whole gallery of Shakespeare's political portraits.

Edmund of Langley, Duke of York, belongs to a type of politician which has made more English history in the bulk than any other. He is a public figure not from choice but by nativity. Shakespeare found him in the chronicles in the shape of a man who loved hunting and good cheer and avoided the council chamber—just the kind of person, in fact, to provide a contrast in temperament with Richard and in ability with Bolingbroke. York has no refinement of understanding and no political ambition. He is a sturdy, honest, well-meaning man, prompt with sensible advice but easily flustered, shrewd enough to see what's coming but not clever or resolute enough to prevent it. He stands for the average gentleman amateur in public life, as true to his friends and as firm in his principles as the times allow. Normally he makes the best of a bad business—which is usually not so bad after all, either for himself or for the nation. Such men are loyal to a government as long as it has legal or traditional status and the means to enforce it. With every appearance of probity and devotion—by no means wholly assumed—they contrive to find themselves in the long run sturdily swimming with the tide. These men of moderate intelligence and average sensibility are normally the backbone of the English political system. Every now and then a member of this class, of more outstanding ability than the rest, will step forward from the ranks when it becomes necessary to direct the allegiance of a party, a government or a people to new fountains of authority. English history has two illustrious examples of the type in James Monk, who served the Commonwealth till it was time to bring King Charles back to Whitehall, and in John Churchill, who served King James till it was time to call King William from The Hague. The politician who saves his country by turning his coat is God's most precious gift to a people which prefers a change of government to a revolution.

Such a person is Shakespeare's Edmund of Langley, Duke of York. He stays with Richard till Richard can no longer usefully be served and he serves Bolingbroke with an equally good conscience as soon as Bolingbroke has successfully assumed the crown. He needs careful watching, for Shakespeare fits him so smoothly into the pattern of the play that his importance is apt to be overlooked. We discover him, upon his first effective appearance, urging Gaunt not to waste breath in admonishing his wilful nephew:

Direct not him whose way himself will choose.

This very sound advice comes at the conclusion of a speech engagingly appropriate in the mouth of so representative an Englishman. Richard, York contends, is too full of foreign notions. The royal ear is no longer open to wholesome English counsel:

No; it is stopp'd with other flattering sounds,
As praises, of whose taste the wise are fond,
Lascivious metres, to whose venom sound
The open ear of youth doth always listen,
Report of fashions in proud Italy,
Whose manners still our tardy apish nation
Limps after in base imitation:
Where doth the world thrust forth a vanity—
So it be new, there's no respect how vile—
That is not quickly buzz'd into his ears?
Then all too late comes counsel to be heard.

But nobody ever listens to York. Gaunt rejects his warning and, when Gaunt is dead and his property attached, Richard pays no attention to his uncle's protests. York wisely insists that, if the King of England, ruling by right of birth and the feudal law, deprives Bolingbroke of his succession to the estates of his father, he will be destroying not only his own title to the crown but everybody's title to anything at all. The barons of England hold their stake in the country by primogeniture:

Take Hereford's rights away, and take from Time
His charters and his customary rights,
Let not to-morrow then ensue to-day;
Be not thyself; for how art thou a king
But by fair sequence and succession?
You pluck a thousand dangers on your head,
You lose a thousand well-disposèd hearts,
And prick my tender patience to those thoughts
Which honour and allegiance cannot think.

York speaks like a true conservative in defence of the traditional rights of property. It cuts him to the heart that his sovereign, apex of the feudal pyramid, should have such small respect for the broad base on which it rests. He might have added that Richard, in seizing the estates of Bolingbroke, was providing his enemy with an excellent pretext for unlawfully returning to England to claim a lawful inheritance.

Richard's answer has the urchin brevity and wilfulness which characterise all his acts of sovereignty:

Think what you will, we seize into our hands
His plate, his goods, his money, and his lands.

York departs, shaking his wise old head. If Richard is determined to ruin himself, he can only wash his hands of the business: ‘I'll not be by the while.’

York, however, is not permitted to escape into private life. Richard sends off messengers to effect the seizure of Gaunt's property and announces that to-morrow he will sail for Ireland. What follows is almost a stroke of humour in a play that but rarely invites a smile:

And we create, in absence of ourself,
Our uncle York lord governor of England;
For he is just and always loved us well.

York has just scolded Richard roundly, proffered him advice which has been discourteously rejected and retired with ominous allusions to what must come of the ‘bad courses’ of his nephew. All this has passed clean over Richard's head. York is his uncle and York shall therefore act as his regent. Richard is quick to utter more than his mind on all occasions and, as is common with free speakers, he attaches little or no importance to what anybody else may say. He is in no way disconcerted by his uncle's reproaches and abrupt retirement. For he is just and always loved us well.

The argument urged upon Richard by York is picked up immediately by the Lords Willoughby, Ross and Northumberland as soon as Richard leaves the stage. Our lives, our children and our heirs are threatened, exclaims Northumberland. But he knows of eight tall ships, well furnished by the Duke of Brittany, which are waiting to bring over Bolingbroke and his friends. Here, then, is a means of making things secure for themselves and of serving the nation:

If then we shall shake off our slavish yoke,
Imp out our drooping country's broken wing,
Redeem from broking pawn the blemish'd crown,
Wipe off the dust that hides our sceptre's gilt
And make high majesty look like itself,
Away with me in post to Ravenspurgh.

This is the first effective appearance of a character whose fortunes Shakespeare is to follow through three successive plays. Northumberland, the man who helps to put Bolingbroke on the throne and who afterwards does his best to unseat him, is a man in whom disloyalty is almost a matter of principle. He lives in perpetual discontent with himself, his friends and the world at large. He abandons every cause as soon as he has persuaded his colleagues to take it up. He has thoroughly mastered the art of identifying his private interests and temperamental grudges with a zeal for the public welfare and he performs this act of identification so easily that it needs a wary eye to take and keep the measure of his suave iniquity. He is the sort of political leader who starts a rebellion and leaves his partners to face the consequences. He will take to his bed when his son is fighting at Shrewsbury and steal across the border into Scotland when his friends are marching south to meet his enemies. He is Shakespeare's presentation, valid for any generation, of the malcontent without a cause, the rebel without a conviction. To-day he speaks boldly for the Opposition and abstains from voting against the Government.

The report that Bolingbroke has landed at Ravenspurgh comes to London simultaneously with the news that Northumberland and his party have absconded. York, Richard being by this time away in Ireland, receives the news in a fluster. The nobles are fled. The commons are cold. The coffers are empty. Posts must be sent to the King. Arms must be collected and men mustered.

                                                                                          If I know
How or which way to order these affairs,
Thus thrust disorderly into my hands,
Never believe me. Both are my kinsmen:
The one is my sovereign, whom both my oath
And duty bids defend; the other again
Is my kinsman, whom the king hath wrong'd,
Whom conscience and my kindred bids to right.
Well, somewhat we must do.

York is as distracted in conscience as in counsel. His bewilderment is admirably conveyed. The very verse is disjointed and breathless as the old man turns this way and that. Note the touching futility of the abrupt, disconnected order to his servant:

Go, fellow, get thee home, provide some carts
And bring away the armour that is there.

It is a masterly little scene and serves, better than pages of explicit commentary on Richard's fecklessness, to expose the levity with which the King has left his kingdom unprovided.

Meanwhile Northumberland is meeting Bolingbroke at Ravenspurgh. Their first colloquy is a model of political deportment as between masters of the game. Evidently Bolingbroke has not been sparing of his charm and Northumberland, as they come upon the scene in the wilds near Berkeley Castle, repays him in kind:

I am a stranger here in Gloucestershire:
These high wild hills and rough uneven ways
Draw out our miles, and make them wearisome;
And yet your fair discourse hath been as sugar,
Making the hard way sweet and delectable;

and Bolingbroke returns:

Of much less value is my company
Than your good words.

To them enters Harry Percy, who in years to come will aptly remember this first meeting with Bolingbroke. It is for all present an occasion big with consequence and the use to be made of it by Shakespeare in two histories as yet unwritten affords a remarkable instance of the continuity with which he follows his political characters from play to play. Harry Percy, Bolingbroke and Northumberland, firmly rooted already in his imagination, though they may grow and put forth the shoots proper to their growth, can never change their essential quality.

Northumberland introduces his son:

NORTHUMBERLAND:
Have you forgot the Duke of Hereford, boy?
PERCY:
No, my good lord; for that is not forgot
Which ne'er I did remember: to my knowledge
I never in my life did look on him.
NORTHUMBERLAND:
Then learn to know him now: this is the duke.
PERCY:
My gracious lord, I tender you my service,
Such as it is, being tender, raw and young,
Which elder days shall ripen and confirm
To more approvèd service and desert.
BOLINGBROKE:
I thank thee, gentle Percy; and be sure
I count myself in nothing else so happy
As in a soul remembering my good friends;
And as my fortune ripens with thy love,
It shall be still thy true love's recompense:
My heart this covenant makes, my hand thus seals it.

The Lords Ross and Willoughby are then presented. Percy stands apart and, if the actor knows his business, will seem a trifle impatient of these civilities:

BOLINGBROKE:
Welcome, my lords. I wot your love pursues
A banish'd traitor; all my treasury
Is yet but unfelt thanks, which, more enrich'd,
Shall be your love and labour's recompense.
ROSS:
Your presence makes us rich, most noble lord.
WILLOUGHBY:
And far surmounts our labour to attain it.
BOLINGBROKE:
Evermore thanks, the exchequer of the poor;
Which, till my infant fortune comes to years,
Stands for my bounty.

The scene is well enough in itself, however carelessly we read. But observe how already it hints at a significance for all concerned which only a distant sequel will in the fullness of time reveal. Harry Hotspur describes this very incident years later in terms which show that, tender, raw and young as he may have been at the time, he has already taken the measure of Bolingbroke's ingratiating ways. Hotspur has a natural dislike of humbug and a keen flair for its presence. Forestalling four years of troubled history, let him speak for himself:

Why, what a candy deal of courtesy
This fawning greyhound then did proffer me!
Look, ‘when his infant fortune came to age’,
And ‘gentle Harry Percy’, and ‘kind cousin’;
O, the devil take such cozeners!

Hotspur almost remembers the very words of Bolingbroke—almost, but not quite perfectly, as is only natural.⁶

The short scene which follows the meeting between Bolingbroke and the absconded peers provides us with a further example of Shakespeare's sureness of touch in the handling of a political situation.

York has come to meet the rebel lords as the King's regent. Bolingbroke respects his loyalty. He does not attempt to force the issue, but with consummate skill he so conducts the interview that York first finds himself committed to neutrality and subsequently drawn into an ambiguous acceptance of the usurper. Bolingbroke does not ask for his support, but York, before he knows it, is being gently urged in the direction of acting as intermediary in procuring Richard's voluntary abdication.

When Bolingbroke kneels to his uncle, York bluntly challenges his false obeisance:

YORK:
Show me thy humble heart, and not thy knee,
Whose duty is deceivable and false.
BOLINGBROKE:
My gracious uncle—
YORK:
                                                                                                    Tut, tut!
Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle:
I am no traitor's uncle; and that word ‘grace’
In an ungracious mouth is but profane.
Why have those banish'd and forbidden legs
Dar'd once to touch a dust of England's ground?
Com'st thou because the anointed king is hence?
Why foolish boy, the king is left behind,
And in my loyal bosom lies his power.

But Bolingbroke has taken the measure of this honest champion of things as they are—or ought to be. He strikes instantly at the weak joint in his uncle's armour. He was banished as Hereford. He returns to claim his rights as Lancaster:

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 of England,
It must be granted I am Duke of Lancaster.
                                                                                                                                  I am a subject,
And challenge law: attorneys are denied me,
And therefore personally I lay my claim
To my inheritance of free descent.

This is too much for a feudal prince who, as Bolingbroke reminds him, has also a son who looks to inherit his father's lands. York will not admit that Bolingbroke is in the right, but cannot deny that he has a grievance. The rebel lords are prompt with assurances that Lancaster has come only to claim his lawful dues and York throws in his hand:

Well, well, I see the issue of these arms:
I cannot mend it, I must needs confess,
Because my power is weak and all ill left;
But if I could, by Him that gave me life,
I would attach you all and make you stoop
Unto the sovereign mercy of the king;
But since I cannot, be it known to you
I do remain as neuter.

Bolingbroke at once presses his advantage:

But we must win your grace to go with us
To Bristol castle, which they say is held
By Bushy, Bagot and their complices,
The caterpillars of the commonwealth,
Which I have sworn to weed and pluck away.
YORK:
It may be I'll go with you: but yet I'll pause;
For I am loath to break our country's laws.

Thus York, the champion of lawful authority, is drawn into the camp of the usurper and becomes his intermediary with Richard. He goes to Bristol; he is present at the condemnation to death of the caterpillars of the commonwealth, thus condoning what is in effect an act of sovereignty on the part of Bolingbroke; and, before Richard has set foot in his kingdom, he is sending letters to Richard's queen on Bolingbroke's behalf.

Shakespeare, having dealt faithfully with the political issues of his play in the foregoing scenes, now fixes our attention on the absorbing spectacle of a gifted, sensitive and undisciplined character exposed to the high tension of a tragic destiny. Politics, for a while, fall into the background. The reactions of Bolingbroke, York and Northumberland are still worth watching; there is always an interest in observing how public persons demean themselves in the presence of emotions which exceed their comprehension or experience. But the mood of the play changes abruptly at this point. Richard enters upon the coast of Wales; drums and a flourish of trumpets die away into silence; history pauses and tragedy takes the stage.⁷

Richard himself establishes the change of key:

                                                                      I weep for joy
To stand upon my kingdom once again.
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 favour 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:
Yield stinging nettles to mine enemies;
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.

It should be borne in mind that the speaker of these lyric numbers has just landed on the shores of his kingdom. He is confronted with a political situation which calls for immediate action. But Richard has no mind or will to spare for the business in hand. He has started upon that dramatisation of himself as a tragic figure which will be henceforth the dominant theme of the play. Narcissus is already absorbed in the contemplation of his royal image. From that nothing will turn him aside. Looking round on his followers, he notes their astonishment that he should be thus wasting the precious hours:

Mock not my senseless conjuration, lords,

he exclaims and starts off again in full career:

This earth shall have a feeling and these stones
Prove armèd soldiers, ere her native king
Shall falter under foul rebellion's arms.

The Bishop of Carlisle respectfully reminds his sovereign that God preferably helps those who help themselves:

The means that heaven yields must be embraced,
And not neglected; else, if heaven would,
And we will not, heaven's offer we refuse,
The proffer'd means of succour and redress.

Aumerle is more explicit:

He means, my lord, that we are too remiss;
Whilst Bolingbroke, through our security,
Grows strong and great in substance and in friends.

But Richard's mind and fancy are otherwise engaged:

Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm from an anointed king;
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord:
For every man that Bolingbroke hath press'd
To lift shrewd steel against our golden crown,
God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay
A glorious angel.

This is Shakespeare's first direct tribute to the sacramental tradition which for his contemporaries was part of the legend that had grown round Richard's deposition. Richard, in his reference to a legion of angels on which he can call for his defence, suggests an analogy between the passion which he is called upon to suffer, and from which he makes no real effort to escape, and that of Christ. These references will become more explicit as the tragedy proceeds.

Bad news now comes by every post. Salisbury reports that the Welshmen who were to have supported Richard are dispersed and fled. Scroop enters. His face promises more evil tidings. All is grist to the mill of Richard's self-centred artistry:

Mine ear is open and my heart prepared:
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.

Scroop tells his lamentable tale. Bolingbroke has a mighty following; the whole kingdom is in arms against the crown. Where, then, asks Richard, are the men of my party? Where is Bagot? What is become of Bushy? Where is Green? Have they, too, made peace with Bolingbroke? Mark what follows:

SCROOP:
Peace have they made with him indeed, my lord.
RICHARD:
O villains, vipers, damn'd without redemption!
Dogs, easily won to fawn on any man!
Snakes, in my heart-blood warm'd, that sting my heart!
Three Judases, each one thrice worse than Judas!
Would they make peace? terrible hell make war
Upon their spotted souls for this offence!
SCROOP:
Sweet love, I see, changing his property,
Turns to the sourest and most deadly hate.
Again uncurse their souls; their peace is made
With heads, and not with hands: those whom you curse
Have felt the worst of death's destroying wound
And lie full low, graved in the hollow ground.

Richard's vehement cursing of his friends upon an ambiguous report of their behaviour has often been quoted by critics as an instance of the unstable impetuosity of his character. It is even more significant as revealing in Richard a self-absorption so complete that he cannot properly attend to what is being said. No one could possibly have mistaken the meaning of Scroop's ‘Peace have they made with him, indeed, my lord’ unless he were wholly self-engrossed, or could have failed to receive the news of the death of his hapless followers without some word of regret. But Richard hasn't a syllable or a thought to spare for Bushy or for Bagot. The announcement of their summary execution by Bolingbroke is just another fillip to his climbing sorrow:

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.

He sees himself walking in a long procession of kings born to illustrate the tragical fall of princes, who are set on high but who in the end must live with bread, feel want, taste grief, need friends and refuse to be mocked with solemn reverence:

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been deposed, some slain in war;
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,
Some poison'd by their wives, some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court, and there the 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!

The Bishop of Carlisle again ventures a rebuke:

My lord, wise men ne'er sit and wail their woes
But presently prevent the ways to wail.

Richard, for a moment, condescends to business. His uncle York has an army. Where is he to be found? Scroop informs him that York has abandoned the field. Richard's cup is now full. There is nothing left to mar the luxury of his grief:

Beshrew thee, cousin, which didst lead me forth
Of that sweet way I was in to despair!
What say you now? what comfort have we now?
By heaven, I'll hate him everlastingly
That bids me be of comfort any more.

Richard discharges his army and takes refuge in Flint Castle. Thither marches Bolingbroke with York and Northumberland in attendance. York is still loyal to Richard in spirit. Bolingbroke has as yet no formal right to his allegiance. Nor has Bolingbroke laid claim to it. He still entertains the wilful stillness of the man who waits upon his fortune. But Northumberland knows what Bolingbroke will do before Bolingbroke has confessed it even to himself. York knows it, too. There is a characteristic passage between them in which Bolingbroke contrives to remain graciously neutral:

NORTHUMBERLAND:
The news is very fair and good, my lord:
Richard not far from hence hath hid his head.
YORK:
It would beseem the Lord Northumberland
To say ‘King Richard’: alack the heavy day
When such a sacred king should hide his head!
NORTHUMBERLAND:
Your grace mistakes me; only to be brief,
Left I his title out.
YORK:
                                                                                The time hath been,
Would you have been so brief with him, he would
Have been so brief with you, to shorten you,
For taking so the head, your whole head's length.
BOLINGBROKE:
Mistake not, uncle, further than you should.
YORK:
Take not, good cousin, further than you should,
Lest you mistake the heavens are o'er our heads.
BOLINGBROKE:
I know it, uncle, and oppose not myself
Against their will.

Bolingbroke's message to Richard is a masterpiece of political statement. He comes in all submission, but with an army which he ostentatiously parades before the walls. He comes with a humble request, but, if the request be not granted, he will enforce it at the point of the sword. Let Richard rage in fire, Bolingbroke will weep his waters on the earth:

Henry Bolingbroke
On both his knees doth kiss King Richard's hand
And sends allegiance and true faith of heart
To his most royal person; hither come
Even at his feet to lay my arms and power,
Provided that my banishment repeal'd
And lands restored again be freely granted:
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 slaughter'd 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,
My stooping duty tenderly shall show.

This is the cue for Richard to resume the stature of a king. York, looking up to the battlements, comments on his royal appearance and yearns to think on what must follow:

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!

Northumberland stands forth to deliver Bolingbroke's message. Richard checks him with a superb gesture:

We are amazed; and thus long have we stood
To watch the fearful bending of thy knee,
Because we thought ourself thy lawful king:
And if we be, how dare thy joints forget
To pay their awful duty to our presence?
If we be not, show us the hand of God
That hath dismiss'd us from our stewardship;
And though you think that all, as you have done,
Have torn their souls by turning them from us,
And we are barren and bereft of friends;
Yet know, my master, God omnipotent
Is mustering in his clouds on our behalf
Armies of pestilence; and they shall strike
Your children yet unborn and unbegot,
That lift your vassal hands against my head
And threat the glory of my precious crown.

Northumberland delivers his master's message, concluding with a solemn oath:

His coming hither hath no further scope
Than for his lineal royalties and to beg
Enfranchisement immediate on his knees:
Which on thy royal party granted once,
His glittering arms he will commend to rust,
His barbèd steeds to stables, and his heart
To faithful service of your majesty.
This swears he, as he is a prince, is just;
And, as I am a gentleman, I credit him.

To which Richard very civilly replies:

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 thou hast
Speak to his gentle hearing kind commends.

But the strain of royally maintaining a false show of courtesy is too great. He turns to Aumerle. Has he not debased himself in speaking the traitor fair? Should he not rather defy his enemy? Aumerle counsels prudence. Fight the intruder with gentle words till time brings friends and forces with which to meet him on a more equal footing. Richard, no longer a king who weighs advice, but a man whose pride has been wounded to the quick, cries out:

O God! O God! that e'er this tongue of mine,
That laid the sentence of dread banishment
On you proud man, should take it off again
With words of sooth! O that I were as great
As is my grief, or lesser than my name!

Northumberland brings back an answer from Bolingbroke, but Richard cannot wait to receive it. He is again the man of sorrows and has thrown his dignity to the winds:

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:
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 figured goblets for a dish of wood,
My sceptre for a palmer's walking-staff,
My subjects for a pair of carvèd 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.

He grows more exquisitely fanciful as self-pity entices him from one conceit to another. He scatters himself, as Coleridge expresses it, into a multitude of images and endeavours to shelter himself from that which is around him by a cloud of his own thoughts. He finds Aumerle, his tender-hearted cousin, weeping beside him and brings him into the picture:

Or shall we play the wanton with our woes,
And make some pretty match with shedding tears?
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.

One of the most moving touches in Shakespeare's delineation is Richard's bleak perception, now and then, that his fancies are regarded by those about him as foolishly irrelevant. We have heard him exclaim on a former occasion: Mock not my senseless conjuration, lords! Now, again, he becomes abruptly aware that he has lost touch with the real world and is playing his part on a stage before spectators who find him fantastic or even ridiculous:

                                                                                Well, well, I see
I talk but idly, and you laugh at me.

These moments, in which Richard sees himself as possibly the only appreciative witness of his tragedy, are the more affecting as they aggravate rather than restrain his excess of feeling. A brief moment of lucidity is in the present instance followed by an outbreak of almost intolerable hysteria:

RICHARD:
Most mighty prince, my Lord Northumberland,
What says King Bolingbroke? will his majesty
Give Richard leave to live till Richard die?
You make a leg, and Bolingbroke says ay.
NORTHUMBERLAND:
My lord, in the base court he doth attend
To speak with you; may it please you to come
          down.
RICHARD:
Down, down I come; like glistering Phaëton,
Wanting the manage of unruly jades.
In the base court? Base court, where kings grow
          base,
To come at traitors' calls and do them grace.
In the base court? Come down? Down, court!
          down, king!
For night-owls shriek where mounting larks should
          sing.

Northumberland's comment is drily expressive:

                                                  Sorrow and grief of heart
Makes him speak fondly, like a frantic man.

King Richard, in the base court, brushes aside Bolingbroke's sustained pretences of respect. He sees himself as the royal martyr, victim of circumstance and the strong hand. Bolingbroke kneels to him:

RICHARD:
Up, cousin, up; your heart is up, I know,
Thus high at least, although your knee be low.
BOLINGBROKE:
My gracious lord, I come but for mine own.
RICHARD:
Your own is yours, and I am yours, and all.
BOLINGBROKE:
So far be mine, my most redoubted lord,
As my true service shall deserve your love.
RICHARD:
Well you deserve: they well deserve to have,
That know the strong'st and surest way to get.
Uncle, give me your hand: nay, dry your eyes;
Tears show their love, but want their remedies.
Cousin, I am too young to be your father,
Though you are old enough to be my heir.
What you will have, I'll give, and willing too;
For do we must what force will have us do.

We come now to the famous scene of abdication in Westminster Hall. It is remembered necessarily as a supreme exhibition of Richard's quality. But the political background is worth attention if only for its faithful rendering of the reactions of public men to the impact and artistry of human emotion expressed in beauty and without reserve. Shakespeare, though his eyes are fixed on Richard, never loses sight of the dramatic contrast between his practical politicians and the suffering, wayward spirit of the fallen King. The scene opens, as so many scenes at this particular point in Shakespeare's plays, with an episode apparently novel but in fact recalling and developing the main initial theme of the tragedy. Bolingbroke is dealing masterfully with precisely the same political situation which confronted Richard at the beginning of the play. Bolingbroke in the first Act charged Mowbray with being privy to the death of Gloucester. Bagot, in the fourth Act, confronts Aumerle with precisely the same charge. Bagot, like Mowbray, denies Aumerle's accusation. Challenges are flung down on either side, but Bolingbroke firmly suppresses the unruly peers:

                                                                                          Lords appellants,
Your differences shall all rest under gage
Till we assign you to your days of trial.

He takes complete control of the situation and incidentally—a revealing touch, this—he adopts the royal ‘we’ in announcing his decision.

Into this scene, clearly designed to show that Bolingbroke has the political tact and resolution in which Richard has proved so grievously deficient, comes York to announce that an abdication has been arranged:

Great Duke of Lancaster, I come to thee
From plume-pluck'd Richard; who with willing soul
Adopts thee heir, and his high sceptre yields
To the possession of thy royal hand.
Ascend his throne, descending now from him;
And long live Henry, of that name the fourth!

Not by a single word or gesture, though he is already behaving like a king, has Bolingbroke laid any explicit claim to the crown. But now his destiny is plain. His chance has come and he seizes it with the readiness of a patient man who, moving deviously to his journey's end, at last sees the road clear before him:

In God's name, I'll ascend the regal throne.

But stay; there is a hitch in these well-ordered proceedings. The Bishop of Carlisle bars the way of the usurper. Richard, he protests, is still the King. There is none present noble enough to judge his royal master and, even if Richard were a common thief, he should not be condemned unheard:

What subject can give sentence on his king?
And who sits here that is not Richard's subject?
Thieves are not judged but they are by to hear,
Although apparent guilt be seen in them;
And shall the figure of God's majesty,
His captain, steward, deputy-elect,
Anointed, crownèd, planted many years,
Be judg'd by subject and inferior breath,
And be himself not present?

The Bishop goes on to warn the rebel lords of what must follow the elevation of a traitor:

Disorder, horror, fear and mutiny
Shall here inhabit, and this land be call'd
The field of Golgotha and dead men's skulls.
O! if you raise this house against this house,
It will the woefullest division prove
That ever fell upon this cursèd earth.

Northumberland takes it upon himself to order the instant arrest of the Bishop, but Bolingbroke intervenes. It must not appear that he is taking the kingdom by force; there must be no doubt that Richard has in fact voluntarily surrendered his rights. He turns to York:

Fetch hither Richard, that in common view
He may surrender; so we shall proceed
Without suspicion.

Thus is Richard called upon to play the famous scene in which he unkings himself and he plays it with a vengeance. These men have summoned him to comply with a formality. He will shame them, if he can; wring their hearts, if it be possible. In any case, he will make it a bad quarter of an hour for everyone concerned:

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 limbs:
Give sorrow leave awhile to tutor me
To this submission. Yet I well remember
The favours of these men: were they not mine?
Did they not sometime cry, ‘All hail!’ to me?
So Judas did to Christ.

York explains the purpose for which he has been called:

To do that office of thine own good will
Which tired majesty did make thee offer,
The resignation of thy state and crown
To Henry Bolingbroke.

‘Here, cousin, seize the crown’, cries Richard and his fancy takes wings. The crown is a deep well; he and Bolingbroke are two buckets—his own deep down and full of tears, Bolingbroke's empty and mounting aloft in the air. Bolingbroke twice interrupts. Somehow Richard must be kept to the point. ‘I thought you had been willing to resign,’ he protests. Richard flashes back:

My crown, I am; but still my griefs are mine:
You may my glories and my state depose,
But not my griefs; still am I king of those.

He invites Bolingbroke to meet him in another flight of fancy but Bolingbroke is not to be put off. Bluntly he asks:

Are you contented to resign the crown?

Richard is contented, but after his own fashion:

Now mark me, how I will undo myself:
I give this heavy weight from off my head
And this unwieldy sceptre from my hand,
The pride of kingly sway from out my heart;
With mine own tears I wash away my balm,
With mine own hands I give away my crown,
With mine own tongue deny my sacred state,
With mine own breath release all duteous rites:
All pomp and majesty I do forswear.
God save King Henry, unking'd Richard says,
And send him many years of sunshine days!
What more remains?

Bolingbroke has brought Richard to the point and his work is done. What more remains he leaves to the callously officious Northumberland. Richard's abdication must be justified to the people of England. No one knows that better than Bolingbroke. But this supple, audacious and secret man has the politician's art of allowing others to do the ignoble things necessary for his advancement while he himself remains in the background to reap the profit and show to advantage in gestures of mercy, magnanimity and honest care for the public weal.

A document has been prepared setting forth the misdemeanours of the fallen king. Northumberland suggests that Richard should read the charges:

That, by confessing them, the souls of men
May deem that you are worthily depos'd.

Richard replies:

Must I do so? and must I ravel out
My weaved-up follies? Gentle Northumberland,
If thy offences were upon record,
Would it not shame thee in so fair a troop
To read a lecture of them? If thou wouldst,
There shouldst thou find one heinous article,
Containing the deposing of a king,
And cracking the strong warrant of an oath,
Mark'd with a blot, damn'd in the book of heaven.

He looks round upon the assembled lords. They are obviously feeling the strain. They have no liking for scenes and there has never been such a scene as this. They stand about awkwardly, uneasily, a little pitifully. And Richard, for the third time in the play, sees himself as the Christ betrayed:

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.

Northumberland is inexorable and finally drives Richard to a sudden blaze of human temper, in striking contrast with the mood in which he adorns and cherishes his grief:

NORTHUMBERLAND:
My lord, dispatch; read o'er these articles.
RICHARD:
Mine eyes are full of tears, I cannot see:
And yet salt water blinds them not so much
But they can see a sort of traitors here.
NORTHUMBERLAND:
My lord,—
RICHARD:
No lord of thine, thou haught insulting man.

Soon, however, his imagination is at work again and inspires him to one of his most striking images:

O, that I were a mockery king of snow,
Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke,
To melt myself away in water-drops!

Finally comes his last command:

An if my word be sterling yet in England,
Let it command a mirror hither straight,
That it may show me what a face I have,
Since it is bankrupt of his majesty.

For the men about him how unexpectedly frivolous is this request! And yet how appropriate! Narcissus has reached the supreme moment of his tragedy and calls for a looking-glass.

Bolingbroke sends an attendant for the mirror. Northumberland still presses Richard. Let him read the paper while the glass is fetched. This is too much even for Bolingbroke:

BOLINGBROKE:
Urge it no more, my Lord Northumberland.
NORTHUMBERLAND:
The commons will not then be satisfied.
RICHARD:
They shall be satisfied: I'll read enough,
When I do see the very book indeed
Where all my sins are writ, and that's myself.

The attendant returns and Richard is allowed his most memorable gesture:

                                                            Was this face the face
That every day under his household roof
Did keep ten thousand men? Was this the face
That, like the sun, did make beholders wink?
Was this the face that faced so many follies,
And was at last out-faced by Bolingbroke?
A brittle glory shineth in this face:
As brittle as the glory is the face;
                    (Dashes the glass against the ground.)
For there it is, crack'd in a hundred shivers.
Mark, silent king, the moral of this sport,
How soon my sorrow hath destroy'd my face.

Bolingbroke's comment—

The shadow of your sorrow hath destroy'd
The shadow of your face—

is not intended as a sneer, though behind it lurks the contempt of a realist for the imaginative exercises of the artist. He is not insensitive to the scene and, in reaction against the impression it has made upon him, he is prompted to reflect that it has no dynamic relation to the world of action. He suggests that Richard's sorrow is largely of the imagination. The sorrow may be real, but its expression is histrionic—in fact, a shadow. Richard acknowledges the force of this observation but construes it with a difference:

                                                            Say that again.
The shadow of my sorrow! Ha! let's see:
'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 tortured soul.

And now suddenly he is tired of the shadow-show and asks leave to go. ‘Whither?’ asks Bolingbroke, and Richard, with the petulance of a hurt child, replies: ‘Whither you will, so I were from your sights.’

So ends a scene in which Shakespeare's gifts as poet and dramatist are for the first time perfectly united. It goes instantly to the heart, but yields its treasures the more abundantly as it is the more closely studied. It is full of wonders. Not the least is the way in which it combines the sacramental, the aesthetic and the purely human elements in the dramatic character of Richard and the situation in which he finds himself. The speech in which Richard divests himself of crown and sceptre is likened by Walter Pater in his ‘Appreciations’ to an inverted rite, a rite of degradation, a ‘long, agonising ceremony’ in which the order of coronation is reversed. The sacramental analogy with Christ's passion has already been noted. The rebel peers who deliver up their lord to his sour cross are thrice stigmatised as Judases in the course of the play. It is Shakespeare's supreme achievement to have retained this mystical aspect of the tragedy and yet in no way to have impaired its humanity. The consecrated king, impiously discrowned, shades away into the poet king, in whom suffering induces a lyric ecstasy; who, in his turn, gives place to the mere human victim of misfortune, subject to everyday infirmities of mind and will, with whom we can live in fellowship. This Richard, who undoes himself with hierophantic solemnity, who humbles, or pities, or exalts himself in imagination, is also the man who turns on Northumberland in a flash of temper and reveals himself, all at once, as a very ordinary creature. Nor do we feel any incongruity or rift in the total performance. The three elements are completely fused. The king, the artist and the man are the person we have come to know as Richard. No play of Shakespeare has a more perfect unity of tone, texture and feeling. Yet no play has drawn upon a greater diversity of thematic material. Shakespeare, deriving from tradition, from recorded facts and from his own mind a bewildering complex of emotions and ideas, has produced a play which is all of a piece.

The scene of Richard's deposition fills, as it should, the whole fourth Act of the tragedy. It is the summit of the play and of Shakespeare's dramatic achievement at the time when it was written.⁸ From this summit we descend in the fifth Act to the foregone conclusion of Richard's death and premonitory hints of the expiation which will be required of the usurper in future histories. The descent is well-contrived and there is much to be observed on the way down.

First we are taken to a street in London. Richard, being led to the Tower, is intercepted by his queen.

This is the third appearance of the Queen as a speaking character and her first appearance in a scene with her husband. Shakespeare, happily misled by his authorities, has given her a part in the play for which there is no warrant in history. Richard's first queen, Anne, dearly loved and extravagantly mourned, had been dead seven years. His second queen, Isabella, was only nine years old. Shakespeare, in presenting Richard as a king who failed in his public office, felt the need of showing him also in a more intimate relationship. Here, too, was an opportunity of adding a touch, here and there, to that English background against which the whole tragedy is played. The Queen, in her garden at Langley, lies full in the fresh green lap of fair King Richard's land, which, like Prospero's island, is full of noises heard above the brazen clamour of its barons and in the hushed pauses of their plotting. From the scene in which a pride of rebel lords sets forth to meet Bolingbroke we are taken to a scene in which a forsaken wife is grieved and anxious for ‘sweet Richard’. From the scene in which Richard comes lamentably down to the court where kings grow base we are taken to where a queen and her ladies devise pastimes. A gardener binds up his dangling apricocks and thinks it a pity that the commonwealth cannot be trimmed and dressed as neatly as his hedges and borders. No one can fail to feel in his heart, though he may not be aware of its peerless cunning, the effect of the speech with which the scene at Langley concludes. The Queen has heard that Richard is deposed. The gardener, who has commented so wisely and gently on the faults which have ruined his master, looks sadly after his mistress:

Here did she fall a tear; here, in this place,
I'll set a bank of rue, sour herb of grace:
Rue, even for ruth, here shortly shall be seen,
In the remembrance of a weeping queen.

Dynasties change; the masters of England have opened the purple testament of bleeding war, which will not be closed for a hundred years to come; a simple plain man, in compassion for a weeping queen, sets a sweet herb. Only a moment before she has upbraided him as a ‘little better thing than earth’ for his evil tidings and called down God's curse upon his flowers. He has accepted her rebuke and bears no malice. In this garden at Langley England is wise and kind; there is here a fragrance which will outlive the futilities of history.

Shakespeare thus prepares us for a last meeting between husband and wife and we realise, when the Queen speaks, if we have not already done so, that Richard is a man beloved:

But soft, but see, or rather do not see,
My fair rose wither.
                                                            Thou most beauteous inn,
Why should hard-favour'd grief be lodged in thee,
When triumph is become an alehouse guest?

Shakespeare here gives us but a glimpse of that lovely quality in Richard which fascinated the chroniclers and survived a hundred years of Lancastrian detraction. Yet he does not falter in his portrayal of Richard's blemishes of mind and will. Now or never Richard should forget himself and speak from the heart. But no; he is still the absorbed spectator of his own tragedy, in which he is now all set to play the penitent:

                                                            Learn, good soul,
To think our former state a happy dream;
From which awak'd, the truth of what we are
Shows us but this! I am sworn brother, sweet,
To grim Necessity, and he and I
Will keep a league till death. Hie thee to France
And cloister thee in some religious house:
Our holy lives must win a new world's crown.

The Queen very naturally resents this performance:

What! is my Richard both in shape and mind
Transform'd and weaken'd? hath Bolingbroke deposed
Thine intellect? hath he been in thy heart?
The lion dying thrusteth forth his paw
And wounds the earth, if nothing else, with rage
To be o'erpower'd; and wilt thou, pupil-like,
Take thy correction mildly, kiss the rod,
And fawn on rage with base humility,
Which art a lion and a king of beasts?

But Richard is incorrigible:

Good sometime queen, prepare thee hence for France:
Think I am dead and that even here thou tak'st,
As from my death-bed, thy last living leave.
In winter's tedious nights sit by the fire
With good old folks, and let them tell thee tales
Of woeful ages, long ago betid;
And ere thou bid good night, to quit their griefs,
Tell thou the lamentable tale of me,
And send the hearers weeping to their beds.

At this point Shakespeare brings on to the stage the man of all others most fitted to impersonate the new political order. Northumberland arrives with fresh instructions from Bolingbroke. Richard is to be taken to Pomfret. This is Richard's cue for prophecy. Retribution inevitably attends the success of wicked men. Triumph, the alehouse guest, has no abiding place:

Northumberland, thou ladder wherewithal
The mounting Bolingbroke ascends my throne,
The time shall not be many hours of age
More than it is, ere foul sin gathering head
Shall break into corruption: thou shalt think,
Though he divide the realm and give thee half,
It is too little, helping him to all;
And he shall think that thou, which know'st the way
To plant unrightful kings, wilt know again,
Being ne'er so little urged, another way
To pluck him headlong from the usurped throne.
The love of wicked men converts to fear;
That fear to hate, and hate turns one or both
To worthy danger and deservèd death.

Northumberland is not, however, a man to be moved by premonitions. He has come to execute an order. ‘My guilt be on my head and there's an end,’ he answers curtly, and, when the Queen begs that Richard may go with her to France, he retorts with a shrug for her simplicity: ‘That were some love, but little policy.’

We are not to see Richard again till we find him playing his last part in the solitude of his prison at Pomfret. But Shakespeare has much to do in the interval. He has first to show us two celebrated companion portraits, one of Bolingbroke in his triumph and the other of Richard in his fall. It is York who executes the commission. Here is Bolingbroke:

Then, as I said, the duke, great Bolingbroke,
Mounted upon a hot and fiery steed,
Which his aspiring rider seem'd to know,
With slow but stately pace kept on his course,
Whilst all tongues cried ‘God save thee, Bolingbroke!’
You would have thought the very windows spake,
So many greedy looks of young and old
Through casements darted their desiring eyes
Upon his visage, and that all the walls
With painted imagery had said at once
‘Jesu preserve thee! welcome, Bolingbroke!’
Whilst he, from the one side to the other turning,
Bareheaded, lower than his proud steed's neck,
Bespake them thus: ‘I thank you, countrymen’:
And thus still doing, thus he pass'd along.

And here is Richard:

As in a theatre, the eyes of men,
After a well-grac'd actor leaves the stage,
Are idly bent on him that enters next,
Thinking his prattle to be tedious;
Even so, or with much more contempt, 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;
Which with such gentle sorrow he shook off,
His face still combating with tears and smiles,
The badges of his grief and patience.

York has accepted the situation and finds God's purpose at work even in the humiliation of his late master:

That had not God, for some strong purpose, steel'd
The hearts of men, they must perforce have melted,
And barbarism itself have pitied him.
But heaven hath a hand in these events,
To whose high will we bound our calm contents.

Nor has he long to wait for an opportunity to demonstrate his loyalty to the new dynasty. For Bolingbroke is already threatened with conspiracy. Richard's friends, headed by the Abbot of Westminster, are plotting a restoration and York's own son, Aumerle, is involved. His father counsels him to accept the accomplished fact:

Well, bear you well in this new spring of time,
Lest you be cropp'd before you come to prime.

But York, even as he delivers this advice, sees dangling from his son's bosom a seal. He demands to see the writing and presently he is spelling out proof that his son, and a dozen other lords, have sworn to kill Bolingbroke at Oxford. He calls for his boots. The King must be warned. It is bad enough that Richard should have been deposed. And now before anyone has had time to settle down under the new dispensation, here is yet another attempt to upset the established order. Is treason to become the fasion in England?

The scenes in which Aumerle's conspiracy is plotted, discovered, reported to Bolingbroke and suppressed are usually omitted on the stage. It is assumed that the interest of the audience is so strongly absorbed by Richard's personal tragedy that the political results of his abdication can be ignored. This was not Shakespeare's intention. It must again be insisted that Richard II is a political play, with a political theme which had a poignant interest for an Elizabethan audience. Bolingbroke has deposed a king ruling by right of birth and consecration. The consequences were to be written red in the history of England for the next hundred years and to haunt the memories of Englishmen for as long again. The scenes in which Bolingbroke is confronted with civil war as an immediate result of his usurpation are essential to Shakespeare's design. It is, moreover, dramatically interesting to see how Bolingbroke handles this dangerous conspiracy while we still have vividly in mind the conduct of Richard in a similar situation. Bolingbroke thanks York for his intelligence:

O loyal father of a treacherous son!
Thou sheer, immaculate and silver fountain,
From whence this stream through muddy passages
Hath held his current and defiled himself!

Bolingbroke is fulsome in his acknowledgment of a service rendered and turns the moral situation inside out. York, who deserted Richard, is praised for his loyalty. Aumerle, who has remained true to his allegiance, is abused for treachery. Bolingbroke pardons Aumerle, but suppresses the insurrection with an iron hand.

Shakespeare's presentation of Aumerle's conspiracy has yet another dramatic purpose. It supplies the crowning motive for his instigation of Exton to the murder of Richard. Characteristically it is an ambiguous instigation:

Have I no friend will rid me of this living fear?

He looks round and there is Exton to overhear and execute his thought. He has been moved to the deposition of a king without explicitly avowing his intention. He is moved to the crowning act of murder in the same somnambulist fashion and, when the deed is done, can in a sense, disavow the intention:

They love not poison that do poison need,
Nor do I thee: though I did wish him dead,
I hate the murderer, love him murderèd.

He can even regard the act as though it had been performed not by, but upon, him:

Lords, I protest, my soul is full of woe,
That blood should sprinkle me to make me grow.

Richard, soliloquising in his prison at Pomfret, is like an actor reviewing the scenes in which he has played and reflecting on their relation to reality. He is still dramatising his own introverted responses to the tragedy that has befallen him and he discusses how these histrionic introversions may be prolonged into the solitude in which he finds himself:

I have been studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world.
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 whate'er I be,
Nor I nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
With being nothing.

How apt is this annihilating conclusion of a self-centred mind, brooding in a wilful seclusion from its kind! These still-breeding thoughts are doomed to sterility and can bear no fruit! The man who lives in imagination only has no place in the world of experience. Richard is himself aware at last of the cause of his ruin. The friendly music that breaks upon his solitude sets him thinking how different his story might have been if he had kept his ears open to the harmonies and rhythms of the life about him:

                                                                                          Music do I hear?
Ha, ha! keep time: 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 disorder'd 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;

and he concludes upon a note of genuine human feeling:

This music mads me; let it sound no more;
Yet blessing on his heart that gives it me!
For 'tis a sign of love.

It is not without significance that this sign of love has come to Richard from a man whom he did not even remember, a poor groom of the stable who with much ado had obtained leave to visit his royal master. This poor groom had seen Bolingbroke in his coronation, riding on roan Barbary. Richard has here the cue for a last exquisite fancy. But what he has to say is for the first time touched with a wistful charity towards man and beast:

RICHARD:
Rode he on Barbary? Tell me, gentle friend,
How went he under him?
GROOM:
So proudly as if he disdain'd the ground.
RICHARD:
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 awed by man,
Wast born to bear?

For Richard now it is finished. There is a brave blaze of anger at the last. He beats the keeper who comes to him with a poisoned dish. He strikes down two of the men who come to murder him and it is Exton himself who strikes him down. He dies a king, whose sanctity no abdication can compromise before God:

RICHARD:
That hand shall burn in never-quenching fire That staggers thus my person. Exton, thy fierce hand Hath with the king's blood stain'd the king's own land. Mount, mount, my soul! thy seat is up on high, Whilst my gross flesh sinks downward, here to die.

The character of Richard has provoked comparisons which, however, only serve to stamp him as unique among the creations of Shakespeare. His futility as a man of action has led many critics to put him in the same gallery with Henry VI, Marcus Brutus and Hamlet. But to none of these three men does he bear any real resemblance except for the fact that they, too, were men unfitted to play the part imposed on them by circumstance.

Henry was a saint and a scholar, required to assert his authority over a full-blooded, termagant queen and as graceless a set of political ruffians as ever reached high office in the land. He loved books, hated war, sought peace and believed in justice. He grieved not for himself, but for a kingdom in disorder and cruelties committed in his name. His weakness, as the world assesses weakness, was that of the altruist. He was a model of non-resistance and a pattern of humility in a society which believed only in power. Hazlitt once observed how Shakespeare, dealing with men who on a superficial view seem much of the same complexion and who appear in almost identical situations, presents characters wholly distinct. It is possible to go further. These characters, who tend to be hung in the same gallery, are often more remarkable for their essential differences than for any real similarity. Even when appearing to make the same speech to the same occasion, they talk a different language in a different mood and with a wholly different meaning. Turn back to the speech in which Richard rejects the splendours of royalty:

I'll give my jewels for a set of beads.

Consider the catalogue of precious things which Richard is prepared to discard—his gorgeous palace, his gay apparel, his figured goblets. His subjects he will exchange for a pair of carvèd saints. Every epithet expresses the sophistication of an aesthete whose hermitage is presented as pleasantly to the fancy as the palace for which it is bartered. Consider, too, the flagellant self-pity of the epithets that come last of all—the little, little grave, an obscure grave. The words themselves and the fall of the lines in which they bloom like flowers in an exotic garden betray their derivation. This is not the utterance of an afflicted heart, seeking peace in surrender and simplicity, but of a man who finds consolation in a wilfully induced luxury of grief. We follow the working of an imagination that wantons in the pleasures of the humble.

Read now the similar, but how different, speech of Henry on the battlefield at Towton. Henry sorrows, not for himself, but for the strife and treachery in which he is entangled. He has so little wish to be king—a part in which Richard postured as readily as in any other—that he feels he is doing well for his family in agreeing that his son shall be disinherited. He sincerely envies a man who can live remote from great affairs and, unlike Richard, who, seeing himself in a bedesman's grown, merely changes his apparel, he shares with all his heart the rustic joys and sorrows of a simple hind. His imagination looks abroad into the world for things outside himself, whereas Richard looks always within himself for his own reflection.

The speech in which Henry's mood is crystallised is of a limpid simplicity. There is hardly an epithet. The picture is seen for itself and needs no touch of the self-conscious artist:

O God! methinks it were a happy life,
To be no better than a homely swain.
So many hours must I tend my flock,
So many hours must I take my rest;
So many hours must I contemplate;
So many hours must I sport myself;
So many days my ewes have been with young;
So many weeks ere the poor fools will ean;
So many years ere I shall shear the fleece.
And to conclude, the shepherd's homely curds,
His cold thin drink out of his leather bottle,
His wonted sleep under a fresh tree's shade,
All which secure and sweetly he enjoys,
Is far beyond a prince's delicates,
His viands sparkling in a golden cup,
His body couchèd in a curious bed.(9)

The comparison with Brutus serves only to mark an equally essential contrast. Brutus failed as a politician because he had fixed principles and a rigid mind. Richard failed because he had no principles at all and a mind of quicksilver. Brutus misjudged political events and public persons because he saw them always in the light of his own convictions. Richard could read the hearts and purposes of the men about him, but having no convictions, only imaginative reactions to events and persons, was unable to use his insight effectively. Brutus was shut off from the world by his philosophy, Richard by his absorption in the play of a self-regarding fancy.

The comparison with Hamlet, more often drawn by the critics, is more delicately fallacious. Goethe compared Hamlet, on whom a tragic duty has been imposed, to a beautiful vase in which an acorn has been planted. The acorn in growing shivers its frail container into fragments. Yeats compares Richard to a vessel of porcelain, contrasting him with Henry V, the vessel of clay, which Shakespeare was to fashion later. Here are two poets, writing respectively of the two characters, using quite independently the same image.

Hamlet and Richard are admittedly alike in their nervous sensibility, their preoccupation with things imagined rather than things experienced, their habit of dramatising the issues presented to them, their constant outpouring of heart and mind in words of incomparable felicity, their chameleon changes of mood and temper, their stultification and defeat by grosser spirits. But how superficial are these likenesses compared with the fundamental difference in texture of the two characters! To put them together is to compare a wilful child ‘pretending’ in a playroom with a grown man searching into the depths of his nature and the ultimate mysteries of human life. Richard is interested only in himself and the figure he cuts in a world of his own contriving. Hamlet's interest is universal. Unlike Richard, who moves always from the general to the particular—the particular being his own destiny and passion—Hamlet moves as inevitably from the particular to the general. The tragedy in which he is immersed is his cue for infinite speculation. His personal wrongs are viewed as an epitome of all the ills that flesh is heir to. His hesitations and misgivings prompt him to analyse the source of all the hesitations and misgivings which distract the human mind. There is no character in all Shakespeare's plays so self-centered as Richard; no character less self-centered than Hamlet, who, in brooding on his own problem, sees it instinctively as the problem of every man; who, in the bitterness of his own suffering, can lose himself in the woes of Hecuba or follow the dust of Alexander till it be found stopping a hole to keep the wind away. No character in all Shakespeare's plays is less capable than Richard of meeting and speaking with men as they are. Hamlet, on the contrary, meets every man for what he is and is instantly on speaking terms with them all—from Osric, the waterfly, to a ghost from the grave. Richard's imagination, governed by his sensibility, turns perpetually inward as inevitably as Hamlet's imagination, governed by his intellect, turns perpetually outward. To Richard nothing has interest or significance but what concerns himself. To Hamlet nothing has interest or significance till it can be related with the scheme of things entire.

If these characters, superficially alike, prove on closer acquaintance to be essentially different, it is equally true that characters superficially different often prove to be in essentials more truly comparable. No two men could seem more unlike in their disposition and fortune than Richard of Bordeaux and Richard of Gloucester. Yet here, surely, are two portraits which might with advantage be hung side by side. The contrast between them serves only to emphasise their fundamental kinship. Both are men of the artist type, the first working in imagination and the second in action. Both are egocentric, the one concentrating upon a self-created image within the mind which changes its form to reflect sensations and experiences passively received, the other concentrating upon the impact of his mind and will upon the external world of men and events. Each is the child of Narcissus: Richard, the fair rose, who calls for a mirror that he may see the brittle glory of a face that did keep ten thousand men every day under his household roof; Richard Crookback, enamoured of his own deformity, who calls on the fair sun to shine out that he may see his shadow as he passes from one piece of mischief to another.

Thus, the two Richards present in their contraries the same fundamental truth. The man who is self-centred in imagination and the man who is self-centred in action are equally out of touch with reality, and equally doomed to destruction. The first withdraws from reality to live in a false world of his own creation. The other loses the real world in an effort to fashion it according to his own will and pleasure.

Notes

1. The blending of the mystical and the realist approach to the tragedy of Richard is finely described by Dr. Dover Wilson in his introduction to the play in the New Cambridge Edition. This introduction, in its handling of the sources of the play, relating them to the finished tragedy and throwing into relief the contemporary ideas and tendencies from which it emerged, is a masterpiece of Shakespearean criticism.

2. Note the political irony of this rejoinder. Mowbray is defending the King. Richard graciously gives him permission to do so and assures him that he will not allow himself to be moved by any partiality for his kinsman, Bolingbroke, who is attacking him.

3. Shakespeare undoubtedly had this thought in mind. Years later Mowbray's son, in rebellion against Henry IV, recalls the lists at Coventry and the part played in that scene by his father:

   The king that loved him, as the state stood then,
   Was force perforce compell'd to banish him:
   And then that Henry Bolingbroke and he,
   Being mounted and both rousèd in their seats,
   Their neighing coursers daring of the spur,
   Their armèd staves in charge, their beavers down,
   Their eyes of fire sparkling through sights of steel
   And the loud trumpet blowing them together,
   Then, then, when there was nothing could have stay'd
   My father from the breast of Bolingbroke,
   O, when the king did throw his warder down,
   His own life hung upon the staff he threw;
   Then threw he down himself and all their lives
   That by indictment and by dint of sword
   Have since miscarried under Bolingbroke.

   This is only one of many references back to Richard II which occur throughout the two succeeding plays. Shakespeare's tetralogy—Richard II, the First and Second Parts of Henry IV and Henry V—is a sequence not only in history but in theme and motive. In all four plays the dramatist looks forward and backward and carries in his mind all that has gone before and all that is to come. Thus we are able to find in the fourth Act of the third play of the series a passage which reveals what was present in his mind, though not explicitly stated, when he was writing the first Act of the first play.

4. See below, p. 210.

5. The editors who divided Shakespeare's plays into Acts should, as Dr. Johnson has pointed out, have concluded Act I with the banishment of Bolingbroke and started Act II with Richard's subsequent comments on the episode. They chose instead to include in Act I the short scene with Aumerle. This scene in time, temper and subject should obviously be Scene I of Act II and not, as printed in all editions, Scene IV of Act I.

6. The scene in which Hotspur recalls his first meeting with Bolingbroke (I Hen. IV, Act I, Sc. III) is more extensively quoted in the chapter on Henry of Monmouth. See below, p. 201.

7. Again the division into Acts is injudicious and illogical. The scene in which Bushy and Green are condemned to death, which is Act III, Sc. I, of the play, should quite obviously be Act II, Sc. IV. This scene concludes the political manoeuvres of Bolingbroke and his confederates and leaves all clear for Richard's return, when he will take the centre of the stage and focus our attention henceforth on the tragedy of his fall from power.

8. The scene has, of course, a long and curious history. It was omitted from early published editions of the play and not printed till 1608, five years after the death of Elizabeth. There is no reason to believe, however, that it was not acted upon the stage in 1595—indeed, it was almost certainly this scene which made the play so dangerously topical and accounted for its performance no less than forty times in the years immediately following its production. Another fact about this scene of interest to the literary historian is that it drew from Dr. Johnson perhaps the most unfortunate of his comments upon Shakespeare. Part of it he declares is ‘proper’, but part ‘might have been forborne without much loss’. He concludes with the observation: ‘The author, I suppose, intended to write a very moving scene.’ The eighteenth century has never so unhappily condescended to the genius of the sixteenth than in Johnson's criticism of this particular play. He seems to have had no idea, first to last, what it was all about. He found Richard ‘imperious and oppressive’ in prosperity, but in his distress ‘wise, patient and pious’—a view of the character which makes complete nonsense of the tragedy from start to finish and which drove Dr. Johnson to his final conclusion: ‘nor can it be said much to affect the passions or enlarge the understanding.’

9. Hazlitt, comparing these two speeches, writes: ‘This (Henry's speech) is a true and beautiful description of a naturally quiet and contented disposition and not like the former (Richard's speech) the splenetic effusion of disappointed ambition.’