SOURCE: Hockey, Dorothy C. “A World of Rhetoric in Richard II.” Shakespeare Quarterly 15, no. 3 (summer 1964): 179-91.

[In the following essay, Hockey surveys the rhetorical effects and devices of Richard II, suggesting that the drama represents a significant development in Shakespeare's use of dramatic language.]

From two equally interesting, but contradictory, views on the style in Richard II have come two quite different interpretations of the play. One, suggested by Hardin Craig as early as 1912 and incorporated into a fuller interpretation of the play by E. M. W. Tillyard in 1944, reached the boards in the 1951 Shakespeare Memorial production of the Lancastrian cycle. In his edition of the play Professor Craig attaches particular importance to the emergence in Richard II of a plain style, related to the more ornate style elsewhere in the play much as prose is to poetry in the later plays. Richard, his Queen, Gaunt, and Mowbray usually speak in the highly rhetorical style, while Bolingbroke, Northumberland, and “others of their party”, speak “more directly and simply” to contrast them as “practical men with the more sentimental and less practical” royal party. Emotional stress or its opposite, prosaic circumstance, can produce a heightened or a plainer style in either group.¹ Similarly, in suggesting a possibly “dangerous and forced theory of the play's significance”—Richard II as a portrait of the Middle Ages, where “means matter more than ends”—Tillyard notes a ceremonial style in Richard and his party.² As further evidence for his interpretation he points to the number of arrested motions in the play—the Coventry lists ending without combat, the Welsh soldiers withdrawing without battle, and the promised clash at Flint Castle concluding without shock. Contrasting with all this static ceremony is the “new kind of vigour” which, according to this same interpretation (p. 259), enters the play at II.i.224. It is too narrow, says Tillyard, to contrast the “‘poetry’” of Richard with the “common sense” of Bolingbroke, for, he continues,

the “poetry” of Richard is all part of a world of gorgeous tournaments, conventionally mourning queens, and impossibly sententious gardeners, while Bolingbroke's common sense extends to his backers, in particular to that most important character, Northumberland. We have in fact the contrast not only of two characters but of two ways of life.

(P. 258)

Though the direct influence of this view on the Stratford director in 1951 must remain conjectural, the “conception” of the production, as Mr. Worsley relates it, suggests a close connection. At Stratford Richard II became mere prologue to the swelling act of the imperial Lancastrian theme, with a pastel-costumed Richard set against a somber Bolingbroke—the one a man of many words and poses, the other a business-like man of the world of action. The followers of each were crowded into the same rather confining molds, much as if—to change the figure—the “caterpillars of the commonwealth” had turned into butterflies.³

Yet studies of the imagery of the play—notably those of R. D. Altick and W. H. Clemen—comment on the unity of tone throughout the play. Professor Altick sees the “symphonic” recurrence of key images, such as those of earth, a garden, blood, sun, and tears, as harmonizing both idea and tone, and notes frequent paralleling of Bolingbroke's and Richard's imagery.⁴ Professor Clemen sees a “new unity of tone and feeling” in this play.⁵ More recently, S. K. Heninger, Jr., shows the important use of the sun-king image by both Bolingbroke and Richard and the dramatic-thematic significance of its passing from king to usurper. In Richard II, thus, he sees a “pervasive poetic quality”, and regards the play as a “milestone marking Shakespeare's mature drama.”⁶ We have suggested, then, a clash of worlds and styles or, on the other hand, a “vast arabesque of language” where harmony of tone prevails.⁷

Though imagery is unquestionably the most vital aspect of style and Shakespeare's artistry in using it to reveal his deepest meanings is certainly the richest discovery of modern criticism, Shakespeare and his contemporaries were equally interested in a vast number of other stylistic elements, all of which, taken together with imagery, produce tone. Perhaps a closer examination of aspects of style other than imagery is needed—a backward glance at style as Shakespeare might have viewed it. T. W. Baldwin and Sister Miriam Joseph have abundantly demonstrated Shakespeare's knowledge of the Tudor rhetoricians and their borrowed wisdom,⁸ derived ultimately from Aristotle's Rhetoric through, as Sister Miriam Joseph's study indicates, Erasmus, Agricola, Melanchthon, Ramus, Quintilian, and Cicero. In her synthesis of this sizeable body of material, she postulates two general groups of Renaissance rhetoricians—one treating rhetoric, logic, and a few figures, and another treating only figures of speech, the number of figures ranging from 90 to 180. (Figure here is used in its widest sense to embrace variations from plain, direct statement for stylistic effect.) Underlying both groups, however, is a basic likeness—the derivation from Aristotle. In Shakespeare she found the entire range of figures.⁹ A close study of a number of these figures points to a resolution of the contradictory interpretations of style in Richard II and illuminates some aspects of the poet-playwright's increasing awareness of the possibilities of language.

Fortunately, one may safely pass over a large number of the 180 figures. Those dealing with changes of a letter or syllable in a word and the omission of a word clearly understood in context such as a verb, a subject, or a conjunction may “satisfy and delight the ear”,¹⁰ as Puttenham remarks, but they exert no effect on tone, particularly that of the spoken language of drama. They are used primarily for metrical purposes. On the other hand, unusual word order, interrupted sentence movement, the conspicuous use of synonym or “contraries”, the verbal quibble, and various patterns of repetition—all lovingly described and assigned their rather forbidding Latin or Greek names by the Tudor rhetoricians—do contribute to tone, importantly so in Richard II. If style is to suggest two tones and two “worlds” in the play, we should expect to find a noticeable difference in their distribution between the two groups of characters.

Departures from normal word order, under the generic name hyperbaton, are commented on and illustrated by the Tudor rhetoricians. Sister Miriam Joseph's analogy of walking and dancing (p. 54) vividly suggests the heightening effect of these rhetorical patterns. The particular pattern of importance in Richard II is anastrophe, unusual or inverted word order. In this play all characters from Gaunt to the Gardener speak in inverted word order where as metrically smooth a line would result from direct order.¹¹ Another effect, then, was Shakespeare's aim—a heightened, more elaborate, style throughout the play. For example, Gaunt's lines to York before Richard's entrance in II.i, employ Shakespeare's favorite inversion—object preceding subject and verb—and another favorite—adverb, verb, subject:

He that no more must say is listened more
Than they whom youth and ease have taught to glose.
More are men's ends mark'd than their lives before.

(II.i.9-11)

If anyone in the play should represent a direct, active, plain-speaking new world, it is Northumberland; yet from him come these deliberate inversions:

His glittering arms he will commend to rust

(III.iii.116)

or in his first appearance in the play, when he announces Gaunt's death:

Words, life, and all, old Lancaster hath spent

(II.i.150)

or when he plots with Ross and Willoughby after Richard's seizure of Gaunt's property:

More hath he spent in peace than they in wars.

(II.i.155)

Willoughby, too, another of Richard's opponents, is given deliberately inverted word order:

Quick is mine ear to hear of good towards him.

(II.i.234)

Examples could be multiplied, but to no further purpose, for the speech of every character in Richard II is marked by anastrophe. As Puttenham remarks about “figures of grammaticall construction”, “the eare may receive a certaine recreation, although the mind for any noueltie of sence be little or nothing affected” (p. 174). Sister Miriam Joseph points out that this stylistic pattern increases in Shakespeare and is particularly marked in The Tempest (p. 54). It is worth noting, however, that it is not used extensively in Julius Caesar, where the plain style predominates. As a figure to distinguish between characters in Richard II and, hence, to suggest a theme of conflicting worlds, anastrophe must be dismissed.

So, too, must interrupted movement, for here as well the general tone of the play is heightened, rather than the tone of Richard's speeches or those of Richard's “world”. From plain-speaking Bolingbroke in the heat of passion comes this long interruption:

Besides I say, and will in battle prove—
Or here, or elsewhere to the furthest verge
That ever was survey'd by English eye—
That all the treasons for these eighteen years
Complotted and contrived in this land
Fetch from false Mowbray their first head and spring.

(I.i.92-97)

It is somewhat characteristic of Bolingbroke that the movement of his speech is interrupted by oaths (another set of “figures”) throughout Act I, when he repeatedly affirms his good faith. In fact, Bolingbroke's oaths are an important, though neglected, aspect of his character. Clustered in the first act of the play, most markedly in Scene One, they constitute both a testament of fidelity which his later action belies and a warning of the kind of man he is. Even as he pledges his loyalty to his sovereign or takes an oath by his own “glorious” ascent, Bolingbroke couples a threat with his oath. His first oath is an affirmation of his truthfulness, classified by rhetoricians as orcos (I.i.30). Turning to Mowbray, he interrupts himself with a kind of oath—or threat—to defend his charges with his life, classified as euche, a promise (I.i.35-39). In the same speech he again interrupts himself to pledge his loyalty to his king, eustathia (I.i.45-46). His next long speech in the same scene furnishes three more promises—or threats—of violent action as well as an interruption to vow “by the glorious worth” of his “descent” (I.i.92-97, 98-100, 107-108). Commenting on this speech, Richard vows by his “sceptre's awe” (l. 118), an interesting thematic contrast. Two more instances of Bolingbroke's oaths or vows occur in this scene (ll. 187, 190-194), both similar to those already discussed. In the lists at Coventry Bolingbroke three times insists upon his good faith in an oath (I.iii.37-38, 41, 84). Interestingly enough, in III.iii after a pledge of allegiance to Richard (not, however, in the form of an oath), Bolingbroke now more clearly speaks in threats. A number of these oaths appear as interruptions.

From Northumberland, too, we hear at least once a marked example of interrupted movement, among other rhetorical flourishes as he greets the king at Flint Castle:

And by the royalties of both your bloods—
(Currents that spring from one most gracious head),
And by the buried hand of warlike Gaunt. …

(III.iii.107-109)

That Shakespeare employs this same rhetorical pattern in Richard's speech, too—but to no more marked degree proportionately than in the others' speech—simply reflects the poetic playwright's attempt to achieve the high style or tone for a regal theme. As Hoskyns remarks of parenthesis, one kind of interruption, it “makes your discourse fair and more sensible. …”¹²

Equally appropriate to fair discourse and a regal theme, according to Tudor rhetoricians, is synonym, discussed as a means of “amplification”. Listing this “ornament” among those appropriate to oratory, Puttenham elevates it further by his choice of illustrative quotation—lines from the Aeneid—and by his comment: [This] store, neuerthelesse, doeth much beautifie and inlarge the matter” (p. 223). As both Kittredge and Professor Black comment, the device is used everywhere in Richard II; examples are “almost countless”.¹³ Richard's “oath and band”, “high stomach'd … full of ire”, “conclude and be agreed”, “plot, contrive, or complot any ill”—to name only a few—are balanced by Bolingbroke's “traitor and a miscreant”, “Fair and crystal is the sky”, “false traitor and injurious villain”, “complotted and contrived”, “their first head and spring”. Even Northumberland is not content to call the news of the Welsh defection from Richard merely “very fair”, but must add “good”. Ross, another of Bolingbroke's supporters, sees the latter as “bereft and gelded of his patrimony”—to Kittredge “a striking instance of the use of synonyms for emphasis” (p. 134). As eloquent as his betters, the Gardener's unnamed assistant refers to “law and form and due proportion”. It is significant that all the characters in Richard II make free use of this emphatic device, synonym, with a resultant general elevation of tone, an oratorical effect.

“Contraries”, too, are significant in this play. In fact, Sister Miriam Joseph is particularly struck by Shakespeare's use of privative terms here. Richard II, she says, “pre-eminently illustrates Shakespeare's skill” in the use of contraries. Citing dying Gaunt's “undeaf my ear”, Scroop's “Again uncurse their souls”, Richard's “unking'd Richard”, “unking'd by Bolingbroke”, and “unkiss the oath”, as well as Bolingbroke's “By you unhappied and disfigured clean” in his charge to his prisoners, she makes the very penetrating observation that this stylistic device emphasizes the theme of disorder in the play (p. 141). One might add Northumberland's “uncivil arms”, Bagot's “unsay / What once it hath deliver'd”, and the Duchess of Gloucester's series of contraries in “unfurnish'd walls, / Unpeopled offices, untrodden stones” to emphasize the breadth of its use in the play.

The verbal quibble, likewise, is the private mannerism of no single character, despite Gaunt's usual assignment to the role of master quibbler. This bad eminence is undoubtedly due to the timing of Gaunt's quibbles and to Richard's calling attention to sick men's playing so nicely with their names. The fact is that York takes over Gaunt's office both as symbol of loyalty to the throne and as master quibbler. But he, too, holds only a precarious title, for Carlisle plays on the word noble through three lines (IV.i.117-119), Bolingbroke catches up Harry Percy's ripen and gives it a new application in his courtly reply (II.iii.48), and Ross five lines later catches up Bolingbroke's enrich'd and turns it to rich in his reply (II.iii.63). In this same scene, where the plotters, being alone, have no reason to put on a show of courtliness before a king, Northumberland plays on the words sweet and sweetness (ll. 7, 13). The respectability of such word-play stems, of course, from Aristotle, who comments on the pleasant “surprise” we experience from word-play, similar to that derived from metaphors and apothegms. Further, he says, “the more antithetical the expression, the greater the applause. The reason is, that our new perception is made clearer by the antithesis, and quicker by the brevity.”¹⁴ Tudor rhetoricians simply extended his treatment. As Miss Mahood points out, it boots us little today to attach the forbidding Greek names to the various sorts of word-play.¹⁵ It may be worth-while here, though, to note that they all appear in Richard II.

It is only partially true, as Wurth suggests, that the quibbles mainly “represent the sorrow and grief of the king over the loss he has suffered.”¹⁶ The element of truth in the statement stems from the play's emphasis on a rightful king's deposition and his resultant grief, and from Shakespeare's focusing so closely on his central character in this play. More accurately, the quibbles in Richard II occur especially at crucial moments in the play's action, whether Richard himself or someone else speaks. This use of word-play “to gain relief from a state of emotional tension” Miss Mahood found as early as Two Gentlemen of Verona (p. 32). In the quibbles of Gaunt and Carlisle cited a moment ago, this principle holds; both men are speaking from full hearts. York, too, quibbles at similarly emotional moments, as when he faces exiled Bolingbroke before Flint Castle (III.iii.12-15) or when he faces his new king to accuse his own son of treachery (V.iii.70-71). Both the Duchess of Gloucester and the Queen speak in verbal quibbles to express grief, just as the Duchess of York does to express her anxiety over her son's safety (V.iii.78-79). Likewise, Richard's word-play is clustered in his two scenes of public humiliation and defeat—the scene at Flint Castle and the deposition scene. With less to mourn than these characters, Bolingbroke quibbles less, but his minor indulgences occur, too, at emotional moments—his parting from his father and his reception of Sir Piers of Exton's report of Richard's murder at the close of the play. Though Miss Mahood found no pattern in the plays as a whole in kind of character or situation calling forth word-play (p. 164), a pattern clearly exists in Richard II.

To sum up, one might say that Shakespeare uses the quibble in Richard II for two purposes—a general heightened effect (according to Renaissance thinking) and a more particular kind of heightened effect in emotional scenes. Since grief is so frequently involved, Shakespeare thus provides a kind of accompaniment to the theme of Richard's grief. If it is true, as W. H. Clemen has shown us, that Shakespeare's imagery at this time is becoming more symbolic, is more artistically suggesting the meaning of a scene (p. 54), it is also true that word-play is becoming functional, rather than merely ornamental. And just as images are later to become submerged, to become more subtly buried in the context, so too are quibbles. In both instances, Richard II represents a significant point in Shakespeare's development.¹⁷

Closely akin to quibbles is rhetorical repetition in its many forms—so closely, in fact, that it is often difficult to distinguish between the two. However, since the effect on tone is more important here than labeling devices, this difficulty is minor. Unquestionably the most prominent figure in Richard II, repetition for a rhetorical effect is present in every scene and is heard from every character. More than any other rhetorical device, it heightens the tone of the play.

Its simplest, least contrived form—ploce, repetition with intervening words¹⁸—of course occurs most frequently. Addressing his fellow-plotters, Northumberland employs the device twice:

Nay, speak thy mind; and let him ne'er speak more
That speaks thy words again to do thee harm.

(II.i.230-231)

‘Gainst us, our lives, our children, and our heirs.

(Ibid., 245)

Bolingbroke, in one of his many stylistic parallels to Richard, uses “arm to arm” (I.i.76, paralleling Richard's ll. 15-16). Later—even to the last scene of all—come other noticeable uses of ploce from Bolingbroke:

Four lagging winters and four wanton springs

(I.iii.214)

Near to the King in blood and near in love

(III.i.17)

Sweet peace conduct his sweet soul to the bosom
Of good old Abraham!

(IV.i.103-104)

They love not poison that do poison need.

(V.vi.38)

Richard's own use of this repetitive pattern is no more prominent proportionately than Bolingbroke's. To conclude, then, a rhetorical effect employed by Northumberland, Bolingbroke, Richard, the Queen, the Duchess of York, Gaunt, York, Carlisle, Green, Fitzwater, Surrey, Exton, and even the unnamed Welsh captain and Another Lord must surely be said to heighten the tone of the play as a whole and of particular actions rather than that of any separate faction.¹⁹

Anaphora, too, probably the most emotional pattern of repetition, grows more out of circumstance than character. It is, for example, the most noticeable figure in Gaunt's death speech, in York's outcry against Richard's misdoings, especially his seizure of Gaunt's property, and in Richard's deposition speeches. That Richard makes fuller use of the figure than any other character evidences Shakespeare's sympathy with a wronged king. It is more significant to note that Northumberland, too, uses the figure when he addresses the king at Flint Castle:

And by the honourable tomb he swears
That stands upon your royal grandsire's bones,
And by the royalties of both your bloods
(Currents that spring from one most gracious head),
And by the buried hand of warlike Gaunt,
And by the worth and honour of himself. …

(III.iii.105-110)

Of further importance is the fact that anaphora—most arresting of repetitions—is used by almost the complete dramatis personae.²⁰

The relative prominence, too, of the most complex of the repetitive patterns, antimetabole (repetition in transposed order), is doubly significant in this play. First, like the preceding patterns, it is widely distributed among the characters,²¹ appearing particularly in moments of wrath or sorrow. Gaunt's death speech (II.i.13, 74, 107-108), Carlisle's outburst before Richard's deposition (IV.i.132), and York's lament over Richard's seizure of Gaunt's land (II.i.180-181, 182-183, 187-188, 193-194) instance such uses of antimetabole to heighten an emotional effect. But from Ross, too, in a relatively unemotional moment, comes this:

We see the very wrack that we must suffer,
And unavoided is the danger now
For suffering so the causes of our wrack.

(II.iii.267-269)

Bolingbroke, too, uses the figure when he demands that Mowbray acknowledge his guilt:

By this time, had the King permitted us,
One of our souls had wand'red in the air,
Banish'd this frail sepulchre of our flesh,
As now our flesh is banish'd from this land.

(I.iii.194-197)

But something more than heightened tone is achieved by antimetabole in Richard II. As York and Richard use the figure—“a favorite with our learned knight” (Sidney), according to Hoskyns (p. 15)—it becomes an instrument to underscore the wheel-of-fortune theme running through the play. In York's lament over Richard's seizure of Gaunt's lands is the first hint of this rhetoric-theme connection:

                                                                                His noble hand
Did win what he did spend, and spent not that
Which his triumphant father's hand had won.

(II.i.179-181)

His hands were guilty of no kindred blood,
But bloody with the enemies of his kin.

(Ibid., 182-183)

In a more subtle way, two of Richard's deposition speeches suggest the same turn, as he addresses King Henry IV, the second instance a complex, double antimetabole:

Good king, great king, and yet not greatly good

(IV.i.263)

Fair cousin? I am greater than a king;
For when I was a king, my flatterers
Were then but subjects; being now a subject,
I have a king here to my flatterer.
Being so great, I have no need to beg.

(IV.i.305-309)

And in his last scene Richard reinforces the relentlessness of fortune, as well as its basis in human character:

I wasted time and now doth time waste me.

(V.v.49)

The prominence of both ploce and antimetabole in reinforcing the formal pattern of the romantic tragedy in Romeo and Juliet noted by Professor Levin²² further confirms the point that Shakespeare was using both rhetorical patterns for a heightened effect. In Richard II he has advanced the further step of reinforcing a theme of his play as well.

If one were to examine Bolingbroke's speeches without any thought of Richard's, one might well use old York's expression to describe him—“a well-grac'd actor”. From his first appearance to his last, with three important exceptions, Bolingbroke speaks a courtly, rhetorically polished language, marked by extensive use of alliteration and synonym, by almost habitual use of rhetorical questions and exclamations, by apt and frequent use of various kinds of repetition, and, finally, by tropes. The three significant exceptions may be what Mark Van Doren had in mind when he described Bolingbroke as “for the most part a man of few words” and as a former poet “before Richard's muse triumphed over his and made him content with plainness”²³ Bolingbroke speaks little in III.iii at Flint Castle after he and Richard meet, in the opening of IV.i, during the baron's quarrel, and later in the same scene during the deposition ceremonies. Thereafter he returns to repetition, alliteration, rhetorical exclamations, synonym, and tropes.

Speaking little, however, is not the same as speaking plainly, and the reasons are likely to be different. Bolingbroke's meager part in the first and third of these passages is dictated, I believe, by the need to defend the Lancastrian and the Tudor houses as well as an important figure in the rest of the cycle of plays if Shakespeare had them in mind at the time, as many think. In these two scenes Richard is dealt with rather harshly, but at the hands of Northumberland, Bolingbroke's (and Shakespeare's) tool. There was no need to protect Northumberland—“that ladder”—from audience wrath since he is to step in as rebel in Henry IV, Part 1. On the occasion of Bolingbroke's second loss of words—that is, during the barons' quarrel in IV.i—Shakespeare is building up his dramatic parallel with the Bolingbroke-Mowbray quarrel at the opening of the play. However one interprets this parallel—to favor Richard or to commend Bolingbroke—the fact remains that the argument among the nobles at Bolingbroke's court had to grow sufficiently heated to need intervention. Hence, Bolingbroke is a man of few words on this occasion by dramatic necessity.

Similarly, Northumberland's language is characterized by rhetorical figures—anastrophe, word-play, repetition of various sorts, and occasional extended tropes. In fact, his first speech in the play employs a quibble on say and said, as he announces Gaunt's death. To Richard's question, “What says he?”—that is, Gaunt—Northumberland replies in a quibble, a metaphor, and anastrophe:

                                                                                Nay, nothing; all is said.
His tongue is now a stringless instrument;
Words, life, and all, old Lancaster hath spent.

(II.i.148-150)

Significantly, this is his only speech during the first half of the scene until Richard leaves. Then in the plotting scene, as he speaks with Ross and Willoughby, first sounding them out and then revealing Bolingbroke's return from exile, he does not descend to the plain style of a new, bustling, active world. Instead, he continues in the high style, using polyptoton, anastrophe, word-play, and two extended metaphors. In the following, for example, balance clearly heightens the effect of the figures:

But, lords, we hear this fearful tempest sing,
Yet seek no shelter to avoid the storm.
We see the wind sit sore upon our sails,
And yet we strike not, but securely perish.

(II.i.263-266)

As was also true of Bolingbroke, Northumberland has his big speech at Flint Castle. But for its subject, it might have been delivered by Richard himself, so highly “colored” is it rhetorically by repetition, polyptoton, interrupted movement, synonym, anaphora, two noteworthy metaphors, and epithet (inevitable in this play):

The King of Heaven forbid our lord the King
Should so with civil and uncivil arms
Be rush'd upon! Thy thrice-noble cousin
Harry Bolingbroke doth humbly kiss thy hand;
And by the honourable tomb he swears
That stands upon your royal grandsire's bones,
And by the royalties of both your bloods
(Currents that spring from one most gracious head),
And by the buried hand of warlike Gaunt,
And by the worth and honour of himself,
Comprising all that may be sworn or said,
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 barbed 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.

(III.iii.101-120)

The catalogue in lines 116-118 is an interesting foreshadowing of Richard's speech a few lines further on, divesting himself of his royal habiliments.

From here to the end of the play Northumberland's speeches are brief. As a character he does not seem to have interested Shakespeare. His function is chiefly to interpose a line here and there to keep the action moving while Carlisle, the Queen, and especially Richard voice the theme and emotion of the play. Even so, however, his style is not always plain. Synonym (“sorrow and grief of heart” in III.iii.184), inverted order (IV.i.150), and hendiadys (“the state and profit of this land” in IV.i.225) belong to the rhetorically polished style, not to the plain. Like both Richard and Bolingbroke, Northumberland reaches greater heights of rhetoric with heightened emotion, but like them, too, he begins his rise from a high plane.

One may, then, by attaching particular importance to Bolingbroke's three exceptions and Northumberland's latter brevity, say that a plain style is emerging in Richard II. Whether it is related to prose in the later plays, as Craig suggests, is a more difficult question since little agreement on the prose-verse problem exists. It seems more likely, as I have suggested, that each instance in Richard II presents its own solution, usually in terms of the focus of the particular scene.

When every character thus is the master of the rhetorical paintbox, including particularly both of Richard's enemies, it is difficult to conclude that Richard II is written in two styles to suggest two warring worlds. Linguistic history alone would call this interpretation into question, for the new language of the English Renaissance with all its love of novelty and innovation is Shakespeare's English. Too, the industry of the Tudor rhetoricians would cast serious doubt upon the suggestion that the new world was plain. Charles Sears Baldwin's two studies—one of Medieval rhetoric, the other of Renaissance theory—evidence a continuing influence of some of the same rhetoricians. One effect of printing, he observes, was “to prolong or widen the influence of books characteristically medieval”; he indicates particularly the “hackneyed” De Inventione, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, and the “hardy perennial” Horace.²⁴ The conventional classical three styles of oratory were transferred to poetry in both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.²⁵ But more specifically the play itself everywhere reflects Shakespeare's attempt to use what the rhetoricians of either period called a high style.²⁶

Richard himself, of course, remains the precious stone set in this silver sea of rhetoric. Though he uses few rhetorical effects not found in the other characters—climax, for example²⁷—he nevertheless is distinguished from Bolingbroke. The important distinction is, as it should be, given to us in Act I—more precisely, in the father-son farewell at Coventry. To Gaunt's suggestion that his banished son make his imagination the master of his woe—that he imagine, for example, that he travels for his health, Bolingbroke makes his most revealing speech in the play:

O, who can hold a fire in his hand
By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?
Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite
By bare imagination of a feast?
Or wallow naked in December's snow
By thinking on fantastic summer's heat?
O, no! The apprehension of the good
Gives but the greater feeling to the worse.
Fell sorrow's tooth doth never rankle more
Than when he bites, but lanceth not the sore.

(I.iii.294-303)

Though he speaks in images and tropes and uses the series of rhetorical questions that mark the technique of “pathos”, Bolingbroke is no poetic visualizer. Shakespeare is telling us exactly that.

Only Richard can rise and fall by the power of imagination alone, as he does on his arrival at Wales, before Flint Castle, at the deposition scene, and in his lonely prison. Possessing the poet's double vision, Richard can see a situation on two planes. His comment, however, derives from the second—the deeper, visionary plane. Appropriately at such moments he speaks almost entirely in metaphor. Thus, his return to his native land resembles “a long-parted mother with her child”, his loss of power before he even meets Bolingbroke at Flint Castle portends graves, worms, and epitaphs. Only deposition and death, this deeper vision tells him, can lie ahead. And in the end what does he have but “death / And that small model of barren earth” to cover his bones? Then when he faces his destroyer at Flint Castle, he sees the intermediate step, the long drawing-out before the final end—the loss of all the pride, pomp, and circumstance of a king. In his rarest moment of insight, at his deposition, Richard sees his downfall completely in terms of his own character:

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 duty's rites.

(IV.i.207-210)

Twice the reactions of others suggest this quality in the king. “Mock not my senseless conjurations, lords”, says Richard as he returns to the everyday plane in his homecoming speech (III.ii.23). And he returns from his visionary interpretation of Bolingbroke's arrival, seeing only “an obscure grave” in store for himself, with the words

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

(III.iii.170-171)

Richard's style, thus, from III.ii onward, far from being “metaphorical mouthings”, marks the play's rise from the historical to the tragic plane. Like Shakespeare's other tragic heroes, Richard falls because of the kind of mind he has—his, the poetic visualizer's “magic lantern”, in Shaw's words as he prefaces St. Joan. Also, like many of the heroes and villains, Richard has supreme and appropriate power of expression. His poetry, then, is single in this play in that he alone visualizes. No one else in his “party” does so; no one in the opposition does so. All, however, are accomplished speakers, masters of the elaborate language patterns described by Tudor rhetoricians. Thus, a kingly woe is lamented in an appropriately regal atmosphere.

Notes

1. Richard II, ed. Hardin Craig (1912), pp. xiv, xv.

2. E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (1944), pp. 252-259.

3. T. C. Worsley, “The Plays at Stratford”, in J. Dover Wilson, Shakespeare's Histories at Stratford 1951 (1952), pp. 24, 35. The theatrical appeal of this striking contrast is obvious. To name another and very recent instance of its influence, the production at Stan Hywet Hall, Akron, during the summer of 1960, with Donald Moffatt as Richard, followed the same costuming and acting pattern.

4. Richard D. Altick, “Symphonic Imagery in Richard II”, PMLA, LXII, 339-365. Altick parallels Bolingbroke III.iii.42-44 and Richard III.iii.95-100, Bolingbroke III.iii.62-64 and Richard III.ii.37, ff. Different groupings are also possible.

5. W. H. Clemen, The Development of Shakespeare's Imagery (1951), p. 53.

6. S. K. Heninger, Jr., “The Sun-King Analogy in Richard II”, SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly], XI (1960), 319-327; p. 326.

7. Altick, p. 340.

8. T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke (1944); Sister Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language (1947). See also W. L. Rushton, Shakespeare and “The Arte of English Poesie” (1909), for parallels between Shakespeare and Puttenham. G. H. Mair, ed., Wilson's Arte of Rhetorike [1553], (1909), terms Books I and II “a judicious compilation of Quintilian” (p. xx), and judges that Book III owes “almost as much to Cicero” (p. xxi).

9. Sister Miriam Joseph, pp. 4-18.

10. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie [1589], ed. Edward Arber (1869), p. 155.

11. Though the style of the play is marked by inversion, I have confined myself sharply to those lines where meter is clearly not involved in order to make my point clear. Kittredge's single-play edition (1941) is cited throughout.

12. John Hoskyns, Direccions for Speech and Style [ca. 1599], ed. Louise Brown Osborn (1937), p. 44. By sensible here Hoskyns seems to mean what Puttenham distinguished as sensable, reaching the “conceit” rather than the ear (p. 171).

13. Variorum, note to II.i.; Kittredge, p. 102.

14. Aristotle, Rhetoric, tr. R. C. Jebb (1909), III, 11, 1412.

15. M. M. Mahood, Shakespeare's Wordplay (1957), p. 19.

16. Variorum, p. 535.

17. Interpreting R. II as “a play about the efficacy of a king's words”, in which a poet's faith in words is set against a “politician's” faith in action, Miss Mahood comments on “the play's verbal ambiguities which nearly all have to do with language” (pp. 73-74). From this point of view, too, then, R. II is a landmark, for, as Miss Mahood remarks later, the pun “in which the secondary meaning gives emphasis to a dominant idea of the play as a whole” begins about the time of R. II (p. 169).

18. Puttenham's terminology (p. 211). Other rhetoricians sometimes call this epanodos or traductio (Sister Miriam Joseph, p. 85).

19. Not to weary the reader with needless cataloguing, yet to be complete, I shall merely note here that other somewhat simple patterns of repetition serve a similar function. Epizeuxis, repetition with no intervening words, often in exclamation, comes from Bolingbroke, Carlisle, the Duchess of York, the Duchess of Gloucester, Salisbury, and Gaunt as well as from Richard. So, too, is polyptoton, repetition of different forms of a word, widely distributed. A general heightening results.

20. Richard, Bolingbroke, Northumberland, Gaunt, York, the Duchess of Gloucester, Bagot, the Groom, the Gardener, Exton, the Queen, and the Duchess of York.

21. Ross, Carlisle, the Queen, the Duchess of York, Gaunt, Bolingbroke, York, Northumberland, and Richard.

22. Harry Levin, “Form and Formality in Romeo and Juliet”, SQ, XI (1960), 7-8.

23. Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare (1939), p. 87; p. 88.

24. Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice (1939), pp. 9, 10.

25. Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic (1928), p. 144; Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice, p. 15.

26. Puttenham mentions the usual three levels—the high, the “meane”, and the base, distinguished by subject matter. The high is appropriate for gods, princes, and “the notable accidents of time” such as war and peace (pp. 164-165). Wilson's “great or mightie kind”, “small kind”, and “lawe” (p. 169) correspond to Puttenham's levels. Though the Tudor rhetoricians do not describe each style in great detail, Puttenham lists certain figures more appropriate to the orator, to the poet, or to both. Where pertinent, I have indicated such distinctions.

27. Richard's uses of this “marching” or “clyming” figure (Puttenham, p. 217) occur at moments of emotional stress—when he descends “down, down” to the base court (III.iii.178-182) and when Northumberland hastens his farewell from his Queen (V.i.66-68). It is perhaps coincidental, but interesting, that in this same speech Richard calls Northumberland “thou ladder …” and Puttenham describes climax as a ladder (p. 217).