SOURCE: Mack, Maynard, Jr. “This Royal Throne Unkinged.” In Modern Critical Interpretations: William Shakespeare's Richard II, edited by Harold Bloom, pp. 37-46. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1973, Mack outlines the antiquated notions of sovereignty professed by the major figures in Richard II, from the ordered, traditionalist views of York and Gaunt to Richard's divinely authorized and idealized, but irrevocably weakened, ruling ideal.]

Richard II tells the very simple story of the deposition and death of the last Angevin king. The first act sets the situation as the king exiles his cousin, Bolingbroke, because of a mysterious dispute relating to the murder of their famous uncle, Thomas of Woodstock; the first scene of the next act supplies the motive for Bolingbroke's return, when Richard seizes his inheritance. The rest of the play shows Bolingbroke rising and Richard falling until the deposed king is murdered at Pomfret Castle.

Many of Shakespeare's plays tell of the death of kings, some of two or more deaths in one play, but no other play deals so thoroughly and exclusively with the subject—politically conceived. There is hardly a scene that does not cast its political weight directly on Richard's shoulders; not a single character in the play remains isolated from the central political action. Nor are there the many probing soliloquies and supernatural elements that in Hamlet and Macbeth, for example, expand the central action of killing the king to a general philosophic and intensely metaphoric concern. In its fundamental outlines, therefore, Richard II is above all a play about political struggle.

To say only this, however, is to leave out what is most interesting in the play: the background of images in front of which, and often in terms of which, the conflict is waged. This is what I have called [elsewhere] the structure for king killing, the imaginative setting in which the action occurs. To this setting I now turn.

Gaunt's deathbed eulogy of England, the royal throne of kings, has always stood out from the rest of the play—partly because it is a remarkable piece of writing, and partly because it is carefully set in a context calculated to give it maximum resonance. Richard, fresh from having stopped the combat between Bolingbroke and Mowbray, receives the news that Gaunt is dying. As he leaves the stage with the brutal comment “Pray God we may make haste and come too late!” (1.4.64), he and his companions are replaced by representatives of a different world: “Enter John of Gaunt sick, with the Duke of York.” Gaunt asks:

Will the king come that I may breathe my last
In wholesome counsel to his unstaid youth?
.....O, but they say the tongues of dying men
Inforce attention like deep harmony.

(2.1.1-6)

Gone here are Richard's confident jests and nasty ridicule, and in their place is a helpless question followed by a different kind of confidence, the quiet confidence of age that has seen much. Though Gaunt is physically weak and politically helpless, he feels himself filled with the spiritual power of the “prophet new inspir'd” (2.1.31). He speaks a formal, frequently rhymed verse that we have heard before in the ceremonious accusations of treason. But there is a new note of rhetorical pattern, sententiousness, and adage-making. As Gaunt talks with York, he piles up pithy phrases as if he were seeking the precisely correct statement.

Where words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain,
For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain.
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.
The setting sun, and music at the close,
As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last,
Writ in remembrance more than things long past.

(2.1.7-14)

Or else he repeats proverbial wisdom, apparently willing it to be true through the cumulative power of the rhetoric.

His rash fierce blaze of riot cannot last.
For violent fires soon burn out themselves;
Small showers last long, but sudden storms are short;
He tires betimes that spurs too fast betimes;
With eager feeding food doth choke the feeder;
Light vanity, insatiate cormorant,
Consuming means, soon preys upon itself.

(2.1.33-39)

Then suddenly in the next line the tone changes, and the rhetoric, though no less formal, breaks free of its didacticism into the rhythm of pure hymn.

This royal throne of kings, this scept'red 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 blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Fear'd by their breed, and famous by their birth,
Renowned for their deeds as far from home,
For Christian service and true chivalry,
As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry
Of the world's ransom, blessed Mary's Son.

(2.1.40-56)

These lines place England in an optimistic but complex perspective. The heavy emphasis on royalty shows kingship to be the central issue of Gaunt's thoughts, as of the play in general. England's insularity is also stressed and this underscores both the precariousness of its natural and political situation and its symbolic status as a nation isolated from lesser breeds and destined to stand or fall alone. Two further aspects of Gaunt's words are especially important. One consists in the suprapolitical images which tie his thoughts about England's kings to a long-standing natural and religious tradition. From “Eden, demi-paradise” Gaunt's thought flows on uninterruptedly to “This fortress built by Nature for herself.” Two traditions, one Christian, one possibly but not necessarily pagan, are here blended to mark England as the choice of both God and Nature. The Christian tradition is picked up ten lines later in “Christian service” and “blessed Mary's Son,” while the close connection with Nature underlies the image of England as “This nurse, this teeming womb.”

The idea that brings the whole speech to its climax is that of a Christian heroic service. It is, we notice, a service rugged, fierce, and energetic, based on a tough-minded conception of the world and of England's place in it. In Gaunt's view England is great because of its great strength both at home and abroad. “This other Eden” is first of all “this seat of Mars,” a fortress; its insularity serves it as a “wall,” a “moat” against assault. It is an order fiercely defended. Its fame is based not on its justice or its culture, as the modern audience might prefer, but on its deeds of strength, specifically in the Crusades—though these Crusades no doubt serve here as expressions of all three national virtues. So long as its kings are feared, the precious jewel is safe. Such is the England Gaunt praises, the kind of Christian service he remembers. And it is from this exalted state that England is falling.

This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leas'd out—I die pronouncing it—
Like to a tenement or pelting farm.
England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats the envious siege
Of wat'ry 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.

(2.1.57-66)

These may be the words of a weak and dying man, but there is nothing weak or helpless in their conception of the world. Even Neptune is apprehended as an “envious” attacking force to be resisted. And now the rugged power, the spare frugality suggested even in Gaunt's name (ll. 73-83), is being destroyed from the inside by foolish waste and shameful bonds that commit England's revenues to favorites of the king. The harmony of discipline that made this other Eden both God's and Nature's chosen home is threatened by the discord created and allowed by a willful misled king. Richard is a king but no Mars renowned for his deeds; he is Christian but has failed in “service”—because he has also failed in strength.

What Gaunt says in this speech and the lost ideals he stands for inform the whole play. From its very first line he is “Old John of Gaunt, time-honoured Lancaster,” who like an ancient landmark chiefly functions to measure change. Later in the first scene he loyally obeys his king in trying to calm the angry disputants, and in the second scene with the Duchess of Gloucester, he reveals the yet fiercer loyalty that has kept him obedient to Richard though he knows the king is responsible for his brother Woodstock's death. His manner of refusing the Duchess's demand that he avenge her reveals a firmly established hierarchy of loyalties and priorities, surviving from a world now all but gone. He rates the fact that Gloucester was his brother above the widow's “exclaims” (1.2.2), but rates his duty to Richard higher still because of his supreme duty to God, whose deputy Richard is.

Put we our quarrel to the will of heaven,
Who, when they see the hours ripe on earth,
Will rain hot vengeance on offenders' heads.

(1.2.6-8)

His words may appear at first evasive and inadequate to the situation in the light of the angry charges of treason in the preceding scene, in which all parties have invoked heavenly support. But Gaunt's conservative faith cannot be rejected as merely “poignant impossibility” unless we are prepared to ignore a good deal of evidence. The necessary criticism of his view is already implicit in the Duchess's comment “Call it not patience, Gaunt, it is despair” (1.2.29), and Shakespeare provides no easy judgment between the two claims. Like the royal widows in 3 Henry VI and Richard III, she invokes images of the specific natural womb that bore both the murdered man and Gaunt (1.2.22), while his thoughts tend toward God and the more general teeming womb that bears England's kings.

When Richard arrives to see Gaunt die, the old man is quick to warn him in clear terms of what is happening to England, though, in the king's presence, his style changes significantly. The prophetic rhetoric of his earlier hymn to the royal throne of kings takes second place to an ironic wit that seems to come, with Richard, from the preceding scene of jests against “high Herford” (1.4.3). But the substance of his address is the same: “Thy deathbed is no lesser than thy land” (2.1.95). Apart from one indirect mention of his son's banishment (ll. 79-81), his thoughts are filled solely with the health of England and the potential greatness of both country and ruler. In this vein, he evokes his memories of Edward III and the Black Prince:

O, spare me not, my brother Edward's son,
For that I was his father Edward's son.

(2.1.124-25)

And York evokes similar memories as soon as news of Gaunt's death is announced.

I am the last of noble Edward's sons,
Of whom thy father, Prince of Wales, was first.
In war was never lion rag'd more fierce,
In peace was never gentle lamb more mild,
Than was that young and princely gentleman.
His face thou hast, for even so look'd he,
Accomplish'd with the number of thy hours;
But when he frown'd it was against the French,
And not against his friends.

(2.1.171-79)

Here is an image of the good prince that hovers in the background of every scene. It is a picture of energy and also of order. It is an ideal of rigorous balance between opposites, not necessarily subtle but reliable and restrained. In this prince, as in imagined England-Eden, lamb and lion lie down together.

The view of kingship held by Gaunt and York, and, we discover later, by Carlisle, corresponds, in one way of understanding it, to the very order of the universe. As Tillyard, C. S. Lewis, and so many others have shown, kingship was simply another dimension of the general hierarchical order that prevailed in the Elizabethan world-picture. York voices the pure doctrine when he warns Richard that rebellion in one area will cause trouble in others.

Take Herford'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?

(2.1.195-99)

Three vastly different areas of experience are here linked. Inheritance, time, and kingship are all presented as analogical. As one critic [Sigurd Burckhardt] has described this kind of thinking, “Everything was like everything else; beneath the diversity in degree there was a remarkable likeness in kind.” York exploits this view as a means of ordering and imaginatively controlling the rapidly changing facts that confront him. Spotting Richard on the walls of Flint Castle, he says:

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

(3.3.68-71)

The heavy use of simile and the word “show” may hint at an imaginable breakdown in the analogies by which the king can appropriately be signified as God on earth, or the eagle among birds, the lion among mammals, the diamond among stones, and so on. But the lines alert us also to the whole implicit structure of royal correspondences that run throughout the play and define one conception of kingship.

This structure of correspondences emphasizes primarily unity and power. On the highest level the king is seen as closely linked with God, as “God's substitute, / His deputy anointed in His sight” (1.2.37-38):

                                        the figure of God's majesty,
His captain, steward, deputy elect,
Anointed, crowned, planted many years.

(4.1.125-27)

God's aid is invoked lest “in a Christian climate souls refin'd / Should show so heinous, black, obscene a deed” (4.1.130-31) as killing his viceregent. “Stirr'd up by God thus boldly for his king” (4.1.133), Carlisle utters the famous prophecy of the disastrous effects for England if the divine and natural hierarchy is disturbed.

Richard himself of course relies on the connection between God and king throughout. He claims that “God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay / A glorious angel” (3.2.60-61); he asks Northumberland to “show us the hand of God / That hath dismiss'd us from our stewardship” (3.3.77-78); he asserts that his “master, God omnipotent” (3.3.85) will prepare armies of pestilence in his defense. In the deposition scene he explicitly calls upon God to pardon the oaths that had been broken in the transfer of power from old to new king. His frequent comparisons of himself to Christ in the hands of Pilate and Judas further enlarge the web of divine connections that in this play surrounds the idea of the king. Even at the moment when the nature of Bolingbroke's demands is at last revealed, Northumberland continues to invoke the sanctity of the royal person: “The King of heaven forbid our lord the king / Should so with civil and uncivil arms / Be rush'd upon” (3.3.101-3).

The imagery of relationship between God and king is paralleled on a less specifically Christian level by imagery of relationship between the king and Nature. The most obvious imagery of this sort, as many critics have pointed out, is the traditional comparison of sun and king which Richard frequently makes, calling himself “the searching eye of heaven” (3.2.37), describing how thieves and robbers who thrive during the night “Stand bare … trembling at themselves” (3.2.46) when the “day”—both sun and king—dawns. Other images implying sympathy between the political and natural worlds abound. Richard imagines a powerful conspiracy of the elements to help him in the face of danger (3.2.4-26). He animates the earth, expressing sympathy for the pain she suffers from the hooves of rebels' horses. He calls upon the earth to oppose to Bolingbroke her spiders, toads, nettles, adders. He supposes that her very stones, like the dragon's teeth in the Jason story, will turn to “armed men” to protect his throne. When Bolingbroke says at their first encounter “be he the fire, I'll be the yielding water” (3.3.58), the comparison sets the conflict of king and rebel in a context of hierarchic natural elements that comments tacitly on Bolingbroke's own soon-to-be-accomplished inversion of hierarchy in the human world.

When the Welsh captain alludes to withering bay trees and falling meteors as foreshadowing Richard's doom, his words take us again into that web of sympathies which secretly embrace the anointed king. The Queen's striking description of her husband—“Ah, thou, the model where old Troy did stand” (5.1.11)—looks in a similar direction. Though it emphasizes his fallen state, it does so in an image genealogical, architectural, geographical even, that glorifies and magnifies his mysterious significance. The conception of London as “New Troy” lies of course behind her conceit, but into it seems to flow also some of the feelings that the Renaissance had absorbed from Virgil about the ruined city beside the sea that fathered Rome and thereby civilization.

In this particular play, which comes early in his career and rather quickly on the heels of his earlier historical tetralogy, it is not easy to exaggerate the role that Shakespeare's imagination assigns to these and other standard fixtures in the lore of kingship. Richard asserts his power, for example, by comparing himself to the king of the beasts, “lions make leopards tame” (1.1.174), and his Queen urges him on reminding him that “the lion dying thrusteth forth his paw / And wounds the earth” (5.1.29-30). Later he discovers that his horse Barbary has betrayed him by not protesting against a new rider, the usurping Bolingbroke, and exclaims: “Would he not stumble? would he not fall down?” (5.5.87). But he catches himself: “Forgiveness, horse!” (l. 90). The episode is revealing. It tells us something about Richard, who has obviously gained in self-knowledge, for while his questions presuppose the sympathetic support of nature, his answer recognizes that he has forfeited such support precisely by not behaving like a king, or even like a man.

Forgiveness, horse! why do I rail on thee,
Since thou, created to be aw'd by man,
Wast born to bear? I was not made a horse,
And yet I bear a burthen like an ass,
Spurr'd, gall'd and tir'd by jauncing Bolingbroke.

(5.5.90-94)

Perhaps the passage also tells us something about Shakespeare. “Forgiveness, horse!” is a phrase that today actors find themselves inclined to muffle, cut, or throw away. Its appeal to an equine moral sense touches modern risibilities. To the extent that the effect was different for Shakespeare and his Elizabethan audience, as we have reason to believe it was, it must have been made so by the seriousness with which the system of sympathetic forces joining natural, human, and divine could still be taken. At another level, the dogged loyalty of the groom who appears in Richard's cell for no other reason than “To look upon my sometimes master's face” (5.5.75) makes the same point. Even in prison, the king's face merits a pilgrimage.

Most important, however, of all the dimensions of ideal kingship is not the divinity that doth hedge it, but its capacity to maintain a stable, just, and energetic order through ordinary political acumen and force. Carlisle seconds Richard's faith in divine support but urges too that “the means that heaven yields must be imbrac'd” (3.2.29). The brief lyric glimpse we get of Mowbray later in the play celebrates his having fought “Many a time … For Jesu Christ in glorious Christian field” (4.1.92-93), only after which, “toil'd with works of war,” he “retir'd himself / To Italy” to die (ll. 96-97). Similarly, in York's memories the Black Prince is “that young Mars of men” (2.3.100). In his own image of himself, Richard was “not born to sue, but to command” (1.1.196); “the king's name” is “twenty thousand names” (3.2.85); “Ten thousand bloody crowns of mothers' sons” (3.3.96) must stain the land before his throne can be usurped. In short, to borrow a phrase from the Duchess of York, the efficient king who roots out traitors and resolves civil and familial strife is “A god on earth” (5.3.134). When he is less than this it is because “The king is not himself, but basely led / By flatterers” (2.1.241-42), and the country must “shake off [its] slavish yoke, … And make high majesty look like itself” again (2.1.291-95). As we saw earlier, only in the king's own name can the king himself be uncrowned.

In all these forms, Shakespeare keeps the official lore of kingship before us throughout the play. It is not, of course, all that he keeps before us, for there are crosscurrents of irony and qualification on every page, which will be noticed in their proper place. All that needs to be said here is that though these crosscurrents qualify the system of references at which we have been looking, they do not cancel them out. In poetry, no strand of meaning ever wholly disappears however much it may be colored by other elements in the context. Hence, though the official lore I have just now summarized, the idea of a divine, natural, and human axis with the king its center, is often enough objected to in the play, and either undercut with ridicule or overlaid with disbelief, it is never entirely obliterated from our apprehension of the play's imaginative meaning. Though it fails to find again so clear a spokesman as the dying Gaunt, it survives him to become, in its turn, an ironic comment on a new kind of kingship. To put this matter more succinctly, all the images and actions of kingship we have traced, the network of correspondences and dynamic energies, establish a definition of kingship which, for want of a better term, we might call nostalgic. It is a definition filled with imaginative power, but embodied primarily in warriors either dead or dying. Like the Golden Age it seems most visible when it is moving away, into the past.