[In the following essay, Berninghausen views the metaphorical relationship between gardening and kingship dramatized in Act III, scene iv of Richard II as the thematic touchstone of the drama.]

In the years since E. M. W. Tillyard's classic study of Richard II,¹ the garden scene (III.iv) has become a focal point of controversy. The scene draws attention to the metaphorical equation of gardening and kingship. This equation, in concert with the Adam/Cain/Abel dynamic of Genesis, defines the rhetoric within which the verbal battles of Richard II are fought. Tillyard has argued that the garden scene acts as an objective commentary on the remainder of Richard II, with the chief gardener's speeches giving “both the pattern and the moral of the play” (p. 250). Subsequent interpreters conceded the gardeners' “choric function,”² though they tended not to see the Gardener's moralizing as circumscribing the entire play. Paul Gaudet has recently argued that in fact, “The Gardener's simplistic formula is at odds with the ambiguous world of concealed motive and undeclared intention that Shakespeare has been cultivating throughout the play.”³

The apparent conflict between Tillyard and Gaudet is somewhat eased when we consider the implications of Richard II's having been “the last king of the old medieval order,” the last to rule “by hereditary right, direct and undisputed from the Conqueror.”⁴ Henry IV, no matter how good his reasons for assuming the throne, was a usurper, a king recognized essentially after the fact and on condition by his supporters. Richard II, the last medieval king, ruled by divine right, whereas Henry IV, the first Renaissance king, ruled through political power. The grave irony in Shakespeare's portrait of Henry IV is that while it shows that because the king's power is politically based his is a Renaissance kingship, Henry, oblivious to this fact, continues to think of his reign in medieval or mythic terms. Gaudet's “world of concealed motive and undeclared intention” is none other than the political world so clearly evident in Henry IV, pts. 1 & 2 and Henry V, but it of course first comes to light in Richard II. While the political world grows increasingly important during Richard II, the rhetoric of the old medieval order still determines the play at the surface level, and Shakespeare gives voice to that order largely through the chief gardener's moralizing. Gaudet is therefore correct to the extent that the rhetoric of the old medieval order does not prevent the play from portraying the emergence of the new political order; yet Tillyard's point is well taken, for the principal characters, Richard and Bolingbroke, though they may no longer believe in the myths that underwrite their rhetoric, are still trapped within it. In this essay I would like to consider in some detail not only the rhetoric of the famed garden scene, but the larger issue of the rhetoric surrounding the institution of what Tillyard calls the “authentic gardener-king” (p. 250), the image which circumscribes, if not the entire play, at least the two kings of Richard II.

The garden scene, an important key to the rhetoric of Richard II, can best be understood in terms of a larger Biblical schema. This central scene, in a garden tended by “Old Adam's likeness” (II.iv.73)⁵ is one of many instances in the play which suggest an equation between England and the Garden of Eden. In fact, this play about the end of medieval history derives its frame, rhetoric, and vocabulary from the myth of the origin of history described in Genesis, chapters 2 through 4.

The Genesis myth of the origin of history may be broken into three stages. The first stage would be Adam and Eve's tenure in the Garden of Eden—“And the Lord God pláted a garden Eastwarde in Eden, and there he put the man whome he had made” (2:8).⁶ God plants the garden for man, requiring of man only that he “dresse it and kepe it” (2:15). Adam and Eve are essentially harvesters in a garden which manages itself. The second stage begins with the Fall/expulsion, when Adam and Eve are cast out and Adam becomes himself a gardener—“Cursed is the earth for thy sake: in sorowe shalt thou eat of it all the dayes of thy life. … y^e Lord God sent him forthe from the garden of Eden, to til the earth …” (3:17, 23). The third stage occurs when the second Genesis gardener, Cain, a “tiller of the grounde” (4:2), murders his brother, Abel, and thus loses his ability to draw strength from the earth.⁷ The connection between blood-guilt and infertility is quite clear in God's curse upon Cain:

The voyce of thy brothers blood cryeth vnto me from the grounde. Now therefore thou art cursed fró the earth, w^c hathe opened her mouth to receiue thy brothers blood from thine hand. When thou shalt til the grounde, it shall not henceforthe yelde vnto thee her strength: a vagabonde and a rennegate shalt thou be in the earth.

(4:10-12)

The progress through the three stages of the Biblical schema describes the medieval rhetoric of the gardener-king so important to Richard II. In the terms of this rhetoric, Adam, as gardener in the fallen world, is an emblem of ideal kingship, while Cain, carrying his curse of infertility, represents a kingship gone hopelessly awry. Richard II ideally represents England, in terms of the Biblical schema's first stage, as pre-lapsarian Eden, but when Gaunt calls England, “This other Eden, demi-paradise” (II.i.42), it is clear that “This blessed plot, this earth, this realm” (II.i.50), is only a replica of Eden. Where pre-lapsarian Eden managed itself in the service of Adam and Eve, this later replica requires a gardener. Gaunt's England needs a gardener-king in the image of Adam as described in the second stage. When York's chief gardener is described by the Queen as “Old Adam's likeness,” she identifies him with the ideal of the gardener-king. The play's other two ideal figures are Edward III, and his son, the Black Prince. In his final exhortation, Gaunt holds up Edward III to Richard as a model king; Richard falls far short of this ideal (II.i.103-08). York makes a similar case for the Black Prince in a later censure of Richard:

… His noble hand
Did win what he did spend, and spent not that
Which his triumphant father's hand had won.
His hands were guilty of no kindred blood,
But bloody with the enemies of his kin.
O Richard! York is too far gone with grief,
Or else he never would compare between.

(II.i.179-85)

York's comparison of Richard and the Black Prince, be it “too far” or not, is straight to the heart of the matter. The Black Prince continues his father's good husbandry in accordance with the second stage of the Biblical schema—by giving more than he takes. He manages well—“His noble hand / Did win what he did spend, and spent not that / Which his triumphant father's hand had won”—but even more importantly, he does not progress into the third stage, that of Cain—“His hands were guilty of no kindred blood.” The question implicit in York's comparison is whether Richard has gone “too far,” whether he has slipped into the third stage and inherited Cain's curse.

The mark of Cain, that of blood-guilt and infertility, frames Richard II, appearing once in the play's first scene (I.i.104-05) and again in the play's final scene (V.vi.43-44). With Adam standing at the center of Richard II in the garden scene, the poles of the rhetorical battle between Richard and Bolingbroke are clearly established. This is a struggle over names, each attempting to cast himself as Adam, the “authentic gardener-king,” while placing on his opponent the mark of Cain. And not surprisingly, this battle is waged through the play's chief rhetorical figure, the gardening metaphor. This rhetoric has its own inherent logic, one that moves progressively through the play. It is set in motion when Bolingbroke first identifies Mowbray with Cain:

Further I say, …
.....That he did plot the Duke of Gloucester's death,
.....Sluiced out his innocent soul through streams of blood;
Which blood, like sacrificing Abel's, cries,
Even from the tongueless caverns of the earth.

(I.i.98-105)

In response to Bolingbroke's charge, Richard attempts to banish Cain, assigning Mowbray's banishment with the “hopeless word of ‘never to return’” (I.iii.152), but it remains uncertain whether Richard will himself retain the mark of Cain for his own part in Gloucester/Abel's blood. Clearly, in terms of the rhetorical struggle between Bolingbroke and Richard, the major questions of Richard II focus on the image of the king: Is Richard like Adam, the good gardener, or has he slipped into the role of Cain and thereby become a curse upon the garden? If Richard has received the mark of Cain, then the issue of succession becomes very tricky. Genesis states that “whosoeuer slayeth Káin, he shalbe punished seuen folde” (4:15). This progressive curse raises the question, assuming that Richard has the mark, as to whether Bolingbroke can remove Richard without bringing similar vengeance upon himself and, by association, upon England. And yet a third question arises: Is Richard's slide irreversible; can the stain be lifted? Tracing the development of the gardening metaphor through Richard II will answer these questions as it reveals how the logic of the play's medieval/Biblical rhetoric is played out.

Aside from the implicit comment in Bolingbroke's accusation of Mowbray as a Cain figure, the first gardening metaphors in Richard II appear in the play's second scene, the conference between John of Gaunt and the Duchess of Gloucester. Though the Duke of Gloucester is referred to twice in the opening scene, once as “Duke of Gloucester” (I.i.100) and later simply as “Gloucester” (I.i.132), here Gaunt significantly chooses to recall his dead brother as “Woodstock” (I.ii.1). In the context of the gardening metaphor and the association of Mowbray with Cain for the murder of Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, the name “Woodstock” is highly suggestive. Addressing Gaunt, the Duchess elaborates on the organic puns in “Woodstock” through her parable of “Edward's seven sons” (I.ii.11):

Edward's seven sons, whereof thyself art one,
Were as seven vials of his sacred blood,
Or seven fair branches springing from one root.
Some of those seven are dried by nature's course,
Some of those branches by the Destinies cut;
But Thomas, my dear lord, my life, my Gloucester,
One vial full of Edward's sacred blood,
One flourishing branch of his most royal root,
Is cracked, and all the precious liquor spilt,
Is hacked down, and his summer leaves all faded,
By envy's hand and murder's bloody axe.

(I.ii.11-21)

Several important themes are drawn together in the Duchess's impassioned speech, a speech which deplores the lack of good gardening in Richard II's realm. The Duchess evokes the spectre of Cain by attributing Woodstock's death to “envy's hand.” She also enhances the significance of Richard's carelessness by adding to the organic image of Woodstock as a branch of Edward's tree the apocalyptic image of Woodstock as one of the seven vials in The Revelation of St. John the Divine. The breaking of the vials in Revelation brings the ultimate Apocalypse and the end of man's history. As Woodstock's blood stains Richard (and thus Richard has implicitly slid into the role of Cain), the apocalyptic association expands the image of Cain's personal suffering to the suffering of the whole kingdom for Richard's breaking of the vial. Richard's fall is thus much more than a personal defeat; it has resounding implications for the entire realm. While all this is understood by the Duchess and Gaunt, it is apparent in the third scene of the first act that Richard believes he can still avoid responsibility for Woodstock's blood. There he asserts himself as the good gardener and attempts to banish Cain.

In the meeting of lists at Coventry, Richard arranges for the trial by combat between Mowbray and Bolingbroke, only to call it off at the last instant. When he reconvenes to pronounce fate upon the combatants, his words ironically recall those of the Duchess in the previous scene. To justify his having stopped the combat, Richard declares that “our kingdom's earth should not be soiled / With that dear blood which it hath fosterèd” (I.iii.125-26). Richard claims to be an Adam restraining two would-be Cains provoked by “rival-hating envy” (I.iii.131). He banishes both Mowbray and Bolingbroke, though it is most emphatically in the unlimited banishment of Mowbray that Richard seeks to banish Cain: “Then Káin went out from the presence of the Lord and dwelt in the land of Nod towarde the Eastside of Eden” (4:16). In response to Gaunt's tears, Richard reduces the sentence on Bolingbroke, seeking to appease his uncle and to reassert his claim to the title of the good gardener. Nonetheless, just as he was fatal to Woodstock—that “flourishing branch of [Edward's] most royal root” (I.ii.18)—Richard has begun to work a “gnarling sorrow” (I.iii.292) on Gaunt.

The contribution of the first act's fourth scene to the gardening metaphor is brief but significant. In the third scene, Richard, surrounded by rivals, had assumed the rhetoric of the good gardener, but in the fourth scene, attended by his flatterers, he is more frank: “… our coffers, with too great a court / And liberal largess, are grown somewhat light, / We are enforced to farm our royal realm” (I.iv.43-45). Richard has overextended himself and yet he fails to take appropriate measures. Ironically, he sees the need “to farm” the “royal realm,” but he has no interest in doing the necessary weeding. This court, grown too great, needs pruning, as is clearly the case with the herbivorous parasites who have punning names like Bushy and Green.

The second act begins with Gaunt's deathbed plea that Richard manage the realm with greater care. In the Renaissance allegory, three beasts—the lion, the fox and the pelican—form an image of ideal kingship. The pelican in particular is connected with the image of the conscientious gardener because it represents the king's feeding of the realm. Gaunt's accusation is that Richard should be like the pelican, but rather than feeding his realm, Richard feeds upon it. Richard is not the pelican; rather, he is the cormorant, and Gaunt warns, “With eager feeding food doth choke the feeder; / Light vanity, insatiate cormorant, / Consuming means, soon preys upon itself” (II.i.37-39). The allegorical cormorant represents Richard's sins against the land, sins which Gaunt will soon describe more concretely. He challenges Richard's management, saying that England “Is now leased out … / Like to a tenement or pelting farm” (II.i.59-60). Not only has Richard mishandled affairs, he has at this point abandoned his responsibility as a ruler. He attends to his personal concerns, but “The Earl of Wiltshire hath the realm in farm” (II.i.256). Gaunt puns on his own name in his accusation: “O, how that name befits my composition! / Old Gaunt indeed, and gaunt in being old. / … / And therein fasting hast thou made me gaunt” (II.i.73-81). The name Wiltshire also suggests a pun. Wiltshire, by taking the realm in farm, wilts the shire of England and thereby confirms Gaunt's charge of negligence against Richard. Having specified the sin, Gaunt remarks upon the consequences. At first he hopes the stain will be lifted—“Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life, / How happy then were my ensuing death” (II.i.67-68)—but in his final curse he recalls the myth of Cain—“Live in thy shame, but die not shame with thee! / These words hereafter thy tormentors be” (II.i.135-36). Richard has become Cain because he did not respect “spilling Edward's blood” (II.i.131). The curse will survive Richard because “whosoeuer slayeth Káin, he shalbe punished seuen folde” (4:15).

With the passing of Gaunt, Richard continues his mismanagement by confiscating Gaunt's land, and thus interrupting the normal line of inheritance. Bolingbroke, finding that Richard has “felled [his] forest woods” (III.i.23) returns early from his banishment to reclaim his inherited lands and to do some pruning of his own. Though Bolingbroke never really decides at any point to usurp the crown, he nonetheless adopts the gardening metaphors on his return to England and thus casts himself as a good king. On meeting with York, Bolingbroke is offered lodging for the night, but before he can see to his own comfort he must go to Bristol Castle and deal with “Bushy, Bagot, and their complices, / The caterpillars of the commonwealth, / Which I have sworn to weed and pluck away” (II.iii.165-67).

When Richard returns to England in Act III, he finds that, in his absence, Bolingbroke has come home and now presents a threat to his kingship. Richard's immediate response is to call to his aid the land to which he has given so little care:

Feed not thy sovereign's foe, my gentle earth,
.....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 mortal touch
Throw death upon thy sovereign's enemies.

(III.ii.12-22)

Although Richard has great confidence in the power of his curse—“Mock not my senseless conjuration, lords. / This Earth shall have a feeling, and these stones / Prove arméd soldiers ere her native king / Shall falter under foul rebellion's arms” (III.ii.23-26)—his mismanaged realm does not respond. After a series of setbacks, he begins to see what little of the land remains his: “Our lands, our lives, and all are Bolingbroke's, / And nothing can we call our own but death / And that small model of the barren earth / Which serves as paste and cover to our bones” (III.ii.151-54). Aumerle attempts to rekindle Richard's spirit, suggesting that the garden is not beyond repair. Recalling the Duchess's parable of Edward's seven sons, “seven fair branches springing from one root” (I.ii.13), Aumerle reminds Richard that York “hath a power. Inquire of him, / And learn to make a body of a limb” (III.ii.186-87). Richard takes solace and for a moment seems to think that he can be the good gardener and nurse this remaining limb to replenish his garden. But when Scroop tells of York's power being grafted with Bolingbroke's, the game is up. Richard closes with an acknowledgement of his infertility: “That power I have, discharge; and let them go / To ear the land that hath some hope to grow, / For I have none” (III.ii.211-13).

When Richard and Bolingbroke finally meet at Flint Castle, they cast their alternate threats in the gardening metaphor. At first Bolingbroke concedes Richard's husbandry, noting “The fresh green lap of fair King Richard's land” (III.iii.47). Yet later in the metaphoric conflict of fire and water, Bolingbroke asserts his own fertility as opposed to Richard's consumption: “Be he the fire, I'll be the yielding water; / The rage be his, whilst on the earth I rain. / My water's on the earth, and not on him” (III.iii.58-60). One obvious pun here suggests usurpation—“whilst on the earth I” reign. At the same time Bolingbroke expresses his desire not to extinguish Richard's fire and thus inherit the mark of Cain. With “my water's on the earth,” Bolingbroke suggests his watering of the garden, while he portrays Richard as a consuming fire. Bolingbroke's characterization of Richard's rapacity recalls Gaunt's speech in Act II, where Richard is the “insatiable cormorant” who feeds on England, and Bolingbroke the pelican who will feed the realm. Richard responds to Bolingbroke's charge of waste, claiming that he is England's true shepherd. He argues that Bolingbroke “is come to open / The purple testament of bleeding war” (III.iii.93-94) and that his rebellion will “bedew / Her [England's] pastor's grass with faithful English blood” (III.iii. 99-100). Imaging himself as England's “pastor” or shepherd, Richard aligns himself with Abel—“and Hábel was a keper of shepe” (4:2). At the same time Richard attempts to cast Bolingbroke as a latter-day Cain: “The voyce of thy brothers blood cryeth vnto me from the grounde” (4:10). To round out his description of Bolingbroke as Cain, Richard gives his version of the curse of infertility: “Our sighs and they shall lodge the summer corn / And make a dearth in this revolting land” (III.iii.162-63). While the issue is not finally settled at Flint Castle, the rhetorical exchange clearly shows that both Bolingbroke and Richard attempt to characterize themselves as good gardeners and their opponent as a scourge upon the land. Though Bolingbroke has sufficient military power to defeat Richard, he still needs to win the rhetorical battle over his image before he can assume the throne.

In terms of the gardening metaphor, the climax of Richard II comes with the garden scene (III.iv). There, in York's garden, the Queen overhears three gardeners discussing the condition of the realm. When the chief gardener issues orders to his men, he makes use of the metaphorical relationship between good government and good gardening:

Go thou and, like an executioner,
Cut off the heads of too-fast-growing sprays
That look too lofty in our commonwealth.
All must be even in our government.
You thus employed, I will go root away
The noisome weeds which without profit suck
The soil's fertility from wholesome flowers.

(III.iv.33-39)

These lines carry a variety of implications for Richard's rule, but we need not gloss them, for the gardeners soon do it for us. The first assistant complains of his master's orders, asking why they should “Keep law and form and due proportion” (III.iv.41) in their garden when Richard's

… sea-wallèd garden, the whole land
Is full of weeds, her fairest flowers choked up,
Her fruit trees all unpruned, her hedges ruined,
Her knots disordered, and her wholesome herbs
Swarming with caterpillars?

(III.iv.43-47)

The reference to caterpillars recalls Bolingbroke's description of Bushy and Bagot as caterpillars (II.iii.165-66). The chief gardener repeats that description in large measure, only substituting the image of weeds for that of caterpillars, and in so doing, he implicitly aligns himself with Bolingbroke:

The weeds which [Richard's] broad-spreading leaves did shelter,
That seemed in eating him to hold him up,
Are plucked up root and all by Bolingbroke—
I mean the Earl of Wiltshire, Bushy, Green.

(III.iv.50-53)

Richard has mismanaged the realm, amongst other crimes having felled Bolingbroke's forest, but here the defoliation is of Richard: “He that hath suffered this disordered spring / Hath now himself met with the fall of leaf” (III.iv.48-49). The chief gardener here appropriates the Duchess's metaphor, making Richard a royal tree as Edward had been that “most royal root” (I.ii.18) of a flourishing tree. Here Richard is the tree and his flatterers are “dangling apricocks /, Which, like unruly children, make their sire / Stoop with oppression of their prodigal weight” (III.iv.29-31). Bolingbroke has come to trim the “too-fast-growing sprays” (II.iv.34), but Richard has already suffered “the fall of leaf” and it seems that it is too late for him to recover. The image of “the fall” suggests Adam's initial fall from grace, but the Queen's questions for the chief gardener argue for another association: “What Eve, what serpent, hath suggested thee / To make a second fall of cursèd man? / Why dost thou say King Richard is deposed?” (III.iv.75-77). The Queen's association of Richard's fall with the “second fall of cursèd man,” Cain's fall, suggests Richard's slippage into the image of Cain.

The question remains, however, as to what caused the fall. There are three possible sources: Richard's negligence, Bolingbroke's desire for power, and/or the bad advice of Richard's flatterers. Richard cites in his own defense Bolingbroke's ambition, but it is worth noting that the chief gardener sees things differently. Bolingbroke is not blamed; in fact, he is implicitly praised as a good gardener for having rooted up Wiltshire, Bushy, and Green. Clearly these “weeds” are at fault, but much of the blame falls to the “wasteful king” (III.iv.55). The gardener laments Richard's negligence at some length:

… O, what a pity is it
That he had not so trimmed and dressed his land
As we this garden! We at time of year
Do wound the bark, the skin of our fruit trees,
Lest, being overproud in sap and blood,
With too much riches it confound itself.
Had he done so to great and growing men,
They might have lived to bear, and he to taste
Their fruits of duty. Superfluous branches
We lop away, that bearing boughs may live.
Had he done so, himself had bourne the crown
Which waste of idle hours hath quite thrown down.

(III.iv.55-66)

The gardener argues that Richard had not “bourne the crown,” had been the king and yet, in an important sense, had not been the king. As God's anointed, he had failed to discipline lesser men, and thus had caused their destruction, and ultimately his own.

The Queen, having failed in her challenge of the chief gardener's conclusions, leaves him with a curse of infertility: “Gard'ner, for telling me these news of woe, / Pray God the plants thou graft'st may never grow” (III.iv.100-01). This curse implicitly raises the question of succession. Bolingbroke is about to be grafted onto the royal tree as a replacement for pruned Richard. The principal question is whether this grafted branch will bring with it infertility and the curse of Cain, or fertility and the good gardening of Adam. This central question about the possible character of Henry IV's rule resonates in the gardening metaphor for the remainder of the play.

In the fourth act, which is taken up entirely by the deposition scene, the gardening metaphor is employed by a variety of speakers. But it is Carlisle who uses it to greatest effect. Infertility and the spectre of Cain inform his speech:

My Lord of Hereford here, whom you call king,
Is a foul traitor to proud Hereford's king;
And if you crown him, let me prophesy,
The blood of English shall manure the ground
And future ages groan for this foul act; …

(IV.i.134-38)

Carlisle foresees the civil wars which will plague Henry IV's reign and casts them in a metaphor of infertility. Gardeners manure the ground to fertilize it, but Carlisle sees the ground manured with English blood, which, like the blood of Abel, will cry up from the ground and bring infertility. Cain's contamination of future generations is echoed in the warning against the crowning of Bolingbroke, which will make “future ages groan for this foul act.” Later Carlisle is more specific about the perils of internal strife:

O, if you raise this house against this house,
It will the woefullest division prove
That ever fell upon this cursed earth.
Prevent it, resist it, let it not be so,
Lest child, child's children cry against you woe.

(IV.i.145-49)

That Carlisle should choose to portray this division as a fall “upon this cursed earth” is highly reminiscent of the Queen's calling it “a second fall of cursèd man” (III.iv.76). Carlisle presumes that the earth is already cursed, that it is post-lapsarian, and therefore that this usurpation would be in the image of the second fall, that of Cain. When he argues against the crowning of Bolingbroke—“Prevent it, resist it, let it not be so”—he urges the court to prevent the mythic progression from the third book of Genesis, the descent from Adam to Cain. The convincing yet contradictory arguments presented by Carlisle and the chief gardener highlight Bolingbroke's double bind. Following the logic of the gardening metaphor as defined by York's chief gardener, Bolingbroke must wrest control of the realm from the “wasteful king” and manage it in the spirit of Adam, the good gardener. On the other hand, to seize the realm from Cain-like Richard, Henry must unseat his own cousin and therefore inherit the curse of Cain.

In the opening scene of the final act, Richard offers to Northumberland a version of Carlisle's prophecy. Describing Bolingbroke as a “foul sin gathering head” (V.i.58), Richard warns Northumberland, “[Bolingbroke] shall think that thou, which knowest the way / To plant unrightful kings, wilt know again, / Being ne'er so little urged another way, / To pluck him head-long from the usurped throne” (V.i.62-65). Using the verb “to plant,” Richard here figures Northumberland as a gardener, one who sows corruption at that. Richard propounds a logic of imminence and, like Carlisle, his prophecy is true. Nonetheless, Northumberland's response also has import. He answers: “My guilt be on my head, and there an end” (V.i.69), and, in so doing, he implies that the chain created by Richard's logic of imminence, the inherent logic that moves up from Adam to Cain, can be broken. But, of course, the question remains as to how it can be broken.

Bolingbroke's plan to break the chain and avoid the curse by holding Richard indefinitely imprisoned at Pomfret castle rather than by spilling kindred blood comes to nought when he finds his Cain in Sir Pierce of Exton. Ironically Exton thinks that by murdering Richard, he will gain favor with Henry and thus he presents Richard's corpse saying, “Great king, within this coffin I present / Thy buried fear” (V.vi.30-31). Rather than burying or laying to rest Bolingbroke's fears as Exton presumes, he has resuscitated the curse. The play begins with Richard finding his Cain in Mowbray and by association receiving blood-guilt for his part in the murder of Gloucester; now, much to Henry's horror, the cycle is completed. Bolingbroke, in supplanting Richard, has fallen into Richard's pattern, and where Richard banished Mowbray, now Henry banishes Exton: “With Cain go wander through shades of night, / And never show thy head by day or light” (V.vi.43-44).

Bolingbroke's defeated conclusion, “I'll make a voyage to the Holy Land / To wash this blood off from my guilty hand” (V.vi.49-50), echoes oddly through all his speeches in Henry IV, pts. 1 & 2. Blood-guilt poisons Henry's reign and his uncompleted quest for absolution fittingly occupies his final thoughts:

KING:
Doth any name particular belong
Unto the lodging where I first did swoon?
WARWICK:
'Tis called Jerusalem, my noble lord.
KING:
Laud to be God! Even there my life must end.
It hath been prophesied to me many years
I should not die but in Jerusalem,
Which vainly I supposed the Holy Land.
But bear me to that chamber; there I'll lie.
In that Jerusalem shall Harry die.

(Henry IV, pt. 2, IV.v.232-40)

Clearly Henry IV, who still conceives of his kingship in terms of the rhetorical tropes of the medieval/Biblical schema, cannot break the chain. But where Henry IV is unable, Prince Hal finally disrupts the chain with the aid of Falstaff, the lord of misrule. Though C. L. Barber gives a slightly different emphasis to the introduction of Falstaff's comedy into the Lancastrian history plays, his comments are remarkably to the point:

The Falstaff comedy, far from being forced into an alien environment of historical drama, is begotten by that environment, giving and taking meaning as it grows. The implications of the saturnalian attitude are more drastically and inclusively expressed here than anywhere else, because here misrule is presented along with rule and along with the tensions that challenge rule. Shakespeare dramatizes not only holiday but also the need for holiday and the need to limit holiday.⁸

Falstaff's “saturnalian attitude” breaks the rigid imminence of the medieval/Biblical schemata at every opportunity. It resists any teleology, any naming of an ultimate end, by its “comic resource and power of humorous redefinition.”⁹ Defying deterministic history with his extemporaneous holidays, Falstaff balances Hal's nature by showing him the value of holiday. Holiday's disruption of the flow of history allows Hal to be at once aware of the claims of mythic history while not being overwhelmed by those claims. Hal's prayer before the battle of Agincourt recalls the mythic claims implicit in the taint of blood-guilt: “Not to-day, O Lord, / O, not to-day, think upon that fault / My father made in compassing the crown!” (Henry V, IV.i.278-80). But while the prayer remembers the guilt, it seeks to limit or defer the guilt's significance. Hal's very hope for victory, his belief that his father's blood-guilt will not of necessity poison his own reign, breaks with the rigidly binding medieval/Biblical schemata. In so doing he enters fully into the Renaissance. Distancing himself from the claims of mythic history, he becomes the first self-consciously political monarch.

Notes

1. E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1938), pp. 244-63.

2. Derek Traversi, Shakespeare: From Richard II to Henry V (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1957), p. 12. And Nicholas Brooke, Shakespeare's Early Tragedies (London: Methuen and Co., 1968), p. 129.

3. Paul Gaudet, “The ‘Parasitical’ Counselors in Shakespeare's Richard II: A Problem of Dramatic Interpretation,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 33 (1982), 152.

4. Tillyard, p. 253.

5. All quotations of Shakespeare come from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, general ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969).

6. All Biblical quotations come from The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, intro. Lloyd E. Berry (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1969).

7. Nicholas Brooke's account of Richard II quite properly focuses on the play's “blood and plant emblems” (p. 121), but it does not bring to light the way in which the spectre of Cain makes a vital connection between the two. Blood and plant emblems may be treated separately, but in the world of Richard II they are interdependent.

8. C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1959), p. 192.

9. Barber, p. 198.