SOURCE: Potter, Nicholas. “‘Like to a tenement or pelting farm’—Richard II and the Idea of the Nation.” In Shakespeare in the New Europe, edited by Michael Hattaway, Boika Sokolova, and Derek Roper, pp. 130-47. Sheffield, U.K.: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994.

[In the following essay, Potter likens England under Richard II to a present-day emerging nation with the choice of two competing ideologies: the masculine “shrewd steel” of Bolingbroke or the feminine “golden crown” of Richard. Neither metaphor, Potter argues, speaks to the middle ground and the plight of the common man.]

Perhaps the most pressing question facing not only the countries struggling to emerge from the ruins of what once was the Eastern Bloc but also the countries of the old Europe, is the question of nationhood. The most frightening and disgusting elements of nationalistic feeling were not slow to take advantage of the uncertainty that characterized the first moments of new countries after the success of the various popular fronts in first challenging and then overthrowing the old regimes. However, as Ralf Dahrendorf remarks in Reflections on the Revolution in Europe,¹ ‘“we the people” can rise against an abhorrent regime of exploitation and suppression, but “we the people” cannot govern’. The problem facing the new countries of Europe is precisely the problem of the basis of government; the legitimacy of authority and the procedures by means of which it is exercised.

This is a problem which is absorbing the old countries of Europe as well, as they seek to discover the basis of legitimate authority in a collective arrangement, one which will eventually include at least some of the new countries. Beneath the deceitful bluster of many politicians real difficulties have to be overcome. The delusive rhetoric of freedom conceals actual liberties to be protected or to be won.

Liberty is never an easy matter to discuss, as the liberty of some sometimes restricts the liberty of others. I follow Ralf Dahrendorf in a suspicion of various ideal solutions, but I think that even his guarded acknowledgement that for many minds private property has been a necessary basis for freedom in a society may go too far for me. The restoration of private property has been widely regarded as a panacea in East and West, and it is a question of ‘by their fruits shall ye know them’. John Stuart Mill pointed out that private property was almost certainly established as an effect of the work of

tribunals (which always precede laws) … to repress violence and terminate quarrels. With this object chiefly in view, they naturally enough gave legal effect to first occupancy, treating as the aggressor the person who first commenced violence, by turning, or attempting to turn, another out of possession.²

He goes on to say that ‘the preservation of peace’ had the effect of ‘confirming, to those who already possessed it, even what was not the fruit of their personal exertion’. Here we have the mechanism of original expropriation in the origins of a society which we have inherited.

My point is not pamphleteering: it is that Richard II takes us into a moment in past history in which the legitimacy of authority is in crisis. John Danby once said that the task of criticism was ‘to keep the past alive, in the present, for the future’. Perhaps in the light of the increasingly pressing debate within English as to the nature and proper use of the past we will need to add the gloss (which I am sure John Danby would not have needed) that the transmission of the past is never a straightforward affair. I also want to draw on his description elsewhere of Shakespearean tragedy as ‘literally a new organ of thought’ and begin by insisting that the subject of Richard II lies in the poetry; in a tension and in an absence, which I hope to explore. I will argue that John of Gaunt's contemptuous account of England's current state as ‘like to a tenement or pelting farm’ exposes an absent middle-ground between his and Richard's poetry of England which it is the business of the play to evoke, as it were, in its absence. This absence is in its nature; perhaps the poetry to express it has not yet evolved.

The play is a drama of character revealed by circumstances.³ We meet Richard appearing kingly enough as Bolingbroke and Mowbray accuse one another with stiff ceremony. We realize the reasons for this ceremony in the next scene;—Richard is the villain, and John of Gaunt states the paradox clearly:⁴

God's is the quarrel—for God's substitute,
His deputy anointed in His sight,
Hath caused his death; the which if wrongfully,
Let heaven revenge, for I may never lift
An angry arm against His minister.

(I.ii.37-41)

The next lines reinforce the sense of impasse:

DUCHESS:
Where, then, alas, may I complain myself?
JOHN of Gaunt:
To God, the widow's champion and defence.

There is a quality in these lines which we find throughout the play, which I can only call reserve. Stanley Wells speaks of the ‘beauty’ of the poetry of the play,⁵ and he is quite right, but it is important to spell out what that beauty consists in. In fact, it is that quality we often find associated with the word ‘beauty’, a static, poised quality of equilibrium, symmetry; the elegance of a situation or an emotion that seems complete in itself. Here it is the quality of impasse.

It is not that these speeches are emotionlessly regular; it is that emotion is not sharp and immediate but long endured. Stanley Wells comments that the play is remarkably ‘passive’: I would like to add that it is patient. Richard demonstrates this quality in the opening scene. His command to Mowbray is authoritative:

                              Rage must be withstood:
Give me his gage; lions make leopards tame.

(I.i.173-4)

Yet it is equally clearly restrained, as is his setting the date for their trial by combat. It is, in a sense, undramatic. It has something in common with what Wilson Knight called ‘the Othello music’; a sustained note or tone, which is remarkable for being sustained. These brief utterances are not curt, or clipped; they are clear, uncluttered.

Such language emphasizes the state of impasse. Mowbray and Bolingbroke are locked into animosity; Richard cannot get them to compose their quarrel; these two tensions hold each other deadlocked until Richard gives way, or seems to, in the rather odd conclusion that he can command them to do what they were refusing to refrain from doing. The word ‘chivalry’ is important in this conclusion:

Since we cannot atone you, we shall see
Justice design the victor's chivalry,

(I.i.202-3)

and of course the sustained rhyme completes the sense of ceremony invoked here. Richard embraces the chivalric concept of trial by combat and seeks to make it a matter of his own will. ‘Chivalry’, the culture of nobility, is being reclaimed by Richard, and appropriated to the king.

Nobility is the quality shown by the Duchess of Gloucester:

Yet one word more—grief boundeth where it falls,
Not with the empty hollowness, but weight.
I take my leave before I have begun,
For sorrow ends not when it seemeth done.
Commend me to thy brother Edmund York.
Lo, this is all—nay, yet depart not so,
Though this be all, do not so quickly go;
I shall remember more. Bid him—ah, what?—
With all good speed at Plashy visit me.
Alack, and what shall good old York there see
But empty lodgings and unfurnish'd walls,
Unpeopled offices, untrodden stones,
And what hear there for welcome but my groans?
Therefore commend me; let him not come there
To seek out sorrow that dwells everywhere.
Desolate, desolate will I hence and die:
The last leave of thee takes my weeping eye.

(I.ii.58-74)

Especially effective is the use of occasional unrhymed lines, interrupting lines that strain towards the condition of rhymed couplets, heroic couplets in fact. The duchess's distracted grief is evident:

Lo, this is all—nay, yet depart not so,
Though this be all, do not so quickly go;
I shall remember more. Bid him—ah, what?—

(I.ii.63-5)

This is the verse for which Browning strove, and in achieving which he occasionally succeeded, as in, for example, ‘Two in the Campagna’:

Just when I seemed about to learn!
                    Where is the thread now? Off again!
The old trick! Only I discern—
                    Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.

or ‘Andrea del Sarto’:

                                                            And you smile indeed!
This hour has been an hour! Another smile?
If you would sit thus by me every night
I should work better, do you comprehend?
I mean that I should earn more, give you more.
See, it is settled dusk now; there's a star;
Morello's gone, the watch-lights show the wall,
The cue-owls speak the name we call them by.
Come from the window, love,—come in, at last,
Inside the melancholy little house
We built to be so gay with.

It has a delicate, poignant quality enhanced by the smoothly melodious measure which is its strongest pulse, and its effects are most strongly and vividly achieved when it realizes (as I believe Browning does here, and elsewhere, often) the rhythms and movement of speech, conversational speech under the pressures of the emotions it dramatizes, that it reveals, as it were, in tension with the verse which encloses it and soothes it. It is, that is, elegiac.

Stanley Wells in particular has commented upon this feature of the play: ‘The mode we feel to be most characteristic of Richard II is the elegiac’. He speaks also of the ‘elegiac lyricism’ of Richard and Queen Isabel, which leads almost into a view such as Mark van Doren's that Richard is a poet who loses his kingdom because he loves poetry ‘more than he loves power’.⁶ This goes, I think, too far in the direction of Bradleian surmise, yet it is only an extreme statement of a view held, in one or more degrees, by many critics of the play.⁷ I do not think that we are meant to see Richard as a poet, but to see him as Peter Ure sees him after the first two and a half acts:

the play's design has now developed to the point where it is laid down for him that he must give voice to what is in him; more narrowly, that he must say what he feels all the time about his situation … to survive at all as the protagonist of a poetic drama designed, as this one is, with a helpless king at its centre, Richard has to use words, or, more accurately, poetry.⁸

Of course, in a poetic drama, especially one in which Shakespeare restricted himself to verse entirely, everybody does. There is, however, a special sense in which Richard does, at which I want to look more closely later on, but which may be stated now to have an affinity with the Duchess of Gloucester's poetry at this moment. The duchess expresses the emotions of a noble spirit restraining its sense of hopeless loss with great dignity that gives just enough for her intensity of feeling to show through, especially perhaps in those economical and remarkable images of the empty house Plashy has become:

          empty lodgings and unfurnish'd walls,
Unpeopled offices, untrodden stones.

One thinks of ‘Mariana’, or of Chesney Wold. There is nothing the duchess can do but speak. For those who are able to speak, such moments are privileged, however dearly bought. Richard looks cold beside her.

The pageantry of the trial by combat that succeeds this scene assists in framing the duchess's last words. Far from seeming pompous, the scene presents with considerable economy a rather ominous solemnity.⁹ John of Gaunt's terrible words hang over this scene:

God's is the quarrel—for God's substitute,
His deputy anointed in His sight,
Hath caused his death.

This trial by combat cannot in any case issue in justice, for ‘God's is the quarrel’. It is a terrible and sinister waste of time, as all parties to it are clearly aware.

Mowbray comes off rather better in the speech-making as a consequence of his being a hapless figure. Bolingbroke's farewell to Richard is elaborate where Mowbray's is not:

As gentle and as jocund as to jest
Go I to fight: truth hath a quiet breast.

(I.iii.95-6)

Bolingbroke leaves the ground on St Lambert's Day with a moving farewell:

Then England's ground, farewell; sweet soil, adieu,
My mother and my nurse that bears me yet!
Where'er I wander boast of this I can;
Though banish'd, yet a true-born Englishman!

(I.iii.306-9)

Forthright though this sounds, there is a greater urgency about Mowbray's verse:

And now my tongue's use is to me no more
Than an unstringed viol or a harp,
Or like a cunning instrument cased up—
Or being open, put into his hands
That knows no touch to tune the harmony.

(I.iii.161-5)

The plainness of this, the unemphatic yet quite apt imagery; the equal distribution of stresses; all are persuasive of ‘a quiet breast’, but one moved deeply:

What is thy sentence then but speechless death,
Which robs my tongue from breathing native breath?

‘Speechless death’ is doubly forceful: not only death after enforced speechlessness, but death itself as the end of speech. For Mowbray, being a ‘true-born Englishman’ resides in the common speech, the ‘native breath’ his tongue breathes in speaking. Bolingbroke has given no similar testimony of his sense of Englishness, though it is his assertion of being a ‘true-born Englishman’ with which this scene ends. I do not want to say that he is not—only that we have seen that Mowbray is. Of the three who have made use of the idea of the ‘nation’ in one way or another, it is really only Mowbray who has evoked it: the other two have claimed to love it or to be acting in its interests, but only Mowbray speaks, and so well, of what it is to be exiled from a life lived in common; a common speech.

The end of Act I finds Richard coldly calculating how he is to finance the Irish wars; looking on John of Gaunt's illness as a stroke of luck; and reviewing suspiciously Bolingbroke's habit of wooing the common people, whom Richard himself seems to hold in contempt:

Off goes his bonnet to an oyster-wench;
A brace of draymen bid God speed him well,
And had the tribute of his supple knee.

(I.iv.31-3)

The peace which Richard has figured as that which ‘in our country's cradle / Draws the sweet infant breath of gentle sleep’ seems to be very much an ideal. The ‘grating shock of wrathful iron arms’ which threatens civil war is set against the image of the infant; not against the oyster-wench and the draymen. We might ask, what is this peace? It doesn't seem to be whatever allows the oyster-wench or the drayman to go about their business undisturbed.

This becomes increasingly important as the next act opens. John of Gaunt's famous speech, for which the opening sets the scene, introduces an idea of England which has no more to do with the oyster-wench and the draymen than Richard's or (in reality) Bolingbroke's. So far Mowbray's ‘native English’ is the only intrusion into this idealist world of a common life, a life, that is, both lived in common and unremarkable.

In his closing exchanges with Bolingbroke, John of Gaunt reveals himself an optimist, determinedly adjusting the appearance of things;

Go, say I sent thee forth to purchase honour,
And not the King exil'd thee; or suppose
Devouring pestilence hangs in our air,
And thou art flying to a fresher clime.

(I.iii.282-5)

But Bolingbroke repudiates this solipsistic view that things are as one sees them:

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?

(294-7)

Mowbray has shown us in I.i why this is:

The purest treasure mortal times afford
Is spotless reputation—that away,
Men are but gilded loam, or painted clay.

(177-9)

We exist, that is, in the good opinion of our fellows. We are otherwise only hollow men, in T. S. Eliot's phrase.

The authorization we seek cannot be supplied from within. Gaunt's advice to Bolingbroke at I.iii.279-80,

Think not the king did banish thee,
But thou the king,

is taken by Coriolanus in a later play. But Bolingbroke cannot think that ‘there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so’ (Hamlet II.ii.259); or, rather, not as one's own thinking makes it so. Neither Bolingbroke nor Mowbray could agree with such theorists as Friedrich von Hayek, who would argue that there is, in Margaret Thatcher's phrase, ‘no such thing as society’. Were there really ‘no such thing as society’, no authorization to supply ‘spotless reputation’, we were but ‘gilded loam, or painted clay’.

We may go further, and remind ourselves of F. R. Leavis's important view of language as a ‘human achievement of collaborative creation … the creation of the human world, including language’ (the phrases are taken from ‘Two Cultures?—the Significance of Lord Snow’). He goes on to say, ‘it is one we cannot rest on as something done in the past. It lives in the living creative response to change in the present’. Mowbray's insistent linking of language and repute argues a collaborative-creative view of the human world, a view of ‘society’. The difference between him and Bolingbroke is that we have no grounds for believing that Bolingbroke really believes what he says—except about the shame of exile, which he feels keenly—whereas we do have grounds for believing that Mowbray does.

For John of Gaunt, however, at the end of a long life, reputation means less than the world of his experience, of which he is preparing to take leave:

Though Richard my life's counsel would not hear,
My death's sad tale may yet undeaf his ear.

(II.i.15-16)

Not the tale of his death, but the sad tale he has to tell, dying. For the same reason that a dying confession is taken so seriously, John of Gaunt believes that his ‘sad tale’ will be listened to. York supplies the necessary corrective:

No, it is stopp'd with other, flattering sounds,
As praises, of whose taste the wise are fond,
Lascivious metres, to whose venom sound
The open ear of youth doth always listen.

(17-20)

York's verse is, we might say, more obviously Shakespearean. It has, as Donne has, or Johnson, the sound of the language, of speech, of common intercourse.

Where doth the world thrust forth a vanity—
So it be new, there's no respect how vile—
That is not quickly buzz'd into his ears?
Then all too late comes counsel to be heard,
Where will doth mutiny with wit's regard.

(24-8)

That last couplet belongs in a world with Jonson's epigrams and Donne's satires. Worldly, knowing, disgusted, it shares nothing formally with the stilted eloquence and ceremonious courteousness of much of the verse of the play so far, except in its sense that that quality is absent in the world which the more elaborated verse seems to imply its speakers believe is present. York picks up Aumerle's note of the last scene of Act I:

I brought high Herford, if you call him so,
But to the next highway; and there I left him.

(I.iv.3-4)

This sceptical note informs York's complaints of:

Report of fashions in proud Italy,
Whose manner still our tardy-apish nation
Limps after in base imitation.

(II.i.21-3)

which suggests that Richard is not only the slave of flattery, but of fashion, and of foreign fashion, which is worse. We are very much in the realm of ‘my native English’.

This is the significance of John of Gaunt's speech at II.i.40-66, his prophecy as he calls it.¹⁰ The speech itself is not so very remarkable, except for the preponderance of martial imagery, ‘sceptred isle’, ‘seat of Mars’, ‘fortress’, ‘teeming womb of royal kings’, ‘true chivalry’; all these point to John of Gaunt's central preoccupation, as does

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,

which refers us to the culture and the ideology of the Crusades.

The burden of the speech, though, is to build through accumulating images in consecutive phrases to the climax:

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.(11)

He shares, clearly, Mowbray's concern for reputation, for England is ‘dear’ on that account, but he shows no more concern for the practical business of being English than does his son. Mowbray has shown us the way—‘my native English’ is the common tongue; the tongue of oyster-wenches and draymen as well as the tongue of John of Gaunt's idealistic poetry and the supple, sceptical verse of York and Aumerle. John of Gaunt is dreaming. What he can't stand is that

England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back 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.

The supporters of Essex doubtless saw a jibe at the hated Cecils in this reference to lawyers, but John of Gaunt's contempt for leasehold is based in his martial imagery and its implications in ‘that England that was wont to conquer others’. He knows only free right of ownership established by force of arms, the irony being that he himself comes from a conqueror's line, and was born at Ghent. England is his England; a possession, a conquest. ‘This happy breed of men’ has no more room for oyster-wenches and draymen than Richard's ‘peace’ sleeping like a baby. The relationships conjured up by ‘tenement’, ‘pelting farm’, ‘oyster-wenches’, and ‘draymen’ are the ordinary, compromised, complicated relationships of men and women in what we might call ‘civil society’ to distinguish it from the state and from matters constitutional. Though Antonio Gramsci pointed out that ‘civil society’ was far from immune to the influence of the ruling class, this play suggests that only Bolingbroke is interested in it and its members. Richard and John of Gaunt seem locked in a poet's war about what ‘England’ really is. When Richard enters John of Gaunt accuses him:

Thy death-bed is no lesser than thy land,
Wherein thou liest in reputation sick,

and

Landlord of England art thou now, not king.
Thy state of law is bondslave to the law,

(II.i.95-6, 113-14)

by which he means that Richard's only claim to be king is formal, legal: he has forfeited his authority because he has relied so much on flattering courtiers.¹²

Those lords left to discuss him after Gaunt's death have their views expressed by Northumberland on Richard's taxation and expenditure:

Wars hath not wasted it for warred he hath not,
But basely yielded upon compromise
That which his ancestors achiev'd with blows;
More hath he spent in peace than they in wars.

(II.i.252-5)

In the kinds of society to which we have become used (though from which we are being weaned), such words are not an accusation, but an acclamation. Richard's concern for peace, which draws its ‘infant breath’ in a cradle on which his hand rests, is an attractive image. Certainly it contrasts with Northumberland's idea of ‘nobility’ which is equated here with ‘blows’:

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

(II.i.291-6)

Northumberland recalls Mowbray on reputation. The condition of England, ‘farmed’, ‘leased out’, he feels as demeaning and undignified. The ‘slavery’ he complains about is this sense of being ‘leased out’. What he and John of Gaunt object to is that possession is no longer absolute possession resulting from conquest, but a negotiated process of contracts and compromise, ‘basely yielded’, in Northumberland's view. The lawyers lie behind ‘inky blots and rotten parchment bonds’, just as they lie behind any concept of justice which is tried in courts of law and not in combat. The lawyers represent a ‘civil society’, a society made up of the complex interactions and squabbles of people with rights and responsibilities established and protected by law.¹³ The ‘sceptre’ of a Northumberland or a John of Gaunt is much less free to strike down its enemies in such a society, and would-be conquerors are faced with demands for redress and reparation; civil suits and criminal prosecution, which they would obviously feel as ‘ignoble’. The last straw for the conspirators is Richard's confiscating Bolingbroke's inheritance—the very basis of his feudal rights. Ross does not exaggerate when he describes him as

Bereft, and gelded of his patrimony.

(II.i.237)

He is deprived not only of what is due from his father, but ‘gelded’ of what he might pass on. The male element in the imagery of ‘sceptre’ becomes explicit here.

The conversation between Bushy and Queen Isabel is a reflection on the poetry of the play itself. Bushy urges the Queen not to multiply grief:

Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows,
Which shows like grief itself, but is not so.
For sorrow's eye, glazed with blinding tears,
Divides one thing entire to many objects,
Like perspectives, which, rightly gaz'd upon,
Show nothing but confusion; ey'd awry,
Distinguish form.

(II.ii.14-20)

The ‘perspectives’ of the poetry of Richard or of John of Gaunt or, for that matter, of the Duchess of Gloucester (or of York, whose fine speech later in this scene is surely not comic, but is rather the distracted effort of a man of action to organize an action he knows to be purposeless) are ways and means of putting off, away or to one side, whatever is pressing. The impasses of the play promote a frustration in some which gives rise to their plangent poetry of loss and futility, and a tendency to procrastinate in others, in Richard that is, which gives rise to a poetry of doing nothing. Beautiful though it is, it is sterile. That it is sterile is brought to mind by contrast with the occasional and startling images of fecundity; the negative image of Bolingbroke's being ‘gelded’; John of Gaunt's image of England's ‘teeming womb’; Isabel's ‘gasping new-delivered mother’. What is missing, however, in these images is the issue—Richard's ‘infant’ is a fantasy, and these images are anyway fenced around by the martial imagery. Nothing is happening; the present is being stifled by a failure to resolve the past and release the creative energies of the ruling class, and that threatens war, which is their business and the basis of their claim to authority. But the poetry of neither can imagine the complex, fertile life over which they have placed themselves, except in contempt for it.

The first element of the play's turn at this point, as Bolingbroke steps forward to centre stage and meets and displaces Richard, is the emergence of a new poetry, a fuller poetry, out of Richard's gathering sense of hopelessness. The repeated references to ‘peace’, as in Berkeley's address to Bolingbroke, ‘and fright our native peace’; or York's rebuke to Bolingbroke:

                                                            why have they dar'd to march
So many miles upon her peaceful bosom,
Frighting her pale-fac'd villages with war

(II.iii.91-3),

gathers into Richard's ‘senseless conjuration’ of III.ii. Having lost the nobles and the commons, he turns to the land itself, to ‘nature’. Graham Holderness says of this that ‘the king seeks to appropriate the realm by means of a pastoral fantasy’.¹⁴ This is true, but it must be added that John of Gaunt seeks to appropriate the realm by means of a martial fantasy; the question is, which of these two rival poetries will win?

In fact, neither does. From this point on the play is dominated by two modes, the ceremonial and the plangent lyric. The confrontation at Barkloughly Castle has all the high ceremony of the trial by combat. These are big figures, striding on a big stage, and the contrast with the intensely introverted poetry of the preceding scene is dramatically a triumph. From

For God's sake let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings

to

                    He is come to open
The purple testament of bleeding war.
But ere the crown he looks for live in peace,
Ten thousand bloody crowns of mother's sons
Shall ill become the flower of England's face,
Change the complexion of her maid-pale peace
To scarlet indignation and bedew
Her pastor's grass with faithful English blood.

is a movement that makes us feel with York that Richard can play king indeed.

But ‘For God's sake let us sit upon the ground’ is not Prospero's ‘We are such stuff / As dreams are made on’; it is not Antony's magnificent dissection of ambition in his defeat; it is nervous, neurotic even; maudlin and melancholic. Richard is not tragic because he is so miserable. Then he steps out with all the pomp and pageantry the chivalric conception of the king as ‘God's deputy’ can lend him, and he rises to it.¹⁵ But it is a show, and he knows it.

We do debase ourselves, cousin, do we not,
To look so poorly, and to speak so fair?

His speech then is another piece of equivocally ironic maudlin self-dramatization, sentimentally self-martyring and yet ironically aware; unstable and worrying. Northumberland is surely right

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

but not like Lear.

The gardeners' scene has been so widely discussed it needs little comment. I agree essentially with Graham Holderness's view that the scene establishes the fact that Richard is not a good gardener.¹⁶ His mystical-poetical invocation of the earth has little place in it for the cultivated area of ‘civil society’. If there is to be a life for oyster-wenches and draymen that goes on, as it were, underneath the poetical idealizations of John of Gaunt and Northumberland, there must be some constitutional framework, a protected framework, to encourage good growth. There must be a gardener. We may draw in another major metaphor and say that there is more to motherhood than having one's hand on the cradle.

The gardeners are at last the appearance on stage of the ordinary lives that have shadowed the ponderous ceremony of feudal nobility throughout the play. It is they who stand between ‘shrewd steel’ and ‘the golden crown’ in the opposition Richard raises. It is they whom Scroope describes arming themselves:

White-beards have arm'd their thin and hairless scalps
Against thy majesty; boys, with women's voices,
Strive to speak big, and clap their female joints
In stiff unwieldy arms against thy crown;
Thy very beadsmen learn to bend their bows
Of double-fatal yew against thy state;
Yea, distaff-women manage rusty bills
Against thy seat.

(III.ii.112-19)

Bolingbroke's ‘shrewd steel’ has masculinized the realm against Richard's ‘golden crown’, his feminized vision of peace.¹⁷

The point is not programmatic; it is a matter of seeing how little liked Richard is—it underlies and underlines the gardeners' scene. Richard's appeal to ideas of ‘majesty’ is inappropriate:

Down, down I come, like glist'ring Phaeton,
Wanting the manage of unruly jades.
In the base-court? Base court, where kings grow base,
To come at traitors' calls, and do them grace!
In the base court? Come down? Down, court! down, King!
For night-owls shriek where mounting larks should sing.

(III.iii.178-83)

This is a superbly effective piece of dramatic verse, enacting in its own disintegration that of the poetry which is the essence of kingship, but which cannot survive without a real basis in the lives of the men and women who live and work in the kingdom.

Neither ‘shrewd steel’ (which catches ‘blows’ from Northumberland, and John of Gaunt's ‘conquest’), nor Richard's mystical-poetical ‘golden crown’ speaks for this middle ground. Bolingbroke's careful cultivation of the Commons and the common people of the kingdom has paved the way for his triumph over Richard, but he has not really raised ‘steel’ as an ideal in the way that ‘crown’ has been raised, both by Richard (from whose phrase this opposition comes) and by John of Gaunt. Bolingbroke is not an idealist at all, though his supporters amongst the nobles may be.¹⁸ Bolingbroke has drawn behind him all the resentment that Richard has built up against him by impoverishing the people to support what comes to seem in the play no more than poetry. That is, he has nothing to hold up but a series of ideals and senseless conjurations which become increasingly ‘frantic’ (to use Northumberland's word).

The death of the King is poignant but not tragic. Some of Joseph Conrad's sense of the instability of personal being; of Martin Decoud's death in Nostromo; of Jim's obsessional fantasies and their consequences (not least for Stein) in Lord Jim; this is in place here in the mirror scene, and in the last great speech in which again he does not recall Lear's ‘Come let's away to prison’. It is worth asking why he does not.

Simply, it is because Lear has seen more than Richard has. When Lear suggests that their cell will be no prison for himself and Cordelia it is not because they are broken, but nor is it because they can ‘make one little room an everywhere’. It is because Lear has within him all human experience—because he really is the mystical-poetical king Richard fancies himself to be. Richard's prison is not really populated with the fantastic hordes of his imagination, because at the last moment he is alone with himself and, like Martin Decoud, that is company he cannot stand:

But the truth was that he died from solitude, the enemy known but to few on this earth, and whom only the simplest of us are fit to withstand. The brilliant Costaguanero of the boulevards had died from solitude and want of faith in himself and others … After three days of waiting for the sight of some human face, Decoud caught himself entertaining a doubt of his own individuality. It had merged into the world of cloud and water, of natural forces and forms of nature. In our activity alone do we find the sustaining illusion of an independent existence as against the whole scheme of things of which we form a helpless part.

(Nostromo, ch. 10)

Significantly, the music irritates Richard. It reminds him of time, and of his struggle to maintain a sense of his own existence:

My thoughts are minutes, and with sighs they jar
Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch,
Whereto my finger, like a dial's point,
Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears.
Now sir, the sounds that tell what hour it is
Are clamorous groans which strike upon my heart,
Which is the bell.(19)

(V.v.51-7)

This irritable punning is surely meant to strike us as improvized; as the increasingly unwilling activity of a mind overwhelmed by images of itself, ‘a generation of still-breeding thoughts’ which, however, is not the population of his ‘little world’ but the disintegration of himself (we are reminded of Bushy's ‘perspectives’):

This music mads me. Let it sound no more;
For though it have holp mad men to their wits,
In me it seems it will make wise men mad.

What cures Lear is only part of Richard's downfall. His image in the mirror is perhaps the last time he sees himself whole. When he is deposed he has all the ambiguous pathos of a defeated dictator, for they are all men and women and not demons after all.

It is this quality he speaks for, and which the poetry of the play presents for us. He was not a good gardener, but the gardener will plant a bank of ‘rue, sour herb of grace’ for the queen. She is a sad figure too. Both ‘sour’ and ‘grace’ are right for her. We may not like tyrants and their consorts for what they have done, but they are very ordinary figures when they are deposed. The Marcoses, or the Ceaucescus, without their apparatuses of power, cut sorry figures. Ralf Dahrendorf quotes Sergio Segre, upbraiding the people of the former East Germany for arresting Erich Honecker:

Will you never learn from History? Is the era of the trials of the 1930s and 1950s going to start all over again? These are politically beaten people; leave them in peace in their defeat; do not begin the old stories again. Otherwise one will never start anything new.

The struggle is to find the shoots of new growth in the garden we have taken over from the defeated tyrant. Richard II presents its audience with a picture of how this was once tried, in the past.

The last acts present a curious contrast between Richard's introversion and disintegration, and Bolingbroke's immediate difficulties as the new king. The extraordinarily fast pace of the political action (involving as it does some of the actors—especially York, and Aumerle—of the previous regime) and the dreamy dissolution of a lonely individual frame the gardeners' scene. We watch fascinated the doings of kings and nobles, but we belong to the world that goes on meanwhile. We reflect on the ironies and the occasional beauties of these pictures of the past; we set in our own way a bank of rue for the queen, but that acknowledgement is also a recognition that the rest of the garden demands our attention. We do not dedicate the whole garden to these extraordinary men and women.

Bolingbroke's problems are only just beginning. As the play ends we are reminded of its beginnings—a murder hangs over both. The ‘slavish yoke’ of political in-fighting has not been thrown off. Neither the ‘golden crown’ nor ‘shrewd steel’ seems to have been able to solve the problems inherent, it appears, in the governance of ‘this sceptred isle’. John of Gaunt's England is a warrior's fantasy, just as Richard's is a doomed attempt to procrastinate his way out of trouble. It is Mowbray's ‘native English’, the ‘tenement or pelting farm’, the lives of ‘oyster-wenches’ and ‘draymen’, the whole complex life which actually makes up nations which is the true central character of the play. The politics of nationhood must always take account of the actual life they have taken over from their predecessors. Even if we are determined to make the garden of our dreams, we have to start where we are, and that is always leased from the past and owed to the future.

Notes

1. London, 1990. I have drawn on Professor Dahrendorf's discussion throughout. Though I think we probably take different views of the role of private property, I am indebted to his account of the importance of ‘civil society’ for political reconstruction in the post-communist countries.

2. ‘Remarks on Socialism, Communism and Private Property’, added to the second edition of Political Economy, 1849. Mill goes on to say that ‘the restraints of Communism would be freedom in comparison with the present condition of the majority of the human race’. Liberty was no less dear to Mill than to any other. Of course it depends what you mean by ‘communism’. It depends also on what view one takes of the importance to political liberty of the existence of private property.

3. It is an interesting fact of critical history that Dr Johnson found the play unimpressive, holding that it did not ‘much affect the passions or enlarge the understanding’, while Hazlitt preferred the ‘nature and feeling’ of Richard II to the ‘noise and bluster of Richard III [of which Johnson's opinion was even lower], at least, as we are so often forced to see it acted’. Hazlitt took to the character of Richard: ‘the sufferings of the man make us forget that he ever was a King’. Though Johnson is not forthcoming on the point, his note on III.iii.156 suggests his feelings: ‘Shakespeare is very apt to deviate from the pathetic to the ridiculous’. Just such a deviation moved Hazlitt.

4. All quotations are from the Arden edition of Richard II (ed. P. Ure; London, 1956).

5. Preface to the Penguin Richard II (1969).

6. Shakespeare (New York, 1939), p. 39.

7. An interesting treatment of this view is Richard D. Altick's ‘Symphonic Imagery in Richard II’, PMLA 62 (1947), p. 351. Altick argues of Richard that ‘the universe is only present to him in packages of fine words’. Terence Hawkes takes Altick to task in Shakespeare's Talking Animals (London, 1973) for suggesting that language is insubstantial.

8. The Arden Shakespeare Richard II, p. lxix.

9. Hazlitt speaks of the ‘state of accomplished barbarism’ which characterizes this period ‘in which “is hung armour of the invincible knights of old”’.

10. Coleridge's remarks on this speech are of interest: ‘When I feel that upon the morality of Britain depends the safety of Britain, and that her morality is supported and illustrated by our national feeling, I cannot read these grand lines without joy and triumph’.

11. Coleridge says, ‘what could be a greater rebuke to a king than to be told that

                                                      This realm, this England …
    Is now leased out …
    Like to a tenement or pelting farm?’

    Catherine Belsey puts it this way: ‘Richard makes a gap between names and things, between kingship and its referent, majesty, and Gaunt cannot live in the world he makes’; Graham Holderness (ed.), Shakespeare's History Plays: ‘Richard II’ to ‘Henry V’ (London, 1992), p. 110.

12. Leonard Tennenhouse views the play as the dramatization of rifts in the ruling class, the ‘blood’, in his terms, and sees ‘Bullingbroke’ as ‘the figure who rescues the principle of genealogy and links it to the law’. I think this a little diagrammatic: Bolingbroke is not merely a saviour (Holderness (ed.), Shakespeare's History Plays, pp. 53-8).

13. We have moved on from Mill's period before the establishment from the custom and practice of tribunals of law and private property into the period of ‘civil society’ and the emergence of the outlines of a state.

14. G. Holderness, N. Potter and J. Turner, Shakespeare: the Play of History (London, 1988), p. 37.

15. I do not intend to recapitulate the by now standard view of Lily B. Campbell and E. M. W. Tillyard, for which Shakespeare's History Plays (ed. Holderness), may be consulted passim; they are no more than in the line of the view which Coleridge picks up, and inflames, from Johnson, and which appears later still in our century in G. Wilson Knight's The Sovereign Flower (1958): ‘in no play is Shakespeare's royalism so poetically explicit’ (p. 31). In principle, nothing divides this view from that of its critics (for which see Holderness [ed.], Shakespeare's History Plays) but their differing opinions of royalty. Johnson and Stephen Greenblatt share the view that the play represents ‘a self-undermining authority’, and Hazlitt pities the man (unlike Johnson) and takes satisfaction from the misfortune of kingship (as Stephen Greenblatt does—though in a very detached manner—and as Tillyard, Lily B. Campbell and G. Wilson Knight do not). I do not believe the play is in fact about royalism in any direct way.

16. Holderness, Potter and Turner, The Play of History, pp. 38-40.

17. Linda Bamber comments, à propos of Queen Isabel:

    The feminine offers too powerful a challenge to the idea of history itself for Shakespeare to deal with it in the history plays. The Otherness of the feminine challenges the ethos of power and conquest through aggression; history as a genre must ultimately base itself on that ethos no matter how it also criticizes it. If we lose interest in the military-political adventure we have lost interest in history itself as a genre.

    (Holderness [ed], Shakespeare's History Plays, p. 67)

    In a sense, this is exactly what happens to Richard, and, through him, for us.

18. Robert S. Knapp argues that neither Richard nor Bolingbroke is able to ‘bring the words and deeds of monarchy together. Neither can successfully personate an undivided, fully legitimate crown, or make power conform to its ideal image’ (Holderness [ed.], Shakespeare's History Plays, p. 89). Thus Catherine Belsey's concern with a gap between signifier and signified, and Leonard Tennehouse's concern with power and its images, are brought together in a single view.

19. James L. Calderwood makes some interesting points about this speech (Holderness [ed.], Shakespeare's History Plays, pp. 121-35), commenting that it introduces a reflexivity on the processes of theatre unusual in a ‘history’ play.