[In the following essay, Kurtz discusses how the element of laughter corresponds to the personalities of Richard and Bolingbroke. According to the critic, Richard's laughter, laced with arrogant elitism and mockery, signifies an aristocratic insecurity which culminates in his deposition; by contrast, Bolingbroke embraces the carnivalesque, popular laughter of the common man to establish political order after usurping the crown.]

Richard II's fall from power in Shakespeare's play has been attributed to many causes: the weakness of the king's ‘poetic’ temperament; the strength of his un-poetic determination to ‘affirm a policy of royal absolutism’; his un-Christian willingness to allow a trial by combat; his failure to allow the trial by combat to proceed; his excessive leniency to both friends and enemies; his complicity in his uncle's murder.¹ Most recently, his fate has been ascribed to the effect of a pervasive ‘carnival spirit’ that shapes the world of this play and the plays that follow it. Richard, according to David Bergeron's ‘Richard II and Carnival Politics,’ is a ‘mock king’ who, governed by the rules of carnival games, must inevitably be thrust down, belittled, and cast out to make place for another: ‘history and the play's carnival spirit … displace him, subvert and substitute him.’² There is, of course, no actual carnival in the play, but Bergeron argues that Shakespeare ‘uses language and ideas associated with carnival as a means of exploring the topsy-turvy world of this play,’ with the result that ‘carnival is not marginal but preeminent in the play as metaphor and reality.’³ In the spirit of popular festivity Bolingbroke too will ‘have his day to “monarchize,”’ but will eventually be subsumed in the carnival process that dethrones every king, every power. ‘[C]arnival pulls down, if only for a moment, established order, whether government or church.’⁴

Bergeron makes the indisputable point that Richard II is concerned with the transitory nature of power and prestige. His focus on ‘carnival’ as a metaphor for this deeply popular theme allows him to draw attention to a number of interesting details of the characters' language, such as Mowbray's description of his forthcoming battle with Bolingbroke as a ‘feast’ which ‘my dancing soul doth celebrate’ (I.iii.91-92),⁵ or Richard's attempt to make light of Bolingbroke's successes by claiming that his rival ‘all this while hath revell'd in the night / Whilst we were wand'ring with the Antipodes’ (III.ii.48-49)—details which suggest an energy, even wildness, in these characters that is all too often forgotten by critics and producers who complain that the play is static and dull.⁶ Perhaps most important, he adds one more voice to the list of critics who have begun to see evidence of what Bergeron calls a ‘playful, sometimes farcical mood’ in what was once considered Shakespeare's most consistently serious play.⁷

Yet Bergeron's use of ‘carnival’ to describe the political processes of this play ultimately distorts more than it reveals. Carnivals were, if nothing else, celebratory occasions, yet in Richard II there is little of the festive tone, the delight in material abundance and sexuality, the sense of exuberance and possibility, that characterize carnival.⁸ Although, as Peter Burke has pointed out, aristocrats certainly participated in carnivals, they were predominantly plebeian festivals; Bakhtin's work has made the term inseparable from ideas of popular culture and ‘popular’ laughter.⁹ Laughter is a critical element in Richard's fall from power, as I will be arguing, but it is something quite different from Bakhtin's ‘laughter of the marketplace’ or ‘carnivalesque.’ Finally, to speak of a disembodied ‘carnival spirit’ as the cause of Richard's fall and Bolingbroke's rise obscures the extent to which the two men are responsible for their own fates. This play does not show Richard and Bolingbroke as interchangeable mock kings who are thrown down from power by an absurdist carnivalesque universe, but as two quite different personalities who are distinguished from each other in many ways, one of the most important of which is the way each uses laughter.

Richard is unlikely to strike anyone as a ‘mock king’ in the play's opening scene; he sounds confident and authoritative as he leads Gaunt, Bolingbroke, and Mowbray through the steps of a formal inquisition into accusations of high treason.¹⁰ Yet it may occur to us that he is, at times, a mocking king. Early in I.i he receives Bolingbroke's and Mowbray's declarations of allegiance with surprising irony:

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

(I.i.20-27)

His response to Bolingbroke's impassioned accusation of Mowbray is unmistakably sardonic: ‘How high a pitch his resolution soars!’ (I.i.109). And when he tells the ‘wrath-kindled gentlemen’ to ‘forget, forgive, conclude and be agreed: / Our doctors say this is no month to bleed,’ the words sound positively flippant (I.i.156-57).

Richard's tone does not suggest a mock king's ineptitude or an effete prince's lack of interest, as the part is sometimes played, so much as an almost too keen understanding of the political process over which he is presiding. He seems to recognize the realities that underlie the rhetoric in which all three men in the opening scenes are participating: he knows that either Bolingbroke or Mowbray must be lying when both swear allegiance to the king, and he is prepared to bring their hypocrisy to everyone's attention. His ability to step away from his formal role and view the ceremony and its participants with detachment is intriguing and, at first, rather appealing; he seems to act as a kind of moral standard—the truth-teller in a world of hypocrites—and his comments encourage us to identify with his point of view. Yet there is something unsettling, too, in his flippancy: the king is the man whom, more than anyone, we expect to take the ceremonies on which his society is built seriously. Court fools and jesters make mocking asides, not kings.¹¹

What begins as odd moments of wit penetrating the otherwise formal and ceremonious opening scenes soon develops into outright laughter. In I.iv Richard enters with a group of intimate friends. We catch them in mid-speech:

RICHARD
We did observe. Cousin Aumerle,
How far brought you high Herford on his way?
AUMERLE
I brought high Herford, if you call him so,
But to the next highway, and there I left him.
RICHARD
And say, what store of parting tears were shed?
AUMERLE
Faith, none for me, except the north-east wind,
Which then blew bitterly against our faces,
Awak'd the sleeping rheum, and so by chance
Did grace our hollow parting with a tear.

(I.iv.1-9)

The alliterative title Richard gives his cousin—‘high Herford’—is obviously sardonic; Aumerle underscores the sarcasm by repeating it and adding the pun on ‘highway.’ The same mocking tone accompanies Richard's question about the parting tears and Aumerle's response. When Richard then asks what Bolingbroke's parting words were, Aumerle's reply—‘Farewell’—is an obvious cue for laughter (I.iv.10-11). Richard keeps up the ridicule in his description of Bolingbroke:

He is our cousin, cousin, but 'tis doubt
When time shall call him home from banishment,
Whether our kinsman come to see his friends.
Ourself and Bushy
Observ'd his courtship to the common people,
How he did seem to dive into their hearts
With humble and familiar courtesy;
What reverence he did throw away on slaves,
Wooing poor craftsmen with the craft of smiles
And patient underbearing of his fortune,
As 'twere to banish their affects with him.
Off goes his bonnet to an oyster-wench;
A brace of draymen bid God speed him well,
And had the tribute of his supple knee,
With ‘Thanks, my countrymen, my loving friends.’

(I.iv.23-34)

The first lines are an ironic assessment of Richard's feelings for Bolingbroke and Bolingbroke's for him; the rest of the speech begs the actor playing Richard to whip off his hat and bend his knee in exaggerated caricature of the cousin he both fears and despises. Mockery is equally evident in Richard's callous response to the news of his uncle's illness:

Now put it, God, in the physician's mind
To help him to his grave immediately!
.....Come, gentlemen, let's all go visit him,
Pray God we may make haste and come too late!

(I.iv.59-64)

To which the others—with surely another burst of derisive laughter—respond ‘Amen’ as they leave the stage (I.iv.65).

Carnival laughter is popular laughter; this is its opposite—aristocratic, arrogant, elitist. Bolingbroke is mocked for his populism, his politeness to draymen and oyster wenches; Richard and his friends sneer at their cousin's ‘high’ness—his pride—because they feel higher. In Henry IV, Part I, Bolingbroke will describe Richard as having befriended ‘shallow jesters’ and ‘cap'ring fools,’ whom he allowed to mock even ‘[h]is great name,’ but what we see here is quite different.¹² This Richard is no passive victim of other men's jokes but a joker himself, whose mockery serves, as mockery so often does, as a means of demonstrating his power over the men around him. He can laugh whenever and at whomever he likes and get away with it, because he is the king; it is not even important that his jokes in the first scene be understood by anyone but himself. His laughter here asserts his superiority over Bolingbroke, his butt, and allows Richard to control his listeners' responses both to Bolingbroke and to himself, assuring that they will be unsympathetic to the man he seems already to suspect is his rival. The comic scene Richard stages here and his earlier flashes of wit are not just incidental touches of comedy; mockery is a form of power that he clearly enjoys exercising.

It is a dangerous power, however. Mockery empowers by making the laughter seem superior to his victim and by drawing others at least momentarily into sharing his point of view. But the distinction between one who laughs and one who is laughed at is not easily maintained; every comedian knows how fine the line is between making people laugh and being laughed at himself. For the professional comic, the distinction is usually irrelevant; for a king, however, it is crucial. To be laughed at is to lose, not only the momentary superiority of laughing at others, but the dignity and awe which should accompany the crown. Richard fails to maintain that distinction here: bending his knee and sweeping off his hat in exaggerated illustration of his words, he becomes for a moment the figure he satirizes, and his audience's laughter will be as much at him as at Bolingbroke. Though laughing at his rival, Richard becomes unexpectedly laughable himself; he plays the jester, but looks like a fool.

This is not the last time that Richard will look foolish. Act I ends with his facetious prayer that Gaunt should die before the king reaches his sickbed; death does not oblige, and Gaunt is still living when the king arrives. Richard may well be sorry that his wish was not heard, since he is forced to listen to the dying man's stern lecture on his sins. At the beginning of the scene the king takes delight in flaunting the proprieties, mocking the attitudes towards age and death that society holds sacred (‘What comfort, man? How is't with aged Gaunt?’ he greets his dying uncle jauntily) (II.i.72). Yet he is not able to retain this jesting detachment for long. Describing his uncle as ‘[a] lunatic lean-witted fool / Presuming on an ague's privilege,’ he shows how much the old man he has been making fun of is capable of angering him: ‘Wert thou not brother to great Edward's son, / This tongue that runs so roundly in thy head / Should run thy head from thy unreverent shoulders’ (II.i.115-16, 121-23). Richard's anger, however, is ineffectual; his threats make no difference to the dying man. When he responds to Gaunt's rebukes by saying, ‘[L]et them die that age and sullens have, / For both hast thou, and both become the grave’ (II.i.139-40), he sounds like a sulky schoolboy, cornered and resentful, helpless and—being a king—not a little absurd for being helpless.

This helplessness, with its accompanying absurdity, is strikingly in evidence after Richard's return from Ireland in act III; many readers have noticed how it undercuts what would otherwise be the most powerful speeches in the play. Bending down to greet the English earth, he appeals to all the legendary powers of nature supposed to attend the realm's anointed king:

Feed not thy sovereign's foe, my gentle earth,
Nor with thy sweets comfort his ravenous sense,
But let thy spiders that suck up thy venom
And heavy-gaited toads lie in their way,
.....Yield stinging nettles to mine enemies;
And when they from thy bosom pluck a flower,
Guard it, I pray thee, with a lurking adder,
Whose double tongue may with a mortal touch
Throw death upon thy sovereign's enemies.

(III.ii.12-22)

Out of context his words sound powerful, but it is clear that Richard's followers are not impressed; his request, ‘Mock not my senseless conjuration, lords,’ suggests that they have been exchanging puzzled or impatient glances (III.ii.23).¹³ His ecstatic assertion that ‘[t]his earth shall have a feeling, and these stones / Prove armed soldiers ere her native king / Shall falter under foul rebellion's arms' meets with the reminder that ‘[t]he means that heaven yields must be imbrac'd / And not neglected,’ a reproof Aumerle expands on: ‘He means, my lord, that we are too remiss; / Whilst Bolingbroke, through our security, / Grows strong and great in substance and in power’ (III.ii.24-26, 29-30, 33-35). Pretty words, in short, need to be backed up by actions—actions which Richard seems foolishly unwilling or unable to take.

Aumerle and Carlisle's pragmatism undercuts Richard's rhetoric, which is brought still lower when we realize that the king himself has no real faith in his own words:

For every man that Bolingbroke hath press'd
To lift shrewd steel against our golden crown,
God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay
A glorious angel: then, if angels fight,
Weak men must fall, for heaven still guards the right,

(III.ii.58-62)

he asserts grandly. But when in the next instant Salisbury brings news that all Richard's troops have dispersed, the king turns pale, and confesses, ‘But now the blood of twenty thousand men / Did triumph in my face, and they are fled’ (III.ii.76-77). Men, not angels, are what he has depended on. Richard's helplessness is not simply the result of adverse circumstances; his failure to take advantage of the powers he has, while he has them, is matched by his easy surrender when his human supports have failed. There is no more talk of relying on God's angels, and no attempt to look further for practical human assistance:

AUMERLE
Where is the Duke my father with his power?
RICHARD
No matter where—of comfort no man speak.
Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs,
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.
Let's choose executors and talk of wills.

.....

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

(III.ii.143-56)

As Richard plops onto the ground in despair, he is as absurd as he is pathetic. Despite the magnificent reflections on mortality and the nature of kingship which accompany this speech, his self-pity is unnecessary and grotesque. It comes too soon. His men—do they remain standing, or do they awkwardly join him as he commands?—are forced to rebuke him again: ‘My lord, wise men ne'er sit and wail their woes, / But presently prevent the way to wail’ (III.ii.178-79). Henry V will recognize the hollowness of kingship in his agonized soliloquy before Agincourt, but he voices his fears in private, while in public he strikes the heroic note that we expect from our leaders and creates the confidence in his troops which helps them to win the battle despite their numbers. The fact that Henry's confidence is unreasonable and Richard's fear perfectly logical is irrelevant; the deflation of Richard's confident claims and his sudden helplessness make him seem unkingly. Even Edward II, who—defeated and in disguise—sits on the ground not to speak of self-pity but to praise the uses of philosophy, has greater dignity.

At Flint Castle, Richard is similarly paralysed by self-pity:

What must the king do now? Must he submit?
The king shall do it. Must he be depos'd?
The king shall be contented. Must he lose
The name of king? a God's name, let it go.
I'll give my jewels for a set of beads;
My gorgeous palace for a hermitage;
.....And my large kingdom for a little grave.
A little little grave, an obscure grave,
Or I'll be buried in the king's highway,
Some way of common trade, where subjects' feet
May hourly trample on their sovereign's head;
For on my heart they tread now whilst I live.

(III.iii.143-58)

This is embarrassingly maudlin, and while the ‘tender-hearted’ Aumerle weeps, other members of Richard's audience appear to be less touched: ‘Well, well, I see / I talk but idly, and you laugh at me’ (III.iii.170-71). The effect is repeated when Richard descends from the walls of the castle:

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)

The emotional appeal of this famous speech is somewhat lessened by its context: Bolingbroke, seeing Richard talking to himself, asks ‘What says his Majesty?’; Northumberland's answer is sympathetic but deflating: ‘Sorrow and grief of heart / Makes him speak fondly like a frantic man’ (III.iii.184-85). Ernst Kantorowicz recognized the absurdity of Richard's position in this scene and suggested that ‘only in that new rôle of Fool—a fool playing king, and a king playing fool—is Richard capable of greeting his victorious cousin and of playing to the end … the comedy of his brittle and dubious kingship.’¹⁴ The role of fool is, however, at this point by no means a new one for Richard.

A ‘fool’ can suggest the helplessness of the natural fool, who is simply a comic butt, or the self-conscious wit of the artificial fool, the jester who laughs at others and at himself even while others are laughing at him. Richard plays both roles. Even in his most helpless and self-pitying moments he is aware of his own absurdity: ‘Mock not my senseless conjuration, lords’; ‘I had forgot myself, am I not king?’; ‘Thou chid'st me well’; ‘Well, well, I see / I talk but idly, and you laugh at me’ (III.ii.23, 83, 188; III.iii.170-71). This awareness does not so much suggest the mock king or the actor acting out unreal emotions as the intelligent ironist who mocks his own emotions even while he indulges them.¹⁵ The intelligence and perceptiveness his wit suggests are as attractive as his self-indulgence is not; they anticipate and to a certain extent prevent the audience's rejection of the king's excessive grief.

Richard's mockery is not only self-directed, however. Throughout the crucial scenes in the middle of the play, he displays the impatience with hypocrisy and, frequently, the scoffing tone that we have seen in him earlier. When he dismisses his troops and prepares to retreat to Flint Castle, Aumerle begs that he listen to ‘one word’; Richard brushes him aside:

                                                                                He does me double wrong
That wounds me with the flatteries of his tongue.
Discharge my followers; let them hence away,
From Richard's night, to Bolingbroke's fair day.

(III.ii.215-18)

There is no mockery here, but the king's disdain of flattery recalls his ironic dismissal of Bolingbroke's and Mowbray's greetings in the first scene. The irony reappears when he confronts Bolingbroke himself:

Fair cousin, you debase your princely knee
To make the base earth proud with kissing it.
Me rather had my heart might feel your love,
Than my unpleased eye see your courtesy.
Up, cousin, up; your heart is up, I know,
Thus high at least, although your knee be low.

(III.iii.190-95)

At ‘[t]hus high’ the actor presumably touches his crown. When Bolingbroke protests, ‘My gracious lord, I come but for mine own,’ Richard continues in the same ironic vein: ‘Your own is yours, and I am yours, and all,’ ‘Well you deserve. They well deserve to have / That know the strong'st and surest way to get’; and finally,

RICHARD
Set on towards London, cousin, is it so?
BOLINGBROKE
Yea, my good lord.
RICHARD
                                                                      Then I must not say no.

(III.iii.196-209)

His response to Northumberland's message is heavy with sarcasm: ‘What says King Bolingbroke? Will his Majesty / Give Richard leave to live till Richard die? / You make a leg, and Bolingbroke says “ay”’ (III.iii.173-75). Even while he concedes political defeat, Richard mocks and exposes Bolingbroke's hypocrisy. His bitter laughter makes us see things, for the moment, in his way, strengthening his power with the play's audience, even while he loses the power of the crown.

Our response to Richard is necessarily coloured by what we know of history and the rest of the play. Bolingbroke does become king; all Richard's ironic comments and a good many of his sentimental ones are ultimately justified. It is easy to see him as a kind of prophet, at least a teller of hard truths; his insight aligns his vision with ours and gives him an undeniable appeal. Yet we may wonder if the play is simply a recounting of historic facts, and if Richard's ironies really give us a complete picture of what is happening at Flint Castle. Bolingbroke never says in this scene that he intends to take the crown. In fact, he repeatedly claims that he only comes to regain his own inheritance. Northumberland tells Richard:

Comprising all that may be sworn or said,
His coming hither hath no further scope
Than for his lineal royalties, and to beg
Infranchisement immediate on his knees,
Which on thy royal party granted once,
His glittering arms he will commend to rust,
His barbed steeds to stables, and his heart
To faithful service of your Majesty.
This swears he as he is a prince and just;
And, as I am a gentleman, I credit him.

(III.iii.111-20)

When Bolingbroke speaks privately to Northumberland, he compares his meeting with Richard to a thunderstorm in which he expects to play the ‘yielding’ part:

Be he the fire, I'll be the yielding water;
The rage be his, whilst on the earth I rain
My waters—on the earth, and not on him.

(III.iii.58-60)

On meeting Richard in the ‘base court,’ he kneels dutifully, and commands his men also to ‘show fair duty to his Majesty’ (III.iii.188). Yet Richard, typically, will not accept this ceremony at face value. His ‘What must the king do now?’ speech is given after he has agreed to Bolingbroke's demand for his lands and before the messenger returns with Bolingbroke's reply; he dramatizes his fall eloquently, but before it has actually taken place. He does not take the opportunity Bolingbroke gives him to play the raging ‘fire’ to his subject's ‘yielding water.’ Bolingbroke has the tangible, material power in this scene, but his words suggest that Richard has access to an intangible authority which is just as much a part of political power as troops and horses—if he will use it. While there is no question that Bolingbroke has the ability to make himself king, one wonders if he would have done so had Richard not been quite so eager to anticipate him.¹⁶

Alexander Leggatt has described Richard as ‘the little boy who points out that the emperor isn't wearing any clothes’—and adds ‘[t]his is complicated by the fact that he is also the emperor.’¹⁷ The complication is significant. To be successful a king must act as if he believes in the forms and ceremonies of his society which support his authority. Bolingbroke will later maintain that Richard's great mistake was allowing himself to become so familiar with his subjects that they make him the butt of their jokes, so that he lost the power of ‘extraordinary gaze, / Such as is bent on sun-like majesty.’¹⁸ What actually happens in Richard II is something quite different from this. While he is king, he is taken seriously by his subjects; even Bolingbroke remains formal and respectful until the actual deposition scene. Richard, on the other hand, constantly mocks the formalities and ceremonies on which his world is built—commenting ironically on Bolingbroke's and Mowbray's hypocritical greetings to him, abandoning all pretensions of family loyalty and affection to make fun of the banished Bolingbroke and the dying Gaunt, and finally scoffing at the convention that his birth, not his strength of arms, is what entitles him to Bolingbroke's deference. We may admire his distaste for temporizing and his insistence on facing hard truths, if that is what they are, head on, but we should not lose sight of the fact that what Richard sees as necessities may not, in the shifting world of politics and power which the play presents, be necessary at all. The ceremonies of compliment and deference which Richard brushes aside may be as hollow as the crown, but Bolingbroke's respect for them suggests that they could nevertheless be more powerful than Richard realizes. It is difficult to know who is forcing whom in an exchange like this:

BOLINGBROKE
My gracious lord, I come but for mine own.
RICHARD
Your own is yours, and I am yours, and all.
BOLINGBROKE
So far be mine, my most redoubted lord,
As my true service shall deserve your love.
RICHARD
Well you deserve. They well deserve to have
That know the strong'st and surest way to get.

.....

What you will have, I'll give, and willing too,
For do we must what force will have us do.
Set on towards London, cousin, is it so?
BOLINGBROKE
Yea, my good lord.
RICHARD
                                                                      Then I must not say no.

(III.iii.196-209)

Richard's later image of himself and Bolingbroke as two buckets rising and falling in a well is an apt one: it is hard to say whether the rising bucket forces the falling one down, or vice versa.

Whatever Bolingbroke's motives might have been earlier, by act IV he has decided to ‘ascend the regal throne’ (IV.i.113). With typical respect for the formalities Richard despises, he is anxious to clothe his actions in an appearance of order and legality by arranging that Richard hand over the crown in a formal ceremony; since no proper ceremony for either abdication or deposition exists, the aspiring king devises one. He gets more than he bargained for, however: Richard continues to play the jester throughout the scene, now mocking the formalities on which Bolingbroke is building his reign, as he has mocked the ones which supported his own. Asked ‘[t]o do that office of thine own good will / Which tired majesty did make thee offer: / The resignation of thy state and crown,’ he tells Bolingbroke, ‘Here, cousin, seize the crown. / … / On this side my hand, and on that side thine’ (IV.i.177-79, 181-83), reducing the monarchy to an object in his hand and Bolingbroke's ceremony to the undignified struggle it really is.¹⁹ If he and Henry are like ‘two buckets,’ Richard tells us sarcastically that his rival is ‘[t]he emptier,’ ‘ever dancing in the air’ (IV.i.185-86). Every question of Bolingbroke's, Richard twists and turns into a series of elaborate conceits, refusing to play the straightforward part Henry has assigned to him and leaving everyone unsure of what his intentions really are:

BOLINGBROKE
I thought you had been willing to resign.
RICHARD
My crown I am, but still my griefs are mine.
You may my glories and my state depose,
But not my griefs; still am I king of those.
BOLINGBROKE
Part of your cares you give me with your crown.
RICHARD
Your cares set up do not pluck my cares down.
My care is loss of care, by old care done;
Your care is gain of care, by new care won.

.....

BOLINGBROKE
Are you contented to resign the crown?
RICHARD
Ay, no; no, ay; for I must nothing be.
Therefore no ‘no’, for I resign to thee.

(IV.i.190-202)

In earlier and later scenes, Bolingbroke's terse speech can convey strength; here, however, he is clearly at a loss. His sudden helplessness is as unkingly as Richard's was earlier, while Richard seems more confident and more impressive than he has at any time since act I. To mock power when one holds power is to weaken oneself; to mock it when one has lost it is to regain some element of authority and control.

Richard's theatrical success in the deposition scene is of course only a temporary gain; we will soon hear of him being paraded through London's streets, cruelly mocked by the citizens who were once his subjects and by the contrast with Bolingbroke's newly acquired glory (V.ii.4-7, 22-30), then forced from his wife, imprisoned, and murdered. Bolingbroke, on the other hand, will retain his grip on the throne—however shaken by dissent and rebellion—for another play and a half, and pass it on without question to his son. Even in this play, his is a very different reign from Richard's. His rise to power is backed, as we have seen, by a popularity with ordinary people which Richard scorns, and when Aumerle's conspiracy breaks down into slapstick and farce, Henry steps comfortably into the role of the benign father-king so familiar from popular ballads and plays like The Shoemakers Holiday or George-a-Greene, and so unlike any part that Richard plays.²⁰ Unperturbed by the chaos around him, Henry pardons Aumerle without asking his crime, and maintains his word even in the face of York's plea that his son lose his life. Merciful and good-humoured (‘My dangerous cousin, let your mother in,’ he tells Aumerle with obvious amusement, ‘I know she's come to pray for your foul sin’) (V.iii.80-81), he retains his dignity while acting the part of the people's king to perfection. He even pictures himself as a figure in a popular song: ‘Our scene is alt'red from a serious thing,’ he jokes when the Duchess begins to hammer at the door, ‘And now chang'd to “The Beggar and the King”’ (V.iii.77-78).

Critics often describe the farce of the Aumerle scenes as a sign of the degradation of Henry's kingship—a position with which Richard would probably agree.²¹ In a comparison of the Aumerle scenes to accounts of actual royal pardons, Janet Spencer concludes that Shakespeare's scenes ‘reveal … Henry's inability to legitimate his power with the metaphysics of blood.’²² The metaphysics of blood might, however, have been less important to the majority of Shakespeare's audience than the authorizing power of popular laughter and popular myth; the scenes anchor the new king firmly in such popular culture, giving his reign a broad appeal that Richard's sorely lacked. He will not keep this appeal for long, of course; just as Henry will recast Richard as a populist king who frittered away his authority by exposing himself to the laughter of his subjects, the next play recasts Henry as a stern and unsmiling figure, ‘weary’ with responsibility and ‘wan with care,’ and replaces him in the audience's affections with that king of popular culture, Falstaff (1 Henry IV, I.i.1). In this play, however, we are shown a man who supports himself in power by consciously playing the part of the common man's king.

It is hard to see Richard and Bolingbroke as interchangeable ‘mock kings’ who are deposed in turn by an impersonal ‘carnival spirit’ that governs the world they live in. Bolingbroke is shown at the end of the play as a strong ruler who, whatever crimes he may have committed, is capable of drawing on some of the enduring myths of popular culture as he builds his kingship. Richard could not be more different. He does not hand out pardons freely or quote popular ballads. He may act, at different times, as both a fool and a jester, but he never takes on the popular elements of these roles; his laughter is ironic and self-conscious, the voice of the sophisticated satirist, not the earthy and material voice of the popular clown. His laughter is exclusive rather than inclusive: his unexplained, secretive joking in act I suggests his isolation from all but a handful of the nobles, while his mockery of Bolingbroke's populism implies his disdain for the ordinary people themselves. Even his discovery that a king is mortal flesh and blood, like any man, does not make him a populist: when he asks his friends how they can call him a king, his tone is one of bitterness and regret at being ‘subjected’—made a subject—to a higher power and mocked by it (III.ii.176-77). Henry's later recollections notwithstanding, Richard never ‘[e]nfeoff[s] himself to popularity’ or—until his last scene with the groom—jests with ordinary people; if he had, his troops might not have abandoned him so quickly.²³ His mocking stance cuts him off from other sources of strength as well. Long before he seizes Bolingbroke's inheritance, Richard shows his contempt for the formalities by which society is ordered and his own power upheld, mocking them even while he plays his public part in them, and scoffing at them with his friends afterwards in private. His attitude is at times appealing but it is also self-destructive; Bolingbroke's own acknowledgment of formality at Flint Castle and later suggests that the ceremonies of men are not, as has been argued, ‘disconnected from the realities of power’ which Bolingbroke's strong will in the first act and his army in the third represent, and that they retain more authority than Richard is willing to allow.²⁴ It is hardly surprising that Richard loses the power of these formalities in the end, or that he seems at times absurd when he weeps over the loss. By taking on the role of jester Richard has gained the power of satire, but, like Death's little pin, it is a destructive power, whose chief victim is not ‘King Bolingbroke’ but King Richard himself. Bolingbroke's less sophisticated joke about ‘The Beggar and the King’ is, for a king, a safer choice. Popular laughter in this play is a source of political stability, not of carnivalesque deplacement and substitution, while the king whose laughter smacks of elitism is the king who is deposed.

Notes

1. The charge of poetic temperament has been made many times, most extensively by M. M. Mahood in Shakespeare's Wordplay (London: Methuen 1957), 73-88. For the other accounts of Richard's fall, see Graham Holderness, Shakespeare's History (Dublin: Gill; New York: St Martin's Press 1985), 46ff; Diane Bornstein, ‘Trial by Combat and Official Irresponsibility in Richard II,’ Shakespeare Studies 8 (1975), 131-41; Phyllis Rackin, ‘The Role of the Audience in Shakespeare's Richard II,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (1985), 263-64; H. M. Richmond, Shakespeare's Political Plays (New York: Random House 1967), 131. Among the many readers who point to Gloucester's murder as Richard's greatest mistake is Derek Traversi, Shakespeare: From ‘Richard II’ to ‘Henry V’ (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1957), 2.

2. David M. Bergeron, ‘Richard II and Carnival Politics,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991), 37.

3. Bergeron, 33.

4. Bergeron, 38.

5. William Shakespeare, Richard II, ed Peter Ure (London: Methuen 1961). All quotations from the play are from this edition.

6. Sir John Gielgud described the play as tending to ‘become somewhat indigestible on the stage’ (‘King Richard the Second,’ Stage Directions [London: Heinemann 1963], 32); and Robert Ornstein contrasts its ‘ceremonious formality’ unfavourably with the ‘racy idiom’ and ‘Elizabethan “contemporaneousness”’ of King John (A Kingdom for a Stage: The Achievement of Shakespeare's History Plays [Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press 1972], 102).

7. Walter Pater and John Dover Wilson were once impressed by the ‘unity of tone’—tragic tone—they saw in the play. An early voice of dissent was Ernst Kantorowicz, who described Richard as playing the ‘Fool’ in several scenes. The tide of opinion did not really begin to change, however, until the early 1970s, when a number of writers pointed out the comic aspects of different scenes in the play. See Walter Pater, ‘Shakespeare's English Kings,’ Appreciations, With an Essay on Style (London: Macmillan 1910), 202-3; John Dover Wilson, ed, King Richard II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1939), xiv-xv; Ernest H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1957), 29-40; Waldo F. McNeir, ‘The Comic Scenes in Richard II,’ Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 73 (1972), 815-22; Lois Potter, ‘The Antic Disposition of Richard II,’ Shakespeare Survey 27 (1974), 33-41; Sheldon P. Zitner, ‘Aumerle's Conspiracy,’ SEL [Studies in English Literature 1500-1900] 14 (1974), 244; W. Gordon Zeeveld, The Temper of Shakespeare's Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press 1974), 43, 41; Leonard Barkan, ‘The Theatrical Consistency of Richard II,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 29 (1978), 11-19; Louise Cowan, ‘God Will Save the King: Shakespeare's Richard II,’ Shakespeare as Political Thinker, ed John Alvis and Thomas G. West (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press 1981), 72; Rackin, ‘The Role of the Audience,’ 273-81; James Black, ‘The Interlude of the Beggar and the King in Richard II,’ Pageantry in the Shakespearean Theater, ed David M. Bergeron (Athens: University of Georgia Press 1985), 104-11.

8. The most extensive and influential discussion of carnival is, of course, Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World, trans Helene Iswolsky (1968; repr Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1984). See also Michael D. Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York: Routledge 1985).

9. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Temple Smith 1978), 24-25.

10. The question of Richard's complicity in Woodstock's murder has not yet been raised, and I think it is only in retrospect that any audience—even an Elizabethan one—would realize how deeply the king himself is implicated in the proceedings.

11. Richard's flippant tone and his ironic awareness of the hollowness of Bolingbroke's and Mowbray's praise make it clear that he has not ‘always been deceived by the seeming power of words,’ as M. M. Mahood once argued—a view of the play still often heard in descriptions of Richard as a pathetic ‘poet king’ (Mahood, 78). Yet Mahood's central premise, that ‘[t]o doubt the real relationship between name and nominee, between a word and the thing it signified, was to shake the whole structure of Elizabethan thought and society’ (73), remains strikingly apt: as I will argue below, it is Richard's scepticism, as much as Bolingbroke's, that will undo him.

12. Shakespeare, The First Part of King Henry IV, ed A. R. Humphreys (London: Methuen 1960), III.ii.61-64.

13. It seems unlikely that they actually laugh out loud, either here or in III.iii (discussed below).

14. Kantorowicz, 33.

15. Bergeron suggests that Richard in these scenes sounds like ‘a parody of a king, a mock king’ (‘Carnival Politics,’ 37).

16. Robert B. Bennett comments that ‘[t]he unhallowing of England seems to be Richard's doing even in the Flint Castle and deposition confrontations where Henry, the “silent king,” is ready to force matters but finds no need because Richard, the incessant talker, orchestrates his submission in both instances’ (‘Four Stages of Time: The Shape of History in Shakespeare's Second Tetralogy,’ Shakespeare Studies 19 [1987], 69). Cf James A. S. McPeek, ‘Richard and His Shadow World,’ American Imago 15 (1958), 204; and A. L. French, ‘Who Deposed Richard the Second?’ Essays in Criticism 17 (1967), 425. Lois Potter, on the other hand, disagrees sharply: ‘Richard does not, like a predestinating God, make things happen because he foresees them. He foresees them because they are going to happen, and because his awareness of the situation is … a convenient dramatic shorthand’ (37).

17. Alexander M. Leggatt, Shakespeare's Political Drama: The History Plays and the Roman Plays (London: Routledge 1988), 64.

18. Henry IV, Part I, III.ii.78-79.

19. Cf Barkan, 15-16, and Zeeveld, 43.

20. Anne Barton, quoting Maurice Keen's The Outlaws of Medieval Legend, describes plays like George-a-Green and The Shoemakers Holiday as developments of a naïve popular fantasy in which the king was seen as the embodiment of mercy and true justice. ‘The King Disguised: Shakespeare's Henry V and the Comical History,’ in The Triple Bond, ed Joseph G. Price (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press 1975), 92-117.

21. See, for instance, Zitner, 239-56; Barkan, 11-15; and Rackin, 273-80.

22. Janet M. Spencer, ‘Staging Pardon Scenes: Variations on Tragicomedy,’ Renaissance Drama ns 21 (1990), 74.

23. I Henry IV, III.ii.69. Richard's change of tone in his last scene, when he responds to his groom's loyal greeting—‘Hail, royal prince!’—with a self-deprecating pun—‘Thanks, noble peer; / The cheapest of us is ten groats too dear’ (V.v.67-68)—suggests that we are meant to see him as having learned something about the value of ordinary humanity at last.

24. Leonard F. Dean, ‘From Richard II to Henry V: A Closer View,’ Studies in Honor of DeWitt T. Starnes, ed Thomas P. Harrison, et al (Austin: University of Texas 1967), 39.