SOURCE: “King of Tears: Mortality in Richard II,” in Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, Vol. 39, No. 1, 1985, pp. 7-18.

[In the following essay, Kehler emphasizes the tragic and psychological aspects of Richard II as she traces the king's emotional journey from a conviction that he is invulnerable to a recognition of his mortality.]

Love's Labor's Lost, which initially depicts an attempt to defeat death through fame, comes to a remarkable comedic close as Marcade enters to announce the French king's death, displacing courtship with mourning. Death also stalks Richard II, contemporaneous with Love's Labor's Lost, transforming it from a parvum opus, a lesser history play important chiefly as prologue to the masterly Henriad, to the self-contained story of a pitiful and terrifying confrontation with mortality. However much England's fate is bound up with its king's, however much dramatic importance accrues to Bolingbroke, our interest is focused above all on the eloquent, tormented individual who dominates the play. As Larry S. Champion observes, “conceptually Richard II is more nearly tragedy than history” (70). Expanding the boundaries of earlier Shakespearean history plays, Richard II diffuses into what Polonius calls “tragical-historical,” presenting a de casibus protagonist whose plight is Everyman's.

By mid-play Richard knows that he is going to die, and soon: a deposed monarch is unlikely to live long. The distance between a heretofore unengaging protagonist and his audience is lessened by the intensity of Richard's anguish. Thus, to observe the anguish of the king at bay is to risk an unwelcome confrontation with our own feelings towards death. Examining the psychology of death, Robert Kastenbaum and Ruth Aisenberg write, “Admission or exposure of our thanatophobia marks us as immature, weak, or morbid. It is childish. It is unmanly.” They conclude, “We seem to fear the fear of death” (43). Perhaps because critics are no less immune than anyone else to fearing the fear of death, discussions of Richard II by and large sacrifice the tragical to the historical, the psychological to the ceremonial and linguistic. Yet only by entering Richard's death-centered world can we fully understand our peculiar sympathy for so callously self-absorbed, unfit a king, whose crimes against his kin, indifference to the commonweal, and reluctance to admit guilt should bar that sympathy. Richard does not move us as a ruler (albeit a gifted actor-poet) deservedly facing loss of power, but rather as our congener, publicly enacting his thanatophobia and despair.

Death is an opponent Richard had not anticipated. Kingship, prolonging solipsistic childhood, has shielded him from recognition of his own mortality. Is he not semi-divine, God's substitute on earth? Then, shattering his complacency, comes the realization that the king is not Death's substitute, that Divine Right is not synonymous with divine immortality. No less than those he has victimized, Richard is a victim of the hypostatization of a political theory; his wholehearted belief in the Divine Right rationale for absolutism¹ allows his part in the human condition to take him by surprise. Even in his blind security, however, the king is Everyman writ large. With less excuse, all men see what they wish to see. Few still young and in health look on their deaths as other than a remote, insubstantial eventuality.

Under Bolingbroke's compulsion, Richard makes a psychic pilgrimage delineated by the association of death and tears in the play's iterative verbal and stage imagery.² References to death, preparing for the powerful fifth-act stage images of the assassination and the coffin, are earlier made concrete by the sight of the weeping king whose tears express a gamut of emotions: grief, loss, betrayal, anger, humiliation, fear, and defeat. Unmanned by the prospect of death, Richard cries like a child, not only tearful in himself but the cause of tears in Isabel, York, Aumerle, Carlisle, and finally even Bolingbroke. Tears, falling as the king falls, evoke our continual awareness of death and, far more than the allied vertical imagery first noted by Jorgensen, grip us emotionally. A major directorial cue, the textual indications of weeping control the actors, eliciting in performance, if not always actual tears, at least the cracking voice, the contorted face. As time runs out for the unready king, such insistent stage imagery, reinforced by verbal references to weeping and death, creates the sense of tragic inevitability. These tears are discomforting, especially Richard's out-of-control, lachrymose writhings, ineffectual attempts to reconcile himself to his end, for they are shadows of our shared evasions.

The pathos of Richard's breakdown is all the greater because at first he is in control—of himself if not of his two most intractable subjects; he is, seemingly, a ceremonial king. Formal blocking and stylized verse serve as the directorial cues here, negating the psychological reality of death. The murder of Thomas of Woodstock, presumably at Richard's behest, never touches the king's heart. Only Gloucester's widow weeps for her husband, first coupling death with tears: “Desolate, desolate, will I hence and die: / The last leave of thee takes my weeping eye” (I.ii. 73-74). Of his many lines on grief throughout the play, Richard has none to spare for this unwanted uncle. Nor does Gloucester's death bring home to Richard his own vulnerability. A new political threat must be dealt with, no more than that. Assassinated in distant Calais, Gloucester died invisibly, a desaparecido. So, too, for all his talk of “letting blood” (I.i. 153) and “too deep incision” (I.i. 155), the death of either Bolingbroke or Mowbray in the trial by combat is never an emotional reality for Richard. While the king's life is secure, Death is a bondslave to the crown.

The death of John of Gaunt strikes nearer home. As the elder statesman presumes upon the privilege of fatal illness, Richard loses control and ceremony begins to slip away. Twice Richard has wished Gaunt dead. At his most snide, Richard amuses his flatterers by invoking the deity to end Gaunt's life: “Now put it, God, in the physician's mind / To help him to his grave immediately!” (I.iv. 59-60). Arriving at Ely House sooner than he had hoped, enraged by Gaunt's tongue-lashing, Richard reiterates his wish: “And let them die that age and sullens have, / For both hast thou, and both become the grave” (II.i.139-40). Only six lines intervene between these words and Northumberland's entrance as herald of Gaunt's death. In David Giles' 1978 BBC production, York, hearing of his brother's death, turns aside and weeps. Richard (Derek Jacobi) does not weep; instead, he looks stunned. Could the king's mere wish, a fiercer Midas touch, have killed yet another uncle?³ Or does Richard begin to sense his own mortality? He expresses not sorrow but eagerness to rationalize Gaunt's death:

The ripest fruit first falls, and so doth he;
His time is spent, our pilgrimage must be.
So much for that.

(II.i. 153-55)

In this shockingly truncated response, Richard both disclaims responsibility for Gaunt's death (Gaunt died because he was old, “the ripest”) and assures himself that he, being young, has a long life ahead of him: people die, after all, in order of seniority. That so clever a man as Richard should take refuge in a cliché to which the murder of Gloucester gives the lie bespeaks the onset of Richard's fear. The face behind the mask of kingship is all too human.

Not until his return to Milford Haven does Richard weep, an actor's tears, bred of his ceremonial sense of occasion. But despite their theatricality, Richard's tears and smiles visually epitomize the opposed emotions of fear and hope between which he vacillates so affectingly in this scene:

                                                                                                    I weep for joy
To stand upon my kingdom once again.
.....As a long-parted mother with her child
Plays fondly with her tears and smiles in meeting,
So weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth,
And do thee favours with my royal hands;
.....This earth shall have a feeling, and these stones
Prove armed soldiers ere her native king
Shall falter under foul rebellion's arms.

(III.ii. 4-5, 8-11, 24-26)

Such joy as Richard feels stems from fear momentarily giving way to pride of ownership. His kingdom, his earth, will protect him from rebellion—and from death. For if Bolingbroke can disobey the king successfully, then he is the king; and for a lesson in the extent to which royal power can be abused, Richard need only remember Woodstock's fate. Fear infuses the king's untoward simile of himself as a mother—not father—seeking protection from—not protecting—her child, England's earth with its soldier-stones. Richard's lack of issue, both a political liability and a foreclosure of temporal immortality, deepens the irony of his revealing conceit.

Richard's on-stage audience serves as chorus. If, like Antony, Richard wishes “to make his followers weep” that they may fight for him more fiercely, he fails. Apostrophizing his earth, calling on its spiders, toads, nettles, and adders, he evokes only uneasy amusement: “Mock not my senseless conjuration, lords” (III.ii.23). Behind the tears of joy and the “senseless conjuration,” Richard's partisans sense his fear and are embarrassed for him. Watching Richard the man weep, they witness the disintegration of his predictable persona, his consciously created and projected self-image. Watching Richard the king weep, helplessly they witness loss of control where control is most expected. So, amid disconcerted laughter, the Bishop exhorts Richard, “Fear not, my lord” (III.ii.27).

What Richard fears and begins to face upon hearing of the Welsh army's dispersion is surely more than loss of power: “Cry woe, destruction, ruin, and decay—/ The worst is death, and death will have his day” (III.ii.102-03).⁴ This odd, almost convincing note of careless, fatalistic acceptance continues to resonate as Richard vacillates between surrender to despair and an inextinguishable urge to live. If death will have his day, Richard will make poetry of his fear, anesthetizing himself aesthetically, surrendering his power and life before he is asked, as if he and not Bolingbroke had been privy to Gaunt's admonition that “gnarling sorrow hath less power to bite / The man that mocks at it and sets it light” (I.iii.292-93). Nevertheless, upon hearing of the deaths of Bushy, Green, and Wiltshire, Richard weeps again; these unripe friends (perhaps his lovers) receive the tribute of a king's “rainy eyes” (III.ii.146) as Richard invites Aumerle, Carlisle, and the others to “sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings: / How some have been depos'd …” (III.ii.155-57). To look on death from an aesthetic or philosophical distance becomes increasingly difficult. If “our lives, and all, are Bolingbroke's” (III.ii.151), then Richard's life as well as his friends' is forfeit; Richard speaks, therefore, of the death of kings rather than courtiers, and mentions first deposed kings. He knows before Bolingbroke the issue of these arms.

Seated upon his earth, soon to be his grave, Richard considers how

                                                                                          within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court. …

(III.ii.160-62)

Now he feelingly discovers the truth behind the euhemeristic theory of Divine Right:

I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends—subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king?

(III.ii.175-77)

If not king over death, then no king at all.⁵ Carlisle, responding to Richard's tears, enjoins the king to “presently prevent the ways to wail” (III.ii.179), that is, to give battle and, if need be, to defeat death by dying bravely:

Fear and be slain—no worse can come to fight;
And fight and die is death destroying death,
Where fearing dying pays death servile breath.

(III.ii.183-85)

He understands that in announcing the deaths of Richard's friends, Scroop tacitly announces Richard's imminent fate. The king weeps for himself.

The loss of Bushy, Green, and Wiltshire marks an emotional turning point for Richard. Over time he might have learned to accommodate himself to his own extinction. But always out of step with time, he is denied time's healing instruction. The lessons inherent in Gloucester's and Gaunt's deaths he had rejected. Taken unawares, the devastated king writhes, and the entelechy of the play is affected: although verse and settings for the most part remain formal, the doomed, weeping king crosses over the boundaries of ceremony and historical circumstance into the domain of the psychological and universal. The tension between ceremony and realism enriches Richard II. As its protagonist eludes the constraints of the “Tudor myth” and the chronicle play, the historical metamorphoses into the tragical-historical. Shakespeare's Richard possesses psychological complexities absent in Holinshed's or Daniel's. Such psychological realism deepens ceremony, while ceremony both sharpens realism through contrast and, paradoxically, makes Richard's “lamentable tale” (V.i.44) endurable.

The psychological Richard again comes to the fore once he learns that York has joined Bolingbroke. The king disbands his few troops, returns to “that sweet way I was in to despair!” (III.ii.205), and resolves to “pine away” (III.ii.209) at Flint Castle. Languorous and pliant, Richard appears to be capitalizing on the feminine elements of his character to seduce Death: by yielding himself unreservedly, “woe's slave” (III.ii.210) may yet become Death's queen. This is more than fatalism: Shakespeare anticipates William Burroughs. To succumb to Death as to a paramour is to transform le petit mort into the ultimate sexual experience, a last frontier of sensation and forbidden knowledge. An aura of triumphant masochism, of the perversely Faustian, surrounds the sweetness of despair.

Even so, briefly, on the battlements of Flint Castle, Richard's pride of place returns. A proud, ceremonial king, “so fair a show” (III.iii.71), drives Northumberland to his knees, demanding to be shown “The hand of God / That hath dismiss'd us from our stewardship” (III.iii.77-78). But if Bolingbroke cannot produce God's hand, neither can Richard produce God's armies of pestilence. Although convinced to the end that he is God's favorite, he comes to feel that God is helpless against Death's temporal omnipotence. In an aborted ploy, Richard in effect makes his will; like a fearful sinner who bequeaths his estate to the church, the king offers up all his worldly possessions in exchange for a religious life—for life itself. Then, as if acknowledging the futility of bargaining with God in the face of Death's hegemony,⁶ he offers the final exchange: “my large kingdom for a little grave” (III.iii.153). And together, he and Aumerle weep (III.iii.160-61).

These tears of defeat revive Richard's morbid fascination with dying as an act of love. His identity deliquescing, Richard may yet seduce Death, if not by yielding, then by dalliance:

Or shall we play the wantons with our woes,
And make some pretty match with shedding tears?
As thus to drop them still upon one place,
Till they have fretted us a pair of graves
Within the earth, and therein laid—there lies
Two kinsmen digg'd their graves with weeping eyes!

(III.iii.164-69)

Once again the king's followers demur: “I talk but idly, and you laugh at me” (III.iii.171).⁷ Awkward and uneasy in their pity and embarrassment, they teach Richard that neither his prettiest wit nor most self-destructive impulses can soften the harsh reality of his fate. Hysterically, he descends to the base court to give away his kingdom and his life to Bolingbroke, Death's agent, while York, a speechless chorus, weeps. To this unwillingly disloyal uncle, Richard offers manly affection: “Uncle, give me your hands; nay, dry your eyes—/ Tears show their love, but want their remedies” (III.iii.202-03). Remediless, all ploys exhausted, Richard reveals the best in his nature. If magnanimity is the true hallmark of royalty, then fleetingly we are in the presence of a king.

It is not a role Richard can sustain. His ordeal is too taxing for his unprepared spirit. York describes Richard's reception in London to his Duchess, who reminds him, “My lord, you told me you would tell the rest, / When weeping made you break the story off …” (V.ii.1-2). Still upset (in the BBC production, York falters in his recital and must borrow his wife's handkerchief), he continues:

No joyful tongue gave him his welcome home,
But dust was thrown upon his sacred head;
Which with such gentle sorrow he shook off,
His face still combating with tears and smiles,
The badges of his grief and patience,
That had not God for some strong purpose steel'd
The hearts of men, they must perforce have melted,
And barbarism itself have pitied him.

(V.ii.29-36)

Richard's tears and smiles in London brilliantly recapitulate the earlier image of the king's intuition of vulnerability at Milford Haven:

As a long-parted mother with her child
Plays fondly with her tears and smiles in meeting,
So weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth. …

(III.ii.8-10)

The contrast is striking. In the past Richard vitiated pathos through verbal excess. Now a captive, the king is speechless, an ill-graced “extra,” derided by contemptuous, scowling spectators, unprotected by his God. These latter tears and smiles are heartfelt. Abused, Richard makes his most appealing public appearance. Speechless, he cannot mar the pathos of his situation with self-pity or too intimate revelations of his psychosexual nature. He can only suffer. Unlike Bolingbroke, the “silent king” (IV.i.290) who plays his cards close to the chest, Richard often seems too voluble; he tells us too much, more than he knows. Here, through York's words, he becomes a silent, moving picture. This double-exposure of Richard's tears and smiles measures his progress. The proclivity to vacillate is still there: Richard is as unsteady as he is unready. But the callow king who returned to Wales, fearful yet not without hope of victory, returns to the angry streets of London doomed and hopeless, yet far more affecting.

In Westminster Hall, after his degradation by the London mob, his little stock of courage runs out. His command—“Here, cousin, seize the crown” (IV.i.181)—succeeds only because Bolingbroke's seizure of Richard's crown, kingdom, and life is a fait accompli. Ceremony, founded on Richard's legitimate right and evidenced by the habit of command, has been undercut by his crimes and desperate vacillation. The cruel moment when Richard, naked before his enemies, breaks down and weeps is framed by verbal references to tears. Summoned to Westminster to abdicate, Richard compares the crown to a well holding two buckets: “That bucket down and full of tears am I, / Drinking my griefs …” (IV.i.188-89); then unkings himself: “With mine own tears I wash away my balm” (IV.i.207). Not yet satisfied, Northumberland, prosecutor in this medieval purge trial, prods him to read a confession of his crimes against the state. Richard, however, can only sob, “Mine eyes are full of tears, I cannot see” (IV.i.244). His humiliation is complete.

But Richard has further cause for weeping. Twice in this scene he compares himself to Christ, referring to the faithlessness of those Judases who had pledged him their loyalty (IV.i.167-71), and again to the Pilates who “Have here deliver'd me to my sour cross” (IV.i.241). This is the point at which Richard blinds his eyes with tears, for these metaphors suggest what may well be Richard's shattering revelation—that even a God can be killed. If a God, then so too God's substitute. Only Death never dies. Richard's “sour cross” is a metaphor for deposition, but also for death. The scene ends with the Abbot sharing knowledge of the conspiracy against Bolingbroke with Richard's tearful supporters, Aumerle and Carlisle, in a speech that once more links death and tears:

Before I freely speak my mind herein,
You shall not only take the sacrament
To bury mine intents, but also to effect
Whatever I shall happen to devise.
I see your brows are full of discontent,
Your hearts of sorrow, and your eyes of tears.

(IV.i.327-32)

The metaphor foreshadows the burial not of the conspiracy but of the Abbot himself—and Richard. The figurative language of the deposition scene has to do no less with Richard's death than with the loss of a throne.

Before Richard invites the French peasantry to weep at his “lamentable tale,” Shakespeare heightens our sympathy by letting us see him through his queen's grieved and adoring eyes:

But soft, but see, or rather do not see,
My fair rose wither—yet look up, behold,
That you in pity may dissolve to dew,
And wash him fresh again with true-love tears.

(V.i.7-10)

Richard knows, as yet Isabel does not, that this is their final parting. He speaks of “a new world's crown” (V.i.24), not of a future meeting, and asks her to “Think I am dead, and that even here thou takest, / As from my deathbed, thy last living leave” (V.i.38-39). But he does not enlarge upon divine rewards. Before winning a new world's crown, he must lose this world. Since the religious life Richard has poetized in act III, scene iii, cannot protect him from loss of life, he turns away. Self-pity leads him to almost forget his wife, except as his mournful biographer:

Tell thou the lamentable tale of me,
And send the hearers weeping to their beds;
For why, the senseless brands will sympathize
The heavy accent of thy moving tongue,
And in compassion weep the fire out. …

(V.i.44-48)

The only consolation Richard can offer Isabel is that, although sundered, they will be united in sorrow: “So two, together weeping, make one woe. / Weep thou for me in France, I for thee here” (V.i.86-87). Then, begging a last kiss, she ironically foreshadows Richard's murder in her metaphor of love that kills:

Give me mine own [heart] again; 'twere no good part
To take on me to keep and kill thy heart.
So, now I have mine own again, be gone,
That I may strive to kill it with a groan.

(V.i.97-100)

Once more tears point the way to death as Richard looks his last on his sometime queen.

The last time we see Richard cry, we are eavesdropping on his private misery. Bereft of even a hostile audience, alone with his thoughts, Richard enforcedly pines away, becoming Time's instrument as he measures his wasted time and present anguish:

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.

(V.v.51-54)

Jacobi, taking his cue from the visual implications of this speech, touched his eye to wipe away a tear. The gesture is apt because Richard has been dwelling on death: scripture fails him, offering no certainty of salvation; thoughts of ambition “die in their own pride” (V.v.22). Again, he despairs:

Nor I, nor any man that but man is,
With nothing shall be pleas'd, till he be eas'd
With being nothing.

(V.v.39-41)

Defeated by life, he seems to welcome death.

And yet, with no comfort but the release of tears, he collaborates in making “misfortune live” (V.v.71). Why does he not starve himself to death as, historically, Thomas Walsingham reports? (Holinshed 24-25). The question is not idle. Despite the grand design informing the tetralogies—the curse upon England for the slaying of its lawful king—and the dramatic superiority of murder to starvation, we still have the right to expect characters to act in character. Addressing himself to the comedies, far more subject to convention and stylization than the histories, Ralph Berry states the common perception: “the behavior of the dramatis personae is, or ought to be, explicable in terms of naturalistic psychology. I take it to be axiomatic that Shakespeare's intuitive grasp of psychology is the foundation of his drama” (18). We may ask, then, does Richard continue to endure for fear of physical pain? Reluctance to incur the sin of suicide? The possibility of escape? Refusal to make easier Bolingbroke's way? An ineradicable survival instinct? Probably for all these reasons. At any rate, though Richard speaks nihilistically, this victim of himself, of power, of history, and of Bolingbroke, clings to life. Thus, even before he lifts a weapon, his endurance commands approval, perhaps even respect.

Did Shakespeare come to respect as well as pity the historical man behind the imaginative creation? This we know: by choosing to dramatize the version of Richard's death most becoming to a man, he spares Isabel's fair rose the final withering of spirit. If, like Charles I, Richard had been publicly executed, it seems likely that he would have made a resigned and dignified exit. Ceremony is Richard's forte. But Shakespeare's Richard is no passive victim; he is given the chance to make a better end. Nihilism gives way to irritability when Richard learns that Bolingbroke has usurped not only his crown but his horse, irritability exacerbated by his keeper's refusal to taste his food on “the King's” orders. Thus goaded, Richard is all the more infuriated at the unceremonious form his end must take: “what means death in this rude assault?” (V.v.105). That a king should die so rudely at the hands of base hirelings offends Richard's most dearly held values of aesthetics and propriety. At the last Richard fights for his kingdom that has shrunk to his own hapless self. He fights on behalf of ceremony, testifying to the valor of his royal blood only as it spills out of him.

Facing death with dry eyes is a near-redemptive ending for a near-tragic hero. There is nothing voluptuous about Richard's death; reality renders all his psychological maneuverings profitless. But as Richard undergoes his own trial by combat, he is granted a final reprieve from fear and despair—not that he conquers fear but that, blessedly, he forgets it. Fighting for his life (and for what he thinks of as integrity), he loses himself in passionate action. Whether courage or sheer instinct impel him is immaterial. What matters is that he seems wholly alive, almost carefree, finally tear-free. Enacting the last rite of passage, this unlikeliest of exemplars demonstrates the capacity for self-forgetfulness, other than faith our only inherent defense against thanatophobia. If Richard's soul does indeed mount up on high, it is not because of a special dispensation for Divine Right kings but because we the audience, playing God to Richard's Everyman, assent. For all his foolishness, vanity, and criminality, Richard dies well, neither whining for life nor devaluing it through surrender. We can at last applaud and accept identification with Richard, for we are all, perforce, de casibus characters, awaiting our fall, fighting a doomed holding action against Time and Death.

Bolingbroke understands. As he looks upon the play's final stage image, the coffin dominating the stage, he looks on his end. Wordlessly, Richard tells him that the coffin, like the crown, is in reversion his, that the conqueror must join the conquered. The new king may hope to wash the blood off his hands, but he cannot wash off the fragility of flesh and blood. Although Bolingbroke's epicedium concludes the play with the final echoing conflation of death and tears—“grace my mournings here / In weeping after this untimely bier” (V.vi.51-52)—Richard has the last word. Death is always untimely, a coffin always a memento mori. The Tragedy of King Richard the Second is the tragedy of mortality.

Notes

1. Ronald R. MacDonald's discussion of sacred kingship is illuminating: “The king is not called ‘God's anointed,’ one does not speak of the divinity that hedges a king because the king really is supreme and untouchable, but because he is patently vulnerable, because in many ways his position is the shakiest one in the pluralistic feudal world” (23).

2. Richard B. Altick first drew attention to tears and weeping as a verbal imagery strand (348-49).

3. Such an interpretation is in keeping with Richard's childlike egocentrism as the Lord's deputy: “the child tends to believe that events happen in a certain way because he thinks about them in a certain way. There are many ‘magical’ ways of thinking about death. Of particular interest is the notion that an angry thought or intention directed toward somebody makes the child, in effect, a murderer” (Kastenbaum 23).

4. The omen implicit in the Welsh having thought him dead is not lost upon Richard. Immediately, he speaks of himself as looking “pale and dead” (III.ii.79).

5. Richard David describes John Barton's 1973 Stratford production in which “the final tableau showed neither Richard nor Bolingbroke crowned, but both standing as equal supporters of King Death” (171).

6. In contrast, Bolingbroke, secure enough in this world but fearful of the next, unquestioningly bargains with God for salvation, pardoning Aumerle—“I pardon him, as God shall pardon me” (V.iii.129)—and vowing an ironically bloody penance as crusader in return for eternal life despite his regicide—“I'll make a voyage to the Holy Land, / To wash this blood off from my guilty hand” (V.vi. 49-50).

7. Ann Pasternak Slater points out how our responses are guided by Richard's on-stage audience: “Stage observers and theatre audience alike laugh uncomfortably at Richard's maudlin fantasy, and the self-indulgent image-spinning which was Shakespeare's error in Titus is turned into an effective piece of characterization” (103).

8. I am indebted to Evelyn and Gerald Butler of San Diego State University for my better understanding of Richard's death scene.

9. This is the quarto title, under which the play was known during Shakespeare's lifetime (Ure xiii).

Works Cited

Altick, Richard B. “Symphonic Imagery in Richard II.” PMLA 62 (1947): 339-65.

Berry, Ralph. Shakespeare's Comedies: Explorations in Form. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.

Champion, Larry S. Perspective in Shakespeare's English Histories. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1980.

David, Richard. Shakespeare in the Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Holinshed, Raphael. “Henry the Fourth.” Holinshed's Chronicles: Richard II 1398-1400, Henry IV, and Henry V. 1587. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1978.

Jorgensen, Paul A. “Vertical Patterns in Richard II.” Shakespeare Association Bulletin 23 (1948): 119-34.

Kastenbaum, Robert, and Ruth Aisenberg. The Psychology of Death. New York: Springer, 1972.

MacDonald, Ronald R. “Uneasy Lies: Language and History in Shakespeare's Lancastrian Tetralogy.” Shakespeare Quarterly 35 (1984): 22-39.

[Shakespeare, William.] King Richard II. Ed. Peter Ure. The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare. London: Methuen, 1956.

Slater, Ann Pasternak. Shakespeare the Director. Sussex: Harvester; New York: Barnes, 1982.