[In the following essay, Black contends that Act IV, scenes ii-iii of Richard II validate rather than mock the stately rituals of the deposition scene that precedes them. The critic argues that during the grievous pageant of his uncoronation, Richard becomes a self-declared beggar, praying for the same dispensation from Henry IV that Aumerle asks of him in the subsequent scenes.]

Everyone is by now perfectly familiar with the point of view that regards Richard II as an exposé of the sham of kingship. Criticism has come, with its little pin, to pierce through the hollow crown or burst the bubble of “Ceremony.” And we also are familiar with the idea that a metaphor of playacting is developed throughout this tragedy to expound the lesson that it is futile for anyone to embrace this sham of kingship too seriously. In Richard II Richard does not “play the king” as efficiently as Bolingbroke does; nor indeed can anyone—even Bolingbroke—quite satisfactorily bridge the chasm that yawns between the “realities” of political power and the “appearances” of majesty itself. At the end of his reign, in 2 Henry IV (IV.v.198-99) Bolingbroke will admit that “all [his] reign has been but as a scene Acting [the] argument” of half-deserved kingship. G. A. Bonnard, Leonard F. Dean, and Anne Righter¹ have prompted us to regard Richard II as a play about playing, whose action frequently is acting, with first Richard and then Bolingbroke as producers of the scenes in which they appear—all this despite Peter Ure's well-taken caution that in fact it is neither Richard nor Bolingbroke but Shakespeare who sets these scenes before us.²

If a theme of Richard II is playacting, what kind of play or scene is being enacted in the passages which follow just after Richard's deposition and parting from his queen? These are the passages (V.ii; V.iii) in which Aumerle's plot is discovered, proclaimed to the new king, and pardoned. Analyzing these scenes in his article “Aumerle's Conspiracy,” Sheldon P. Zitner asserted that they are “fully intended farce, sometimes roaring, sometimes savage, but farce with such salt and savour as to distress the taste for pageant, pathos, and elevated death the play otherwise appeals to and satisfies. … In the Aumerle scenes Shakespeare has inserted a satyr play into the last act of his tragedy.”³ “Distress the taste” hints at a vitiation of the more serious scenes by this farcical element, and Zitner's conclusion is explicit: the Aumerle conspiracy scenes “mock [Richard II's] elevation and seriousness; they riddle its style. They destroy the fine trajectory of emotion that ends in the intensity of Richard's murder in Pomfret Castle and the eloquent guilt of Bolingbroke in the last scene. They strike at almost everything that moves us in the tragedy. [Yet they indicate] Shakespeare's complexity and toughness of mind.”⁴

Zitner's conclusion of farce is predicated mainly upon the action the scenes clearly seem to call for: Aumerle with his plot indenture foolishly hanging from his clothing; York struggling with his riding boots; the seriatim arrivals at Bolingbroke's presence chamber and the hammering on the doors by the old duke and duchess; the exaggerated kneeling. There seems no doubt that Shakespeare meant these scenes to be comic. The question is, Did he mean them to be comic in a way that mocked the rest of the play and tended to drag that playacting down to their level?

Bolingbroke is made to comment upon the comic turn. Taking up the words of Aumerle's mother, “A beggar begs that never begg'd before,” he says, “Our scene is alt'red from a serious thing, And now chang'd to ‘The Beggar and the King’” (V.iii.77-78). It is the first time in the play—in his trilogy—that he speaks in “theatrical” terms. When he last speaks so—saying that all his reign has been but as a scene—he will use the same word, “scene,” that he uses here in Richard II. And this should make us ask whether, though Bolingbroke is capable of irony and of the rather stiff witticism, he is exactly the kind of character we would associate with full-blooded farce. I think that the farce of these scenes may be in flow, but it is a flow which, like the flow of argument in the trial scene which Bolingbroke conducted in IV.i (Aumerle is one of the disputants there), beats without injury against Bolingbroke's adamant. Perhaps his word “scene” refers not just to this scene in which he is an embarrassed participant, but the wider scene which embraces the events in which he already has played. Those events are to him “a serious thing” indeed; they may be meant to be serious to us as well, and the “farce” may be supposed to counterpoint that seriousness.

The “serious thing” that the beggar and the king matter follows is the deposition scene of Richard and that scene's aftermath: Richard's parting from Isabel and York's report of Bolingbroke's and Richard's entry (about which I will say more later on) into London. In V.i Richard and his queen in parting play out a duet of grief. The scene has a distinct parallel in Romeo's and Juliet's first meeting, which takes place at a masquelike domestic revel (Romeo and Juliet I.v). Just what did Shakespeare in the 1590s conceive a masque to be? Enid Welsford discusses A Midsummer Night's Dream as “a masque-like” play while affirming that “the suggestion that [the Dream] should be regarded as [a masque] has little to recommend it.”⁵ In The Merchant of Venice Shylock describes a masque as a kind of street revel, a saturnalia with fife and drum and a “shallow foppery” indulged in by “Christian fools with varnish'd faces” (II.v.28-36). The rout of young men approaching the Capulet house in Romeo and Juliet initially has something of this flavor, but Capulet's old-accustomed feast, which is called a masque by Romeo and in quarto and folio stage directions,⁶ has all the ordered dignity befitting the festivity of “earth-treading stars that make dark heaven light” (I.ii.25)—a spectacular display of wealth and courtliness, masked revelers and stately dancers. The most common Elizabethan form of masque was simply a formal dance by the masquers alone.⁷

The patterned speech and patterned movement of Romeo's and Juliet's meeting fuse in the complete and partial sonnets (I.v.95-111) which they join in speaking. Their lyrical speech is appropriate to a masque though also (and more importantly) to the tragedy denoted by their brief spell of perfect harmony's being broken into by the feud's hatred and danger. In Richard II the deposed king and queen, surrounded by enemies, also “let lips do what hands do” (Romeo and Juliet I.v.103) as they develop and speak a sonnetlike conceit while they touch, kiss and part:

RICHARD.
Come, come, in wooing sorrow let's be brief,
Since, wedding it, there is such length in grief:
One kiss shall stop our mouths, and dumbly part;
Thus give I mine, and thus take I thy heart.
QUEEN.
Give me mine own again; 'twere no good part
To take on me to keep and kill my heart.
So, now I have mine own again, be gone.

[V.i.93-98]

This little ceremonial at the parting of Richard and his queen also emphasizes—as masques could do⁸—a theme of seasonal change:

Part us, Northumberland: I towards the north,
Where shivering cold and sickness pines the clime;
My wife to France, from whence set forth in pomp,
She came adorned hither like sweet May,
Sent back like Hallowmass or short'st of day.

[V.i.76-80]

What we appear to have in these scenes from Romeo and Juliet and Richard II, then, are examples of what Welsford refers to as “the masque influence”:

The masque influence made itself felt, not only by causing interruptions in the action, but by permeating the form and spirit of tragedy in a way that is easier to feel than to define. In the Elizabethan age masquerading was so much in the air that insensibly, inevitably, it coloured the imagination of playwright and play-goer, and infected the epical imitative play with something of the symbolic movement of the masque.⁹

In fact, Richard II is strongly “infected … with … the symbolic movement of the masque.” The masque influence is especially present in the high ceremonial of Richard's deposition—the “inverted rite” as Walter Pater called it, a “long, agonizing ceremony, reflectively drawn out, with an extraordinary refinement of intelligence and variety of piteous appeal, but also with a felicity of poetic invention.”¹⁰ No such ceremonial is indicated in Holinshed's account of Richard's overthrow, which confines itself to Richard's capitulation at Flint Castle and his committal to the Tower, with detailed transcriptions of the major articles and instruments of deposition. Far more striking in Holinshed is the description of “the manner and order of the king's [that is, Richard's] coronation,” which runs to nearly two thousand words (by way of comparison, Edward II's and Edward III's coronations are not described at all by Holinshed; Edward I's is recounted in about two hundred words). Richard's crowning, as Gervase Mathew notes, was a new, elaborate ceremonial for an English king.¹¹ In Holinshed it is an astonishing event, with the anointing ritual amounting to an assault on the senses:

When the people with a lowd voice had answered that they would obeie him, the archbishop vsing certeine praiers, blessed the king; which ended, the archbishop came vnto him, and tearing his garments from the highest part to the lowest, stripped him to his shirt. Then was brought by earles, a certeine couerture of cloth of gold, vnder the which he remained, whilest he was annointed.

The archbishop (as we haue said), hauing stripped him first annointed his hands, then his head, brest, shoulders, and ioints of his armes with the sacred oile, saieng certeine praiers, and in the meane time did the queere sing the antheme, beginning, Vnxerunt regem Salomonem, &c. And the archbishop added another praier, Deus Dei filius, &c. Which ended, he and the other bishops soong the hymne, Veni creator spiritus, the king kneeling in a long vesture, & the archbishop with his suffraganes about him. When the hymne was ended, he was lift vp by the archbishop, and clad first with the coate of saint Edward, and after with his mantell, a stoale being cast about his necke, the archbishop in the meane time saieng certeine praiers appointed for the purpose. After this, the archbishop and bishops deliuered to him the sword, saieng, Accipe gladium, &c.¹²

Mathew conjectures that the ceremony may well have influenced Richard for the rest of his life, and Pater shrewdly conceives that the chronicle accounts of this terrific ritual influenced the creation of a Shakespearean tragic hero who emphatically reiterates his dream of sacredness:¹³

Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm off from an anointed king.

The coronation account is unmatchable by anything that the Elizabethan theater could have displayed in terms of pageantry. (It is easy to imagine a playwright's wistfulness on reading this section of Holinshed, and it is impossible to conceive of the play without the deposition events, which were omitted from the printed quartos 1-3, quite likely because of the political climate in 1597-98. As Peter Ure suggests, the deposition is likely to have been performed on the stage even though it was considered too risky for print.¹⁴) The high point of Richard II is at any rate the deposition moment which, as mentioned, Holinshed tends to surround with a thicket of documentation. Shakespeare not only clears away the verbiage here; he also has the idea of extending the play's rhetorical device (noticed by Miriam Joseph¹⁵) of negative or privative terms—“undeaf,” “unhappied,” “uncurse,” “unkiss.” Richard becomes “unkinged,” and in becoming so goes through a form of uncoronating, a ceremony of decoronation. The abdication scene of IV.i is rather like a coronation ritual filmed and then run backwards, not with the speed and jerkiness usually associated with a film so run, but with elaborate stateliness. For Richard's music at the close of his reign is spoken to accompany a pattern of movement as well: the proferring of the crown (IV.i.181), the “buckets in the well” tableau; the visible process (“in common view,” l. 155) of giving away the crown, then the scepter, washing away the balm, and proclaiming the successor: “God save King Henry, unking'd Richard says” (l. 220).

The poetic invention seen by Pater comes so predominantly from one character that it is very easy to conceive of Richard's deposition scene as written for solo voice and figure. But Bolingbroke's cryptic and reluctant contributions actually make him as much a foil and partner for Richard as the queen will be in the next scene. In fact, the queen there is at first as reluctant (see V.i.26-34) to join Richard's recital of grief as Bolingbroke is to particpate in Richard's deposition ritual. Bolingbroke's contribution to the decoronating is notably wary, stilted, and even clumsy. Richard, all too skilled in this patterned self-destruction, has to place his rival's hand for the tableau with the crown:

Give me the crown. Here, cousin, seize the crown.
Here cousin,
On this side my hand, and on that side thine.

[IV.i.181-83]

Thus Bolingbroke's first touch of the crown is a compelled one—and how he must involuntarily start to comply with the order, “Here, cousin, seize the crown,” and then draw back! He makes as sure of being forced as Richard does of forcing him, and in Henry IV Part Two will say, “I and greatness were compelled to kiss” (III.i.74). But once his hand is on the crown he is a close, thralled participant in Richard's tragic rite, suffering the agonies of Richard's apparent indecision:

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.200-203]

Daniel's Civil Wars has it that “'Tis said with his owne hands he gave the crowne / To Lancaster” (II, st. 119), and it is tempting to speculate that in the decoronation Richard adds to the silent Bolingbroke each appurtenance of kingship which he removes from himself. Finally, there is the business with the mirror, and at last the shattering of the glass leaves Richard face to face not with himself but with Bolingbroke, beggar and king:

RICHARD.
I'll beg one boon,
And then be gone, and trouble you no more.
Shall I obtain it?
BOLINGBROKE.
Name it, fair cousin.
RICHARD.
Fair cousin! I am greater than a king;
For when I was a king, my flatterers
Were then but subjects; being now a subject,
I have a king here to my flatterer.
Being so great, I have no need to beg.
BOLINGBROKE.
Yet ask.
RICHARD.
And shall I have?
BOLINGBROKE.
You shall.
RICHARD.
Then give me leave to go.

[IV.i.302-12]

Editors have tended to look outside Richard II for some ballad prototype of Bolingbroke's “The Beggar and the King,” but there really is no need to do so. Richard says of himself:

Sometimes am I king,
Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,
And so I am. Then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better when a king;
Then am I king'd again. …

[V.v.32-36]

“The Beggar and the King” could be the title of this deposition episode as well as of the Aumerle scenes which follow. The deposition episode's seriousness and harmonies, matched by those of the immediately following duet with the queen, are soon contrasted with the disorganized blundering of the Aumerle incident in V.ii. For example, Richard's unwillingness to read for Northumberland the articles of his wrongdoings (IV.i.222-69) seems to be reversed in York's eager perusal and proclamation of Aumerle's incriminating bond; we may wonder whether York's struggle with his boots is not a kind of comic dressing which counterpoints Richard's dismantling of himself; and the duke's robust tearing away from his duchess—“Make way, unruly woman!” (l. 110)—together with the general violent dispersal of wife, husband, and son to ride pell-mell to King Henry must surely glance at the long-drawn-out parting of the preceding scene.

To return to the question which I posed at the outset, What kind of play or scene is being enacted in these passages which follow just after, and both echo and contrast so sharply with, the scenes of Richard's deposition and parting from his queen? If it could be argued that Richard's “passion” (to use Peter Ure's term¹⁶) is a masque, then the Aumerle episode might be classified as a kind of antimasque. But although, as I have suggested, music and gesture are lovingly drawn out in IV.i and IV.ii, these masquelike scenes are not a masque. At any rate, losers like Shakespeare's Richard II traditionally do not figure in masques, which are for winners. As Stephen Orgel points out (by an irony, citing a Christmas 1377 entertainment in which Prince Richard actually participated), “The sovereign wins, the masque says, because it is his nature to win; and this concept of the nature of the monarch is, in one form or another, at the root of every court masque.”¹⁷

The most helpful proposal on this question of classification comes in the play itself from the abbot of Westminster, to whom the spectacle of Richard's decoronation is “a woeful pageant” (IV.i.251). The abbot is right, of course: Richard has been a pageant king, a king of shows and a king in show. At Flint Castle, for instance, he looks marvellous:

See, see, King Richard doth himself appear,
As doth the blushing discontented sun
From out the fiery portal of the East,
When he perceives the envious clouds are bent
To dim his glory and to stain the track
Of his bright passage to the occident.
          Yet looks he like a king. Behold, his eye,
As bright as is the eagle's, lightens forth
Controlling majesty.

[III.iii.62-70]

Yet the spectacle, like that mounted on any pageant wagon, is pasteboard-thin. At this particular moment it is propped up by Aumerle, who stands behind this cut-out of a king almost as it were with paste, scissors, wire, and string, repairing the flimsy and battered image between speeches. Aumerle will do anything for Richard (though he is the very same duke of York who will die so magnificently at Agincourt, fighting for Bolingbroke's son). His loyalty to Richard makes him, to use the metaphor of the king's career as theater, construct the appearance of Richard at Flint, possibly script it (“Good my lord, let's fight with gentle words,” l. 131), certainly prompt it (“Northumberland comes back from Bolingbroke,” l. 142), then weep with frustration (l. 160) at Richard's unpredictable conceits of despair.

The pasteboard cut-out at Flint, the mockery-king of snow (IV.i.260), the hollow crown—all of these tend to suggest a crude kind of theatrical pageantry. The entry into London is a pageant show of king and beggar. To Bolingbroke:

… all tongues cried “God save thee, Bolingbroke!”
You would have thought the very windows spake,
.....… and that all the walls
With painted imagery had said at once
“Jesu preserve thee! Welcome Bolingbroke!”

While of Richard

No man cried “God save him!”
No joyful tongue gave him his welcome home,
But dust was thrown upon his sacred head.

[V.ii.11-17, 28-30]

Could Shakespeare, when he has the decoronation events described (by a churchman) as “a woeful pageant,” possibly be glancing at the theater of Richard's time and the theater of Passion plays—the pageant mysteries? Seeing Richard fancy his deposition as a passion wherein he is mocked, stripped, and delivered by Pilates and Judases to his “sour cross” (compare IV.i.167-71, 239-42), we remember that what usually comes next in the mystery cycles is the “Harrowing of Hell” interlude, that passage of thunderous knocking at the gate, devil-portering, and high excitement. Shakespeare will look more directly at the harrowing of hell in Macbeth; here in Richard II we at most can say only that he has it in the corner of his eye. Some of the sounds are there: “The Duke of York knocks at the door and crieth” (Qq. V.iii.275, S.D.), and undoubtedly his duchess thunders on the same door to Bolingbroke's presence-chamber when she arrives after her husband. And there is a muted Resurrection note at the end when, after Aumerle has been pardoned, his mother says, “Come, my old son, I pray God make thee new,” wherein she seems to echo the Book of Common Prayer's “Grant that the Old Adam in this child may be so buried, that the new man may be raised up in him.” (Aumerle gets more interesting the more we look at him: errant Aumerle is not just a preview of errant Hal, but in his final acceptance by Bolingbroke and rejection of the Old Adam he adumbrates Hal's reformation as well.)

“The Beggar and the King” does not go very far at all along the way to being a harrowing of hell: the chief correspondence with the mystery incident is in its placing directly after the passion scenes. Yet the fact that we are able to speculate or muse upon possibilities—upon the possibility that “The Beggar and the King” is an interlude in a woeful pageant, seems to suggest that the business which Shakespeare is about is not that of undercutting or mocking the seriousness of the play, but rather intensifying that seriousness by contrast or counterpoint. For if the “beggar and king” relationship is something to smile about in the Aumerle scenes then we may be meant to take it all the more seriously in the Richard scenes; the passion in the mysteries is intensified, not lessened, by the comic interlude in hell.

And so I believe that “The Beggar and the King” episode with its farcical element is designed to make us consider and value the stately ceremonials of kingship and grief that precede it. For even when these ceremonials of kingship are performed “backwards” and then burlesqued they still are very grand. The pageant may be pasteboard-thin and the patterns of the ceremony of monarchy ultimately shattered—indeed, Shakespeare requires us to consider all the hollowness and mockery. Authority, he is saying, is little and brief, and can decline to farce. The figures that move in the rays of Richard II's setting sun are motes; yet they are beautiful, and worth the elegy of music at the close.

Notes

1. G. A. Bonnard, “The Actor in Richard II,” Shakespeare Jahrbuch 87 (1952): 87-101; Leonard F. Dean, “Richard II: The State and the Image of the Theatre,” PMLA 67 (1952); 211-18; Anne Righter, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967), chap. 5.

2. Peter Ure, Introduction to King Richard II, New Arden Edition (London: Methuen, 1961), p. lxxix. All references to Richard II in this essay cite this text.

3. Sheldon P. Zitner, “Aumerle's Conspiracy,” Studies in English Literature 14 (Spring 1974): 240.

4. Ibid., p. 257.

5. Enid Welsford, The Court Masque: A Study in the Relationship Between Poetry and Revels (1927; rpt. ed., New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), p. 324.

6. Romeo and Juliet I.iv.48; I.iv.1, S.D.; I.v.16, S.D.

7. John C. Meagher, Method and Meaning in Jonson's Masques (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966), p. 7.

8. Welsford, The Court Masque, p. 3.

9. Ibid., p. 294.

10. Walter Pater, “Shakespeare's English Kings,” in Appreciations (London: Macmillan, 1927), p. 198.

11. Gervase Mathew, The Court of Richard II (London: John Murray, 1968), p. 15.

12. Raphael Holinshed, Holinshed's Chronicles (New York: AMS Press, 1965), 2:713.

13. Mathew, The Court of Richard II, p. 11; Pater, “Shakespeare's English Kings,” pp. 196-97.

14. Introduction to New Arden Edition, pp. xiii-xiv. But for a contrary view, see David M. Bergeron, “The Deposition Scene in Richard II,” Renaissance Papers 1974 (1975), pp. 31-37.

15. Sister Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), p. 140.

16. See Ure, Introduction to the New Arden Edition, pp. xiii-xiv.

17. Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 19.