SOURCE: Liebler, Naomi Conn. “The Ritual Groundwork.” In Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre, pp. 51-111. London: Routledge, 1995.

[In the following excerpt, Liebler examines the way ritual actions in Richard II are honored, abruptly curtailed, subverted, or ignored. The critic focuses on the joust between Bolingbroke and Mowbray at the opening of the play, the formal deposition of Richard at Westminster, and the continuing degradation of the sacred bonds of kinship.]

“What is a ceremony?” I asked. “It is a proper way to behave. You do this and that, so the gods do not punish you,” said Amah.

Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

Tragedy is part of a genealogy of related encodings that begins in ritual, myth, and folklore, whose interests are the same and whose vestiges remain visible even in the most complex and sophisticated plays. Since drama is communal production, “the critical intensification of collective life … and the possibility it creates for action and initiative” (Bristol 1985: 3), we can expect to find in it the expression of concerns that matter most urgently to the population that produces it. In Shakespearean tragedy, where the protagonists, along with any number of their communities, are destroyed, we find that sociopolitically important rituals have been honored in the breach, that is, they have been perverted or ignored. The community's need for ritual redress is misconstrued or neglected, and, as the Prince says at the end of Romeo and Juliet, “All are punished” (V.iii.295).

Ritual is the formal structuring or ordering of the life of any community that seeks to perpetuate itself. The definition of ritual, like that of tragedy, is problematized first of all by variations across different disciplines and disputes among proponents within a given discipline (e.g., anthropology), and further, by a widespread casual application of the term within and outside the academy to refer to any structured or repetitive behavior by either individuals or groups. “Any analytic system that cannot (or does not) discriminate between performances of Hamlet, the State Opening of Parliament, and the Mass is wasting our time by trivializing the study of social behavior” (Goody 1977: 28-9). Repetition is an important formal property of ritual, an imitation of “the rhythmic imperatives of the biological and physical universe, thus suggesting a link with the perpetual processes of the cosmos. It thereby implies permanence and legitimacy of what are actually evanescent cultural constructs” (Moore and Myerhoff 1977: 8). But repetition alone does not identify or define ritual. Collective agreement and belief in its efficacy for cultural and physical survival are more significant hallmarks. Regularly repeated conventional behaviors or obsessive-compulsive repetitions in the domain of psychiatry are not rituals. Beyond those distinctions, there is little agreement among sociologists and anthropologists on what ritual is and is not: Durkheimians separate sacred from mundane; others argue that secular ritual is an equally compelling counterpart to religious ritual; still others attempt to distinguish ritual from ceremony and custom from tradition (Moore and Myerhoff 1977: 21-2). Most recent anthropological studies agree, at least, that ritual is social action requiring “the organized cooperation of individuals, directed by a leader or leaders” recognizing a “correct, morally right pattern that should be followed in any particular performance” (LaFontaine 1985: 11-12). It is prescriptive, that is, it must be done (but not necessarily by the total community), and its structure is modeled either directly or inversely on that of the community concerned (LaFontaine 1985: 12; T. S. Turner 1977: 61-2). It is indistinguishable from a community's sense of its own complicated identity. As Catherine Bell has recently argued,

ritual systems do not function to regulate or control the systems of social relations, they are the system, and an expedient rather than perfectly ordered one at that. In other words, the more or less practical organization of ritual activities neither acts upon nor reflects the social system; rather, these loosely coordinated activities are constantly differentiating and integrating, establishing and subverting the field of social relations. … Insofar as they establish hierarchical social relations, they are also concerned with distinguishing local identities, ordering social differences, and controlling the contention and negotiation involved in the appropriation of symbols.

(1992: 130)

Actions that are communally significant (the core of Aristotle's concept of tragedy) are marked by practices that link the group's past to its present and to its future. In traditional cultures, such practices operated comprehensively in the ordinary life of the community, whereas in modern cultures they operate in distinctly separated areas of life (Douglas 1966: 40). Modern ritual, both ecclesiastic and social, is separated out from daily concerns. The putative “advancements” of industry and technology have enabled us to compartmentalize and manage what we need for survival.¹ In traditional cultures, that management was ensured by ritual, without which survival was considered to be doubtful if not altogether impossible. As a way toward “understanding” Shakespeare, we sometimes try to see his culture as an image, an early pattern, of our own: the term “early modern,” which suggests “forward-looking” and “anticipating the modern,” has replaced “Renaissance” (the rebirth of interest in the distant past) in many recent discussions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture. Though both rubrics denote epistemic change, it is worth remembering that while it initiated what we now know as industry and technology, Shakespeare's England, both rural and urban, had not yet jettisoned all of its links to its immediate preindustrial past. Pestilence and drought, however abetted by such political and economic (that is, human) interventions as land enclosures and gerrymandered parish boundaries, could still wreak havoc with systems of economic and personal survival on the farms, and drive up prices in the cities. Natural phenomena, as well as human behavior that fell outside the domain of acceptability and management, were the constitutive conditions that called for ritual redress. The continuities of tradition, expressed in ritual practices, reminded people that they lived in a universe larger than individual selves, local events, and personal satisfactions.

On this view, Roger Caillois identifies “two complimentary universes” for religious man: the profane, “in which he can act without anxiety or trepidation, but in which his actions only involve his superficial self” and the sacred, “in which a feeling of deep dependency controls, contains, and directs each of his drives, and to which he is committed unreservedly” (1959: 19). The dialectical opposition between the two is “a genuinely intuitive concept. We can describe it, analyze it into its elements, and theorize about it. But it is no more within the power of abstract language to define its unique quality than to define a sensation” (1959: 20).

Caillois's description of the sacred underpins much of Shakespearean tragedy in the shadows, echoes, and vestiges of ritual that appear, often overtly, in the action of the plays. This is more than a matter of language, although language is a frequent vehicle of expression. The symbolic content of much of social reality is “verbally non-retrievable information. … Language and culture are quite different sorts of codes and there is no easy and immediate way of translating from one into the other” (Aijmer 1987: 4). But when language supports and is supported by the specific action of the drama, it is more than metaphor, figurative decoration, or a prod to the intellect. Combined with specifically ritualistic action, the words and actions of Shakespeare's tragic characters reflect the plays' suspension in the dialectic Caillois describes. His point about the ineffable quality of the relation between sacred and profane applies to the powerful affect of the relation between community and hero. In Shakespearean tragedy, the community's commitment to the sacred,² its “deep dependency,” is threatened by a crisis whose source and embodiment the community assigns to the hero. The community's drive to survive its crisis emerges as an urgent need to kill its hero-scapegoat. Caillois's concept of “two complimentary universes for religious man” applies equally to the Elizabethan audience whose religious concerns were thoroughly infused with secular interests. This interweaving is by no means immediately clear at all points, even to the community that animates it. As Barbara Myerhoff notes,

All rituals are paradoxical and dangerous enterprises, the traditional and improvised, the sacred and secular. Paradoxical because rituals are conspicuously artificial and theatrical, yet designed to suggest the inevitability and absolute truth of their messages. Dangerous because when we are not convinced by a ritual, we may be aware of ourselves as having made them up, then on to the paralyzing realization that we have made up all our truths; our ceremonies, our most precious conceptions and convictions—all are mere invention.

(1978: 86)

Rituals are containers that shape and reveal the contours of a culture's collective values (Myerhoff 1978: 86). Through precise, regular, repetitive, and predictable formal ritual practice members of a given culture clarify and reiterate those values, most urgently when they seem because of some real or impending crisis to be in question or to have been obscured altogether. Changes in government or impending changes to any level of the sociopolitical structure are the situations that most commonly revive interest in ritual; not coincidentally, these are also the most common situations illustrated in Shakespearean tragedy. The complexities and ambiguities of Elizabethan culture summoned just such clarification during Shakespeare's lifetime. And we can fully expect to find evidence of that summons embedded in the drama of the period, “the abstract and brief chronicles of the time” (Hamlet II.ii.524).

Ritual processes are difficult to define because they operate in a domain that defies semantic anchorage. They call for belief, but this may be more a matter of conviction than of cognition. Ambiguity in word or gesture may be

glossed, even celebrated, then transcended in ritual performances. Through ritual we organize our understandings and dramatize our fundamental conceptions … rearranging our fundamental assumptions in the course of rituals themselves. Rituals begin with a cultural problem, stated or unstated, and then work various operations upon it, arriving at … reorganizations and reinterpretations of the elements that produce a newly meaningful whole. Achieving the appropriate shift in consciousness is the work of ritual.

(Myerhoff 1982: 128-9)

The origins of ritual behavior are usually unrecoverable; indeed, “in some societies there is no tradition of exegesis or discussion; … questions may even be frowned on” (LaFontaine 1985: 12). Understanding complex ritual operations without collapsing important distinctions into meaningless generalizations requires comprehension of what Ronald Grimes has described as two different ritual strategies, “superstructuring” and “deconstructing” ritual performances. The former is a mode of “symbolic amplification,” expansive, sometimes inversive, “magnifying and turning a culture's good, virtuous, proper side to public view”: this is the mode commonly understood by the term “celebration.” The latter is a negative mode of “symbolic stripping” which foregrounds “the under, down, dark, unstructured, or emergent side of culture” (Grimes 1982: 273-4). “Superstructuring” and “deconstruction” in this sense also distinguish comic from tragic drama. Each constitutes a separate “ritual fiction.” The object of such a fiction

is not merely to reflect the cultural status quo but to transform it in a moment of specially concentrated time. … [Rituals and dramas] are not practice for some more real kind of action, say, pragmatic or economic action, nor are they sublimations for some remembered or more desirable action. In a celebratory moment the ritual action is a deed in which the symbols do not merely point, mean, or recall but embody fully and concretely all that is necessary for the moment.

(Grimes 1982: 252)

The specific subject of Grimes's essay is a performance during the Santa Fe Fiesta, but the principles he outlines apply equally well to any cultural performance. The “deconstruction” he identifies is not the nihilism of certain post-modern French theoretical practice; instead it unpacks the layers of fictional expression to locate underneath it and reiterate not indeterminacy or meaninglessness but rather something very real and significant for participating members of the community: the foundation of values upon which that community developed. Moreover, as Grimes says, rituals

are not only embedded in social processes, they also process actors, things, spaces, and times. Furthermore, they are in process; they develop and decline. So one should not too quickly summarize the essence of some type of ritual (say, celebration) without noting … the social processes surrounding ritual; the work of processing which a ritual does; and the process of change which a ritual undergoes.

(1982: 274)

Ritual in performance therefore does not merely remind its audience/participants of its significance as a purely intellectual or moral exercise; as a functioning component of the performance it transforms its agents and its auditors during the course of the performance in which it occurs, just as it would in a formal, liturgical setting such as a Mass.

The “under, down, dark, unstructured, or emergent side of culture” is also the subject of tragedy. As a cultural performance embodying ritual action, it is not a marker or a prompt for another kind of action; it is itself a complete action. It tells a story, a “ritual fiction,” for the story's own sake. By mediating fictionalized action and the “real” or re-cognized world that operates before and after the performance, ritual performance clarifies and reaffirms the cultural values of the audience/participants. Tragedy “deconstructs,” in Grimes's sense, the cultural properties of the audience/participants and brings these up from underneath the historical and mundane layers of experience that conceal them between performances: the mask of performance, as it were, unmasks the cultural substratum. Such disclosure occurs not discursively or analytically, but in a flash. At the conclusions of such performances, “entropy is a fundamental law, and therefore whatever is achieved ritually begins to erode in the very moment of its success” (Grimes 1982: 252).

THE MOCKERY KING OF SNOW: RICHARD II AND THE SACRIFICE OF RITUAL

Because of this entropic law, rituals must always be repeated, regularly and systematically. Their efficacy does not last long. Neither does that of theatrical performance, and for the same reason, the flash of specific tragic performance does not ignite revolution and anarchy. From Plato through Gosson (1579) and Stubbes (1583), down to the present time, critics of the drama have been interested in the relation between rebellion and performance, but no clear interpretation emerges. One of the most infamous examples of theater pressed into partisan service—the staging of Richard II in February 1601 on the eve of the Essex rebellion—occurred to support a plot already under way. The play did not inspire the rebellion, nor did it engender one on the occasion of its original performance some four to six years earlier.

Noting Elizabeth I's famous remark about the play's performance “40 times in open streets and houses,” Stephen Greenblatt asks, “can ‘tragedy’ be a strictly literary term when the Queen's own life is endangered by the play?” (1982 [ed.]: 4).³ By decontextualizing Elizabeth's remark, Greenblatt implies that she was responding immediately to the performance of 5 February 1601. But in fact the remark was made much later, in a conversation recorded by the antiquary William Lambard, Keeper of the Records of the Tower. Reviewing the entire set of Tower documents, Elizabeth came to those from the reign of Richard II, and said, “I am Richard II, know ye not that?” Lambard answered tactfully, “Such a wicked imagination was determined and attempted by a most unkind Gent. the most adorned creature that ever your Majestie made,” to which Elizabeth replied, “He that will forget God, will also forget his benefactors; this tragedy was played 40 times in open streets and houses” (Albright 1927: 692; Heffner 1930: 771; Neale 1957: 398). The conversation continued, “until an explanation prompted another reflection: ‘In those days force and arms did prevail; but now the wit of the fox is everywhere on foot, so as hardly a faithful or virtuous man may be found’” (Neale 1957: 398). This exchange took place on 4 August 1601, six months after the “dangerous” performance (which proved far more dangerous to Essex than to Elizabeth), and as the queen's further remarks indicate, reflected on the general tenor of politics “in those days” (i.e., in Richard's time) as compared with “now.” The threat posed by the performance itself cannot have been perceived, at least by the queen, as very immediate. It was Lambard who made the reference to Essex; there is perhaps a careful distinction to be made between the queen's own perceptions and her awareness of the analogy in the minds of her subjects (Albright 1927: 691).

The ambiguously understood “danger” of Shakespeare's play resides in large part in its “deposition” scene, whose original performative impact remains unknown. There are actually two “deposition” scenes. The first is III.iii.144-77, at Flint Castle before Northumberland as Bolingbroke's emissary. The second is IV.i.162-318, the formal deposition before the Parliament, and is the one usually referred to as “the” deposition scene. Although this second deposition scene was not printed until the fourth quarto of 1608, five years after Elizabeth's death, it may have been performed at least once by the Chamberlain's Men, and if the queen's own report was accurate, “40 times,” evidently without incident of rebellion. If, like the Essex conspirators, Elizabeth saw a threat to her rule in the play's representations of deposition, this could not have been a widespread association or more than an afterthought; otherwise, presumably, the play would not have been performed “40 times in open streets and houses” with apparent impunity. Moreover, it may not have been any particular scenes, but rather the play's whole representation, that prompted Elizabeth's response.

So much has been made of the queen's remark in connection with Shakespeare's play that a corollary situation has been obscured.⁴ In 1599, John Hayward's The First Part of the Life and Reign of King Henry IV was printed and dedicated to Essex. The dedication was added after the printing had been licensed and was deleted by orders of the Archbishop of Canterbury, but not before some five to six hundred copies had been sold. The book was extremely popular, with another six hundred copies sold after the deletion, and demand continued even after a second printing was suppressed (Albright 1927: 701; Guy 1988: 447-8). Despite the fact that the title pointed to Henry IV, the principal subject matter of this popular book was the reign and deposition of Richard II. Bacon noted in the “Essay Concerning the Earl of Essex” that Elizabeth explicitly found the book “a seditious prelude to put into the people's heads boldness and faction, [and] said she had good opinion that there was treason in it” (quoted in Albright 1927: 700). The charges against Essex at his trial in 1601 included his use of Hayward's book, “no sooner published but the Earl, knowing hundreds of them to be dispersed … has confessed that he had the written copy with him to peruse 14 days plotting how he might become another Henry IV” (quoted in Albright 1927: 704). For unknown reasons, but perhaps through the influence of the Lord Chamberlain, or perhaps because the queen's wrath was focused upon Hayward's book (Heffner 1930: 771), Shakespeare's company and their play managed to evade suppression.

The latter-day attribution, adaptation, or interpretation of a Shakespearean performance should not be mistaken for its original, unrecoverable intent (Marcus 1988: 42). The current critical interest in identifying in Shakespeare's plays an array of specific political mirrors ignores the capacity of these mirrors to reflect and refract each other and turn the theater into a fun-house: the critical debate then becomes its own end and its own self-perpetuating subject. There is no evidence that any change to the Elizabethan or Jacobean sociopolitical structure occurred consequent (or even immediately subsequent) to the performance of any of Shakespeare's plays. If they were indeed pressed into subversive service, that subversion, like the Essex plot, failed.

This does not deny a political discourse to Shakespearean tragedy; the shaping of these plays, and in particular their incorporation of selected ritual elements, reveals a dialectic that is unmistakably political. The deposition scenes in Richard II, for example, reverse the rites by which the king is invested; their “undoing” in effect deconstructs or anatomizes the process of investiture, arguably for the purpose of “reconstructing” it. It is the interpretation of the dialectic, not its presence within a text or a performance, that is subject to debate. Because the design and application of ritual require communal agreement, the inclusion of ritual elements within a play's action marks that play's concern with how, by whom, and for whom, such agreement is negotiated. When a play such as Richard II or Julius Caesar performs the breakdown of communal accord, it reveals the conditions necessary for such accord, the consequences of its breakdown, and the potential for a new and perhaps different accord.

Richard II opens with an aborted ritual, the joust between Bolingbroke and Mowbray whose cancellation appears to illustrate Richard's inability to rule: “We were not born to sue but to command; / Which … we cannot do to make you friends” (I.i.196-7). The joust is (or would have been) one of several ritual events depicted in the play whose close observation mark the normative relationship of king and state but here, in Richard's crisis of kingship, are aborted or evacuated of meaning. Close examination of those rituals and of the way Richard handles them in his crisis reveals a complex portrait of the king as one who attempts to hold on to certain aspects of a traditional order while violating others. Since that order is itself in the process of change, Richard participates in but does not control the destruction of tradition and, at the same time, of himself. Responsibility for the monarchic disorder that governs this play devolves on other heads besides the king's.

The ritual function of the joust and its sequent events can be understood in terms outlined by Victor Turner. When a “norm-governed social life is interrupted by the breach of a rule controlling one of its salient relationships,” a state of crisis results, which splits the community into contending factions. Redress is undertaken by those in authority, usually in the form of ritualized action, either legal, religious, or military. The aim of such action is to defuse the conflict, and then, barring immediate regress to crisis, to reconcile the conflicting parties through the outcome of the ritualized action. Failing that, the alternative solution is a “consensual recognition of irremediable breach” and a “spatial separation of the parties.” If neither solution works, the state of crisis prevails “until some radical restructuring … sometimes by revolutionary means, is undertaken” (V. Turner 1982: 92).

Richard's management of the joust in the play's sources, radically contracted in Shakespeare's version, shows a complicated dynamic in which the king is an actor in the monarchic crisis, but not its instigator. Both historically and in Shakespeare's representation, Richard's reign was a troubled time in which old orders gave way to new. It is frivolous to attribute the toppling of whole social and political structures to one individual, even to a king, let alone to one who is removed or removes himself from the throne. In the patterned terms Turner uses to describe such crises, the management of ritual in the play reveals a range of social and political meanings in the changes that occur.

The play begins, of course, in medias res. The initiating breach was the murder of Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, in which Richard may or may not have been implicated, and for which Bolingbroke accuses Mowbray of treason. Mowbray counters with a similar charge. The ritual of trial by combat was prescribed by tradition in such cases. Shakespeare employed it again in King Lear V.iii, when Albany charges Edmund with treason and Edgar arrives to take up Albany's cause. By the time of Richard's reign, the ritual itself had devolved to a theatricalized event, and by Shakespeare's time, in England as well as on the continent, it was more often associated with carnival festivities than with judicial decisions. In Venice, for example, jousts were part of the Sensa festival (celebrating the marriage of the sea) that marked the beginning of the theatrical season (E. Muir 1981: 121 n.) and lent an element of structure to the more topsy-turvy processes of Carnival (E. Muir 1981: 177). The one-to-one combat of the joust originated as a substitute for the dangerously chaotic mêlée of the tournament, involving whole armies, that had disturbed the reigns of Henry II and Richard I; the latter attempted to regulate his knights' participation by requiring royal licenses for combats. In time the joust, using blunted weapons and forbidding a fight to the death, replaced the tournament and ultimately became mere ceremony (Bucknell 1979: 148). By the end of the Middle Ages, jousts had become an entertaining part of ceremonial pageantry, “a festival ritual of homage and service to the crown,” and had become so controlled and theatricalized that “[in] 1343 the challengers at a tournament in Smithfield came dressed as the Pope and his cardinals. Forty-three years later Richard II looked on to see knights led in by silver chains held by ladies mounted on palfreys” (Strong 1984: 13).

Chaucer's Knight's Tale, written during Richard II's reign, gives a detailed account of the preparations for a combat between Palamon and Arcite, which Theseus, whose control is much better than Richard's, cancels swiftly and authoritatively. The Chaucerian version presents in six lines what Shakespeare stretches out over two scenes. Theseus's herald announces:

The lord hath of his heigh discrecioun
Considered that it were destruccion
To gentil blood to fighten in the gyse
Of mortal bataille now in this emprise.
Wherfore, to shapen that they shal nat dye,
He wol his firste purpos modifye.

(2537-42)

The herald then announces in the next nineteen lines the rules and restrictions for the combat, especially stipulating that no lethal weapons be used, and that opponents may only capture each other. The combat is thus transformed into a joust, and Theseus's pacific command receives boisterous popular approval (2561-4). Shakespeare's Richard, pleading the same cause, more than doubles the length of the herald's proclamation, and delivers it himself, closing the distance between king and combatants. His decision, however, does not get the same response as Theseus's.

The account of the cancellation in Froissart's Chronicle (translated 1523-5) reveals Richard's predicament in terms omitted by Shakespeare. The king's councillors warn him of popular revolt if the combat proceeds:

The Londoners and dyvers other noble men and prelates of the realm say howe ye take the ryght waye to distroye your lygnage and the realme of Englande. Whiche thynge they saye they wyll natte suffre. And if the Londoners rise agaynste you, with suche noble men as wyll take their parte, … ye shall be of no puyssaunce to resyst they. …

(Bullough 1973: III: 424)

Having impressed upon Richard his inability to control his citizens, the councillors remind the king of the people's love for Derby (Bolingbroke) and their hatred for “the erle Marshall” (Mowbray), and point out that when the quarrel first arose, Richard should have settled it and commanded peace. Furthermore, he should have shown Derby some preferential affection in order to maintain the popular good will. Because he did not do that, say the councillors, he is rumored to favor Mowbray. They close by urging him to heed their advice: “sir, ye had never more nede of good counsayle than ye have nowe” (Bullough 1973: III: 424-5).

Froissart's account shows a Richard whose power depends upon popular approval, and who takes the advice of his councillors in order to win that approval. Their advice also included the plan to banish both Mowbray and Bolingbroke. Shakespeare omits the scene of counsel, and has Richard acknowledge it only obliquely in chastizing Gaunt's grief: “Thy son is banish'd upon good advice, / Whereto thy tongue a party-verdict gave. / Why at our justice seem'st thou then to low'r?” (I.iii.233-5). Gaunt replies that he argued as a judge, not as a father: “A partial slander sought I to avoid, / And in the sentence my own life destroy'd” (241-2), taking upon himself what in Froissart's account was Richard's predicament. There are no councillors in the play to tell the king that he should have commanded peace. Richard tries that on his own initiative and it does not work. It is the first form of post-ritual redress noted in Turner's pattern. The banishment is his second choice (in Turner's terms, the “consensual recognition of irremediable breach … followed by the spatial separation of the parties”); it is prompted in part by his councillors' advice but more by the combatants' refusal to obey, which takes up a substantially greater proportion of the scene than does the brief exchange between Richard and Gaunt. The power of the king is compromised as much by the combatants' stubbornness as by his own and his advisers' vacillation. The disruption of order is present from the start, and resides both within the king's character and outside it.

The general applicability of the pattern Turner describes indicates that structures of authority sometimes do not prevail over recalcitrant subjects. Such failures of authority may indicate a king's unfitness. They may equally well indicate his subjects' violation of their contractual allegiance. Shakespeare's kings never seem to operate in an unreal world of absolute power. When they are shown trying to do that (e.g., Lear, Macbeth, Richard III) they are inevitably stopped. In Richard II Shakespeare shows a monarch hewing closely to a normative pattern for the resolution of conflicts. His effort is overpowered by Bolingbroke's and Mowbray's intractability. Froissart's document presents a clear image of Richard caught in a kind of “Woodstock-gate,” and helpless before the threat of popular uprising. Working toward theatrical rather than historical clarity, Shakespeare gives Richard the opportunity to control, and thereby directs our attention to the centrality of the monarch. This is figured both visually and politically in the opening scene as he stands between the two antagonists; the image prefigures his isolation at the center of his circle of supporters in the center of the play (III.ii), when he sits upon the ground and talks of graves. As the first test of his authority in the play, the episode of the combat becomes an emblem of the play's political/ritual crisis.

The situation presented to Richard at the beginning of Shakespeare's play is not only one that performs the failure of kingly authority but one for which the ritual prescribed to close the rupture in the kingdom had long since become theatricalized and ambiguous. Nevertheless, Froissart's account indicates that the combat retained the potential for real danger, not only to the combatants but to the commonwealth as well. There is no suggestion in Shakespeare's play that the combat between Mowbray and Bolingbroke was meant to be merely ceremonial. Historically, by Richard's time it would have been, and it would have been if Richard had declared it so. The difference between theatricality and actual mêlée in the fourteenth century depended upon the ad hoc rules of the game. Richard's own sense of theatricalism in the play has often been cited as evidence of his unfitness to rule, but as Kernan (1970: 254) and more recently Kastan (1986: 470) have pointed out, the Lancasters, father and son, are no less thespian in mounting their kingly personae. All the characters of the Second Tetralogy live in theatrical times.

The late fourteenth century had long since ceased to honor the original adjudicating function of ritual combat. Strong argues that its growing theatricalism indicates not the form's decline and decadence but rather its response “both to the evolution of the aristocrat as courtier and to the demands of nationalistic chivalries, which focused the loyalty of knights on the ruling dynasty” (1984: 12). The shift was evidently an adaptive strategy, a compromise between the total extinction of old ways and the movement of social change, which often occurs at the cost of stability and peace. If the ritual of combat did not decline and decay, its political function altered radically. Shakespeare's use of it to open his play shows a concern for the progress of a civilization at those moments in its history when the rituals and ceremonies that once signified and guaranteed its orderly functioning and integration had been reduced to outward shows. The dilution by Richard's time of the joust's ritualistic force contextualizes what happens more disastrously, as the play eventually represents, to the sacred permanence of the king's enthronement.

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

(III.ii.54-5)

Richard counts on his protected status as God's anointed deputy on earth. But as we have begun to see, when one traditional action loses its meaning, the significance of and adherence to others are also problematized. Since rituals are acts of faith, the very act of questioning is itself dangerous to stability. The play takes up at other points what happens when traditional understanding of God's law is suddenly interrogated. The Duchess of Gloucester's appeal to Gaunt to support her accusation against Richard merits a whole scene, set between the two parts of Richard's combat dilemma. Besides inculpating Richard in Woodstock's death, the scene sets forth the inherent ambiguity in Richard's England regarding kingly immunity when the king is involved in a murder. The Duchess appeals to the older law of retribution for the murder of a husband and a brother. Gaunt tells her to go complain to God. Gaunt's refuge, like Richard's, is in the code of the king's divine ordination. The Duchess's sympathetic plea, the fact that she can question the king's immunity, exposes the instability of that code. Like Richard's command to Mowbray and Bolingbroke, England's belief in divine ordination by Richard's time lacked the force of communal agreement. The historical records, including Holinshed's, show that in the matter of Richard's deposition the code of divine ordination was in fact ignored: the deposition was not Richard's own idea—he is consistently a believer in tradition—but was forced upon him by both Henry and Parliament (Bullough 1973: III: 406). The conditions of social collapse that Girard calls the “sacrificial crisis” (1977: 49) are set up in the first act of the play, and all the travesties of formal order that follow are blazes on the trail toward that end. The detailed formal preparations for the combat (I.iii.7-45)—the formulaic pronouncements by the marshall and by Bolingbroke and Mowbray of their names, titles, and charges against each other, Richard's ceremonial decoronation before his followers (III.iii.147-53) and again before Bolingbroke (IV.i.203-15), York's agonized narrations of Henry's entrée into London followed by the deposed and publicly degraded Richard (V.ii.23-36)—all punctuate the play with instances of rituals aborted, inverted, and finally rejected in favor of a new order, which in turn proved more disordered than Richard's.

The traditional critical response to this series of events is that it was Richard's responsibility, that his was the first rupture in parcelling out the kingdom to profiteers, “Like to a tenement or a pelting farm” (II.i.60), and then appropriating Hereford's estate, “tak[ing] from Time / His charters and his customary rights” (II.i.195-6). But as even those who hold this Richard-centered view have noted, “the old world is breaking up” (Kernan 1970: 247). Shakespeare creates enough sympathy for Richard at several points—most dramatically in the speech beginning “Of comfort no man speak! / Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs” (III.ii.144-77) at the center of the play—to suggest more ambivalence than blame. In other plays, Shakespeare shows what real disregard for order can unleash. At a similarly transitional moment in Julius Caesar, Antony incites the mob to riot and then absolves himself: “Mischief, thou art afoot, / Take thou what course thou wilt” (III.ii.260-1); later, in Antony and Cleopatra, he would “Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch / Of the rang'd empire fall!” (I.i.33-4) rather than give up Cleopatra. In his most intense despair, Lear urges the heavens to “Strike flat the thick rotundity o'th'world, / Crack nature's molds, all germains spill at once, / That make ingrateful man!” (III.ii.7-9). Unlike these later creations, Richard in crisis cleaves to order, the old order of the generation of York and Gaunt, which he honors even as it passes. There is an interesting and subtle irony in this alignment of Richard and Bolingbroke's father: Richard is not absolute villain and Henry is not absolute savior. Even though (or perhaps because) it means his death, Richard ensures the legal passage of control to Bolingbroke before he is finished. Doubtless he has no choice, but his gesture lends formality and legitimacy to the inevitable. Whatever else he misconstrues in his troubled government, he retains to the end a clear sense of purpose in honoring the ritual underpinnings of his culture.

The king realizes his negligence by the middle of the play. He stands far from his London court, with Aumerle, Carlisle, and his soldiers, on the wild Welsh coast. Wales, in this play as in Henry V, is home to fierce, primitive, superstitious, mystical, and above all, loyal men like the Welsh captain in II.iv, and Fluellen in the later play. At the margin of England's map, it is the appropriate locus for Richard's transition, and Wales is where he stays until he is brought back to Westminster, “plume-pluck'd,” for the formal transfer of power in IV.i. At the Welsh outpost, Richard becomes liminal; such figures are “neither here nor there; … betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. … Their behavior is normally passive or humble” (V. Turner 1969: 95).

                                                                                I weep for joy
To stand upon my kingdom once again.
Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand,
Though rebels wound thee with their horses' hoofs.
.....So weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth,
And do thee favors with my royal hands.
.....Mock not my senseless conjuration, lords,
This earth shall have a feeling. …

(III.ii.4-24)

Such reverent animation of the land belongs to a ritual-centered king. The contrast in this regard between Richard and Bolingbroke is most obvious when the latter addresses the land at the moment of his departure into exile: “Then, England's ground, farewell; sweet soil, adieu, / My mother, and my nurse, that bears me yet!” (I.iii.306-7). Bolingbroke relates to the land in terms of himself, not as an externally and independently potent locus for respect as Richard does. With the fatal exception of the leasing-out, the synecdoche of the land was Richard's concern from the start. When he stopped the combat, in language that amplifies Chaucer's model, he did so

For that our kingdom's earth should not be soil'd
With that dear blood which it hath fostered;
And for our eyes do hate the dire aspect
Of civil wounds plough'd up with neighbours' sword.

(I.iii.125-8)

Yet it will come. The Bishop of Carlisle, keeper of Christian ritual in this play by virtue of his office, warns Bolingbroke's followers:

The blood of English shall manure the ground
And future ages groan for this foul act;
Peace shall go sleep with Turks and infidels,
And in this seat of peace tumultuous wars
Shall kin with kin and kind with kind confound.
Disorder, horror, fear, and mutiny
Shall here inhabit, and this land be call'd
The field of Golgotha and dead men's skulls.
O, if you raise this house against this house,
It will the woefullest division prove
That ever fell upon this cursed earth.

(IV.i.137-47)

His office may be Christian, but his diction casts the civil war in terms of pre-Christian ritual: kin-killing, civil war, will turn England into its own pharmakos whose blood will fertilize the soil, but the dead crop of the “cursed earth” is only skulls. Properly conducted in a culture where such rites still have active meaning, a blood libation would insure fertility, but this England-in-transition has sacrificed its rituals under Richard and will continue to do so in the new (dis)order under Bolingbroke.

In his speech if not in action, Richard often appears as the last true defender of the old faith. From his and the play's opening lines—“Old John of Gaunt, time honoured Lancaster, / … according to thy oath and band” (I.i.1-2)—Richard shows himself wrapped for security in tradition and ritual. The ceremonial quality of his language and his reliance on Gaunt's loyalty to the old codes has been well noted (e.g., Berger 1985: 215). Critics have made much of Richard's neglect of inheritance laws, but this neglect is actually brief, confined to Bolingbroke, and committed for political expedience. Richard is certainly not alone in it; at some point in the play, all of the principals neglect the laws of inheritance, most obviously in accepting Richard's deposition and Bolingbroke's accession. York's admonition, “for how art thou a king / But by fair sequence and succession” (II.i.198-9) is ironized by the sequence and succession of the rest of the play: Bolingbroke's “right” to be king, whatever its retributive justice and its parliamentary endorsement, is certainly not granted by the code York endorses in that line. Moreover, the principle of “fair sequence and succession” is problematic for all claimants in this play and in the history behind the play. Richard succeeded his grandfather Edward III, not his father Edward who had died the year before and never inherited the throne; thus Richard's kingship was not by intact dynastic inheritance (Saccio 1977: 19), although York's citation of “fair sequence and succession” suggests that there was no question about Richard's right. Shakespeare notes Bolingbroke's coronation in much the same way as he was later to note Macbeth's: it is simply recorded as a done deed, and attention is given instead to the theatricalism of Richard's public disgrace and Bolingbroke's acclaim (V.ii.23-4). Hall gives little notice to the ceremony, and points out that “who so ever rejoysed at this coronacion, or whosoever delighted at his high promocion” (Bullough 1973: III: 364), certainly Richard's originally designated heir, Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March was not among them. Bolingbroke's real claim rested only on conquest and on parliamentary assent, which was granted immediately upon request, and he became king by election rather than by inheritance or designation (Bullough 1973: III: 364; Oman 1906: IV: 153). Despite the fact that there was some precedent for passing over a designated successor (Arthur of Brittany had been passed over in 1199) as there was, after Edward II, for deposing a king, the cultural significance of substituting election for traditional modes of succession was unmistakably problematic. The rule of primogeniture became ambiguous when Edward III died, and remained so through the generations of the Tudors. Thus everyone who moves to Bolingbroke's side in the course of the play does so not from principled adherence to ancient law but for political exigency; nearly everyone who does not (except for Aumerle, who comes around eventually) is destroyed. The old ways are past, or passing.

Only Richard clings to ritual. His deposition is widely recognized as an inverted coronation ceremony (e.g., Girard 1977: 304). It is usually cited as evidence of Richard's unfitness: he gives up his crown too quickly, too willingly, to his eager cousin. It is, however, also evidence of his care for the proper formalities of his culture's rites. We should focus as much attention as Richard does, and as Shakespeare does, on how he gives it up. The first of the two deposition scenes occurs with his homage to the land at Flint Castle in Wales. Richard appears with his supporters atop the castle walls, and receives Northumberland as Bolingbroke's emissary.

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,
My gay apparel for an almsman's gown,
My figur'd goblets for a dish of wood,
My sceptre for a palmer's walking staff,
My subjects for a pair of carved saints,
And my large kingdom for a little grave,
.....What says King Bolingbroke?

(III.iii.143-75)

The first four lines of this passage inversely echo the rhetoric of the “Homilee agaynst Disobedience and wylful Rebellion” (1574): “What shall subjects do then? Shall they obey valiant, stout, wise, and good princes, and condemn, disobey, and rebel against children being their princes, or against indiscreet and evil governors? God forbid.” It may be that Shakespeare's audience heard Richard's lines ironically in the context of that echo, reminding them that Richard submits here to nothing less than “Disobedience and wylful Rebellion.” The meticulous catalogue of what Richard will trade refers to the outward signs of his state, the concrete ways in which early modern England “knew” its monarch from any other human being. They are the symbols that most actively occupied Richard's attention as well: name, jewels, palace, robes, plate, sceptre, subjects, kingdom. Their exteriority is echoed in the scene's locus—at an outpost, atop the “rude ribs of that ancient castle” (III.iii.32), in the open air. Although they are outward signs, they are not superficial, but as tangible and fragile as the land itself. They entail all the metonymy that a monarchic symbol-system imbues in them.

The audience (but not Richard) has just heard Bolingbroke tell Northumberland the conditions he will offer the king: “Even at his feet to lay my arms and power, / Provided that my banishment repeal'd / And lands restor'd again be freely granted” (III.iii.39-41). Conditional allegiance is no allegiance, and Henry intends none; his repetition of the name “King Richard” four times in a speech of thirty-six lines rings with sarcasm (like Richard's “What says King Bolingbroke?”). More interesting, however, is the threat that Bolingbroke offers if Richard rejects his conditions. He will “lay the summer's dust with show'rs of blood / Rain'd from the wounds of slaughtered Englishmen. … The rage be his, whilst on the earth I rain / My waters—on the earth, and not on him” (III.iii.43-4, 59-60). Bolingbroke's token respect of the king's person is meaningless in the face of his anarchy against the king's other body, the kingdom and its people. Moreover, he immediately retracts even that token respect when Richard, “the blushing discontented sun,” appears just after these lines. Caught up in his blood-rain metaphor, Bolingbroke expands it to a cloudburst that will “stain the track / Of his bright passage to the occident” (III.iii.66-7), that is, to the west, where the sun sets. York, in attendance, catches his drift immediately and warns against it: “Yet looks he like a king. … Alack, alack, for woe, / That any harm should stain so fair a show” (III.iii.68-71). Richard apparently intuits Bolingbroke's specific threat, as he counter-warns in similar diction: “Yet know, my master, God omnipotent, / Is mustering in his clouds on our behalf” (III.iii.85-6) an appropriate inheritance of pestilence upon succeeding generations. This blood-rain is what Richard offered to prevent at the start of the play, what Carlisle later warned would issue from Bolingbroke's accession, what Bolingbroke himself now actively and irresponsibly threatens, and what in fact plagued his subsequent rule. It is arguably to stave this off as much as to submit to the inevitable that Richard so readily capitulates.

The care with which Richard enumerates his relinquished symbols belongs to all ritual; it is the appropriate preparation for the formal and final rite of the second, “real,” deposition scene in IV.i, set at Westminster, in the full court. The procession into the hall is fully ceremonial: “Enter, as to the Parliament” (stage direction). As at the beginning of the play, the scene begins with reciprocal charges of treason, this time by Bagot and Aumerle, with Bolingbroke adjudicating. The wheel is coming full circle. Again there is no resolving combat. Bolingbroke says, “These differences shall all rest under gage / 'Till Norfolk be repeal'd” (IV.i.86-7), but Carlisle informs the court that Norfolk is dead. Thus the prescribed restorative rite is again aborted. In this ominous and official setting, Richard's full deposition occurs. The process is the exact reverse of the order of investiture:

Now mark me how I will undo myself.
I give this heavy weight from off my head
And this unwieldy sceptre from my hand,
The pride of kingly sway from out my heart.
With mine own tears I wash away my balm,
With mine own hands I give away my crown,
With mine own tongue deny my sacred state,
With mine own breath release all duteous oaths.
All pomp and majesty I do forswear;
My manors, rents, revenues I forgo;
My acts, decrees, and statutes I deny.
God pardon all oaths that are broke to me!
God keep all vows unbroke are made to thee!
.....God save King Harry, unking'd Richard says. …

(IV.i.203-20)

The speech is both pitiable and dangerous. Richard undoes himself, as well as his kingship. In denying his acts, decrees, and statutes he erases the record of his existence and occupation of the throne. This is more than the passage of control; it widens the hole in the historical record, the breach in the “fair sequence and succession” of the Plantagenet dynasty that began when Edward III died. This is nihilism of the most terrifying order, “mark'd with a blot, damn'd in the book of heaven” (IV.i.236).

Girard reminds us that the traditional monarchic system is rooted in the function of the king as surrogate sacrificial victim. “The sacred character of the king—that is, his identity with the victim—regains its potency as it is obscured from view and even held up to ridicule. It is in fact then that the king is most threatened” (1977: 304). Richard himself acknowledges,

Nay, if I turn mine eyes upon myself,
I find myself a traitor with the rest;
For I have given here my soul's consent
T'undeck the pompous body of a king. …

(IV.i.247-50)

As Girard points out, Richard has become both victimizer and victim, erasing the distinction between himself and those who do him violence (1977: 304).

Richard's identification with his enemies is more than histrionic. From the perspective of ritual it is also accurate. Throughout the play Shakespeare repeatedly emphasizes the factor of kinship, especially that of Richard and Bolingbroke. The play insistently refers not only to the tragedy of state but to that of family as well, in true Aristotelian fashion. Among the several scenes that illustrate this insistence, two do so with special force.

Just after Richard imaginatively turns his eyes upon himself in the lines quoted above, he calls for a mirror in order to see himself literally. In the mirror he sees “the very book indeed / Where all my sins are writ, and that's myself” (IV.i.274-5). The replication of his face in the mirror enables him, in Girard's terms, “to polarize, to literally draw to himself, all the infectious strains in the community and transform them. … The principle of this metamorphosis has its source in the sacrifice of the monarch and … pervades his entire existence” (1977: 107). When Richard shatters the glass and says to Bolingbroke, “Mark, silent king … / How soon my sorrow hath destroy'd my face,” Bolingbroke equivocates, “The shadow of your sorrow hath destroy'd / The shadow of your face” (IV.i.290-3). And well he might; it is urgent for him to distinguish rigorously between the substance and its replicated image. Besides the face reflected in the glass, so easily “crack'd in an hundred shivers,” the other double of Richard is Bolingbroke himself. Shakespeare unmistakably presents this relationship to us earlier in the same scene, just before the formal deposition:

          … Here, cousin, seize the crown.
Here, cousin.
On this side my hand, and on that side thine.
.....That bucket down, and full of tears am I,
Drinking my griefs, whilst you mount up on high.

(IV.i.181-9)

The tableau presents the two men frozen in the liminal moment, equal and opposite.⁵ On stage this moment represents what Girard calls the “sacrificial crisis,” built on “fierce mimetic rivalries” that oscillate constantly until distinction between the two is blurred, undifferentiated. Noting the prevalence of enemy twins and mirror effects in traditional ritual and mythology, Girard concludes that such symmetries of conflict must represent a genuine threat to cultural identity: the “world of reciprocal violence is one of constant mirror effects in which the antagonists become each other's doubles and lose their individual identities” (1978: 164, 186). The threat of indistinction is removed by redifferentiating the twins, establishing stable binary patterns in place of the “fearful symmetry.”

Shakespeare ensures that we will see the binding symmetrical patterns of rival brothers at the beginning and end of the play. When Mowbray charges Bolingbroke at the start, “and let him be no kinsman to my liege,” Richard answers that he would be impartial “Were he my brother, nay, my kingdom's heir, / As he is but my father's brother's son” (I.i.59, 116-17), although he later confides to Aumerle that he suspects Bolingbroke feels a little less than kin: “He is our cousin, cousin; but 'tis doubt, / When time shall call him home from banishment, / Whether our kinsman come to see his friends” (I.iv.20-2). Meanwhile Bolingbroke vows to avenge the Duke of Gloucester, whose “blood, like sacrificing Abel's, cries / … To me for justice” (I.i.104-6). By the end of the play, in a structural symmetry, Bolingbroke is associated not with Abel but, via Exton's surrogacy, “With Cain [to] go wander thorough shades of night” (V.vi.43).

Neither the historical sources nor the recognized dramatic antecedents for this play (the anonymous Woodstock and Marlowe's Edward II) suggest any association of Richard and Bolingbroke with Cain and Abel; it was apparently Shakespeare's own idea to bind this play in the framework of the First Murder. On first glance this frame might appear to be merely decorative, a foil against which Richard's fall and Bolingroke's ascent stand out clearly. But after that first glance, it immediately seems more than that. Gloucester is likened to Abel (I.i.104) with Mowbray standing in for Cain, and Bolingbroke casting himself as God the avenger; why then at the end does Bolingbroke link his surrogate murderer Exton (and thus himself) with Cain? And why introduce the biblical analogy at all, let alone as the bracketing format of the play, at I.i and V.vi? At the end, the analogous positions are reversed in a complicated twisting of narrative strands that began early in the play: Richard (as Abel) is killed, and Bolingbroke, whose Cain-like banishment began in I.iii, at the end imposes upon himself the penance of pilgrimage to expiate the double sin of regicide and fratricide.

Because they are, seriatim, kings, the crimes attributed to Richard and Bolingbroke respectively must be displaced. Richard's involvement in Woodstock's murder is the unresolved charge displaced onto Mowbray at the start of the play; Bolingbroke's “contract” on Richard is displaced onto Exton and revealed only by report and implication in the very brief conversation between Exton and “a servant”: “‘Have I no friend will rid me of this living fear?’ / … he spake it twice, / And urg'd it twice together, did he not?” (V.iv.2-5). Because Richard and Bolingbroke are each other's doubles, the surrogated murder puts Bolingbroke in the position not of avenger but of fratricide. There is no doubt of his identification with Exton/Cain, for in the next lines he pledges to “make a voyage to the Holy Land, / To wash the blood off from my guilty hand” (V.vi.49-50). Like the other restitutive rituals represented in the play, Bolingbroke's expiation too was aborted by the continuing civil strife, as dramatized in the rest of the Second Tetralogy.

Cain's punishment, exile from Eden, is accompanied by the divine protection of God's mark; thus, in the 1560 Geneva Bible: “Douteles whosoeuer slayeth Kain, he shalbe punished seuen folde. And the Lord set a marke vpon Kain, lest anie man finding him shulde kil him” (Genesis 4:15).⁶ The mark is both stain and anointment; the marked one is both shunned and protected, villain and consecrated victim, in other words, the tragic protagonist. In Shakespeare's play, Cain is incorporated in both Richard and Bolingbroke, serving as a link that binds them together.

The mirrored relationship of Richard and Bolingbroke is set forth once more, this time by verbal recitation. The Duchess of York reminds her husband to “tell the rest / When weeping made you break the story off, / Of our two cousins coming into London” (V.ii.1-3). Besides the immediate pairing of “our two cousins” as kin and equals, the narrative relates the double royal entrée as the last formal ceremony in the play. Since there cannot be two kings, the description images appropriately York's—and England's—crisis in witnessing and recording it, and completes the redifferentiation of the royal pair.

Then, as I said, the Duke, great Bolingbroke,
Mounted upon a hot and fiery steed
Which his aspiring rider seem'd to know,
With slow but stately pace kept on his course,
Whilst all tongues cried, “God save thee, Bolingbroke!”

(V.ii.7-11)

In grotesque contrast, there is the mirrored reverse:

As in a theatre the eyes of men,
.....Did scowl on gentle 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.23-30)

No doubt the sight of a monarch so degraded and abused by the citizenry was too painful to be enacted, and so it is theatrically displaced as narrative. According to a Tudor law derived from a 1352 statute from Edward III's reign, it was also treason even to imagine it (Kastan 1986: 473). The verbal re-creation crystallizes York's own crisis of partisanship so that weeping chokes him off. But York did see it; his narrative underscores the painful paradox of what cannot be and nonetheless is. In the exchange between the Duke and his wife, the audience hears it twice, in York's line and in the Duchess's recall of “that sad stop, my lord, / Where rude misgovern'd hands from windows' tops / Threw dust and rubbish on King Richard's head” (V.ii.4-6), and knows that it was said a third time, when the Duke broke off. The imagined/actualized scene also constitutes a third deposition, the public witness and approval of Richard's disgrace. The unthinkable has come to pass, “But heaven hath a hand in these events” (V.ii.37). The issue has already been foretold, and now is told again: “To Bolingbroke are we sworn subjects now, / Whose state and honour I for aye allow” (V.ii.39-40). It is easy to hear this as the “eye for eye” of retribution; indeed in the next lines we learn that Aumerle has been stripped of his title by Henry for supporting Richard, though allowed to remain Earl of Rutland, recreating in part Bolingbroke's position in the early scenes of the play.

In his degraded state, Richard's passage through liminality is momentarily frozen; he is stuck in a nameless, faceless, uncreated condition, neither what he was nor what he will be:

                                                                      I have no name, no title—
No, not that name was given me at the font—
But 'tis usurp'd. Alack the heavy day,
That I have worn so many winters out
And know not now what name to call myself!
O, that I were a mockery king of snow,
Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke,
To melt myself away in water drops!

(IV.i.255-62)

He has assumed, in Girard's terms,

the role of the unworthy king, the antisovereign. The king then unloads on this inverted image of himself all his negative attributes. We now have the true pharmakos: the king's double, but in reverse. He is similar to those mock kings who are crowned at carnival time. … But once the carnival is over the anti-king is expelled from the community or put to death, and his disappearance puts an end to all the disorder that his person served to symbolize for the community and also to purge for it.

(1977: 109n.)

The redifferentiation of paired contestants is necessary for both individual and national identity and is accomplished through the ritual process. The relationship between Bolingbroke and Richard, and the double identification of both, at different moments, with both Cain and Abel, is more than a matter of imagistic or symbolic cross-matching. In so far as the stewardship of the “blessed plot” of Gaunt's famous speech (II.i.40-68) is a material manifestation of God's blessing, the differentiation of paired contenders is reiterated throughout the tetralogy, reflected in only slightly altered forms in the pairings, in 1 and 2 Henry IV, of Hal and Falstaff (or as versions of the father, of Henry and Falstaff), and Hal and Hotspur, and in Henry V, of England and France.

Ricardo Quinones locates the origin of civilization with the biblical brothers: “Cain, who aspires to possession, to rights, to identity, is the founder of the first city. Abel then becomes the figure of the right-thinking man who knows he is a stranger and a sojourner among earthly things” (1991: 26-7). Both Richard and Bolingbroke so aspire, and both Richard and Bolingbroke become at alternate moments the stranger and sojourner: Bolingbroke when he is banished and returns in Richard II, and again as he waits to die in the “Jerusalem Room” in 2 Henry IV, and Richard politically excommunicated as “landlord of England” at the start of his play and marginalized at Flint Castle towards the end. In the next generation, Hal reiterates this duality in the Gadshill and Boar's Head episodes, and in a different way, at Agincourt.

The “monstrous Cain” is at once a criminal and a permanent outcast, marked to prevent any possibility of reassimilation. As Quinones argues, the threat that such outcasts pose to material societies is the possibility that they may return to avenge their deprivations; that threat is interpreted not only as against the specific agent of their exclusion but as against civilization itself (1991: 41-3). In the extant dramatic versions of the Cain-and-Abel narrative, the medieval cycle plays, Cain's act of fratricide is given a specifically materialist base; that is, the differentiation of the brother-rivals for God's blessing occurs in the context of their respective “professions,” Abel's as shepherd and Cain's as farmer. Specifically, in the Towneley Mactatio Abel (Stevens and Cawley 1994), Cain evinces a certain stinginess in regard to the number of sheaves of grain to be offered, and his grudging sacrifice produces only a choking smoke in contrast with Abel's clean voluntary burning. The Chester Cain (Lumiansky and Mills 1974), is even more fully dramatized and presents a more complicated discourse. There he hopes to get away with offering his second-best cuttings, saving the best for himself: Cain's polluting sin was not only his unwilling sacrifice but his conversion, or perversion, of sacred ritual to economic or material concerns. Cain not only refuses God any grain fit for human consumption: “This corne standinge, as mote I thee, / was eaten with beastes, men may see. / God, thou gettest noe other of mee” (533-5), but offers fruitless stalks only: “This earles corne grewe nexte the waye; / of these offer I will todaye. / For cleane corne, by my faye, / of mee gettest thou nought” (541-4). His whole intention is only “too looke if hee / will sende mee any more” (519-20). His offering does not catch fire at all; it is rejected totally. Cain is thoroughly shamed: more than the grain, he himself is an abomination. His punishment is prophesied down to the seventh generation (659-60), which situates the Chester play at the foundation of the genre of dynastic drama and thus of the Shakespearean tetralogies.

The political and economic impact of the Cain-and-Abel narrative resonates in Shakespeare's play, where the crisis of the monarchy stands in close parallel to the contest for land and/or divine favor, which may ultimately be the same thing, the one manifesting the other in material terms. This is clearly illustrated in the Gardeners' scene in III.iv, and in the resonating language and imagery of aborted or inverted crop production throughout the play: in Carlisle's terms, “the blood of English shall manure the ground” and yield “the field of Golgotha and dead men's skulls” (IV.i.137, 144). Both narratives are concerned with kinship and its sacred ritual status, but if one asks why that relationship is sanctified, the materialist answer is because of land use. That issue, we will recall, was the principal charge laid against Richard in Gaunt's deathbed speech: Richard “leas'd out” the “blessed plot,” the “other Eden, demi-paradise,” and became “landlord of England … not king.” The commodification of land through enclosures had been an accelerating factor in a growing social and economic crisis from Richard's time through Shakespeare's. There is an interesting symmetry between the banishment of Cain and his loss of the post-Edenic garden, and Richard's undoing and his commodification of the “blessed plot.” Such evidence of materialist realism serves, as Robert Weimann pointed out, to anchor awareness of “an aesthetic and historical problem beyond the traditional context” as well as within it, and to record “a new mimetic form of self-expression and self-portrayal” (1978: 63). The way in which a late Elizabethan audience responded to a cycle play such as Cain and Abel probably differed from the way a medieval audience did, just as twentieth-century responses to Shakespeare's plays (and to medieval drama) must differ from those of the original audience. In the case of Richard II and the Cain-and-Abel plays, the awareness Weimann identifies resonates with multiple referents: the ground of Eden is in Shakespeare identical with England (Berninghausen 1987: 4). Sibling rivalry for God's blessing, the urgency of redifferentiation, fratricide, and the establishment of a new dynasty: these are among the emphases Shakespeare found in the drama of Cain and Abel that linked the crisis of the Tudor monarchy with the history of the world, rendering it at once unavoidable, contemporary, and cyclical.

The idea that the Second Tetralogy, and Richard II in particular, tells the story of the passage of England from the Middle Ages into “history” has been widely recognized (Berninghausen 1987; Kernan 1975: 273; cf. Frye 1967: 14). But critics differ in the interpretation of that idea. The general interpretation suggests that the loss of Eden equates with the loss of a medieval “world view,” that the historical and political passage we witness in the Second Tetralogy is a fall tantamount to Adam and Eve's, and then again to Cain's. But this view requires a nostalgia that may not have been universal in Tudor England, especially when we consider that the Tudor reign depended heavily upon the deposition of Richard in the first place. As Kernan writes,

In that Edenic world which Gaunt describes and Richard destroys, every man knew who he was. His religion, his family, his position in society, his assigned place in processions large and small, his coat of arms and his traditional duties told him who he was, what he should do and even gave him the formal language in which to express this socially assigned self. But once, under the pressures of political necessity and personal desires, the old system is destroyed, the old identities go with it. Man then finds himself in the situation which Richard acts out in IV.i, the deposition scene.

(1975: 273; emphasis added)

In the story of Cain Shakespeare found the movement of historical change “under the pressures of political necessity and personal desires.” Cain's banishment extends the map of the world beyond Eden, and further, beyond that East-of-Eden legitimized for Adam and Eve after the expulsion from the garden. In the 1560 Geneva Bible, Cain is the “vagabonde and rennegate” whose punishment clearly differentiates center (Eden), margin (East-of-Eden), and outside (the Land of Nod, where Cain lived out his banishment). In this instance too we find material that is replicated in Richard II. Before the murder, Cain and Abel inhabit ground that is already outside of Paradise, from which their parents had been expelled (Frye 1967: 14). But it is still legitimate ground, in so far as their residence there is divinely authorized. It is, in other words, the “margin” between Eden and elsewhere, and is identified as “East-of.” Such marginal loci, like marginal statuses, are liminal, ambiguous, and therefore both vulnerable and dangerous (Douglas 1966: 145). This marginalization of Cain and Abel, the immediate context of the fratricide, is replicated in Shakespeare's III.ii and III.iii, in Wales, just before the first deposition. There, abject Richard embeds the humble figure of Abel, with the mocking Henry Bolingbroke in the role of arrogant, rebellious Cain. At this liminal outpost, in this liminal moment, the roles of both men in relation to each other and to the crown and kingdom are ambiguous, ambivalent, neither what they were nor what they will be. They are becoming what the historical record will say they were, but Shakespeare stops the action of that passage and centers attention on Richard's self-deposition and his inscription of his own story among the “sad stories of the death of kings” (III.ii.156). In both Richard II and Cain and Abel, we have more than a version of an historical/biblical record; we have a dramatic interrogation of the reasons for and the process by which it happened, and this interrogation yields a complicated thesis. In the story of Cain we find the explanation of political necessity, for when Cain rose up against his brother, partisanship and dynasty were invented. Gaunt's famous identification of England as “other Eden” would be meaningless if his audience could not distinguish “other than Eden,” to differentiate “demi-Paradise” from the fallen world. By echoing the cycle play's resonance, Shakespeare directs his audience's attention to both its own proximal past—the generation that saw cycle plays performed—and its very distant past. The contest for husbandry of the “blessed plot” did not begin with Richard II and Henry Bolingbroke but with Cain.

Just as tradition and custom serve political ends, so do retentions of specific traditions and customs a generation or more after they have apparently departed the scene of contemporary life. Foucault's definition of “subjugated knowledges,” mentioned earlier, serves well to describe the Elizabethan fate of the cycle plays and all such occluded traditions and customs. Subjugated knowledges are

a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate … or insufficiently elaborated: naive knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy. … [A] particular, local, regional knowledge … which owes its force only to the harshness with which it is opposed by everything surrounding it … [and] allowed to fall into disuse whenever they are not effectively and explicitly maintained in themselves.

(Foucault 1980: 82)

The mechanism of suppression first trivializes and then erases both the knowledge and the language that sustains it. Subjugated knowledges “entertain the claims to attention of local, discontinuous, disqualified, illegitimate knowledges against the claims of a unitary body of theory which would filter, hierarchise and order them in the name of some true knowledge” (Foucault 1980: 83). The relation of this strong language to the demise of the cycle plays may not be immediately evident, especially in view of the relatively privileged and protected status of cycle plays authorized by town, guild, and to some extent ecclesiastic warrant, compared with the marginalized loci and status of Elizabethan public playhouses (Mullaney 1988: 26-59). But Foucault's definition of “subjugated knowledges” applies easily to the demise of the cycle plays in general as a social and theatrical institution, and in fact illuminates Shakespeare's imbrication of the cycle play material in Richard II. Localized by both townships and guild management, cycle plays constitute exactly that “particular, local, regional knowledge … allowed to fall into disuse whenever they are not effectively and explicitly maintained in themselves.” It is useful to recall that although they operated for a time under the aegis of the Catholic Church, they were not strictly the productions of that Church, and therefore when Catholicism and its festivals were suppressed in England, the cycle plays did not immediately suffer the same radical fate. Drama that endures through long passages of time functions kaleidoscopically: turned one way or another, it yields one or another view, or one or another perspective of any particular view, and perhaps reveals more about the focusing powers of the observer than about the observed. What did Shakespeare hear in the Cain and Abel play that still spoke loudly to his Elizabethan audience? If, as some critics believe, Richard II is “about the end of medieval history” (Berninghausen 1987: 5), then echoes from a specific medieval play about the first murder and the first dynastic differentiation, the first play of politics, serve as a carefully chosen mnemonic of how such a horrific event as fratricide could happen in “demi-paradise.” It could happen precisely because it replicates the first such event in the first paradise. The basic outline of the story could of course be identified in the biblical tale, but not the concerns and dimensions of Cain and Abel as homo economicus, each negotiating for his patch of the garden and favorite-son status. For that fleshed-out model Shakespeare had the dramatic antecedent of the cycle play, which fills in the outlines of the biblical tale in economic terms. The issue of material concerns is evident elsewhere in the Second Tetralogy: in all of the tavern and Gadshill scenes in 1 and 2 Henry IV, and in the opening dialogue between the Bishops of Ely and Canterbury in Henry V, where the contested matter of lands promised for the church is the reason why the bishops urge Henry to engage the war against France that takes up the rest of the play. The Cain-and-Abel play is the first play, and one already known to many in Shakespeare's audience, that interrogates the issue of land use and retention of goods. Shakespeare's selection and placement of the mnemonic as the frame of his play anchored the transition from medieval history to Elizabethan early-modernity.

Tracing the roots of Richard II back to the Cain-and-Abel cycle play offers a view of several kinds of succession, both dynastic and dramaturgical, as the process of political and material selection. Shakespeare's interpolation of the cycle play material was deliberate and pointed: it reminded his audience that what they were seeing in Richard II was something they had seen in another form in a previous generation's drama. The public theaters and the plays they housed were the functional archives of what Linda Woodbridge calls “shadow genres,”⁷ her term for what Bakhtin describes, in language reminiscent of Foucault's, in discussing the development of the novel:

Contemporaneity, flowing and transitory, “low,” present—this “life without beginning or end” was a subject of representation only in the low genres. Most important, it was the basic subject matter in the broadest and richest of realms, the common people's creative culture. … The “absolute past” of gods, demigods and heroes is here … “contemporized”: it is brought low, represented on a plane equal with contemporary life, in an everyday environment, in the low language of contemporaneity.

(Bakhtin 1981: 20-1)

The Cain and Abel cycle play stands in precisely this relation to Shakespeare's Richard II. As a popular genre, the cycle play mediates the canonical biblical text and the de casibus material of Holinshed, Hall, Froissart, and The Mirror for Magistrates; it constitutes a “shadow genre,” a parallel text which stands in relation to the canon in much the same way as a Haftorah encodes a portion of the Torah, as a covert echo of a subjugated knowledge. Despite, or perhaps because of, its discontinuation by 1595, the cycle play's echoes in Richard II establish a Bakhtinian heteroglossia (Bakhtin 1981: 428) of related discourses—theatrical, biblical, historical, and contemporary. Such a view “reveals the same kind of continuity in drama that was characteristic of early modern culture as a whole. Rather than sacred culture suddenly giving way to secular, what we find is a gradual transformation of ideology that accompanies the transformation of social and political relations” (Cox 1989: 31). The ritual foundation of Richard II anchors its act of fratricide in a long and authorized tradition rooted in the economic motivations of political action. In this mirror of English “history,” both biblical and dynastic, the Tudor age checked its own appearance.

Folded in with the “shadow genre” of the cycle play is another discourse “subjugated” during Elizabeth's reign. Richard's self-carnivalization as “a mockery king of snow” condenses an extended narrative in Holinshed which begins: “Thus was king Richard deprived of all kinglie honour and princelie dignitie, by reason he was so given to follow evill counsell, and used such inconvenient waies and meanes, through insolent misgovernance, and youthfull outrage, though otherwise a right noble and woorthie prince” and ends: “[Yet] hee was a prince the most unthankfullie used of his subjects, of any one of whom ye shall lightlie read” (Bullough 1973: III: 408-9). His sins are enumerated by Holinshed as prodigality and lasciviousness, in which he was not alone: “speciallie in the king, but most cheefelie in the prelacie” (Bullough 1973: III: 409). These are hardly high crimes and capital treasons; Holinshed's Richard was more a Lord of Misrule than a criminal. His implication in Woodstock's death is barely noticed in Holinshed, and however much is made of it by Shakespeare, it is not mentioned again after Act I.

The seriousness of identifying an anointed monarch as Misrule would not have been lost upon Shakespeare's audience. For clearly political reasons, Misrule performances were discontinued in the courts of Mary and Elizabeth after periods of great popularity under Edward VI and occasionally under Henry VIII (Barber 1959: 26; Laroque 1991: 68). Although Elizabeth promoted and supported various seasonal festivities in and out of court, Misrule was not one of them. Even a temporary release of control is fatal to the monarch in unstable times. Elizabeth knew that; Richard learned it in a shower of dust and rubbish.

The carnivalization of Richard, first by himself and then by his trash-throwing subjects, prepares him, as Girard notes, for the role of pharmakos, for it is only as his own double, not as his kingly self, that he can take on the sacrificial function of the scapegoat. Richard wants to see Henry, not himself, as the roi soleil. But Henry has already identified himself inversely with rain, not sun, in the lines quoted earlier from III.iii. It is Richard who is linked with the defeated sun (II.iv.21). Richard thinks himself inadequate to the role of sun; he is the sun's son (or, if “sun” signifies an anointed king, the sun's grandson): “Down, down I come, like glist'ring Phaeton” (III.iii.178); in that image is his own admission of his failed potential. The mockery king of snow is the inverse and alter-ego of the sun-king; in those terms, as sun turns to snow, Richard undoes himself. But snow is also the frozen, rigid form of rain, Henry's symbol, and rain melts and washes away snow. Sun and rain are potentially both destructive and restorative elements. The ambivalent meanings of these meteorological images prevent facile conclusions about Shakespeare's view of Richard's sins and Henry's heroism.

Commenting on Richard's humiliation, Bristol writes:

These images of royal abjection and victimization do not have the purely redressive and exemplary features of an actual ritual. The violent uncrowning of the royal martyr or royal villain is invariably accompanied by a more generalized, pervasive social violence or civil war. … The relationship between victimized king and victimized kingdom is complex and elusive.

(1985: 197-8)

For Richard's deposition and Henry's accession to have those redressive features, the ambiguity of Richard's alternately conservative and destructive behavior would have to be resolved as preeminently negative, and the matching ambiguity of Henry's restructuring of the monarchy would have to appear as positive. But the play does not allow such an easy and comfortable resolution; the sugar-coating of the “Tudor Myth” did not entirely mask the bitter taste of Richard's deposition and the continual outbreaks of rebellion during Henry IV's reign. The restorative function of uncrowning followed by new crowning is absent from the play because the redressive capabilities of such rituals had long since been lost to medieval and Renaissance England, leaving only the outward forms of ritual actions. Rituals evacuated of meaning cannot work, and historically they did not work; the restoration of England's political stability took longer than the unquiet reign of Henry IV. Against the backdrop of an England whose rituals had turned from religious to secular to spectacular, and from purgative to political to pro forma, Richard II performs the “movement from ceremony and ritual to history” (Kernan 1970: 247) of the rest of the Henriad. By attending to the changes during Richard's reign in the way ritual was variously honored, aborted, subverted, debased, and ignored, Richard II dramatizes the inescapable cost of secularizing a ritual-centered political ecology. The price of “history” is a loss of the ritual integrity that stabilizes its movement and protects its original social, political, and religious structures.

Notes

1. Bocock (1974), working from a sociological rather than an anthropological argument, discusses ritual as “non-rational action” in modern industrial England, and includes what he calls “aesthetic” (i.e., dance, theater, music) as well as religious domains. Although he cautions against stretching the parameters of “ritual” to include the most mundane activities, he nevertheless includes such transitory activities as “pop” festivals, athletic events, labor strikes and political rallies. From an anthropological perspective, Bocock's approach is problematic because it privileges activities common during the decade in which he was writing that have diminished since that time, for example, “pop festivals” and other so-called “counter-culture” gatherings specific to one or at most two generations. Part of the difficulty of analyzing ritual in the twentieth century is the extreme fragmentation of culture itself. Unlike ritual in traditional cultures, what Bocock identifies as those of modern times do not link past, present, and future. They are not designed to ensure survival beyond the moment and are often random or spontaneous occurrences.

2. Dumouchel makes the important point that “societies, though they have always resulted from human actions, have almost everywhere conceived of themselves as instituted by the sacred: by powers beyond the reach of humanity” (1988: 17).

3. In a footnote to this rhetorical maneuver Greenblatt acknowledges the “intensified ambiguity” of the remark, but he clearly intends the implication of the play's immediate threat to stand. An alternative, and ironic, speculation is suggested by W. Gordon Zeeveld at the end of his essay on Coriolanus: “Had Shakespeare's audience been able to foresee the course of seventeenth-century history as clearly, the upheaval some forty years later might have been averted” (1962: 334). A theater that can spark revolution can also avert it; but it appears in Shakespeare's case to have done neither. See also Marcus 1988: 27-9.

4. That is, it has been obscured in recent criticism. The connections between Shakespeare's play, Hayward's book and the Essex plot are debated at length in Albright 1927, Heffner 1930, and Albright 1931.

5. In a Royal Shakespeare Company production of the play some years ago, the actors did in fact freeze the moment for several seconds in a tableau. To underscore the reciprocal identity of the two kings and kinsmen, the actors playing Richard and Henry switched roles on alternate evenings throughout the run of the play.

6. Besides the obvious biblical source, Shakespeare and his audience would have known the dramatizations of the Cain and Abel story in the cycle plays at Coventry and elsewhere, which continued, despite various statutory suppressions during the Reformation, through the 1570s (Laroque 1991: 56; Cox 1989: 22, 39), and possibly until 1591 (Ingram 1981: xix).

7. Personal communication.

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