SOURCE: Harrier, Richard. “Ceremony and Politics in Richard II.” In Shakespeare: Text, Language, Criticism: Essays in Honor of Marvin Spevack, edited by Bernhard Fabian and Kurt Tetzeli von Rosador, pp. 80-97. Hildesheim, Germany: Olms-Weidman, 1987.

[In the following essay, Harrier examines Richard's conduct in Act III, scene iii of Richard II. In the critic's opinion, the king's increasing inability to preserve the ritual show of monarchy is an outward manifestation of his loss of confidence in his entitlement to the throne.]

Interpretation of Richard II has inevitably focused on Richard's shortcomings as a man and a king. The special interest of his dramatic figure derives precisely from the interrelations of his double aspect—the flawed mortality and the ritually endowed divinity. It is the purpose of this essay to pursue their connections in ways that may risk the charge of being speculative.

Although it may be argued that the realizable effects of a live performance should be used as a measure of what academic analysis should propose, I suggest that much can be lost by attempting to reconcile the two. Let performance of a play have its privilege of vivid distortions. In the restrospect of academic forums—the lecture and the essay—we should explore all implications of the poetry in order to redefine the margins of relevance and distracting ingenuity.

One line of argument I wish to develop here is that Richard dooms himself by failing to complete a ritual act he has more than one opportunity to perform. There is considerable irony in this lost possibility, considering Richard's vacillation between stiff dependence upon ceremonial magic and cavalier violation of its forms. The crucial failure occurs in 3.3, after Bullingbrook recovers from his shock that Flint “castle royally is mann'd” (3.3.21).¹ At that point Bullingbrook responds with a brilliant oration proposing how he and King Richard “should meet” (54).

Richard's failure to rise to the occasion, to sustain “so fair a show” as he appears to be initiating, has been prepared for in a sequence of scenes and moments we must review. The first and third scenes of the play present a Richard who seems entirely confident in the possession of majesty and grace. The legal process brought by Bullingbrook against Mowbray for the death of Gloucester constrains inventive speech within expected topics of ceremonial rhetoric.

Thus Richard has the advantage of response from the position of both judge and jury. He can playfully and pointedly accuse “one” of the accusers—obviously Bullingbrook—of flattery in wishing him “Many years of happy days” (1.1.20), since it is clear to all that Mowbray is the King's man in this “cause” of high treason. And he can joke about the inconvenience of bloody combat at this point in the calendar: “Our doctors say this is no month to bleed” (157). Even the embarrassment of Mowbray's refusal to play his part in aborting the movement towards bloodshed serves only to reveal a Richard who was “not born to sue, but to command” (196). For, as Richard has already warned Mowbray, “Lions make leopards tame” (174).

Whether Richard's refusal to allow the trial by combat to take its course be a sign of weakness or simply a tactical error will no doubt continue to be debated. It is clear that the decision was reached beforehand with Gaunt's approval and that of the royal council. I take that to be implied by the phrases “good advice” and “party-verdict” which Richard hurls at the old man when grudging against the banishment of his son (1.3.233-4). Perhaps there was already no escape from events. Either the combat eventuated in bloodshed and the risk of more “civil wounds” (128) or the hostile parties had to be sent into exile. It is worth noting that the King fears only that Mowbray and Bullingbrook might combine against him in some foreign place. To obviate that he makes them swear an oath never to “Embrace each other's love in banishment” (184),

Nor never by advised purpose meet
To plot, contrive, or complot any ill
'Gainst us, our state, our subjects, or our land.

(188-90)

With regard to Mowbray, Bullingbrook keeps his oath, but he does combine with others against the King's person and his land. However, by then Bullingbrook has hit upon a witty legalism for just who he is.

What Bullingbrook's behavior and style have suggested to the King up to this point is left largely undefined by Shakespeare, no doubt for good dramatic reasons, since we also, as spectators and readers, must find Bullingbrook's psyche even more puzzling than Richard's. Inevitably, our impression of a relatively free development in the choices made depends upon Shakespeare's ability to compose in a condition of suspended ambivalences. We note that Bullingbrook's indictment of Mowbray in the opening scene is phrased on the level of Biblical grandeur as he assumes the authority of a divine minister to punish Mowbray for shedding Gloucester's blood:

Which blood, like sacrificing Abel's, cries,
Even from the tongueless caverns of the earth,
To me for justice and rough chastisement.

(1.1.104-6)

But the Biblical context should also be a warning to the speaker, were he aware of it, since God pronounced that vengeance would be taken “sevenfold” upon that man who presumed to avenge Abel by slaying Cain.

The King's reply to these words is almost a dismissal: “How high a pitch his resolution soars!” The irony here is difficult to place within the large reaches of humor. No doubt the falcon image does register an awareness of ambition testing the boundaries of natural movement. But there is also the note of pointing to a gesture in bad taste, as if Bullingbrook should be embarrassed for going beyond what the rules of the game would allow as proper to him.

Since Bullingbrook is invoking the royal blood he shares with Richard, the King nicely puts him in his place by acknowledging the kinship while observing how far Bullingbrook is from the throne, “As he is but my father's brother's son” (117), which amounts to a “neighbour nearness” (119). In all of this there is no evidence that Richard feels any guilt or fear of punishment. If he were the sort of character to articulate his thoughts on the matter—and he is not—he could appeal to the cautious and reverent defense offered to the widow of the murdered man in the second scene by Gaunt:

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

(1.2.37-41)

Here in private Gaunt uses the saving phrase, “if wrongfully.” Gaunt's piety only reinforces one's sense of the audacity resonant in the language of Bullingbrook's accusation speech. Vengeance is the Lord's, and Bullingbrook is usurping the language of God when He said to Cain: “the voyce of thy brothers blood cryeth vnto me from the grounde.”²

Shakespeare prepares for the crucial ceremonial moment in 3.3 by allowing Bullingbrook to combine tradition with invention in the third scene of the first act. After the King and the Earl Marshal have guided the potential combatants through the lines prescribed by chivalry he suddenly makes a request that momentarily suggests his own doubt as to which side God will favor.³

Lord Marshal, let me kiss my sovereign's hand
And bow my knee before his Majesty,
For Mowbray and myself are like two men
That vow a long and weary pilgrimage.
Then let us take a ceremonious leave
And loving farewell of our several friends.

(1.3.46-51)

As if Richard cannot hear these words the Earl Marshal transmits the request in simpler language.

What follows is a triumphant descent by Richard, significantly contrasted by his despairing one in the third act:

We will descend and fold him in our arms.
Cousin of Herford, as thy cause is right,
So be thy fortune in this royal fight!
Farewell, my blood, which if to-day thou shed,
Lament we may, but not revenge thee dead.

(54-8)

This moment of perhaps eye-to-eye encounter is one that invites novelistic interpretation, a temptation that should be resisted. I have already argued that Bullingbrook, in giving himself away to grandiloquence, may be harboring fears of retribution. Indeed, why should he be pondering “a long and weary pilgrimage?” Shakespeare, in his authorial capacity, foresees that pilgrimage all the way to the Jerusalem Chamber in which Henry the Fourth will die. Here we surmise one of those points of interaction between poet and dramatic character that are all the more rich for their openness.

Note that the King takes the moral risk of allowing Bullingbrook a victory in this trial by combat if his “cause is right.” Surely this is a sign of Richard's self-righteous assurance, of his conviction that anything he has done or will do will be favored by heaven. I shall postpone further speculation about Bullingbrook's attitude towards the royal mystery until later in this essay.

From the moment that the King hears of Gaunt's impending death to his departure for Ireland, having seized “the plate, coin, revenues, and moveables” (2.1.161) now rightly Bullingbrook's, we observe only an increase in arrogance. Gaunt's denunciation of Richard as having traded the name of King for that of “Landlord” includes a rather subtle legal quibble about deposition as a royal right or punishment:

O had thy grandsire with a prophet's eye
Seen how his son's son should destroy his sons,
From forth thy reach he would have laid thy shame,
Deposing thee before thou wert possess'd,
Which art possess'd now to depose thyself.

(2.1.104-8)

What is interesting here is that Gaunt speaks of a hypothetical deposition by preventing a coronation ceremony, and one clearly based upon a miraculous foresight. In prophesying that Richard will depose himself, Gaunt does not grant such power to anyone of lower station.⁴ These words foreshadow what Richard invents as a ceremonial transference of his crown to Bullingbrook, and that “show” is so well done that it leaves Bullingbrook with the feeling of having received full royalty from the King's own hand.

In 3.2, Shakespeare gradually builds to a crisis in the King's psyche from which he does not recover until the last few moments of his life. The dramatic problem here is unusually instructive, because it reveals—upon reflection—the limits of theatrical preparation before a large poetic leap. Richard's posturing is unnerving not only to us but to his supporters, the deeply religious Carlisle and the intimate Aumerle. They are unmistakably shocked by his magical and pointless, that is, “senseless” solicitation of actions on the part of his “gentle earth.” They must be looking at him in a state of wonder when he rebukes their silent disapproval:

Mock not my senseless conjuration, lords,
This earth shall have a feeling, and these stones
Prove armed soldiers, ere her native king
Shall falter under foul rebellion's arms.

(3.2.23-6)

The King's consciousness, however, is as much attuned to “the blood of twenty thousand men” (76) as it is to each “glorious angel” (61) he insists God has “in heavenly pay” (60) to fight on his behalf. And he does not finally give in to despair until Scroop informs him that his “uncle York is join'd with Bullingbrook” (200).

These pragmatic considerations, in rhythmic sequence, tend to undermine Richard's assertion of the magical force his royal image will have on the criminal Bullingbrook:

So when this thief, this traitor Bullingbrook,
Who all this while hath revell'd in the night,
Whilst we were wand'ring with the antipodes,
Shall see us rising in our throne, the east,
His treasons will sit blushing in his face,
Not able to endure the sight of day.

(3.2.47-52)

However vainglorious these words may seem, it is my contention that they represent all that Richard needs—if he could maintain the “show”—to deal with Bullingbrook's return. Before this scene is completed, however, Richard has lost conviction of his royalty, and with that loss the force to sustain a style adequate to another close confrontation. His appearance in the following scene will therefore lack all the dimensions of a sun-like presence.

The break within Richard has a superb effect on the stage. His lines make for powerful theatre, and it is arguable that they are the best lines in the whole play. In their peculiar quality, however, we can perceive a quantum leap from psychological realism to poetic form. The particular lines I refer to conclude Richard's outburst after he has been told by Scroop that Bushy, Green, and the Earl of Wiltshire “have felt the worst of death's destroying wound” (139). The impact of their deaths seems to penetrate Richard as no other event has as yet been able to do. He brushes off Aumerle's inquiry about York's army and delivers twenty-six lines that resonate with his sudden register of death's power over everyone—even over kings (3.2.144-70). These lines are Richard's imaginative re-creation of a morality play in which Death, playing the role of fool or “antic,” allows the king “To monarchize, be fear'd, and kill with looks” (165), but only for a while. Thus we are skillfully drawn into the nightmare Richard is inhabiting.

His conclusion, however, makes another sort of demand upon our imaginations. Indeed, one may find the lines which follow tinged with the deeper magnetism of the incredible:

Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence, throw away respect,
Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while.
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,
How can you say to me I am a king?

(171-7)

In the history of English verse this speech has a special place. The longer first part is more oratorical and impassioned, but it is constructed primarily of monosyllables well within the general stream of English colloquial language. Therefore, the few points of ornament come as awaited emphases of figuration: terms like “monarchize,” “infusing,” and “brass impregnable.” The conclusion is even more straightforward. It achieves that “moral sense of simplicity” we have come to accept as the linguistic correlative of sincerity.⁵ Thus we get the impression that some secret depth of the King has been sounded by the time the last word has been uttered. In substance, what is being asserted is hard to credit: that common human vulnerability to need and to its sharpest form, death, has destroyed Richard's conviction that he is a king. Or, as he would further assert, any man's ability to “monarchize.” But that is as far as we can go into the mystery of Richard's collapse. There are psychological labels available that would only reduce him to a paradigm to some degree shared by all mankind, and by other dramatic personae, especially King Lear. We learn more about the play by staying within its own limits.

After Scroop has informed Richard that he can expect no help from York, Richard forbids all future talk of comfort and embraces “that sweet way” he was working out “to despair” (3.2.205). The confession of taking pleasure in the process of his own destruction is characteristic of Richard's child-like nature. His ability to act and command has clearly been dissolved into the mist of sounds. It is not surprising, then, that the crux of the problem has sometimes been reduced to the formula: Richard is too much of a poet and not enough a king.⁶ But the definition of “poet” here implied is post-Romantic rather than Renaissance, if the expression of strong and self-indulgent emotion is to be the defining quality of poetry. Renaissance poetic assumes that poetry can illuminate through a precision of statement and argument. It is not primarily an instrument of personal recollection or the expression of personal feeling. If Shakespeare had not inherited those assumptions his own poetry would have been diminished by more than half of its dimensions. In applying this truth to the play at hand, we should grant Bullingbrook the title of poet also, even though his style is curt and the control over feeling sometimes severe.

As we begin to examine the confrontation in 3.3, let us remember that Richard has already described his body as “deposed” (3.2.150) and has added, “Our lands, our lives, and all are Bullingbrook's,” ending the scene with “From Richard's night to Bullingbrook's fair day.” The reader or spectator is thus prepared for the King's failure in the following scene. But the dramatic issue is not that simple. The crisis is redefined by Bullingbrook himself, since he faces the dilemma of presenting his claim in a way that will escape the charge of seizing the crown.

Bullingbrook knows that he must “play the orator” after he learns from Percy—Hotspur to be—that Flint Castle contains the King, the lords Aumerle and Salisbury, Sir Stephen Scroop and “a clergyman / Of holy reverence,” Carlisle. His speech ex tempore is masterful and familiar enough to be outlined rather than quoted in full (3.3.31-61).

The salient political and psychological point of these lines is the balance of ceremonial obeisance (kneeling) with the alternative use of military force. Since his unauthorized re-appearance in 2.3, Bullingbrook has emphasized that the scope of his demands lies entirely within his legal right to the title and properties of Lancaster. Again Bullingbrook repeats this circumscribed claim, one that even York has been unable to contradict directly. Of course that demand here takes the form of a “proviso,” which, if refused, would be followed by the use of force even to the level of civil war.

But let us focus upon Bullingbrook's promise to kneel “On both his knees” to “kiss King Richard's hand,” bearing of course the royal signet. At the end of this scene he makes good that pledge. To give his gesture a proper style, Bullingbrook orders that no “threat'ning drum” be sounded. Then he concludes with an allegorical characterization of his meeting with the King, assigning himself the natural position of “the yielding water,” fire being the highest and royal element.

His last words are a challenge to Richard's royal style:

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

(3.3.58-61)

Bullingbrook is a poet of grammatical ambiguity. The “be” here implies both a condition, “If he truly is,” and a courteous hope, “May he prove to be.” Bullingbrook even concedes the King the right to rage, and rather astonishingly, his own need to weep, all on condition that he be asked to rise from the kneeling position as Lancaster—no longer merely Herford. In 2.3, at his first encounter with York acting as Regent, Bullingbrook went down on his knees but received no decisive confirmation after a severe tongue-lashing.

Despite Scroop's report to Richard that his uncle York has “join'd with Bullingbrook,” York has only declared that he will “remain as neuter” (2.3.159), since he cannot “mend the issue.” But York's problem is not simply one of lacking a police force large enough to “attach” Bullingbrook. For Bullingbrook has already brilliantly challenged the authority of any magistrate to arrest him as a man who is still under the sentence of banishment. As he puts it:

As I was banish'd, I was banish'd Herford,
But as I come, I come for Lancaster.

(2.3.113-4)

If, as the director of a performance, one were to choose the exact moment for Bullingbrook to rise from his knees by his own volition, these lines would best serve.

Thus Bullingbrook has independently asserted that he is not the same man who was banished; and, as even York cannot deny, he has every right to be confirmed in the title of Lancaster, which is inescapably the royal duty. In Act 1 Bullingbrook could be raised from the ground by the King. Here he may rise by his own authority. At the end of 3.3 the King will invite him to rise as high as the royal crown.

When King Richard, as Bullingbrook carefully terms him in 3.3, looks down from the walls of Flint Castle, his image is described by two observers, Bullingbrook and York. Bullingbrook's words may be fairly described as a conventional portrait of majesty as “the blushing discontented sun.” York follows with phrases both hopeful and apprehensive:

Yet looks he like a king! Behold, his eye,
As bright as is the eagle's, lightens forth
Controlling majesty. Alack, alack for woe,
That any harm should stain so fair a show!

(68-71)

The word “show” here is central and worth some consideration since Shakespeare's usage has implications far beyond the modern reduction of “show” to the superficial and spectacular. Because he is physically powerless, Richard's presence in this crisis must be in one sense merely a show, but in another it could be the ultimate realization of royalty as an honored and all-powerful presence. The challenge to the King here is to make good his words at the opening of 3.2, when he asserts that “the searching eye of heaven,” his royalty, will make the traitor Bullingbrook unable to “endure the sight of day.”

As the King begins to speak no one is kneeling.⁷ The stage directions in the Riverside text seem to suggest that only Northumberland is close enough to the castle to be in the royal presence, and Richard's rebuke is therefore addressed to him. At this moment in the action York would surely be kneeling if he thought it appropriate, as would Bullingbrook, since he has made it a special point in his speech. Richard should break this impasse with an assertion of his presence. He should descend of his own free will and “progress” calmly up to Bullingbrook until he is forced to make good his promise to kneel. Thus the “show” of royalty would be sustained and Richard would himself be facing the decision of granting Bullingbrook his title of Lancaster.

After some “rage” the King would have to ask Bullingbrook to rise as Lancaster or, as he later suggests to Aumerle, give “Defiance to the traitor and so die.” But a stylish and positive execution of bestowing on Bullingbrook what is rightfully his would indeed give Richard the time he needs. That would indeed be playing for time, as Aumerle later suggests. But this neglected ceremony is only a necessary subtext for what is there. We are not surprised that Richard cannot make a royal “show” of the occasion. We are asked to become absorbed in his inadequate substitute for a sun-like persona.

As I have already attempted to argue, Shakespeare has left some margin of doubt about Bullingbrook's thoughts. I do not mean to imply that there is reason to wonder whether Bullingbrook would not be as good as his word. Rather, we are left puzzled as to Bullingbrook's conception of the royal condition and whether the use of force could put him or anyone fully in possession of it. We have heard Bullingbrook's appreciative weighing of royal power when Richard reduces his banishment from ten years to six, “such is the breath of kings” (1.3.215). And at the end of that scene his parting words seem to reveal a mind that cannot entertain the possibility of an intellectual realm that could dominate sensory experience:

O, who can hold a fire in his hand
By thinking on the frosty Caucusus?
Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite
By bare imagination of a feast?
Or wallow naked in December snow
By thinking on fantastic summer's heat?
O no, the apprehension of the good
Gives but the greater feeling to the worse.

(1.3.294-301)

This is Bullingbrook's reply to Gaunt's fatherly advice to rise above the pain of banishment. As Gaunt puts it:

For gnarling sorrow hath less power to bite
The man that mocks at it and sets it light.

(202-3)

The Bullingbrook we see here is somewhat like the grief-stricken Richard, and in his sorrow he does not consider the possibility of drawing upon the spiritual resources that would sustain royalty.

Had Bullingbrook in the course of the action been forced to simply seize the crown, the state of his mind could have become central to the play. As it is, Bullingbrook's psyche makes a fascinatingly vague ground upon which Richard's emerges into verbalization. Bullingbrook is fortunate enough to have the King deliver the crown to him in what appears to be a coronation ceremony invented to deal with Richard's personal sense of loss. Whether or not Bullingbrook harbors a deep sense of awe for royalty, he is bound to give that impression. Since he is taking the utmost precaution to avoid the accusation of seizing the crown, he must find it a particularly delicate moment when Richard suddenly thrusts it upon him.

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

(4.1.181-3)

The Riverside text does not indicate whether or not Bullingbrook does cooperate by holding his side of the crown. I would suggest that he declines to do so. Withholding his hand would re-inforce his somewhat pained reply, “I thought you had been willing to resign.” Bullingbrook thus succeeds in giving the impression that he will receive the crown from the King's own hand, and that it is being delivered with the full grace of God's anointed.

It is important to recall that, at the end of 3.3, after Richard has talked himself down “like glist'ring Phaeton,” Bullingbrook for the last time went down on his knees before the King. There again, Richard could have asked him to rise as Lancaster rather than willfully raising him as high as his own head. In so doing and in even taking the initiative of deciding that they should both go to London, as if reading Bullingbrook's intent, Richard is instinctively feeling his way towards making his own deposition an accomplished fact.

There also Shakespeare suggests in an almost offhand way that Richard will be unable to bring the pressure of his countenance upon Bullingbrook. In addressing the defiantly erect Northumberland, Richard gives him a message for Bullingbrook with a tell-tale interjection:

Tell Bullingbrook—for yon methinks he stands—
That every stride he makes upon my land
Is dangerous treason.

(3.3.91-3)

If the King cannot fully acknowledge, even from that distance, that Bullingbrook is standing there, he is not likely to enhance his awareness by physical approach. But Richard's problem cannot be simplified by concluding that he cannot overcome a streak of cowardice. The root of the King's indecision must lie deeper, in his refusal to acknowledge that his position in the nature of things is bound to the same rules that guarantee Herford's right to become Lancaster, a right he is duty-bound to confirm.

Thus he determines to unburden himself totally of all responsibility for being at the apex of the rituals which give an every-day reality to “sequence and succession.” First he sends Northumberland as messenger to Bullingbrook, going so far as to declare that Bullingbrook “is right welcome hither” and that “all the number of his fair demands / Shall be accomplish'd without contradiction” (3.3.122-4). But to Aumerle, privately, he expresses his sense of debasement at not making a better show of it, “to look so poorly and to speak so fair.” Now his impulse is to “send / Defiance to the traitor, and so die” (128-30).

Ironically, Aumerle advises that they “fight with gentle words, / Till time lend friends.” Since the semantic dimensions of Time have been given an almost allegorical force in the play, the appeal to time here, which Richard has violated beyond repair, signals the domination of events by a providential authority. But Shakespeare again places the dramatic accent upon the King's sense of private grief:

O God, O God, that e'er this tongue of mine
That laid the sentence of dread banishment
On yon proud man should take it off again
With words of sooth! O that I were as great
As is my grief, or lesser than my name!

(133-7)

These words represent the completion of a process that began with the challenging lines: “subjected thus / How can you say to me I am a king?” (3.2.176-7)

It is important to realize that Shakespeare keeps the emphasis upon Richard's dilemma as he states it here, and that he does not take it any deeper until 5.5. The King of this play is not an introspective character who might, say in a scene alone with Aumerle or in soliloquy, turn some analytical beam upon himself. Nowhere does the King directly address himself to his inner substance. He expresses only conflict in terms of frustration and grief. Once his mortal limitations are thrust upon him he is occupied only with his moment to moment embarrassment on how to conduct himself, a king and no king, and how to finally divest himself of his royalty. That accounts for some of the critical dissatisfaction with the figure at the center of the play, and why he has been thought too much poet and too little king. As he descends into the “base court,” now at the request of Bullingbrook and not of his own free royal will, he can only compare himself to “glist'ring Phaeton.” The allusion is a measure of how desperate he is for self-styling authority. Bullingbrook, on his knees, is once again willing to settle for his own but ready for as much as his “true service shall deserve” from the king's “love” (199). With perfect deftness Bullingbrook awaits the now inevitable, even to the point of making Richard decide to proceed to London.

At his entrance in the deposition scene Richard announces that he has not sufficiently “shook off the regal thoughts” he needs to unburden himself of, but his new image of himself is that of divine scapegoat, accusing those in attendance of doing to him what “Judas did to Christ” (4.1.162-70). That Shakespeare means these words to be taken seriously is shown by what he makes of them in the experience of York. For, as we learn later in 5.2, York has become the subject of Bullingbrook because he now views Richard as the divinely appointed scapegoat in a necessary development of English history.

But since we are still in the dark as to York's thinking, it is an effective stroke to have him invite the “Great Duke of Lancaster” to ascend the throne as “Henry, fourth of that name!” (107, 112). The focus of the play has been so intensely upon Richard and his unburdening that we can hardly expect Shakespeare to turn aside to York's change from “neuter” to a new commitment of loyalty. If Shakespeare seems to be risking the impression of allowing Richard one more inflated self-characterization he more than compensates for it later in York's account of his reaction to the humiliation Richard suffered at his entry into London.

          No man cried “God save him!”
No joyful tongue gave him his welcome home,
But dust was thrown upon his sacred head,
Which with such gentle sorrow he shook off,
His face still combating with tears and smiles,
The badges of his grief and patience,
That had not God, for some strong purpose, steel'd
The hearts of men, they must perforce have melted,
And barbarism itself have pitied him.
But heaven hath a hand in these events,
To whose high will we bound our calm contents.
To Bullingbrook are we sworn subjects now,
Whose state and honor I for aye allow.

(5.2.28-40)

Richard's head is still “sacred” but it is a head that must be sacrificed in the procession of English monarchy that reaches its apex in the career of the usurper's son, Prince Hal and Henry V. I refer now to Shakespeare's conception of the myth dominating the second tetralogy and not to York's private vision. But York's conversion is so complete that he insists upon the execution of his own son Aumerle, when he proves to be a potential assassin of the new Henry. Again, the allusive background of all this is Biblical, recalling the offered sacrifice by Abraham of his son Isaac as proof of his subjection to the Lord. York, after Gaunt the reverent conservative of the play, owes his allegiance finally to God and his chosen minister.

The conclusion of Richard II works out the interaction of ceremonially constituted authority with brutal violence. In 5.5 Richard undergoes a rapid series of developments that culminate in his surprising leap from passive victim to royal warrior. Before he is slain by Exton he seizes a weapon and kills two of his would-be murderers. That action is surprising, but what precedes it does convincingly outline the introspective descent into a condition of nothingness that could trigger a sudden emergence.

As the scene opens Richard is engaged in a moody and obscure attempt to understand all the roles men may be forced to play in the world outside his prison. He appears to have reached some sort of resolution of the problem by noting the common fate of all men in misfortune and mortality.

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

(38-41)

The tone of these lines is in unmistakable contrast to the agonized “Ay, no, no ay; for I must nothing be” (4.1.201) of the deposition scene. Also, we recall the melodramatic response Richard showed to the deaths of his closest friends and flatterers.

With the penetration of music into his cell, however, he is deeply disturbed by the realization of how he wasted time: “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.” His feelings reach a peak close to hysteria before he recovers with a sense of gratitude towards those playing the music, who alone in the world seem to be trying to bring him some relief.

When the Groom of his stable enters he jokingly rejects the title of “royal prince.” But it is the behavior of his personal mount, “roan Barbary,” as described by the Groom, that precipitates the crucial leap in the psyche of the King. In railing at the horse for proudly carrying Bullingbrook, Richard seems to be reverting to the magical view of his power expressed in 3.2, on his return from Ireland. But with these words he finally grasps and exorcizes the unnaturalness of his passivity:

          I was not made a horse,
And yet I bear a burthen like an ass,
Spurr'd, gall'd, and tir'd by jauncing Bullingbrook.

(92-4)

Two grace notes fittingly introduce Richard's violent end. He asks the Groom to leave him as a gesture of love. Then he demands that the ceremonial tasting of his food be carried out. When that is denied he knows that the food is poisoned and goes into action. Appropriately, however, he grants Herford his title as he curses him and his keeper:

The devil take Henry of Lancaster and thee!
Patience is stale, and I am weary of it.

(102-3)

While falling to the ground Richard re-asserts his royalty, which is acknowledged by Exton, the murderer. And Exton's acknowledgement of manly qualities in Richard, “As full of valure as of royal blood!”, puts a chivalrous period to the agony the King has undergone and overcome.⁸

When we weigh Shakespeare's presentation of Richard II's tragic dissolution against his portrayals of Henry VI, Edward IV, and Richard III, the gain in psychological complexity can hardly be overestimated. The ineffectuality of the child-monarch Henry VI never becomes a medium for the exploration of his psyche. His enslavement to Queen Margaret is worked out in the conventional patterns of courtly love. His lamentations for the sufferings of his people or for a patriot like good Duke Humphrey of Gloucester are only occasional and soon exhausted. Further, in three plays devoted to his reign the dramatic interest is focused more upon contending barons like Talbot, the Duke of York, king-maker Warwick, and the Machiavellian Duke of Gloucester.

Before Richard II, none of the monarchs reveals any of the deeper human capacities that may sustain the burdens of a ceremonial power capable of ruling an entire nation. Of course, that imaginative subject does not dominate Shakespeare's work until the second tetralogy is begun. It is merely a haunting presence in the background, the England addressed in an apostrophe by a neutral figure such as Salisbury in 2 Henry VI. Even the more calculating Richard III presides over the destruction of a family and the state, and his only moment of inner conflict occurs in the form of a nightmare. In the daylight he knows no fear. His cynical and mocking attitude towards the implied divinity of the monarchy adds a strong note of grim comedy to the last act of the civil wars.

The contrast between Richard of Gloucester and Bullingbrook may further define a significant aspect in Shakespeare's treatment of royalty as a human condition as well as an institution. Bullingbrook's careful ambiguity of procedure avoids the charge of atheistical power-grabbing. Bullingbrook may be presumptuous, but he is never a mocker of a possible divinity behind the crown he finally receives from the King's own hands.

A phrase from King John, perhaps written as early as 1590-1, points to the central object of Shakespeare's political imagination in the two tetralogies. In his rebuke of Hubert for the supposed murder of Arthur, King John invokes “the meaning / Of dangerous majesty” (4.2.212-3). Shakespeare's earlier plays show a growing capacity to dramatize the danger that majesty has both for the possessor of it and for those who would intrude upon its ambience. The figure of King John himself displays only a sense of blustering confusion that transfers power to others such as Hubert and the Bastard son of Coeur-de-Lion. The latter character begins the play as a cynical adventurer and ends it as a patriot whose moral life began when he was touched by the mystery of a royal presence, the fallen Prince Arthur, who somehow represents all of England.

The Life and Death of King John is a pastiche of rhetorical debates and set speeches, but it powerfully suggests the issues which are given their first analytical treatment in The Tragedy of Richard II. The weight of public responsibility on a national scale, borne with increased concern by Shakespeare's moral imagination, emerges as the drama of an individual royal person. Fundamentally different as they are, Richard II, through his disintegration, makes possible the finely detailed unfolding—or is it development?—of Prince Hal.

Notes

1. My greatest debt in this essay is to the edition of the play by Peter Ure (London, 1956). I am aware of no fundamentally different view of the play since Ure's work was published, although there have of course been different emphases. My suggestion of an unperformed ritual in 3.3 is simply a more specific application of commonly held views about Bullingbrook's right to the title of Lancaster.

2. Quoted from The Geneva Bible: a Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, ed. Lloyd E. Berry (Madison, 1969), Gen. 4, 10.

3. On the pilgrimage motif see James Black, “Henry IV's Pilgrimage,” ShQ [Shakespeare Quarterly], 34 (1983), 18-26.

4. See Clayton G. MacKenzie, “Paradise and Paradise Lost in Richard II,” ShQ, 37 (1986), 318-39.

5. I believe this potent phrase was invented by Richard F. Jones, but I have been unable to trace its exact source in his writing. Similar to this formulation is his note on “moral distrust of eloquent writing.” See The Triumph of the English Language (Stanford, 1953), p. 253, n. 34, and also p. 304, n. 23.

6. See Peter Ure, ed., King Richard II, pp. lxix, lxxviii-lxxix.

7. Shakespeare makes fundamental changes from his sources in this sequence. Holinshed reported that Northumberland and his colleagues did kneel before the King. Froissart said that Bullingbrook actually “entered in” Flint Castle “and persuaded Richard to go with him to London.” Still more significant is the character of the historical Richard, who was “capable of long and patient deception.” See the New Variorum of The Life and Death of King Richard the Second, ed. Matthew W. Black (Philadelphia, 1955), pp. 206, 216, and 221 in the notes.

8. I owe a large debt of re-assurance to the clear-sightedness and erudition of Larry S. Champion in his Perspective in Shakespeare's English Histories (Athens, Ga., 1980), especially to Chapter 3 and the elegantly concise notes.