I have always loved the poetry of Richard II. Lots of great lines.
“RICHARD II […] The accuser and the accusèd freely speak.
High-stomached are they both, and full of ire,
In rage, deaf as the sea, hasty as fire.”
(Act 1 scene 1)
Or:
“MOWBRAY […] The purest treasure mortal times afford
Is spotless reputation—that away,
Men are but gilded loam, or painted clay.
A jewel in a ten-times-barred-up chest
Is a bold spirit in a loyal breast;
Mine honor is my life, both grow in one;
Take honor from me, and my life is done…”
(ibid.)
In time and in style, Richard II is close to Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream—the verse is more regular, there is more rhyme—quite different from the knotty language of the later plays.
“RICHARD What says he?
NORTHUMBERLAND Nay, nothing, all is said;
His tongue is now a stringless instrument;
Words, life and all, old Lancaster hath spent.”
(Act 2 scene 1)
The play is full of great speeches—you know the famous “This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle” speech? It’s in this play.
Undeniably magnificent is the poetry of Richard II. And yet I have felt that I didn’t quite get the play, mostly because I didn’t quite get Richard.
When he’s back from Ireland, hearing about Bolingbroke’s uprising, he says:
“… Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm off from an anointed king…”
(Act 3 scene 2)
Not long after:
“RICHARD But now the blood of twenty thousand men
Did triumph in my face, and they are fled;
And till so much blood thither come again,
Ave I not reason to look pale and dead?
All souls that will be safe fly from my side,
For Time hath seat a blot upon my pride.
AUMERLE Comfort, my liege, remember who you are.
RICHARD I had forgot myself: am I not King?...”
(ibid.)
He has seen himself as lost before getting defeated. He has let go before having to give up his crown.
Shakespeare gives him some great speeches.
“RICHARD […] For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been deposed, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed,
All murdered—for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be feared, and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life
Were brass impregnable; and, humored thus,
Comes at the last, and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!...”
(ibid.)
All is vanity. When Lear has lost everything, he realises at last there’s not much difference between a king and poor Tom. So does Richard.
“RICHARD […] 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?”
(ibid.)
More than any other Shakespeare play, Richard II examines what it means to be a king. In some way, the play makes me think of King Lear: in the abdication scene, for example, Richard repeats several times the word “nothing”, which recurs throughout King Lear; Richard says “I have no name, no title” and “know not now what name to call myself”, which is similar to Lear’s feeling of loss of identity when he has lost his power and gets treated abominably by his daughters. But Richard is not a larger-than-life character like Lear or Macbeth; he doesn’t have the stature and vitality of Lear or Richard III; he is small and becomes smaller and smaller as he withdraws more into himself towards the latter part of the play.
But look at the mirror moment:
“RICHARD […] Was this the face
That, like the sun, did make beholders wink?
Was this the face that faced so many follies,
And was at last outfaced by Bolingbroke?
A brittle glory shineth in this face,
As brittle as the glory is the face.
[Throws glass down]
For there it is, cracked in a hundred shivers,
Mark, silent king, the moral of this sport:
How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face.”
(Act 4 scene 1)
Shakespeare does something brilliant here. This is a bad king, a corrupt king, a selfish and self-pitying and even self-dramatising king. And yet you can still feel his grief and see his tortured soul underneath all the self-dramatisation.
I have to think some more about his scene in prison and the “a generation of still-breeding thoughts” soliloquy.
I reread Richard II with my friends Michael and Himadri. Follow the discussion!
I love the poetry of this play, it’s just so perfect. Indeed, the poetry is especially musical in this play, and indeed (as so often in Shakespeare), music is mentioned multiple times in the play:
ReplyDeleteMOWBRAY. . . . And now my tongue’s use is to me no more
Than an unstringèd viol or a harp,
Or like a cunning instrument cased up,
Or, being open, put into his hands
That knows no touch to tune the harmony.
. . .
JOHN OF GAUNT. . . . Suppose the singing birds musicians,
. . .
JOHN OF GAUNT. O, but they say the tongues of dying men
Enforce attention like deep harmony:
. . . .
NORTHUMBERLAND Nay, nothing; all is said.
His tongue is now a stringless instrument;
. . . .
RICHARD. . . . . Music do I
hear?
Ha, ha, keep time! How sour sweet music is
When time is broke and no proportion kept.
So is it in the music of men’s lives.
And here have I the daintiness of ear
To check time broke in a disordered string;
But for the concord of my state and time
Had not an ear to hear my true time broke.
Another interesting thing I noticed is this time round is the very musical repetition of figures, even phrases or images. Thus, above, Mowbray and Northumberland both use the images of unstringed or stringless instruments – Mowbray because he doesn’t know the language in foreign parties; Northumberland speaking of Gaunt’s death.
But there are other interesting figures that repeat, like echoes at very different points in the play:
Thus Mowbray and Richard, in very different contexts, say similar things about being commanders or kings of their own private feelings:
MOWBRAY. . . My life thou shalt command, but not my shame.
. . .
BOLINGBROKE. I thought you had been willing to resign.
RICHARD. My crown I am, but still my griefs are mine.
You may my glories and my state depose
But not my griefs; still am I king of those.
Duchess of York and Richard use the same phrases a few scenes apart:
DUCHESS
Dost thou teach pardon pardon to destroy?
Ah, my sour husband, my hard-hearted lord,
That sets the word itself against the word!
. . .
RICHARD. . . . The better sort,
As thoughts of things divine, are intermixed
With scruples, and do set the word itself
Against the word, as thus:
Gaunt and Richard on necessity:
GAUNT: . . . Teach thy necessity to reason thus:
There is no virtue like necessity.
. . .
RICHARD. . . . I am sworn brother, sweet,
To grim necessity, and he and I
Will keep a league till death.
I don’t think these are coincidences. The music of this play is such that themes reverberate throughout.
Another thing I notice is that Shakespeare gives Richard one of his great speeches about the universality of human experience – the same form of speech he so famously gives Shylock (“Hath not a Jew eyes…”), but also Emelia (“Let husbands know Their wives have sense like them”), and Henry V (“I think the king is but a man, as I am: the violet smells to him as it doth to me.”) Richard’s version of this speech is particularly sad, lonely and pathetic:
ReplyDeleteRICHARD. 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?
A question I always have about Richard is this – Why does he give up the fight so easily? Bolingbroke does not ostensibly return to take Richard’s crown. Why, in the base court, does he so readily give up his crown? He does so, seemingly without any reason; Bolingbroke certainly wasn't demanding it of him. Why does he essentially depose himself? Is he just bowing to “necessity”? Or is the secret in his initial line, early in the play: “We were not born to sue, but to command.” Richard cannot bear to be figurehead. If he cannot command, he doesn’t want to be king at all. But still, why does he make it so easy for Bolingbroke? Couldn’t he have resisted a little bit more – other than to whine and cry and complain about his misfortune? Once Richard returns home from Ireland, his weakness – his basic flaccidity of character, his lack of inner strength – overcomes him. The scene where he returns from Ireland, his mood oscillates wildly with every piece of news. He lacks all resolution, he lacks guts and will.
The one thing positive I suppose you can say of Richard is that he is not dishonest with himself, ultimately. He is a Lear like figure, as you note – in part because, notwithstanding his tyranny, weakness and corruption, he does ultimately come to an understanding of his own deficiencies as a king:
And here have I the daintiness of ear
To check time broke in a disordered string;
But for the concord of my state and time
Had not an ear to hear my true time broke.
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;
On reflection, two more examples of echoing motifs in the play:
ReplyDeleteGaunt regrets his part in counseling the exile of his son (“Things sweet to taste prove in digestion sour.“) and King Henry regretting the wished-for death of Richard (“They love not poison that do poison need, Nor do I thee: though I did wish him dead,”)
The dispute between Bolingbroke and Mowbry that starts the play is repeated in Aumerle’s dispute with various noblemen at the end. Both are over the same murder. In both, gages are thrown down, and indeed Henry (like Richard before him) tries to control the dissension by ordering Aumerle not to pick up the gage.
Great comments.
ReplyDeleteI did notice the music/ musical instrument motif too. In The Shakespearian Tempests, G. Wilson Knight has the idea that music represents good and harmony, and the other side is disorder and chaos.
Actually, he drew quite a complicated graph.
I only read a bit of it, because his reading of the plays along these lines is a bit distorted, especially in his interpretation of The Merchant of Venice. But the idea of music and harmony is still interesting.
What did you think about Richard's soliloquy in the castle?
One of my favorite speeches in Shakespeare. It’s one I’ve long been intending to commit wholly to memory. It actually encapsulates all of Richard’s strengths and weaknesses. His strength— an ability to be honest with himself about himself. He fully understands how he squandered his own privileges, how his own state was out of tune. His weaknesses— the man cannot stop complaining. His complaints are the highest of poetry, but once things stop going his way in the play, all he can do is lament. In the Arkangel version of the play I listened to (wonderful!), in the earlier scene where he asks for a looking glass, when Henry says “Go some of you and fetch a looking-glass,” it’s almost with a sigh, as if to say “very well, let’s have your little performance.” Henry is clearly tired of having to deal with his spoiled cousin.
DeleteIn this way, I think deeper wisdom escapes Richard. In the way Lear, or even Macbeth, seem to come to a true and deeper understanding of themselves and the world, Richard comes to it only partially. Shakespeare does give us a final redemption only in his death. He may be a moral coward in many ways, but he never lacks physical courage. Like Lear killing the captain who hangs Cordelia, he is able to boldly confront his own assassins.