King Richard II – A. J. Drake's Shakespeare Site

Commentaries on
Shakespeare’s History Plays

Shakespeare, William. The Life and Death of King Richard the Second. Folio. (The Norton Shakespeare: Histories, 3rd ed. 488-548.)

ACT 1

Act 1, Scene 1 (489-93, King Richard is tasked with judging a quarrel between Thomas Mowbray and Henry Bolingbroke; Bolingbroke, King Richard’s cousin, accuses Thomas Mowbray of treason—he says that Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, was culpable in the murder of his and Richard’s uncle Thomas of Woodstock, Duke Gloucester; Richard and John of Gaunt, find it impossible to reconcile Mowbray and Bolingbroke, so Richard declares that there must be a trial by combat at Coventry.

The play begins with King Richard trying to arbitrate a feudal quarrel between Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk and Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford, both of whom bandy words of high honor and charges of treason at considerable length. This is an important test of Richard’s power since his accession in 1377 following the death of his grandfather Edward III. [1] He has spent much of his reign trying to avoid being controlled by such powerful lords as these mutual accusers Mowbray and Bolingbroke. [2]

Henry Bolingbroke’s initial words sound rather contentless—”thou art a traitor and a miscreant, / Too good to be so, and too bad to live” (489, 1.1.39-40), he declares boldly to Mowbray. The accused shoots back something more like an insult that a defense: “I do defy him and I spit at him, / Call him a slanderous coward and a villain” (490, 1.1.60-61).

One gets the feeling that these two could go on for some time slinging barbs back and forth, but Richard II steers Bolingbroke toward an actual set of accusations: first, he says, Mowbray misappropriated funds intended for the King’s military efforts, which misappropriation Bolingbroke calls treasonous. Secondly, he claims Mowbray has been responsible for all of the fierce opposition and plotting against Richard II since the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, when the King was only 14 years old. Third, Mowbray is tagged with the apparent killing of Richard’s uncle Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, the youngest of Edward III’s five adult sons. [3]

Hearing all this, King Richard claims that he will judge impartially between the two men, accuser and defendant, though this seems like an absurd promise because he himself was almost certainly involved in the killing of Gloucester in September, 1397. The man was his uncle, to be sure, but Richard had reason to hate him and want him out of the way. Gloucester was one of the powerful noblemen who sought to direct Richard’s kingship. Opposing the King’s counselors the Earls of Suffolk (Michael de la Pole) and Oxford (Robert de Vere), Gloucester steered the “Lords Appellant” and nearly deposed the King as early as 1388.

It makes sense, then, that Richard’s real agenda here is to stop all talk of the Duke of Gloucester’s death in 1397, and that can’t happen if the Bolingbroke and Mowbray keep tossing insults and accusations at each other in a very public way. Mowbray sounds increasingly guilty, and even admits to trying to have Gaunt ambushed and killed. In any event, Richard and Gaunt, who is Bolingbroke’s father, try to reconcile Bolingbroke and Mowbray, but it immediately becomes clear that neither man finds King Richard II a commanding enough presence to cause them to cease quarreling.

Exasperated, Richard declares, “We were not born to sue but to command …” (493, 1.1.196), and quickly orders the two men to settle their differences in a duel to the death in full view of the public and the court. Richard’s hasty arrangement of a public spectacle in which the winner will be thought to have fought with truth on his side presents an obvious risk to the King if Mowbray should be slain, but his “theater of deflection” has not achieved what he wanted it to achieve, so for the time being, he has been forced into this course of action.

Act 1, Scene 2 (493-94, the Duchess of Gloucester, wife of the murdered Duke, Thomas of Woodstock, urges Gaunt to intervene on Bolingbroke’s side, but he stays neutral, believing that a King—God’s supposed agent on earth—shedding royal blood is God’s affair to deal with, not that of even the most highly placed mortals.)

The Duchess of Gloucester, wife of the murdered Duke of Gloucester, urges her brother-in-law John of Gaunt to intervene on the side of his son Bolingbroke and his brother Gloucester against Thomas Mowbray. Her initial appeal is to the pull of kinship: the seven sons of Edward III were, she says, as “seven vials of his sacred blood, / Or seven fair branches springing from one root” (492, 1.2.12-13). How can he stand by and watch his own father’s royal blood poured into the earth, and do nothing?

But Gaunt responds with a combination of weariness and theological steadfastness: his “text” is drawn from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans 12:19: “Vengeance is mine: I will repay, saith the Lord.” [4] If we go by the Divine Right of Kings theory that flowered fully in Elizabethan-Jacobean England, it simply is not up to the mortal likes of John of Gaunt to correct or punish his sovereign. But of course, it has been dangerous to upbraid a monarch for much longer than that. In any case, Gaunt seems to despair of reforming Richard II’s kingly misbehavior.

The Duchess then offers a theory that must have occurred often to Shakespeare himself since, as Jonathan Bate points out, we hear so much from the playwright about the chaos that is sure to ensue when degree and rank are not respected, and everyone starts asserting powers and rights for which there is no backing beyond their own ambition, desire, and willfulness. [5] The Duchess says bluntly, “In suff’ring thus thy brother to be slaughtered, / Thou show’st the naked pathway to thy life, / Teaching stern murder how to butcher thee” (494, 1.2.30-32).

If Richard can cut one of his uncles down, surely, she reasons, he can do so to another uncle whenever it suits his needs or his fancy. But the trouble is, Gaunt is old and ill, so the Duchess’s argument doesn’t convince him that he has any moral right to act against his nephew Richard II. The Duchess is resigned to Gaunt’s inaction, and says finally, “Desolate, desolate, will I hence and die; / The last leave of thee takes my weeping eye” (494, 1.2.73-74). Eleanor de Bohun, Shakespeare’s “Duchess of Gloucester,” died in October 1399, only days after Richard II was deposed.

Act 1, Scene 3 (495-500, just after Bolingbroke and Mowbray offer the prescribed formulaic challenges in their trial by combat, Richard halts the proceedings and instead banishes Bolingbroke, initially for ten years but then reduces the term to six years; Mowbray is banished for life, and laments that his native language is now useless to him; Gaunt complains that he won’t last even the now six years of his son’s exile; Richard frets over reports of Bolingbroke’s popularity as he makes his way toward exile on the Continent.)

Thomas Mowbray and Henry Bolingbroke open the scene with formulaic language whose underlying purpose in medieval times was to contain but also to justify acts of violence. In speaking, they follow the prescription set for them by the King’s Marshal: “In God’s name and the King’s, say who thou art / And why thou com’st thus knightly clad in arms, / Against what man thou com’st, and what’s thy quarrel” (495, 1.3.11-13).

But after so much has been said and so much action is about to take place, Richard decides, seemingly of a sudden, to stop the proceedings. He withdraws with his advisers, takes his time, and returns with a pronouncement that no doubt shocks all present. In sum, he banishes Bolingbroke for a period of 10 years, and Thomas Mowbray for life. His reasoning, at least publicly, is that “our kingdom’s earth should not be soiled / With that dear blood which it hath fosterèd” (497, 1.3.125-26).

Bolingbroke takes the news somewhat stoically, though he shows himself a realist. He cannot, like Richard will do later on, imagine his circumstances to be better than they really are. Of his predicament, he says poetically, “Oh, who can hold a fire in his hand / By thinking on the frosty Caucasus? / Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite / By bare imagination of a feast?” (500, 1.3.258-61).

Thomas Mowbray reacts with more passion, lamenting that his native tongue will now become useless to him forevermore. He complains to the King, “Within my mouth you have enjailed my tongue, / Doubly portcullised with my teeth and lips, / And dull, unfeeling, barren Ignorance / Is made my jailer to attend on me” (498, 1.3.161-64).

Richard is not much interested in Thomas Mowbray’s problems with English, but he is interested in ensuring that these two powerful lords do not combine against him while in exile. He orders them as follows: “You never shall, so help you truth and heaven, / Embrace each other’s love in banishment; / Nor ever look upon each other’s face …” (498, 1.3.178-80).

When Richard notes how heartbroken John of Gaunt seems, he shortens Bolingbroke’s sentence by four years. This scarcely relieves Gaunt’s heartache since he is too old and sick for it to have any effect — he will be dead shortly. But Bolingbroke himself notes something else from Richard’s seemingly generous gesture. He can’t help but admire the great power that a king wields: “How long a time lies in one little word! / Four lagging winters and four wanton springs / End in a word; such is the breath of kings” (499, 1.3.207-09).

Act 1, Scene 4 (501-02, Richard makes arrangements to lead his troops in Ireland; because of his lavish spending habits, the King stands in need of funding for the Irish campaign, so he leases crown property and assets for cash, and farms out to his subordinates the power to tax England’s wealthiest citizens; a report comes telling Richard that his Uncle John of Gaunt is at death’s door; Richard responds with shocking callousness to Gaunt’s approaching death.)

The significance of what Bolingbroke said about the power that a king commands becomes obvious to us when we hear about Richard’s reaction to Bolingbroke’s departure from England to the Continent. The King notices what a gifted politician Bolingbroke is. He sees, as he says to Aumerle, “What reverence he did throw away on slaves, / Wooing poor craftsmen with the craft of souls / And patient underbearing of his fortune, / As ‘twere to banish their affects with him” (501, 1.4.27-30).

In Henry the Fourth, Part 1, this same Henry, older now, lectures his dissolute son Prince Hal about not spending too much time with the common sort of people, [6] but here in the late 1390s, he shows skills similar to those of a good politician in a modern democracy. To be fair, in Richard II Henry isn’t actually placing himself at the commoners’ level. He is merely acknowledging their existence, and showing gratitude for the affection they bear him.

Shakespeare’s Richard, it isn’t too difficult to see, can be roguishly charming in certain circumstances, but he is not “a man of the people” by any sensible standard. The King is therefore distrustful of Bolingbroke’s abilities and his intentions as he leaves the country. Still, there isn’t much time to devote to the newly exiled Hereford and Norfolk: Richard is more worried about his “Irish Wars,” in which he hopes to cut a dashing military figure. [7]

When the King hears that John of Gaunt is on his deathbed, he jokes that Gaunt’s estate, illegitimately snatched away from its rightful inheritor Henry Bolingbroke, will line his pockets for the Irish campaign, and utters the immortal bit of insouciance, “Pray heaven we may make haste, and come too late” (502, 1.4.63).

ACT 2

Act 2, Scene 1 (502-08, Just before he dies, Gaunt complains to York about Richard’s wickedness and mismanagement of the kingdom, and then upbraids Richard directly; the report comes informing the King that Gaunt is dead; the King says he is confiscating Gaunt’s estate to pay for his Irish campaign; Northumberland, Willoughby, and Ross privately express their disgust with Richard over his treatment of Bolingbroke; Northumberland says Bolingbroke is headed for England in defiance of his term of banishment; the three men make ready to join him.)

The mortally ill John of Gaunt, expressing the vain hope that “the tongues of dying men / Enforce attention like deep harmony” (502, 2.1.5-6), spends some of his last breath conversing with York, and his cast of mind turns prophetic and patriotic, as he first castigates Richard in absentia and then offers one of the most famous descriptions of England ever uttered, beginning with “This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle, / This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, / This other Eden, demi-paradise …” (503, 2.1.40-42).

Gaunt seems most upset that Richard, his nephew, has engaged in various schemes essentially to extort money from wealthy citizens as well as to rent out crown lands for a quick profit. [8] The effect of this, says Gaunt, is that “That England that was wont to conquer others / Hath made a shameful conquest of itself” (503, 2.1.65-66). Gaunt is referring, of course, to the falling off of English prowess against the French since the time of Edward III.

King Richard II enters directly after Gaunt has made this remark, and soon becomes impatient and sardonic, failing to hide his disrespect for this dying pillar of the kingdom he rules. Gaunt infuriates Richard by speaking in the name of his own father, King Edward III, who he says would be ashamed of the way Richard is running the kingdom. The old man [9] calls him easy prey to flatterers, and offers this devastating barb: “Landlord of England art thou, and not king: Thy state of law is bondslave to the law …” (504, 2.1.113-14). Richard, Gaunt is telling him, is a failure in the eyes of his deadly serious predecessor king.

Among Gaunt’s final words to Richard are, “Live in thy shame, but die not shame with thee; / These words hereafter thy tormentors be” (505, 2.1.135-36). That is unmistakably a curse issued from a dying uncle to a profligate, dissolute nephew-King. Soon thereafter, word comes that Gaunt has died, and Richard’s relief couldn’t be more palpable: “So much for that. Now for our Irish wars” (505, 2.1.155).

To York’s extreme consternation, King Richard at once gives orders to confiscate everything of any value on or pertaining to Gaunt’s estate, which should, of course, go to his son Henry Bolingbroke, even though he is currently exiled. Why is York so upset? Here’s what he says: “Take Hereford’s rights away, and take from Time / His charters and his customary rights; / Let not tomorrow then ensue today; / Be not thyself, for how art thou a king / But by fair sequence and succession?” (507, 2.1.195-99)

Fundamentally, York is pointing out, King Richard does not sufficiently respect the feudal net of loyalties and obligations that legitimize and secure his rule. He is a feckless opportunist, and does not take care to protect his own position or England’s reputation as a strong nation. The Duke of York, Edmund of Langley, is trying to explain to the youngish King that when he shreds the concept of primogeniture, he undercuts the legitimacy of his own rule.

But Richard overrules such mature advice with glib rhyming couplet. He tells York, “Think what you will, we seize into our hands / His plate, his goods, his money, and his lands” (506, 2.1.209-10). The King sees no reason why he should respect the rights of a man whom he has already sent into long exile, and with whom he already had an unpleasant history even before that event.

Richard’s next move is startling: York has just accused him of spitting on his entire royal line, but now the King uses this family connection, his uncle, to prop up his authority. He leaves York, whom he apparently considers docile or loyal enough to trust, in charge of managing the kingdom while he himself goes off to deal with a rebellion in Ireland. Whether this was a wise move, we will soon find out.

Northumberland (Henry Percy, father of Harry Hotspur), Ross, and Willoughby remain behind and serve up a litany of Richard’s offenses, saying that he is “basely led / By flatterers …” (507, 2.1.241-42), and that he has managed to anger both the nobility and the commoners in the realm by imposing extortionate fines, taxes, and whatnot. To be fair, this is not drastically different from the way most of England’s early chieftains and then kings treated their subjects, but that is small comfort for the sufferers of such rapacious behavior. [10] The upshot is that the King Richard II has lost everyone’s loyalty and respect.

Conspiracy and rebellion can’t be far behind, and indeed Northumberland has some cheering news about just that eventuality. He has heard, he says, that Henry Bolingbroke has gathered some of England’s great lords in his cause and is on the way across the Channel at this very minute. Backing him are “eight tall ships” and “three thousand men of war” (508, 2.1.286), says Northumberland, and all this affords Richard’s enemies a fine chance to “make high majesty look like itself” (508, 2.1.295), as once it did.

Act 2, Scene 2 (509-12, The Queen is sorrowful at Richard’s departure; Bolingbroke is now in England, at Ravenspurgh, at the head of an army; York, frankly confessing his ethical confusion over whom he should support, tells Bushy, Bagot, and Greene to gather their forces and meet him at Berkeley Castle; Bagot, however, decides to head for Ireland to join Richard, while Bushy and Green will seek protection at Bristol Castle.)

Greene tells Richard’s Queen that Henry Bolingbroke is presently back in England in defiance of his banishment: he has landed safely at Ravenspurgh along the east coast. [11] The Queen seems genuinely upset at this news. She is more of a realist that her husband, saying disconsolately, “I will despair and be at enmity / With cozening hope. He is a flatterer, / A parasite, a keeper-back of death …” (510, 2.2.68-70). Still, and understandably, when she York coming her way, she asks him fervently to “speak comfortable words” (510, 2.2.76). [12]

But Uncle Edmund of Langley, Duke of York, has no such words. He informs the Queen that King Richard is out of the country, and that he himself has been tasked with holding down the fort, so to speak—or what’s left of it. York sounds none too sure of himself by this point, saying “Here am I left to underprop his land / Who, weak with age, cannot support myself” (510, 2.2.81-82).

News soon arrives that the Duchess of Gloucester, widow of the murdered Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, has died. With the situation crumbling around him, York weighs his loyalties with an earnestness that is ominous for the absent King Richard. Whom should he ally himself with? He says, “Th’one is my sovereign, whom both my oath / And duty bid defend; th’other again / Is my kinsman whom the King hath wronged …” (511, 2.2.310-13). Thus far, all York can bring himself to cough up is, “Well, somewhat we must do” (511, 2.2.16).

York tells Bushy, Bagot, and Greene to get their troops together and meet him at Berkeley Castle, but only Bagot chooses to make his way toward King Richard in Ireland. Bushy and Greene decide to save themselves by seeking refuge at Wiltshire Castle, where they hope that William le Scrope, First Earl of Wiltshire will protect them.

Act 2, Scene 3 (512-16, Bolingbroke and Northumberland combine outside Berkeley Castle, where they meet Northumberland’s son, Harry Percy; the Duke of York denounces Bolingbroke to his face as a traitor for returning in spite of his banishment, but recognizes that he can’t stop him; the neutral position that York declares effectively favors Bolingbroke instead of Richard: he invites Bolingbroke and his confederates to stay at Berkeley Castle.)

Northumberland introduces his son, Harry Percy (the gallant “Hotspur” of the Henry IV plays), to Bolingbroke—the beginning of a fraught connection between these two ambitious young men. [13] Harry doesn’t seem to recognize his illustrious colleague, but Bolingbroke is kind to him when they meet, telling him, “I count myself in nothing else so happy / As in a soul rememb’ring my good friends …” (513, 2.3.46-47).

Henry Bolingbroke again shows us his strength as both a politician and a realist. He describes himself starkly as “A banished traitor” in the eyes of the opponent, and gracefully expresses his gratitude to his supporters with, “Evermore thanks, th’exchequer of the poor, / Which till my infant fortune comes to years / Stands for my bounty” (513, 2.3.60, 65-67). This is a man who, at least at this point in his career, knows how to gain and keep loyalty. He refrains from promising what he doesn’t have, yet manages to paint himself as the quintessential “good chieftain” who will distribute bounty to his loyal defenders when the time is right.

Soon enough, the principal players get to the affair at hand: Bolingbroke informs Lord Berkeley that he will answer only to the title of “Lancaster,” and not to “Hereford” now that he is the rightful inheritor of his father, John of Gaunt, the late Duke of Lancaster and founder of that illustrious and warlike line.

York, however, isn’t impressed with Bolingbroke’s courtly bows and whatnot. The younger man’s graceful comportment, York makes plain to tell him, does not effectively conceal the fact that his return to England against the King’s sentence amounts to treason—a word that Bolingbroke, we may remember, has already applied to himself, though probably more in the fashion of a slick politician currying favor with his supporters. York wishes himself much younger so that he might punish this upstart, and tells him bluntly, “Thou art a banished man, and here art come / Before th’expiration of thy time, / In braving arms against thy sovereign” (514, 2.3.109-11).

Bolingbroke, however, is not so easily dealt with—he has a case to make for himself that is in its essentials undeniable. “Wherefore was I born?” he asks York. “If that my cousin King be King of England, / It must be granted I am Duke of Lancaster” (515, 2.3.121-23). Claiming that he has been denied proper legal counsel, he has, he insists, simply come to England to tender his claim to his “inheritance of free descent” (515, 2.3.135). This is his lawyerly self-defense.

Ross and Willoughby chime in to bolster Bolinbroke’s case, with the latter tellingly pointing out something dear to the heart of English royalty: “Base men by his endowments are made great” (515, 2.3.138). This kind of severe slippage in rank and status is apparently intolerable to the likes of Willoughby and, we may presume, Bolingbroke himself, though there is some irony in taking such a position when one is rebelling against a sovereign who—whatever his faults—enjoys a clear, superior claim to the throne.

Northumberland claims somewhat ridiculously in Bolingbroke’s defense that the young man has only come all this way “But for his own” (515, 2.3.148); that is, for his patrimony as Duke of Lancaster. It’s common sense that a subject cannot engage in rebellion and then expect a deal forced upon the King at the point of an army’s swords to be honored.

At this point, York’s realism kicks in, and he admits to all present that his forces are too weak to serve as the enforcer that the absent King Richard wanted him to be. He is no match for Bolingbroke’s forces, so he declares himself “neuter” (i.e., neutral), and then immediately invites the man he has just called a despicable traitor to “repose” (515, 2.3.158, 160) for the night at Berkeley Castle.

Taking full advantage of this breakthrough, Bolingbrook pushes farther: he holds it necessary, he tells York, to make a trip to Bristol Castle, where he will seize Bushy, Bagot, and their accomplices, “The caterpillars of the commonwealth” (515, 2.3.165), as he calls them, and it’s clear that he does not mean them well. York professes to be of both minds even about this demand, saying only that he may or may not go. By now, York’s neutrality has taken an almost nihilistic tone, as he says, “Things past redress are now with me past care” (516, 2.3.170).

Although Thomas Hobbes will not set forth his theory of royal absolutism in Leviathan until 1651 (half a century or so after the present play, and two-and-a-half centuries after the events it covers), the Duke of York’s reaction to Bolingbroke’s attack illustrates the paradox in Hobbes’s treatise: rebellion is utterly illegitimate and inadmissible, but if it succeeds, the rebel becomes the new absolute power, against whom nobody may rebel—unless, of course, they do it successfully.

York knows the score: things have gone far beyond the point of no return, so there’s no point in continuing to back him. King Richard II no longer has any effective fighting force, and he has lost the loyalty of his subjects from low status to high. Bolingbroke, with his army at his side, is already the de facto ruler, and will soon be the ruler de jure.

Act 2, Scene 4 (516-16, Since King Richard has failed to return within ten days and the heavens and earth are full of terrible portents, the captain of the Welsh troops Richard was counting on reports to Salisbury that he is dismissing his men; Salisbury laments that Richard is on the verge of catastrophe.)

A Welsh captain reports to one of the King’s last remaining loyalists, John Montagu, third Earl of Salisbury. He is full of misgivings, is this Welsh captain: he tells Salisbury, “The bay trees in our country all are withered, and meteors fright the fixèd stars of heaven …” (516, 2.4.8-9). This, and much more by way of astronomical and human behavioral portents, tells the good captain that all of this indicates more than enough chaos for him finally to give in and let his men return to their homes.

There isn’t much that Salisbury can say to make the captain feel better. He himself feels the meaning of the portents deeply, and concludes as if addressing Richard, “Thy friends are fled to wait upon thy foes, / And crossly to thy good all fortune goes” (516, 2.4.23-24).

It’s easy for modern readers and viewers to dismiss all this talk about portents and fortune, but Shakespeare often seems (like many of his contemporaries) to be of two minds about what we would call superstition. The theory of “man the microcosm” held, after all, that humans contain within themselves the elements of all that is above and below them on the great ladder or chain of being. If that’s the case, chaos in the heavens might very well plausibly relate to chaos—whether coming or present—in the sublunary realm, or as we say, “on the ground.” [14]

ACT 3

Act 3, Scene 1 (516-17, Bolingbroke blames Bushy and Green for corrupting King Richard and turning him against both his queen and Bolingbroke himself, and sentences the two men to die; he also sends a message of reassurance to Queen Isabella of Valois.)

Bolingbroke accuses the captured Bushy and Green of corrupting the King, and we will see in the next scene that Richard himself feels he has been led astray. This is the polite fiction one so often sees tendered to kings and queens when they’ve made grave mistakes: “the sovereign’s corrupt, selfish, scheming advisors have led him or her astray, etc.” Most likely, no one—not the speaker, and not the sovereign—really believes such formulaic responses to royal wrongdoing.

In the charge that Bolingbroke levels against Bushy and Greene, there is also perhaps an echo of Christopher Marlowe’s treatment in Edward II (1592) of the relationship between King Edward and his intimate companion, Piers Gaveston. [15] Shakespeare’s Bolingbroke says as follows to Bushy and Greene: “You have in manner with your sinful hours / Made a divorce betwixt his queen and him, / Broke the possession of a royal bed, / And stained the beauty of a fair queen’s cheeks …” (516, 3.1.11-14). It is not difficult to catch what Bolingbroke is insinuating with these words.

Bolingbroke also allows his smoldering anger at these two men for all the heartache and hardship their hostile actions have caused him. They have done so much wickedness, says Henry, that, as he says, that they have left him “no sign, / Save men’s opinions and my living blood, / To show the world I am a gentleman” (517, 3.1.25-27). Neither Bushy nor Greene shows the slightest remorse for anything they’ve supposedly done, and they are duly marched off to their executions.

Finally, Bolingbroke asks Northumberland, with whom the Queen is staying at present, to treat her with the great respect she deserves, and to send along his “kind commends” or greetings (517, 3.1.38). Evidently, he does not want anyone to think that he blames Isabella for her husband’s offenses.

Act 3, Scene 2 (517-22, Richard returns to England and believes God is on his side; as Bolingbroke’s forces close in and Richard hears more bad news—the Welsh troops are gone, his friends are dead, and York and other erstwhile supporters have defected to Bolingbroke—the King’s moods swing wildly back and forth, from exuberance to despair and self-pity: he disbands his dwindled forces and withdraws into Flint Castle.)

Richard opens this scene by weeping for joy and touching the earth of his beloved kingdom. He condemns the rebels who have trod this ground in their treasonous pursuit of his crown. The men surrounding him, though, seem to function much like King Lear’s Fool in that they make it more difficult for an audience to take Richard’s earnest effusions seriously. [16] This is signaled in the text when the King feels obliged to say to his elite supporters, “Mock not my senseless conjuration, lords” (518, 3.2.23). Either they are already mocking him, or he anticipates that they will.

Still, there is something genuinely moving in the claim, “Not all the water in the rough rude sea / Can wash the balm from an anointed king” (518, 3.2.49-50). This sounds less like a basic assertion of the royal prerogative that gives English kings the right to do their will without parliament’s say-so, and more like the later assertion by King James I and others of the theory that would in future come to be called “the divine right of kings.” Richard is speaking for the sacramental, divine element that he embodies as an anointed King.

Such anachronistic terminology isn’t strictly necessary since, as Ernst H. Kantorowicz explains in his book The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (1957), we have access to the notion developed by medieval jurists that a monarch’s physical frame contains both a normal, mortal body and plays host to a corporate body that represents or embodies the divine principle of kingship. In essence, the king is both a mortal human being and a host for the god-sanctioned principle of kingship itself. [17]

King Richard’s belief that he is unassailable is strong at this point, as we see when he says, “For every man that Bolingbroke hath pressed / To lift shrewd steel against our golden crown, / Heaven for His Richard hath in heavenly pay / A glorious angel” (518, 3.2.53-56). This is not a man who expects to lose his title to a band of traitors.

Unfortunately, bad news begins to roll in by the minute: Salisbury brings word that the 12,000 Welsh troops Richard was counting on have gone over to Bolingbroke. Richard still insists that “the king’s name” is worth many thousands of ordinary fighting men, but still the terrible news comes his way—Bolingbroke is winning over to his cause all sorts of Englishmen. As Scrope puts it, “distaff-women manage rusty bills / Against thy seat. Both young and old rebel …” (520, 3.2.113-14). Bushy, Greene, and the Earl of Wiltshire are dead, executed at Bristol, and the Duke of York is no longer defending the King.

Richard’s mood swings in a moment’s worth of such news from great optimism to despair. Unforgettably, he urges all his hearers to join in his lament: “For heaven’s sake let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings …” (520, 3.2.150-51). He soon slips from this sad frame of mind to a fine but macabre sense of where he now stands: “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 …” (520, 3.2.155-58).

At this point, Richard seems to be suggesting that a mere mortal can hardly expect to have the strength to hold together the “two bodies” that a king must contain harmoniously within himself. In fact, the true “ruler” who emerges here is Death, who grins for a time and scoffs, and at last swallows up the frail human who dares to accept his role as a dualistic, symbolically fraught entity of great significance to the life of an entire nation.

As his chances crumble, Richard II offers his audience a message and a questions he thinks they sorely need to hear: “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?” (521, 3.2.169-72) [18] How can the frail, perishing individual take upon himself the attributes and burdens of a divinity-hedged and mandated king?

At such a moment, one wants to grant Richard a measure of epiphanic insight, but throughout this scene, he has lurched from one extreme mood to its opposite, so it’s hard to accommodate this generous desire to call his states of mind the function of wisdom. [19] Indeed, while Carlisle and Aumerle’s rebukes are mild in manner, they are devastating in their import. Carlisle says, “My lord, wise men ne’er wail their present woes, / But presently prevent the ways to wail” (521, 3.2.173-74). And that man’s son, Aumerle, says, “My father hath a power. Inquire of him, / And learn to make a body of a limb” (521, 3.2.180-81).

Richard actually takes this criticism well, but then arrives the worst possible news: the political realist Duke of York, Edmund of Langley, has defected to Bolingbrook. There is no coming back from this information, this loss: Richard is a king without army, and a medieval king without an army will not remain a king for long. This king disbands whatever’s left of his forces, and withdraws to Flint Castle.

What are we to make of King Richard II’s conduct in this scene? We might say that he is incapable of seeing things directly, incapable of raw perception in so far as anyone is capable of such a thing. But that may not do him justice. Perhaps we are to understand that he sees things too clearly sometimes, so much so that he is driven immediately to begin telling a fine story that distances him from the painfulness of his perceptions.

That is, after all, one of the many uses of art. A sad story can serve the same purpose as a triumphant one in this regard, justifying life and preserving dignity by aesthetic means when it can’t be justified or dignified otherwise.

Act 3, Scene 3 (522-26, Bolingbroke finds out that King Richard II is inside Flint Castle; when Richard appears at the battlements, Bolingbroke, through Northumberland, demands the return of his “lineal royalties” and the cancellation of his banishment, both of which things Richard recognizes he must grant; defeated and diminished, Richard obeys his opponents’ demand to descend to ground-level and go with him to London: Bolingbroke thereby admits that it isn’t only his own patrimony he wants, it’s the English crown.)

In conversation in front of Flint Castle, York shows what may be signs of a guilty conscience over his abandonment of Richard. He takes offence at Northumberland’s failure to say “King Richard” instead of simply “Richard,” and is loath to give up his complaint when that lord says he meant no disrespect, though the words he uses leave plenty of room for doubt: “only to be brief / Left I his title out” (522, 3.3.10-11).

Bolingbroke seems to be misleading York when he promises him that he really has no intention of taking King Richard’s crown, no matter how it looks. When Bolingbroke tells him to “mistake not” the meaning of Northumberland’s penchant for brevity, York admonishes him in return to “Take not … farther than you should. Lest you mistake the heavens are o’er your head” (522, 3.3.15-17). This prompts Bolingbroke to declare, “I know it, uncle, and oppose not myself / Against their will” (522, 3.3.18-19). Henry Bolingbrook is a master at this sort of equivocation—the will of heaven is the point of contention, and it isn’t certain where he thinks that will tends.

Bolingbrook’s instructions to Northumberland as his messenger to the King sound hollow, but the threat they constitute is real enough: either King Richard will agree to the restoration of Bolingbroke’s right of inheritance and the repeal of his banishment, or violence will follow: the incensed nobleman will, he says, “Lay the summer’s dust with showers of blood / Rained from the wounds of slaughtered Englishmen …” (523, 3.3.43-44).

Bolingbroke’s speech in its entirety is cast in the form of a Jeremiad in miniature, with wonderful benefits for doing the right thing and unspeakable woe for not doing it, but we moderns will no doubt recognize that it has a mafioso flavor: “Nice country you’ve got here—it would be shame if anything happened to it.” How ironic that Bolingbroke, a native Englishmen, is making this threat to a monarch who was born in Bordeaux, France.

Bolingbroke is in command of the situation, and when Northumberland hurries off to do his errand, he makes what some directors stage as action flowing from a vulgar pun: “Be he [Richard] the fire, I’ll be the yielding water; / The rage be his, while on the earth I rain / My waters—on the earth and not on him” (523, 3.3.58-60). Bolingbroke seems to be alluding obliquely to urination with the image of “raining his waters.” He promises that he only means to urinate on the ground, not on Richard. He doesn’t sound sincere in that promise, if that’s what it is.

Bolingbroke’s mockingly grandiose description of King Richard when he appears at the battlements of Flint Castle are countered by York’s similar but earnest description: “Yet looks he like a king. Behold his eye, / As bright as is the eagle’s, lightens forth / Controlling majesty” (523, 3.3.68-70).

Richard himself soon appears and takes pains to display his shock at the disrespectful conduct of his subjects, saying, “We are amazed, and thus long have we stood / To watch the fearful bending of thy knee, / Because we thought ourself thy lawful king” (523, 3.3.72-74). He calls upon his master, “God omnipotent” (523, 3.3.85) to strike down these rebels, and prophecies that Bolingbroke’s payment will be not a royal crown but “Ten thousand bloody crowns of mothers’ sons “ (524, 3.3.96).

Northumberland’s response is to swear on behalf of Bolingbroke that the man will take nothing but what is his: “His coming hither hath no further scope / Than for his lineal royalties, and to beg / Enfranchisement immediate on his knees …” (524, 3.3.112-14). It should be obvious by now that Bolingbroke cannot mean this—his return from banishment is looked upon as treason, and so is his taking up arms against the King. Sometimes, monarchs find it necessary to temporize and delay retribution, but this simply isn’t the sort of affront that a King can forgive. It’s all or nothing now, and both Bolingbroke and King Richard II know it.

By now, Richard is evidently certain that his lot is to be “nothing.” He says to Aumerle and others around him on the battlements, “What must the King do now? Must he submit? / The King shall do it. Must he be deposed? / The King shall be contented” (525, 3.3.143-45). Following this is an eloquent string of imaginings, with the King transforming himself into an impoverished monk or a holy religious pilgrim, and finally inhabiting “A little, little grave, an obscure grave,” or even ending up interred “in the king’s highway” (525, 3.3.154-55) along with criminals and suicides.

All of this marks quite a fall for Richard, and it is shocking both for its distance and for its speed. He has gone from being “amazed” that anyone would dare deny him the ceremonious respect he deserves to accepting the most abject, humiliating fate he can imagine. In the end, King Richard II understands something he should have already known: “They well deserve to have / That know the strong’st and surest way to get” (526, 3.3.199-200). It isn’t that he’s saying this sententia is morally right—he is admitting only the Machiavellian point that it’s how things actually work.

To end the scene, Bolingbroke the smooth politician finally serves up a straightforward statement of his intentions, one that doesn’t include any mumbling of phrases like “lineal royalties.” When Richard asks him pointedly, “Set on towards London, cousin, is it so?” Bolingbroke responds simply, “Yea, my good lord” (526, 3.3.207-08). He will be led to Westminster, where he will be expected to resign the crown in a very formal, humiliating way.

Act 3, Scene 4 (526-29, a Gardener explains Richard’s failures in horticultural terms, and maintains his view even when confronted with opposition by the Queen.)

Queen Isabella and her two ladies hide themselves among the trees, eager to hear what the Gardener will say. This fellow turns out to be wise beyond expectation, and while his words bring no consolation to the Queen, he helps us compare the workings of a kingdom with the processes of nature. The Gardener asserts a correspondence between the care and maintenance of plants and the governance of a court environment, or even of an entire nation.

This laborer tells his assistant that King Richard, like a bad gardener, has failed to keep his plot—which is England, ultimately—orderly: whereas he should have pruned those branches of the nobility and his subject more generally that were growing beyond what is healthful, he let everything get out of control, with disastrous consequences for all concerned, including himself. This “pruning” metaphor is ancient—it has been used as least as far back as the Greek historian Herodotus. [20] The “weeds” in this garden of England, it makes sense to suggest, are nourished by the pride of its ambitious nobility and the insolence of corrupt favorites, etc.

The Gardener’s description of what has happened is anything but gentle: when the assistant asks why anyone in England should bother behaving well if the whole land has gone to seed, the Gardener replies sternly: “Hold thy peace. / He that hath suffered this disordered spring / Hath now himself met with the fall of leaf” (527, 3.4.47-49). In the Gardener’s view, the workings of nature in his little garden are as ruthless and inexorable as can be—they will certainly remind us today of the process of evolution, whereby only the fittest members of the various species survive.

The Queen steps forward with her ladies to curse the plainspoken Gardener for his all-too-accurate description of England under the rule of her husband. She says he has offered a vision of “a second fall of cursèd man” (528, 3.4.76), and curses the Gardener with the sentence, “I would the plants thou graft’st may never grow” (528, 3.4.101).

Even so, when the Queen and her ladies exit the scene, the Gardener has the last word. He points out that nature, and his dealings with nature, are not subject to the Queen’s curse. He will make nature testify to the Queen’s sorrow by planting “a bank of rue” (528, 3.4.105), but as for her desire, all he can say is, “I would my skill were subject to thy curse” (528, 3.4.103).

Perhaps he means by this that he wishes the consequences of Richard’s mistakes and misdeeds did not have to be so severe. But in truth, there is no stopping natural process, and there is no avoiding the consequences that accrue to a state badly managed. What must happen, will.

ACT 4

Act 4, Scene 1 (529-36, Bolingbroke demands from Bagot the details of Gloucester’s death; Bagot accuses Aumerle of having a hand in it, and several men issue challenges to Aumerle and one another; York reports that Richard has given up his crown; as Bolingbroke takes the throne, Carlisle calls him a traitor and predicts civil war; this Bishop is immediately arrested, and Bolingbroke orders that Richard be brought before him; Richard eloquently “uncoronates” himself, and requests permission to depart; he is taken away to the Tower of London; the Abbot of Westminster tells Aumerle that a plot is already brewing against Bolingbroke.)

In Parliament, Bolingbroke insists that Bagot tell what he knows of the murder of Thomas of Woodstock, the Duke of Gloucester. The question is, “who performed / The bloody office of his timeless end” (529, 4.1.4-5)? Bagot names Aumerle, who steps forward, and is at once accused of murdering the youngest son of King Edward III. Aumerle is disgusted at having to throw down his gage against such a base individual as Bagot, but he does it all the same. When Bolingbroke tells Bagot not to take up the challenge, Fitzwater throws down against Aumerle instead. Harry Percy then challenges Aumerle, too, but Surrey takes up Aumerle’s cause.

Aumerle next challenges Norfolk, aka Thomas Mowbray. Bolingbroke declares that he will recall Norfolk from banishment and restore to him his lands, even though he was an enemy. Apparently, the new king wants to make a show of respecting the feudal nobility’s rights in hopes of keeping order in his realm. Both Aumerle and he are surprised to hear from Bishop Carlisle that Mowbray is in fact dead, having died in Venice after fighting in the Crusades. [21]

When York informs him that Richard has willingly given up his crown, Bolingbroke declares that he will ascend the throne “In God’s name” (531, 4.1.107). The Bishop of Carlisle is aghast when he hears Bolingbroke’s words, and declares that nothing of the sort must be allowed to happen. Carlisle’s argument is close to the notion of “divine right” as articulated by King James I in Shakespeare’s day. [22] The Bishop asks in seeming exasperation, “What subject can give sentence on his king?” (531, 4.1.115). To him, the answer is obviously, “nobody but God.”

Carlisle’s next words are the ones that no doubt result in his arrest: he denounces Bolingbroke in brutally frank language: “My lord of Hereford here, whom you call king, / Is a foul traitor to proud Hereford’s king; / And if you crown him, let me prophesy / The blood of English shall manure the ground” (531, 4.1.127-30).

Bolingbroke is determined that his taking of the throne will be perceived as a legitimate act alongside of Parliament’s legal pursuit of Richard once he is dethroned. This need for legitimacy on Bolingbroke’s part is a keen lens through which we can look at what happens next. Richard surely knows that his opponent and future king is in a great hurry to get this whole affair over with and have himself officially installed as King Henry IV. What he does, then, is a performance of dilatory genius: Richard will muse, marvel, and metaphorize in a way that Bolingbroke could never do, even if he wanted to (which he manifestly doesn’t).

His first gesture among several extraordinary ones is to ask, “Alack, why am I sent for to a king, / Before I have shook off the regal thoughts / Wherewith I reigned? I hardly yet have learned / To insinuate, flatter, bow, and bend my knee” (532, 4.1.156-59). He even compares himself to Christ, saying that at least he found eleven disciples faithful, instead of not even one.

Next, Richard appears to dangle the crown in the air, as if, he says, it were a balancing mechanism—a pool with a pair of buckets inside it. As Bolingbroke’s empty bucket is hauled up, elevated so to speak, Richard’s is weighed down with water, which comes from his flowing tears. Of course, there’s more than a hint in the figure that Bolingbroke’s claim to the crown is much “lighter” than Richard’s. It’s a striking figure, and one for which the soon-to-be King Henry IV has no patience. He remarks tartly, “I thought you had been willing to resign” (533, 4.1.183). Richard’s eloquence sets the practical Bolingbroke’s teeth on edge.

But Richard is not done yet, no matter how annoyed cousin Bolingbroke gets with such impressive wordsmanship. He says he will indeed resign his crown, but as for his sorrow, that belongs to him, and as he says, “You may my glories and my state depose, / But not my griefs; still am I king of those” (533, 4.1.185-86). King Richard strives to keep at least something of his former identity, even if it’s only resident in his terrible distress at what is happening to him so rapidly that he can scarcely accommodate it, or fully register it in his mind. [23]

What follows next is an extraordinary scene, one in which Richard very deliberately “un-coronates” himself. [24] In answer to Bolingbroke’s curt question, “Are you contented to resign the crown?” (533, 4.1.193) Richard gives a “yes and no” response for the ages, much of it pure poetry drawn from his own sense of negation. “Now mark me how I will undo myself,” he tells a triumphant, yet all but hapless Bolingbroke, “I give this heavy weight from off my head,” and, he continues, “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 …” (533, 4.1.196-97, 200-02).

Thus, and much more. A series of rhyming couplets manage a simultaneously formulaic yet poetical end to this remarkable act of self-undoing. It is as if Richard recognizes that as God’s anointed, only he can properly do this to himself—not a subject even such as the mighty Henry Bolingbroke.

Richard seems to believe that what he has said, capped off with some half-cheerful-sounding formulaic language, ought to be quite enough to satisfy his antagonists, but that isn’t how things play out. Northumberland brusquely offers him a document that he must read in front of the Commons and others around him, a paper containing his allegedly numerous and grave crimes and those of his followers, the better to show Bolingbroke’s righteousness in seizing the crown from him.

Richard seems incredulous, and this leads him to become angry. He calls others and himself a traitor since, as he describes his actions, “I have given here my soul’s consent / T’undeck the pompous body of a king, / Made glory base, a sovereignty a slave, / Proud majesty a subject, state a peasant” (534, 4.1.242-45). This anger, in turn, leads Richard to contemplate the strangeness of his existential state: he has no name, no proper identity.

Then he offers us a startling figure: “Oh, that I were a mockery king of snow, / Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke, / To melt myself away in water-drops” (534, 4.1.253-55). [25] The lines are so remarkable that we almost forget that Richard isn’t such a sad royal snowman, melting into oblivion before his sun-like vanquisher. The question is still, for him and us, what remains of Richard of Bordeaux, formerly King of England?

The metaphor of self-understanding that Richard settles upon is not that of melting water, it is a figure that involves reflection. He commands that a mirror be brought to him “That it may show me what a face I have, / Since it is bankrupt of his majesty” (534, 4.1.259-60). When he beholds his image, his first remark is one of surprise that he can’t see the effects of his “sorrow” (534, 4.1.270) in his visage. He declares that “A brittle glory shineth in this face, / As brittle as the glory is the face” (535, 4.1.280-81) and dashes the mirror to the ground.

There the mirror lies, shattered—“cracked in an hundred shivers” (535, 4.1.282). In his influential reading, Ernst Kantorowicz finds that Richard’s gesture marks the now-former King’s abandonment of any last attempt to keep together the duality, the “two bodies,” that a monarch contains: the ordinary one—which Richard in breaking suggests is the only one remaining to him—and the sacred, corporate, and effectively immortal one wherewith he represents his entire people, or the nation. He is now no more than himself, a mortal, vulnerable man surrounded by powerful enemies.

Bolingbroke seems startled by this gesture, and tries to tame it by suggesting to Richard, “The shadow of your sorrow hath destroyed / The shadow of your face” (535, 4.1.285-86), but the now-deposed king is not to be dismissed so facilely. Richard’s reply is similar to the one that Hamlet offers his mother Gertrude when she tries to cheer him up regarding his father’s death: “I have that within which passes show, / These but the trappings and the suits of woe.” [26] The full reality of Richard’s grief is unavailable to the likes of Henry Bolingbroke, and not reducible to his words and gestures alone.

Even though Richard II is not among Shakespeare’s most-performed plays, the scene just examined is surely among the finest he ever composed. [27] Throughout the scene, Richard all but “steals the show” while his victorious opponent finds that he has his hands full in trying to limit the damage Richard is causing him as he tries to effect a smooth, if forced, transfer of power. Bolingbroke is nothing if not a skillful politician, and he wants such a smooth assumption of kingly power, but Richard partly undercuts this carefully staged production.

The former king’s metaphors and figures, his musings about identity and nothingness in the face of those who simply want him out of the way, hold their own. In history the King was crushed, but Shakespeare is not writing the play for Bolingbroke, he’s writing it for his contemporaries. Richard is called upon to play his part dutifully and abdicate, but he is too much of an actor for that. He insists upon his grief as a private man and underscores the heavy and solemn nature of the act that is taking place—it is more than the “show trial” that Bolingbroke clearly wants it to be.

Still, Bolingbroke at last manages to end the ordeal. In truth, he has little time for such high drama and philosophical speculation. He promises to grant Richard one wish, and that wish is “give me leave to go” (535, 4.1.306), the sharp returning question is “Whither?” The first idea is that Richard must be taken to the Tower of London, there to remain a prisoner until his death. But as it will turn out, Pomfret (Pontefract Castle in West Yorkshire), will be his final lodgings.

Bolingbroke has tried to keep his seizure of the crown more or less civil, but in the end, Richard undermines that effort when he picks up on the command that he be “conveyed” to the Tower, saying, “Conveyors are you all / That rise thus nimbly by a true king’s fall” (535, 4.1.310-11). In effect, he calls all of his antagonists thieves.

To end the scene, the Abbot, Carlisle, and Aumerle discuss among themselves the possibility of reversing this coup against King Richard II, to whom they remain loyal. The Abbot invites the other two to dinner, saying that he does indeed have a plan to make things right.

ACT 5

Act 5, Scene 1 (536-38, Queen Isabella is dismayed at Richard’s passivity; she says goodbye to him and will be sent to France; Richard, who will be lodged at Pomfret Castle, warns Northumberland about the fickleness of destiny and friends.)

Queen Isabella of Valois tries to revive Richard’s spirits, but she finds it impossible. This scene between a well-matched husband and wife is pure imagination on Shakespeare’s part since Isabella was nine years old in 1399, the year in which this part of the play is set, but it may be patterned somewhat after Marlowe’s portrait of Queen Isabella of France, the wife of another ill-fated king, Edward II.

In any event, the Queen makes known her dismay at how abject Richard has become, asking him, “Hath Bolingbroke / Deposed thine intellect?” (536, 5.1.27-28) But by this time, Richard is most concerned that his sad story become a royal winter’s tale. Evidently, he has already transitioned into a melancholy, reflective post-reign mode, and is trying to imagine a time beyond the span of his life. He suggests to the Queen, “Tell thou the lamentable fall of me / And send the hearers weeping to their beds” (537, 5.1.44-45). In this way, she will keep his memory alive, at least among the company she keeps by the fireside.

Richard’s eloquence never truly deserts him, as we see when he goes on to say to Isabella, “the senseless brands will sympathize / The heavy accent of thy moving tongue / And in compassion weep the fire out …” (537, 5.1.46-48). It is worth asking how much “compensation” Richard’s evergreen eloquence brings him in his ordeal of grief and loss—perhaps this is an unanswerable question, but it arises because Shakespeare shows a strong and consistent interest in the many uses of fine language, as well as in its limits.

Richard, about to be sent to Pomfret rather than the Tower, exchanges some pointed words with the new King Henry IV’s ally Northumberland, aka Henry Percy. He calls Percy the “ladder wherewithal / The mounting Bolingbroke ascends my throne …” (537, 5.1.55-56), [28] and predicts that this great lord who so strongly supported the new king’s violent usurpation of the throne will soon distrust Henry IV, just as Henry will soon hold him to be a deadly enemy: neither man, quite understandably, will trust the other. Northumberland is unfazed, and responds, “My guilt be on my head, and there an end” (537, 5.1.69), and it’s time for Richard to go to Pomfret, and his young Queen to France. [29]

Act 5, Scene 2 (538-41, Bolingbroke rides to his coronation at Westminster in October 1399, with Richard in tow; York, describing the procession to his wife, pledges faith to Bolingbroke, even as he confesses his sadness over Richard’s downfall; York snatches an incriminating paper from his son Aumerle and sets out on horseback to warn the new King about the treasonous plot to assassinate him; Aumerle and the Duchess also head for the court to beg King Henry to pardon Aumerle.)

The Duke of York describes the coronation procession of Henry Bolingbroke. While he is not without sympathy for the outgoing Richard II, York makes it clear that he knows it’s time to show his loyalty for the incoming sovereign. His stance is hardly heroic, but it’s undeniably practical. He says, “To Bolingbroke are we sworn subjects now, / Whose state and honor I for aye allow” (539, 5.2.39-40). As we say today, “nothing succeeds like success.” Those who have the most to gain and lose generally back the politician who seems most likely to provide security. [30]

The Duke of York’s description of Bolingbroke in procession to Westminster is astute: as he relates the sight to his wife the Duchess, “You would have thought the very windows spake, / So many greedy looks of young and old / Through casements darted their desiring eyes / Upon his visage …” (538, 5.2.12-15). It seems as if almost the whole population of London has pinned its hopes on the success of the new king, and York’s account makes him sound for all the world like a late-medieval rock star. Henry Bolingbroke, as Shakespeare portrays him, is nothing if not an accomplished politician.

As Bolingbroke rides toward his coronation, Richard’s sad role is to serve as the cleanup act. He shows almost Christlike patience in this new role. York describes the ex-monarch’s fate as follows: “As in a theater the eyes of men, / After a well-graced actor leaves the stage, / Are idly bent on him that enters next, / Thinking his prattle to be tedious …” (539, 5.2.23-26), so it goes with Richard of Bordeaux. No friends commiserate with him in the crowd, and in fact they throw dust on his head, but he suffers it all without any display of anger at the surly, disrespectful crowd.

But now a potential domestic disaster looms for the Duke of York when he discovers—however implausibly—on his son Aumerle’s person a document directly implicating the young man in a treasonous plot to assassinate Henry IV. Brushing aside with almost comic brusqueness the pleas of his wife the Duchess, York sets out to warn the king even though it means condemning his own son—something York actually seems eager to do.

Act 5, Scene 3 (541-44, King Henry IV is worried about his son Hal’s madcap behavior and absence from court; Aumerle arrives at Henry’s chamber first and implores him for a pardon; York then shows up and rails until the King admits him; York reveals the Oxford plot as detailed in Aumerle’s incriminating document; the Duchess arrives and all three family members kneel before the king, two for Aumerle’s pardon and York for his execution; Henry magnanimously pardons Aumerle for this dire offense; all the same, the other conspirators will be hunted down and condemned.

At the beginning of this scene, we hear King Henry IV’s first mention of his troublesome son, Prince Hal, who will one day become one of England’s most celebrated kings for his prowess in defeating the French at Agincourt in 1415. But just at the moment, the King’s fond hopes for the young roustabout seem rather badly misplaced, as by the King’s own telling, Hal “daily doth frequent / With unrestrainèd loose companions …” (541, 5.3.6-7). The distraught father calls his absentee son a “young wanton and effeminate boy …” (541, 5.3.10). This is hardly what a king hopes for in his future successor.

We are no doubt being asked to understand that Bolingbroke’s anxiety stems from the genuine possibility that Prince Hal will turn out to be as reckless and irresponsible as the man his father recently deposed: Richard II.

The action that ensues is essentially comic, with the Duke of York adopting an attitude similar to that of the severe ancient Roman nobleman who, in the historian Livy’s recounting, executed his own son rather than mitigate just punishment for the young man’s crimes against the state. [31] His wife, the Duchess of York, kneels for the principle that any mother must have tender feelings toward her child and that those feelings must be respected.

Confronted with this spectacle that would make for pretty good modern “reality TV,” what does Henry Bolingbroke do? He generously sides with the Duchess and with Aumerle, although he decrees the execution of “the rest of that consorted crew” (544, 5.3.138). Apparently, now that the feckless Richard II has been deposed, Henry plans to preside over a kinder, gentler Windsor Castle and England. The reign of King Henry IV lasted from late September 1399 to his death in March 1413.

Act 5, Scene 4 (544-44, Sir Piers Exton, reflecting on King Henry’s overheard wish that the still-living Richard of Bordeaux be dealt with once and for all, makes the fateful determination to carry out that wish.)

Like Henry II against Thomas à Beckett a few centuries back in 1170, King Henry IV voices his desire to be rid of the royal person (Richard of Bordeaux) whose continued existence troubles him. And like Henry II, he is overheard by a supporter eager to do his bidding. This time, it’s Sir Piers Exton, an ambitious knight. The similarity of the two kings’ conduct indicates rough sailing ahead for the conscience of Henry IV. Henry II, students of history may recall, is said to have felt so guilty about Beckett that he ended up donning sackcloth and having himself scourged through the streets of London. [32]

Act 5, Scene 5 (544-47, Imprisoned at Pomfret, aka Pontefract Castle, Richard meditates on ambition, misfortune and death; he receives as visitors one of his former stable grooms as well as the prison warder; Sir Piers Exton and his gang of thugs enter bearing arms; Richard slays several of these men, only to be fatally stabbed by Exton.)

In the penultimate scene of Richard II, Shakespeare provides a well-rounded, dramatic conclusion to the fallen King Richard II’s life—one that has more to do with the playwright’s imagination and audience expectations than anything the historical record suggests. [33] When we see the former king at the beginning of Scene 5, his speech is true to character: “I have been studying how to compare / This prison where I live unto the world; / And, for because the world is populous / And here is not a creature but myself, / I cannot do it. Yet I’ll hammer’t out” (544, 5.5.1-5).

So sits Richard of Bordeaux in his cell at Pomfret, philosophizing about himself, his surroundings, and the world. This is his particular way of practicing the medieval art of dying well, ars moriendi. [34] He examines the notion that so many other disgraced actors in the world have hit upon, which is simply that “they are not the first of Fortune’s slaves, / Nor shall not be the last …” (545, 5.5.24-25). As always, Richard regards himself as an actor, so his take on this timeworn idea is, “Thus play I in one prison many people, / And none contented” (545, 5.5.31-32).

The sum of such exercises, Richard finds, is not much compensation, but rather a melancholy admission that “Nor I, nor any man that but man is, / With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased / With being nothing” (524, 5.5.39-41). Only death puts an end to suffering, and to speculation of the sort that is dear to Richard. It seems clear that even the best of his reflections won’t “compose” him, won’t give him peace or produce any change in his final predicament.

Richard has been above all, he suggests, a waster of time, and he recognizes too late that time is bound to waste the waster in return: “I wasted time, and now doth Time waste me; / For now hath Time made me his numb’ring clock …” (545, 5.5.49-50). [35] For Richard, as we follow his metaphor, time no longer flows like the sand in an hourglass; it is measured in and on his body like the movements of a ticking clock, and the passage of time’s units consists of “sighs and tears and groans” (546, 5.5.57), all while Henry Bolingbroke goes about his kingly affairs. [36]

The temporal figure Richard uses may be peculiar to him, but there is something typical about his musings at this point, an air or attitude that makes him sound like one of the ghostly speakers in A Mirrour for Magistrates, with their sententiae summing up the value of a life and the cost of grave mistakes. [37]

It is clear that Richard, though humbled, is unable to arrive at the patience he seeks. He holds a brief conversation with a stable groom who used to dress the horse that Richard rode, only to see it bear Bolingbroke to glory. This is the last sympathetic voice that Richard hears, though, as the young man is ushered out by the Keeper, who so angers the former king by refusing to sample his food that he earns for it an outburst and a beating: “The devil take Henry of Lancaster and thee!” (547, 5.6.102)

Moments later, Richard’s murderers make their entrance, and the ex-king dies courageously, even killing some of his assassins. Exton reminds us of the theological dimensions of what has just happened when he realizes he has purchased nothing but damnation by doing the new king’s bidding: “Oh, would the deed were good! / For now the devil that told me I did well / Says that this deed is chronicled in hell” (547, 5.5.114-16). The historical date of Richard’s death was February 14, 1400.

Act 5, Scene 6 (547-48, Henry IV learns that his enemies have been captured and executed; he pardons the Bishop of Carlisle; Exton brings Richard’s corpse to Henry and is banished for his regicidal act; Henry makes plans to overcome further rebellion and distributes honors; the new king declares that he will undertake a crusade to the Holy Land, a pilgrimage to assuage his guilt over Richard’s death.)

King Henry IV starts this scene by summing up the situation as it now stands: rebels have burned Ci’cester in Gloucester to the ground. But right away, in comes Northumberland (Henry Percy) to tell him that the main would-be assassins, the so-called Oxford conspirators who signed Aumerle’s letter, have been captured and executed: Percy tells him, “I have to London sent / The heads of Salisbury, Spencer, Blunt, and Kent” (547, 5.6.7-8). Fitzwater adds a few more traitors to the list (Broccas and Sir Benet Seely).

As of early 1400, the new King Henry IV has work to do in putting down rebellions against him—disorders that will stretch forward to around 1408, and that begin with the Oxford Conspiracy that threatened to end his reign as soon as it began. [38] Just now, however, Henry distributes honors to his supporters and pardons the Bishop of Carlisle, establishing a precedent of generosity and gratitude over against Richard II’s venal, selfish, and corrupt administration.

Exton, remover of Henry’s worst fear, is rewarded only with his own guilt as the assassin of an anointed king. Henry curses him with the words, “With Cain go wander through the shade of night / And never show thy head by day nor light” (548, 5.6.42-43). The new king’s response to Exton’s atrocity is of course hypocritical and yet somehow genuine. Henry admits that this “poison” (38) was necessary, but hates the poisoner and still has some regard for the one poisoned—Richard was, after all, his cousin, and the two had known each other since childhood.

The play ends with King Henry IV in a penitent mood, declaring openly his grief “That blood should sprinkle me to make me grow” (548, 5.6.46). What he is now confronting is the brutal, proto-Machiavellian truth that not only must a king deal with maintaining his “two bodies” in a productive relationship, but that even the supposedly glorious, corporate, symbolic body that is the monarchy itself is often obtained and kept by the bloodiest and most impure means.

Understandably, then, the stricken King Henry IV desperately wants to make a voyage to Jerusalem to expiate his guilt, but as it will turn out, he has far too much on his plate to indulge himself in the luxury of self-reproach. [39] Although Henry had undertaken several religion-based travels—two expeditions to Lithuania and a pilgrimage to Jerusalem—during the early 1390s before he became king, as King Henry IV he never did undertake a pilgrimage during his reign, which lasted from late 1399 to 1413. [40]

If there is to be renewal in this Lancastrian dynasty, it will come only with the maturing of Henry IV’s son Prince Hal, who is still a tavern-goer and an actor trying on many parts. In I and II Henry IV, the Prince’s role-playing is redeemed because it differs profoundly in its purpose from the self-absorbed poetical and dramatic inclinations that consumed Richard II and ultimately made him unfit to govern. [41]

Final Reflections on Richard II

Richard is at times a villain, especially in his reckless early reign. But he is also a reflective and poetical villain. Students of the play should probably, therefore, consider the extent to which the observations and moral sententiae or summings-up he repeats with gathering pathos redeem him as a man with tragic insight into the nature of kingship, or whether such language simply flows from, and amounts to, self-pity.

Another question concerns the element of tragedy in Richard II. The play is Henry IV’s triumph, but it is Richard’s tragedy. The question of tragedy in relation to Christianity is a vexed one since, of course, there’s no question of positing a merely chaotic, senseless universe. Richard’s fate was avoidable in that it wasn’t due to some indomitable but dangerous quality (such as Oedipus’s intrepidity and strength of intellect) but rather to his rapacious disregard for feudal loyalties, prerogatives, and common decency.

Shakespeare hardly follows any unitary model of tragedy—he builds his tragic intensities and ideals circumstantially, from one set of dramatic raw materials to the next. In this way, he is able to bring out whatever makes excellent drama in his source material. A notion of tragedy as broad as “a fall from good fortune to bad” serves a playwright of his astonishing caliber as a sufficient point of departure, where in a lesser author, it might only general insipidity.

One possibility to consider: aside from political philosophy, perhaps the play could be read as an argument between a vision centered on ceremony, the sacred, and the aesthetic dimension of experience (a Catholic vision, if we don’t mind the proleptic reference) and a mindset that tends strongly toward clarity and the practical consideration of how to get and hold power. That would be Bolingbroke’s proto-Machiavellian approach, and we might also note in Henry the existence of a practical, iconoclastic, proto-Protestant sensibility.

Tragedy, if we follow the Hegelian interpretation of that genre, must wrestle with competing sets of rights, as when Antigone, in the Sophocles play by that name, battles Creon over the granting of proper burial rites for her slain brother: both have a kind of right on their side. [42] In the current play, it may be that we are to dismiss neither Richard’s aesthetic and ceremonial sensibilities nor Henry Bolingbroke’s businesslike understanding of power’s imperatives.

Bolingbroke is hardly liberated by his assumption of power from the sort of questions that nag the deposed Richard. Indeed, he will return to just such questions from the moment he learns that his death-wish against Richard has been overheard and carried out. The blood on Bolingbroke’s hands turns out to be as durable as the “anointed balm” that Richard had claimed could never be washed from a king’s sacred body, even by all the water in “the rough rude sea.” [43]

Richard II is deeply flawed, but we can’t easily dismiss him. The Richard who suffers and dies at the play’s end isn’t easily reduced to the sum of the acts that brought him to his sorrow. Richard II is partly about a gruff, ugly transfer of power, but by his own qualities and intelligence, Richard himself calls upon us to consider the value of an essentially poetical way of seeing and being that stretches beyond the kingly circumstances of his own existence.

Edition. Greenblatt, Stephen et al., editors. The Norton Shakespeare: Histories + Digital Edition. 3rd ed. W. W. Norton, 2016. ISBN-13: 978-0-393-93859-3.

ENDNOTES

*To return to exact part of the text referenced by the endnotes below, left-click on the endnote’s numbered link. By contrast, the blue scroll-up button at the bottom right of the page returns to the top of the document.

[1] Richard of Bordeaux’s grandfather was King Edward III, and his father was the illustrious Edward the Black Prince, heir to the throne but for his untimely death. Whatever his flaws, King Richard II of England was as “legitimate” as a sovereign can be, at least in terms of birthright. Britannica.com. Accessed 1/17/2025.

[2] Indeed, Bolingbroke and Mowbray were junior members of the so-called “Lords Appellant,” who saw it as their prerogative to interfere with King Richard II’s freedom to set policy during the 1380s. See “Richard II of England” (Worldhistoryencyclopedia.com) for an outline of Richard’s troubled reign. Accessed 1/17/2025.

[3] Edward III’s five adult sons were as follows, in order of seniority: 1) Edward the Black Prince, aka the Prince of Wales, heir apparent; 2) Lionel of Antwerp, Duke of Clarence; 3) John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster; 4) Edmund of Langley, Duke of York; and Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester.

[4] See Romans 12:19. Geneva Bible 1599. Biblegateway.com. Accessed 1/4/2025. St. Paul was drawing from Deuteronomy 32:35.

[5] See Tillyard, E. M. W. The Elizabethan World Picture: A Study of the Idea of Order in the Age of Shakespeare, Donne and Milton. New York: Vintage, 1959. Orig. pub. 1943. ISBN-13: ‎978-0394701622. See pg. 17.

[6] Shakespeare, William. The History of Henry the Fourth. Aka The First Part of Henry the Fourth. In The Norton Shakespeare: Histories, 3rd ed. 629-95. See 669-70, 3.2.60-84.

[7] Richard II undertook two expeditions to Ireland, in 1394 and 1399 respectively. See “The Reign of Richard II, 1377 to 1399.” BBC History. Accessed 1/17/2025.

[8] See Norton footnote 6 for pg. 501, which refers in part to “tax farming” by medieval royal administrations, which meant contracting out for tax collection services, or to leasing crown land for rent.

[9] John of Gaunt was just shy of 59 years of age at his death in Feb. 1399, but that was considered a robust lifetime in late-medieval England.

[10] David Mitchell makes this point with good humor in discussing the early history of Britain in his recent history of England’s rulers, Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England’s Kings and Queens. New York: Crown, 2023. See in particular pp. 28-29.

[11] See the entry Ravenspurn at Wikishire. This seaside town has long since sunken under the ocean.

[12] In reality, Queen Isabella of Valois, sister to the same Catherine of Valois who would later become Henry V’s bride, was not a mature woman but a very young girl. She was born in 1389, and was married at the age of six to Richard in 1396. The marriage was never consummated since she was too young and Richard was deposed in 1399, when Isabella was a few months away from her tenth birthday.

[13] That connection will end with the rebellious Hotspur dead, killed by King Henry IV’s son Prince Hal during the climactic battle at Shrewsbury, which in Shakespeare’s I Henry IV occurs in Act 5, Scene 4. See Shakespeare, William. The History of Henry the Fourth. Aka The First Part of Henry the Fourth. In The Norton Shakespeare: Histories, 3rd ed. 629-95.

[14] See E. M. W. Tillyard’s standard study, The Elizabethan World Picture: A Study of the Idea of Order in the Age of Shakespeare, Donne and Milton (Vintage, 1959, first pub. 1943; Amazon link), on the most common among the cultural and other assumptions made by Shakespeare’s fellow citizens during the Elizabethan Era. Arthur O. Lovejoy’s book The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Harvard UP, 1976. First published 1933) goes into great detail about the “great chain” figure by which so many people figured the boundaries and ultimate nature of the universe. See also Scala Naturae: Great Chain of Being and Great Chain of Being, R. Fludd, 1619 (Wikimedia).

[15] While the editors of the latest Oxford edition lay claim for Shakespeare to the historical play “King Edward II,” to this commentator it seems unlikely that Shakespeare would so directly represent a same-sex intimate relationship between the King and his court favorite, Gaveston.

[16] Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Folio with additions from the Quarto. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. Combined text 764-840. It is often said that the Fool’s mockery keeps our pity for Lear within healthy bounds, even as he instills pity for the old king.

[17] Kantorowicz, Ernst. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Princeton UP, 2016. Orig. published in 1957. ISBN-13: 978-0691017044. In his chapter on Shakespeare’s Richard II, Kantorowicz details, in an analysis of Act 3, Scene 2 (on the Welsh Coast), Act 3, Scene 3 (Flint Castle), and Act 4, Scene 1 (Richard’s elaborate resignation of the crown, a kind of self-deconsecrating), how Richard II tries to hang on to some semblance of his sacramental and mortal duality, only to fail and be confronted with his mere humanity. Each time, he slides or tumbles precipitately from a regard for the divinity within him to a mere name, a “nominal entity” so to speak, and finally to a suffering, dying human being who, in the end, represents nothing but what poor shards remain of himself. See pp. 24-41.

[18] Richard’s observation here is similar to what King Lear says in Act 4, Scene 6 of King Lear: “They told me I was everything. ’Tis a lie. I am / not ague-proof” (823, 4.6.104-05). Both Lear and Richard have been told that they are something more than human, and they find out to their grief how false that claim is. This is a traditional theme—fear or self-interest will lead counselors to delude the powerful about their true circumstances and nature. In this sense, power is an obstacle to understanding, not an advantage. See Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Folio with additions from the Quarto. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. Combined text 764-840.

[19] The King’s theatrical nature makes him rehearse again and again both the heights of power and the inevitability of a great fall, as if he always has seen himself as an actor in a tragedy. Like any educated medieval man, Richard seeks the consolation of philosophy by patterning his own life after moral exempla. But it seems that his temperament is too mercurial to permit him to draw the necessary sustenance for long.

[20] Herodotus offers an anecdote about the Corinthian ruler Periander, who sent a messenger to the despot Thrasybulos of Miletos. This despot led Periander’s messenger into a field of wheat, and kept cropping the tallest stalks as he passed by, leaving only the middling stalks. The messenger didn’t understand the gesture, but Periander did, and he thus learned how to deal with potential rivals. The Histories, vol. 2. Gutenberg e-text. Accessed 1/4/2025. Another such story comes to us from the Roman historian Titus Livius. “Livy” explains how the Etruscan King Tarquinius Superbus got across through a messenger what he wanted his son Sextus Tarquinius to do in Gabii. Livy says that he “went into the palace-garden, deep in thought, his son’s messenger following him. As he walked along in silence it is said that he struck off the tallest poppy-heads with his stick.” Today, this eliminate-the-most-eminent-ones theory is usually called “the tall poppy theory.” Livy. The History of Rome, Book 1.54. Perseus Digital Library. Accessed 1/4/2025.

[21] Mowbray died in Venice on Sept. 22, 1399. See “Thomas Mowbray, 1st Duke of Norfolk.” Britannica.com. Accessed 1/17/2025.

[22] King James I considers the theory of the divine right of kings in Basilikon Doron and The True Law of Free Monarchy.

[23] As mentioned above, much in Act 4, Scene 1 responds well to Kantorowicz’s reading, which is that Richard tries desperately and successively, but in vain, to hold together “the king’s two bodies” within his own identity.

[24] In The King’s Two Bodies (see note above), Kantorowicz mentions Walter Pater’s remarks on this moment in “Shakespeare’s English Kings” from Appreciations, with an Essay on Style. London: Macmillan, 1889, repr. 1924. Pater refers to the play as “the most touching of all examples of the irony of kingship” (196). Then on 205, he writes, “In the Roman Pontifical, of which the order of Coronation is really a part, there is no form for the inverse process, no rite of ‘degradation’…. It is as if Shakespeare had had in mind some such inverted rite, like those old ecclesiastical or military ones, by which human hardness, or human justice, adds the last touch of unkindness to the execution of its sentences ….” It’s worth remarking, though, that it is Richard II himself who insists on performing this rite, thereby stretching out the intended cruelty of the whole affair.

[25] We may be reminded here of a similarly striking image in The Comedy of Errors. Antipholus of Syracuse refers to his search for his lost family, saying, “I to the world am like a drop of water / That in the ocean seeks another drop, / Who, falling there to find his fellow forth, / Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself” (282, 1.2.35-39). See Shakespeare, William. The Comedy of Errors. In The Norton Shakespeare: Comedies, 3rd ed. 278-321.

[26] Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Second Quarto with additions from the Folio. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. Combined text 358-447. See 365, 1.2.85-86.

[27] See footnote 3 to pg. 532 Norton. The editors say that the deposition scene was probably cut from the original for some years since it only shows up in 1608, well over a decade from the time of writing. The Norton editors refer to the politically sensitive nature of staging or describing the deposition of a king.

[28] In using this figure, Richard anticipates Sir Francis Bacon’s line in his essay “Of Great Place,” “All rising to great place is by a winding stair….” Bartleby.com. Accessed 1/17/2025.

[29] The historical Isabella went on to marry the Duke of Orléans, but she died of childbirth at the age of nineteen. Her sister, Catherine of Valois, married Henry IV’s son and successor, Henry V. They were married in 1420, but the marriage lasted only two years since Henry V, one of the most illustrious of England’s kings due to his victory over the French at Agincourt in October 1415, died in 1422. See Britannica’s entry “Catherine of Valois.” Accessed 1/17/2025.

[30] A timely quote by Sir John Harington (circa 1560-1612) speaks to the issue of switching sides after a conflict: “Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason.” SIR JOHN HARINGTON, “Of Treason,” The Letters and Epigrams of Sir John Harington…, ed. Norman E. McClure, book 4, epigram 5, p. 255 (1977). Harington’s epigrams were published in 1618, just a few years after Shakespeare’s death.

[31] For an account of the consul Titus Manlius Torquatus executing his son for disobeying an order not to engage with the enemy, see Titus Livius, The History of Rome, Books 1-8. Gutenberg e-text. See Book 8, paragraph 7.

[32] With regard to King Henry II’s act of penance in 1174, see “Thomas Becket, Henry II, and Dover Castle.” English-heritage.org.uk. Accessed 1/17/2025.

[33] See “Shakespeare’s King Richard II: Drama Versus History.” J. M. Pressley, the Shakespeare Resource Center. Accessed 1/17/2025. It’s thought that Richard was starved to death, which is probably a worse fate than being stabbed by an ambitious knight and dying forthwith. See also the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’s brief gloss, “Shakespeare’s Richard II: Myth or Reality?” by Wahseem Ahmed, August 2018.

[34] On the ars moriendi tradition, see, for example, William Perneby’s 1599 treatise, A direction to death: teaching man the way to die well, that being dead, he may live ever …. This text is representative of the ars moriendi genre in English. As the main speaker says, “a man is to prepare himselfe to die ere euer hee comes to die, because the greatest worke a man hath to finish in this worlde, is to die….” London: Thomas Man, 1599. Oxford Text Archive. Accessed 3/21/2024.

[35] Shakespeare’s representation of time is noteworthy on more than this occasion. See, for example, Feste’s figure of a child’s spinning top as he admits his part in the mean prank played against Malvolio: “And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges” (797, 5.1.363).

[36] See Norton footnote 6 for pg. 545.

[37] See A Mirror for Magistrates, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. HathiTrust. Accessed 1/17/2025.

[38] See Dr. Dan Spenser’s brief article, “Windsor Castle and the Epiphany Rising of 1400.” The rebellions faced by Henry IV will, of course, spread across the two Henry IV plays.

[39] See Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Gutenberg e-text. The narrator says in Chapter VIII, “There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us.”

[40] On Henry Bolingbroke’s early 1390s crusades and pilgrimage, see “Adventures of a Future King—Henry Bolingbroke and the siege of Vilnius 1390.” Lost Fort Blog, Gabriele Campbell. Accessed 1/17/2025.

[41] Shakespeare’s portrayal of Prince Hal’s misconduct is temporally adjusted—the Prince was 14 years old when his father became King Henry IV, and therefore he was a bit too young to be up to no good with Sir John Falstaff.

[42] On Georg Hegel’s theory of tragedy, see “Hegel, Theory of Tragedy.” Britannica.com. Accessed 1/17/2025.

[43] See current Norton edition 519, 3.2.49-50: “Not all the water in the rough rude sea / Can wash the balm from an anointed king.”

Commentaries onShakespeare’s History Plays