Richard II
Act I

ACT I

SCENE i

In 1398 at Windsor Castle on the Thames (Asimov 261), King Richard II asks his uncle, “Old John of Gaunt, time-honoured Lancastrian” (I.i.1) — who historically was only 58 years old (Asimov, I 263) — if he has investigated the matter concerning his son, Henry Hereford (a.k.a. Bolingbroke, a.k.a. Bullingbrook), who has charged Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, with treason. Mowbray’s life story is pretty interesting (Asimov, II 267-268). As for Bolingbroke, he is indeed Richard’s cousin: the Black Prince and John of Gaunt were brothers. But Henry comes from the fourth line of Edward III, Richard from the first, and there are third-line descendants of Lionel, relevant before Henry (Asimov, II 266), which will require lengthy footnotes in Henry IV, Part 1 and more unveiling hypocrisy in Henry V.

From the opening lines resonate the themes of timing, “ground,” and especially “highness” — “high treason” (I.i.27), “High-stomach’d” (I.i.18), “high blood” (I.i.58), the royal honorific “Highness” (I.i.54), etc. Bolingbroke and Mowbray are brought in and pay their over-the-top respects to Richard. Richard is not unaware of their obsequious greetings to him: “We thank you both, yet one but flatters us” (I.i.25), though perhaps he doesn’t realize that they both could be but flattering him.

Bolingbroke and Mowbray level accusations of high treason at each other. The touchiness here seems to be that Mowbray knows how involved Richard was with the murder of his own uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, so his defensiveness is really a loyalty to the King. When commanded to explain the charge further, Henry indicates that Mowbray plotted in the murder of Gloucester. Mowbray denies this, and diverts matters by admitting he was involved in a plot against Gaunt but has since repented and been forgiven. Mowbray “denies killing Thomas of Gloucester in a few brief and rather unconvincing words. He is more circumstantial in denying the lesser charge, that he has stolen public funds” (Asimov, II 269).

The argument escalates to the level of a duel challenge, with Henry declaring,

Pale trembling coward, there I throw my gage,
Disclaiming here the kinred of the King,
And lay aside my high blood’s royalty….
(I.i.69-71)

Thus we have “two supplicants accusing each other before their king, dressed formally, speaking formally, hurling down their gages” (Garber 241). A “gage” is a pledge, but probably represented by a gauntlet here, thrown down in “the ancient feudal gesture of challenge”; the scene is “ceremonious in the extreme” (Garber 241).

The King seems more interested in the style than in the content of the debate: “How high a pitch his resolution soars!” (I.i.109). Allusion to the “original” contentious male relationship in the Bible, Cain and “Abel” (104), prepares for Richard’s assurance to Mowbray, “Were he my brother, nay my kingdom’s heir” (I.i.116), Richard will remain impartial.

With what should be a superfluous, “be rul’d by me” (I.i.152), he attempts to end the contention. He trots out a medical conceit that may be clever but threatens to seem trivializing:

Let’s purge this cholar without letting blood.
This we prescribe, though no physician;
Deep malice makes too deep incision.
Forget, forgive, conclude and be agreed;
Our doctors say this is no month to bleed.
(I.i.153-157)

Mowbray shares Cassio’s philosophy (in Othello) concerning reputation:

Myself I throw, dread sovereign, at thy foot,
My life thou shalt command, but not my shame:
The one my duty owes, but my fair name,
Despite of death that lives upon my grave,
To dark dishonor’s use thou shalt not have.
I am disgrac’d, impeach’d, and baffled here,
Pierc’d to the soul with slander’s venom’d spear….
. . .
The purest treasure mortal times afford
Is spotless reputation; that away,
Men are but gilded loam, or painted clay.
. . .
My honor is my life, both grow in one,
Take honor from me, and my life is done.
(I.i.165-171, 177-183)

In addition to the perpetual hyper-concern over “good name,” these declarations would certainly have matched Oxford’s feelings in the early 1580s — particularly regarding the Howard/Arundel accusations (Ogburn and Ogburn 430) — and beyond (Clark 497; Farina 113).

Henry refuses to back down. So Richard authorizes the duel for Saint Lambert’s Day (17 September) at Coventry. Apparently some disputes can end only in violence. St. Lambert was martyred in the 7th century for knowing about a mayor’s infidelity and hypocrisy. Richard announces — and note: “The royal ‘we’ modulates, trails off into the voice of impotence. The enjambed line tells the story, as the word ‘command’ is abruptly undercut in the phrase that follows” (Garber 241-242) — “We were not born to sue, but to command, / Which since we cannot do to make you friends / Be ready, as your lives shall answer it” (I.i.196-198).

SCENE ii

Gaunt speaks with his sister-in-law, the widowed Duchess of Gloucester, who historically was really only 32 at time of scene (Asimov, II 271), though she did die the next year. Gaunt’s “blood” relation with the murdered Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester — notice how often the word “blood” is used in this scene, with various meanings — stirs him to want vengeance more than do her rants (I.ii.1-3). Gaunt hints at Richard’s involvement, and will be more direct later. Since the King is beyond “correction” by we mortals (I.ii.4f), heaven will eventually have to “rain hot vengeance on offenders’ heads” (I.ii.8). The Duchess waxes eloquent about Edward III’s seven sons, some now dead, being “as seven vials of his sacred blood, / Or seven fair branches springing from one root” (I.ii.12-13). Her husband is a branch now “crack’d, and all the precious liquor spilt” (I.ii.19). So begins a pattern of horticultural metaphor recurring throughout the play. The Duchess appeals to Gaunt’s engendering in the same womb as her late husband (I.ii.22f): “and though thou livest and breathest, / Yet art thou slain in him” (I.ii.24-25). In fact, as a son, “Thou dost consent / In some large measure to thy father’s death” (I.ii.25-26) in allowing Gloucester to die unrevenged. She insists he makes himself vulnerable: “Thou showest the naked pathway to thy life, / Teaching stern murder how to butcher thee” (I.ii.31-32).

[Throughout this diatribe appear verbal echoes of the first 18 lines of Chaucer’s General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, as will occur again in Henry IV, Part 1. The explanation is here, my article, “Subliminal Chaucer in Shakespeare’s History Plays.” The Oxfordian 17 (2015): 153-162.]

Gaunt reiterates that it must be left to Heaven since the King is involved: “I may never lift / An angry arm against His [God’s] minister” (I.ii.40-41). He insists that the Duchess must make her complaint to God, “the widow’s champion and defense” (I.ii.43). The Duchess hopes at least that Bolingbroke will prevail over Mowbray, or at least that his sins are so heavy “That they may break his foaming courser’s back, / And throw the rider headlong in the lists” (I.ii.51-52). [Another Chaucer allusion, this time to The Knight’s Tale?] Gaunt must leave for Coventry, and for some reason, Shakespeare makes this a long goodbye, with the Duchess in the part of Columbo: “Farewell, old Gaunt!” (I.ii.54); “Yet one word more!” (I.ii.58);

Commend me to thy brother, Edmund York.
Lo this is all — nay, yet depart not so;
Though this be all, do not so quickly go;
I shall remember more. Bid him — ah, what? —
With all good speed at Pleshy visit me.
(I.ii.62-66)

She says she’ll die and won’t be seeing Gaunt again (I.ii.73-74).

Some Oxfordians see in the noble character of Gaunt traces of Thomas Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex, fervent Lancastrian and one of Oxford’s older supporters at court (Ogburn and Ogburn 432). June 1583 When Sussex died of consumption in June 1583 after many months of the wasting disease, “he must have looked ‘gaunt'” (Clark 501).

SCENE iii

All parties go through all the superfluous ritual and formal frou-frou of the duel ceremony — announcements of names and charges, trumpetings, etc. Henry again declares Mowbry “a traitor, foul and dangerous, / To God of heaven, King Richard, and to me” (I.iii.40). Since the guy cannot be dangerous to God, the list has to refer to the crime of being a traitor; so “to me” is telling. “The author shows such complete familiarity with the formalities as only a participant, or certainly an habitué, of the joust could have” (Ogburn and Ogburn 431), one “comfortable with the rituals of heraldry” (Farina 113). Henry kneels to Richard, saying oddly that “Mowbry and myself are like two men / That vow a long and weary pilgrimage” (I.iii.48-49) — an inappropriate use of the word that invokes Chaucer.

Bolingbroke wishes to kiss Richard’s hand. Richard descends from his seat. Shakespeare makes a point of embedding the stage direction by having him say so: “We will descend” (I.iii.54).”This is the first of the play’s many fateful downward movements, which will bring Richard off the throne” (Garber 243). Richard embraces his cousin Henry, but adds,

Farewell, my blood, which if to-day thou shed,
Lament we may, but not revenge thee dead.
(I.iii.57-58)

What happened to the declared impartiality? Or is he really just sussing up Henry? More build-up involves Gaunt and Mowbray, but just before the battle is to begin, Richard throws down his “warder,” or baton, a signal that all must halt. This delay up to the last possible minute “is pure Elizabeth” (Ogburn and Ogburn 431). Richard says that such bloodspilling would resemble civil war: the “civil wounds plough’d up with neighbors’ swords” (I.iii.128) sound like those of the Knyvet feud (Ogburn and Ogburn 431) and the “civil blood” of Romeo and Juliet. Therefore, instead, each is banished from England: Henry for ten years, Mowbray for life.

What a denunciation of war! What an appeal for peace! … And not one word of it sincere! The tortuously long sentence, the involved construction, the piled-up relative clauses, the pronouns with ambiguous antecedents, the excess of hyphenated adjectives, all go to show how a poetically gifted but mentally dishonest and frightened man expresses himself when he opens his mouth and lets what will come come. Examine the speech, and it falls to pieces like the pack of words that it is.
The central figure is that of Peace, an infant, asleep in its cradle, England [I.iii.132]. But why should a professed lover of tranquility like Richard wish to keep peace asleep? Obviously, when peace sleeps, war and domestic turmoil have their chance…. Subject and object the same! [peace. (I.iii.137)]. The verbiage almost conceals that fact…. The King’s predicate, because of the verbal meanderings that lay between, forgot its subject. (Goddard, I 151-152)

“His show of impartiality, therefore, was pure sham. It was fear, not love of peace, that led him to call off the duel in an attempt to solve an ugly problem by the easy device of pushing it out of sight” (Goddard, I 150). He banishes the two because “he cannot tolerate having this murky affair pried into” (Smidt 91).

Banishment as thematic in the plays, reflecting Oxford’s own trauma, places for some the composition of this play in the early 1580s, when Oxford was banished from court (Ogburn and Ogburn 327, 415). Forms of the word “banish” occur 18 times within 200 lines of Act I (Ogburn and Ogburn 431). Reflecting on his banishment, Mowbray, oddly for him but like a poet might, laments the loss of immersion in the beloved English language, “The language I have learnt these forty years” (I.iii.159) — although Mowbray was really only 32 at this time (Asimov, II 274), perhaps was aged a bit to match Henry Howard at age 41 in 1581 (Ogburn and Ogburn 431). “Within my mouth you have enjail’d my tongue” (I.iii.166). And, Richard adds, there’s to be no conspiring! (Potential enemies must be kept apart. No texting either!)

When Mowbray leaves, Richard reduces Henry’s sentence to six years, due ostensibly to Gaunt’s sorrow (I.iii.208-210); but Gaunt still doesn’t expect to live that long. Goddard is probably correct: because of his own complicity in the murder of Gloucester, “fear, not love of peace” motivates Richard to stop the duel, and the reduction of Henry’s sentence comes not from mercy but actually from a “sense of guilt” (Goddard, I 150).

A philosophical and conciliatory Gaunt and an impatient Henry say goodbye to one another, the latter off on “an enforced pilgrimage” (I.iii.264; cf. I.iii.230) — that word again, again inappropriately used. Gaunt tries to convince Henry to think of this not as being banished by Richard but as Henry banishing Richard (I.iii.279-280). Or he could tell himself he’s fleeing “pestilence” for a “fresher clime” (I.iii.284-285) where he can “Suppose the singing birds musicians” (I.iii.288). [Chaucer’s “smale foules maken melodye.”]

Gaunt “urges the power of the imagination, of poetry and of transforming language, as a way to deal with things as they are” (Garber 244). Henry objects to the notion of adjusting one’s attitude, to which is a form of self-delusion: “O, who can hold a fire in his hand / By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?” (I.iii.294-295). The analogy resembles some of the lyrics of the Weelkes madrigal “Thule, The Period of Cosmography.” Henry bids goodbye to his country:

Then England’s ground, farewell, sweet soil, adieu;
My mother, and my nurse, that bears me yet!
Where e’er I wander, boast of this I can,
Though banish’d, yet a true-born Englishman.
(I.iii.306-309)

With the cheeriness that six winters will be quickly gone, we get “No hint of Gaunt’s imminent death. Both Gaunt and Bolingbroke contradict what they have said only a few minutes earlier” (Smidt 88).
Eventually, also suggesting revision, there will be “confusion as to who accompanies Bolingbroke on his departure: the Lord Marshal…, Gaunt… or Aumerle,” the first two indications in rhyme, the last in blank verse (Smidt 88).

SCENE iv

Richard tests the loyalty of Aumerle, son of the Duke of York, to find out anything Henry might have conveyed when Aumerle escorted him into exile. Aumerle obviously doesn’t like Henry. Maybe. We get two “quite different versions of Aumerle’s parting with Bolingbroke, one a brief but friendly ‘Cousin, farewell’, followed by a request that he should write…, the other Aumerle’s account to Richard (… in blank verse) of how he saw Bolingbroke off and counterfeited grief so as to avoid having to speak the word ‘farewell'” (Smidt 88). With sneering elitism, Richard mentions that his men Bushy, Bagot, and Green — and “There is a strong implication here of homosexuality between the King and the favorites” (Asimov 293) — have noted that Henry is popular among the common people. Richard is disgusted: “With ‘Thanks, my countrymen, my loving friends,’ / As were our England in reversion his, / And he our subjects’ next degree in hope” (I.iv.34-36). But enough of that; Richard must put down an Irish rebellion and needs money:

And for our coffers, with too great a court
And liberal largess, are grown somewhat light,
We are enforc’d to farm our royal realm….
(I.iv.43-45)

[Chaucer’s “Complaint to his [Light] Purse”?]
When Bushy enters with news that Gaunt is on his deathbed, Richard immediately and viciously hopes his uncle a speedy death so that he can get his hands on funds (I.iv.59-64). “This is a marvelous antithetical prologue to John of Gaunt’s famous deathbed prophecy; its plain nastiness contrasts to Gaunt’s unworldliness” (Bloom 254). The effect?: “the audience’s respect for Richard is undermined in the first scene in which we see him in his private capacity … in which he admits he has been extravagant and speaks with callous indifference about his uncle’s illness; Gaunt’s subsequent evocation of what England should be serves as a measure of Richard’s disqualification for the kingly office” (Wells 138).

But we will experience ambivalences, some possibly due to revision, for “after the first act Richard betrays not the slightest sign of a guilty conscience for any criminal or evil deed…. In fact we have the decidedly odd phenomenon of the suspected criminal going through the greater part of the play without awareness that a crime has been committed. And, what is more, he is never accused of the crime by his chief antagonist” (Smidt 93). “Could it be that Shakespeare got cold feet about pressing a similarity which might have aroused the displeasure of Queen Elizabeth?” (Smidt 95).