The Rightful King and the King Innate

The good king will have a character symbiotic with his rank, the very reflexes of his intelligence will govern a disposition to cultivate the unitary in his realm, quell the divisive when he is in exchange with his subjects. And when these reflexes are awry in his nature it is immediately apparent because his behaviour is inalienable from its civil effect. This is as true for Elizabeth II as it is for Shakespeare’s Plantagenets.

Richard II begins when the young king challenges his uncle, John of Gaunt, to bring forth his son, Bolingbroke, to make good a charge of treachery against another lord, Mowbray. Here is a tricky accusation that will grievously harm the Realm’s concord from the outset of the play. The king must arbitrate in circumstances where the accuser is his own cousin, and the energy of vilification between the two lords suggests animosities transferred from the foreplay. It is rancour between patrician families and, for all the evidence of actual treachery seems slight, the crisis nonetheless combines being dire with being murky. In addition, John of Gaunt is the Realm’s most venerable counsellor, but now frail with age:

 

Richard: Tell me, moreover, hast thou sounded him,

If he appeal the Duke on ancient malice,

Or worthily, as a good subject should,

On some known ground of treachery in him?

Gaunt: As near as I could sift him on that argument,

On some apparent danger seen in him

Aimed at your Highness, no inveterate malice.

(I.i.9–14)

 

“No inveterate malice,” counsels Gaunt. In raising the issue, Richard botches its resolution. Worse, he plays for an effect on his beholders that is gratuitous. By decreeing Bolingbroke will fight Mowbray in mortal combat at Coventry, by allowing much pomp to attend preparations for this fight, the king raises for all beholders an expectation of spectacle only to disappoint anticipation at the last minute by converting the penalty to differing terms of exile. So the pomp is witnessed to be frivolous.

“Some apparent danger,” Gaunt has told him. In fairness, one might ask how any ruler would decide for the best in such an awkward crisis where the seat of malice is unclear but the insecurity is very real. Might a shrewd ruler like Henry V, or Claudius of Elsinore, have sent one lord off on embassy here, the other there, letting the air settle at home meanwhile? Richard is confronted with the intractable detail by which crises arise and instead of practicality chooses the course of onus. For the effect of exile is to push discord beyond the sea so that, Freudian fashion, it rankles by being put at remove.

Both the banishment penalty, and the gratuitous manner by which it is applied, form the wellspring of Richard’s troubles and downfall and, with great nicety, Shakespeare places before this sovereign a very real dilemma with which authority has to deal and an equally particularised depiction of the weakness with which this authority responds. Bad kingship is on display, effective kingship is present by inference. The inalienable requirement of Richard’s office was that his intelligence should recognise the specifics of the crisis, and his imagination encompass an effective resolution for them. Why so? Because that is what kingship does. The young king lacks character for this, where the unstated premiss of Richard II is the indissolubility of character and kingship, and the critical edge of our watch on how the drama unfolds is this witness of how Shakespeare illumines the pathos of mismatch in Richard to a nicety.

At the heart of this mismatch is Richard’s uncertain self-possession. This young man, strangely distrait from the actuality of his Realm, lacks a centring purpose. Summoned to Gaunt’s deathbed, he cynically tells his cronies how he hopes they will arrive too late and, in so doing, discloses himself to be not waggish but paltry. Arrived, he cuts short Gaunt’s admonitions where regal tact might have heard out the dying servant of his forefathers. Next, and stupidly, Richard sequestrates the dead man’s estate to pay for his Irish war. Being a king, all this imprudent behaviour is witnessed, so all must effect his power to draw allegiance.

 

The mismatch might be well illumined by comparing three reactions. The first is Gaunt’s celebrated paean to England, and the old man’s patriotic passion is one of the decisive emotions of the play. Here Gaunt centres himself, discloses the value from which his entire life’s service has depended. It is precisely this value one expects as the foremost badge of kingship, namely a complete identification with Realm, as we will see in Henry V. But here that identification is found, not in the monarch, but in the state’s most eminent trustee, and there is no doubting its sincerity:

 

This royal throne of kings, this sceptr’d isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi-paradise,

This fortress built by Nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war,

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea …

(II.i.40ff)

 

The second reaction we find in Bolingbroke, Gaunt’s son, who is observed (by a jealous Richard) to show a “humble and familiar courtesy” to the common people:

 

As were our England in reversion his,

And he our subjects’ next degree in hope.

(I.iv.35–36)

 

Certainly, when Bolingbroke meets Percy we note the usurping king’s knack of allowing another to know he values them:

 

And as my fortune ripens with thy love,

It shall be still thy true love’s recompense:

My heart this covenant makes, my hand thus seals it.

(II.iii.48–50)

 

Here, of course, Bolingbroke’s sincerity has the ambiguity of one already campaigning for office, again, this ambiguity noted by Richard himself in his cousin when, voyeur-like, he presses Aumerle for Bolingbroke’s emotions as he passes into exile. Let us recall, it will be Bolingbroke’s son, Hal, who will skewer Percy at Shrewsbury in the ensuing Plantagenet play.

Richard is called degenerate by Northumberland (II.i.262) though it is intriguing to pin down the pathos in which this degeneracy lives. His cajoling, his seizing upon advantage as with Gaunt’s estate, seem wrong-footed more than malevolent. His quizzing of Aumerle over Bolingbroke’s emotions suggests a man puzzled and intrigued by how others express love towards their homeland. This voyeurism is a shrewd piece of life-drawing on Shakespeare’s part in the depiction of insecurity. But it is Richard’s soliloquy in prison at Pomfret Castle that I single as my third reaction and the sharpest counterpart to Gaunt’s paean:

 

I have been studying how I might 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 it out:

My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul,

My soul the father, and these two beget

A generation of still-breeding thoughts;

And these same thoughts people this little world,

In humours like the people of this world.

(V.v.1–10)

 

This is the victim-king’s finest speech. It discloses an intellect as enabled by a fabulist imagining as it is disabled in its power to resolve practicalities.

 

Thus play I in one person many people,

And none contented.

(V.v.31–32)

 

The pretended life suits his nature and makes it entirely unsuitable for kingship because he cannot integrate that “many people” into a singular person that carries authority. He has the self-absorption of the child, fanciful, small in its compass but intense in its fancifulness. We have seen his distraction in how he gives more attention to the formalities of the joust than to the deadliness of the dispute between Bolingbroke and Mowbray. We have seen his callow prying in quizzing Aumerle on Bolingbroke’s emotions at the point of exile. And in the two first scenes of Act III, Bolingbroke before Bristol Castle, Richard before Barkloughly, Bolingbroke’s peremptory attendance to policy may be usefully contrasted with the king’s attendance to his own sensibility. Most pathetic is the collapse of spirit when he accepts defeat:

 

Let’s talk of worms and graves and epitaphs …

For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground

And tell sad stories of the death of kings:

… For you have but mistook me all this while:

I live with bread like you, feel want,

Taste grief, need friends—subjected thus,

How can you say to me, I am a king.

(III.ii.145ff)

 

It is worth recalling how, before Agincourt, Henry V gives voice to similar sentiments. “O hard condition”, this “model” king says, mediating the tension between his human vulnerability and the qualities required by his rank. But the crucial difference between his meditation and Richard’s here is that Henry’s is private to himself, and his fitness to be king lies in the knowledge that this agonising tension must be borne alone by all men who accept rank; his spirit does not quail before the burden, he needs no witness to the fact he bears it. By contrast, Richard must demonstrate his sensibility to an audience on the topic. One of his listeners, Carlisle, grasps the problem of morale immediately:

 

My lord, wise men ne’er sit and wail their woes,

But presently prevent the ways to wail.

To fear the foe, since fear oppresseth strength

Gives in your weakness strength unto your foe.

(III.ii.178–81)

 

The scene that follows at Flint Castle where Richard places himself in the usurper’s hands is a peculiar one indeed, and might well fascinate a modern animal behaviourist. Bolingbroke, the strong party, places himself in the obeisant posture before Richard, the weak party. Simultaneously Richard, the anointed power, places himself in the submissive posture before the strong party and, in their exchanges, Shakespeare follows finely the guardedness of Bolingbroke as he deals with effective, but unsolemnised authority, and the exhibitionist prostration of Richard as he asserts his formal but empty authority. So my tribute to the dramatist extends to how finely in the poetry he has comprehended the pathos in two very distinct psyches in an era of unstable state power. He offers grist for the animal behaviourist in the same breath he offers grist for historian and psychologist watching the very dynamic by which rigid protocols of authority are getting tested against natural challenge in a drama lifted closely from actual history.

Carlisle’s stalwart argument defending the cause of rightful kingship (IV.i.114ff) casts prophecies of insurrection and civil disorder that will prove accurate in the six plays for which Richard II is the opener. But Carlisle’s defence comes immediately after its champion, the reigning king, has ceded his throne to the usurper. It earns the old lord prompt arrest for treason by an authority incompetent to ordain this. Truly Shakespeare shows us the mischief of a constituted authority when it is upside down.

Then Richard himself is brought before Boling­broke at Westminster Hall for a public affirmation of his decision to abdicate office. His image of the crown as a “deep well / That owes two buckets” (IV.i.183–84) shows an intelligence poetically ingenious. It owns a resource of wit by which to feed his self-pity until, as it were, his self-pity is able to feed on itself. It is an intelligence most vibrant when it sounds the depths of his own misery, as though downfall were his natural place. With shrewd, affecting argument he draws our compassion for his plight, likening himself to Christ delivered up to the Cross, but he makes no hint he wants actual restitution of his office. He seeks to be affective that he might be seen to be affected. This is a very particularised victim. His defence of solemnised kingship does indeed have its effect, not in restoring him to rank, but in successfully planting an ill-morale that will possess his successor, Henry IV, throughout his reign, and also unnerve Henry’s successor, of whose princely japes we get a first glimpse in this play (V.iii.1ff). The deposed king’s gift lies in fomenting ill-morale.

 

When Gaunt farewells his son into exile he suggests to him he should “pretend” in order to make the absence more tolerable: “Think not the king did banish thee, / But thou the king” (I.iii.278–79). The son’s reply shows an intelligence impatient with the fanciful:

 

O who can hold a fire in his hand

By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?

… O no! The apprehension of the good

Gives but the greater feeling of the worse.

(I.iii.293ff)

 

Then, as events unfold, Bolingbroke returns, England polarises, Richard’s allies either desert him or lose their heads. Bolingbroke’s level appreciation of the real, his decisiveness, and our sense that policy is ever before his attention, whether overt or covert, place him unequivocally as the fitter king. But Richard, inescapably, is the anointed king and we are not allowed to dismiss his legitimacy in this. When Bolingbroke summarily beheads Bushy and Green at Bristol, he disturbs our natural sympathy for that fitness. To redeem his sequestered property was a fair pretext for his return from banishment, but to appropriate a judicial authority at Bristol (III.i.1ff) is to exercise a state power he does not have, being un-anointed.

We should be clear what this term “anointed” signifies because both Richard and Bolingbroke believe in it. A monarch has the powers of state formalised in his person by state ceremony, a procedure that stabilises them in a general recognition and thereby prevents judicial process from being arbitrary. At Bristol we witness the moment of usurpation. Both Bolingbroke and his son, Hal, know this to have been the case, and it will trouble them for the ensuing three plays, culminating in Hal’s prayer in Henry V that the usurpation not be used by fortune as a nemesis for his chances at Agincourt.

So this theme whereby an individual courts the pretended life as a fanciful overlay to make his dismal situation more bearable bears also upon the central issue of the play, namely the distinction between the anointed and the pretender, between the rightful and the fittest. Across his plays, Shakespeare scrutinises the idea of kingship as it touches ten different British kings. These include the five Plantagenet monarchs from Richard II to Richard III, as well as Lear, Cymbeline, Macbeth, John and Henry VIII from their respective dramas. In each, there is the tension between character as it arises among laity in the chance dramas of life, and character as it matches or does not match the special circumstances of rank at this kingly summit of the human order in The Chain of Being.

Richard II was first performed in 1595. At the time England’s Tudor queen was growing old and lacked a clear successor, so this play, and the histories composed at around the same time, suggest Shakespeare meditated acutely upon that adaptation of human character to the clinching office of sovereign. Like Richard III, Richard II is denominated a “tragedy”, and again like that play, we understand the tragic misfortune to belong to the Realm rather than the ruler. When England got Richard III as king, the Realm’s tragedy was to endure the man’s fascination with his own daemon. When England got Richard II the Realm’s tragedy was to secure in that office an intelligence distrait from any instinct for judgment or decision at a time when its powerful families were in unrest.

Can one detect a small element of didacticism in Richard II? I think so. The play abounds in premonition. Carlisle and Richard tell us of the disorder that will come to the Realm as a result of a subverted solemnised authority, and hard upon Bolingbroke’s coronation we witness this in the locked chamber at Windsor. Here a mother pleads with the new king to pardon her son’s intended treachery while the father pleads for his punishment. The new reign has commenced with plots of assassination implicating the Realm’s leading family very similar to that Richard confronted in the play’s first scene.

More treachery and insurrection will follow in the ensuing plays, their theme an unrest in how loyalty towards a ruler who is both rightful and naturalised to the job might be at ease with itself. It is clear England needed a change of monarch. But Richard has been foolish rather than vicious, and while his foolishness might merit being deposed, does it merit his physical extinction just because no satisfactory resolution of his rightfulness to the throne can be made while he lives? Thirty-three years after Shakespeare’s death, England did indeed behead its anointed king and lived in unease for a decade thereafter. Richard’s murder is vile. The new king deals summarily with the murderer, and is not to be ingratiated by the crime’s convenience. The play concludes, not with a prospect of peace, but with anguished conscience.

 

We read a Shakespeare play for its poetic power, which is to say the wholeness of Life that arises from its compass of personae and the situations that draw out their characters. Implicit in these characters in Richard II is the attitude to honour, whether that of personal reputation or blood-kindred. Bolingbroke, for instance, holds reputation as an abstract ideal, a value higher than the possession of life itself. He will risk mortal combat at Coventry to prove he tells no lies in his devotion to his monarch’s security, and the cancellation of the fight cheats this dearly cherished estimation of himself, nourishing the underpinning animosities of the play. Similarly the Duchess of Gloucester’s appeal to Gaunt to avenge her husband’s murder illumines this rigidity as it applies to blood-kindred:

 

Ah Gaunt, his blood was thine, that bed, that womb,

That metal, that self mold that fashioned thee,

Made him a man, and though thou livest and breathest,

Yet art thou slain in him; thou dost consent

In some large measure to thy father’s death,

In that thou see thy wretched brother die,

Who was the model of thy father’s life.

(I.ii.9ff)

 

The argument is shrewd; you lose presence, both for yourself and your paternity, for so long as you outlive an unavenged wrong done to your kin. Reputation and kinship allegiance serve to perpetuate difference rather than reconcile party. Richard II begins an epoch of cruel social schism, the Wars of the Roses, that Shakespeare will follow over five plays, and this further story is finely incipient in this play.

Cherished the ethos may be of personal and family reputation coming out of the medieval mind, but its rigidity meant that once you introduce questions of honour to a quarrel you make it impossible for either side to step back. Bolingbroke and the Duchess of York both needed a court to calmly weigh evidence. The effect on society therefore is that civil order can be so easily subverted when forces polarise on either side of a perceived breach of honour. So the sheer rigidity and clumsiness of dynastic change that Shakespeare depicts in Richard II might well have left its Elizabethan audience wondering whether a less fraught and more naturalised process for the continuity of state authority might be possible, particularly as their much-loved monarch aged with no successor.