Textual Dramaturgy: Representing the Limits of Theatre in "Richard II"

Author(s): Harry Berger, Jr.

Source: Theatre Journal, Vol. 39, No. 2 (May, 1987), pp. 135-155
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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Textual Dramaturgy: Representing the Limits

of Theatre in Richard II
Harry Berger, Jr.
I
For a long time the strange dramaturgy of Richard II puzzled or irritated those
commentators who took it seriously enough to be troubled by the effect of its
stylistic excesses and anomalies on the historical drama it stages. Some have worried
over the stiff parade of ceremonialism and verse, others over the passages of near
farce or bathos that jar the journey through the last two acts. But in 1974 and 1975
two essays appeared that in my opinion finally made sense of some of the play's
more perplexing features: Sheldon Zitner's study of the Aumerle conspiracy scenes
and Leonard Barkan's of the play's theatrical consistency.' The great value of these
essays derives in part from the fact that their interpretations of anomalous detail are
explicitly grounded in questions of dramaturgical theory that open up on basic
features of Shakespearean practice. No one who encounters their contributions to
Richard II, either to borrow or to disagree (or both), can fail to deal with those
questions, or to gain something from the encounter, because the questions are posed
in such a way as to suggest that a new reading of Richard II and the Henriad
implicates a new approach to what may be called textual dramaturgy-that is, to
indications of staging given by the Shakespeare text.2
Textual dramaturgy is an old topic, of course, and has received much attention
during the past two or three decades owing to the wave of stage-centered criticism

Harry Berger,Jr., Professorof English at the Universityof California, Santa Cruz, has written on Spenser,
Shakespeare,Plato, variousaspectsof modernculture,and thetheoryof culturechange.He is currentlyat workon a
three-volumestudy of the Henriad entitledHarrying: Skills of Offense in Shakespeare's "Henriad."

'Sheldon Zitner, "Aumerle'sConspiracy," Studies in English Language 14 (1974), 239-57; Leonard

Barkan, "The Theatrical Consistency of Richard II," Shakespeare Quarterly 29 (1978), 5-19. See also
Waldo F. McNeir, "The Comic Scenes in Richard II," Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 73 (1972), 815-22,
and Joan Hartwig, Shakespeare'sAnalogical Scene (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 113-34.
Some of the argument and material in the present essay overlaps that in my "ArsMoriendi in Progress, or
John of Gaunt and the Practice of Strategic Dying," forthcoming in The Yale Journal of Criticism.
2Two recent examples: Michael Goldman, Acting and Action in Shakespearean Tragedy (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1985), and Philip C. McGuire, Speechless Dialect: Shakespeare's Open Silences (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

135

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TI, May 1987

that arose partly in reaction to the excessive literariness of armchair Shakespeareans.

But I think the studies of Zitner and Barkan begin to give the topic a turn in a
different direction-not necessarily a direction they themselves are aiming at, but
one toward which I want to steer them by means of a critique that brings them into
line with my own reading of the play and the conspiracy scenes. In order to set up
this encounter I shall begin by giving a condensed account of the two primary
features of the reading that informs the critique: first, the portrait of Richard and the
profile of his relationship with Bolingbroke, and second, the profile of Bolingbroke's
relation with Gaunt. Since I have discussed the second elsewhere, I need say very
little about it here, and will confine most of my preliminary remarks to the Richard/
Bolingbroke profile.
II
The Richard portrayed by Shakespeare dramatizes the same complex mode of
cultural and institutional disenchantment - despair in a stronger term for it - that
Chaucer depicts in his Pardoner; the same interaction between the impulse to aggression against others and the impulse to aggression against oneself that Chaucer represented and Shakespeare would explore further in King Lear; a spiralling oscillation
between contempt for self and contempt for others. This interaction is inscribed in
Richard's rhetoric and politics. It patterns the course of his behavior and the trajectory of his career. It establishes the psychological framework within which his
successors in the Henriad are forced to operate. I agree with some recent commentators who argue that he is extremely effective, at least in theatrical terms, and that he
upstages Bolingbroke throughout the play.3 But I would claim in addition that he is
equally effective in political terms, given what I take to be his project; to get himself
deposed, pick out a likely "heir"to perform that service, reward him with the title of
usurper, and leave him with a discredited crown and the guilt of conscience for his
labor.
The first item in this schedule is announced early in the play by Gaunt: "[thou] art
possess't now to depose thyself" (II. i. 108). Several of the others are compressed in
Richard's wicked little game in IV. i, "Here, cousin, seize the crown" (181), where
"Here, cousin" offers a gift and dangles the bait, while "seize the crown" retracts the
offer, publishes the act as a usurpation, and transfers both blame and guilt along
with the crown to the usurper. The result is not only that Bolingbroke will lie uneasy
all his life but also that he will lie uneasily to himself and will remain unpersuaded,
as when he tries to attribute his insomnia to the political burden that accompanies
the possession of the crown rather than to the moral burden that accompanied its
acquisition: "Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown"; to read "wears"as a displacement that suppresses "stole"is to reorganize the figure circling about the main

3See, among others, Lois Potter, "The Antic Disposition of Richard II,"Shakespeare Survey 27 (1974),
33-41; Samuel Schoenbaum, "RichardII and the Realities of Power,"Shakespeare Survey 28 (1975), 1-13;
Miriam Gilbert, "Richard II at Stratford: Role-Playing as Metaphor," in Shakespeare: The Theatrical
Dimension, ed. Philip C. McGuire and David A. Samuelson (New York: AMS Press, 1979), 85-101.

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verb so as to scratch the political metonymy on its surface and betray the metonymy
of self-accusation it tries to conceal from its speaker.4
My view of the scenario embedded in Richard's language is encompassed in a
single line uttered during his ceremonial farewell to Bolingbroke before the two
combatants begin battle:5 "We will descend and fold him in our arms" (I. iii. 54).
This foreshadows the deposition scene but it is also a visual trope expressing Richard's latent project as it unfolds through the play, here condensed with the confines of a single ceremonial gesture. The rhythm accentuates the will to descend.
"Foldhim in our arms"is a kinesic hyperbole that mimes the desire coupling Richard
to Bolingbroke in their dance toward deposition and regicide, and toward the subsequent regime, when the embrace gradually becomes a stranglehold. This account of
their relationship develops an idea long ago suggested by Wilson and Tillyard, the
idea that although Bolingbroke "acts forcibly he appears to be borne upward by a
power beyond his volition," grows increasingly bewildered, "has no steady policy
and . . . is the servant of fortune."6But the power that bears him up, the power
whose servant he is, is not fortune; it is Richard. To be more precise, it is the vector
sum of the close collaboration between Richard and Bolingbroke as each, by his
acts, helps progressively to sharpen and define motives in the other that appear
initially to have been vague, hesitant, indecisive, or not fully articulated. Bolingbroke's words and actions in the early scenes do not reveal any clear plan. He
seems diffusely aggressive, ready for anything, but not certain as to what specific
course he will take. He jumps abruptly forward with imperious gestures-such as
his almost instant return from abroad with a large force even before his father's
death-then nervously backtracks into deferential postures. Richard's seizure of his
inheritance gives him an excuse after the fact; it partially justifies, if it does not
legitimize, his reason for being in England; more importantly, it gives him a middle
ground that allows him to continue vacillating between the two courses-regaining
Lancaster and gaining the throne - and thus temporarily to resist Richard's attempts
to make him cross the Rubicon. As A. R. Humphreys justly observes, "Richard's
despairing haste to yield power virtually thrust[s] the crown into Bolingbroke's
hands."7In doing this he also thrusts a curse into Bolingbroke's hands. The succession of kings in the Henriad is a genealogy of guilt which, seeded in Richard's own
self-division, transmits itself with increasing virulence. The virulence testifies to the
abiding power of the murdered king, a power seriously underestimated by the canonical view of Richard as a weak and politically inept ruler who, if he victimized
anyone, only victimized himself.
4This is the final line of Henry's insomnia soliloquy, his first speech in his first appearance in 2 Henry IV
(III. i. 31); his inability to soothe himself or manage his guilt becomes more obvious during the remainder
of the scene.
5This paragraph repeats some statements in my "Psychoanalyzing the Shakespeare Text: the First Three
Scenes of the Henriad," in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey
Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), 222.
6E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948), 260.
7 The Second Part
of King Henry IV, ed. A. R. Humphreys, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen,
1966), 93.

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TI, May 1987

In IV. i. York announces that Richard has adopted Bolingbroke as his heir and
"son,"and this folds a father/son motif into the relationship of succession. Most
critics would now agree with Richard Wheeler's opinion that the Henriad centers "on
royal inheritance complicated by patricidal motives in relations to actual and symbolic fathers." Wheeler goes on to observe that Richard "collaborates in his own
destruction,"and that his behavior seems "calculatedto bring on his overthrow . . .
and to bring punishment upon himself for his guilty actions." But he fails to draw
the connection between the second observation and the first: between the desire for
punishment and the problems attending the transmission of phallic power from
fathers to sons, especially in a psychic economy afflicted by a notable shortage of
mothers and by what I think is a related failure in paternal authority.
Bolingbroke's problem with his symbolic father, Richard, finds ample outlets of
expression in the Henriad, his relation to his son being one of them. On the other
hand, whatever problem he may have with his actual father finds no direct outlet of
expression. But this needn't mean that he does not have such a problem - i.e., that it
is not inscribed in the text of his and John of Gaunt's language. In my essay on this
subject I argued that Bolingbroke's language in I. i and I. iii resonates with the sense
of his father's double betrayal, first, Gaunt's refusal to avenge Gloucester's murder,
and second, his complying with Richard in the suspension of the judicial duel and
the sentence of exile. I concluded from my analysis of Gaunt's language that it
discloses "his fear of being contaminated by Bolingbroke's action; his reluctant
agreement to the sentence of exile in response to that fear; the desire to defeat the son
who challenges him; the guilt occasioned in him by the desire and by an agreement
[with Richard] that sacrifices his son's interest to his own; and the attempt to assuage
that guilt by blaming his party-verdict [I. iii. 234] on others, an attempt that could
only increase the corrosive power of self-despite" (p. 226).
This paternal relationship does not end with Gaunt's death since, before Richard
adopts Bolingbroke as his son, Bolingbroke casually "adopts"York as his father, and
York'srole in this surrogational parade is of considerable interest. It begins in II. iii
shortly before he collapses under the pressure imposed by Bolingbroke and his
allies, and accedes to the violation of exile. The collapse is anticipated in the nostalgic counterfactual conditional that echoes Gaunt's submission in I. i ("Tobe a makepeace shall become my age,"160) by pleading senility as the excuse for helplessness:
WereI but now the lord of such hot youth,
As when braveGaunt,thy father,and myself,
Rescuedthe BlackPrince,that young Mars of men,
Fromforth the ranksof many thousandFrench,
O then how quicklyshould this arm of mine,
Now prisonerto palsy, chastisethee,
And ministercorrectionto thy fault!
[98-104]
8RichardWheeler,Shakespeare's
Developmentand the ProblemComedies:Turnand Counter-Turn
(Berkeley:Universityof CaliforniaPress, 1981), 158-59. See also JamesWinny, The Player King:A
Histories(London:Chatto & Windus, 1968), 58-59 and 73-82, and David
Theme of Shakespeare's
Restorationsof the Father(New Brunswick:RutgersUniversityPress, 1983),
Sundelson,Shakespeare's
31ff.

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After another exchange, Bolingbroke co-opts him by choosing him to be Gaunt's

successor:
Youare my father,for methinksin you
I see old Gauntalive. O then my father,
Will you permitthat I shall stand condemn'd
A wandering vagabond ...

[?]

Youhave a son, Aumerle,my noble cousin;

Had you firstdied, and had he been thus trod down,
He should have found his uncle Gaunta father
To rouse his wrongs and chase them to the bay.
[116-27]

The lines beginning with "O then my father" are an exact statement of what Bolingbroke could or should have said to Gaunt but (so far as we know) sadly failed to
say. They describe Gaunt's role in the sentence of exile. This throws a strange light
on the utterance that follows: does the speaker imply that Gaunt would have been
quicker to "rouse"Aumerle's wrongs than those of his own son? Or that he collaborated with Richard as a hunter flushing out the "wrongs"committed by (rather than
against) Bolingbroke? If we don't imagine the speaker to imply these meanings, they
yet reside in his language. It would be more interesting to imagine that he doesn't
intend them but that they rise from the motivational forces inscribed in the speaker's
language and breach his utterance, edging it with a bitterness barely kept under
control.
It is thus when York is preparing the ground for his nonresistance that Bolingbroke sees "old Gaunt alive" in him, and in fact resurrects Gaunt in him by
soliciting his aid in recovering his rights to the duchy of Lancaster-his rights to the
inheritance Richard and Gaunt together denied him. This relationship is next focused at the precise moment in which the father/son conflict is being transferred to
the next generation. The Aumerle conspiracy episode in Act V sandwiches the
introduction of the Prodigal Son scenario on which Bolingbroke and Hal collaborate
for the better part of the next two plays. The birth of the new relationship is
attended on by the passing of the old, but that passage is announced and staged in
the strangely distorted form of a melodramatic discharge which renders it suspect. It
is this distortion to which the essays by Zitner and Barkan address themselves, and
for which the previous discussion has laid the groundwork.
III
The similarities between Gaunt and York are parodically insisted on in V. ii-iii
when York offers up his son to the newly crowned king partly to free himself from
any complicity in Bolingbroke's eyes. Aumerle's conspiracy gives York a chance to
show Henry that his own previous vacillation is behind him and his loyalty confirmed. That the ferocity of York'sreaction expresses a deep uneasiness is revealed
by his utterances at the beginning of V. ii: the speech conveying his lingering attachment to Richard ends with an echo of the religious justification of nonresistance

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TJ,May 1987

Gaunt had employed with the Duchess of Gloucester.9Aumerle may be doing what
Yorkmight have liked to do had he the will, means, and courage to do it, therefore it
is a tactical error for his wife to defend her son by asking York, "Ishe not like thee?
Is he not thine own?" (V. ii. 93-94), since that resemblance is precisely what York
wishes to exorcise.10
The York/Aumerle episode, which ends in doggerelized comedy, is a compressed
caricature, a skewed icon, of the Gaunt/Bolingbroke interaction. York screams for
his son's death, while Gaunt reluctantly consents to his son's banishment. Yet York's
melodramatic noise is crossed by Gaunt's reverberating silence, and the parodic
character of this restatement lends it a clarity that briefly brings to the surface the
theme of father/son conflict just at the moment in which it is about to pass and
burrow into Bolingbroke'srelation to Hal. The episode displaces and precipitates out
as parody the deeply embedded and repressed power conflict between Bolingbroke
and Gaunt. Before discussing the implications of this treatment of the episode, I
want to enumerate three of the features that should keep us from taking its melodrama at face value.
First, the episode is distinguished by the presence of the only mother in the
Henriad except for Lady Northumberland, who speaks four and a half lines in 2
Henry IV In a tetralogy one of whose major concerns is the relation between real or
surrogate fathers and sons, the absence of maternal women on stage, and the infrequent but interesting occurrences of figurative Mother in the language, deserve far
more attention than I can give them here." Suffice it to say that it is the presence of
the Duchess of York that allows the problem to be quickly brought to a head and
discharged in melodramatic parody. The Duchess wins the battle and apparently
saves her son, after which we hear no more about this father/son conflict. The York
family quarrel is an isolated episode with no narrative antecedents or consequences.
As such, it provides a conspicuously inadequate model of the way to dramatize such
a conflict. At the same time, it signals a decisive shift of dramatic weight from the
political to the domestic scene of conflict. Both Duchesses-Gloucester and Yorkassert the primacy of family loyalty and kinship claims over those of the wider
political group. Yet though both are treated sympathetically in thematic terms as
spokeswomen for the values of a passing order, in theatrical terms they fare less
well, since Shakespeare fades them out in gales of megaphonic self-indulgence, as if
to suggest that the kind of theatre best suited to that order-the theatre of Richard
III and the first tetralogy-is also a thing of the past.
9York'scomment to his wife that he must stand surety for his son (V. ii. 44-45) harks back to Gaunt's
responsibility for Bolingbroke's appearance in the first scene (I. i. 1-5).
"?Seethe astute observations by Norman Rabkin in Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New
York: The Free Press, 1967), 88.
"For interesting comments on mothers in Shakespeare see the following: Madelon Gohlke, "'I wooed
thee with my sword': Shakespeare'sTragic Paradigms,"in RepresentingShakespeare: New Psychoanalytic
Essays, ed. Murray Schwartz and Copp6lia Kahn (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980),
170-87; Janet Adelman, "Anger's My Meat': Feeding, Dependency, and Aggression in Coriolanus," Representing Shakespeare, 129-49; Madonne M. Miner, "'Neither mother, wife, nor England's queen': The
Roles of Women in Richard III," in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn
Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Neely (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 35-55; Coppelia Kahn,

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I said that the Duchess apparently saves her son because of a second peculiarity in
V. iii, which is that Bolingbroke conditionally pardons Aumerle before the Duke and
Duchess intervene: if the fault was intended but uncommitted, "how heinous e'er it
be, / To win thy after-love I pardon thee" (33-34). This is odd, because he had
arrested Aumerle in the gage-throwing scene, and because the expediency that motivates a pardon sight unseen is so ingenuously stated. At this moment in his young
and shaky regime, Bolingbroke could be expected to feel pressed both by the need to
cultivate allies and by concern for his safety. Hence it is understandable that he
pardons Aumerle and that, after reading about the conspiracy, he ignores or mistakes York'saccusation and pardons him again, for his father's sake (52-64). But it is
clear that he does not feel threatened by Aumerle, so that all the floor-pounding and
rafter-bending of "shrill-voic'dsuppliant[s]"is gratuitous. The onset of rhymed couplets at line 68 signifies a further lightening of tone as the petitioners lose themselves
in the rhetorical pleasures of point-scoring and turn-taking in the game of Debat.
The onset of Aumerle's mother at line 72 draws from Bolingbroke a good-humored
comment on maternal solicitude and an equally good-humored dismissal of her
boy's capacity for harm: "My dangerous cousin, let your mother in; / I know she's
come to pray for your foul sin" (79-80).
The few words Bolingbroke utters during the remainder of the praying session
betray an attitude which is the third and surely the most peculiar feature of the
scene. On three occasions separated by equal intervals of rhyming rant he begs his
aunt to stand up: "Rise up, good aunt" (90), "Good aunt, stand up" (109), "Good
aunt, stand up" (127). These repetitions generate a delicious array of multiple
choices. He is: amused, diverted, disdainful, embarrassed, patient, impatient, uncomfortable, comfortable, and all of the above. Since he has already made up his
mind, he practices balancing his two bodies by politely humoring the Yorks both as
their respectful nephew and as their gracious king. He finds himself the object of
fulsome ceremonial fuss in a melodrama which is nevertheless as familiar and reassuring as any spat that remains "All in the Family."Bolingbroke's presence thus puts
on stage a relatively detached observer who could be said to anticipate much of the
criticism commentators have leveled at this scene.
But something else is going on, and it lurks in the second word on my multiplechoice list: diverted. I think the scene is represented as diverting Bolingbroke from
other worries. The most obvious candidate is mentioned at the end of the scene and
separated from what precedes it by the return to unrhymed verse: the Oxford conspiracy. But there are two other candidates, both of which I find more interesting. I
shall only mention them now and defer discussion until after the more general
implications of the scene have been explored. The first is suggested by the words
with which he praises York for disclosing his son's treason (57-64): these words are
crossed by reminders of Bolingbroke's relation both to his father and to his son. The

Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 151-72
and passim; Peter Erickson, Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare'sDrama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), passim. For some brief but suggestive comments on the role of mothers in Richard II
see Sundelson, Restorations, 36-37.

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second is suggested by the one phrase that momentarily jolts the easy forward
march of couplets. It is the third of his four speech acts pardoning Aumerle: "I
pardon him, as God shall pardon me" (129): these words are crossed by a sharp
reminder of Bolingbroke's relation to Richard. Such reminders lead me to think that
the speaker of those words is represented as distracted by an episode that provides
temporary relief from more serious concerns, or, to put it the other way round,
distracted by those concerns from a scene to which he is only partly attentive. This
accounts for the strange tonal dissonance between the rhyming rant and Bolingbroke's brief punctuations or punctures. I think it also helps account for stylistic
anomalies that puzzled or dismayed commentators until the stimulating essays by
Zitner and Barkan showed us how to appreciate them.
Zitner explains the deflationary elements in those scenes as expressing Shakespeare's "disaffectionfrom the mode of historical tragedy,"his "deliberatesend-up of
the Elizabethanbig bow-wow style" and of "thevision of life as a historical pageant,"
and his reflexive critique of the "elevationand seriousness"of "RichardII as theater."12
Barkan shows how elements of farce, bathos, and "semi-comic dramaturgy"divert
us from the play's serious questions and deflate "the seriousness with which such
questions can be handled."He argues that the clustering of these elements in the last
two acts signifies the release of chaotic forces of passion or violence-forces suppressed by the ritualistic style of the early scenes and let loose when Henry's usurpation ushers in the "raucous and destructive" modern world to whose style he is
"personally unsympathetic" even though its "combination of comedy and bloodshed" dominates the plays and the regime to which he gives his name."3
The metatheatrical focus of Zitner's study and the metadramatic focus of Barkan's
converge on a common feature of Shakespeare's dramaturgy: using signals in the
theatrical code to interpret and criticize both its own conventions and those of the
dramatic code; serving up a particular view of the represented fiction by means of
presentational devices indicated in the text of the play. In similar-but not
identical-arguments both studies persuasively justify the way theatrical deflation
and deflection contribute to dramatic meaning. I want to take advantage of these
insights by giving them a different interpretive bounce in order to resituate them
within the field of psychopolitical tensions I have been exploring.'4 The message I
receive or elicit from both the ritualistic and the deflationary elements of Richard II
is that such questions as the latent conflict between Gaunt and Bolingbroke can't
find adequate expression within the scope of "historical tragedy,"which, as Zitner
makes clear, is a form of drama peculiarly suited to the theatre that caters to the
tastes of Elizabethan audiences (wherever and whenever they exist). Of course I
could not receive or elicit such a message if I did not first receive or elicit two other
messages: that the latent conflict is represented, and that it is represented as being
"Zitner, "Aumerle'sConspiracy;' 254, 256, 255, 257.
"3Barkan,"Theatrical Consistency,"17, 11, 18-19.
"Zitner's thesis-that Shakespeare is dramatizing his disaffection from the kind of play Richard II isstrikes me as insufficient to the strong reading he gives. One could argue that if Shakespeare troubled to
write in the mode for which he was disaffected in order to dramatize his disaffection, this must have been
a project he affected. But even this smacks of apology.

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unable to find adequate expression in a drama whose apparent themes lend themselves to "the huge public stylizations of historical tragedy" (p. 255) -theatrical
externalizations of drama which, aspiring to be larger than life, are smaller than life.
This means that my romance with the text has a different orientation from Zitner's
and Barkan's:I am lured not only by textual aspects that indicate how the drama is
to be staged but also by aspects that suggest what can't be directly staged, what must
somehow be indirectly communicated against the grain of staging. My reading of
those aspects produces, and is guided by, a further hypothesis, which is that the
inadequacy conveyed by the theatrical rhythm of the play - strongly marked ritualism followed by deflation and deflection-has a positive psychopolitical function:
the very limits of ritualized drama work both to repress latent conflicts or scenarios
and to enable their continuance by providing sanctioned media of displacement so
that they can be expressed and discharged in safely distorted form.15
One of the often-noted peculiarities of Richard II as dramatic fiction is the extent
to which the theatrical practices and effects that stage it are reproduced, represented,
in the theatricality of its major episodes and of the "Player King" who (we never
cease being told) "stage-manages"them. Students of Shakespeare's dramaturgy in
this play and others have shown that whether the theatrical effect is ceremonial or
deflationary it is produced by a persistent focus on the stage presence and materiality of signifiers-verbal as well as physical-that ordinarily point beyond themselves but stubbornly refuse to get out of the way. Gages, crowns, rhymed couplets,
boots, and genuflection all serve instrumental functions as conveyers of narrative
movement and symbolic meaning. When they are conspicuously foregrounded in a
way that makes them conspicuously irrelevant to those syntagmatic and metonymic
functions, then, to borrow Richard'spun, "conveyers"- thieves - "arethey all" (IV. i.
317). Bolingbroke's reign is inaugurated by a series of ceremonial misfires which,
whether accidental or mischievous, compromise the solemnity of state and contribute to the embarrassment of a king whose haplessness increases with his power.
Thus in IV. i the epidemic of gage-throwing builds to a thudding climax when
Aumerle runs out of gages and the news of Mowbray's death frustrates Bolingbroke's
attempts at closure.16 Richard begins his domination of the deposition scene by
subjecting Bolingbroke to a tug-of-war over the physical crown (Barkan, p. 15) and
ends it by staging his tantrum with the mirror. This is followed by the parting which

15Iadd the term "scenarios"because of my sense that the play's central conflict between Richard and
Bolingbroke is conducted by Richard at two levels. On the surface he submits to being deposed-some
say reluctantly, some passively, some in an actively self-destructive way-but a study of his language
reveals a different scenario informing this surface action: on the one hand he actively solicits deposition
from the beginning, chooses and seduces his usurper/heir, and leaves him with a discredited possession of
the crown; on the other hand, he manages to persuade Bolingbroke that he- Richard- was the hapless
victim of the deposition and he leaves Bolingbroke with the guilt of conscience for his labor. Thus what is
latent or repressed is not so much a conflict as a scenario, and one founded on Richard's self-contempt,
his desire for justice or punishment, his choosing his punisher and punishing him for his acquiescence in
that role.
"6Criticswho have responded to the comic effect of these scenes account for it in wildly varying ways.
Compare, for example, Barkan (pp. 17-19), Hartwig (pp. 132-33), McNeir (p. 817), and McGuire,
"Choreography and Language in Richard II," in McGuire and Samuelson (pp. 78-79).

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gives Richard and Isabel such sweet sorrow that they end it in a weird rhyming
contest of moans and groans"- a contest rendered all the more notable for a feature
that marks the portrayal of Isabel throughout the play: her silence about the actual
character of Richard's regime and his contribution to its downfall, a silence so
conspicuous as to seem wilfully to avoid what her sometimes tortured language
shows she understands too well.18After this odd "unmarriage"scene the York family
melodrama reaches one climax in the turmoil over York'sboots (V. ii) and another in
the frenzied battle of the bended knee (V. iii).
These effects indicate something more specific than the general release of chaotic
forces Barkan ascribes to them. They drive the wedge deeper between what goes on
in the psychopolitical drama and the theatricalized narrative that reduces the drama
to a parade of iconic stage spectacles. The gap is first opened up by the hyperritualism of the early scenes, that is, by the way the two opponents push recitative
redundancy and formulaic self-explanation to the point of parody. But if Bolingbroke and Mowbray expend inordinate energy in staging themselves-"mark
well what I do, mark how I do it, mark what I say it means"-this excess escapes
parody because it is justified by the general atmosphere of distrust and suspicion, as
if everyone knows that the ritual format is a misdirection, that the words, gestures,
and conventions of the ceremonial procedure serve to keep the lid on some "hidden
imposthume." The tense uneasiness conveyed by such care of ceremony so archly
preempts attention from "inward wars" to the "big bow-wow style" that we listen
with equal care for some clue to what is being withheld: do Richard, Gaunt,
Mowbray, and Bolingbroke have hidden agendas, are they all different agendas, are
they all equally aware of these agendas, etc.? Their suspiciousness becomes ours,
and our suspicions are increased rather than allayed when the "externalmanners,"
the "trappingsand the shows," of earlier episodes are recalled and travestied in the
last two acts.
This illustrates the general phenomenon discussed by James Siemon, in Shakespearean Iconoclasm, of "the conflict between iconic and iconoclastic impulses.""9
The iconic representation featured in the early scenes is itself obviously diversionary
and misleading, and the iconoclastic impulse is already active in Richard's mordantly mocking verse no less than in his tactic of interrupting rituals. The emphasis
on verbal and gestural signifiers, the insistent treatment of words as bodily blows,
bespeaks the effort to confine and discharge the action within the immediate range
of the visible agents, and to control its outcome within the approved channel of a
ritual pretense that seems to deceive no one. Exaggerating the circumstantial immediacy of embodiment and performance in this emblematic mode injects the staginess
of theatrical representation into the tissues of the represented drama. The effect is to
"On women as groaners, see Sundelson, Shakespeare'sRestorations, 36-37.
"See II. ii, III. iv, and V. i.
"gJamesSiemon, Shakespearean Iconoclasm (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 106. I
would place more accent on the icon as a theatrical trope and less on the term's general philosophical implications than Siemon does. My earlier studies of the conflict he discusses expressed it in terms of greenworld vs. second-world impulses, or pastoral vs. metapastoral impulses.

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make the "historical"characters seem engaged in calculated performances before

their onstage audience.
From this standpoint, I think Barkan'sthesis about the play's theatricality needs to
be supplemented by two premises that will carry it further into the fictional interior
lurking in the text. First, it is not only Shakespeare who deflects attention and his
audience whose attention is deflected; deflecting attention is a strategy practiced by
the characters on themselves and each other. Second, what is involved is not merely
suppression and deflection but repression and displacement. That is, the very inadequacy of ritual and deflationary elements makes them a suitable medium in which
characters may displace or discharge things that would hurt them more, to vary
Lear'sphrase. They have the effect of Lear'sstorm which, like the genuflection in V.
iii, at once "deflectsattention from the main concerns"(Barkan, p. 14) and represents
them in emblematic distortions. In Lafew's trenchant phrase, which I take as a
cardinal statement of Shakespearean dramaturgy, they help the characters and us
"make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves in seeming knowledge when we should
submit ourselves to an unknown fear"20-rather than, say, bury it as Gaunt and
Bolingbroke bury their conflict under ritual displacements, or as Richard buries his
fear deep in Bolingbroke's mind, or as Bolingbroke tries unsuccessfully to re-inter it
in his conflict with Hal, who, as Henry V, buries all those accumulated "inward
wars,' all that "swoln . . . other grief,"by redirecting "the stern tyrant War"outward
toward the French scapegoat.
To say that "without the Aumerle scenes, the full comic truth of the asininity of
the natural body and the asininity of pomp -implicit in the doctrine of the king's
two bodies-would have escaped the play" (Zitner, pp. 254-65) may be putting it a
little too strongly. It isn't the asininity of the body and pomp that is targeted but
their growing inadequacy to represent and displace the latent conflicts in external
manifestations. It may be true that "to show York'spalsy and age as comic, and the
Duchess's mother-love as ludicrous, and Bolingbroke's canny expediency as also ineffectual embarrassment"serves partly to mock "the illusion that man's existence in
history is faithfully rendered in the huge public stylizations of historical tragedy"or
tragical history (ibid.). But in my opinion that truth is contingent on two important
points obscured by Zitner's emphasis on York's "toothless fussiness" (p. 245), the
play's "harsh geriatric slapstick" (p. 248), and its "sometimes cruel insistence on the
awkward, farcical claims of the physical, 'the withness of the body'" (p. 254).21
The first is that if there is an emphasis on York's"age and physical enervation in
contrast with a querulous fluency,"that emphasis is York's;Zitner borrows the term
"palsy" from York himself, as his reference to "the palsied arm speech of II. iii"
suggests (p. 247). York represents- transitively - his age and weakness as Gaunt and
20All's Well That Ends Well, II. iii. 3-6. I have discussed this principle and some of the related issues
touched on below in "Sneak'sNoise, or, Rumor and Detextualization in 2 Henry IV,"Kenyon Review 6:4
(Fall 1984), 58-78, and in "Psychoanalyzing the Shakespeare Text', 213-14 and 226-29.
21Zitner borrows this phrase from a poem by Delmore Schwartz, but Schwartz must have borrowed it
from Alfred North Whitehead. See, for example, Process and Reality (New York: Social Science Book
Store, 1928) 99, 475-508.

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the Duchess of Gloucester do theirs. When "theold Duchess of Gloucester"mentions

"'good old York'in her first conversation with old Gaunt;"it is as "one of the triumvirate of an ineffectual dying generation" (ibid.). Zitner's argument is "ineffectual
because dying," but surely the alternative deserves consideration: "dying because
ineffectual; ineffectual, therefore dying'" When York says he has never bent "one
wrinkle on my sovereign's face" (II. i. 170) the image makes more vivid the longsuffering patience that Richard'sseizure of Lancasterhas just ended, and there are no
wrinkles in the powerful speech that follows. And when the Queen describes York as
having "signs of war about his aged neck" (II. ii. 74) it reflects her own foreboding
and precedes a performance in which his ineffectuality springs not from age but
from indecisiveness. The palsied arm speech, which uses age to excuse inaction,
elicits Bolingbroke's comparison of York to "Old Gaunt,' and York's subsequent
reason for remaining "asneuter"extends the impotence of his palsied arm to that of
his paltry armament: "my power is weak and all ill left" (II. iii. 152-58). That there
exists a clear alternative to York'schoice of impotence is dramatized in the play by
the speeches of the Bishop of Carlisle, whose age is never mentioned but whom I
would very much like to think of as wearing the makeup of a senior - if not senilecitizen. For age, like makeup, is an artifice of self-representation or selfconcealment.22Zitner is wrong to argue that the representation of age or illness (or
any other aspect of the "withness of the body") as a "natural"determinant, a motivational "cause,"is to be ascribed solely to the author of Shakespeare'stext and not to
its speakers. Those speakers do not have body, age, or illness unless or until they
need them, and when they put bodily states into play, they do so to mystify moral
effects as physical causes.23Senility is a trope of disguise and displacement, a form
of self-applied makeup.
The second point to be made against Zitner's argument is that York's use of
senility is affected by its being a ghostly echo of Gaunt's and a comment on it. "Tobe
a make-peace shall become my age"is Gaunt's third utterance and first appeal to the
trope in I. i, and "become"sits uneasily on a paronomastic powderkeg, "shall be
transformed into'"that tells us senility is the weakling's plea. Commenting on York's
forgetfulness at the beginning of V. ii, Zitner remarks that Shakespeare
observesthe slaveryof the personto the fleshlightlyin passing.Butit is a terriblehome
observationthat deflatesplumedtroopsand big wars. Besideit, Gaunt'sold age is only
2Cf. Ulysses's wonderfully taunting description of Nestor in Troilus and Cressida, I. iii. 61 and 65:
"thou, most reverend for thy stretch'd-out life," and "hatch'd in silver:' Nestor has just displayed his
blustery "bond of air,"and Ulysses notes that he is revered chiefly for the senescence he parades-the
heroic senility (or senile heroism) of a life stubbornly protracted, hyperextended, as by the rack. "Hatch'd
in silver": a painted figure, created by art or artful makeup; therefore, born old.
3InII. iv the Captain tells Salisbury that when his soldiers witnessed the (un)natural portents they took
them to signify Richard's death, and this caused them to flee. Salisbury, "with the eyes of heavy mind'"
translates this into fatalistic figures: "Isee thy glory like a shooting star / Fall to the base earth";"Thy sun
sets weeping." But since Richard's downfall and death are more the effect than the cause of the soldiers'
flight, their interpretation is a classic example of self-fulfilling prophecy. "The eyes of heavy mind"
disguise moral failure as, and transform it into, natural inevitability. Salisbury's figurative appropriation
betrays the mystificational character of the displacement process that permeates the Richard II community. Senility is one form of the process.

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the literary convention of the Pisgah Sight and its attendant rhetoric. York's set piece
ends with his resignation to whatever heaven offers (p. 246),

but in a few moments, when heaven offers Aumerle's conspiracy, he calls for his
boots and his horse with enough guilt-spurred vigor to suggest that he momentarily
forgets the literary convention of Nestor whose attendant makeup he had so sedulously applied earlier.4 The dismissal of Gaunt's "Pisgah Sight" is unwarranted, as I
hope I have shown, and tends to dull the rich chiaroscuro that gives the comedy of
the conspiracy scenes its illuminating force. Barkan observes of V. iii that "kneeling
is a highly charged symbolic issue in a play about definitions of royalty; and so, while
kneeling deflects attention from the main concerns, it also symbolizes them" (p.
14).25But it is also a highly charged issue in a play whose language and major action
continually suggest the tremor cordis of a conscience that desires or flinches from
forgiveness. Pardon is the subject of the scene, and Barkan'scomment applies to it as
well as to kneeling. The deflection receives its power from all that is implied and left
unsaid by Bolingbroke's "I pardon him, as God shall pardon me" (129).
To say that pardon is the subject of the scene is also to be able to appreciate,
thanks to Zitner and Barkan, the positive contribution the style of the episode
makes to the meaning of Richard II. Any conspectus of the motives of the Henriad's
three kings that follow on a close study of their language will reveal how central the
problematic of conscience and guilt management is to the tetralogy: the ambivalent
fear/desire to be punished, to be forgiven, to be judged, to get or to avoid what one
thinks one deserves. Bolingbroke's desire for pardon deepens until it becomes the
driving force of the motivational drama expressed by the political and paternal
scenarios that shape both the civil and the moral "inward wars" of the next two
plays. The complexity of this drama is bound to the complexity of the language that
nourishes it, cherishes it, displays its reticence to go on display, preserves it from the
ever-present threat of embodiment and reductive closure in the icons of chronicle
history plumped up by "huge public stylizations" in the theatre.
"Zitner'sfantasyof the palsiedYorkstrugglingwith his boots is gratuitousand misplacesthe emphasis
of the humor, which centerson the Duchess'sattemptto block the poor speechlessservantand her
commandto Aumerleto strikehim.
and Language,"
25SeeMcGuire,"Choreography
72-77, for an extendedanalysisof the kneeling/rising
pattern,whichhe associateswith othervisual and verbalemphaseson verticalityas iconicrenderingsof
the de casibustheme. McGuireattributes"thepotentialambiguityof such ceremonialgestures"to the
"dichotomybetween gesturesof submissionand the actualitiesof power"(p. 73), and contraststhis
of wordsand of actionswhichevery
dichotomyin the dramaticcommunityto the theatrical"integration
Forexample,"kneelingandrisingaugmentthe verbalpatternof
performanceof RichardII accomplishes."
scalesand bucketsin verticalmotion, thus 'marrying'the action which the audiencesee with the words
II succeedswhereits charactersfail"(p. 79).
they hear."By this integration,McGuireconcludes,"Richard
But this estheticjustificationin termsof unity too easily smooths away what Siemon would call the
iconoclasticeffect producedby overstatingthe symbolic gesture.McGuire'saccount of the "divorce"
betweenwordsand actionsfixeson Shakespeare's
representationof the failureof languageto clarifythe
past or establishthe truth(pp. 77-79), i.e., about Woodstock'smurder.Butwe learnabout this "failure"
of languageonly fromthe language- the meaningsandmotivesdiscerniblein the textof theplay-which
providesthe measureof the inadequacyof visual icons. From the standpointof textualdramaturgy,
McGuire'ssoft focus blurs the tensionaland to some extent antitheatrical"integration"
analyzedmore
sharplyby Zitnerand Barkan.

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The Aumerle pardon scene introduces a superficial thematic version of that drama
as a conspicuous misdirection, that is, it dramatizes the wrong way to deal with the
theme, the wrong way to express or represent something that badly wants to find its
way into expression but wants just as badly to avoid direct confrontation. For how
to stage the desire of forgiveness, or even to represent it to oneself, as in soliloquy (a
method Richard unsuccessfully tries)? Or what sort of desire of forgiveness would it
be that could be adequately staged or efficiently discharged within the confines of a
soliloquy or two? If words fly up, thoughts must remain below. The same is true of
flying swords, blessing hands, bending knees, and such esthetic fantasies as the one
Richard half-mockingly plays with, for "ahermitage,""analmsman's gown,' "apalmer's walking staff,' "a pair of carved saints" (III. iii. 148-152); a mordant comment,
perhaps, on the vacation from guilt others look for in trips to the Holy Land.
Whether Mowbray actually "Cast off his chains of bondage" (I. iii. 89) and purged
his soul "with works of war" against the infidels we shall never know. We have only
Carlisle's word for it (IV. i. 91-100), and he is an interested party. Yet, though
Carlisle makes it sound a little easy (giving up the soul to Christ in Venice)-or
possibly because it sounds a little easy -Bolingbroke is not unaffected by the pleasant prospect, and until the moment of his death he retains the idle fantasy of
venturing abroad in search of the spiritual peace that would vanish as soon as he got
there.
Bolingbroke's "as God shall pardon me" thus affords a glimpse of what the conspiracy scene conspicuously excludes and of the distance between his own problem
with forgiveness and the use of pardon as a political commodity by which the donor
forges alliances and the donee saves his skin. The amused contempt playing over his
reference to "'The Beggar and the King"'indifferently embraces the style of political
theatre he is trapped in, the moral poverty of the kind of pardon he is empowered to
give, and the irony of his receiving that power only by wounding himself with a
much deeper version of the need for pardon he can so quickly satisfy. If we listen to
the Duchess's last two comments with Bolingbroke's ears, the irony produced by the
scene's conspicuous exclusion takes on a wry resonance. After his fourth statement
of pardon, she replies, "A god on earth thou art" (134). The god's final speech is
another attempt-following the failures in IV. i-to couple political with theatrical
assertions of control. He concludes his instruction to York to mop up the Oxford
conspiracy with one rhymed couplet (signal of the desire for closure) and devotes
another to proclaiming the Duchess's suit Happily Ended; "Uncle farewell; and
cousin too, adieu: / Your mother well hath pray'd, and prove you true" (142-143).
But the Duchess foils the attempt by making it a triplet, and the line she adds is
charged with an echo of the desire for another kind of closure, the possibility of
redeeming grace, a grace beyond the earthly god's competence to bestow on another,
much less on himself, and a grace that is mocked, dissipated, by the facile courtliness both of its political meaning and of its easy rhyme: "Come, my old son, I pray
God make thee new" (144).26
"See Hartwig, Shakespeare'sAnalogical Scene, 122. Hartwig argues that the Duchess here "evokes a
resonant body of theological knowledge at the same time she creates a parody of it.' But I think it unlikely
that she creates the parody. Rather she is getting off a courtly flippancy that celebrates her triumph. The
parody is dramaturgically structured into the scene, as Zitner perceives, and it measures the distance

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This haunting, or taunting echo is freighted with the burden of Richard'slegacy to

Bolingbroke. For more than the latter will ever show he knows, Richard's stagey
representation of himself as the hapless victim of the wicked usurper had persuaded
Bolingbroke and others to place the entire weight of guilt along with the discredited
crown upon the usurper'shead.27Richard'sbehavior in Acts III and IV promoted two
very different kinds of danger: the external political danger of unending civil strife and
the internal danger of unending guilt, the ineradicable sense of moral reprehensibility
that can be dealt with only by displacing the inward war to more external and inadequate wars- paternal, physical, civil, foreign. "Cana weak empty vessel bear such a
huge full hogshead" of the "othergrief"that "swellswith silence in the tortur'd soul"?
The conspiracy scene represents the first danger and its inadequacy as "aweak empty
vessel," albeit one to which Bolingbroke has committed and confined his labors of displacement, knowing that every exercise of his power of royal pardon can only drive
him farther from his own hope of forgiveness.
"I pardon him as God shall pardon me" provides the peephole that refocuses the
conspiracy scene as an anamorphic distortion of "things [that] would hurt me more."
If Bolingbroke's words in the scene express amusement, contempt, puzzlement, and
a touch of embarrassed helplessness, if in this scene he draws closer to us as, at least
apparently, a detached and critical observer of the Yorks'style of behavior, it reinforces our sense of another dramatic dimension, another kind of theatre, which that
style excludes, and one of the many virtues of Zitner's essay is his emphasis on the
way the self-mockery of the scene anticipates the very different Falstaffian style of
the next two plays (pp. 255-56). It has been pointed out to me that the conspiracy
scenes are fast theatre and fast reading, which is to say that they display all the
conventional artifices dramatists use to engage audiences, to encourage the blood to
"course from the inwards to the parts' extreme,"to burn off those "foolish and dull
and crudy vapors" that prompt the pale interpreterto consider too curiously. 8These
scenes tempt us even to read them theatrically, to consume them as sack drama, and
they offer a false model of theatrical reading which could well reduce the rest of the
play to a sack drama about the folly and crimes of overmighty men on the stage of
royal history. That is a drama which-as Howard Felperin has so persuasively
shown-Shakespeare represents as the middle term yoking an "archaic"form of
theatre to the inadequate morality he associates "with an older and passing order of
things."'
between the political and theatrically congenial form of pardon, on the one hand, and the textually
grounded problematic of forgiveness on the other.
27I don't mean to imply that Bolingbroke is not a de facto usurper and regicide, only that the text of
Richard II inscribes those achievements in a network of motivations and complicities which is much more
complex and diffuse than he recognizes, and that he adopts the more simply damning view of his
behavior induced on him by Richard. If this makes Richard morally (or immorally) more agile than
Bolingbroke, it also suggests that the latter has a tender enough conscience to remain persuaded throughout his career in the Henriad that he lives in violation of his own moral sense. Compare, for example,
Bolingbroke's muffled expressions of guilt with Northumberland's quick discharge in V. i: "My guilt be on
my head, and there an end" (69).
2This idea was suggested by my student, Ms. Beth Pittenger.
29HowardFelperin, Shakespearean Representation: Mimesis and Modernity in Elizabethan Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 59.

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Though Falstaff'spraise of sack in 2 Henry IV (IV. iii. 88-112) is obviously not

meant as a serious explanation, neither is he simply mocking the praise as an
inversion of the message that sack makes one drunk, not valiant. Rather he is
targeting all such quasi-physical, -medical, and -technical rationalizations for resorting to placebos that enable people to go on doing what they may despise themselves
for doing.30Sack is a conspicuously inadequate and reductive displacement of what
it represents, namely, whatever it is that will make bad things good, turn fear into
courage, and redirect attention from inner griefs to outer grievances. Falstaff'semphasis is on a settled condition of inward fear and war that is externalized as aggression against others; courage is therefore defined as fear turned outward, as the flight
from "the inwards to the parts' extremes"that make the fear bearable. The praise of
sack is an amplification of Lafew's principle that helps explain the dramaturgical
meaning of what I have just referred to as sack drama. If we model our response to
the Aumerle scenes on this response to the praise of sack, the message conveyed by
the elements of farce is that some deep anxiety, some unknown fear of terror, is
being deflated to a theatrical trifle; a terror latent in the language of the text is
kinetically manifested in a theatrical mode that can't do it justice. The trifle has the
force of a condensation which is overdetermined by the dense intertwine of meanings that branch like a rhizome through the text. An operatic moment given a
Brechtian skew, the comic style of the second conspiracy scene (V. iii) has the effect
of raising placards over the episode - Father/Son Conflict in Progress supplemented
by Mother Pleading for Her Boy - and suggesting that we had better look elsewhere
for full details.
The "elsewhere"resides in the motivational impulses transmitted through the
branches from other moments of the play and complicating the sense of such words
as those Bolingbroke addresses to York when the latter discloses his son's treason:
O heinous, strong,and bold conspiracy!
O loyal fatherof a treacherousson!
Thou sheer,immaculateand silverfountain,
Fromwhencethis stream,throughmuddy passages,
Hath held his currentand defil'dhimself,
Thy overflowof good convertsto bad;
And thy abundantgoodnessshall excuse
This deadlyblot in thy transgressingson.
[57-64]
This speech is crossed by remote as well as proximate echoes. Most obviously,
Bolingbroke had just complained about his own son. But E. K. Chambers notes that
"O loyal father of a treacherous son" echoes Mowbray's address to Gaunt at I. i. 136
("Thehonorable father of my foe"),31and the pertinence of the observation lies in the

criticismin this soliloquyis initiallydirectedat PrinceJohnfor his teetotallingcoldblooded30Falstaff's

is an
ness, but as he shifts cold blood to a symbol of folly and cowardicefor which "inflammation"
antidote,the criticismis redirectedto Henryand himself.
31Citedin TheLifeand Deathof KingRichardthe Second,ed. MatthewW. Black,in A New Variorum
27 (Philadelphia:J. B. Lippincott,1955), 315.
Editionof Shakespeare

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fact that Mowbray is reminding Gaunt that he had confessed his attempted ambush
on Gaunt's life and begged his pardon for it.32

If pardon is on Bolingbroke's mind as it is in his words to York, one father/son

pair may stand in for the other. James Winny argues that Bolingbroke's terms fit
Gaunt better than York and proposes a reading that bears out his negative view of
Bolingbroke: he unconsciously supplies "adouble moral commentary upon himself,
by admiring the integrity of a confederate who shares his own dishonor, and by
lamenting the disgrace which a dissolute son has brought upon the noble reputation
But even on this reading, some of York'starnish rubs off on the noble
of his father."33
so
that
one could assume Bolingbroke to be diminishing Gaunt's aura by
reputation
him
as York. And the speech, so construed, offers different tonal
reconstituting
he
be expressing his father's view and criticizing himself, or he
could
possibilities:
could be bitterly mimicking this view and criticizing the father's criteria of loyalty
and treachery, criteria rendered problematic by the different ways in which he and
Richard have violated the norms of kingship.
There is no reason why both these possibilities can't be simultaneously entertained. Together they express the speaker's inward wars, and I find it easy to imagine
that he momentarily projects onto the inadequate figure of York his frustrated wish
for the strong father he lacks; his wish for the idea of a "sheer, immaculate, and
silver fountain" of a father who represents justice or the higher Law, and who will
reward and support or else challenge and punish his son; or pardon him. Another
commentator suggests that the "unnatural loyalty" expressed in York's response to
Bolingbroke (65-71) "reads like a perverted echo of Gaunt's speech in a similar
situation," his uneasy defense of his "party-verdict"at I. iii. 236-246.34 To anyone
listening with Bolingbroke's ears it may well seem that York is replaying Gaunt's
muffled betrayal of his son in a melodramatic key. "I pardon him, as God shall
pardon me" is vexed by these crossings. Bolingbroke sides with the son who did
what York feared to do when he - Aumerle- defended the former king and conspired against the usurper. At the same time, he sees his own likeness to Aumerle in

32Mowbray'sconfession to Gaunt is the sort of detail about which editors are careful to note that
Shakespeare was closely following Holinshed. It interposes another puzzling pocket of silence, adds
another motive to the darkness that already palls the play in thickest night. We learn that Mowbray is
making a career of failed ambushes: why? If the trespass against Gaunt vexed his soul, was he commanded to lay the ambush? And if so, by whom? Placing Gaunt and Gloucester in parallel positions
points a finger at Richard. Whatever the confession implies, it has the effect of dissociating the "honorable
father"and his Christian act of forgiveness from his rancorous son. Gaunt's Christian cheek-turning takes
on a different complexion when viewed through the eyes of the Duchess of Gloucester in I. ii. At any rate,
Mowbray's sympathetic epithets sound a soft note of accord with Gaunt; they may also occasion or hint
at strains of discord between the defendant's antagonist and the father who, in spite of his assumption of
ritually imposed neutrality, might be expected to support his son's cause. On Bolingbroke's side,
Mowbray's reference to the ambush makes it clear that if Bolingbroke felt any impulse to avenge his father
and family honor, he himself never adverts to it. Indeed, his rhetoric more than once betrays a different
impulse: what seems to bother him is not the attempt on Gaunt's life but Gaunt's acquiescence in
Gloucester's death and his continuing complicity with Richard.
33Winny,The Player King, 77.
"Newbolt, cited in Variorum, 315.

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the context of usurpation. But he also pardons him as a father whose own father
refused any similarly direct encounter, neither accusing nor forgiving, and who
perhaps hopes he will find it within himself to pardon his son.
I say "perhaps"because his remarks about Hal suggest that although he claims to
"see some sparks of better hope" he is already fashioning Hal's truancy into an
instrument of displacement that will prepare him to function simultaneously as a
scapegoat and as "unthrifty"Richard's surrogate: "If any plague hang over us, 'tis
he"; "he, young wanton, and effeminate boy, / Takes on the point of honor to
support / So dissolute a crew";"Asdissolute as desperate"(V. iii. 3, 10-12, 20).35The
first phrase is doubly charged. It echoes Gaunt's "suppose / Devouring pestilence
hangs in our air"(I. iii. 283-284) as if Bolingbroke, remembering and responding to
it, reminds his audience in passing that his son (i.e., not his usurpation) is the only
pendant plague. But in the next play these anxieties converge in the confused oscillation of his guilt and anger. He constructs Hal both as Richard redivivus and as
Richard's and God's revenge, "mark'd/ For the hot vengeance and the rod of
heaven, / To punish my mistreadings" (III. ii. 9-11).36
The unresolved question of Bolingbroke's relation to his father fuses with the
overresolved question of his relation to Richard who, as Bolingbroke learns from
York in IV. i, "with willing soul / Adopts thee heir" (108-109) and thus becomes
another father. The fusion is clearly felt in the final speech of Richard II. Though
Bolingbroke is speaking of the murdered king, the language with which he banishes
Exton remembers earlier moments:
With Cain go wanderthoroughshadesof night,
And nevershow thy head by day or night
Whichblood, like sacrificingAbel's, cries
Evenfrom the tonguelesscavernsof the earth
to me for justice. . .

[V. vi. 43-44]

[I. i. 104-106]

It remembers Mowbray's "Then thus I turn me from my country's light, / To dwell

in solemn shades of endless night" (I. iii. 176-177), and above all it remembers
Gaunt's anticipatory gesture toward the escape from complicity or guilt that death
affords:
My oil-driedlamp and time-bewastedlight
Shallbe extinctwith age and endlessnight,
My inch of taperwill be burntand done,
And blindfoldDeath not let me see my son.

[I. iii. 221-224]

35Afterobservingthat "HenrypardonsAumerle'streasonbecausehe alreadyfeels guilty for his own',

CoppeliaKahnnotesthat he "regardsHal as his punishmentlong beforehe explicitlyadmits . . . having
committedany crime"(Man'sEstate,70).
Dramatic
"See G. R. Hibbard'sexcellentcommentson this passagein The Makingof Shakespeare's
Poetry(Toronto:Universityof TorontoPress, 1981), 172.

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During the next two plays Henry projects his self-doubt on Hal, whose conscience
he tries to pack with guilt for being a bad son so that he can deal both with his own
guilt and with the power wielded by the true inheritor on whom he depends to
secure the legitimacy denied him so long as he lives. At the end of his life, responding to Hal's removal of the crown in a replay of his tug-of-war over the crown with
Richard ("Here, cousin, seize the crown"), his rhetoric swells with the pleasures of
self-pity and his ominous prediction of the fifth Harry's effect on England (2 Henry
IV, IV. v. 64ff.) recalls his father's dying denunciation of Richard. Gaunt's speech
evades his own passive complicity in the "shameful conquest" he deplores, while
Henry finds bitter consolation in anticipating a return to the state of Ricardian riot
that will make him and his "poor kingdom" look better by comparison (133-135). In
Richard II, Gaunt vainly wishes he can perform the magical office of scapegoat, and
Henry repeats this gesture in the final reconciliation scene. His self-pity is muted but
not absent from the words defining the sacrifice that will clear his son's possession of
the crown:
To thee it shalldescendwith betterquiet,
Betteropinion, betterconfirmation,
Forall the soil of the achievementgoes
With me into the earth. It seem'din me
But as an honor snatch'dwith boist'roushand,
[187-191]
and "boist'rous"carries us back to the opening speech of Richard II in which Richard
mentions Bolingbroke's "boist'rous late appeal." Not that Henry, who hadn't yet
come onstage, remembers those words, but that they remind us of the perspective he
critically glances at in his reference to sacrificing Abel.37"How I came by the crown,
O God forgive, / And grant it may with thee in true peace live" (218-219). The
music of this close is all the more moving when we view it in ironic retrospect and
see how Henry's relation to his son mirrors the relation to his father suggested in the
first act of Richard II-suggested but never made explicit, never openly articulated,
by either son or father.
As to Richard, his ultimate victory over Bolingbroke is won on the eve of the
battle of Agincourt when Henry V resurrects his spirit and utters his sharpest, most
explicit, indictment of his father. We learn for the first time that he has already taken
measures to expiate Bolingbroke's crime. But as Peter Erickson has shown, the tone
of the following prayer betrays the hopelessness of Harry's attempt to protect his
own "purity by confining the blame to Henry IV,"and it conveys "anoblique admission that his own royal power as well as his father's may be contaminated."38The
37Gloucester's
blood,
like sacrificing Abel's, cries
Even from the tongueless caverns of the earth
To me for justice and rough chastisement;
And, by the glorious worth of my descent,
This arm shall do it, or this life be spent.

See my discussion in "Psychoanalyzing the Shakespeare Text,"216ff.

38Erickson,Patriarchal Structures, 51.

[I. i. 104-108]

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oddest thing of all in the prayer is the faint and distorted echo of the motif that
embarrassed Bolingbroke in the second conspiracy scene, "The Beggar and the
King";
O not to-day, think not upon the fault
My father made in compassing the crown!
I Richard's body have interred new,
And on it have bestow'd more contrite tears
Than from it issued forced drops of blood.
Five hundred poor I have in yearly pay,
Who twice a day their wither'd hands hold up
Toward heaven, to pardon blood:
And I have built two chantries,
Where the sad and solemn priests sing still
For Richard's soul. More will I do;
Though all I can do is nothing worth,
Since that my penitence comes after all,
Imploring pardon.39
Harry's attempt at religious insurance is noteworthy not only because he seeks to
make sacramental puissance by piecing out his imperfections into a thousand prayers a day but also because of the personnel he had recruited. Clearing the streets of
five hundred members of the underclass and giving them decent employment is an
administrative expedient of which he may be justifiably proud. And it will increase
the national tone of piety: instead of begging for alms they will beg for pardon;
instead of begging for themselves they will beg for another; instead of begging for
the body, they will beg for the soul. The York family prayer meeting is as nothing
compared to this institutionalized extravaganza. The beggars' "wither'd hands" attest
to their long experience of the ars mendicandi, though if that detail suggests undernourishment as well as age it may detract a little from confidence in their expertise.
Harry's scheme is vulnerable to a certain symbolic contamination because his criterion of the ability to beg for pardon is the ability to beg for money or food, and the
equivalence may suggest one reason why all he can do - or have the beggars do on
his behalf-"is nothing worth."
The background of this effort at ritual atonement suggests what may be at stake.
From the beginning of Act IV the rhetoric had been permeated by images of resurrection and the Day of Judgment, and by barely muffled allusions to damnation and
salvation.40 Thus after Bates argues that if "his cause be wrong, our obedience to the
king wipes the crime of it out of us," Williams adds that "if the cause be not good,
the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make; when all those legs and arms and
heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day . .. it will be a
black matter for the king that led them to it" (IV. i. 133-148). Harry's defense of the
king is strangely breached by the analogy of king to father, for although he refers to
himself, the analogy brings into play his relation to Henry IV:
39IV.i. 299ff. I have shifted from the Arden to the Folio lineation at lines 306-309 because the Folio linebreaks give stronger accents to Harry's emphasis on his effort at ritual atonement - compare, for example,
the difference made by the hypometric "Though all I can do is nothing worth."
40See,for example, Ch. 1-3, 25-29, 31; i. 9-12, 20-23, 135ff.; iii. 58-59, 82-88, 95-103.

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So, if a son that is by his father sent about merchandise do sinfully miscarry upon the
sea, the imputation of his wickedness, by your rule, should be imposed upon his father
that sent him . . . But this is not so: the king is not bound to answer the particular
endings of his soldiers, the father of his son.
[150-161]
The subsequent reference to those who make "the wars their bulwark, that have
before gored the gentle bosom of peace with pillage and robbery" (169-171) recalls
Harry's tavern capers and thus sharpens the distortion produced by the father/son
analogue. For Harry's intended self-defense against the soldiers' "imputation"
thereby admits into its recesses a latent defense of Bolingbroke against his own
imputation of the latter's wickedi :ss. It is as if he has to remind himself that although he is carrying out his father's order to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels, the guilt and the responsibility are his, not Bolingbroke's. And to remind
himself of that is of course to adopt the father's perspective, as indeed he does when
in places replicates- Bolingbroke's insomnia
his speech on ceremony echoes-and
2
in
IV
He
manages to fight off that perspective, to clear himself
Henry
soliloquy
and displace the imputation of wickedness, when he speaks of "the fault / My father
made."
These, then, are the pressures of self-division that penetrate his prayer. The effect
is to bathe the ingenuous fervor of his desire for decontamination in a mordant
shadow. The effect is not unappealing in itself, since he is trying to persuade God
and himself together that he has done all he could do, and that if it is worth nothing,
the fault is not his. Yet the participial construction of the final short line, "Imploring
pardon," floats dangerously free of its appositional dependence on "my penitence'"
and takes on a continuous-present force. Is it pardon for his father that he implores?
For himself? The speech as a whole insists that pardon is not in his gift, that only
God can grant it. This is a perfectly legitimate Catholic response, and it is no doubt
a conventional expression of pious atonement to establish chantries for the sake of
Richard's soul. What is less appealing, what is very sad, is the omission that the
preceding argument covers and rationalizes. The priests sing only for Richard's soul.
They might also have sung for Bolingbroke's. To claim that what he does is nothing
worth is to reaccuse Bolingbroke and deny the gesture of atonement he might have
made. For there is a kind of pardon that lies within the human gift, a pardon that is
private as well as political, a pardon that springs from one's awareness of one's own
need of pardon, a pardon the bestowal of which might make it less terrifying for the
one who pardons to confront himself and implore pardon for himself, a pardon
Harry fails to say: "I pardon him, as God shall pardon me."