Wednesday, April 15, 2020

"A woeful pageant have we here beheld." (On "Richard II")

I read "Richard II" in college, but to be honest, I didn't remember a thing about it, even once I re-read my notes in the margins. I'm glad that was the case, because it felt like coming into this play as a blank canvas for me, which was pretty perfect, because I darn well loved it.

There's a metaphor in the play that sums up the plot pretty succinctly: Richard describes how the kingship is like two buckets in a well; as one rises, the other falls, and the play mirrors that device. But it's not just Bolingbroke's kingship that rises: as he ascends, so does our respect for Richard.
"Give me the crown. Here, cousin, seize the crown;
Here cousin:
On this side my hand, and on that side yours.
Now is this golden crown like a deep well
That owes two buckets, filling one another,
The emptier ever dancing in the air,
The other down, unseen and full of water:
That bucket down and full of tears am I,
Drinking my griefs, whilst you mount up on high." (IV.i.)
Reading the plays in as close to a chronological order as we can figure, it's possible to watch as Shakespeare's playwriting skills develop. In "Richard II," there is a vast leap forward in the portrayal of what feels like real humanity in the plays. The intro in my Riverside Shakespeare describes how the previous plays' characters are not really developed people in their own right, but still somewhat allegorical, and I was prepared to argue that point until after I'd read "Richard II."

At the start of the play, Richard is the typical ineffectual king bent on personal pleasure and obeisances from his court. Out of jealousy and pettiness, however, he makes a fatal mistake: upon the death of his uncle, John of Gaunt, Richard seizes John's assets and thereby the inheritance of his first cousin, Henry Bolingbroke.

But here is the great paradox of the piece: Richard's kingship is based on divine right, and the belief that God has placed him and the nobility in their positions, that "Not all the water in the rough rude sea / Can wash the balm off from an anointed king" (III.ii.) But if the nobility and monarchy are granted their positions by God, then how can Richard remove the inheritance of Bolingbroke? How omnipotent is the king? Can he upend God's order? And if he can, then why can't another man?

In the end, much like Anne Boleyn seals her own fate by upending queenship and marriage laws just a little over 100 years later, Richard's downfall is caused by his own hand. In denying Bolingbroke's divine right, he denies his own sacred right to kingship, and Bolingbroke takes first his land and then his crown, and then his life.

Which brings me to Richard's humanity. As his kingship, and the royal rights and privileges afford to him by it, slip away from him, his human side comes more and more to the front. The scene in which he hands his crown - literally - to Bolingbroke brought me quite truthfully to tears, sitting at my dinner table, trying to keep the big, fat, wet drops from gumming up my precious Riverside.

The scene is, at its core, about the loss of identity. Richard was born to be king, and his kingship has taken up his entire self. Without it, who is he? When Northumberland addresses him as "My lord - ," Richard interrupts him:
"No lord of thine, thou haught insulting man,
Nor no man's lord; I have no name, no title,
No, not that name was given me at the font,
But 'tis usurp'd: alack the heavy day,
That I have worn so many winters out,
And know not now what name to call myself!" (IV.i.)
He has lost his very self, and next calls for a mirror to check to see if he is indeed still himself, and not completely altered on the outside, as he feels himself to be on the inside. When he sees his outward face to be the same as it ever was, he smashes the mirror. And when Bolingbroke disdains to minimize his grief, claiming it is only a shadow, Richard speaks with the kind of sarcasm and bite we all might wish for when someone gaslights us:
"The shadow of my sorrow! Ha! Let's see:
'Tis very true, my grief lies all within;
And these external manners of laments
Are merely shadows to the unseen grief
That swells with silence in the tortured soul;
There lies the substance: and I thank thee, king,
For thy great bounty, that not only givest
Me cause to wail but teachest me the way
How to lament the cause." (IV.i.)
Richard's lament in IV.i. is the cry of a man whose entire identity has been wiped away - is he the shadow himself now? Who are we, when all of the structures that have held us up are stripped away? Without his kingship, is Richard no one? Without the identities we have built for ourselves, are we still... someone? What if all of the things we have believed in - the divine right of kings, the honesty or power of our leadership, faith in an institution - is stripped away? How do we find meaning without it?

I don't have answers. But Shakespeare's depiction of a man grieving his identity and previous life brought me to tears in a way none of his other plays had yet done, just with the power of the words on the page. I know what it's like to struggle to find your identity after much of it is swept away, so perhaps that explains my reaction. Regardless, if you haven't yet read "Richard II" or seen a production, do so, when you can. It's a gem.

Robert Sean Leonard in the title role, San Diego’s Old Globe, July 2017.

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