Transcript The Tragedy of Richard II - University of California

The Tragedy of Richard II
Third lecture
“Prolepsis”: Flash forward to Henry
IV, part 1
• II, 3: Northumberland’s son, Harry Percy
• “Hotspur” Henry IV, 1
• Percy: “I tender you my service . . .” (l.
41ff)
• Bolingbroke: “as my fortune ripens with thy
love . . .”
• All ironic!
The play’s manipulation of our
sympathies
• First two acts complicate our sympathies.
• Our political sense of Richard’s liabilities.
• Our sympathies with Gaunt, his
complexities.
• With Bolingbroke.
• York as an index of the complexities of
audience sympathy: II, 2, 109ff.
• York in II, 3: ll. 88ff.
The turn in Act III
• Bolingbroke executes Bushy, Green, “the
caterpillars of the commonwealth”
• Their defiance of Bolingbroke.
• Richard’s return: our reaction to this?
• His vacillation, III, 2, 76ff
• R’s isolation.
• “Of comfort no man speak . . .”
Clip from BBC Richard II: Derek
Jacobi as Richard
• Richard’s separation of himself from
kingship.
• Separation of theoretical “two bodies.”
• A new self-understanding?
• Or weakness and susceptibility to
suggestion?
Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the boson of the earth.
Let’s choose executors and talk of wills.
And yet not so – for what can we bequeath
Save our deposed bodies to the ground?
Our lands, our lives, and all are Bolingbroke’s,
And nothing can we call our own but death
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover for our bones.
For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings!
How some have been deposed, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping
killed –
All murdered; for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps death his course; and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp;
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be feared, and kill with looks;
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life
Were brass impregnable; and humored thus,
Comes at the last, and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence. Throw away respect,
Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty;
For you have mistook me all this while.
I live with bread like you, feel want, taste grief,
Need friends. Subjected thus,
How can you say I am a king?
Richard’s despair and its
performance
• At the end of the scene Richard insists on his
despair.
• Does this realization produce a sense of
kingship as role?
• Bolingbroke’s appreciation of Richard’s
appearance as a king . . . (III, 3, 62ff)
• . . . Seconded by York.
• Richard’s critique of Northumberland’s failure to
act his part.
• And his truth-speaking about the consequences
of deposition.
Richard’s ability to imagine his role
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“What must the king do now?” III, 3, 142.
He can change roles.
Change costumes.
Change props.
Change the very play? (ll. 161-165).
Switches other people’s roles:
Northumberland’s, Bolingbroke’s, his own.
• Addresses Bolingbroke’s new role, l. 190ff.
Richard’s management of the
deposition scene
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I hardly know my new role.
“God save the king.” A trick?
“Here cousin, seize the crown.”
His allegory.
His eloquence.
His rounding on Northumberland.
His insistence on a Christ-like role.
The mirror
• Richard’s prop to read out his message to
the court.
• Am I the same man?
• Or does this flatter me – like this court?!
• Did this face have power?
• And did it “countenance” folly?
• Look how brittle faces (selves?) are!
• Trumps Bolingbroke’s attempt to moralize.
Richard’s discovery of interiority
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Prison as world/ interior of mind as world.
The contradictions of interiority.
“Thus play I in one person many people.”
A king, a beggar, a king, then unkinged.
Then “nothing”.
“Nor I, nor any man that man is,/ With nothing
shall be pleased [satisfied] till he be eased/ With
being nothing.”
• “I wasted time, and now time doth waste me.”
Richard’s final kingly, manly
defense of himself
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Exton: “As full of valor as of royal blood.”
“This dead king to the living king I’ll bear.”
“Richard of Bordeaux”
If Exton is Cain, Richard is Abel, the just
brother.
• And Henry?
• “I’ll make a voyage to the Holy Land/ To
wash this blood from off my guilty hand.”
• But he never does.