The Soul and the Kingdom: Shakespeare’s Richard II

Robert Thornett
May 4, 2006
Introduction

Shakespeare’s Richard II is in large part a portrait of an English king whose

divided soul leads to division within the kingdom. As King Richard’s division leads to

his destruction, this paper contributes to his autopsy, as it were. Yet, while Richard does

not survive this tragedy, the kingdom does; hence, it is essential to note that this, the first

of four plays in the Henriad tetralogy, sets the stage for the events of several plays to

come. Thus, insofar as this paper contributes to a diagnosis of England’s ailments under

Richard, it hopes to gain understanding as to what must be righted by succeeding kings in

succeeding plays.

The Effect of Grief on Philosophy

Early in Richard II, Shakespeare directs our attention to the relation between grief

and the ability to make distinctions in the right place, the task of the philosopher. The

queen, whose lines are few but incisive, expresses a sense of profound grief to Bushy at

the moment her husband Richard is leaving to go to war in Ireland. Responds Bushy:

Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows, / Which shows like grief itself, but is not so;
For sorrow's eye, glazed with blinding tears, / Divides one thing entire to many objects;
Like perspectives, which rightly gazed upon / Show nothing but confusion, eyed awry
Distinguish form: so your sweet majesty, /Looking awry upon your lord's departure,
Find shapes of grief, more than himself, to wail; / Which, look'd on as it is, is nought but shadows
Of what it is not. Then, thrice-gracious queen, / More than your lord's departure weep not: more's not seen;
Or if it be, 'tis with false sorrow's eye, /Which for things true weeps things imaginary.1

Here, Bushy warns of grief’s propensity to delude. Tearful eyes act as a prism

which skews a real object of grief into a multiplicity of non-existent “shadow-griefs,” as

it were. As darkened vision conceals the distinction between real and shadow, these

shadow-griefs—really “nothing but confusion”—appear worthy objects of lamentation.

While the illusioned mind gains a measure of analytical clarity as it can now

1
II.2 13

2
“distinguish” more “shapes of grief,” it does so at the expense of philosophical clarity,

the perception of truth. Grieving over nothing, Bushy implies, will be the soul’s plight

until it seeks the truth, or, put differently, confronts the real sorrow and stops looking at

shadows, which are, literally, no thing.

Why would the grieving mind lament new, false objects of grief? Shakespeare’s

metaphor blames the natural effect of tears, but in terms of the soul perhaps it is that one

cannot or will not face the real sorrow. When a true sorrow appears only blurry and

misunderstood, the confused mind may find it comforting to turn away and behold more

clarity and distinctness somewhere among the many shadows of that sorrow that it may

imagine. A well-distinguished “shape of grief” may provide a readier subject for the

attachment of meaning than a true one. Though that meaning be false, a soul handling an

excess of grief and a defect of meaning may, in this, find comfort enough to linger among

shadows.

Bushy’s counsel offers a truer source of comfort. His suggestion that the queen

dispense with lamenting illusions implies that the grieving mind’s tendency to stray into

falsehood can be averted. If Bushy is right, shadow-sorrows are “traceable” back to a real

sorrow, which can be sought by philosophy, which seeks truth.2 If the true grief is not

confronted, much less resolved, there seems no alternative but that griefs will multiply.

This message proves to foreshadow Richard’s plight: turning away from true griefs, as

2
This point, mysteriously, is no comfort to the queen, who insists that the source of her sorrow is not to be
found: “Some unborn sorrow, ripe in fortune's womb, / Is coming towards me, and my inward soul
With nothing trembles: at some thing it grieves, / More than with parting from my lord the king….
But what [the source of grief] is, that is not yet known; what / I cannot name; 'tis nameless woe, I wot.”
Here, the queen insists to Bushy that her sorrow’s is not mere illusion but derived from a sense of
misfortune to come. Her intution turns out to be right.

3
will be examined below, by the end of the play the king can see nothing but an “all-hating

world.”3

England’s Real Griefs

Surely by no accident, Bushy’s warning of the danger of turning away from real

grief directly follows the scene in which Richard seems to turn away from the real griefs

England now suffers. In that scene, a host of nobles voice their perspectives, forming a

rough sketch of the plight of the kingdom. Just before his death, Sir John of Gaunt,

lambastes the king for having led England in a “shameful conquest of itself,”4 such that

now the nation is “leased out—I die pronouncing it—like to a tenement or pelting farm.”5

Lord Ross later tells his fellow nobles that Richard has sucked the realm’s funds dry, top

to bottom:

“The commons hath he pilled out in grievous (my emphasis) taxes,

And quite lost their hearts. The nobles hath he fined
For ancient quarrels, and quite lost their hearts (my emphasis).”6

Shakespeare does not allow his characters to go into detail as to how the money

was spent, but clearly it was wasted needlessly. Gaunt scolds Richard for having

“drunkenly caroused” surrounded by “a thousand flatterers” until the royal funds

completely dried up. Lord Northumberland describes the king as having been dissolute

and over-compromising, having “basely yielded” to the nobility. But the point here is not

accounting, but rather to establish England’s true grief: it is “broke” in two ways. First, it

is financially broke. Perhaps more importantly, the realm is heartbroken, as it were;

through taxes, fines, and wastefulness the king has “lost the hearts” of both the nobles

3
V.5 68
4
II.1 70
5
II.1 65
6
II.1 255

4
and the commons. It should be noted here that mending this schism of hearts between

king and subject is, in fact, the task throughout the entire Henriad tetralogy, and is only

begun in Richard II. Starting here in the depths with a heartbroken and grieving kingdom,

only with England’s victory over France in Henry V does it finally reach the heights of

united celebration.

Turning Toward Shadow-Griefs

While the consensus among the nobles is that England’s domestic decay is

unequivocally urgent and obvious, Richard seems to be the only man who is not paying

attention. To Gaunt’s litany of pointed accusations, the king’s only defense amounts to a

reprimand that he is out of line to speak to him so. In fact, when Gaunt dies moments

later, the king immediately declares that he will—illegally—seize the nobleman’s estate,

proving himself to be just the “Landlord of England”7 that Gaunt had called him

moments before. The upright Duke of York vehemently counsels the king that in flouting

the laws of inheritance he undermines the very principle of hereditary possession by

which he possesses the crown. A multiplicity of new griefs, says York, are sure to ensue:

“You pluck a thousand dangers on your head,

You lose a thousand well-disposed hearts (my emphasis).”8

Whereas Bushy warned the queen that ignoring griefs causes them to multiply in

the soul, York here warns that ignoring legal transgressions causes political griefs to

multiply. The principle is the essentially the same both for men’s souls and for the soul of

the kingdom. Richard simply turns a deaf ear to York this wise counsel: “Think what you

will, we seize into our hands / his plate, his goods, his money, and his lands.”9

7
II.1 118
8
II.1. 210
9
II.1. 220

5
Simultaneously, he turns away from the real griefs of England, as he announces that the

profits from the seizure will be used to finance wars in Ireland. Seizing and spending

more of England’s money, moreover on foreign matters, makes the timing of these wars

doubly absurd. This point is not lost on Lord Ross, who notes that “[The king] hath not

money for these Irish wars…. [he has] grown bankrupt like a broken man.”10 By the end

of the play, both Bushy’s and York’s advice proves correct, as Richard’s transgression

gives Henry Bolingbroke, Gaunt’s son and rightful heir, a legal cause for rebellion and

leads to imprisonment and murder for the king.

Precluded from Philosophy

It is not for lack of intelligence or lack of information that Richard ignores

Gaunt’s litany of England’s griefs or York’s counsel of restraint. In fact, Richard is the

most quick-witted and eloquent character in the play. Moreover, he is not simply

oblivious to the effects of his “mismanagement”: at his deposition he publicly admits to

his “weaved-up follies,”11 and in his final soliloquy in prison he privately admits “I

wasted time; now time doth waste me.”12 The question, then, remains as to why Richard

cannot or does not confront and pro-actively try to repair the damage he has caused. A

full answer may, in fact, be beyond the scope of the information in the play. But toward a

general explanation, I mean to suggest that what Richard lacks as a political leader is not

political shrewdness but political philosophy. Consider that whenever his authority is

challenged or effaced in public, his response essentially returns to one principle, of which

the following is only one iteration:

Not all the water in the rough rude sea / Can wash the balm off from an anointed king.
10
II.1 270
11
IV.1 240
12
V.5 50

6
 The breath of worldly men cannot depose / The deputy elected by the Lord.13

Here, Richard assumes his divine, untouchable right to rule, and from this there

can be no other conclusion than that the king always ought to be honored. Philosophy,

however, is precluded by starting from such an assumption, as it leads directly to

conclusions and bypasses the search for truth. Philosophy moves from assumptions

upward toward truth, or first principles; only having first sought such principles does it

then descend back down and, where possible, make conclusions. In bypassing this

endeavor, as he does time and again by invoking his divine right to rule, the king leaves

himself no room to examine the underpinnings of his own legitimacy. He seems to have

gotten by up until this point by regurgitating the handed-down notion of the divine right

of kings. Yet, philosophy cannot be handed-down; each person must look on truth for

himself.

In the king’s rhetorical defenses, Shakespeare illustrates the absurdity that can

ensue when, bereft of philosophy, handed-down assumptions are all one has to wield.

Consider, for example, the king’s words when Lord Northumberland and the rebels

present him with a list of “accusations and grievous crimes” to read over so that it might

be said that he was “worthily deposed”14:

Must I ravel out my weaved-up follies?.... / If thy offenses were upon record,
There shouldst thou find one heinous article / Containing the deposing of a king…
Marked with a blot, damned in the book of heaven / Nay, all of you that stand and look upon me
Whilst that my wretchedness doth bait myself, / Though some of you, with Pilate, wash your hands,
Showing an outward pity, yet you Pilates / Have here delivered me to my sour cross,
And water cannot wash away your sin.15

Here, Richard does not deny his crimes, yet nor does he try to explain them.

Instead, by a sort of sleight-of-hand—which no one seems to fall for—he diverts

13
III.2.55-63
14
4.1.235
15
IV.1. 240s

7
attention from the legal record to the “book of heaven” in which his divine right to rule is

inscribed. Making himself out to be the victim of Pilate-like deposers of God’s king

despite his crimes, he implies that crimes are no grounds for deposing kings. If they were,

he reasons, none of the rebels could claim legitimacy either, since none are free of

injustice. The result of this logic is to table justice altogether as a criteria for judgment,

leaving a vacancy for some new standard of honor to be put in its place; it is here that

Richard finds himself in the absurd position of defending the honor of nothing more than

honor itself.

Richard’s response, while insufficient in its solution, does raise the problem of the

difficulty of making distinctions among shades of justice and injustice. It is precisely this

difficulty which gives honoring honor over justice its appeal. Assuming a black-and-

white standard of honor such as anointed/not anointed obviates the need to make more

difficult distinctions, at least in the short term. The trade-off, however, is that while such

assumptions make clear what is honorable today—while the assumption still holds

weight in public opinion—they contain no timeless truth. When times change and the

assumption has lost its sway, as has Richard’s assumption of his divine right in this play,

all the conclusions that followed, of which his legitimacy is one, are lost along with it. By

contrast, only philosophy makes the distinctions that lead to timeless truths; moreover,

only such truths provide first principles which alone can be the basis for valid

conclusions. Hence, Richard, in clinging to the assumption of his anointment, precludes

himself from coming unto a valid political philosophy by which he might provide some

measure of rhetorical defense to York, to Gaunt, and to the rebels. Lacking a grounding

in such philosophy, his rhetorical defenses amount to nothing at all, empty articulations

8
of yesterday’s assumptions which no one any longer assumes. Bereft of any purpose yet

somehow still lingering, he is discarded—deposed, shuffled off to prison, and murdered.16

Private Longing to Be Free of Honor

It is essential to note that while the logic of Richard’s public defenses rests on the

assumption of his divine right, this does not mean that he necessarily believes this

assumption. Rather, the only thing that is clear is that it is all he has to proffer in public.

Shakespeare shows us several instances at which, in private, Richard tries to shake free

from “anointment.” First, consider his words just after learning that the rebels have armed

the nation against him:

“For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been depos'd, some slain in war, / Some haunted by the ghosts they have depos'd,
Some poison'd by their wives, some sleeping kill'd,
All murder'd - For within the hollow crown that rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court, 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 last and with a little pin
Bores through the 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 to me I am a king?17

Here in private, Richard sings a tune vastly different from his public invocations

of his divine right. Having heard that the rebels are poised against him, he observes that

underneath the deference paid to honor lurks competition for honor’s seat. He conveys

the unsettling feeling of being “eyed” by competitors who would murder him for the

crown in a metaphorical feeling of being watched by Death. Alarmed by this

occupational hazard, Richard suggests a rhetorical escape from his office: his common

traits are incompatible with the uncommon tribute paid to the crown. Yet, this logic does
16
In parallel to his rhetorical defenselessness, Shakespeare portrays Richard’s physical defenselessness in
the face of rebellion: as the rebels approach he does not abandon Flint castle, nor does he send forth forces.
He ultimately hands over the crown without so much as a scuffle, and then simply asks to go away.
17
III.2 160

9
not follow: all those bearing honors must reconcile this seeming incompatibility between

what they share in common with mankind and the uncommon traits for which they are

distinguished.18 Richard duly calls attention to the difficulty of bearing these burdens of

honor; the trouble, however, is that he does not attempt to resolve them.

Here lies Richard’s hamartia: he cannot or does not reconcile the honor-loving

element in himself with “the common”—neither the common people of the kingdom nor

the common, lower part of his soul. In fact, on both sides of the honorable/common

spectrum Richard is at extremes that are moving apart rather than toward reconciliation.

On the lower end, as mentioned earlier various characters describe the king as personally

dissolute, drunken, immoderate, etc. At a political level, we find his treatment of his

subjects is also overly base, as evidenced by his reference to Henry’s “courtship to the

common people” as “throwing away reverence on slaves”19 and his brazen, lawless

seizure of Henry’s inheritance. At the honor-loving end of the spectrum, the king is

overly grandiose. He insists on an exalted, anointed status that knows no check except

God himself; moreover, he wishes to retain this status even having committed “grievous”

crimes. Put differently, he assumes he holds the almighty power both to be the law and to

break the law. As these two tendencies, toward baseness and grandiosity, pull in opposite

directions, the result is that the king is caught paralyzed in the middle, unable to take any

true action but only to stand by as he is deposed. Note his detached, spectator-like play-

by-play commentary on his own plight as he hands over the crown to Henry:

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.

18
Moreover, all honor involves a sort of “being watched,” though not necessarily of the gravity that
Richard laments. Honor assumes one has surpassed some standard, and some judge, even if abstract or
oneself, must be “watching” to determine whether this is so.
19
I.4 28

10
 That bucket down and full of tears am I, / Drinking my griefs, while you mount up on high. 20

Nowhere does Shakespeare illustrate the contention between the honor-loving and

the common element in Richard’s soul more vividly than in his final soliloquy in prison.

Alone, he again only watches as two sorts of his own “thoughts people this little world.”21

Those “tending to ambition”22 still would fight for their honor, but since at this point they

have already lost they “die in their own pride.”23 The others “tending to content”24 would

eschew honor and prefer to be a “beggar,” a base nobody who can “refuge [his] shame”25

by blaming Fortune. The king reports on the spectacle he beholds as his thoughts oscillate

between these two tropes:

Thus play I in one person many people, / and none contented. Sometimes I am a king.
Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar, / And so I am; then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better when a king. / Then I am kinged again, and by and by
Think that I am unkinged by Bolingbroke, And straight I am nothing.26

Here, for the discontents of the honor-loving “person” in himself, Richard blames

a traitorous nation, which later he expands to an “all-hating world.”27 He tries beggary

instead, which is perhaps a metaphor for his compromises with and yieldings to the

nobility, which appear to have been the cause of the crown’s bankruptcy. In beggary, he

hopes to elude the stings of competition by playing a role in which there is no honor, and

hence no competition; yet, he finds dissatisfaction there, too, in the poverty it brings.

Finding the burdens of both an honorable and a common existence too difficult to bear,

he oscillates ceaselessly between them. This tortured inability of his soul to rest is

Richard’s grief.
20
IV.1. 195
21
V.5 5
22
V.5 25
23
V.5 20
24
V.5 18
25
V.5 20
26
V.5 38
27
V.5 65

11
 And here recall again Bushy’s warning to the queen, that “Each substance of a

grief hath twenty shadows, / Which shows like grief itself, but is not so.”28 Richard has

“found shapes of grief…to wail” in treasons, poverty, Death, and even Irish wars. Yet, if

we have learned anything from York and Gaunt and from the king’s actions themselves,

it is that he brought all of these troubles on himself. They are but shadows of the real

grief that, to the king, appear to be the true substance, but are not so. In fact, the ceaseless

disharmonies sounding in Richard’s soul constitute the true substance of his grief. In his

final soliloquy, the king hints that he did not recognize where the true grief lay because to

these disharmonies he was not listening: Hearing musicians losing “time” i.e. rhythm

outside his prison tower, he reflects

How sour sweet music is / When time is broke and no proportion kept.
So it is in the music of men’s lives. / And here have I the ear to check time broke in a disordered string;
But for the concord of my state and time / Had not an ear to hear my true time broke (my emphasis).
I wasted time, and now time doth waste me.29

Ignoring the sour notes in the kingdom, the king ultimately leaves the task of

restoring harmony to future kings. Ignoring the sour notes in his soul, he leaves it to

shadows of his true grief, Death and traitors, to bring his broken time to an end.

Toward Harmony

To achieve harmony among the honor-loving and the contentment-seeking

aspects within his soul and within the kingdom, the king would have had to have

understood how to do justice to each by granting each its due. Tragically, he cannot

because he has a real understanding of neither. On the one hand, his spendthrift,

dissolute, lawless character indicates that he knows nothing of the moderation that brings

contentment to the common element. On the other, his observation that Death mocks and

28
II.2 15
29
V.5 50

12
destroys the honor paid to kings, noted above, and his instruction upon parting with his

wife to tell future generations his “lamentable tale,” that “of the deposing of a rightful

king,”30 indicate that Richard is concerned with honor insofar as it endures in this world;

he knows nothing of the true honor that outlasts this world and, as the Bishop of Carlisle

notes, destroys death: “Fight and die is destroying death / Where fearing dying pays death

servile breath.”31 As he understands neither true honor nor true contentment, there is no

hope in this tragedy that Richard can reconcile the two by granting each its due.

As the Henriad tetralogy plays out, the main task which engages Richard’s

successors, Henry IV and then his son Hal, a.k.a Henry V, is finding just this

reconciliation between the honor-loving and the common, contentment-loving elements

in the kingdom. Henry recognizes early in Henry IV Pt. 1, which succeeds Richard II,

that the English must learn again, in the wake of a dishonorable king who “lost their

hearts,” to love honor. Respect for the crown must be reinfused into the honor-loving,

rebellion-prone nobility; hence, Henry recognizes he must cease being patient with them

and return to being himself, “Mighty and to be fear'd," as the “proud soul ne'er pays

[respect] but to the proud.”32 He largely succeeds in quelling rebellion in the kingdom

before his death. In the meantime, young Prince Hal awaits his ascent to the throne in

Eastcheap Tavern, among the commons who Richard called “slaves.” He finds a gentler

sort of honor there in the honesty of simple folks like the eager-to-please young waiter

Francis and the good-humored hostess, Mistress Quickly. In Eastcheap, to his father’s

chagrin Hal also steeps himself in the charms of the life of contentment, of which his

drinking companion Falstaff, a rotund knight who has eschewed the pursuit of valor for

30
V.1 50
31
III.2 195
32
I.3 5

13
the pursuit of wine and the exercise his formidable wit, is a veteran. Moreover, in his

breakout moment defeating the rebellious Hotspur, deemed the epitome of honor, at the

Battle of Shrewsbury, Hal sees, as Richard did not, that when the love of honor insists on

more than its due it runs the risk of a violent reckoning, as he notes to Hotspur’s dead

body:

Fare thee well, great heart! / Ill-weav'd ambition, how much art thou shrunk!
When that this body did contain a spirit, / A kingdom for it was too small a bound;
But now two paces of the vilest earth / Is room enough.

When Hal becomes Henry V, he shows in ways too numerous to explore here

fully that he has come unto an understanding of what is necessary to achieve harmony in

the kingdom. Banishing and hanging his old drinking buddies Falstaff and Bardolph,

respectively, he refuses to allow his common friendship with both to excuse their

dishonorable acts. Personally leading the English into the Battle of Agincourt against

France, he knows how to infuse the common troops with the honor they are due:

From this day to the ending of the world… / we in it shall be remembered-

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; / For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile, / This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed / Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here, / And hold their
manhoods cheap whiles any speaks / That fought with us (my emphasis) upon Saint Crispin's day.

Indeed, by the end of the Henriad tetralogy the schism of hearts between king and

subject left by Richard has finally been mended; king and subject are now “we” and “us.”

Henry IV restores honor to the crown, and Henry V makes honor available to the whole

nation by, as his father had told him was necessary just before his death, victory in war.

What began with grief ends with celebration. Yet, conquering grief does not come

without bearing real and heavy griefs along the way, viz., the arduousness of quelling

rebellion, the tension of misunderstanding between Henry IV and Hal, the costs and

casualties of war. In the light of this, perhaps we can see more fully the significance of

Bushy’s advice to the queen: only when the soul stops lamenting shadows, as Richard

14
could not, and confronts the true griefs that must be born, as do Henry and Hal, can grief

be overcome.

15