The
Classics (1): Richard II,
William Shakespeare
To lead things off . . . of course. The only question
was which
Shakespeare?
One I like, obviously, but also one I hoped wouldn't be too
familiar. Reading Shakespeare is already such a layered experience,
I wanted something at least a little off the beaten path. Richard II fit
the bill. And it's special for me because I think it was the first of Shakespeare's
plays where I really found myself getting into the language, the rhetoric and sound of
it, without caring a whole lot about the plot. I still remember the effect this
had on me:
I'll give my jewels for a set of beads;
My gorgeous palace for a hermitage;
My gay apparel for an almsman's gown;
My figur'd goblets for a dish of wood;
My sceptre for a palmer's walking staff;
My subjects for a pair of carved saints,
And my large kingdom for a little grave,
A little little grave, an obscure grave,
Or I'll be buried in the king's highway,
Some way of common trade, where subjects' feet
May hourly trample on their sovereign's head
I think it was all those long a's that hooked me. They always
say that you're supposed to read poetry out loud, but Shakespeare is one of the few
writers who makes you do it. One
of the signs that you're in the hands of a master, in poetry or prose, is when
you notice your lips moving. You just want to sing along.
Who could ever get tired of this stuff? There is an exciting
weirdness to Shakespeare's use of language that prevents you from ever feeling
too familiar with it. You can study it all you want, but then someone makes a reference to "that dead time when Gloucester's
death was plotted" and suddenly you're lost in space. Dead time?
Or take a
famous image like the Duchess of Gloucester's likening of the seven sons of
Edward to "seven vials of his sacred blood." Vials? Of blood? I know I shouldn't but I can't
help thinking of when Angelina Jolie and her then-husband Billy Bob Thornton
were reported to be wearing tiny vials of each other's blood around their necks.
I'm sure Shakespeare wasn't thinking of that, but I'm not sure what he was thinking of. In
fact, in three editions I checked there was no explanation of this image by the play's editors. Where were the footnotes when I really needed them? Was it something obvious I was missing? The Tree of Jesse
image the Duchess goes on to adopt is obvious enough, but this bit about vials
of blood left me wondering. What were vials of blood used for back in
Shakespeare's day? Did anybody actually keep blood in vials? What was the Duchess
thinking of?
And this should have been an easy one. Later in the same short
scene the Duchess hit me with this little wonder:
"Yet one word more: grief boundeth where it falls,/ Not with the empty
hollowness, but weight."
Now just what does that mean? As I read it: Grief bounces where
it gets dropped, not like a basketball (which is full of air and hence
"empty"), but more like a medicine ball (which, unfortunately for the
sense of the passage, doesn't bounce, but which does pack a wallop). Hmmmm. At least the footnotes have something to say here. And what they
say is this (Signet Edition): "i.e., my grief returns because it is heavy,
not like a ball." Huh? Why should the heaviness of the grief cause it to
return? Perhaps the heavily
annotated Arden can shed some light:
"The Duchess likens the iteration of her grief ('one word more') to the
bouncing of a ball; but it is weight that makes her grief rebound, its emptiness
and hollowness the ball." That's supposed to be an explication?
I have a hunch this may be one of those images that just doesn't
work. It seems too condensed, as though something has been left out.
But then again, no one expects this guy to be easy.
I'm talking about these little things because they're what I
notice the most on a re-reading. I'm sure the
meaning of "imp", in the line "Imp out our drooping country's
broken wing" didn't register the first time I read it. Now I'm surprised to learn that it has a
technical meaning borrowed from falconry: to engraft new feathers. I didn't even
know such things were possible today, much less that they were being done 400
years ago. And I probably missed the striking use of "venom" to
describe the Irish:
Now for our Irish wars:
We must supplant those rough rug-headed kerns,
Which live like venom where no venom else,
But only they, have privilege to live.
Apparently "venom" did have an archaic meaning as a
"malicious or spiteful person", but I'd be surprised if anyone even in
Shakespeare's day used it like this. And to "live like venom" . . . who
else but Shakespeare could have come up with that?
And then, like an unwelcome guest at the feast, we have the
quibbles and word puzzles. What Shakespeare found so endlessly amusing about
such displays of superficial cleverness is anyone's
guess:
For nothing has begot my something grief,
Or something hath the nothing that I grieve:
'Tis in reversion that I do possess,
But what it is that is not yet known what,
I cannot name; 'tis nameless woe I wot.
Your cares set up do not pluck my cares down.
My care is loss of care, by old care done;
Your care is gain of care, by new care won.
Ugh. Even Johnson was flummoxed. "It [a quibble] has some
malignant power over his mind, and its fascinations are irresistible. . . . A
quibble poor and barren as it is, gave him such delight, that he was content to
purchase it, by the sacrifice of reason, propriety and truth. A quibble was to
him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to
lose it."
Not unlike, when you think about it, Richard himself.
Like most
of Shakespeare's heroes, Richard II has a strong sense of theatre. He likes putting
on a show and enjoys a bit of wordplay, even at his own expense. What sets
him apart is the perverse joy he
takes in his downfall, the way he stage manages his own tragedy and authors the
kind of "sad tale" he imagines himself the hero of. He doesn't want anyone cheering him up and
wrecking the mood. "Beshrew
thee, cousin, which didst lead me forth/ Of that sweet way I was in to despair." (It's a habit of mind his wife shares, insisting that she "will despair and be at enmity/ with cozening Hope").
Some of this may have been forced on Shakespeare for political reasons.
Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV, can't be a usurper but has to have the crown
drop into his hands (and even so the image of blood on his hands will haunt him
like Lady Macbeth's spot). But it's also Richard's tragic flaw. He is manic
depressive. Those wild mood swings in Act III Scene ii, ending with him on the
sweet way to despair, give it away. He is going down - "Down, down . . .
like glist'ring Phaeton." And, as the simile suggests, he is doing it in
style.
When I call Richard a manic depressive I don't mean to introduce
a lot of anachronistic psychiatric therapy-speak. Shakespeare had a more nuanced
understanding of human psychology than either the theory of humours or the DSM
will allow. What I mean is that certain dramatic requirements demanded this kind of
a self-destructive personality, half in love with its own gloom and despair, and
that Shakespeare didn't have to just make it up (any more than he made up Othello's
jealousy or Hamlet's melancholy). Depression was something he could use,
something he could do.
Of course the theatrical, self-dramatizing form Richard's
depression takes has the effect of making him seem more than a little
ridiculous. There is something almost campy about the deposition scene. Forget
about all the obscure references to Richard's sexuality and what Bushy and
Greene were up to in the royal bed - at Westminster Richard is a drama queen. He calls for a mirror. No
one will bring him one (he has trouble getting people to follow orders even in
Act I Scene i) and so Bolingbroke has to order it for him. Then he smashes it to
pieces. Hollywood and MTV would make this a cliché, but Richard anticipates the
pique of the faded star. We register the exasperation and contempt of
everyone watching. Richard isn't just committing
suicide; he's making a fool of himself while doing it.
Poor Richard. Othello is tragic, Desdemona pathetic. Hamlet
tragic, Ophelia pathetic. Lear tragic, Cordelia pathetic. But Richard is both tragic and
pathetic. In his final scene he is alone but divided - hermaphroditic, bipolar -
his brain the female to his soul, his mood swinging from laughter to tears, from
grief to rage.
No longer a king, no longer even playing a king (since he has
lost his audience), he isn't sure what he is any more:
But whate'er I be,
Nor I, nor any man that but man is,
With nothing shall be pleas'd, till he be eas'd
With being nothing.
The end of the sweet way to despair is in sight, and when it
comes Richard is effectively offstage. A noble mind
is overthrown, but quietly. In Pomfret prison glist'ring Phaeton becomes Auden's
Icarus ("even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course/ Anyhow in a
corner, some untidy spot"). The play doesn't even end with his death.
He's only something to be got out of the way so that another series of history plays (Shakespeare's second, though chronologically
the first) can get started.
It's a long way from being a perfect play. The
shift in Richard's character is too
great. After the first two acts,
what would make us think he would
turn into a figure of any depth? The most famous lines,
John of Gaunt's "This royal
throne of kings" speech, seem
kind of potted (as does the
political philosophy of the
gardeners). There is a lot of
repetition, in dramatic structure
and language, that might have been
avoided. The Duchess of York's plea
for her son's life in Act V Scene
iii is every bit as bad as everyone
says it is.
And yet it's still compelling tragedy, full of those familiar
moments of big theatre and agonized introspection that characterize the history
plays, expressed in lines that stick to the mind like burrs ("I wasted time, and now doth Time waste me" is my personal
favourite). I know I'll be reading it again in a few years. And when I do
I'm sure I'll notice more I've missed, a few things I've forgotten, a bit that's
taken a while to finally understand . . .
You never read Shakespeare for the first time. And you never get
to the end.
