Richard II: Outdoors and In

by

Nicki Leone

In my ongoing quest to rediscover Shakespeare, drama by drama, I happened to reach for Richard II on a warm day in early spring. It was, in fact, the first warm day after a damp, cold winter and not a week earlier the garden had been covered for almost an entire day by several inches of snow—something that is rarer in these parts than the county voting democrat. But now the sun was out, the air was balmy, the birds were practically ecstatic. As much as I wanted to be digging into Shakespeare, I also wanted to be outside digging in the dirt.

As it turns out, Richard II is a good play to be listening to if you want to do both. For this is a play of politics, personality, and plants.

As kings go, Richard II (1367-1400) is not among the best known. The name “Richard” tends to evoke either the heroic Lionheart (R the First), or the villainous Duke of York (R the Third) who murdered children in their beds. Likewise, Shakespeare’s drama Richard II is not one of the better known—coming on the heels as it does of the vivid and ferocious Richard III and soon to be followed by more action-packed dramas of Henry IV (i and ii) and Henry V. It is a prequel, of sorts, to the Henry VI plays that document the fall of the House of Lancaster and the rise of the House of York. The story of a weak king’s overthrow by a discontented populace and a conspiracy of disaffected nobility. This much of the story I knew when, hoe in hand and iPod in my back pocket, I was raking out the winter weeds from the dormant garden beds and another gardener walked into the story:

SERVANT. Why should we, in the compass of a pale,
    Keep law and form and due proportion,
    Showing, as in a model, our firm estate,
    When our sea-walled garden, the whole land,
    Is full of weeds; her fairest flowers chok'd up,
    Her fruit trees all unprun'd, her hedges ruin'd,
    Her knots disordered, and her wholesome herbs
    Swarming with caterpillars?

Richard II, act iii, sc. 4

I perked up at that, charmed by the notion of England as a garden that its king had been neglecting, and not oblivious to the coincidence that, while nobles and peasant gardeners grumbled at the pernicious influence held by the courtiers surrounding the king—calling them weeds and caterpillars interchangeably—I was on my knees in the dirt, pulling at the caterpillar grass and runner beans that had taken over the garden. We both of us had a battle on our hands.

Anyone who listens to a Shakespeare play to catch the garden references is sure to be amply rewarded. The man knew his flowers, and knew his plants. In Richard II one can find reference to “apricots, balm, bay, corn, grass, nettles, pines, rose, rue, thorns, violets, yew.” At least, according to Mr. Henry Nicholson Ellecombe, who spent what must have been many happy hours cataloging every kind of flora referenced in the plays and listing them in a book called The Plant-Lore and Garden-Craft of Shakespeare (Satchell & Co., 1884). It is Mr. Ellecombe, also, who notes that Shakespeare had more than just a passing acquaintance with the flowers and plants that make their way into his work. He knows when violets are in bloom and when corn is harvested. He knows that strawberries are to be found growing low to the ground, under taller plants like nettles. He knows wild boars will ruin a harvest and caterpillars will spoil a crop. He knows

. . . We at time of year
Do wound the bark, the skin of our fruit-trees,
Lest, being over-proud in sap and blood,
With too much riches it confound itself:
Had he done so to great and growing men,
They might have lived to bear and he to taste
Their fruits of duty; superfluous branches
We lop away, that bearing boughs may live:
Had he done so, himself had borne the crown
Which waste of idle hours hath quite thrown down.

Richard II, act iii, sc. 4

As in every other sphere to which he turned his attention, William Shakespeare seemed to absorb the details of horticulture like a sponge. He’s unique among his compatriots for this talent. I’d like to see Christopher Marlowe expounding on the proper way to prune an apricot tree. It would be utterly beyond him.

Listening to Richard II while pulling weeds and planting seedlings, one naturally tends to notice all the garden references—the bay trees that have withered and are seen as a bad portent by the Welsh, the fact that the king’s inner circle, Earl of Wiltshire, Bushy, Green, that are continually referred to as weeds or caterpillars (the two are equally disgusting to gardeners), the queen’s rose that has lost its bloom—a sight that fills her with sorrow and dread. And the moving scene (my favorite in the play) where the Queen herself, having overheard the news that her husband has been deposed from the gardeners’ gossip, of all things. She runs, frightened and angry and crying, from the garden that had been her sanctuary, and the old gardener Adam (gardeners in Shakespeare are always called Adam) watches her sadly:

Poor Queen, so that thy state might be no worse,
I would my skill were subject to thy curse.
Here did she fall a tear; here in this place
I'll set a bank of rue, sour herb of grace
Rue, even for ruth, here shortly shall be seen,
In the remembrance of a weeping queen.

Richard II, act iii, sc. 4

Apparently, in King Richard’s day, even the gardeners spoke in rhyme. The play has been called Shakespeare’s “most lyrical”–not in the overused modern sense of the word to denote pretty language, but in its classic poetic sense: The entire play is written in verse, with nary a lick of prose even for the commoner.

But as entrancingly poetic as all this is to a girl in her garden on a spring day, garden metaphors are the window dressing, not the point, of the play. As the sun set and the shadows fell over my newly planted beds, I was forced indoors (warm days bring warm evenings, which bring mosquitoes). There I went through Richard II again, this time without the distractions of compost. And as it grew dark outside, I became gradually aware that there was a very dark side to Richard.

The story begins, for example, on an accusation of murder. Henry Bolingbroke has accused Thomas Mowbray of murdering the Duke of Gloucester and challenged him in front of the King to trial by combat. In technical terms, he “throws down his gage”–that is, he throws down a glove as a challenge. It’s a hot-headed era because there are some scenes in this play where gloves are just flying—men seem to want to throw down more gloves than they have hands to wear them.

Henry’s accusation is a problem for King Richard, for it is made quite clear to the audience that Mowbray did indeed murder the Duke, but on the King’s less-than-implicit orders. This seems to happen a lot in Shakespeare plays. A king says “I would be rid of this thorn in my side” and a loyal—or overly ambitious—knight interprets this as a veiled request for an assassination. Really, so many monarchs lose their thrones by losing their heads that it is a wonder anyone still wants the job. Richard solves the problem by banishing the both of them from England—Bolingbroke for six years, and Mowbray—who, after all, knows far too much—for life.

If Richard secures his throne by murder, is he really a king? Is he also still a murderer? A man? That is the question that Shakespeare toys with in this play. Richard has been called ‘the player king’ because he spends so much time acting as a king, rather than being one. He demands the absolute obedience implicit in the policy of the divine right of kings. A Deo rex, a rege lex (The king is from God. The law from the king.)

Even John of Gaunt, Henry Bolingbroke’s father and the brother-in-law to the murdered man, accepts this and will not seek revenge:

GAUNT. God's is the quarrel; for God's substitute,
    His deputy anointed in His sight
    Hath caus'd his death; the which if wrongfully,
    Let heaven revenge; for I may never lift
    An angry arm against His minister.

Richard II, act i, sc. 2

“Let heaven revenge.” It is not the place of subjects to pass judgment on their kings. Not for murder, anyway. Money, however, is another matter. When Richard starts to seize the lands and treasuries of his noblemen to finance an unsuccessful war, suddenly the nobility find him not so divinely championed. When John of Gaunt dies and Richard seizes his property rather than allowing it to go to the exiled son, they revolt. Henry Bolingbroke returns to England in defiance of his exile to reclaim his rights, and Richard’s support melts away with little resistance. Murder is one thing, but a man’s pocketbook is truly sacred.

The part of me that is fascinated by narrative structure and composition was quite taken with the dichotomy between King Richard and Henry Bolingbroke. Richard II is not the story of an evil king deposed by a good one. Rather, Richard and Henry seem like two sides of the same man. It’s almost as if Shakespeare were experimenting with character division. Richard is callous and narcissistic in his ascendancy—he dismisses the advice he doesn’t like, chastises anyone who questions his decisions. He even, in a particularly distasteful moment, jokes with his friends on being told that the dying John of Gaunt wishes to see him. “I pray we come too late” he laughs. He wants Gaunt’s money, not his deathbed admonishments.

But Henry is not any better. He curries favor with the populace, courts their affections. He lands in England claiming only to seek redress for his inheritance, and keeps claiming this up until the moment he takes the crown from a captive Richard’s hands. He’s very concerned with making things look legal, is Bolingbroke. He bullies Richard into publicly declaring that he wants to step down in favor of his successor. Then he makes the uncrowned King read out loud a list of the “crimes” for which he is purportedly guilty. He’s the kind of politician that hands out lollipops to babies and lines his pockets with backroom deals.

As Richard’s fortunes fall, he becomes more and more eloquent. There are some pretty speeches made in front of mirrors, internal debates voiced out loud, and a general waffling sense of confusion as Richard—who seems to be what you might call a tad “excitable”—muses upon who he is:

For you have but 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?

Richard II, act iii, sc. 3

On the other hand, as Henry’s fortunes rise, he says less and less, until he is all but laconic. And his final, most important utterance is actually made completely offstage:

EXTON. Didst thou not mark the King, what words he spake?
  ‘Have I no friend will rid me of this living fear?’
  Was it not so?

SERVANT. These were his very words.

EXTON. ‘Have I no friend?’ quoth he. He spake it twice
  And urg’d it twice together, did he not?

SERVANT. He did.

EXTON. And, speaking it, he wishtly look’d on me,
  As who should say ‘I would thou wert the man
  That would divorce this terror from my heart’;
  Meaning the King at Pomfret. Come, let’s go.
  I am the King’s friend, and will rid his foe.

Richard II, act iv, sc. 4

And thus the first act of Henry Bolingbroke, now Henry IV, as king is the implicit request for another murder.

It is sad and pathetic and seemed so very pointless. I found myself staring out at my garden in the dusk, wishing it were morning so I could go out in the sun, and plant something green that would grow and grow and bloom into something pretty.

Books mentioned in this column:
Richard II by William Shakespeare, The Arkangel Shakespeare, (AudioPartners, 2003)
Richard III by William Shakespeare
Henry IV (i and ii) by William Shakespeare
Henry V by William Shakespeare
Henry VI (i, ii and iii) by William Shakespeare
The Plant-Lore and Garden-Craft of Shakespeare by Henry Nicholson Ellecombe (Satchell & Co., 1884)

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.