As the contest to find the North East’s favourite Shakespeare character enters the last lap, CHRISTINE CHAPMAN ponders the lot of kings in Richard II and Henry VI, Part 3
THE words of John of Gaunt in Richard II – “This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle/ This earth of majesty” – evoke romantic visions of a lost England, a demi-paradise surrounded by silver sea, ruled by mighty monarchs.
Talk of setting suns suggests a less glorious reality. Shakespeare understood well the powerful impact of colour and symbols, skilfully using metaphor and emblematic devices to convey meaning in his plays.
England’s coat of arms depicts three golden lions: kings are “not born to sue, but to command”. Monarchs also adopt personal emblems, a fact used by Shakespeare to dramatic effect. Crowns and thrones abound in Richard II and Henry VI, Part 3 but it is Henry’s connection to a blood-red rose that best conveys his pain.
Richard invites our pity, likewise; his royal emblem is a pure white hunted hart. As Shakespeare focuses his glass on royalty, we see that kings – like men – feel want, taste grief and need friends too.
“For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings,” says Richard II.
Richard II and Henry VI, Part 3 both dramatise moments in history when a weak monarch’s rule brings civil war, planting an unrightful king.
Richard’s and Henry’s thrones mask golden sorrow: “for within the hollow crown/ That rounds the mortal temples of a king/ Death keeps his court”. Shakespeare’s word-play shows how easily a king can be “kinged” only to be unkinged again. Also how a lion can tame a leopard “but not change his spots”.
“If angels fight/ weak men must fall,”, says Richard II. Historically, he was deposed by a cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, John of Gaunt’s son and later Henry IV.
Richard had previously banished this ambitious, dissenting lord: “such is the breath of kings”.
Claiming only his own lands at first, Bolingbroke returned to challenge Richard’s crown.
On deposition, Richard is imprisoned, then murdered, at Pomfret Castle.
Under Richard, Shakespeare imagines England as an unweeded garden over-run by royal favourites, “caterpillars of the Commonwealth”.
Bolingbroke seeks to pluck these weeds away. Reduced to a “mockery king of snow”, Richard symbolically undoes himself at Westminster, handing the usurper his heavy crown.
Calling for a mirror to see what he has become, the silent king dashes it to the ground. It cracks into a “hundred shivers”. Farewell king!
At Pomfret, king of his own grief still, Richard finally exchanges his “large kingdom for a little grave”.
Richard’s last words invoke what will happen when the king’s blood stains the king’s own land.
Bishops predict England will become a place of “dead men’s skulls”, fittingly describing the killing fields of what are now known as the Wars of the Roses.
Henry VI’s right to reign was based on Bolingbroke’s claims and thus another king, tongue-tied by sorrows, was forced to give up a crown and die.
Images of rising and falling link these plays. Richard compares the crown to a well with two buckets, one empty in the air, the other down and full of tears.