Taylor wrote: In reading act 3 I'm fascinated by the grace behind the horror of deposition.
Gardner:
And Bolingbroke
Hath seized the wasteful king. O, what pity is it
That he had not so trimmed and dressed his land
As we this garden! We at time of year
Do wound the bark, the skin of our fruit trees,
Lest, being overproud 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.

I really like the Garden scene - it makes a nice change of pace after the intensity of the preceding scenes and, like all good gardens, provides a place of refuge and reflection, a time for the audience to gather its thoughts. And of course the garden is such a wonderful metaphor for good and bad government, and this gardener is full of common sense and wisdom. He should be running workshops for underperforming monarchs.

The scene ends with the Queen cursing him before she leaves. His reaction is to plant some ruth in remembrance of her, for pity. A wise and kind man.

Taylor wrote: I've ordered a copy of George Macdonald Fraser's "The Steel Bonnet", even though it doesn't deal directly with the part of history we're discussing it does deal with Scottish Border History of the times, its seems like it might be a good read, also I'm just an enormous fan of the "Flashman" series of books.

Ha - a neighbour just lent this book to my wife yesterday - I think he comes from that part of the world. It looked like a dusty bit of local history to me - I didn't realise who the author was. I'll have to take a closer look.

My wife read me the opening lines of The Steel Bonnets this morning. Nothing to do with Richard II, but interesting all the same:

"At one moment when President Richard Nixon was taking part in his inauguration ceremony, he appeared flanked by Lyndon Johnson and Billy Graham. To anyone familiar with Border history it was one of those historical circumstances which send a little shudder through the mind : the descendants of three notable Anglo-Scottish border tribes - families who lived and fought within a few miles of each other in the West Marches in Queen Elizabeth's time - were standing side by side.

Richard Nixon is the perfect example. The blunt, heavy features, the dark complexion, the burly body, the whole air of dour hardness are as typical of the Anglo-Scottish frontier as the Roman Wall. Take 30 years off his age and you could put him straight into the front row of the Hawick scrum and hope to keep out of his way. It is difficult to think of any face that would fit better under a steel bonnet."

jetsam wrote:Thanks you two for working through this with me - I think it's worth the effort because because the story sort of turns on it, and it's a tricky area. I feel more comfortable with the issues now.
Flann, why the surprise at the priest disguise?

Thank you all for a great discussion. One last comment on Act 3 . . .

I get a sense that Richard abdicates as much as Henry usurps. As Jetsam points out, it is perplexing how the King behaves. He seems to lose faith so quickly that even those around him are confounded. I think you're right that the story really hinges on these few scenes where the King essentially gives up.

There's another speech that I think shows precisely where Richard loses faith . . . just after finding out that Bushy and Green have been executed, and Lord Scroope tells the King that the common people now recognize Bolingbroke as lord. This is where Richard uses the term "Hollow Crown”—the title of the BBC production that spans events in the four plays of the Henriad. He also talks much of death as he does later in scene 2.

KING RICHARD II

No matter where; of comfort no man speak:
Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom 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 to 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 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 fear'd and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour'd 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 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?
Act 3.1

The above line stands out for me after reading Act 4 . . .
Tradition, form and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while:

There’s a phrase—all form, no substance—and I think Richard II’s reign has been like that. The patina of king washes off in this scene, even before he finds that York has “join’d with Bolingbroke” (which isn’t quite true).

After finishing the play, I would say the climax is here in Act 3. The rest of the play is all a bit of housekeeping and setting the stage for Henry IV, Part 1.

I think you hit the nail on the head with this comment about Richard's reign and his loss of faith, Geo. This is where the scales fall from his eyes and he finally understands.

This speech is really something; there are a couple of wonderful passages in it - for instance this melancholy meditation on kingship:

"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 poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd "

- Richard will be murdered of course, and Bolingbroke will be haunted by the ghost he has deposed, always yearning to go on the pilgrimage to Jerusalem that will redeem him, but never able to.

And then there is the wonderful macabre imagery of the hollow crown passage:

"... 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 fear'd and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!"

I get the feeling that you're wrapping things up here, but before we close, there are a couple of short passages in Richard's long soliloquy in Act 5 I'd like to note.

Firstly a riff on the sentiments expressed in the classic Rolling Stones track "Satisfaction" - one of the enduring dilemmas of the human condition:

"... but whate'er I be,
Nor I nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
With being nothing."

And secondly, hearing music being played (obviously not very well) he turns it to a bitter-sweet comment on his own failings as king:

"Ha, ha! keep time: how sour sweet music is,
When time is broke and no proportion kept!
So is it in the music of men's lives.
And here have I the daintiness of ear
To check time broke in a disorder'd string;
But for the concord of my state and time
Had not an ear to hear my true time broke.
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;"

Locked up in Pomfret Castle, time wasted him indeed, but not for long ...

Thanks Geo for leading this discussion - I really enjoyed it. It seems you can have a good discussion with a small number of people. Thanks also to Flann, and to Taylor as well.

Now I too am off to watch The Hollow Clown.

Great roundup, jetsam. This has been a great discussion and I thank everyone. I think Shakespeare plays do lend themselves nicely to online discussion. Maybe we can do another one in the near future.

geo wrote:

jetsam wrote:Thanks you two for working through this with me - I think it's worth the effort because because the story sort of turns on it, and it's a tricky area. I feel more comfortable with the issues now.
Flann, why the surprise at the priest disguise?

Thank you all for a great discussion. One last comment on Act 3 . . .

I get a sense that Richard abdicates as much as Henry usurps. As Jetsam points out, it is perplexing how the King behaves. He seems to lose faith so quickly that even those around him are confounded. I think you're right that the story really hinges on these few scenes where the King essentially gives up.

There's another speech that I think shows precisely where Richard loses faith . . . just after finding out that Bushy and Green have been executed, and Lord Scroope tells the King that the common people now recognize Bolingbroke as lord. This is where Richard uses the term "Hollow Crown”—the title of the BBC production that spans events in the four plays of the Henriad. He also talks much of death as he does later in scene 2.

KING RICHARD II

No matter where; of comfort no man speak:
Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom 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 to 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 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 fear'd and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour'd 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 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?
Act 3.1

The above line stands out for me after reading Act 4 . . .
Tradition, form and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while:

There’s a phrase—all form, no substance—and I think Richard II’s reign has been like that. The patina of king washes off in this scene, even before he finds that York has “join’d with Bolingbroke” (which isn’t quite true).

After finishing the play, I would say the climax is here in Act 3. The rest of the play is all a bit of housekeeping and setting the stage for Henry IV, Part 1.

Hi Geo,
Good discussion I thought all round. We learn as we go along.
There is real pathos in this speech of Richard's. His identity is a key point in the play I think. He saw himself as divinely anointed child king, raised above other mortals and divinely favoured and protected. He's the star fallen to earth with a crash.

His requesting the mirror and smashing it, is highly symbolic of his self perception going from the illusion of grandeur to the grim reality of mortality.
In a sense his perception is now sharpest of all and he sees there is a hollowness in the crown more clearly than anyone.
All too late.
You have to feel some sympathy for him as thrust as a child into this role of king. He was a tyrannical ruler, perhaps pushed in that direction from early on,but he never understood how to rule other than by force and compulsion.
Richard's speech here is a meditation on mortality as leveler and how fragile kingship really is. He doesn't acknowledge his own misrule as the reason for his overthrow, which is a glaring oversight by him.
Perhaps he doesn't want to, but deep down he must have realised this.

Here's a talk by Mark King on "Richard landlord not king" which underlines how badly he ruled but is interesting on his self identity from about 32 minutes in.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTD94Z7Z4Iw