Richard II

Richard continues to grapple with The Crisis of Identity occasioned by his deposition in the play’s final Act. When the queen encounters Richard in the street, she uses the play’s recurring vegetation imagery as she laments seeing her “fair rose wither” (5.1.7-8). While she wishes Richard would be more defiant, Richard is now more resigned to his fate. The sheer scale of his unpopularity is now apparent to him, with Richard being openly abused by the populace in the streets of London:

[D]ust was thrown upon his sacred head;

Which with such gentle sorrow he shook off,

His face still combating with tears and smiles,

The badges of his grief and patience (5.2.30-33).

In Scene 5, Richard is alone and analyzes the fluctuations of his mind, noting that “no thought is contented” (5.5.11). Sometimes he has elevating thoughts, stimulated by texts from the New Testament gospels. Then come “thoughts tending to ambition” (5.5.18), such as fantasizing about how he might escape his prison walls; but such thoughts, being impractical, soon fade. He also has thoughts aimed at reconciling himself with his situation—he is not the first person to experience a reversal of fortune, for example. None of these thoughts, however, give him any contentment, and he continues to oscillate between extremes of emotion as he again harps on the loss of his kingship. In this effort to find some stability, he concludes that he will only be content when he is accepting of death—till he be “eas’d / With being nothing” (5.5.40-41). In this way, Richard’s decision that he will only be content when he is literally “nothing” through death echoes his metaphorical use of the idea of being “nothing” during his deposition scene: Without his identity as a king, Richard can construct no enduring alternative sense of selfhood or identity at all.

Meanwhile, The Problem of Order and Legitimacy also continues to haunt the new king, Henry IV. Richard himself predicts that while Northumberland has helped Bolingbroke to the throne, he will soon think that “Though he divide the realm and give [him] half / It is too little, helping him to all” (5.1.60-61). Thus, the seeds of mistrust and rebellion against the new king have already been laid. This sense of ongoing political fracture is also embodied through the disorder and conflict within the York family, since Aumerle, York’s son, supports a plot against the new king, which outrages his father, who wholeheartedly accepts Bolingbroke. The family quarrel is thus symbolic of the wider conflict in society that will soon break out following Bolingbroke’s ascension.

These two scenes also contain comic elements, as when the duchess tries to prevent her husband from getting his boots so he can go to the king and inform him of Aumerle’s treachery (5.2.85-88). The comic tone is also apparent in Scene 3, after the duchess arrives at Windsor castle, where York and Aumerle are already with the king. She begs the king in such an obsequious manner that even the usually dour Bolingbroke comments, “Our scene is alter’d from a serious thing, / And now chang’d to ‘The Beggar and the King’” (5.3.77-78)—the title of an old ballad.

The comedic elements heighten, by contrast, the tragedy and pathos of Richard’s final scenes and violent end. After Richard’s murder, Bolingbroke maintains plausible deniability: He acknowledges that he wanted Richard dead, but he does not admit to actually asking Exton to do the deed. He does admit some guilt, however, saying that he will make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to expiate his sin. Bolingbroke’s conflicting emotions and sense of horror at a former king’s murder suggest that he, too, still struggles to reconcile The Problem of Order and Legitimacy with his own usurpation of the throne, and that he does not feel entirely secure in his possession of it.