I am coming to the conclusion this week of Shakespeare’s Richard II. This is the first in the four plays concerning the rise and reign of Henry IV. It tells the story of the end of Richard’s reign and his deposition by Henry Bolingbroke (who becomes Henry IV). Richard was a terrible king–corrupt, depraved, weak–and much of the play concerns the nature of good and bad political governance. It is a very rich play in many respects and could easily make it into a Law & Literature curriculum, since its themes do very much relate to the law. For example, it is in seizing John of Gaunt’s (Bolingbroke’s father’s) money and lands, and the stripping of Bolingbroke’s inheritance to fight frivolous wars–a violation of “his customarie rights,” as the Duke of York puts it–that Richard commits an ultimate misdeed that leads, for a variety of reasons, to his downfall.
I want in this post to reflect on the deposition of Richard and the language of Christian kingship that Shakespeare uses to describe it. It can be difficult to get a sense today for the deep political and psychic wound that the deposition of a king would represent. Even those in the play who side with Bolingbroke feel the deep pain and sorrow of it.
In Act IV, Scene 1, the Bishop of Carlisle (an ally of Richard’s) as well as Richard himself rely on images of Christ and his stripped kingship to great effect and to get across something of the weight of royal deposition. Here is Carlisle:
My Lord of Hereford [Bolingbroke] here, whom you call King,
Is a foule traytor to prowd Herefords King,
And if you Crowne him, let me prophesie,
The blood of English shall manure the ground,
And future Ages groane for this foule Act.
Peace shall goe sleepe with Turkes and Infidels,
And in this Seat of Peace, tumultuous Warres
Shall Kinne with Kinne, and Kinde with Kinde confound.
Disorder, Horror, Feare, and Mutinie
Shall here inhabite, and this Land be call’d
The field of Golgotha, and dead mens Sculls.
The reference at the end of these lines to Golgotha is of course to the place where Jesus was crucified, and the Bishop foretells doom to England by evoking the memory of Golgotha. It is striking that this reference follows an entire scene in Act III, Scene 4 in which the principal metaphor is the Garden of Eden overgrown with weeds and sickly plants, which is used again by analogy to suggest political decay in England. The sequence of Biblical allusions is quite powerful.
Just after these lines by the Bishop, listen to Richard, just before he is compelled by Bolingbroke to renounce his throne. Here he is asking Bolingbroke for a little while longer to wrap his mind around the awesome act of deposition:
Give Sorrow leave a while, to tutor me
To this submission. Yet I well remember
The favors of these men: were they not mine?
Did they not sometime cry, All hayle to me?
So Judas did to Christ: but he in twelve,
Found truth in all, but one: I, in twelve thousand, none.
And then again just a few lines later, Richard is forced by one of Bolingbroke’s allies to read a list of crimes that he is alleged to have committed, and to confess to them. He resists doing this, and once more the imagery of Christ’s kingship and His crucifixion is used by Richard to suggest the betrayal of the English people to their liege:
Nay, all of you, that stand and looke upon,
Whil’st that my wretchednesse doth bait my selfe,
Though some of you, with Pilate, wash your hands,
Shewing an outward pittie: yet you Pilates
Have here deliver’d me to my sowre Crosse,
And Water cannot wash away your sinne.
The image is that of Pilate washing away the sin of the killing of Christ the King with water, something that the many traitors (Pilates) to Richard will not be able to do.
Richard was a dreadful king, of course, and it is he himself and his acolytes using this language at the moment that he is destroyed. Yet as I say, even some of Bolingbroke’s supporters (like the Duke of York) recognize the awfulness of the moment, one that only Christ’s own betrayal can suitably describe.
