"...for I must nothing be..."
Disintegration of self and poetic rebirth in Shakespeare's Richard II
Bolingbroke: “Are you contented to resign the crown?”
King Richard: “Ay, no; no, ay; for I must nothing be.
Therefore no ‘no,’ for I resign to thee.
Now, mark me how I will undo myself.” (Richard II, IV.i.209-212)
The voluble and often curmudgeonly critic Harold Bloom, probably his generation’s most perceptive reader of Shakespeare, insisted that “our ideas as to what makes the self authentically human owe more to Shakespeare than ought to be possible.”1
I think there’s a goodly measure of truth in this judgment. Shakespeare was an acute student of the complexities of the human psyche, and his observations inform our thinking to this very day. They’ve survived because they so resonate with our own experience.2 The pivotal characters in his tragedies and histories3 are multidimensional personifications of the all too familiar clash of base and noble motives that populate our interior landscapes. Shakespeare’s heroes possess faults which rescue them from implausible saintliness, while even his worse villains display glimmers of conscience or remorse. That’s why we find Lear, Hamlet, Cordelia, Macbeth, Shylock, Coriolanus, Portia, Iago, Antony, Miranda, or Falstaff so mesmerizing. We can relate to them. They both remind us of our own complexity and encourage us to plumb its depth. Their selves are mirrors of ours.
In his relatively early (probably 1595) Richard II, the opening play of his second Henriad tetralogy about English kings, Shakespeare offers what to my mind is one of his most intriguing and authentic insights: the transformation that can occur when circumstances lead to the collapse of the ego-self.4 In a painful stripping-away of his sense of identity—in being reduced, as he says, to “nothing”—the deposed King Richard unexpectedly experiences a freedom that enriches his interior landscape. He dies to the old self, one that was narrowly petulant, petty, histrionic, and ill-tempered, and in this ego-dying undergoes an expansive rebirth: a falling-only-to-rise pattern that seems woven into the very fabric of myth and reality.
Richardus Rex
The play focuses on the closing months of Richard’s reign.5 He’s the final Plantagenet king, grandson of Edward III and son of the Black Prince who died, youngish, before he could ascend to the throne.
The play begins with Richard exiling Henry Bolingbroke, his cousin, son of John of Gaunt, ostensibly to preserve the peace of the realm but actually to cover over the fact that Richard had another uncle, Gloucester, murdered.
With Bolingbroke safely out of the way, Richard seizes his inheritance immediately upon the death of his father John, but not before the old man rebukes Richard for overtaxing England to support his lavish lifestyle and a planned military expedition to Ireland. He also accuses Richard of surrounding himself with sycophants who shield him from news of his unpopularity with both nobles and commoners. The king is “encagèd” by them as well as by his royal arrogance.
“A thousand flatterers sit within thy crown,
Whose compass is no bigger than thy head.” (II.i,106-107)
In exile, Bolingbroke learns of Richard’s theft of his inheritance and defiantly returns to England, ostensibly to take back what’s rightfully his but in reality to seize the throne. At around the same time, Richard returns from his feckless Irish campaign and is told, immediately upon landing on England’s shore, of Bolingbroke’s plans. Alternately alarmed and cocky, Richard waffles between absurdly boastful assertions of power and frightened despair, a back-and-forth waffling that highlights the essential weakness of his character.
He insists, for example, that even the very earth of England is his vassal and will defend him against Henry. Kneeling on the beach, he says:
“So, weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth,
And do thee favors with my royal hands.
Feed not thy sovereign’s foe, my gentle earth,
Nor with thy sweets comfort his ravenous sense.” (III.ii.10-13)
Going even further, Richard compares his kingly splendor and might to the sun’s, and insists, in keeping with his embrace of the divine right of kings doctrine, that no mortal can lawfully depose him. God is enlisted along with nature as his ally.
“Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm off from an anointed king.
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord.” (III.ii.55-58)6
But almost immediately after such boasting, Richard’s mood darkens—“Of comfort no man speak,” he unexpectedly tongue-lashes his obsequious retinue—and launches into one of the play’s most haunting soliloquies.
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 humor’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? (III.ii.150-182)
Despite his character flaws, soliloquies like this make it difficult to dislike Richard or to feel no pity for him. More than one critic has pointed out that Richard is a horrible king but an inspired poet,7 an observation I’ll return to shortly. It’s in his heart-wrenchingly beautiful confessions of fear and uncertainty, of which this is the play’s first, that we begin to sense deeper currents in him than we may’ve earlier suspected.
Richardus Depositus
For the first time in his life, perhaps, Richard recognizes his own vulnerability (“I live with bread like you, feel want, / Taste grief, need friends”), and this raises the novel question for him of just who he is (“How can you say to me, I am a king?”). This first tentative step into his interiority picks up pace when force of circumstances require him to admit that Bolingbroke’s army is stronger than his, and that he must relinquish the crown. Referring to himself in the third person, Richard acknowledges, with some bewilderment, his shrinkage.
Must he lose
The name of king? I’ God’s name, let it go.
I’ll give my jewels for a set of beads,
My gorgeous palace for a hermitage,
My gay apparel for an almsman’s gown,
My figured goblets for a dish of wood,
My scepter for a palmer’s walking-staff,
And my large kingdom for a little grave,
A little, little grave, an obscure grave;
Or I’ll be buried in the King’s highway,
Some way of common trade, where subjects’ feet
May hourly trample on their sovereign’s head;
For on my heart they tread now whilst I live
And, buried once, why not upon my head? (III.iii.150-164)
There’s a remnant of self-pity in this initial acknowledgment of his kinghood’s loss, especially towards the end when he imagines (a significant word, as we’ll see) his grave being trampled on by his erstwhile subjects. But surely we can forgive Richard. He’s doing his best to cope with his drastically reduced condition, and understandably oscillates between a wounded desire to vanish, to cease to be (“a little, little grave, an obscure grave”) and a petulant desire to accuse (“on my heart they tread now whilst I live”). But it’s hard. As he admits a bit later on, the loss of his throne entails the disintegration of his identity. In contemporary parlance, he has been cancelled. His past obliterated, his present situation alienatingly hostile, he no longer knows who he is.
“I have no name, no title,
No, not that name was given me at the font,
But ‘tis usurped. Alack the heavy day,
That I have worn so many winters out
And know not now what name to call myself.” (IV.i.266-270)
The highpoint—or, perhaps, lowpoint—of Richard’s disintegration, of his perplexity as to what name to call himself, comes at the public renunciation of the crown which Bolingbroke forces upon him.
Bolingbroke: “Are you contented to resign the crown?”
Richard: “Ay, no; no, ay; for I must nothing be.” (IV.i.209-210)
And then Richard proceeds to “undo myself,” (IV.i. 212) to formally renounce the identity that has already been taken from him so that, “nothing have” (IV.i. 225), he becomes nothing.
Richard’s “Ay, no; no, ay” is every bit as complex as Hamlet’s more famous “to be or not to be.” On one level, it suggests the indecisiveness that is a mark of his personality. He knows he must give up the crown, but at the same time resists doing so: Yes I will, no I won’t; no I won’t, yes I will. It’s as if Richard is an addict who, at an intervention, wants both to deny his condition and bow to hard reality.
But keep in mind that Shakespeare meant his words to be heard by audiences. The words “ay” and “I” are, of course, homophones. So on another, deeper level, Richard is confirming in his official renunciation his loss of identity: I, no; no, I = I am nothing; nothing is I. His cry is the deathknell of selfhood. Even though Richard’s earlier soliloquies should’ve prepared us for it, the impact of his terse declaration of nothingness is breathtaking. When in the same scene Richard shatters a mirror and, along with it, his reflected image—“There it is, cracked in an hundred shivers” (IV.i. 300)— his interior fragmentation is complete. Richard the king is depositus. So is Richard the man.
Richardus Renatus
After his formal renunciation of the crown, a broken Richard is dragged through the streets of London, pelted with offal by a jeering mob. Taken to West Yorkshire, he is imprisoned in the dungeon of Pomfret Castle. It’s there, shortly before his murder, where he experiences a transformative rebirth of sorts. Richard, writes Shakespearean scholar Marjorie Garber, “speaking now in soliloquy without even a silent onstage audience, articulates the power of language to contravene perceived reality.”8
This is, I think, a brilliant insight. Richard’s transformation, the advent of which was hinted at in the eloquence of his earlier soliloquies, is one in which he transcends the confines of both his egoistic self, “encagèd” within the “hollow crown,” and his prison’s physical walls. He does this through the power of imagination.
Coleridge understood imagination in two interrelated “primary” and “secondary” senses. The first is “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am,” an intuitive tapping into God’s creative energy. The second, an “echo” of the first, is the exercise or application of the divine creativity to which we’re connected. It “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create.” Secondary imagination, in other words, is a transcending of the given, a liberation from the here-and-now—what Coleridge means by dissolving, diffusing, and dissipating—that births new creations.9 It’s what Garber is getting at when she writes about the power of language “to contravene perceived reality.”
Even though we throw around the word “imagination” in ordinary parlance, using it to describe mental events ranging from pleasant daydreaming to morbid anxiousness, Coleridge is pretty clear that very few of us actually know how to be creatively imaginative. We confuse it with “fancy,” which is nothing more than the static rearrangement of memory’s “fixities and definites.”10 There’s no contravention of reality here but, on the contrary, just an embrace of the status quo. Real imagination, genuinely creative transcendence, liberation from the hard edge of facticity, is the prerogative of the poet, the mystic, the visionary.
And, in Richard’s case, of a deposed and imprisoned king.
Most of Richard’s life was fanciful in the Coleridgian sense. His insulated understanding of self revolved around the “fixities and definites” of royalty and privilege. But when all that was taken away from him, when the constants with which he’d surrounded and defined himself disappeared, the ground was cleared for a rebirth, a transitioning from fancy to imagination. In realizing that he has no fixed self, Richard is freed to become someone who can imaginatively create and recreate himself in any number of roles. He breaks through the given to envision new horizons.
The possibility of such an imaginative rebirth comes to him while he has been
“studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world,
and for because the world is populous
And here is not a creature but myself,
I cannot do it. Yet I’ll hammer it out.” (V.v.1-5)
In hammering it out, Richard imaginatively begets an entire world of people, “in humors like the people” (V.v.10) of the real world. His imaginary folk are restless, fluid, unfixed: “no thought is contented.” (V.v.11) So is he. Sometimes he imagines that he’s able to tear through the stone walls of the dungeon with his bare fingernails; at other times, he realizes that escape is impossible, but consoles himself that “many have and others must sit there” (V.v.27) as well.
“Thus play I in one person many people,
And none contented. Sometimes am I king.
Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,
And so I am; then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better when a king.
Then am I kinged again, and by and by
Think that I am unkinged by Bolingbroke,
And straight am nothing.” (V.v.31-38)
Unexpectedly, in the midst of his disgrace, psychological distress, and physical discomfort, Richard has discovered a freedom that he never knew. Before his overthrow, he was in fancy-bondage to his role as king, pushed hither and yon, even though he labored under the illusion of control, by the cares, ambitions, and excesses befitting his royal identity. Now that he has and is nothing, he can creatively imagine himself in any number of roles, some pleasant, some distressing, but all transcending the givenness of his dungeon existence. He has become, according to Coleridge, a poet. For what else is poetry but an envisioning and yearning for what lies just out of reach but which is experienced as more real, more vital, more fulfilling, than one’s actual surroundings?
In the short time remaining to him in the play, Richard will experience a couple more flashes of resentment at his fate. Who wouldn’t?
“I was not made a horse,
And yet I bear a burden like an ass,
Spurred, galled, and tired by jauncing Bolingbroke.” (V.v.93-95)
But for the most part, he is content with his discontent. He has reached the maturity, born of honesty and self-reflection, to know that a certain restlessness is a more authentic way of being human than complacency or egoistic fixity, and he is satisfied with that insight.
“Whate’er be,
Nor I nor any man, that but man is,
With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased
With being nothing.” (V.v.38-41)
King though he may now be, Bolingbroke—Henry IV—will never reach this kind of self-clarity. He has no gift for poetic imagination. This no-nonsense, matter-of-fact man is all fancy. One senses no interiority, nor even any curiosity, in him. Immediately after Richard exiled him, Bolingbroke’s father, John of Gaunt, tries to comfort him by encouraging him to transcend his situation by imaginatively recreating it.
“Look what thy soul holds dear, imagine it
To lie that way thou goest, not whence thou com’st.
Suppose the singing birds musicians,
The grass whereon thou tread’st the presence strewed,
The flowers fair ladies.” (I.iv.292-296)
But stolid Bolingbroke is having none of it. His father’s counsel strikes me as ridiculous.
“O, who can hold a fire in his hand
By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?
Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite
By bare imagination of a feast?
Or wallow naked in December snow
By thinking on fantastic summer’s heat?” (I.iv.300-306)
No, there’s no poetry in Bolingbroke’s unimaginative soul, even though he will be king. Better, far better, to be Richard who, despite all his travails, has peered behind the veil of ego and therein discovered a liberating expansiveness. Who knows where it might’ve taken him had he lived longer?
###
Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), p. 17.
In saying this, I remain neutral about Bloom’s insistence that Shakespeare “invented” our understanding of the self. My more modest suspicion is that Shakespeare gave voice to and hence awakened and clarified what we moderns think about the self.
I forgo judgment on the comedies since, alas, I’m unable to appreciate them. This is a great but, at this late stage of my life, apparently irremediable failing on my part.
This isn’t to say that Shakespeare’s exploration of the theme of transformation is unique to Richard II. But I find his treatment of it here particularly moving.
Richard reigned from 1377 to 1399, ascending to the throne when he was ten years old. The historical events that inspired Shakespeare’s play occurred between 1397 and 1399. For dramatic purposes, the playwright collapses them into a shorter time frame.
Richard will later repeat, although querulously, the same claim as a gesture of defiance when confronted by Bolingbroke’s superior forces.
If we be not [thy lawful king], show us the hand of God
That hath dismissed us from our stewardship,
For well we know no hand of blood and bone
Can gripe the sacred handle of our scepter,
Unless he do profane, steal, or usurp […]
Yet know, my master, God omnipotent,
Is mustering in his clouds on our behalf
Armies of pestilence, and they shall strike
Your children yet unborn and unbegot,
That lift your vassal hands against my head
And threat the glory of my precious crown. (III.iii.79-83, 87-92)
Mark van Doren especially argues for this position in his rather tepid Shakespeare (New York: Doubleday, 1939). But see also Harold C. Goddard’s much better The Meaning of Shakespeare, Vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), Bloom’s insightful Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and Marjorie Garber’s superb Shakespeare After All (New York: Anchor Books, 2004), a book I heartily recommend.
Garber, Shakespeare After All, p. 265.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (Boston: Crocker & Brewster, 1834), p. 177.
Ibid.
“I wouldn’t be king for a hundred pounds, says Alice .” A.A. Milne.