Nora Manca
Dr. Cohen
Ren. 500
29 November 2012
The Land and Kingship in Richard II
Shakespeare’s Richard II is rife with questions about sovereignty and the nature
of kingship. Shakespeare explores to what degree a king owes his rule to the land and
people, or to a royal title, not only in the speech of his characters, but also in subtle,
meaningful embedded stage directions. In Richard II, the visual repetition of touching
the land not only symbolizes the fateful bonds between both Richard II and Henry
Bolingbroke and the English nation, but serves to draw comparisons between the royal
claims of Richard, Henry and Isabel within the framing device of a mythic Albion where
the land and king are sacredly conjoined.
Understanding the allegorical nature of the land touching motif requires first an
examination of the context of each visual repetition of the direction in Richard II. In
both act three, scene two and act one, scene three, the text contains embedded stage
directions to kneel down and touch the earth. In two different film adaptations, one
from 1978 and the other from 2012, the actors playing Richard kneel and stroke the
ground at the beginning of his speech just as the actors playing Henry are standing
when they start to speak, but by “sweet soil, adieu” they are touching the ground. Most
significant, and most central to the theme, is Richard’s overt direction to caress and
command the land of his dominion. In act three, scene two, Richard has just returned
to England by sea and is beginning to fear the loss of his crown and kingship. He kneels
beatifically upon the beach and fondly strokes the earth with his hands: “Dear earth, I
do salute thee with my hand... As a long-parted mother with her child… So, weeping,
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smiling, greet I thee, my earth, /And do thee favours with my royal hands” (3.2: 8, 1011). Richard then calls upon the earth to defend him from his enemies with spiders,
toads, stinging nettles as well as adders in each flower, an admonition that his land shall
grant them no food, no rest, and no comfort. Richard goes on to say that the earth will
sooner have her stones rise as soldiers than see her monarch overthrown. James E.
Berg, in his article “This Dear, Dear Land? ‘Dearth’ and the Fantasy of the Land-Grab in
Richard II and Henry IV,” explains that Richard’s appeal t0 Britain’s creatures and
stones had no expectation of success. The king’s desperation or delusion presses him to
call upon the land as an ally, army, and rocky limb of the body king and attempt to bend
the mortal realm to a will that Richard felt justified by the mandate of Heaven:
In order to be plausible, of course, such invocations of the soil must be
acknowledged metaphor. The King cannot really make immediate use of his
land any more than he can marshal its spiders, toads, nettles, adders and
stones as soldiers, or keep the soil from benefiting his “foe.” Nevertheless,
his own characterization of his speech (and presumably of his gesture) as
“senseless conjuration” suggests that at this moment he is compelled to
attempt the impossible: to get beyond metaphors of possession and literally
to possess the “dear earth (241).
Richard’s deep belief in his divinely appointed royal right to rule and command, and his
current state of desperation leads him to call on England, the land itself, to defend him
as he kneels and touches the ground with his hand. He continues later in act three,
scene two to address Bolingbroke’s rebellion in religious terms:
Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm from an anointed king.
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord.
For every man that Bolingbroke hath pressed
To lift shrewd steel against our golden crown,
God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay
A glorious angel. Then if angels fight,
Weak men must fall; for heaven still guards the right (3.2: 50-58).
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To Richard, no enemy can stand against him for he is the duly ordained hand of God
within the divine land of England, which he himself named “Dowry of Mary” upon his
termination of the Peasants’ Revolt early in his reign. Thus is it almost within
acceptable limits (in Richard’s mind) that Richard would seize the lands of Gaunt, for all
of English land must belong to the King before all others and above all other titles.
James Phillips states in “The Practicalities of the Absolute: Justice and Kingship in
Shakespeare’s Richard II”
It is not as a tyrant that Richard believes himself above the law. Rather… his
understanding of his rule has its place in the long ethico-political history of
the absolute and the frustrated attempts at its accommodation (1).
Richard sees himself not just as royal ruler, but as a truly divine King, who nurtures the
land and breathes life into it as a mother would a child. The core belief behind Richard’s
sureness is that he, and no other, has the essential right to wear the crown of England.
Themes of the monarch conjoined with the land and monarch as ruler by divine
right would have been familiar to the audiences at Shakespeare’s performances, and
evidence suggests the historical Richard II may have had a similar belief in the dual
bodies of the king and the divine right to rule. Richard had the Wilton Diptych
commissioned; a small two paneled painting depicting Richard II kneeling in front of
the Virgin Mary holding the infant Jesus surrounded by Angels and Richard’s patron
Saints. Judith Bumpus describes an interesting find during the restoration of the
Wilton Diptych in “A Medieval Enigma: The Regal Image of Richard II and the Wilton
Diptych”
Under enormous magnification a tiny painting came into view within the orb
on top of the banner in the right-hand panel. It shows a ship on a silver sea
and, beyond, an island capped with trees and a white, twin towered castle
surely a schematic representation of England…the new information seemed
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to offer a fresh account of Richard's belief in him as divinely elected, holding
England in trust (1-2).
As a study of sovereignty and English identity, opposite Richard stands Henry
Bolingbroke. As a character who embodies not only a competing view of kingship, but
his own connection to the land as reinforced by the land touching motif, Henry serves to
draw parallels and comparisons between the two kings. In fact, the first time an
audience would see someone kneeling, touching, and speaking to the earth in Richard II
is in act one, scene three when Henry Bolingbroke has just been banished from England.
As Henry’s father, John of Gaunt is encouraging him and leading him away, Henry stops
and says farewell to England. Like Richard, Henry identifies the ground he touches not
just as earth or soil, but England. Henry’s does not direct his speech to the country at
large, as an abstract concept, but he addresses it to England’s soil personally, the ground
itself, and calling it his mother and his nurse.
Then, England's ground, farewell; sweet soil, adieu;
My mother, and my nurse, that bears me yet!
Where'er I wander, boast of this I can,
Though banish'd, yet a trueborn Englishman (1.3: 269-272).
While Richard speaks as the direct appointee of Heaven and inheritor to a divine
lineage, Henry raises the concept of Englishness as grandeur with which to cloak
himself. A national pride in English identity is a powerful message to place in Henry’s
mouth in the moment he forges his metaphysical bond with the land. Unlike Richard,
who sees himself as lord of the earth and refers to the earth as his child, Henry calls the
earth his mother and his nurse. Henry understands how the earth nourishes him, and
bears him in a way that Richard does not.
The final instance of the fated touch to the land comes not from either King, but
from the young Queen caught between their warring factions. In a scene rich with
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imagery of England as a garden and the ideal King as a constant gardener, more allegory
than history play, Richard’s Queen Isabel and her ladies overhear the Gardener and
some servants talking about Richard’s overthrow and how he should have managed his
country like one would a garden. The allegory even goes so far as to call England a
garden:
…as in a model, our firm estate,
When our sea-walled garden, the whole land,
Is full of weeds, her fairest flowers choked up,
Her fruit-trees all upturned, her hedges ruin'd,
Her knots disorder'd and her wholesome herbs
Swarming with caterpillars? (3.4: 43-48).
The Queen, unaware of the depth of Richard’s plight, confronts the Gardener, calling
him “old Adam's likeness” (line 74), and demands the truth, upon hearing it leaves
crying and cursing the Gardener for bringing her such news. The Gardener, feeling
sorry for the young queen, touches the ground where one of her tears hit the Earth and
vows to plant rue there in her honor. “Here did she fall a tear; here in this place/I'll set a
bank of rue, sour herb of grace…” (105-106). The repetition of the word “here” and the
indication of where the tear hit the ground clearly signal that the Gardener is touching
the ground where the tear hit.
Isabel, like Richard, believes that the king rules by divine right and that Richard,
as king, is the embodiment of England. Her deeply allegorical scene in the garden
provides a priceless moment to identify England with a natural realm, ordered by god
and men, with Kings as patient servants as much as mighty possessors and receivers of
its fruits. Jonathan Bate says in Soul of the Age:
First there is the notion that a monarch has two bodies, his or her own ‘body
natural’ and the ‘body politic’ that he or she (as if literally) embodies. From
the monarch’s two bodies flows the idea of the royal we, the distinctive
custom of one person speaking about him- or herself in the plural (230).
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Continuing with the idea of the monarch in two bodies, Bate later states that it is likely
that Shakespeare “…absorbed various versions of the body/state analogy by osmosis: it
had taken on the force of the commonplace” (231). Here the connection between royal
body and body England is perhaps most strongly felt, with England referred to as ‘she’
by the Gardener, and both the ‘she’ of the garden English and the ‘she’ of the royal
English crown united by the growth of rue. Henry and Richard through their touch and
Queen Isabel through her tear are bound to and communing with the earth. Richard
calls on the earth as his child and defender, Henry as his mother, and most tragically
Isabel with tears for her king and country. As queen of England she had probably
expected to be mother to the next king of England, mother to the next England
embodied in man, but instead will only give birth to a tear to nourish bitter, abortive rue
as she weeps for her king, and laments the triumph of Henry.
In Richard II, the repetition of embedded stage directions to touch the land
makes the moment of the shift between Harry and Richard even more important. The
concept of the King as divine ruler is common across many cultures, but the northern
isles have a particular interest in mythologizing the connection between land and lord in
a deeply cyclical, interdependent way. By reinforcing the motif of land and king,
Richard II presents its discussions of kingship, the right to rule, and the stewardship of
the land through the lens of British myth. An extreme example of the monarch’s two
bodies is the popular British myth of the Fisher King whose wounds of the body result in
his land turning into a wasteland. The king’s land returns to life as he returns to health.
Norris J. Lacy and Geoffrey Ashe with Debra N. Mancoff, while discussing Chétien’s de
Troyes’ The Counte del Graal in The Arthurian Handbook, state, “The Fisher King
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himself had suffered a wound in the thigh or genitals, and his kingdom had at the same
time been transformed into a wasteland.” The original story goes back to ancient Irish
mythology but by Richard’s time, the Arthurian mythos had adopted the Fisher King as
its own. Elizabeth Archibald and Ad Putter state in The Cambridge Companion to the
Arthurian Legend “Celtic folk material provided the motif of the wounded Fisher King
awaiting the Questioner who would heal him and restore his wastelands; Christianity
provided the context” (205). Richard’s England, a garden overrun with “noisome
weeds” that choked out the fruits, the flowers, the commonwealth of his realm, had
become a wasteland to his people. As Robert N. Watson explains in his book Back to
Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance:
Richard II imagines the flora and fauna of England rising up to protect his
kingship, but events then suggest that this naturalizing of power is delusory,
and the grandly rhetorical Richard is driven back into his private
imagination… (373 n. 94).
In Richard’s speech calling on the land to defend him he is calling on the legacy of the
Fisher King and the British mythology of the king being one with the land. Here
Richard has lost that power, and the land, to him, is mute. The people of the land,
rather than creatures and stones, have risen up to Henry’s banner. Just as the true
wound to the Fisher King was as spiritual as the nature of the healing question,
Richard’s wound was not to his physical body but to his body politic, and to his
Kingship.
In Richard II, Shakespeare takes pains to highlight the tragic flaw of Richard as a
king whose hubris destroyed the bond between himself, his Queen, and the land.
Richard’s displays impotent desperation as he commands the stones to defend him, and
recalls echoes of Canute, King of England, ordering back the tides in Henry of
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Huntingdon’s The chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon: Comprising the history of
England, from the invasion of Julius Cæsar to the accession of Henry II. Also, The acts
of Stephen, king of England and duke of Normandy from 1139, edited and translated by
Thomas Forester:
Thou, too, art subject to my command, as the land that I am seated upon is
mine; and no one has ever resisted my commands with impunity. I
command you, then, not to flow over my land, nor presume to wet the feet
and the robe of your Lord (199).
The sea carried on rising as usual without any reverence for his person, and soaked his
feet and legs. Then moving away he said:
Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings for there is
none worthy of the name but He whom heaven earth and sea obey by eternal
laws (199).
Where Canute knew kings had the limits of a mortal man, Richard II, both in history
and in Shakespeare’s play, makes a fatal mistake: he fails to understand that the people
of the land are as much a part of England as the soil. Richard claims divine rule of the
land even as he falls mortally wounded and gives his dying words. Historical Richard
seemed to feel that his power gave him the right to take as much as he wanted, whether
he was taxing his peasants until they revolted or taking lands and possessions that
should have gone to Henry Bolingbroke. In the play, Richard never understood that by
doing so he was losing his right to be king. In “Landholding, Leasing, and Inheritance in
Richard II” William O. Scott claims, “Abuses of what the king possesses—both property
and kingship— threaten the status of kingship itself” (276). Henry Bolingbroke returns
to England and wins the hearts of the people (in large part due to Richard’s injustices
against him) because he understands what Richard does not, that the subjects are just as
much a part of England as the land. In The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern
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England, Jean E. Howard, while talking about the second tetralogy of Shakespeare’s
history plays, claims “…even as performative prowess, rather than blood lineage,
becomes sine qua non (without there is nothing) for kingship.” As Howard says later,
when talking about Richard: “Rather, his gorgeous but ineffective rhetoric and his
histrionic poses reveal the emptiness of legitimate titles severed from pragmatic skills
necessary to invest them with meaning” (141).
Richard’s lack of understanding gives Henry, who has many reasons to be unhappy with
his cousin’s reign (from the unchecked murder of their uncle to Richard usurping his
inheritance) the opportunity to take the crown for himself. Philips explains that Richard
scoffs at Henry’s power over people: “What Richard at first sneers at in Henry is a
competing claim of a different order altogether—it is popularity as the foundation of
political power” (7).
In the end, Richard’s lack of connection to the true England, the people of England
forces him to abdicate his crown. “Shakespeare’s Richard II is an extraordinary study in
what happens to a king after he has abdicated one of his bodies” (Bate 230).
The visual of the repetition of touching the land in Richard II symbolizes how
Richard, Henry and, Isabel connect to the England of mythos and legend where land
and king are united by divine right. Through Richard’s flagrant disregard for his people,
both the nobility and the peasantry, his Kingship is lost to the nearly as legitimate
Henry. The inheritor of the crown, Henry, had forged a sacred respect for the land as he
turned in exile to foreign shores, and upon his return claimed his due and nothing more.
The people rushed then to Henry as the true Englishman and the true English King, and
began to see the rule of kings not as a right of blood privilege, but of popular consent.
As England searched for a national identity in the wake of Henry VIII’s turbulent reign,
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it is perhaps no surprise that The Life and Death of Richard II would inspire such a deep
discussion upon the nature of the English Sovereign. England stood at a crossroads, as
it had done in Richard’s time, between notions of legitimacy, identity, and destiny.
While Richard II is often misrembered as a seditious play, it may be that among the
histories it is the closest to poetic allegory in support of England’s grand identity in a
time when the “frail body” of a Queen would house the entirety of an emerging English
character, one grounded not only in the history of the isles and the unity of their people,
but in the ancient and mythic tradition of a ruler, a land, and a sacred bond forged in
patient, mothering stewardship.