Now is this golden crown like a deep well
That owes two buckets, filling one another,
The emptier ever dancing in the air,
The other down, unseen and full of water […] .
Richard II, IV.1.193-198
In Shakespeare's Richard II, a self-absorbed king banishes a dangerously popular nobleman, Henry Bolingbroke, only for the latter to defy exile and return to depose him.
Some of the finest speeches of the play come from Bolingbroke's father, who regrets voting to banishing his son (III.2), and from Richard himself, who regrets surrendering the crown at the end (IV.1). On one of my umpteenth rereads, I noticed that there were curious parallels between the two scenes. Gaunt and Richard both luxuriate loudly and lyrically in griefs they themselves helped bring about, much to the chagrin of others.
Consider Richard’s question to Gaunt in the latter scene:
Thy son is banish'd upon good advice,
Whereto thy tongue a party-verdict gave:
Why at our justice seem'st thou then to lour?
This perfectly foreshadows Henry’s reaction to Richard’s melodramatic surrender:
I thought you had been willing to resign.
However, they both protest that their consent (to banishment and deposition, respectively) was purely “procedural.” As Gaunt puts it:
You urged me as a judge; but I had rather
You would have bid me argue like a father.
Richard puts it a little differently:
My crown I am [willing to resign]; but still my griefs are mine
This is part of Shakespeare’s aim to highlight, throughout this play, that behind formal, public gestures lies a ‘teeming womb’ of inner tumult, complex emotions. (Paul Cantor has commented on this at length in an excellent series of lectures, particularly with reference to the duel-that-never-was). And a king’s power over this inner sphere is limited.
You may my glories and my state depose,
But not my griefs; still am I king of those.
continues Richard, asserting his right to wallow.
Gaunt, meanwhile, focuses on the fact that though a king can set griefs in motion, transcendental powers forbid the reversal of sad decline.
Thou canst help time to furrow me with age,
But stop no wrinkle in his pilgrimage;
Thy word is current with him for my death,
But dead, thy kingdom cannot buy my breath.
Thus a king’s attempts to alleviate inflicted harm are often misguided and futile. ‘[L]ittle vantage shall [Gaunt] reap’ from the shortening of his boy’s exile; runaway sorrow, heedless of a king’s will, kills the old man much earlier. Later, the new king attempts to comfort Richard by highlighting his own misfortunes:
Part of your cares you give me with your crown
Richard points out that ‘Your cares set up do not pluck my cares down.’ I suspect that this idea of a one-way force deliberately echoes Gaunt's speech about the ‘pilgrimage’ of time, and shows that Richard, toppled from power, finally understands what the old man meant, and warns Bolingbroke. Kings new and old, it seems, do not realise that some mechanisms are not bi-directional. One of the earliest signs that Henry is seduced by the crown, is his simplistic marvelling at Richard’s “power” to reduce his exile- a very different reaction to his father's:
How long a time lies in one little word!
Four lagging winters and four wanton springs
End in a word: such is the breath of kings.
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