Some thoughts on the performance of Richard II’s monologue, Act 3, Scene 2.

I wrote this up when performing this monologue for an exercise. Not gonna lie, it was super fun.

Here is the speech (it’s hefty, but it’s a good one!):No matter where; of comfort no man speak:

• 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 humour’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?

At this point in the play, Richard has received all the bad news he can handle. Coming off two long speeches filled with the bravado of majesty, Richard’s whole world has suddenly collapsed around him. Between this monologue and the last, he discovers that York has joined Bolingbroke’s forces (who, he thought, had “power enough to serve our turn”). The Welsh, thinking him dead, have dispersed and joined with Bolingbroke. And perhaps the worst – the people have turned against him, not just the men but women and children ranting in the street, bearing arms against his crown. For a moment, he believes even his most loyal followers – Bushy, Bagot and Green – have turned against him, but then he learns even worse news – though they remained loyal to the end, they are dead. He has no army, no supporters save the three men in the room with him. He is, for the first time, alone.

This is a thought that never crossed his mind. It never seemed possible for the king to be alone. Richard has placed all his faith in the divine right of kingship. Indeed, his last two monologues centered on how that right could never be broken; how the very earth would rise up to protect a divinely appointed king. But now, he realizes, that will not happen. None of it will happen. Death and deposition are imminent.

So in this moment, this private moment between “heaven still guards the right” and what we have come to call the “Really?!” speech in the next scene (where Richard stands on the castle wall and musters up the only power he has left: rhetoric), we see him realize for the first time the exact nature of his predicament – and, flowing from that, we see him confront his own humanity and ultimately, mortality.

Up until the moment of the first line (No matter where! Of comfort no man speak) I am still trying to think of a way out of this mess – is there anyone else I can appeal to? I drop out of the conversation between Carlisle, Scroop and Aumerle completely, and when I yell at them, it is a surprise. Thus begins my progression of thoughts. It does not matter where the forces are, we cannot fight against them. The situation is hopeless and therefore we will not speak of comfort, and here is what we will talk about: death, graves, the ground. No longer is the earth my triumphing warrior but just dirt in which to lay my all-too-mortal body. This is the discussion which continues the thought from “what will we talk about?” to “what will we do?” which brings us to the discussion of wills and a realization of loss, of not-having for once, of the idea that perhaps this is deadly serious. This is the first time I have ever come up against the idea of nothing, of not having anything to leave after my death. When I first say the word “deposed” and liken it to the fact that “our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke’s” it is slowly becoming clear to me that another man has the power I believe was given to me by God, never to be rent asunder.

I continue the imagery of my own death until my thoughts transition entirely to the “sad stories of the death of Kings” and here, I sit. On the ground. This is something no king has surely ever done before, at least to my knowledge, and I know the impact of it full well. Still, I want my comrades to sit with me, I want to try out this feeling of being equals with mortal men, but they do not. They don’t know what to do with this strange, un-kingly behavior I am trying on for the first time.

It is easy for me here to fall into self-pity, and since my comrades do not choose to sit with me, I tell the stories of the dead kings to myself. It begins as an exercise in humor, but with the line “All murdered” I realize that the only thing the divine right of kingship has given me is the right to go howling to my grave. These stories I have been telling are not funny, and not designed to encourage my own self-pity. They are warnings I should have paid attention to but did not, in my pride and glory, and now I can take no comfort in them, extract no lesson to learn from what they have tried to teach.

I am lost and do not know what to do with this information, this realization. My world has begun to crumble around me – and though it has been doing so for a long time, this speech remains important because this is the first time I am realizing it. The kingly imagery that has always surrounded me becomes tangled with death and I enumerate it beautifully with the lines “For within the hollow crown / That rounds the mortal temples of a king / keeps death his court.” First, the crown never before to me seemed hollow and continues to hold huge power over me and others for the rest of the play, but in this moment it is nothing, a mere prop, and so I take it off and look at it as if truly seeing it for the first time, and seeing it worthless.

Second, I pair the words “mortal” and “king” as if to reaffirm to myself that these two words do in fact go together. Then death becomes the king, for in my crown keeps death his royal court, and my royal court is completely eclipsed by it. Death’s court is the multitudes outside my door; my court is the three men sitting around me.

So I give up. I tell them to forget me as king, to throw away the ceremonious duties and rites of tradition that had always accompanied me as such. But I do not even – cannot even – look at them while I say this. I know it in my heart to be true, that I am soon to be deposed, soon to become just another mortal man and soon after that to die, but I cannot look at my loyal comrades when this realization comes to me. So instead, I turn inward for a moment, but then I give my thoughts to the audience, for it is to them truly that I want to make this revelation clear. When I say, “for you have but mistook me all this while” I am talking to them – they, the audience, have mistaken their kings and in doing so have mistaken me. The last three lines are directly to them – it is like the audience that I live with bread, feel want, taste grief, need friends. They are the ones who are wrong in calling me a king. I never stand up during this speech, after I have sat.

The Richard I am is a Richard completely stripped of everything that made him Richard up until this point. When he puts those things back on for the “Really?!” speech, they are a shallow imitation of what they used to be – a hollow crown, one Richard does not believe in. The “Really?!” speech is his last attempt to regain his kinghood, but he knows it is in vain, because I have gone through the steps of breaking that kinghood down in a way no Richard following can hope to piece back together in any meaningful way.