Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs
The first page of Shakespeare's Richard II, printed in the First Folio of 1623 Current location Folger Shakespeare Library Accession number STC 22273 Fo.1 No.68
Source/Photographer Folger Shakespeare Library Digital Image Collection http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/jh88xi
Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs
This is the beginning of my favourite speech from my favourite play by Shakespeare.
To set the scene...
Richard ll has just arrived back in England after quelling a rebellion in Ireland, only to be met with not one but four pieces of really bad news:
- The banished Henry Bolingbroke who has unlawfully returned to England is building a large army of supporters.
- The Welsh tribes who he was counting on to help him quell the uprising have got tired of waiting for him and, believing from various signs and portents that he has died, have gone home.
- 2 dear friends have been executed by Bolingbroke
- and, most terrible of all, his uncle the Duke of York, who he entrusted with his Kingdom in his absence, has gone over to the enemy.
In response to these crushing blows Richard, who up to now has been a remote and unattractive presence, suddenly becomes human.
He turns to his few supporters and says:
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?
In Richard II, Shakespeare tells the story of the overthrow of a weak and unpopular Monarch who refuses to see that in order to rule he needs the support of his subjects (the most powerful ones at least). It’s Divine Right v Might and might, in the form of Bolingbroke, wins.
But in Shakespeare (as in life) nothing is ever quite that simple and slowly but surely our sympathies are drawn away from the initially hearty and honourable seeming Henry Bolingbroke to the deposed ex king.
Richard begins the play as an arrogant, flippantly cruel aristocrat who takes nothing seriously, but as his fortunes change he becomes more and more human, even lovable (in a self obsessed, tragedy queen kind of a way).
Conversely, as Bolingbroke’s fortunes rise ever higher he appears more and more cunning, ruthless, austere and unattractive .
At the end of the play Richard is dead and Henry is king and we wonder ,now that the precedent of getting rid of an unpopular King has been set, how long will Henry and his decendants manage to keep the throne.
Image- wikicommons
This is The Wilton Diptych - isn’t, it beautiful? You can see it in the National Gallery.
Painted for Richard ll it shows him kneeling on the left being presented to the Virgin and Christ Child by his favourite saints - John the Baptist, Edward the Confessor and Edmund the Martyr.
The BBC recently made a brilliant adaptation of Richard ll as part of the Hollow Crown series. Ben Whishaw (currently James Bond’s Q) played Richard as fey man-child-cross between Marc Bolan and Michael Jackson. Watch it you’ll love it
Here is a clip from you tube
image- my copy of Richard Il - The Oxford Shakespeare
sources
The Oxford Shakespeare Richard ll
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilton_Diptych