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Article Excerpt
IN RICHARD II SHAKESPEARE is as unsystematic in his use of history as he is systematic in his use of poetic imagery and sustained metaphor. Students of the play have been efficient in developing critical vocabularies that express the latter fact and obscure the former. Madeline Doran noted in 1942 that Richard's character "is exhibited directly. He is a poet and he speaks poetically"; the play's images "tend to be direct or explicit, complete, correspondent, point by point to the idea symbolized, and separate from one another" (113). (1) The play's critical and theatrical traditions have borne Doran's argument out. (2) The feeling of completeness and coherence a reader or spectator gets from the poetry of Richard II is probably what makes it seem trivial, or at least inconsiderate, to point out the way in which virtually everything in this history play--from its elision of the majority of Richard's reign, (3) to its imagining of Woodstock, (4) to its representation of Richard's queen, (5) to its hyperbolically poetical representation of Richard himself--is a historical travesty. (6) In this play we get almost no sense of the Richard we find in Holinshed, and much less of the Richard we find in modern historical scholarship, such as Anthony Steel's or Nigel Saul's biographies of the king. Even putting factual and chronological details aside, Shakespeare gives us a Richard who is always, or can always be, solely to blame for his troubles--not a Richard who was repeatedly hemmed in by competing factions from the moment, in his early youth, of his father's untimely death; nor a Richard whose work in maintaining England's status as a European power was continually hampered by the fallout from the fiscal and military crises of the end of Edward III's reign; nor a Richard who was throughout much of his reign capable of cultivating strong internal political alliances (notably, in contrast to Shakespeare's play, with Gaunt) and of imagining and carrying out ambitious foreign policy aims (notably in his first Irish campaign). (7)
In the following pages I attempt, in three movements, to create a critical vocabulary for the study of Shakespeare's history plays and Holinshed's Chronicles that does justice to Shakespeare's disregard for written historical fact, and that goes beyond construing the relationship between Shakespeare and Holinshed as one of dependence, where Shakespeare's "departures" from his "sources" ultimately reinscribe the importance of those sources. In the first movement, which is as much the demonstration of a critical method for analysis of historical drama as it is an argument about Richard II, I argue that Shakespeare's thinking about Richard II and his use of Holinshed are imprecise: (8) understanding, or at least imagining, Shakespeare's work in this way makes it possible to see how he and Holinshed are working with the same material for purposes that are not merely entirely different, but largely unrelated. I begin by locating the traces of some of Shakespeare's imprecise, impressionistic thinking in some labored, underdeveloped poetic images that seem to me occasionally to jut out awkwardly in this densely patterned, highly symmetrical play. The palimpsestic metaphorical pattern I focus on is one that has largely gone unnoticed as such in the prolific imagery-criticism of Richard II: a pattern of images involving food and eating. I argue that these undeveloped, or awkwardly introduced, or clumsily artificial images are symptomatic of a form of compression analogous to that which results from the deliberate effacement of historical narrative for the sake of theatrical effect. In the images of food and eating that occur only erratically throughout the play, we see Shakespeare attempting, not always quite successfully or elegantly, to compress what he sees-and what we might see--as essential material from an antecedent text into a poetic shorthand, conferring upon it the force and energy of lyric.
In the essay's second movement, I address specifically some critical language that is conventionally brought to bear on discussions of Shakespeare's use of antecedent historical writings. My goal here is to describe how some of the entrenched habits we have developed in our reception and interpretation of medieval (and early modern) history as it has been digested by Shakespeare are simultaneously enabled by and oddly indifferent to Shakespeare's disregard for historical "facts." The essay's final movement works to trope, in the terms of the essay's first movement, and to meditate upon the implications of the way in which the historical vacuum at the center of Richard IFs poetic and theatrical structure has been peculiarly generative of specific but illusory historical meanings. While the processes of interpretation and reception I describe in this movement can probably be seen to be at work with respect to any early modern history play, Richard II is a usefully vivid representative case in that its particularly casual treatment of the monarch's reign has meant that its function in both source-study and New Historicist criticism has largely depended on various kinds of evidentiary absence being converted into crucially signifying presence. A subtitle for this essay might be found in the literary, theatrical, and interpretive processes its analysis works to describe: the transubstantiation of Holinshed.
In 3.2, Richard asks the land itself to revolt against Bolingbroke. "Feed not thy sovereign's foe, my gentle earth," he implores at line 11, "Nor with thy sweets comfort his ravenous sense" (12). (9) The word ravenous has an echo in Holinshed's excoriation of the usurping Bolingbroke: (10)
What vnnaturalnesse, or rather what tigerlike crueltie was this ... being so neerelie knit in consanguinitie, which ought to have moued them like lambs to haue loued each other, wooluishlie to lie in wait for the distressed creatures life, and rauenouslie to thirst after his bloud ... (869, emphasis added) (11)
At something like the center of the play--in the middle of the middle act, at the moment Richard has come home to an England entirely changed from when he left it--these lines are a crucial expression of the play's sporadic but ongoing concern with consumption and eating. Sweet is a word with largely Lancastrian force throughout the play. Bolingbroke relishes its aggressive ambiguity, as we see perhaps most vividly in 4.1 when he reacts to the news of Mowbray's death: "Sweet Peace conduct his sweet soul to the bosom / Of good old Abraham!" (104-5). (12) Bolingbroke is the first to use sweet in the play, at 1.3.68, and he and his father control the metaphor through 2.1--see also 1.3.236, 1.3.306, and 2.1.13. At the end of 1.3, Bolingbroke refers to England at his banishment as the "Sweet soil ... / My mother and nurse that bears me yet" (306-7); in the passage from 3.2 with which I began, Richard and the play's poetic patterning conspire in an attempt to deprive Bolingbroke of his consuming power, turning the earth into a barren mother or poisonous nurse.
The range of possible meanings comprised within Richard's sweets--its primary sense is quite general, as in OED 3a, "something that affords enjoyment or gratifies desire," but it also carries the proximate senses "that which is sweet to taste" (la), "sweetness of smell" (6), "a sweet sound" (5a), and even possibly "a beloved person, darling, sweetheart" (4)--makes the subsequent ravenous particularly apt; what is being emphasized, or even foreshadowed, is how Bolingbroke might not have returned merely to take what is "his own," but all that the land (both as nation and as earth) can produce or offer. Shakespeare expresses an irony similar to that which we see in the passage where Holinshed uses rauenouslie, and a typical way of understanding the echo would be as a form of imaginative concord: Shakespeare "follows his source." Another, and I think more accurate, way of looking at it is as an opportunistic seizure, where Shakespeare forcibly enlists the almost inevitable result of Holinshed's conventional wolf-lamb antithesis in a larger and somewhat unwieldy system of images that act as a lyric gloss on Holinshed's historical narrative. The impetus toward ravenous can be seen to have its beginnings in the way sweet--a very common poetic word whose culinary connotations are far from inevitable--gets into the poetry of Richard II: by means of an unwieldy alimentary metaphor early in the play. In 1.3, after bidding farewell, before the imminent duel, to his cousin Aumerle, Bolingbroke turns to his father: "Lo, as at English feasts, so I regreet / The daintiest last, to make the end most sweet" (67-68). Even if one knows about the pattern of alimentary images that is going to develop out of these lines, it's hard to see what Shakespeare hopes to achieve with this odd metaphor, in which John of Gaunt is conceived as a dainty confection. Bolingbroke's obscure and self-important regreet is probably an opportunistic seizure of a word from Marlowe, which Shakespeare is using both for its grandiose feeling and for the way it sonically and metrically prepares for a rhyme with sweet. (13) The lines are stumbling hastily toward sweet because one path of Shakespeare's...
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