“I Live With Bread Like You”: Forms of Inclusion in Richard II

Aaron Landau
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
alandau@bgumail.bgu.ac.il

Landau, Aaron. "'I Live With Bread Like You': Forms of Inclusion in Richard II". Early Modern Literary Studies 11.1 (May, 2005) 3.1-23 <URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/11-1/richard.htm>.

1. When it comes to Shakespeare, Richard Helgerson’s very fine discussion of the English history play and its contribution to the early modern project of forging English nationhood ends up having a fairly familiar ring to it: in comparison with the history plays written for the companies under Henslowe’s control, and increasingly over the decade of the 1590s, Shakespeare’s histories grow more exclusive and elitist; they concentrate chiefly on upper-class figures and leave out popular characters, perspectives, and traditions; ideologically, they are “concerned above all with the consolidation and maintenance of royal power” (1). In a recent critique of this position, Jean Howard has taken exception, not so much to Helgerson’s vision of Shakespeare as a gentrified author (although she does suggest in passing that Helgerson largely overstates Shakespeare’s elitism and conservatism), but most fundamentally to Helgerson’s vision of the so-called Henslowe dramatists as inclusive and progressive: their histories, she argues, are not more inclusive than Shakespeare’s; they are as exclusive, only in different ways (2).
   
   
2. In this paper I should like to propose an alternative to both these assessments, one that will hopefully be more case-sensitive, so to speak, to the subtle, intricate, and roundabout ways in which popular voices and perspectives form part of Shakespeare’s historical imagination. Instead of discussing here the entire body of the histories, a task that is beyond the scope of this paper, I will choose one play, Richard II, that is concerned almost entirely with dynastic struggles within the aristocracy and leaves very little room for actual representations of non-aristocratic characters. By showing that even this play, ostensibly the most exclusive and elitist in the genre, is substantially more inclusive and popular than it might at first appear, I would like to suggest that Shakespeare’s take on English history is as a rule popular and inclusive, although the particular forms of inclusion differ depending on changing conditions and circumstances (3). If in the beginning of the decade, in 2 Henry VI (c.1590-2), Shakespeare could still afford to stage popular revolt directly and to give explicit, if largely unfavorable, expression to various popular claims, the civic disturbances that shook London during the summer of 1592 and, even more severely and protractedly, during 1595-6 would have induced him to incorporate popular perspectives within Richard II in less explicit, if arguably more radical, ways (4). Thus, the specter of popular revolt keeps haunting Richard II, notwithstanding the strictly aristocratic aspect of its many intrigues and conspiracies. When the Welsh Captain informs Salisbury that his forces have fled, he slips from what is supposed to suggest a typically Welsh brand of mysticism and superstition to a more straightforward analysis of class conflict and social change:

   Rich men look sad and ruffians dance and leap,
   The one in fear to lose what they enjoy,
   The other to enjoy by rage and war.
   These signs forerun the death of fall of kings.
                                                   (2.4.12-15) (5)

   Similarly, when Scroope informs Richard of the rebellion against him, he moves from a very brief mention of Bullingbrook’s own agency, somewhat depersonalized in terms of his overflowing rage which covers the land with steel, into a detailed description of a general, popular uprising:

   Whitebeards have armed their thin and hairless scalps
   Against thy majesty, boys with women’s voices
   Strive to speak big, and clap their female joints
   In stiff unwieldy arms against thy crown.
   Thy very beadsmen learn to bend their bows
   Of double-fatal yew against thy state.
   Yea, distaff women manage rusty bills
   Against thy seat. Both young and old rebel
   And all goes worse than I have power to tell.
                                            (3.2.112-120)
   

3. For spectators watching this play in 1595, these words would have suggested, albeit hyperbolically, the reality of mounting social unrest and rising popular protest outside the theaters. These were years of severe economic and social crisis known by historians as the “crisis of the 1590s”. The decade saw a disastrous series of harvest failures (1593-7) followed by soaring food prices, general economic depression, widespread poverty, and high mortality rate from starvation and plague. Among the violent reactions to the recession were numerous food, enclosure, and anti-alien riots conducted by apprentices, wage-laborers, unemployed soldiers, and other discontented members of London’s working classes (6). The years 1595-6 were particularly turbulent. Lower-class hostility towards the city authorities had been bottling up since early June 1595 (7). Later that month, on various occasions, apprentices and youths confiscated stocks of butter and fish supplies that were sold at exorbitant prices in order to sell them at more reasonable rates (8). The Star Chamber’s decision to sentence the apprentices involved in these incidents to be flogged and pilloried, instead of serving as a deterrent, had only caused the situation to escalate. When the apprentices’ sentence was known, no fewer than 1,800 apprentices, convoyed by discharged soldiers, demolished the pillories in Cheapside and Leadenhall and proceeded to build up gallows next to the house of the Lord Mayor in a gesture of defiance and threat. Two days later, a crowd of apprentices gathered at Tower Hill and proclaimed their intention to dispossess the wealthy inhabitants of the city and to win over political control from the governors. This last incident prompted a series of harsh repressive measures such as the enforcement of a state of martial law, intensive police action to track down protestors, and eventually the arrest and execution, by hanging, drawing, and quartering, of five of the demonstrators on July 24 (9). According to the historians Roger Manning and Peter Clark, the disorders of 1595-6 were among the most serious to threaten London up until the Civil War (10).



4. This climate of increasing social unrest and escalating class conflict, invoked in the aforementioned references to a general revolt, permeates Richard II in a variety of other ways as well. The nominally upper-class character of Bullingbrook, for example, occasionally echoes lower-class grievances, most notably, when he re-articulates common apprentice anxieties about the diminishing prospects, given the severe economic recession, of apprentices ever finishing their terms and becoming independent members of their livery companies. When sentenced to exile by Richard, Bullingbrook protests:

   Must I not serve a long apprenticehood
   To foreign passages, and in the end,
   Having my freedom, boast of nothing else
   But that I was a journeyman to grief?
                                      (1.3.270-3) (11)

5. A few lines later Bullingbrook again gives a particularly lower-class twist to his father’s idealizing depiction of his exile in terms of a highly refined, aristocratic journey. Gaunt urges his son to think of the birds as musicians and to conceive of the grass as the carpeted floor of the royal chamber; to imagine the flowers as fair ladies and his own steps as “no more than a delightful measure or a dance” (1.3.281-90) (12). Bullingbrook’s rhetoric, by contrast, puts a suggestively plebeian stress on the inexorable nature of material and bodily deprivation when he flatly dismisses his father’s sentimental call for patience and resignation with a more realistic insistence on the relentlessness of hunger and cold:

   Oh, who can hold a fire in his hand
   By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?
   Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite
   By rare imagination of a feast?
   Or wallow naked in December snow
   By thinking on fantastic summer’s heat?                                
                                        (1.3.293-8).
   

6. David Norbrook perceptively notes in this episode a pronounced shift from “an exclusively aristocratic to a generally national” stance (13), a shift that culminates in Bullingbrook’s concluding exclamation:

   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 banished, yet a true born Englishman. 
                                       (1.3.305-8)

   It is interesting to notice -- especially in view of Helgerson’s claim that in Shakespeare the construction of English nationhood is largely and increasingly exclusive and gentrified -- that in this scene Englishness is, by contrast, very nearly predicated on inclusion: to be ”a true born Englishman” consists of being, or at least knowing what it means to be, also an apprentice, a journeyman, a starveling, a homeless vagrant. The use of “true-born” rather than “free-born” is revealing, since in early modern England the words “free-born” referred principally to the nobly born, or at the most to the propertied, whereas the epithet “true-born” denoted Englishness at large (14). Norbrook associates this all-inclusive sense of nationalism, which stands out as rather anachronistic in the play’s medieval setting, with the celebration, on the part of Essexians among the audience, of a kind of aristocratic constitutionalism (as opposed to royal absolutism) that was advertised as analogous to the national and common good (15). But lower-class spectators in the audience, either unfamiliar with or indifferent towards court factionalism, would have applauded the very inclusion of their own kind of popular discontent in Bullingbrook’s defiant sense of nationalism. Bullingbrook is continuously associated with the popular segments of the population in the course of the play: he is reported to court “the common people” (1.4.24); to throw away reverence on slaves and woo poor craftsmen (1.4.27-8); to lift his bonnet to an oysterwench (1.4.31); to be embraced by a throng of “draymen” (1.4.33); and finally to receive ample support from the multitude on his triumphant entry to London (5.2.5-40). His nationalist stance is thus also to a large extent a provocatively popular one, in addition to, or irrespective of, the “original” political intention behind such populism (16).



7. The “original” intention behind early modern drama is in any case particularly difficult to ascertain and delimit given, among other things, the collective, dynamic, and extremely versatile aspects of early modern performances. One of the working principles of this paper is an intent to look beyond intentionality as a unified and unifying factor, to deliberately do away with the idea of the text as a well-wrought urn with immanent properties, and to ponder instead what bits and pieces of it might have meant to plebeian spectators under specific historical circumstances (17). In the case of Richard II, the popular is indelibly there, not only in the actual persons of players and spectators, or the location and status of the theater, but also, quite audibly, at the level of the text itself; it constantly lurks behind the high-sounding phrases of aristocratic figures, just waiting to be seized upon and brought to full effect at the right moment by an apt actor and a ready audience. Thus, to go back to the text, even a glaringly elitist and exclusive conception of England as that of Gaunt, who relates to it as a “royal throne of kings” and a “sceptered isle” (2.1.40) (18), soon develops into an embittered, anxious complaint against what is quite radically denounced as the country’s disgraceful commodification, its disastrous fall from medieval grace to the crass realities of a market-oriented economy. The supposedly Edenic, heroic, and chivalrous England of the feudal past, the idealized England which Gaunt nostalgically conjures up in the first part of his speech, is at present shamefully reduced, so he protests, to no more than a tradable property, a piece of land that one cannot even denominate as “dear” without having instantly to clarify that the word is meant in a moral, not a financial, sense:

   This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land,
   Dear for her reputation through the world,
   Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,
   Like to a tenement or pelting farm.
   England, bound in with the triumphant sea
   Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
   Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
   With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds,
   That England that was wont to conquer others
   Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
                                         (2.1.57-66)
   

   The marked emphasis on the “dearness” of the land should have suggested to spectators the inflationary waves of the 1590s as well as the harshness of the dearth, both of which were major causes for social unrest in the period (19). The complaint about the country’s having been “leased out  . . . like to a tenement” is an allusion to the gradual changeover from freehold and copyhold (i.e., long-term and relatively secure forms of land tenure) to unprotected and temporary leasehold (20). This was part of an overall transition from a more traditional economy based on customary rights to land and other natural resources to an emergent capitalist economy driven increasingly by competition and the overriding pursuit of profit. These socioeconomic changes were the cause of widespread anxiety, in city and country alike. They had devastating effects on the lower orders of society and were regarded by a wide array of writers as responsible for such ills as famine, unemployment, vagrancy, poverty, as well as social disintegration and moral degeneration at large (21). Gaunt’s jeering commentary on how England “is now bound in . . . with inky blots and parchment bonds” characteristically targets the entire administrative-legal apparatus that was instrumental in this transition; it suggests an hostility towards the law similar to that which, according to Christopher Hill, characterized the common people in their endeavor to defend their customary rights and liberties against upper-class legislation and law enforcement (22). Finally, the nationalistic ring to Gaunt’s lament about a once heroic England that has “made a shameful conquest of itself” would invoke, on top of a general sense of common English nationhood, also a distinctively lower-class variant of chauvinist radicalism, so to speak. Consider, for example, the mixture of radicalism, patriotism, and xenophobia with which Doll Williamson, the carpenter’s militant wife in The Booke of Sir Thomas More (1593-5), incites her fellow working-class men to rise against London’s rapacious and well-to-do aliens: “I am ashamed that free borne Englishmen, hauing beatten straungers within their owne boun[ds] should thus be brau’de and abusde by them at home” (23). Doll’s suggestive use of “free-born” would reinforce the inherent nobility or at least the heroic stature and political agency of London laboring classes in a kind of a “mirror image” version of Bullingbrook’s inclusive reference to himself as “true born”.



8. This brings us straight to the next issue in our discussion: women and their particular contribution to the inclusive social vision of Richard II. It is important to consider, in this respect, Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin’s general thesis concerning the representation of women in Shakespeare’s histories, a thesis that might be regarded as the gender-oriented counterpart of Helgerson’s class-based approach. In Engendering a Nation, Howard and Rackin argue, along lines similar to those of Helgerson, albeit from a strictly feminist perspective, that over the decade of the 1590s Shakespeare’s history plays grow more restrictive and exclusive in the way they represent women. Whereas in the first tetralogy women are granted considerable power as warriors and politicians, in the second tetralogy there are “fewer female characters; they have less time on stage and less to say when they get there. Moreover, virtually all the women we see in these plays are enclosed in domestic settings and confined to domestic roles” (24). To the extent that they are at all allowed to speak and act, women do so only in their capacity as wives, widows, and mothers. This reduction of women to their domestic and familial roles marks, according to Howard and Rackin, a “movement into modernity, the division of labor and the cultural restrictions that accompanied the production of the household as a private place, separated from the public arenas of economic and political endeavor” (25).
   
   
9. The women in Richard II, although admittedly few -- even if not substantially fewer than women in other plays by Shakespeare -- have nonetheless an important role to play in making Richard II more inclusive than it may, prima facie, seem to be the case. Thus, even such a flagrant instance of upper-class bias as the one in which the Duchess of Gloucester exempts the aristocracy, the aristocracy alone, from the obligation to acquiesce to unjust political authority -- even this glaring instance of patrician one-sidedness takes on a surprisingly radical edge when the overall social and cultural conditions of the utterance, not least the gender of the speaker, enter into consideration. The Duchess, urging Gaunt to avenge her husband’s murder, debunks the notion of patience -- the only proper response to oppression according to contemporary orthodoxy -- as both disgraceful and dangerous, binding, if at all, only for the baser sort of people:

   Call it patience, Gaunt. It is despair.
   In suffering thus thy brother to be slaughtered 
   Thou showest the naked pathway to thy life,
   Teaching stern murder how to butcher thee.
   That which in mean men we entitle patience
   Is pale cold cowardice in noble breasts.
   What shall I say? To safeguard thine own life
   The best way is to venge my Gloucester’s death
                                         (1.2.29-35)

   One wonders what the actual effect of these words might have been, words that in theory were delivered confidentially to Gaunt in an aristocratic tête-à-tête but in practice were “overheard” by an audience which to a significant degree comprised of “mean men and women”. Could not these words, when spoken by a common actor who might occasionally, in performance, step out of role and engage, avant la lettre, middle- and lower-class spectators, also highlight the demeaning and deceptive aspects of political conformity, perhaps even incite non-aristocratic spectators to adopt the less compliant approach of their social betters?



10. We do know that history plays were often regarded by contemporaries as capable of inspiring playgoers to imitate the momentous action taking place on stage. In 1594 Thomas Nashe suggested so much when he famously praised English history plays for exhuming “our forefathers’ valiant acts” from “worm-eaten books” and making them available to mass audiences in an act of “reproof to these degenerate effeminate days of ours” (26). In 1595, the turbulent year in which Richard II was composed, a group of London’s aldermen complained to the privy council that plays “are so set forth as that they move wholly to imitation and not to the avoiding of those vices which they represent, which we verily think to be the chief cause. . . of the late stir and mutinous attempt of those few apprentices and other servants, who we doubt not drew their infection from these and like places” (27). In An Apology for Actors (1612),Thomas Heywood fully acknowledged the theater’s capacity to inspire imitation in ordinary spectators but tried to minimize the potential subversiveness of such capacity by emphasizing its beneficial, patriotic uses:

    To turne to our domesticke hystories, what English blood seeing the person of any bold English man presented and doth not hugge his fame, and hunnye at his valor, pursuing him in his enterprise with his best wishes, and as beeing wrapt in contemplation, offers to him in his hart all prosperous performance, as if the Personator were the man Personated, so bewitching a thing is lively and well spirited action, that it hath power to new mold the harts of the spectators and fashion them to the shape of any noble and notable attempt. What coward to see his contryman valiant would not bee ashamed of his owne cowardice? (28)

    Realizing, however, that imitation could also have a radical, destabilizing edge, Heywood insists, later on in the Apology, that the “true use” of plays is to “teach the subiects obedience to their king, to shew the people the vntimely ends of such as haue moued tumults, commotions, and insurrections, to present them with the flourishing estate of such as liue in obedience, exhorting them to allegeance, dehorting them from all trayterous and fellonious stratagems” (29).
    
    
11. But if there is something that Richard II, for one, shows most vividly it is, on the contrary, the dire consequences of obedience and the considerable benefits, if not the very urgency, of rebellion. In a climate of mounting social unrest, with the rich and the powerful popularly portrayed as murderous and predatory and their economic policies often denounced as a direct and deliberate attempt against the lives of the poor, this entire episode would have served to articulate, not only the anti-absolutist sentiments of the aristocracy, but also a growing apprehension among the lower-classes that a patient endurance of injustice is dangerous, self-defeating, and might well prove fatal (30).
    
    
12. Most importantly perhaps for our purpose here, the Duchess’s destabilizing call for political action is intimately connected with her being, aside from an aristocrat, also a disempowered female, a wronged and defenseless widow, with everything that this status implied, culturally and socially. In scripture, the afflicted widow was a stock figure of socioeconomic vulnerability, a very synonym for want and poverty (31). As such the image was frequently used in early modern denunciations of social injustice, for example, in John Ball’s sermon in The Life and Death of Jack Straw (1590-3) where the oppressed widow occupies a central place in the priest’s listing of present-day social iniquities:

    Now tis come to a wofull passe,
    The Widdow that hath but a pan of brasse,
    And scarce a house to hide her head,
    Sometimes no penny to buy her bread,
    Must pay her Landlord many a groat,
    Or twil be puld our of her throat.
                                  (1.1.75-9)
    

13. In general, when it comes to early modern women, aspects of gender and class tend considerably to overlap, since women, however privileged, were still -- qua women -- part of a largely underprivileged female “fourth estate”, so to speak. As such, they were readily associated en masse with social marginality and discontent. In a 1596 letter to Lord Burghley, for example, in which Edward Hext, justice of peace at Somerset, expressed alarm at the rapid increase of rogues and vagabonds, Hext lumps together “the simple citizens and women” as especially sympathetic towards the homeless, whom he regards as a major source of sedition against the rich by “continually buzzing into [the] ears [of the lower-classes] that the rich men have gotten all into their hands and will starve the poor” (32). As Natalie Zemon Davis had shown a while ago -- and Richard Wilson has recently reminded us -- the association of women and lower-class militancy dates back to the distant medieval past when “Maid Marion had queened over rebellious May games long before Robin Hood joined her in the fifteenth century” (33). In the early modern period, “enclosure riots frequently took the form of masked night-time attacks by bearded ‘ladies’,” that is, men disguising themselves as women, since, as John Walter suggests, women were not considered punishable by law (34). We have already seen how the very condition of the Duchess as a widow in distress might have suggested to contemporary audiences specifically socioeconomic forms of oppression far and beyond her aristocratic mien. Her explicit call for active disobedience, notwithstanding her own eventual dependency and helplessness, would have similarly invoked the kind of radical female militancy that informs, for example, the character of Doll Williamson in Sir Thomas More. This heavily censored anti-alien play, which Shakespeare himself eventually helped to revise, shows Doll upbraiding her husband for his excessive docility (1.28-9) and then inciting other working-class men who likewise feel “curbd by dutie and obedience” (1.42) to defend themselves against the aliens with a provocative exhortation: “if you men durst not vndertake it before God we women” will (1.71) (35).
    
    
14. There is no such sense of agency, however, in the case of the Duchess: once her petition to Gaunt is declined, she does not seem to have much choice but to go back home, grieve, and die. But the subversive potential of her initial posture, the fact that one would expect a figure like her to go on ranting, and that her provocative role is somehow cut short -- all these are insinuated in her own statement: “I take my leave before I have begun” (1.2.60). If the Duchess takes her leave at this point, the rest of the play with its numerous instances of active resistance to royal authority actually ratifies and puts into effect her initial position; in that sense she never really leaves stage. To go back to the thesis of Howard and Rackin, the Duchess’s restrictive association with family and domesticity does not imply her effective separation from the public sphere. On the contrary, her subject position as a bereaved wife actually allows her, as we have seen, a uniquely demystifying insight into the concrete, pragmatic workings of politics. Her superior political acumen, superior by far to that of Gaunt, for she anticipates with startling accuracy the dangers lurking in his acquiescence, is inseparable from her own first-hand experience of personal injury.
    
    
15. In general, the play’s insistence, in contradistinction with official Tudor doctrine, that the imperfections of the actual person of the monarch (his body natural) are not purged by the impersonal office of kingship (his body politic) but, on the contrary, that these imperfections fatally contaminate it -- this overall insistence would seem to vindicate and reinforce an embodied and private understanding of politics, one that would qualify as more “female” than “male” by Howard and Rackin’s standards (36). In other words, the conscription of women to the private sphere of body, home, and family, which for Howard and Rackin marks their exclusion from politics in the histories, turns out to be, in Richard II, yet another form of inclusion, for the politics of body and family -- the politics, in other words, of narrow private interests -- turns out to be, in this play, the only politics there is.
    
    
16. I shall not discuss here in great detail the roles of the queen and the Duchess of York, since their particular contribution in this respect does not consist precisely of incorporating elements of popular protest into the play. But I should like to point out that they too offer highly gendered interventions in history that manage to override and undermine, in a variety of different ways, the play’s homogenizing and elitist aspects. In the case of the Duchess, her pleading for the life of her son, Aumerle, serves to mix the “high” genre of history with the “low” genre of domestic drama as well as to subject official absolutist claims to parody and farce: the king may indeed prove to be “A god on earth” (5.3.135), as the Duchess finally affirms that he is, but only on condition that he does exactly as told by his aunt, not just pardoning her son, but repeating the pardon twice. In the case of the queen, her character seems to change considerably depending on whom she talks to. When talking to Bushy and Green early on in the play, she exhibits a remarkable degree of intuition; her intimate premonition of an impending disaster allows her to see through the “public” lies of her courtiers and even to name these professional liars for what they are: flatterers and parasites (2.2.69-70). Interestingly, this superior foresight, grounded in an unfathomable sense of grief that is purely internal, a melancholy that is all her own, is also very carefully gendered, riddled with sexual and natal puns; it culminates in the queen’s description of herself as “a gasping new-delivered mother” who has “woe to woe, sorrow to sorrow joined” (2.2.65-6). The queen’s symptomatic confusion of cause and effect, assuming that her grief has somehow brought about -- “begot” -- the actual reasons for it in reality, is of course not something that court politicians like Green and Bushy, who lie for a living, would care to point out. But it is certainly something that gardeners, who work physically for a living, can bring into sharp relief. Thus, the same queen, whose self-absorption had made to look quite dignified and true to herself in the company of courtiers, appears to be rather hysterical and noticeably out of touch with reality in the company of working-class people.
    
    
17. This brings us to the garden scene, one of the very few occasions in the play on which lower-class characters are allowed to speak directly. That this happens in such a short and marginal scene is admittedly not much. But what a scene this is, for all its shortness! Usually in Shakespeare, whenever commoners are allowed to speak about politics, there is at least some degree of ridicule and clowning involved. Not here. The ridicule, it seems, had been reserved for the high-sounding proclamations of divine right monarchy and the many hyperbolic oaths of patrician figures, all of which are debunked, one after the other, by the actual turn of events. The gardeners’ political commentaries, by contrast, are not just accurate in concrete terms, but also, despite their extensive use of allegory, remarkably free of mystification. In part, the resort to allegory can be attributed to the gardeners’ concern about the (very real) possibility of being overheard and the need therefore to speak in tropes. But even so the allegorical language that they use does not serve to conceal or obfuscate the political dimension of things; on the contrary, it helps them to vividly illustrate what they have to say about politics with familiar, down-to-earth parallels from their own professional lives. Most importantly for our purposes, it invests their analysis with an extra layer of radical signification, bringing social reality more fully into the discussion rather than aestheticizing it away: the first gardener talks of the “oppression” (3.4.31) that results from the fact that some fruits have excessive “prodigal weight” (3.4.31) and the need therefore to give “some supportance” to the weaker “bending twigs” (3.4.32); he also talks about the urgency in this respect of cutting off, in the manner of executioners, “the heads of too-fast-growing sprays / That look too lofty in our commonwealth” (3.4.34-5). “All must be even in our government” (3.4.36), he concludes. All this is supposed to suggest of course, not just horticultural know-how, but politics as well, and not only court politics at that. The very same phrases that at some level refer to aristocratic power struggles also invoke, at another level, typically plebeian concerns: anxiety about growing inequality and diminishing social solidarity; longing for some retributive and reparatory “reign of terror” for the rich, so to speak; and even that most radical of working-class ideals according to which everyone must be equal and everything must be equally distributed in the laborers’ alternative commonwealth. Even after clarifying that the comments he was just making refer specifically to intra-aristocratic affairs, the gardener still uses terms that could easily be appropriated by plebeian spectators to fit their own agenda: he talks, for example, about Richard’s favorites as superfluous branches, deleterious to the whole arboreal economy since they are “overproud in sap and blood / With too much riches” (3.4.59-60).



18. By the same token, the second gardener’s reference to England’s decay in terms of its ruined hedges (3.4.25) -- that is to say, his largely positive view, by implication, of enclosure -- is really a double-edged sword; the passage as a whole, even as it celebrates enclosure as coterminous with orderliness and prosperity, serves to justify lower-class insubordination by putting the blame for it, as much as for the deplorable state of the land at large, on the reckless behavior of England’s ruling classes:

    Why should we, in the compass of a pale,
    Keep law and form and due proportion,
    Showing as in a model our firm estate,
    When our sea-wallèd garden, the whole land,
    Is full of weeds, her fairest flowers choked up,
    Her fruit trees all unpruned, her hedges ruined,
    Her knots disordered and her wholesome herbs
    Swarming with caterpillars?
                                          (3.4.40-7)

19. As James Siemon has perceptively pointed out, “the word enclosure, like the hedges that embody it, functions during the period as an exemplary instance of the heteroglossic -- an arena for the criss-crossing of disputed and competing values and orientations” (37). While attitudes towards enclosure were overwhelmingly negative, their complexity deserves a close and nuanced attention. There is evidence to suggest, for example, that some people “who were attacking enclosure or being defended against it were often themselves engaged in acts of enclosure and in defending enclosures” (38). The Levellers, for instance, named so after their leveling of hedges and fences, were willing to accept enclosures that were “only or chiefly for the benefit of the poor” (39). While large-scale enclosures that caused massive depopulation and/or converted common arable land into pasture were almost universally condemned, enclosure of arable land for improvement, enclosure by agreement, or small-scale enclosure of common land for private use by individual tenants, were widely accepted (40). The disparked fields in the gardener’s description with their disordered knots, unattended trees, and unwholesome weeds -- the visible signs, not of inefficient communal cultivation, but of a complete and utter abandonment to nature -- these fields might have suggested to contemporary audiences, not necessarily the process of putting private land to public use, but rather the conversion of land from tillage to pasture. This most notorious form of early modern agricultural change was frequently associated with such images of decivilization as deserted villages, abandoned fields, and grazing herds of sheep roaming undisturbed where people were once wont to live and work. For example, in his 1587 edition of The Description of England William Harrison remarked about enclosure: “Certes if it be not one curse of the Lord to have our country converted in such sort, from the furniture of mankind into walks and shrouds of wild beasts, I know not what is any”, adding the note, “The decay of the people is the destruction of a kingdom” (41). In 1604, Francis Trigge takes pain to clarify that he does not condemn past enclosure of woodland but rather enclosures which “deca[y] tillage”, those “covetous & new devised Inclosurs, which convert champian and fruitfull soiles, being good arable ground, to pasture; casting halfe a cornefield to a sheepes pasture. And so thereby diminish Gods people, and depopulate townes” (42). In the mid-seventeenth century, in his Inclosure thrown open (London, 1650), Henry Halhead, concludes his extensive discussion of the pros and cons of enclosure with his own retrospective vision of more than half a century of enclosure in terms of general degeneration and decay:

    Oh, that in all the Counties of this Kingdom, there might be a View of all the Villages, and Towns, and Houses of Husbandry, that have been decayed within these fifty-yeers, and the Desolation that hath come by that means, by laying of Lands accustomed to Tillage, and now turned into Pasture-grounds; whereby Idleness, one of the sins of Sodom, is much increased, Men, women, and children, and their progenies be diminished, and Husbandry, the greatest Commodity of the Land (for the furtherance of Man) is decayed, Churches and Market-towns be brought to great ruine and decay, Necessaries for mans use and furtherance be made scarce and dear. (43)

20. As it turns out, it is the destabilizing potential of the first gardener’s speech -- his disruptive reluctance to work, his implicit justification of lower class noncompliance, and finally his critique of socioeconomic and political reality at large -- that alarms his colleague who orders him to “Hold [his] peace” (3.4.48). The somber prospects of surveillance and discipline, the almost “panoptic” feel to this entire scene, are further underscored by the punning exclamation of the eavesdropping queen, “Oh, I am pressed to death through want of speaking”(3.4.72). Pressing to death, the peine forte et dure, was a well-known form of medieval interrogation still largely in use during Elizabeth’s reign (44). What follows is, correspondingly, an intense interrogation that serves to illustrate the kind of trouble that potentially awaited “rude-tongued” men who dared talk of state, be they gardeners or, by implication, playwrights:

    Thou, old Adam’s likeness set to dress this garden,
    How dares thy harsh rude tongue sound this unpleasing news
    What Eve, what serpent hath suggested thee
    To make a second fall of cursèd man?
    Why dost thou say King Richard is deposed?
    Darest thou, thou little better thing than earth,
    Divine his downfall? Say, where, when and how
    Camest thou by this ill tidings? Speak, thou wretch!
                                              (3.4.73-80) (45)
    

21. “[T]hou little better thing than earth” -- these words, which in effect set apart the plebeian character of the gardener from the aristocratic figure of the queen, are in a sense what the play as a whole has finally to say about the monarch himself. And this is where another form of inclusion comes into play. Richard Helgerson has emphasized the extent to which Shakespeare’s histories suppress, increasingly over the decade of the 1590s, the popular heritage of carnival and the jig. But if these are indeed absent from Richard II, there is another equally popular tradition that is central to it: the morality play. This popular and communal tradition, predating the commercialized phase of professional drama, is vital for exposing Richard for what he really is: not a godlike monarch but Everyman. The morality tradition is implicit in the queen’s description, quoted above, of both the gardener and Richard as Adam-like. But it is much more amply and explicitly present in a variety of passages such as the one in which Richard expatiates about the death of kings in characteristically allegorical terms:

                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 monarchise, be feared and kill with looks,
    Infusing him with self and vain conceit
    As if this flesh which walls about our life
    Were brass impregnable, and humoured thus
    Comes at the last and with a little pin
    Bores through his castle wall and farewell king!
                                      (3.2.160-70)

    Or when he moralizes to his wife with similar doses of allegorical personification and residual medievalism:

                                    Learn, good soul,
    To think our former state a happy dream,
    From which awaked, the truth of what we are
    Shows us but this. I am sworn brother, sweet,
    To grim Necessity, and he and I
    Will keep a league till death. Hie thee to France
    And cloister thee in some religious house.
    Our holy lives must win a new world’s crown
    Which our profane hours here have thrown down.
                                          (5.1.17-25)
    

    Or, finally, in prison, when Richard sums up, for himself and for our own sake, what this historical pageant, as well as the pageant of life in general, is really all about:

    Thus play I in one person many people,
    And none contended. Sometimes am I king,
    Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,
    And so I am. Then crushing penury
    Persuades me I was better when a king
                      . . .
                                But whate’er I be
    Nor I nor any man that but man is
    With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased
    With being nothing.
                                     (5.5.31-41)

22. These are just a few manifestations of the morality tradition in Richard II -- a tradition whose presence in the play is in fact so pervasive that it can be said to counterbalance, undermine, and to a large extent overwrite official absolutist rhetoric, if not secular conceptions of politics in general (46). The morality tradition, which was part of a residual cultural legacy shared by many in Shakespeare’s generation and a major source of influence on early modern drama at that, was popular not only in the sense of pertaining to the people, of forming an organic part of their lives by being communal, collective, ritual, and local; it was also popular in the sense of conveying an alternative people’s ideology, in displaying an oppositional and more subversive attitude toward political and economic power, one which had ultimately to do with its egalitarian religious premises, for example, its tendency to concentrate on death, the great leveler, as an incorruptible agent of divine justice “set not by gold, silver, nor riches, / Ne by pope, emperor, king, duke, ne princes”
(47).


23. Thus, when Richard urges his followers to cover their heads and not to mock “flesh and blood / With solemn reverence” (3.2.172), his words, though intended perhaps to provoke a scandalized sense of empathy, also call to mind the leveling rhetoric of generations of religious radicals from John Ball, in the fourteenth century, to Gerrard Winstanley, in the seventeenth century:

                 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?
      (3.2.172-77)  

    King Richard lives with bread, feels want, and tastes grief, “like you” -- these words also resonate with the specific suffering of ordinary spectators in the 1590s, forcefully including lower-class subjects and their material and economic deprivation in the play’s overall representation of English history.
    

Responses to this piece intended for the Readers' Forum may be sent to the Editor at M.Steggle@shu.ac.uk.

© 2005-, Matthew Steggle (Editor, EMLS).