BOLINGBROKE Pale trembling coward, there I throw my gage,
Disclaiming here the kindred of the King,
And lay aside my high blood’s royalty,
Which fear, not reverence, makes thee to except.
If guilty dread have left thee so much strength
As to take up mine honour’s pawn, then stoop.
By that and all the rites of knighthood else
Will I make good against thee, arm to arm,
What I have spoke or thou canst worse devise. (1.1.69-77)
Bolingbroke is supremely indifferent, unruffled, steadily insulting, as he takes this confrontation to the next stage of its ritual. Mowbray is pale and trembling because he is a coward, his pallor contrasted with Bolingbroke’s high blood, which is high because of his royal connections and descent but also because he is full of courage and anger; his blood is up and he is resolved. (Compare Hamlet: ‘the native hue of resolution’ – red – ‘sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought’ – white.) I’m happy to set aside my royal blood, my kinship with the King; you’re only making a big deal of that out of fear, rather than any reverence or respect for the King’s person and my rank and connections. Then he needles away again: if you’ve got any strength left, after it’s been sapped by your guilty dread (like blood draining from the face) – then bend down and pick up mine honour’s pawn. (Are you even capable of that?) And if you do, by that token, and all the other courtly rituals of knighthood, honour, and chivalry: I’ll take you on, prove my claim, arm to arm. I will defend and affirm the truth of my words—that you are a traitor. Stoop is important too: the two men are face to face, brow to brow, arm to arm; King Richard, presumably, is enthroned on a dais, a little above the level of the stage. Bolingbroke is going to make Mowbray stoop, lower himself. That vertical axis, and movement up and down it, will be central to the play. (Another similarity with Romeo and Juliet, but whereas that play is dominated by elevation, Richard II, unsurprisingly for a tragedy concerned with the fall of princes, often stages and uses the language of descent. Proxemics, not just who’s up and who’s down, but their positions relative to others, are key.)
There I throw my gage, at the top of this speech. This is going to come back and back, not just in this scene but later in the play. It’s probably a glove, a standard chivalric token. Difficult to find equivalents in modern dress, not least because of the glove’s close relationship to the hand, to ideas of contracts, handshakes, and as a kind of opening salvo of future combat – a blow, a prosthetic body-part flung to the ground in earnest of more violence. The gage is a pledge; it has the force of an oath, a promise, a threat. In this play, gloves as gages form part of a larger circulating economy of bodies and things and words, not least the crown and the words (and oaths) of a king. And an audience in the 1590s would still be entirely familiar with such rituals, or at least with the idea that gloves could be exchanged and given as gifts and tokens; they were a very common gift (to a visiting dignitary; between courting lovers; as favours at weddings). (I have much, MUCH more to say about gloves, not least in Richard II, and there are fortunately many more gloves to come! and also a whole book about that sort of thing…)
