BOLINGBROKE          Further I say and further will maintain

Upon his bad life to make all this good,

That he did plot the Duke of Gloucester’s death,

Suggest his soon-believing adversaries,

And consequently, like a traitor coward,

Sluiced out his innocent soul through streams of blood—

Which blood, like sacrificing Abel’s, cries

Even from the tongueless caverns of the earth

To me for justice and rough chastisement.

And by the glorious worth of my descent,

This arm shall do it or this life be spent. (1.1.98-108)

And now the main accusation, which Bolingbroke emphasizes by reiterating that he will make all this, the charge of treason, good upon Mowbray’s bad life, in trial by combat: he did plot the Duke of Gloucester’s death. He wasn’t brave enough to kill the Duke, Richard’s (and Bolingbroke’s) uncle himself: no, he persuaded and encouraged the Duke’s credulous, suggestible, eager enemies, his soon-believing adversaries, to do it. Mowbray is coward as well as traitor. Then, blood, lots of it, onomatopoeically sluiced out of the Duke of Gloucester’s soul, streaming almost hypermetrically, certainly alliteratively. A lot of blood (and the unheard typography helps, the dash streaming, streaking, bleeding towards the margin—actually in the 1597 first quarto it’s the gutter, A3v, and there’s no dash, never mind). As well as being like Abel’s blood, murdered by his brother Cain and crying out from the ground ‘what hast thou done?’ in Genesis 4.10, the streams of blood perhaps, just, echo Faustus’s terrified vision, on the brink of damnation: ‘See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament’. Bolingbroke casts this murder as primal, and also as fratricidal (‘am I my brother’s keeper?’ Cain has just asked; the idea of what it might mean to be a brother’s, or a cousin’s, keeper is a resonant one), and he is accusing Mowbray of sacrilege and sin as much as of murder and treason. But the blood doesn’t just stream: it’s run down into the tongueless caverns of the earth, soaked into the ground, the land, England (another conceit that will return). The land is like a body, its hollow places are mouths and wounds (and wombs), and—in the presence of the murderer, the phenomenon known as cruentation—they cry out for justice and rough chastisement, of which Bolingbroke is to be the instrument. He gives them voice; he speaks in blood. Because he is of royal descent—Gloucester is his kin too, like Richard—and he will do it, or die in the attempt.

Bolingbroke is, carefully and obviously, not mentioning here that Richard was also implicated in Gloucester’s death. But the terms of his accusation—fratricide, terrible, primal crime, divine vengeance, profound consequences for the land itself—gesture at Richard, as if the blood streams and spreads and stains him too even as Bolingbroke explicitly accuses Mowbray.