RICHARD        How high a pitch his resolution soars!

Thomas of Norfolk, what sayst thou to this?

MOWBRAY     O let my sovereign turn away his face

And bid his ears a little while be deaf,

Till I have told this slander of his blood

How God and good men hate so foul a liar. (1.1.109-114)

Goodness, get him, what a speech! Richard, more or less archly, deflates Bolingbroke’s final couplet and his furious, overwrought rhetoric: his speech, his vivid, florid, bloody accusation of Mowbray, and his determination to see justice done, has been like the flight of a falcon—high flown rhetoric; the pitch is the highest point of the hawk’s flight. (That animation of the vertical dimension, again.) And what have you got to say for yourself, Thomas of Norfolk?

Mowbray starts sorrowful: don’t listen, don’t watch, my lord; turn your face away and pretend to be temporarily deaf, while I rebuke this slander of your blood, outraging the royal blood, which he shares, by telling him how God and good men hate so foul a liar. Not just God (picking up on the heavily biblical language of Bolingbroke’s speech) but also good men: I am a good man, he says, and I hate liars (Are you a good man? he asks Richard, implicitly.) Bolingbroke is lying, Mowbray says. (But he is, at this point at least, playing the man, not the ball, not a metaphor which I thought I’d ever reach for…)