MOWBRAY     My life thou shalt command, but not my shame.

The one my duty owes, but my fair name,

Despite of death, that lives upon my grave,

To dark dishonour’s use thou shalt not have.

I am disgraced, impeached and baffled here,

Pierced to the soul with slander’s venomed spear,

The which no balm can cure but his heart-blood,

Which breathed this poison.

RICHARD                                                        Rage must be withstood.

Give me his gage. Lions make leopards tame.

MOWBRAY     Yea, but not change his spots. (1.1.166-175)

Mowbray speaks for honour: if he is not able to prove his innocence in combat with Bolingbroke, then he will lose his reputation, he will be disgraced, in his own eyes and the eyes of his peers. His life is the King’s to command, he says, but not his shame; even the king cannot restore his reputation once lost. He repeats the point: he would give his life in the service of his king, that’s his duty—but the King can’t give him his fair name, his reputation after death. He doesn’t want a dishonourable epitaph. (This comes back again and again throughout Shakespeare’s career and reflects the centrality of honour to the period: Lucrece tries to make Tarquin imagine his disgrace in terms of a defaced monument, Troilus and Cressida is obsessed with different models of reputation, renown, posterity, and Hamlet laments the ‘wounded name’ that he will leave behind him in death. It’s not just Othello’s Cassio who is obsessed with his reputation and its loss.) It’s knighthood, chivalry that Mowbray clings to in particular: he is disgraced, impeached, accused of felony (here, treason) and baffled, a technical term used for the formal stripping away of the rank of knight and its accouterments. (Knights who were found guilty of treason or some other crimes could be formally degraded before execution, their spurs cut off, their coat of arms defaced.) The slander of being called a traitor (as he terms it) has pierced him to the soul, Mowbray says, like a poisoned spear (echoing the language of blood-letting from a moment earlier) and no balm, no ointment or unction will cure that wound except the heart-blood of the person who breathed this poison, who spoke the slander, made the accusation: Bolingbroke. Tough, says Richard, master your choler, get a hold on your anger; rage must be withstood. Give me his gage. The King (as far as he is concerned) is the lion, the alpha-beast, and he will get his way, making leopards, lower down the hierarchy, tame. A nice conceit, vividly heraldic, a bit quirky, but Mowbray is adamant: even you can’t make a leopard change its spots.