Enter John of Gaunt with the Duchess of Gloucester.
GAUNT Alas, the part I had in Woodstock’s blood
Doth more solicit me than your exclaims
To stir against the butchers of his life.
But since correction lieth in those hands
Which made the fault that we cannot correct,
Put we our quarrel to the will of heaven
Who, when they see the hour’s ripe on earth,
Will rain hot vengeance on offenders’ heads. (1.2.1-8)
There’s perhaps an indirect indication here of the numbers involved in the opening scene, and its possible staging: Gaunt has been present in the previous scene, and the Duchess could have been too (although it would make more impact if she hadn’t been). The exit at the end of 1.1 will most likely be a formal procession, perhaps accompanied by music (a fanfare, for instance), and a throne and dais might have to be removed: Gaunt would be near the head of any procession, because of his high rank, or could exit separately, and hurriedly, with his son Bolingbroke. Either way, there will be time for him to re-enter with the Duchess for this short, more private scene, the only scene in which the Duchess appears. (She quite possibly doubles the Duchess of York, and perhaps one of the Queen’s ladies too, although they are usually younger.)
More backstory, and it’s about to get even more genealogical: the Duchess is the widow of Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, Gaunt’s brother and another of King Richard’s uncles. Historically he was much younger than his other brothers, closer in age to his nephew Richard than to Gaunt, and only in his early 40s at the time of his death. The historical duchess was Eleanor de Bohun, a considerable heiress in her own right (and her sister Mary was married to the historical Bolingbroke). She too was much younger than she is usually played in Shakespeare’s play, in her early thirties at the time of her husband’s death in 1397. She died of a broken heart (according to the chroniclers) in 1399.
On with the scene. The Duchess has clearly been soliciting Gaunt’s help in bringing her husband’s killers to justice, but Gaunt is reluctant to get involved, for a number of reasons. He wants to seek justice for his brother, because they’re family, of the same blood, a claim and motivation that he describes as even more compelling than the Duchess’s exclaims, her laments and entreaties. He’s on her side, he feels her pain, and her anger, at Gloucester’s butchery. (Historically, he may have been smothered with a feather bed, in Calais, an extra-judicial murder that got around the problem of a treason trial for one so close to the King.) But the problem is—and here Gaunt is wonderfully, delicately circumlocutory—the person who could right the wrong, correct the fault that we cannot correct is the same person who made the fault. That is, King Richard, whose sanctioning of the killing is a pretty open secret. And the King’s not going to do anything. All they can do, therefore, is to put their quarrel to the will of heaven, trust in divine justice, who will, in due course, when the time is ripe, rain hot vengeance on offenders’ heads. Gaunt, the great survivor: pious, politic, discreet, and leaving just enough room for plausible denial in his deft evasion of naming names. It’s still completely clear what he thinks, though, and where he lays the blame for Woodstock’s death. (A reminder that the history and backstory mightn’t have been quite as obscure for an audience in the mid 1590s, as a play known as Thomas of Woodstock, probably dating from the early-mid 1590s, survives in manuscript: it depicts the events leading up to his murder and is sometimes described as Richard II Part 1.)
