DUCHESS       Finds brotherhood in thee no sharper spur?

Hath love in thy old blood no living fire?

Edward’s seven sons, whereof thyself art one,

Were as seven vials of his sacred blood,

Or seven fair branches springing from one root.

Some of those seven are dried by nature’s course,

Some of those branches by the destinies cut.

But Thomas, my dear lord, my life, my Gloucester,

One vial full of Edward’s sacred blood,

One flourishing branch of his most royal root,

Is cracked and all the precious liquor spilt,

Is hacked down and his summer leaves all faded,

By envy’s hand and murder’s bloody axe. (1.2.9-21)

I think that this is a brilliant speech (this is only the first part), and a really interesting transitional moment in the history plays as a group. Some details, first. The Duchess of Gloucester begins with a rebuke for Gaunt, her brother-in-law: isn’t brotherhood motivation enough for revenge, can’t it give you a sharper spur than the passive regret and resignation to heaven’s will you’ve just expressed? Did you really love your brother? Gaunt’s old blood is implicitly cold, unlike the hot blood of his son in the previous scene; has his ardour cooled, his passion and loyalty faded? Then a vivid, extended conceit which manages to be both conventional and strangely baroque. Edward III had seven sons (that itself has a mystical resonance: seven is a heavily symbolic number: days of creation, deadly sins, liberal arts etc), of whom Gaunt and Gloucester were two. (Richard’s father, Edward the Black Prince, was another.) Those sons were like vials, glass vessels—imagined here as bottles or jars, but with a suggestion of alchemy or medicine or magic; not ordinary bottles—full of their father’s sacred blood. The blood of a king is sacred; royal power is passed on in blood. And as soon as these vials of blood have been evoked, the picture is complicated: those seven sons were also like seven branches springing from one root. Family trees were a thing long before Shakespeare was writing, and depicting genealogies in tree form was not uncommon, in documents but also in wall paintings and other forms; here what’s particularly being imagined is the Tree of Jesse, a representation of the genealogy of Christ, as dreamed by Jesse, father of King David (Isaiah 11.1). The Tree of Jesse is the origin of the family tree device more generally, but here it’s emphasizing the sacredness of kingship and the royal inheritance. As a tree, however, this family and its inheritance is vulnerable. Some of those seven are dried by nature’s course, that is, they have died of natural causes. Some have been cut by the destinies, by fate (or the fates, cutting the thread of life). But Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester, one vial full of Edward’s sacred blood, one flourishing branch, has been willfully destroyed before his time, cracked and all the precious liquor spilt, hacked down in his prime, his summer leaves all faded. The vital, sacred blood is elided with the flourishing sap of the tree, in a vivid image not simply of death, but of destruction: an ominous bleeding tree.

Murder’s bloody axe would resonate particularly with an age accustomed to beheadings; it also, here, recalls the future Richard III—Duke of Gloucester—in 3 Henry VI, announcing his intention to gain the crown from his brother and his heirs even if it means that he must, ‘like one lost in a thorny wood … hew my way out with a bloody axe’ (3.2). That Richard post-dates the historical events of Richard II, obviously, but it pre-dates it theatrically, and the internecine family conflicts of the first tetralogy, the Henry VIs and Richard III, written in the early 1590s, have their ultimate origin in Richard II, in the complexities of the successors of Edward III. They also, theatrically, establish a language of plants and gardens, branches cut off, roses plucked, which becomes ever more symbolically fraught in Richard II. The state as a garden is an ancient conceit, and it is more complicated, more ambivalent, and more deeply embedded in the history plays than might at first appear. John of Gaunt’s later eulogy of England’s despoiled garden, and the ‘gardeners’ scene’, do not come out of nowhere, and the Duchess’s speech here is one of the moments that sets them up.