DUCHESS       Ah Gaunt, his blood was thine! That bed, that womb,

That mettle, that self mould that fashioned thee,

Made him a man; and though thou liv’st and breath’st,

Yet art thou slain in him. Thou dost consent

In some large measure to thy father’s death

In that thou seest thy wretched brother die,

Who was the model of thy father’s life.

Call it not patience, Gaunt, it is despair.

In suff’ring thus thy brother to be slaughtered

Thou show’st the naked pathway to thy life,

Teaching stern murder how to butcher thee.

That which in mean men we entitle patience

Is pale cold cowardice in noble breasts.

What shall I say? To safeguard thine own life

The best way is to venge my Gloucester’s death. (1.2.22-36)

Similarity and similitude, patterns and doubles are as characteristic of this speech as they were in the previous scene, but here, interestingly, they’re not reinforced by couplets, the Duchess mostly sticking to blank verse. She argues that Gaunt should not simply remember his closeness to his dead brother, but that he should think of him as another self, sharing blood, descent, and parentage, that bed, that womb, and also more intangible substance, mettle, character, personality, molded by similar experiences as much as by their shared parentage and, specifically, their birth from the same womb. You’re so alike, you’re one flesh, one body, one blood, that, even though you’re still alive, it’s as if you’ve died with him—or rather, been slain in him, she adds. If you stand by and do nothing to avenge his death, she continues (ramping up the guilt trip) it’s as if you’re consenting to your father’s death too, because your brother Gloucester was so like your father King Edward.

Doing nothing isn’t patience, Christian fortitude and resignation to the divine rule, it’s despair, a terrible sin, an ending of all hope, a resignation of your own free will and salvation. And in your patience, your acceptance, your passivity, seemingly allowing your own brother to be slaughtered, you’re making yourself vulnerable. You’re showing the naked pathway to your life, making yourself defenceless—and you too could end up butchered by stern murder. (The Duchess’s language is not simply violent—slaughter, butcher—but also suggests that Gloucester, and potentially Gaunt too, are like lambs to the slaughter, defenceless and weak, rather than having any kind of agency.) If you were a mean man, one of the common people (a villain, to use the term bandied around by Mowbray and Bolingbroke) then this so-called patience might be understandable, even acceptable, but in you, of royal blood, one of the greatest nobles of the land, it’s pale cold cowardice. You are betraying your brother, your family, your honour as a nobleman and as a man. You have to avenge your brother—and my husband—because it’s the best way to safeguard your own life, too.

The Duchess here has the force of her predecessors in the first tetralogy, and perhaps above all Queen Margaret and the Duchess of York in Richard III: politically astute, emotionally manipulative, rhetorically sophisticated. She will almost certainly be dressed in mourning, but her call for revenge is motivated by political pragmatism, it seems, as much as by grief. It matters, perhaps, that she’s mourning a husband, not (as is so often the case in the first tetralogy) a child. (There’s a comic parallel, sort of, in Beatrice’s beseeching of Benedick to challenge Claudio, in Much Ado, in that what is also at stake is the powerlessness of an able, intelligent, wronged woman who cannot act in her own interests.) And she’s nowhere near finished yet…