DUCHESS                               Farewell, old Gaunt.

Thou goest to Coventry, there to behold

Our cousin Hereford and fell Mowbray fight.

O, sit my husband’s wrongs on Hereford’s spear

That it may enter butcher Mowbray’s breast!

Or if misfortune miss the first career,

Be Mowbray’s sins so heavy in his bosom

That they may break his foaming courser’s back

And throw the rider headlong in the lists,

A caitiff recreant to my cousin Hereford.

Farewell, old Gaunt. Thy sometimes brother’s wife

With her companion, grief, must end her life.

GAUNT            Sister, farewell. I must to Coventry.

As much good stay with thee as go with me. (1.2.44-57)

The repetition of old Gaunt here is interesting (yes, really). It continues the emphasis on Gaunt’s age, which will be increasingly important in the next few scenes. It allows for an easy cut, without any change to Gaunt’s cues: the Duchess could, albeit with a little metrical irregularity (she would need to pause after the first half of line 44) simply speak her final couplet, without any material loss to the plot. But what’s probably going on here is a neat example of a false cue shaping the performance: there is a joke developing that the Duchess keeps saying that she’s finished and then keeping going. Gaunt can pick up the first cue—Farewell, old Gaunt—as if he’s about to continue with his own speech, his firmly conclusive couplet in lines 56-7—but then he’ll have to stop, perhaps expressing exasperation, a bit of eye-rolling, as the Duchess continues with the rest of her speech. (In a cue-script system, where actors work from their own parts and don’t have the full text of the play, only their own lines and short cues, it’s a way of eliciting a particular performance, here probably frustration, as Gaunt has to bite back his lines, which after all express some urgency.)

I hope that the Duchess’s lines in between aren’t cut, however, because they’re interesting of themselves. She demonstrates a close knowledge of the combat that has been set up, and in so doing, vividly imagines for the audience one version of something that they will not in fact see, because it’s unstageable: the lists, the foaming courser, the over-excited, straining horse, the lances—and of course the two men riding at each other, fully armed, on enormous horses, in front of a noisy crowd. She is heavily partisan, seeing Mowbray unambiguously as the villain and Hereford as avenging Gloucester’s death. Like the two younger men, she uses the language of chivalry, and this is not an unfamiliar scene for her: Mowbray will be thrown from his horse as a caitiff recreant, a despicable, common coward. Even if Hereford (Bolingbroke) misses in the first career, the first charge, Mowbray might fall simply because the weight of his sins in his bosom is too heavy for his horse to bear. She imagines the wrong done to her husband as sitting on Hereford’s spear, guiding it into butcher Mowbray’s breast, and there’s perhaps another echo here of the great scene of cursing, grieving women in Richard III (4.4), near the end of which the Duchess of York, Richard III’s mother, promises him that ‘My prayers on the adverse party fight; | And there the little souls of Edward’s children | Whisper the spirits of thine enemies | And promise them success and victory’. This is a formidable, angry woman, as well as a grief-stricken one. But Gaunt needs to get away, and speaks his final couplet with some relief, the neat chiastic structure (Farewell, old Gaunt … Sister, farewell) giving even more closure to the next, monosyllabic leave-taking and benediction: as much good stay with thee as go with me. But still the scene isn’t quite done…