DUCHESS       Yet one word more. Grief boundeth where it falls,

Not with the empty hollowness, but weight.

I take my leave before I have begun,

For sorrow ends not when it seemeth done.

Commend me to thy brother, Edmund York.

Lo, this is all. Nay, yet depart not so;

Though this be all, do not so quickly go.

I shall remember more. Bid him—ah what?—

With all good speed at Pleshey visit me.

Alack, and what shall good old York there see

But empty lodgings and unfurnished walls,

Unpeopled offices, untrodden stones,

And what hear there for welcome but my groans?
Therefore commend me; let him not come there

To seek out sorrow that dwells everywhere.

Desolate, desolate will I hence and die.

The last leave of thee takes my weeping eye.        Exeunt. (1.2.58-74)

It’s made too easy to laugh at the Duchess: Yet one word more … Nay, yet depart not so. A garrulous (old) woman, a bit forgetful, querulous; needy, in a word that’s become overcharged with negativity, used all too readily to replace ‘in need’. But this is an important moment in the play’s exploration of grief, loneliness, and loss, and to laugh at the Duchess, to be impatient with her, is to confront our own discomfort with those things, which she sets out in resonant, visceral terms. Grief boundeth where it falls, she begins, a strange image: it rebounds, bounces back like a ball, not because of its empty hollowness (although it has those qualities too, is implied) but because of its weight. You think you’ve cast it off and it comes heavily back, and one imagines catching an unexpectedly heavy object, sagging and staggering under its weight, stricken. And—sadly, with real pathos—I take my leave before I have begun, for sorrow ends not when it seemeth done. Grief is never ending. (Even an aphoristic rhyming couplet gives no closure.) You think you’ve said it all, and then it starts up again.

There’s a sense that Gaunt is actively trying to leave, that she’s thinking of things to say in order to make him stay just a little longer. She is lonely; she has been as anxious to have Gaunt’s assurance that he shares her grief as to have his promise of vengeance. So, an instruction: Commend me to thy brother, Edmund York. (Ah yes, all those brothers. An in-joke, perhaps, if the Duchess of Gloucester is doubling the Duchess of York.) That’s all—but please, please don’t go yet. I’ll remember something else (casting around for an excuse): ask him to visit me, at Pleshey. (House in Essex; it’s historically accurate, but here it chimes a little with ‘pleasure’, the very thing no longer present there.) But the heart of the house has gone with the death of its lord: the rooms are empty and stripped, even of their wall-hangings (unfurnished walls). It is cold and drear and dark. Its offices are unpeopled: there are no jobs for people to do, and no one to do them. (Household officers, such as stewards, formally ended their tenure at the death of their master.) Even its stones are untrodden; no one is living there, let alone visiting. And if anyone were to visit, all the welcome that they would hear would be her groans, the empty anguish of her mourning. In this stark evocation of bereavement, the Duchess is less reminiscent of the grieving, cursing women of the first tetralogy than of another woman in the histories: Constance, in King John, maddened by the loss of her son Arthur: ‘Grief fills the room up of my absent child, | Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, | Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, | Remembers me of all his gracious parts, | Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form; | Then, have I reason to be fond of grief?’

So the Duchess changes her mind: don’t tell your brother the duke of York to visit, it’s a terrible place, desolate, desolate, and after all sorrow is everywhere, he doesn’t need to visit me to find it. I’ll go back there by myself, to the emptiness, the hollow, the weight, and await my own death. I take my leave of you, finally, for the last time… And that’s the end of the scene; they will leave by different doors.