LORD MARSHAL Sound, trumpets, and set forward, combatants!
A charge sounded
Stay. The King hath thrown his warder down.
RICHARD Let them lay by their helmets and their spears
And both return back to their chairs again.
Withdraw with us and let the trumpets sound
While we return these dukes what we decree.
A long flourish. [Richard confers apart with Gaunt and other nobles] (1.3.117-123SD)
Finally, finally it’s underway, after all the speechifying and ritual pronouncements. It’s the Lord Marshal’s show, and at last he’s being allowed to get it started. As editors have to point out, there are staging problems here, because horses, or rather, no horses, at least not on stage. So the trumpet call—even though it’s described as a charge—probably cues Bolingbroke and Mowbray to move to the lists, to leave their positions and even, perhaps, to begin to walk offstage, as if to their horses, when ordered to set forward. And then—although no stage direction—the King throws down his warder, which probably looks like a mini-sceptre, a shiny stick, basically, and the Lord Marshal has to call a halt to proceedings: Stay, presumably shouted in surprise, urgency, even panic or outrage. After all the build-up and ritual, the precise attention to order and the rules, this wasn’t in the script; the King is improvising and has gone not so much off-message as totally rogue. Nothing more from the Lord Marshal, and the heralds are silenced too: Richard takes over, ordering Mowbray and Bolingbroke to stand down, take off their helmets, lay by their lances, and return back to their chairs again (at which instruction it’s hard not to have a vision of grand-slam tennis). There’s going to be a conference, perhaps seen but very definitely not heard, as the trumpets are ordered to play a long flourish (potential for comedy here, especially if they repeat the same thing over and over) while Richard confers with his nobles (probably including the Lord Marshal, somewhat mystified and miffed). And only then will Bolingbroke and Mowbray be told what’s going on, and what is to happen, to them, and to their combat. So the trumpets play, and the focus of the stage, and the audience shifts, in a different kind of suspense. We—and the characters—expected some kind of fight at least, some resolution to the conflict which has been the central matter of the play so far, the subject of elaborate and impassioned speeches across two scenes. And now the King, whether through policy or cunning or caprice, has changed the whole apparent trajectory of the play so far. (By throwing something, his warder, down from above. That crucial vertical axis again…) What’s going on?
