RICHARD                    You, cousin Hereford, upon pain of life,

Till twice five summers have enriched our fields

Shall not regreet our fair dominions,

But tread the stranger paths of banishment.

BOLINGBROKE          Your will be done. This must my comfort be:

The sun that warms you here shall shine on me

And those his golden beams to you here lent

Shall point on me and gild my banishment. (1.3.140-147)

Banishment. (It’s really interesting to compare this with Romeo and Juliet and Romeo’s banishment: this is very different, because the emphasis is on geographical displacement, on distance and alienation, rather than on separation from a person, but in some senses the two passages are different sides of the same coin, together forming an astonishing meditation on what banishment might mean and the different ways in which it might be experienced.) Bolingbroke, first, upon pain of life (that is, on pain of death)—but that it’s life sets up the second line, when Richard, rather than saying ‘ten years’ says twice five summers, imagining them not simply as a period of time but as enriching the fields of our fair dominions; as both time and place, in effect. This is what Bolingbroke is being banished from, his homeland, its fertility, prosperity, and beauty, Richard expressing both for how long, and from what, in one elaborately-ordered conceit. The stranger paths of banishment are stranger because they are foreign (stranger is the customary word for foreigner or immigrant in early modern usage) but also because they will be unfamiliar and alien—not home. The fields of home, their stability and knownness, are set against the stranger paths, which must be trodden; dwelling is set against restless motion. Your will be done, Bolingbroke replies, tersely and compliantly, but also, in his echoing of the Lord’s Prayer (albeit the formal your, not the intimate thy), affirming that he is recognising and acquiescing to Richard’s God-like power. He also switches into rhyming couplets from Richard’s blank verse, the neatness of his aphorism’s expression balancing out (probably) any suggestion of narkiness: you’re banishing me, but wherever I go, the same sun will shine on both of us (and you may have heat but I will have light); you can’t do anything about that. And Bolingbroke speaks in golden terms: Richard has imagined the passage of time and the seasons as enriching his fields with crops, but Bolingbroke turns grain to gold, evoking the sun’s golden beams and imagining them as gilding his banishment. A golden time, he says, defiantly, not one of deprivation.