RICHARD Uncle, even in the glasses of your eyes
I see thy grievèd heart. Thy sad aspect
Hath from the number of his banished years
Plucked four away. [To Bolingbroke] Six frozen winters spent,
Return with welcome home from banishment.
BOLINGBROKE How long a time lies in one little word!
Four lagging winters and four wanton springs
End in a word—such is the breath of kings. (1.3.208-215)
Richard has perhaps not been listening to Mowbray’s farewell speech (shame), because he turns now to Gaunt, his uncle, Bolingbroke’s father, who is, it seems, in tears. The glasses of his eyes could be windows, or they could be mirrors (which would be interesting, given the play’s fascination with mirrors, reflections, and doubles), but the main import is that Richard sees through, or into Gaunt’s eyes and sees not his soul but his grievèd heart, the shock of this old man who has just listened to the banishing of his son, for ten years—in effect, ensuring that Gaunt will never see his son again, because he expects to die before Bolingbroke can return. But Richard—ever capricious—can also be magnanimous and merciful. Gaunt’s sad aspect, his solemn, sorrowful expression has won his son a partial reprieve, plucking away four years from the total number: Bolingbroke must now remain in exile for only (only!) six years, which Richard characterizes (meanly? certainly vividly) as six frozen winters. Bolingbroke is acid? certainly rueful, but also significantly foreshadowing: the King’s word is law, able to magic away time and seasons (slow winter, lively spring) in an instant. Such is the breath of kings, he concludes, in a neat aphorism (and couplet).
What makes a king? What is the status of a king’s word? A king has the power to make and unmake with words, and to take back the words that he has only just spoken. There are precedents here, in the conceits and the underpinning concepts and concerns more generally, that will come back in far fraughter moments later in the play. What are the limits of a king’s power? (And—glancing at Falstaff’s disquisition on honour in 1 Henry IV, in which honour is dismissed as ‘a word. What is in that word honour? what is that honour? air’ (5.1)—the sense that words themselves are airy things, that language is unstable, evanescent. The King’s English. If language can become arbitrary, then so might the structures of power.)
