RICHARD        Why, uncle, thou hast many years to live.

GAUNT            But not a minute, King, that thou canst give.

Shorten my days thou canst with sullen sorrow

And pluck nights from me, but not lend a morrow.

Thou canst help time to furrow me with age

But stop no wrinkle in his pilgrimage.

Thy word is current with him for my death,

But dead, thy kingdom cannot buy my breath. (1.3.225-232)

A tense exchange, in which the commonplace content and the jingly quality of the rhyming couplets doesn’t necessarily balance out or ameliorate the pointedness of Gaunt’s statements. It’s there from the start, in the asymmetry of the men’s address to each other: uncle, from Richard, perhaps conciliatory, a reminder of their closeness; King from Gaunt (although he too uses the informal thou, perhaps indecorous here). And it’s the limits of the king’s power which are again moot. The king may have the power of life and death, as he’s just been demonstrating, sentencing Bolingbroke and Mowbray to banishment on pain of life. But that power is also asymmetrical: the king can pass a death sentence, or commute one—but he cannot give or lengthen life by so much as a minute. He can shorten Gaunt’s life with sullen sorrow, with dull suffering and sadness; pluck away nights (in sleeplessness?) but not (even) lend a morrow, a single extra day. That suffering and sorrow will mean that the furrows, the lines of ages will be even deeper in Gaunt’s face, but the king cannot arrest the progress, the pilgrimage of a single wrinkle. (Sonnet 2: ‘When forty winters shall besiege thy brow | And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field’; Sonnet 19: ‘O carve not with thy hours my love’s fair brow’; Sonnet 22: ‘My glass shall not persuade me I am old | So long as youth and thou are of one date; | But when in thee time’s furrows I behold, | Then look I death my days should expiate’. And lots of others too.) The identification between Gaunt’s body and the state of the land, and the King’s body and the state of the land, its fertility—suggested by ploughing—or not is part of what’s being suggested here, as well as the powerlessness of all people before the forces of time, and the inability of even an all-powerful, capricious monarch, able to give death, or recall to life, with a word, to arrest or combat time itself. The king’s word is current (with time) for Gaunt’s death; he can command it instantly, the slight, airy, breathy word currency enough, sufficient exchange value for a life. But once Gaunt is dead, nothing the king can say will bring him back to life, and even the worth of his entire kingdom wouldn’t be enough. The power of the all-powerful king has limits; his word is not always law.