GAUNT Thy grief is but thy absence for a time.
BOLINGBROKE Joy absent, grief is present for that time.
GAUNT What is six winters? They are quickly gone.
BOLINGBROKE To men in joy, but grief makes one hour ten.
GAUNT Call it a travel that thou tak’st for pleasure.
BOLINGBROKE My heart will sigh when I miscall it so,
Which finds it an enforcèd pilgrimage.
GAUNT The sullen passage of thy weary steps
Esteem as foil wherein thou art to set
The precious jewel of thy home return.
BOLINGBROKE Nay, rather every tedious stride I make
Will but remember me what a deal of world
I wander from the jewels that I love.
Must I not serve a long apprenticehood
To foreign passages and in the end,
Having my freedom, boast of nothing else
But that I was a journeyman to grief? (1.3.258-274)
This exchange has the quality of a duet, supple and complex as it tropes on time, labour, and grief. It’s instructive to compare this passage with other father-son exchanges in the histories: Bolingbroke’s own (as Henry IV) with his son in the two parts of Henry IV, and also the scenes of farewell between Talbot and his son in 1 Henry VI, much earlier. The Talbot scene reads like a moral interlude, its rhyming couplets hammering out expressions of filial piety and paternal love which are as hackneyed as they are heartfelt. (And the scene of parting between Romeo and Juliet, too…) As in the Sonnets (‘How like a winter hath my absence been from thee’ etc.), both Gaunt and Bolingbroke consider the subjective nature of time and grief. Gaunt tries to downplay it, first: your grief at parting is occasioned by absence, lack, not by a thing, and it must therefore be less significant than that caused by something present and active. But Bolingbroke disagrees: grief itself will have a palpable presence in his life, and it is joy that will be absent. Those six years will fly by, says Gaunt (a bit desperately, given what he’s just been arguing about his own age), but (as Bolingbroke retorts) when one is grieving or depressed, time drags; one hour seems to last for ten. Another tack: pretend you’re going on holiday! says Gaunt. But travel itself invites a quibble, because it’s also a travail, an onerous labour, a period of suffering, and it’s that meaning which Bolingbroke picks up later on. That would be to miscall it, he replies, and my heart will sigh; I won’t be comforted by such a feeble attempt at self-deception or consolation. It is an enforced pilgrimage, a journey taken unwillingly, with little prospect of spiritual fulfillment. So turn that suffering into a virtue, a kind of pilgrimage after all, suggests Gaunt: every one of your sullen, sad, weary steps will make your eventual homecoming seem all the sweeter; the hardships of your journeying will be like foil, making the precious jewel of thy home return shine more brightly. On the contrary, retorts Bolingbroke (he is determined not to see any upsides whatsoever in this): every tedious stride I make will remind me that I am travelling, step by step, further and further away from the jewels that I love (my father, my country). It’s as if I’m having to serve a long apprenticehood (at six years, nearly the full seven of a typical apprenticeship) in foreign parts, on the move, and when I finally have my freedom, all I will have achieved is becoming more proficient and accomplished in grief. I will be a journeyman to grief, punning on journey as travel and journeyman as day-labourer. But to grief? What kind of achievement is that? It’s the waste of time that Bolingbroke is lamenting here, as well as the suffering of exile and separation. The grief he explores here is both personal and existential.
