BOLINGBROKE O, who can hold a fire in his hand
By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?
Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite
By bare imagination of a feast?
Or wallow naked in December snow
By thinking on fantastic summer’s heat?
O no, the apprehension of the good
Gives but the greater feeling to the worse.
Fell sorrow’s tooth doth never rankle more
Than when he bites but lanceth not the sore.
GAUNT Come, come, my son, I’ll bring thee on thy way.
Had I thy youth and cause I would not stay.
BOLINGBROKE Then England’s ground farewell, sweet soil adieu,
My mother and my nurse that bears me yet.
Where’er I wander, boast of this I can:
Though banished, yet a true born Englishman. Exeunt. (1.3.294-309)
As this long scene draws to a close, I think that Bolingbroke’s speech is much more interesting than it might at first appear. First, he’s doing exactly what Gaunt’s just done, coming up with increasingly absurd scenarios and pointing out their absurdity, rejecting the principle of mind over matter. Who can hold a fire in his hand simply by concentrating very hard on a frozen mountain range? Or forget that he’s starving merely by imagining a lavish feast? Or (neatly inverting the hot-cold opposition of his first scenario) who can wallow naked in December snow, by remembering the fantastic heat of high summer? It’s possible to play this as humorous, rather than bitter and exasperated, and doing so highlights the closeness of the father and son: they’re doing the same thing, they’ve played this rhetorical game before. (And there’s a sense of son being told by father, if at first you don’t succeed, or, dust yourself off and try again, make the best of things, buck up.) That in itself is consoling, the how of what they’re saying to each other more so than the what. They are both prolonging this final encounter, too; these conceits could simply continue to proliferate, a textbook example of rhetorical copiousness.
It’s also slyly interesting in dramatic terms, because the audience can’t help doing the imagining, much more so when Bolingbroke speaks than Gaunt, because his scenarios are more extreme. We think of burning heat, a coal, a candle-flame, and simultaneously of a frosty mountain; we recall the invention of ideal repasts in times of hunger; we perhaps, irreverently, even picture Bolingbroke and his aged father wallowing in the snow. It’s cognitively and theatrically interesting, because some of what Bolingbroke is evoking is what theatre does too, a vivid investment of imagination. Bolingbroke says it’s not enough; the audience may, like Gaunt, disagree, at least in the split seconds when they picture the fire and the snow, the chill and the burning heat.
But the scene must end, Bolingbroke must depart, and couplets appear to wrap things up. Gaunt doesn’t attempt to argue with the aphoristic finality of fell sorrow’s tooth doth never rankle more than when he bites but lanceth not the sore, that is, the biting pain of sorrow is never more galling, irritating, than when its sharpness gives no relief, like a piercing pain that doesn’t drain a wound, that niggles away, a dull ache, an abscess of sorrow. (Hamlet comes back to this conceit again and again.) So you’d better go then, says Gaunt, and I’ll go with you as far as I can. If I were your age, and in your situation, I wouldn’t stick around either (to the last suggesting that Bolingbroke has some agency here). And Bolingbroke has the last word. He can’t bring himself, even after all that’s been said, to say goodbye to his father (or at least that scene is too painful and intimate for the audience to witness; we can only imagine it, primed by the more fanciful imaginings we’ve just heard), so instead he farewells England itself, as his mother and his nurse, the sweet soil which has nurtured him, and on which (punning on bear, give birth, and bear, support, carry) he still, and for a little while longer, stands. And there’s a note of defiance, and intent, in his final patriotic couplet: wherever I am, even in banishment, I remain a true born Englishman.
