GAUNT England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds.
That England which was wont to conquer others
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life,
How happy then were my ensuing death!
Enter [Richard], Queen, Aumerle, Bushy, Green, Bagot, Ross, and Willoughby
YORK The King is come. Deal mildly with his youth,
For young colts, being reined, do rage the more. (2.1.61-70)
In its final short movement, Gaunt’s speech runs out of steam, mimetically dissolving into water, ink, soggy paper. The gilded, patterned, hypnotic delicacy of the rest of the speech has given way here to something more conventional (or is that simply because its rhetoric feels more wearily familiar?): English separatism, exceptionalism, all from an accident of geography. Yes, England is an island, bound in with the triumphant sea, but protected and defended by its rocky shore, beating back the envious siege of watery Neptune. (Envy, again; everyone should be jealous of England, that’s meant to be the natural order of things.) But that paradoxically solid, protecting boundary and bulwark of cliff, shore, sea, has now given way to something else. There’s a play here between bound, boundary, bond, and binding, and the bounds of the shore have given way to bonds in the sense of contracts, documents, which are shamefully binding. They’re not even substantial: the parchment is rotten, the ink is blotted. It’s a soggy mess, a morass of slipshod, underhand paperwork. England that was wont to conquer others hath made a shameful conquest of itself. Given up, sold out to the money-men, the bankers.
The ending of Gaunt’s speech isn’t quite a damp squib, but it’s not the searing prophecy that he promised, both explicitly and in his initial rhetoric either. Incandescent and incantatory he may have been, but this has been elegy, and at a pinch diagnosis, rather than any attempt at counsel or cure. And while Gaunt finishes by making a contrast between the solidity of the rocky shore and the flimsy, yet binding documents he disparages, the England that he has evoked has been in its own way as ephemeral and evanescent, a creation and effect of language; a poem, not a nation. This, this, this, he’s intoned, so resonantly and affectingly—but what is this really? was it ever there in the first place? His last two lines here are almost bathetic: if my death could end that scandal, it’d be worth it: how would that even be possible? What does that even mean?
But enter a delegation, nightmare hospital visitors, disrupting the hypnotised stasis of the scene, their bustle contrasting starkly with the spent figure in his chair. Not just Richard, but the Queen too, and a whole clutch of hangers-on, personifying exactly the problem of Richard’s frivolity and weakness, his susceptibility to flattery that York and Gaunt have lamented at the beginning of the scene. Be careful, cautions York, don’t berate him. The King’s young; like a young colt he’ll only fight against you if you attempt to rein him in.
