QUEEN How fares our noble uncle Lancester?
RICHARD What comfort, man? How is’t with agèd Gaunt?
GAUNT O, how that name befits my composition!
Old Gaunt indeed and gaunt in being old.
Within me grief hath kept a tedious fast,
And who abstains from meat that is not gaunt?
For sleeping England long time have I watched;
Watching breeds leanness; leanness is all gaunt.
The pleasure that some fathers feed upon
Is my strict fast—I mean my children’s looks—
And therein fasting hast thou made me gaunt.
Gaunt am I for the grave, gaunt as a grave
Whose hollow womb inherits naught but bones. (2.1.71-83)
The Queen is formal and polite, using the royal plural (or perhaps suggesting that Gaunt is her unclebecause he is her husband’s?) and Gaunt’s title; Richard is more familiar, even jocular: what comfort, man? how you doing? how are things with old Gaunt? (It’s difficult not to read man in the sense of, DUDE, far out, man, but, alas, it’s not, although it’s still casual.) The key word here is agèd, which cues Gaunt’s bitter, if not exactly sparkling riff on his own name. Yes, that’s my name, replies Gaunt, and it’s a fitting one. I am old, and gaunt in being old. More than just my age, however, it’s grief that’s wasted my flesh; it’s kept a tedious fast within me, made me near starve myself, and so, of course, I’m gaunt. And I’ve watched over sleeping England, stayed awake, alert, on guard, while England has slumbered in careless ignorance (sleepwalked, one might say, into ignominy and ruin, under the leadership of this king). Implicitly, to the King: you’ve been asleep on the job. And sleepless nights, they make you lean too. But most of all, I’ve been deprived of the nourishment of seeing my son, the exiled Bolingbroke: the pleasure that some fathers feed upon is my strict fast. I am starved of love, famished by the absence of my boy. It’s no wonder that I’m gaunt. I’m not just ready for the grave, it’s as if I’m dead already, wasted away to a skeleton, gaunt as a grave whose hollow womb inherits naught but bones. And here the contrast is not just between the hollow womb of the grave, which awaits (and already all but contains) Gaunt’s bones, but the teeming womb of royal kings which he has so gloriously invoked only a moment earlier. The rhetorical thinness of this speech, its bitter wordplay which has a kind of self-loathing in its obviousness, is performing exactly the loss, the lack, the fall that Gaunt has just been describing. These emptied out words, like the scrawled documents, are all that’s left, for Gaunt, and (as he sees it) for his country. The garden of England, so generative and fecund and copious of poetry, has become a thinly quibbling grave.
