RICHARD        Can sick men play so nicely with their names?

GAUNT           No, misery makes sport to mock itself.

Since thou dost seek to kill my name in me,

I mock my name, great King, to flatter thee.

RICHARD        Should dying men flatter with those that live?

GAUNT           No, no, men living flatter those that die.

RICHARD        Thou now a-dying sayst thou flatt’rest me.

GAUNT           O no, thou diest, though I the sicker be. (2.1.84-91)

Not so much a combat of wits, perhaps, as two men competing as to who can be narkier, although Gaunt mostly remains in possession of the moral high ground (he is, after all, the one who’s dying, as both of them repeatedly point out). Can sick men play so nicely with their names? snipes Richard, suggesting, you can’t be all that unwell if you’re up to punning so obsessively, but also, perhaps, being ironic: nicely means wittily, delicately, with a light touch, and Gaunt’s bitter quibbling on his name has been heavy-handed, not nice at all. I’m not playing games for the sake of it, fires back Gaunt; this is the nature of misery, mocking itself in self-loathing. I’m not enjoying this; I’m not having fun. You are trying to kill my name in me, by banishing Bolingbroke, my son and heir, destroying my family’s reputation and prestige; ending my line, my name, my posterity. And so if I mock my name, great King (dripping with sarcasm) I’m only doing it to flatter you, mirroring your own destructive vindictiveness towards me and my family. Ah, but you’re the one who’s dying; should you really be flattering the living (as opposed to asking for their prayers and forgiveness)? No, Gaunt comes back at him: living men flatter the dying—which is the natural order of things, but here Gaunt’s twisting it to suggest that he’s the one who is living, while Richard is a dying man. (And also, perhaps, that Richard has many other living flatterers, which is perhaps being illustrated by the sycophantic laughter of Bushy, Bagot et al even as they watch the sparring.) No, you’ve just said you’re dying, not living, and that you’re flattering me, replies the king, which allows Gaunt to twist again: you’re dying, though you don’t know it, and even though I’m far sicker than you are. Richard is dying, as all people are dying from the moment of their birth, but, more pointedly, Gaunt is near-cursing Richard here: you’re falling, you’re on the way out, your star is waning, your reputation is shot. You might not know it yet, but soon the game will be up.

I think I’ve mostly untangled it?! It’s a tricksy, unsatisfying little passage, perhaps mostly there as a bridge between two of Gaunt’s great speeches (he’s revving up again). The rhyming couplets switch it into a mode that is at once more aphoristic and less personal, as the ear attends to patterns which are to do with sound and repetition rather than the deeper, stranger structures of the conceits in Gaunt’s longer, blank verse speeches. Richard’s flippancy doesn’t play well (we have to remember he’s turned up with a large entourage at Gaunt’s death-bed) but Gaunt risks sounding petulant rather than despairing, although he still comes out of this better than the King. The stichomythia, the alternating lines (especially reinforced here by the couplets) make this exchange both aggressive and intimate, Gaunt and Richard really getting at each other, mirroring and interrupting; it’s a device which will return in the encounters between Richard and Bolingbroke.