RICHARD I am in health, I breathe, and see thee ill.
GAUNT Now he that made me knows I see thee ill.
Ill in myself to see, and in thee seeing ill.
Thy deathbed is no lesser than thy land
Wherein thou liest in reputation sick,
And thou, too careless patient as thou art,
Commit’st thy anointed body to the cure
Of those physicians that first wounded thee.
A thousand flatterers sit within thy crown,
Whose compass is no bigger than thy head,
And yet, encagèd in so small a verge,
The waste is no whit lesser than thy land. (2.1.92-103)
Richard’s still playing a game, with flippancy and not a little cruelty: you’re the one who’s dying; I (by contrast) am in health, I breathe and see thee ill. But Gaunt’s off again, or about to be, the triple rhyme on ill apparentlygiving him the final impetus for another furious, vivid, needling castigation of his nephew. He that made me—God—knows I see thee ill, sick, and not just because I’m sick myself; I’m not seeing you ill in the sense of inaccurately, wrongly, but also because you are doing ill, acting wrongly. This is Gaunt as prophet, discerning truth—Richard is in trouble, doing the wrong things—and telling it as he sees it. Your deathbed is your land, your kingdom, and you are deathly sick in your reputation; you’re squandering your good name and status. And you don’t seem to care: you’re a careless patient, above all in relying so much upon, spending so much time with, the wrong people. You’ve given your anointed body, your sacred, kingly person (and the emphasis on the king as anointed, physically transformed by his coronation ceremonies, will come back many times) to the cure of those physicians that first wounded thee, your favourites and flatterers, your yes men and (in some productions) partying companions or even lovers. They’re absolutely part of the problem, and you’re looking to them for help and advice; they’re not curing you, but rather making you sicker and sicker.
This extended medical conceit, and especially the condemnation of Richard’s inner circle as physicians, perhaps makes a little more sense (or at least comes into sharper focus) if one remembers that blood-letting was an important part of medieval and early modern medical practice. So physicians could indeed wound, let blood, but as Gaunt evokes it here it’s not curative, but harmful; ideas of the body politic as wounded and bleeding, and of the land as wounded and bleeding, will come back later in the play. Physicians could be called leeches, like the real leeches that they sometimes used, and there’s perhaps even the suggestion that Richard’s favourites are like leeches, sucking his blood. (They will later be described as caterpillars.)
And then one of the play’s most characteristic and mobile conceits: the crown, as encircling, as hollow. Your crown, your head is full of flatterers, thousands of them—even though the crown seems no bigger than your head, because it’s The Crown, bigger than you, because it’s actually your court, your state, your land, it’s all being affected. It seems such a small thing, like your brow, encagèd in so small a verge, taking up so little space—but it’s laying waste your entire land, destroying it, and also wasting it, in extravagance and carelessness. There’s the same play here as in Gaunt’s earlier speech between the abstract and the concrete, big things and little things (isle as jewel), but—assuming that Richard’s wearing a crown (he often does)—he’s got a visual referent to play off in the scene, and the audience too can start to think about a/the crown, what it is, and what it might mean.
