Enter the Queen, Bushy and Bagot

BUSHY            Madam, your majesty is too much sad.

You promised when you parted with the King

To lay aside life-harming heaviness

And entertain a cheerful disposition.

QUEEN           To please the King I did, to please myself

I cannot do it. Yet I know no cause

Why I should welcome such a guest as grief,

Save bidding farewell to so sweet a guest

As my sweet Richard. Yet again, methinks

Some unborn sorrow, ripe in Fortune’s womb,

Is coming towards me, and my inward soul

With nothing trembles; at something it grieves

More than with parting from my lord the King. (2.2.1-13)

 

Here we are in 2.2, and until this point the Queen has spoken precisely one line in the play, although she may appear silently in some of the big ensemble scenes. But it would be a mistake to write her off as a character, or to undercast the role, because her scenes are little gems, and her speeches are intricate and often profound.

 

It’s probably compulsory to point out here that Shakespeare’s Queen is an invention: historically, Queen Isabel, Richard’s second wife, was a child at the time of the play’s action (like, 10, having married the king at 6 or 7…) His first wife, Anne of Bohemia, had died aged 28 in 1394, and he was apparently grief-stricken by her death; the marriage to Isabel in 1396 was part of a peace treaty negotiated with France, politically expedient in the short term but shortsighted in other respects, as there would be no possibility of an heir to secure the succession for at least a decade. Historians suggest that the relationship between the king and queen was a kind and affectionate one, and one can only pity the child who spent her entire life as a dynastic pawn: effectively a prisoner after Richard’s fall, she was eventually returned to France (after much wrangling over the repayment of dowries), and married to her cousin Charles (later duc d’Orléans); she died giving birth to her first child in 1409, aged 19.

 

That exploited child is not Shakespeare’s Queen, but it’s interesting to speculate (as some critics have) about the ways in which her sad story might have influenced the portrayal of the Queen in the play, who otherwise seems more to recall Richard’s first wife Anne in the close and even romantic relationship between the couple. I’d add another angle: thinking about casting possibilities, what if the actor playing the Queen is also Juliet, known to be able to ‘carry’ speeches of considerable psychological intensity and emotional depth? And, dramaturgically, there’s another similarity: Romeo begins the play as an underwritten and sometimes unlikeable character, who grows and is redeemed through Juliet’s love and language. Richard is not Romeo; he’s much more mobile, clever, and perverse, with a more complicated relationship with the audience. But here the audience has to pause and register that this interesting, eloquent woman truly loves her husband, and that she has profound insights into him, his situation, and the state of the realm.

 

On with the scene. Cheer up, says Bushy! You promised when you parted with the King to lay aside life-harming heaviness and entertain a cheerful disposition. So, time has passed, although not much; the King has left for Ireland. And Bushy is, perhaps, a fair-weather friend, not able to cope so well when things are difficult or uncertain. (He’s also apparently the sort of man who tells women to cheer up, love, it might never happen, you’d look so much prettier if you smiled…) Yes, I did, to make the King feel better, replies the Queen. But to please myself, I cannot do it. (That resonant half line, I cannot do it, will come back in Richard’s final speech. But that’s a long way off.) I have said farewell to my sweet Richard, a sweet guest, and in his place I entertain a new guest, grief. That seems a good enough reason to be sad. Yet there’s more: I am filled with forboding. Some unborn sorrow, ripe in Fortune’s womb, is coming towards me. (Added poignancy for a young, childless woman, wife to an heirless king, to be employing this conceit of pregnancy and imminent birth.) Something bad is about to happen; the sorrow is ripe. I don’t know what it is: my inward soul with nothing trembles. (Nothing is another word which will come back again and again.) But I’m shaken, afraid. I’m filled with sorrow for something more than with parting from my lord the King. It’s not just that.