QUEEN           So, Green, thou art the midwife to my woe,

And Bolingbroke my sorrow’s dismal heir.

Now hath my soul brought forth her prodigy

And I, a gasping new-delivered mother,

Have woe to woe, sorrow to sorrow joined.

BUSHY            Despair not, madam.

QUEEN                                               Who shall hinder me?

I will despair and be at enmity

With cozening hope. He is a flatterer,

A parasite, a keeper-back of death,

Who gently would dissolve the bonds of life,

Which false hope lingers at extremity.       (2.2.62-72)

Green’s previous speech, delivering the news that Richard’s own household have deserted him for Bolingbroke, finished on the half line—so there is potentially what could be termed a pregnant pause before the Queen replies, while the three men digest the seriousness of the situation, lost for words. (I’m not sure if the idiom is current in the 1590s, but it pleases me.) Green has delivered the news, but also enabled the Queen to give birth to, realise, give a form and name to, her woe, the sense of terrible, as yet unspecific sadness and foreboding that she’s just been articulating; he has been her midwife. Her sorrow’s dismal heir, both her grief and the outcome, the heir, the child of that grief is Bolingbroke himself. My soul has brought forth her prodigy, not a precociously gifted child but a monster, a misshapen and unlucky portent; I’m like a woman who’s just given birth, panting for breath, full of anguish, but my pains, my travails, my labour has only given birth to more pain and grief, joining woe to woe, sorrow to sorrow, distress at the terrible child that’s been born compounding the pain of the labour. And the Queen’s conceit here is surely reinforced not only by her childlessness (and perhaps even, already, the thought that if Richard falls, she is unlikely ever to bear his child) but also by the way in which Richard himself can be childlike, prodigious, a child-king who has never grown up.

Despair not, madam, says Bushy, weakly; buck up, don’t go on so, don’t give up hope—really, this isn’t going to cut it here, as a response, especially given that the Queen and Green have just been comprehensively demolishing the possibility of hope. The Queen continues to be steely and splendid, and there’s hints here not just of Juliet, but of the great, grief-stricken Constance in King John, notoriously difficult to date, but not impossibly close to this. Who will hinder me?, she asks. Who’s going to stop me despairing? (You and whose army would be anachronistic, but ironically appropriate in the circumstances; Bolingbroke’s the one with the army.) I will despair and be at enmity, set myself against deceitful, deceptive, cozening hope. Hope is a flatterer, a parasite—terms more readily applied to Green, Bushy, and Bagot, as the Queen surely knows and intends. Hope (like a king’s flattering favourite) only tells you what you want to hear, and not the truth. Hope is a keeper-back of death, only delaying the inevitable; death gently dissolves the bonds of life, but false hope only prolongs the agony of dying, causing one to linger at the point of death, in extremity. No point in being let down gently. Let’s know how bad it really is.