Enter a Servant
SERVANT My lord, your son was gone before I came.
YORK He was? Why so, go all which way it will.
The nobles they are fled, the commons they are cold
And will, I fear, revolt on Hereford’s side.
Sirrah, get thee to Pleshey, to my sister Gloucester,
Bid her send me presently a thousand pound—
Hold, take my ring.
SERVANT My lord, I had forgot to tell your lordship,
Today as I came by, I callèd there—
But I shall grieve you to report the rest.
YORK What is’t, knave?
SERVANT An hour before I came the Duchess died. (2.2.86-97)
The writing here neatly conveys the increasing chaos of the situation. The scene began with the intricate, conceited meditations on the nature of grief by Bushy and the Queen, abstract and artificial (in the sense of, full of art), then bad news from Green (40 lines in), then bad news from York (after another 30 or so lines) and now an unnamed messenger (less than 15 lines after that). Abstract meditation has given way to information, but the increasing pace makes it confused and stressed, with a sense of worryingly unfocused urgency; York entering in his gorget has radically shifted the terms, broken open the intense, solipsistic, self-referential discussions of the Queen and the courtiers. (They do all continue in blank verse, of course.) No more extended metaphorical conceits of perspectives or childbirth, but urgent questions and instructions, and in particular the clever sense that York’s multitasking, that he’s been trying to set in motion other bits of the plot, remain in control of the narrative. The servant has been sent to Aumerle, York’s son—but he’s gone, presumably to King Richard in Ireland. (The unpredictability and capriciousness of Aumerle, and perhaps also a distant relationship with his father, is going to matter, much later on.) York’s too distracted to pay much attention to this: He was? Why so, go all which way it came; what will be will be. A quick reminder of the dire situation, that the nobles they are fled, and also the commons they are cold; there’s no sign of popular support for Richard, either in parliament or among the common people more generally. York’s fear is that, when it comes to it, the people will revolt on Hereford’s side. (A reminder of Richard’s anxious/malicious account of Bolingbroke’s courtship to the common people, as he called it, and their respectful affection towards him: that’s now coming home to roost.)
York clearly has a big to-do list, and he can’t worry about Aumerle; it’s on to the next thing: raising money. He sends the servant (who may well be visibly exhausted and travel-stained) on his next errand, to Pleshey, to the Duchess of Gloucester; he is to ask her to send presently, right away, a thousand pound (a huge amount of money). And, hang on a minute (as he starts to take it off)—here, take my ring, to authenticate the request. Oh dear. (What is’t knave? isn’t necessarily insulting or pejorative, indeed it could be affectionate, but it is certainly impatient.) The servant now has to deliver yet more bad news: he’s already been to Pleshey today and he arrived there only to learn that an hour before he came the Duchess died. This nameless servant knows that he’s the bearer of yet more bad news in a rapidly worsening situation—I shall grieve you to report the rest—but there’s no point in concealing it. We might flash back to that dignified, eloquent, grief-stricken woman, seen only in her short scene with Gaunt. Both of them now dead.
(Historically, the Duchess was very much still alive at this point in the story, although she was to die within a few months. But her death here adds to York’s isolation and, even more, to the cascading sense of sorrow and loss at this point in the play. ‘When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions’, as Claudius will observe in Hamlet 4.5.)
