Drums, flourish, and colours. Enter Richard, Aumerle, Carlisle, and soldiers

RICHARD        Barkloughly Castle call they this at hand?

AUMERLE      Yea, my lord. How brooks your grace the air

After your late tossing on the breaking seas?

RICHARD        Needs must I like it well. I weep for joy

To stand upon my kingdom once again;

Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand

Though rebels wound thee with their horses’ hoofs.        (3.2.1-7)

Richard’s back! He was last seen back in 2.1; he’s been in Ireland (and off-stage, killing time, having a nap, doing the crossword, doing his nails) for a considerable length of time. But it’s quite an entrance (and unless some of the same attendants who have just exited with Bolingbroke come straight back on, this is evidence for a reasonably large number of extras). Drums, flourish—of trumpets—and colours, flags, banners. There will be a contrast, probably, with Bolingbroke’s contingent: Richard’s ensemble could look brighter, shinier, more royal—and also, perhaps, flimsy, superficial, ill-prepared, inappropriately dressed. But it’s early days. First of all, where are we, exactly? WALES. This unpronounceable castle (as spelled by Shakespeare and his editors) appears in Holinshed as ‘Barclowie’; it’s actually Harlech, in North Wales. How brooks you grace the air, how do you like it here, asks Aumerle, after your late tossing on the breaking seas, voyage, your rough crossing over the Irish sea? I like it very much, replies Richard, and here he begins what will be a long speech in his characteristically intense, emotional idiom. I weep for joy that I’m home, to stand upon my kingdom once again—but it’s not some abstract, sentimental vision of home or nation or even ‘land’ that he conjures, but an emotional connection deeply rooted in the earth itself. The kingdom, his kingdom, on which he stands has a near-sentient quality; he imagines that it feels and responds, and he greets it, salutes it, by bending or kneeling or even sitting down and touching the ground, reconnecting with it, suggesting a parallel and an intimate connection and understanding between the earth, the land, and the man who is, still its ruler. Kingdom is a profoundly personal and material concept for this king. He’s seizing back for himself the intensely emotional evocation of the land, of England, that seemed, once, to be more John of Gaunt’s prerogative. Yet Richard is all too aware that at the moment, his land is being wounded with the horses’ hoofs of rebels. One mightn’t obviously think of hooves as wounding, but there’s a contrast, perhaps, between Richard’s delicate, intimate placing of his hand on the ground and the solidity and weight of a horse, a troop of horses, a rebel army—as we have only just seen, in the previous scenes. (There won’t have been horses, at least not on stage, but here Richard’s speech retrospectively furnishes Bolingbroke with cavalry.) The land has been sullied, injured—but it’s alright, now, Richard’s home.