RICHARD Yield stinging nettles to mine enemies
And when they from thy bosom pluck a flower,
Guard it, I pray thee, with a lurking adder,
Whose double tongue may with a mortal touch
Throw death upon thy sovereign’s enemies.
Mock not my senseless conjuration, lords.
This earth shall have a feeling and these stones
Prove armèd soldiers ere her native king
Shall falter under foul rebellion’s arms. (3.2.18-26)
The whimsy of Richard’s speech, and the sense that, perhaps, his hearers are amused by it, shouldn’t obscure the intensity of Richard’s identification both with the land and with his own kingship. First there’s the vivid evocation of Bolingbroke and his supporters being stung with nettles and then, when they do want to pluck a flower from the ground, the bosom of the earth (that is, when they find one in the midst of all the nettles, and as if, again, the land were a body) may it be concealing a poisonous snake, which will, with its forked tongue, give a mortal touch to the king’s enemies, bring about their deaths. Appropriately, there’s more to the concealed snake than meets the eye. The early modern belief was that it was the tongue which was poisonous, not the bite—hence, all that’s needed is the touch of the double tongue, rather than any action from actual poisonous fangs. To describe the forked tongue as double is completely conventional (as in the fairies’ lullaby in Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘You spotted snakes with double tongue’, which also banishes the spiders, the ‘long-legged spinners’ from Titania’s bed), but it’s also, perhaps, a reminder of the idea of double-speaking and hypocrisy, associated with the forked or double tongue of the snake. It’s an image of betrayal, imagining and hoping for the betrayal of Bolingbroke by his friends and supporters as Richard himself has been betrayed, although he as yet doesn’t know the full extent of his friends’ and supporters’ desertion. And that hypocritical, treacherous, double-tongued snake also, of course, recalls the snake in the garden of Eden. The Fall, like the snake itself, almost always lurks in the gardens of this play. The image of the snake in the grass, the serpent hiding beneath the flower, is a very common emblem and idiom at this time: ‘Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it’, Lady Macbeth tells her husband.
Mock not my senseless conjuration, lords. Are they smiling indulgently, perhaps, opening laughing? Richard, as ever, can switch tack (he can do irony; Bolingbroke can’t, really, although he can do subterfuge): I know I’m being silly, conjuring that which is senseless, addressing an inanimate thing, the earth, as if it can hear me. I know I’m being a bit overly dramatic. But I’m the king, the native king of this earth—and that connection is important, the sense that he has this strong, symbiotic bond with the land, that he is both its king and born of it, native to it. (In Psalm 47, ‘The Lord is the King of all the earth’; Richard’s self-dramatization often gestures at or echoes the prerogatives of God or, especially later, Christ.) And, as if in a sign of his resolve and his seriousness, he sets aside the nettles, the flower, even the snake, and speaks of this earth, and these stones. This earth shall feel, shall become animated; these stones shall prove armèd soldiers—as if flinging themselves as weapons against the invaders, even? Perhaps. But do not doubt that I will fight with everything I have, and call on all the resources and powers at my disposal, and above all on the land itself, before I will falter, weaken, surrender, bow my head under foul rebellion’s arms, the weapons and banners of Bolingbroke and his invading army.
Objectively it’s ridiculous, hubristic. But it’s got such grandeur to it, and, by acknowledging its own absurdity, it disarms the hearer, the reader. Richard in full cry is astonishing, lively, resonant, intensely emotional, vivid and sensual. He cannot ever be written off, or even indulgently mocked, for long.
