RICHARD        Discomfortable cousin, know’st thou not

That when the searching eye of heaven is hid

Behind the globe and lights the lower world,

Then thieves and robbers range about unseen

In murders and in outrage boldly here;

But when from under this terrestrial ball

He fires the proud tops of the eastern pines

And darts his light through every guilty hole,

Then murders, treasons and detested sins,

The cloak of night being plucked from off their backs,

Stand bare and naked trembling at themselves.                (3.2.36-46)

Richard is not going to be out-obscured by Carlisle, and he’s not going to let Aumerle interrupt his flow of thoughts and words either. This whole passage is setting up a simile, based around a trope that is central to the play, the sun. But it’s also a bravura moralised development of the figure of chronographia, the description of the time of day: the ‘envious streaks that lace the severing clouds in yonder east’, ‘jocund day standing tiptoe on the misty mountain tops’ in Romeo and Juliet; ‘the morn in russet mantle clad walking o’er the dew of yond high eastward hill’ in Hamlet; the terrible conjurings of night in Macbeth). But that’s getting ahead, not least because the word sun doesn’t appear yet. Discomfortable cousin, gently chiding Aumerle: you’re not helping, you’re saying discomforting, uncomfortable things. (Comfort is going to come back in a moment or two.) Don’t you know, my cousin, that when the searching eye of heaven, that is, the sun, is hid behind the globe and lights the lower world (so, when it’s night here and daylight in the antipodes, on the other side of the world), then, while it’s dark, thieves and robbers range abroad unseen in murders and in outrage boldly here. Bad people do bad things in the dark of night. But the sun appears again, from under this terrestrial ball, the earth, and fires the proud tops of the eastern pines, lighting up the topmost branches of the trees with the light of morning (in Romeo and Juliet, the moon ‘tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops’). And when the sun rises, its rays reach everywhere, darting his light through every guilty hole, every hiding place, and murders, treasons and detested sins are exposed, the cloak of night being plucked from off their backs. Sins and sinners have nowhere to hide. They stand bare and naked, trembling at themselves. The sun here does not warm, or gently illuminate; it has the harsh, merciless quality of a searchlight, and Richard imagines the wrongdoers standing stripped in its glare, like souls before God on the day of judgement.