SCROOP More health and happiness betide my liege
Than can my care-tuned tongue deliver him.
RICHARD Mine ear is open and my heart prepared,
The worst is worldly loss thou canst unfold.
Say, is my kingdom lost? Why, ’twas my care
And what loss is it to be rid of care?
Strives Bolingbroke to be as great as we?
Greater he shall not be: if he serve God,
We’ll serve him too and be his fellow so.
Revolt our subjects? That we cannot mend;
They break their faith to God as well as us.
Cry woe, destruction, ruin and decay—
The worst is death, and death will have his day. (3.2.91-103)
Scroop begins by managing Richard’s expectations, preparing him for yet more bad news: he wishes him more health and happiness, in general, than the specifics of the news he is about to deliver with his care-tuned tongue, as if his tongue were a musical instrument, capable only of playing notes of woe and worry. Richard is as mercurial as ever (he is an exhausting companion) and now he is going to be magnanimous, philosophical, a model of devout fortitude and patience. My ear is open and my heart prepared: whatever you have to tell me, the worst can only be worldly loss, earthly suffering, physical and material ill-fortune, rather than, implicitly, the loss of heavenly things, spiritual deprivation, divine displeasure. My mind is on higher things. (This whole speech is a kind of elevated gazing into the middle distance, rather than dealing with the specifics of what’s in front of him.) Say, is my kingdom lost? (Is he really contemplating the possibility? Being loftily fatalistic, to make a rhetorical point?) My kingdom was my care, my burden—and what loss is it to be rid of care, to be relieved of such a weighty responsibility? No loss at all! Is Bolingbroke trying to be as great as we (he means, me)? He can’t be greater (because I’m the king); so long as he serves God, then I’ll serve God too, and we will be equals. (This is mysterious as well as knotty: is Richard really entertaining the possibility that Bolingbroke could be king? Unknowable.) Are our subjects revolting? (The old joke…) Well, we can’t do anything about that; that we cannot mend. If they are rebelling against the king, then they are also breaking their faith with God. (He might be thinking especially of those of his followers, nobles, who have explicitly sworn an oath of loyalty to the crown.) And a final moralising couplet: Cry woe, destruction, ruin and decay—the worst is death, and death will have his day.There’s nothing to be done, really, because everyone has to die eventually. No matter how many times I’m told how bad things are, and how much worse they could become, there’s nothing worse than death, and death comes to us all.
Possibly more than Scroop was expecting: he thought he was bringing an update on troop movements, and he’s been given the benefit of a full-blown existential crisis, worked through and bravely rationalised on the spot.
(Pretentious title: it’s the opening line of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. But Godot riffs on King Lear, and Lear in many ways reworks Richard II, so…)
