SCROOP Glad am I that your highness is so armed
To bear the tidings of calamity.
Like an unseasonable stormy day,
Which makes the silver rivers drown their shores
As if the world were all dissolved to tears,
So high above his limits swells the rage
Of Bolingbroke, covering your fearful land
With hard bright steel and hearts harder than steel. (3.2.104-111)
Scroop might well be a bit too reassured by Richard’s apparent fortitude and acceptance: glad am I that your highness is so armed to bear the tidings of calamity. It’s not clear that he brings news, in the sense of anything new, and he’s certainly not being specific in terms of numbers. What he brings is a fantastic epic simile, expressing the nature of the crisis in terms that Richard can understand: grandiose, vivid, literally grounded in land, land that is also a body, weeping. It’s Scroop’s speech, rather than Salisbury’s one a few moments earlier, that really answers, and perhaps destroys, Richard’s evocation of balm unable to be washed away by sea, of golden angels fighting for the king. Scroop imagines an unseasonable stormy day: torrential rain, dark skies, which makes the silver rivers drown their shores, as if the world were all dissolved to tears. The land is flooded, the rivers have burst their banks—and that’s how swelling, rising, devastating Bolingbroke is. But there’s more to this simile than a striking evocation of aggrandisement. The flooding of the land suggests the Biblical Flood, something as cataclysmic and transformative. (And a sign of divine displeasure and punishment?) The water swelling so high above his limits, the rivers bursting their banks are disordered as well as damaging, breaking out of their channels, their ordained place and position. And, most brilliantly, those silver rivers are transformed into a flood, a torrent of hard bright steel, armour, swords in opposition to Richard’s gold. The very land has turned against him, hearts harder than steel. Is Richard really armed to bear the tidings of this calamity?
