SCROOP          Whitebeards have armed their thin and hairless scalps

Against thy majesty; boys with women’s voices

Strive to speak big and clap their female joints

In stiff unwieldy arms against thy crown;

The very beadsmen learn to bend their bows

Of double-fatal yew against thy state;

Yea, distaff-women manage rusty bills

Against thy seat. Both young and old rebel,

And all goes worse than I have power to tell.         (3.2.112-120)

Scroop’s is a tiny role; this is the only scene in which he speaks, although he appears silently in at least one other scene. The actor would originally (and is probably now) doubling other parts: the Lord Marshal, for instance, would be one possibility (and the two characters could well be conflated). But he has fantastic speeches, and, perhaps more than any of Richard’s other companions (certainly more than Aumerle) he speaks Richard’s language, intense, vivid, visual, exaggerated. Having so powerfully evoked the rivers of steel, as Bolingbroke’s supporters, his rebel army flood the land, he now gives that army bodies, faces, personalities (although they are all types), all the while emphasising, and making real, just how desperate, catastrophic, cataclysmic, the situation is.

The old men have gone over to Bolingbroke, whitebeards have armed their thin and hairless scalps—and there is a glimpse of fragile, freckled heads, encased, with determination, in that hard steel. And the young ones, too, the boys too young to fight, with their women’s voices, striving to speak big; they too have sought armour, to protect but also conceal their female joints, in stiff unwieldy arms, the prosthetic steel body of adult masculine power, agency, and identity. (And we imagine a child’s limbs, unable to bend freely, wave, play, fragile as the armour is strapped on.) The very beadsmen, pensioners, the poor, the old, whose only income is from being paid to pray for others: they’ve taken up longbows, of double-fatal yew (poisonous even before it becomes a deadly weapon), and the image of them learning to bend those bows (especially to an audience still familiar with archery and the sheer strength and skill it required) again reinforces the magnitude and the determination of the forces arrayed against King Richard. And even the distaff-women (pretty much all women were distaff women, spinsters, at some point in their lives)—they manage rusty bills against thy seat, they grab the old-fashioned bills, spears (no shiny steel for them) to do their bit, like farm women arming themselves with pitchforks and scythes. And running through this beautifully balanced speech, more awful than even that final couplet, with its nod to the conventions of inexpressibility (and all goes worse than I have power to tell) there is the refrain, varying yet constant: against thy majesty, against thy crown, against thy state, against thy seat. That’s how bad it is. That’s what you’re facing. Who dares take arms against the Lord’s anointed? Pretty much everyone.