SCROOP          Sweet love, I see, changing his property,

Turns to the sourest and most deadly hate.

Again uncurse their souls, their peace is made

With heads and not with hands. Those whom you curse

Have felt the worst of death’s destroying wound

And lie full low, graved in the hollow ground.

AUMERLE      Is Bushy, Green and the Earl of Wiltshire dead?

SCROOP          Ay, all of them at Bristol lost their heads.   (3.2.135-142)

Finally, someone manages to shut Richard up: it’s Aumerle who replies to Scroop here, not Richard, shocked by this particular, close to home bit of bad news. These are the first actual deaths to be reported, with names, relationships, history; Bolingbroke means business. And Scroop—as well as his eloquence—holds Richard to a kind of moral account, or at least a certain standard of courtesy: you may be the King, but you don’t speak ill of the dead. And, stop being so capricious. These are your friends you’ve just cursed: you have been accustomed to speak of them with sweet love and now (in a sort-of continuation of that series of paradoxes, marvels he’s just described, the old men, boys, and women arming themselves to fight with Bolingbroke, those floods of steel) that sweet love had turned to the sourest and most deadly hate. Uncurse their souls: they’re dead already. Their peace is made with heads and not with hands, not with supplication, or the clasped hands of friendship and allegiance. (A grisly point.) They’ve paid with their lives, felt the worst of death’s destroying wound (and somehow he revives and prolongs the agony and terror of their deaths, reminding us that we saw the final moments of these condemned men). And now they lie full low, graved in the hollow ground. Dead and buried. A final brutal confirmation, all euphemisms pretty much abandoned: Is Bushy, Green and the Earl of Wiltshire dead? Ay, all of them at Bristol lost their heads.

I suspect this little transitional speech of Scroop’s, which is much more elaborate than it needs to be, might have been written after the long speech of Richard’s which follows it, because graved, hollow, ground will shortly come back again and again. The impression is that Richard, sensitive, suggestible, picks up Scroop’s words and develops them into some of the most astonishing images and words anywhere in Shakespeare. But I wonder if Scroop’s speech is, as it were, cleverly retrofitted, to create exactly that effect.