AUMERLE      Where is the Duke my father with his power?

RICHARD        No matter where. Of comfort no man speak—

Let’s talk of graves, of worms and epitaphs,

Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes

Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.

Let’s choose executors and talk of wills—

And yet not so, for what can we bequeath

Save our deposèd bodies to the ground?

Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke’s,

And nothing can we call our own but death

And that small model of the barren earth

Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.     (3.2.143-154)

Aumerle is, it seems, still looking for a bright side, for good news, for consolation (or at least that’s one way of reading it): where is the Duke my father with his power, his troops? —that is, York, whom Richard left in charge in his absence, and whom we have already seen more or less capitulate to Bolingbroke. No matter where. And that half-line, a defeated, deflated reality check, might signal a pause in Richard’s fluency, his eloquence, his intensely sensual spinning of astonishing conceits. Of comfort no man speak—as if he’s cutting Aumerle off from his characteristic needy optimism. Don’t you start. Don’t you even dare.

Of comfort no man speak; there’s no possibility of consolation here. Let’s get real. Let’s talk of graves, of worms and epitaphs; the verbal memento mori makes sense here, on one level—these are the things of death—but the logic of their ordering takes a little while to work out. The worms are in the grave (as yet Richard’s skirting around the corpse) but the epitaph properly belongs outside it, is even something separate from the grave itself. The epitaph points, rather, to the more elaborate, and far stranger, conceit of making dust—the earth, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust—our paper and with rainy eyes write sorrow on the bosom of the earth. Again, there’s the identification between body and land, but here that elision is at a starker and more fundamental level: the body is dust: remember man that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return. As the heavens rain upon the earth, so Richard’s eyes (and those of his friends; he’s including them in his speech, as for once his royal plural has disappeared) will weep—and those tears will be like ink, and the body, like the earth, will be like paper, on which sorrow will be written. Richard’s own tears will write sorrow (perhaps just the word, perhaps words of sorrow more generally) on his heart, on his land. (To write in the dust is also ephemeral; this is an epitaph that will soon be lost, scattered by wind and weather. Is there also a glance at Lavinia—Titus Andronicus is still in rep in 1595-6, and in print—writing the names of the men who raped and mutilated her in the dust?) It’s a strange, fugitive image of the transience of life, record, language.

And that’s what Richard’s preoccupied with: loss, absence, erasure, futility—death (a word he hasn’t quite used yet). Let’s choose executors and talk of wills—and yet those essential acts of the early modern man of property, of the ordering of affairs, dignity, stability, are immediately dismissed. What’s the point? What can we bequeath save our deposèd bodies to the ground? Deposed as in deposed from the throne is of course at stake here—but so is death as deposition, meaning to be lowered, buried. (The Deposition from the Cross in art depicts the body of Christ being lowered to the ground for burial; the lowering of bodies to the ground is about to be staged.) Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke’s—and nothing can we call our own but death (fair enough, it’s the one thing that remains a certainty, that they can still count on, and so in a sense possess) and that small model of the barren earth which serves as paste and cover to our bones. There’s the body, finally—not land, not dust, but mere flesh, here imagined as both a microcosm of the world (that small model of the barren earth) and as flesh itself, like the paste, the pastry of a pie (and—again as in Titus, pie-play supreme—a pastry case can be a coffin in early modern usage) and also, more generally, what Shakespeare refers to in Sonnet 44 as ‘the dull substance of my flesh’. It’s heavy, dull—earthly, in elemental and humoral terms. Flesh is earth, the body is dust; here it is a dead thing, no longer beautiful, barely functional. A covering for bones.