RICHARD        Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood

With solemn reverence. Throw away respect,

Tradition, form and ceremonious duty.

For you have but mistook me all this while,

I live with bread like you, feel want,

Taste grief, need friends. Subjected thus,

How can you say to me I am a king?            (3.2.171-177)

After that strange, sharp, breathless, terrifying picture of death, laughing at him—in a castle, in the hollow crown; inside Richard’s head—there is a helpless resignation here, with these shorter, more flowing phrases. Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood with solemn reverence: even the most ordinary signs of courtesy and respect, as Richard’s companions (and any soldiers, silently present) are exhorted, gently (or bitterly? the option’s there) to put their hats on again, rather than appearing respectfully bareheaded before their sovereign lord. (Compare the acid mockery of Osric’s hat in Hamlet; an early modern audience would be far more attuned to such niceties. The covering of heads with hoods in particular, especially if pulled low over the brows, would evoke mourning to an audience in the 1590s, too.) It is mockery to make such a gesture of respect, of solemn reverence, to one who is but flesh and blood, a mere mortal; it could only be done in jest. Stop worrying about such things (about which Richard has cared meticulously, passionately): throw away respect, tradition, form and ceremonious duty—all of the things that make him king. (Power is performed, not least on a stage, not by the actions of the person with the highest status, but by the way in which those with less power react and respond to them.)

You have but mistook me all this while: you’ve got it wrong, you’ve mistaken me for someone else. I’m not who you thought I was. (I’m not who I think I am.) I live with bread like you, the most basic level of human subsistence. I feel want; I need things, I experience lack and loss. I taste grief—and I have to say, I think this is one of the most genius moments in the whole speech, if not the entire play. Richard could simply repeat feel—feel want, feel grief—but taste, that brilliantly aligns grief with bread, making it as basic and as commonplace—and it’s bitter in the mouth, a sour tang, poisoning even daily bread, which it turns to dust and ashes.

And the final truth: I need friends. That’s what it is to be human, to be merely human. Will you be my friends? Will you continue to be my friends—or will you abandon me me, through treason or by death? (I think that there is a Christological thread running through here too: Christ as the man of sorrows, despised and rejected and acquainted with grief, as in Isaiah 53, denied by his friend Peter, as in Matthew 26 and the other gospels—and invoking the daily breadof the Lord’s Prayer.) Subjected thus, how can you say to me I am a king? I am a man. I am subjected, both a subject not a king, and subjected to these human forces and vulnerabilities, of hunger, sorrow, lack, and loss, grief, and death.