CARLISLE My lord, wise men ne’er wail their present woes,
But presently prevent the ways to wail.
To fear the foe, since fear oppresseth strength,
Gives in your weakness strength unto your foe,
And so your follies fight against yourself.
Fear and be slain, no worse can come to fight,
And fight and die is death destroying death,
Where fearing dying pays death servile breath. (3.2.178-185)
Ah, the Bishop of Carlisle, bringing an enduring episcopal faith in the efficacy of alliteration to the party. It’s a rather knotty and opaque way of saying to the king, you’ve got nothing to lose, man, get a grip. But it also forms a kind of buffer between the haunting beauty and existential abyss of Richard’s cri de coeur (to which it could never adequately respond, and to Carlisle’s credit he doesn’t even try) and the need for something to happen, for a plan, a way of getting up off the ground. (Aumerle is working on that.) Wise men don’t sit around complaining about their current situation, but instead do something immediately, presently, to forestall and avoid the causes of their trouble and distress, with ways to wail adding a touch of assonance to the alliteration. Fear makes you weaker (fear oppresseth strength) and thereby only strengthens your adversary; your follies, your weaknesses, your fears effectively fight against you, becoming your foes too. Fear is self-defeating, self-destructive. You can be afraid and still be slain in battle, and at least you’ll have joined in the fight; what’s more, no worse can come to fight, than death. You lose nothing by facing your fear and attacking; to die in that attempt is a way of defeating death itself, because you have not merely paid death the cowed, cringing tribute of fearing it, with servile breath, weak words of fear. (Carlisle is saying, in fact, although with rather more abstraction and prelatical gnomicness, that it is better to die on your feet than live on your knees. Which makes me wonder about casting, and whether Carlisle would have played Friar Lawrence, whom he seems in part to be channelling here, Richard as Romeo, down on the ground feeling sorry for himself.)
