RICHARD And though you think that all—as you have done—
Have torn their souls by turning them from us
And we are barren and bereft of friends,
Yet know my master, God omnipotent,
Is mustering in his clouds on our behalf
Armies of pestilence, and they shall strike
Your children yet unborn and unbegot
That lift your vassal hands against my head
And threat the glory of my precious crown. (3.3.81-89)
A single, furious sentence, of threat and admonition, at once epic and personal. You (Northumberland, specifically, but directed at all his hearers), you think that everyone is as much of a traitor as you are, tearing your soul as you break oaths, rebel, and betray. You think that I am barren and bereft of friends, alone and friendless (this of course chimes with Richard’s own anguish, his plaintive need for friends, in the previous scene). But I am not alone: God is on my side, omnipotent; He is my master and I am doing his work. And He is mustering in His clouds on our behalf armies of pestilence—not an angelic army now, but plague. The language here is biblical, God smiting the Egyptians with plague in Exodus, but also epic, the plague sent by Apollo upon the Greeks in the first book of the Iliad, soon to appear in its first English translation (by George Chapman; the first seven books were printed in 1598). This is both a threat and a curse, of terrible consequences not just for those whom Richard so furiously, magnificently addresses here, but for their children yet unborn and unbegot, an intergenerational catastrophe. This will be the outcome, disaster, terror, and despair for those who lift their vassal hands against my head, subjects raising their hands not in supplication but in violence, and threat the glory of my precious crown. (And it’s as the last word in the nineteenth line of this speech that he finally says crown, concluding the first part of this brilliant speech. Apart from anything else, the breath control…) If one stops to think, it is absurd, but in the moment, magnificent, a golden figure high above the stage, calling down the wrath of God. (Lear’s crisis recalls this, bathetically, in his final curse of Goneril and Regan as he rushes into the storm: ‘I will have such revenges on you both | That all the world shall—I will do such things—| What they are, yet I know not, but they shall be | The terrors of the earth!’, 2.4.)
