RICHARD        Aumerle, thou weep’st, my tender-hearted cousin.

We’ll make foul weather with despisèd tears.

Our sighs and they shall lodge the summer corn

And make a dearth in the revolting land.

Or shall we play the wantons with our woes

And make some pretty match with shedding tears?

As thus: to drop them still upon one place

Till they have fretted us a pair of graves

Within the earth and, therein laid, ‘There lies

Two kinsmen digged their graves with weeping eyes’.

Would not this ill do well? Well, well, I see

I talk but idly and you laugh at me.             (3.3.159-170)

 

Aumerle at least has been moved by Richard’s speech of renunciation, although it could as well be the whole desperate situation, the tension, fear. (And Richard has, on some level at least, been articulating what sounds like a suicidal intent.) So now Richard pulls the focus in, as he (mostly) addresses his cousin and friend, with whom he is sometimes impatient but whom he mostly treats with great affection. (In some recent productions, the relationship between the two of them has been portrayed as more intimate still, with an erotic dimension.) Are you weeping? We’ll weep together, and we’ll weep up a storm; our tears and sighs will flatten the summer corn, the grain in the fields. There will be famine because of us, and the violence of our grief. This recalls Titania’s great ‘forgeries of jealousy’ speech in Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which she tells Oberon, in fury, that the discord between them has disrupted the seasons and the weather, destroying crops: ‘The ox hath therefore stretched his yoke in vain, | The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn | Hath rotted ere his youth attained a beard’ (2.1). Or else, instead, we could play the wantons with our woes—Aumerle is starting to smile at this, which is the object of the exercise—we could make a game of our weeping, some pretty match with shedding tears. We could let our tears drop still upon one place, so that they will wear away the earth, fret for us a pair of graves (and fret also suggests the fretting of worrying and sorrow which, in the Sonnets at least, will carve furrows in a beloved face). And we can be buried in those graves, side by side (he doesn’t say, a single grave, in which we can be buried together, which really would ramp up the emotional temperature), and it can be said of us, as in a neatly rhymed epitaph, ‘There lies two kinsmen digged their graves with weeping eyes’. A characteristic bit of rapid, quibbling wordplay to conclude, changing ill to well, bad to good, suffering to consolation, and then simply well, well, that’s cheered you up; I see I talk but idly and you laugh at me. A ridiculous little consoling fantasy, intimate and amusing, and ironic. Aumerle’s so often been the one to speak of comfort; here it’s Richard who, briefly, finds some to offer, ridiculous though it is. Witty, amusing, desperately sad.

What this anticipates, perhaps, in that sudden close focus on the bond between two people in the midst of conflict, oppression, and loss, is Lear to Cordelia:

Come, let’s away to prison.

We two alone will sing like birds i’th’ cage.

When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down

And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues

Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too—

Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out—

And take upon’s the mystery of things,

As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out,

In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones

That ebb and flow by th’ moon. (5.3.8-19)

A moment of escape, a consoling shared imagining of an alternative ending, made as much in the mode of the writing, suddenly private in the midst of an emphatically exposed and public scene, as in the nature of the fantasy itself, a private, quiet, space, a world remade.