SERVANT What, think you the King shall be deposed?
GARDENER Depressed he is already, and deposed
’Tis doubt he will be. Letters came last night
To a dear friend of the good Duke of York’s
That tell black tidings.
QUEEN O, I am pressed to death with want of speaking! (3.4.67-72)
Deposed has, hitherto, mostly been used by Richard himself, but now it’s in the mouth of a gardener’s servant; the suggestion is that this is something that’s been the subject of general conversation for a while. It’s still a shocking thought, but not an unfamiliar one, and the Gardener seems to think it’s a foregone conclusion. Depressed he is already, depressed here mostly means reduced, debased, lowered (as has been so vividly spoken of and staged, in the previous scene) but also in the sense of dejection, a more modern understanding of depression—and yes, Richard’s mental state has suggested that too, however anachronistic it might be to privilege that sense here. There can now be no doubt that he will be deposed. And this isn’t just idle chat; there’s actual news: letters came last night, things are moving. The Gardener is well connected, or at least well-informed, it seems (he’s not just an allegory): the letters came to a dear friend of the good Duke of York’s (York is still well-regarded, then, even though he’s gone over to Bolingbroke), and the news is bad. They tell black tidings. The Queen can’t contain herself any longer, her anger and frustration, but also, perhaps, at the prospect of some fresh, real news: what more might the Gardener know? O, I am pressed to death with want of speaking: partly this is her characteristic wordplay, picking up on depressed (which she also, surely is, both in status and in her mental and emotional state), but it’s also an intense evocation of the state she’s been in, cut off without news, in limbo. That frustration has been a crushing, oppressive weight, a torture, a form of death, that she cannot sustain any longer in hearing her husband spoken of like this.
Those who were pressed to death judicially, by having heavy weights piled on them, were killed in that way because of their refusal to plead in court (that is, to say whether they were guilty or not guilty, thereby recognising the authority of the court and allowing the trial to continue), a terrible death, but one sometimes bravely chosen because it enabled heirs to inherit, rather than an estate being forfeit, or else it prevented others being called to testify and perhaps incriminating themselves. (Two famous examples: St Margaret Clitherow, martyred in York for harbouring priests in 1586; much later, Giles Corey, in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, immortalised in The Crucible.) The Queen here is being pressed to death because she cannot speak, rather than because she has chosen not to—but she can no longer keep silent.
