RICHARD                                Give me the crown.

Here, cousin, seize the crown. Here, cousin,

On this side my hand, and on that side thine.

Now is this golden crown like a deep well

That owes two buckets filling one another,

The emptier ever dancing in the air,

The other down, unseen and full of water.

That bucket down and full of tears am I,

Drinking my griefs whilst you mount up on high.             (4.1.181-189)

Richard is, astonishingly, in control—of the stage, and of its symbolism. He knows the value of a prop as much as of a vivid conceit, and here he has both. (Is the crown just a prop? What kind of a thing is a crown? That’s moot here.) Give me the crown, he commands, a command which is, apparently, obeyed immediately. Where is it prior to that? Not on Bolingbroke’s head. On a table, or a cushion held by—who? The abbot of Westminster would be one possibility. Or an anonymous functionary, a page? It is the scene’s and the play’s contested thing, after all; it has had some kind of silent presence, like the throne, up until this point. And as soon as Richard has the crown, he issues another command: here, cousin, seize the crown. (The verb is, of course, deliberate, and there is space for comedy in the repetition of here, cousin, as if Bolingbroke is a reluctant pet who must be cajoled. Here, cousin.)

So they stand, in one of the play’s—and early modern drama’s—iconic moments, two men (sometimes played as mirror images of each other, sometimes very different) standing with the crown between them, a golden thing, a circle (hollow), a prize, a symbol, absolute power. The two men balance either side, holding it in mid-air and in a strange sense being held by it, suspended. But Richard’s the one in charge of reading it, interpreting it: Now is this golden crown like a deep well. And for a moment a void yawns, plummets, deeper and darker even than the death-dwelling hollowness which Richard has previously evoked. A well with two buckets, though, and the imagination comes back to ground level (the effect is a bit dizzying, vertiginous) to picture the emptier ever dancing in the air, carefree in the sunlight, the other down, unseen and full of water. They are interdependent, and the rising of one necessitates the lowering, the subjection, the abasement, the fall of the other. These buckets are, in part, the wheel of fortune. And I am the bucket down and full of tears, says Richard. I drink my griefs, drown in them, whilst you mount up on high.