BOLINGBROKE I thought you had been willing to resign.
RICHARD My crown I am, but still my griefs are mine.
You may my glories and my state depose
But not my griefs; still am I king of those.
BOLINGBROKE Part of your cares you give me with your crown.
RICHARD Your cares set up do not pluck my cares down.
My care is loss of care, by old care done,
Your care is gain of care, by new care won.
The cares I give I have, though given away,
They tend the crown yet still with me they stay. (4.1.190-199)
Bolingbroke thought that this was all settled, that this is just the formalities to perform in public an agreement that’s already been made (and perhaps double-checked by York, when he went to fetch Richard in). I thought you had been willing to resign: a flicker of doubt? annoyance? a meaningful glance at York? But what marks this exchange is Bolingbroke’s single-line replies, factual, functional, abrupt, quite patient, around which Richard spins webs of elaborately patterned wordplay (and this is largely in rhyming couplets), betraying deep trauma, revealing profound need. Willing to resign? My crown I am, but still my griefs are mine. Perverse, histrionic, but also strikingly recognisable in psychological terms: defined, as he now sees it, by sorrow (despised and rejected, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief: Richard’s identification as a Christ-figure continues, here perhaps via Isaiah 53) he will hug those griefs to him, a weight, a wound, which remind him that he still exists. You may my glories and my state depose (not the nation state, but rather the ceremonies and honours of kingship) but not my griefs; still am I king of those.
Part of your cares you give me with your crown: Bolingbroke does have some idea, it seems, of what he’s getting in to. But Richard’s ready for that: your cares set up do not pluck my cares down. (Up/down—the play’s characteristic vertical axis.) Doesn’t make any difference. Cares are not finite; they expand to fill the space available. (Yes.) And then a four-line passage that even by the standards of Richard’s riffing is obsessive. My care, my trauma, is the result of having lost care, the responsibility of kingship, even though I have been exhausted, wrung out by those responsibilities, that weight. Your care is the anxiety of taking over that responsibility, that care; you’ve care-fully sought that charge, little by little by new care won it. The cares I give I have, though given away: I can’t rid myself of this anguish, this sense of responsibility, even though I ostensibly pass my cares to you. Such cares, such anxieties tend the crown, attend it, wait upon it; they’re part of it—but now they also remain with me.
It’s obsessive, properly compulsive in its repetitions, and desperately sad, even as it frustrates; it has a mesmeric quality in those repetitions. It reminds me a little of Chidiock Tichborne, whose bleak and beautiful lament would have been known to Shakespeare and many in his audience.
