RICHARD Must I do so? And must I ravel out
My weaved-up follies? Gentle Northumberland,
If thy offences were upon record,
Would it not shame thee in so fair a troop
To read a lecture of them? If thou wouldst,
There shouldst thou find one heinous article
Containing the deposing of a king
And cracking the strong warrant of an oath,
Marked with a blot, damned in the book of heaven. (4.1.228-236)
Reluctance or defiance? Must I do so, do I have to? Or, must I do so, who are you to order me that I must do anything? Then, must I ravel out my weaved-up follies? A vivid image of undoing, a textile fraying and collapsing into indistinction; no indication of what kind it might be, but follies suggests the imagining of something light and silken (perhaps overthinking, by analogy with Macbeth’s description of sleep ‘ravelling up the sleave of care’, sleave being fine silken threads…) Ravel out suggests not simply an undoing but something painstaking, time-consuming, and also more fundamentally destructive.
But then Richard really goes for Northumberland. Gentle Northumberland—noble, kind Northumberland, the heavy sarcasm perhaps not yet quite clear; is this simply politeness, pleading? If thy offences were upon record, if there were such a list of all your wrongdoings, wouldn’t you be embarrassed, ashamed in so fair a troop, in such an assembly of fine and noble people, to have to read that list aloud? But—turning the knife—if there were such a record, and you had to proclaim it in public, you’d find just the one charge, one heinous article there. It would tell of the deposing of a king and cracking the strong warrant of an oath. You are an oath-breaker, a perjurer, a traitor, Northumberland. You have committed a terrible sin—and the imagined record of Northumberland’s crimes becomes the book of life, in which Northumberland’s name is marked with a blot; he is damned in the book of heaven. Northumberland—and Bolingbroke—are speaking politically, legally, pragmatically. But God is still on my side, is Richard’s implicit response.
