RICHARD        Nay, all of you that stand and look upon me

Whilst that my wretchedness doth bait myself,

Though some of you with Pilate wash your hands,

Showing an outward pity, yet you Pilates

Have here delivered me to my sour cross

And water cannot wash away your sin.      (4.1.237-242)

More hyperbole from Richard, but real pain too, its expression full of resonant details. All of you that stand and look upon me emphasises Richard’s isolation, with an additional instantly recognisable dynamic: you’re all standing and staring at me, I feel so exposed. And what are you staring at? At the way in which my wretchedness doth bait myself, as if I were an animal (a bear, for instance) being baited by dogs, attacked and tormented while I cannot properly fight back. (They have tied me to a stake, as Macbeth will say a decade later.) Misery and wretchedness as savage, merciless, relentless dogs—inside his head, his heart. (As acute an expression of psychological distress as one could ever read, or speak.) Though some of you with Pilate wash your hands—oh Richard, you do so well in drawing us into your pain, and then you go just that little bit too far, here comparing himself (again) to Christ by accusing the bystanders of absolving themselves of any responsibility, washing their hands of him like Pilate and showing an outward pity (which Pilate, in point of fact, did not do, but here perhaps the suggestion is that some of the lords at least are looking sympathetic? perhaps?) And the characteristic sting at the end, a near-curse: yet you Pilates have here delivered me to my sour cross and water cannot wash away your sin. (Macbeth again, anticipated in that denial of grace, the impossibility of washing away such transgression. Richard is perhaps even suggesting that they have his blood on their hands, or will have. Lots of water and washing still to come in this scene.) It’s sour cross that strikes me most, though: sharp or another word more obviously associated with pain would be more expectable, but this sourness, while perhaps recalling the bitter herbs and the vinegar offered to Christ, is also another example of Richard’s tendency to a kind of synaesthesia. In his ‘hollow crown’ speech he had movingly protested that I live with bread like you, feel want, taste grief, need friends. Here he is indeed tasting grief, sour and biting. And desperate for friends.