Enter Queen and Ladies

QUEEN           This way the King will come. This is the way

To Julius Caesar’s ill-erected tower

To whose flint bosom my condemnèd lord

Is doomed a prisoner by proud Bolingbroke.

Here let us rest, if this rebellious earth

Have any resting for her true king’s queen.           (5.1.1-6)

This is an entirely made-up scene, for which there is no historical source (there are, as will be seen, many literary analogues). It’s a tight turnaround for Richard, who is about to enter, with only fifteen or so lines at the end of the previous scene, after Richard’s exit, and then the Queen’s short introduction here. (There will almost certainly be longer allowed, especially if the throne is removed from the stage; there might be music; there is probably at least a partial costume change and sometimes the addition of chains.) This is one of the play’s few properly public scenes, in that it is set in a city street, one that could be easily pictured by everyone in the audience—from whom the mention of the Tower would also quite possibly elicit a shiver of fear.

The scene is made-up but also, if one stops to think about it, preposterous: how on earth is the wife of a recently-deposed king meant just to be wandering around London with her ladies? But one doesn’t really think about that, in the moment. Somehow the Queen has discovered what’s going on—no time seemingly having passed since the end of the previous scene—and she’s got herself to the right place. This way the King—and she definitely means Richard—will come. That the Tower had been originally built by Julius Caesar was an enduring commonplace (it wasn’t); here the legend’s invocation perhaps gives the play’s events, and especially this scene’s, a larger historical stage on which to be enacted, a more mythic tone. What matters more, however, is that the Tower is ill-erected, not badly built but ominously, a place of ill-omen. And, like other edifices in the play (not least Flint Castle, where Richard—sort-of—began the process of abdication) it’s imagined as a body, with a flint bosom, unyielding and hard-hearted. (The Tower is indeed partly made of flint.) The stony welcome of the Tower is implicitly compared with the tenderness of the Queen’s own embrace of her husband, and she is not optimistic about his fate: he is condemned and doomed, meaning sentenced but also suggesting something more final. The Queen recognises that she too has been displaced: this rebellious earth, England, has cast her out too. Is there still anywhere she can rest, stay still a while, just to watch? And, emphatically, to her Richard is still England’s true king, and she is still his queen. (But, not least because she is named only as Queen, her status and identity is entirely contingent upon his and, as the previous scene has shatteringly demonstrated, Richard’s identity and not merely his status is precarious, to say the least.)