Enter Richard and Guard
QUEEN But soft, but see, or rather do not see
My fair rose wither. Yet look up, behold,
That you in pity may dissolve to dew
And wash him fresh again with true-love tears.
Ah thou, the model where old Troy did stand
Thou map of honour, thou King Richard’s tomb,
And not King Richard. Thou most beauteous inn,
Why should hard-favoured grief be lodged in thee
When triumph is become an alehouse guest? (5.1.7-15)
It may be that the Queen’s companion or companions begin to speak, only to be hushed by the Queen as she sees Richard approach: but soft, but see—or rather do not see, because it is such a distressing sight. The Queen brings the garden, the countryside so loved by Richard into this stony urban setting, but only to note how her fair rose withers, Richard, her husband and lord, now deposed, reduced, undone. (The rose had no royal symbolism for Richard, his device being the broom, plantagenet, but it might have suggested Tudor sovereignty, albeit anachronistically, for a mid 1590s audience.) Here the rose is sentimental and nostalgic, familiar from Romeo and Juliet and the Sonnets as a sensual and erotic conceit. But it withers now, and its petals will soon fall.Yet look up (does she address herself, or her women? Do they look away, horrified, embarrassed?), behold him, that you in pity may dissolve to dew and wash him fresh again with true-love tears.The Queen’s own tears (like the one she let fall in the garden scene, to be commemorated with a bank of rue, for pity) will revive him, she says, wash him fresh again.
The Queen’s language is characteristically intense, and (also characteristically) just a bit weird, like Richard’s tending to the metaphysical. Perhaps picking up her previous invocation of the ill-erected tower and its flint bosom, her conceit is one of buildings, monuments, a built environment. In his brokenness and ruin, Richard is like the model where old Troy did stand, the shattered remains of a once-great city, or its imitation in miniature. (This might recall the Trojan origin myth, whereby Britain had been founded by Brut, a descendant of Aeneas, and London was New Troy; it had been historically debunked but remained popular in literature and myth-making. Richard is thus the ruins of Britain too.) He is the map of honour, both a paragon and, again, a mere representation, not the thing itself. And he is King Richard’s tomb, and not King Richard: she imagines Richard already dead, as well as being like himself (like the effigy on a tomb) and yet not like himself. (Some in the audience might have been familiar with Richard’s tomb in Westminster Abbey; some of them might have known that it had been made following the death of his first wife, Anne, that is, in Richard’s own lifetime. He was reburied there, with Anne, by Henry V in 1413; their effigies were originally holding hands, although the hands have now been broken off.) Then a stranger image: Richard is like a beauteous inn, in which hard-favoured, ugly, stony (like the Tower) grief is an unwelcome guest; Bolingbroke is like a cheap tavern, an alehouse, where, incongruously, triumph is now lodged.
The Queen’s ladies do not speak, and a production may well supply her with just one. If there are three, however, they will more readily recall the women mourning at the foot of the Cross, an archetype which is latent in this scene, but anticipated in both Richard’s own identification with Christ in the deposition scene, and in the description of this same scene by York in the scene which follows.
