RICHARD        Join not with grief, fair woman, do not so

To make my end too sudden. Learn, good soul,

To think our former state a happy dream

From which awaked, the truth of what we are

Shows us but this. I am sworn brother, sweet,

To grim necessity, and he and I

Will keep a league till death. Hie thee to France,

And cloister thee in some religious house—

Our holy lives must win a new world’s crown,

Which our profane hours here have stricken down.         (5.1.16-25)

Don’t ally yourself with sorrow, Richard says, perhaps with the suggestion that it’s as if the Queen is marrying grief (join can have that force); he could be saying, therefore, that if you give yourself so wholeheartedly to something or someone else (grief), then it’ll kill me, or, otherwise, you’re mourning me as if I’m already dead, and that can only make my end too sudden, hasten my death. His next suggestion—learn, good soul, to think our former state, the life we used to lead together, a happy dream—chimes poignantly with the various dreams in both Romeo and Juliet and, especially, Midsummer Night’s Dream, both so close to this play in date. This is reality, he says: waking from that happy dream of our former life, the truth of what we are shows us but this—misery, captivity, ruin. A characteristically vivid conceit: I am sworn brother, sweet, to grim necessity: I have no choice, it’s as if I have been adopted, enrolled into a fraternity against my will—but it’s my destiny. And necessity and I will maintain that alliance until death. (Already running through this, in join and till death, is the language of marriage, which will become more explicit later on in the scene.) Go to France, make haste, and cloister thee in some religious house. Become a nun. Sigh. Not a lot of options around for former queens—but this is also the suggestion that the Friar makes to Juliet when she discovers Romeo dead in the tomb, with which Egeus and Theseus threaten Hermia at the beginning of Midsummer Night’s Dream. Richard’s love for the Queen is not in doubt—this is a heart-breaking scene—but the instruction that she become a nun is also bound up in his own imagining of having joined in a kind of fraternity with grief, perhaps (although not necessarily) a religious one. He can see her only through the prism of his own experience and the way in which he’s attempting to make sense of it: our holy lives must win a new world’s crown, which our profane hours here have stricken down. The rest of our lives must be spent in penance for the profane hours we have been leading; our immoral way of life has lost us our worldly crown, but our new, holy lives will secure us a heavenly crown. With the benefit of hindsight, one might say, speak for yourself, Richard, but in the moment, it moves. With the benefit of hindsight, too, one might recall that there has been little textual evidence of a close, mutually affectionate relationship between the couple, although the Queen has often spoken of her love for her husband; indeed, Bushy and Green are accused by Bolingbroke of having made a divorce betwixt his queen and him, broke the possession of a royal bed and stained the beauty of a fair queen’s cheeks with tears drawn from her eyes by your foul wrongs (3.1). But I don’t think that Richard is aiming to deceive, or that there’s any great inconsistency here: this scene is less about facts (after all, the Queen is more or less an invention, just as their encounter here is) than it is about affect, and especially Richard’s construction as a martyr, a figure who can properly be pitied.