RICHARD        Doubly divorced! Bad men, you violate

A twofold marriage—’twixt my crown and me,

And then betwixt me and my married wife.

[To the Queen] Let me unkiss the oath ’twixt thee and me—

And yet not so, for with a kiss ’twas made.

Part us, Northumberland: I towards the north

Where shivering cold and sickness pines the clime,

My wife to France, from whence set forth in pomp

She came adornèd hither like sweet May,

Sent back like Hallowmas or short’st of day.          (5.1.71-80)

Ever mercurial, Richard undercuts Northumberland’s brutality with humour, of a kind, although it’s bitter. It’s hard not to get a laugh on bad men, I think—tut, tut—but a 1590s audience would probably be more cognisant of the equivalence being made between Richard’s identity as king and as husband, both God-given, formed with inviolable oaths. In a world where divorce was all but impossible—whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder, as the marriage service has it—the point that Richard’s making, that both of these things, effective divorce and deposition, are meant to be ontological impossibilities would be more apparent. (It is death that should end the reign of a king, and that should be the only thing to come between husband and wife: Richard knows that.) Richard goes to kiss or rather unkiss the Queen, as if to repeat his rituals of undoing in the deposition scene, but immediately stops himself: their marriage vows were, after all, sealed with a kiss, and so to kiss her again will only reinforce them. (The Romeo and Juliet resonances here are unavoidable, and also, perhaps, echoes of the parting of Margaret and Suffolk in 2 Henry VI.)

So do your worst, Northumberland: send me to Yorkshire, where shivering cold and sickness pines the clime, makes it a horrible, miserable place. (Harsh.) The point is the contrast between the dark, wintery north and the remembered spring of the Queen as a bride, when she set forth from France in pomp like sweet May, springtime, but also the hawthorn, perhaps, a brief vision of the English countryside, full of fragrant white flowers and sunshine. And now she must return in mourning, like Hallowmas, 1 November, All Saints’ Day, or the shortest day even, dark and desolate.