QUEEN And must we be divided, must we part?
RICHARD Ay, hand from hand, my love, and heart from heart.
QUEEN Banish us both and send the King with me.
NORTHUMBERLAND That were some love but little policy.
QUEEN Then whither he goes, thither let me go.
RICHARD So two together weeping make one woe.
Weep thou for me in France, I for thee here.
Better far off than, near, be ne’er the near’er.
Go count thy way with sighs, I mine with groans.
QUEEN So longest way shall have the longest moans. (5.1.81-90)
A switch into rhyming couplets and stichomythia, alternating lines characterised by repetition and echo: Shakespeare employs it for scenes of conflict but also intimacy (Richard III and Lady Anne; Romeo and Juliet), as here—but it also allows Northumberland to interrupt, disrupting the back-and-forth, highly patterned rhythm of the couple’s dialogue. They’re delaying the inevitable: the Queen’s must we be divided, must we part? is surely rhetorical; Richard’s reply—ay, hand from hand and heart from heart—is another example of the way in which he sees this as an undoing, as if the handsthat they joined in marriage, which joined their hearts, are now being forcibly unclasped. It’s the Queen who still tries to negotiate: banish us both and send the King with me, which seems reasonable, briefly, but Northumberland (who will probably get a laugh here, as he completes the couplet) is right: that were some love but little policy. Nice try, darling, but no, what kind of a political novice do you take me for, that’d be a daft thing for us to do, in strategic terms. (That is, Richard would try to raise an army in France, to retake the throne.) But the Queen’s undaunted: then whither he goes, thither let me go, her plea echoing Ruth’s beautiful words to her mother-in-law Naomi in Ruth 1.16-16: ‘Intreate mee not to leaue thee, or to returne from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will goe; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, wil I die, and there will I bee buried: the Lord doe so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me’.
But Richard is more resigned, more pragmatic, and also, surely, exhausted. Even if we’re parted, two together weeping make one woe; we’ll still be together, in a way, in our sorrow, doing the same thing, weeping, at the same time, united in grief. Weep thou for me in France, I for thee here. Better for you to be far off, in France, safe, than still here, closer, but yet unable to be together, or to be happy. (A madly tricky and obscure line, with many punctuation possibilities.) So: count thy way with sighs, I mine with groans. We’ll measure out the distance between us as we go with the sounds of our sorrow: my moans will be longer, then, the Queen replies, since I’m going a longer distance…
