RICHARD        Twice for one step I’ll groan, the way being short,

And piece the way out with a heavy heart.

Come, come, in wooing sorrow let’s be brief,

Since wedding it there is such length in grief.

One kiss shall stop our mouths, and dumbly part.

Thus give I mine and thus take I thy heart.

[They kiss]

QUEEN           Give me mine own again, ’twere no good part

To take on me to keep and kill thy heart.

[They kiss again]

So now I have mine own again, be gone

That I may strive to kill it with a groan.

RICHARD        We make woe wanton with this fond delay,

Once more, adieu, the rest let sorrow say.              Exeunt             (5.1.91-102)

Richard protests that even though it’s a shorter distance from London to Pomfret in Yorkshire than from London to France (Paris, presumably?) he will groan twice for every step, so they will remain evenly matched in their moaning and groaning; he will piece the way out with a heavy heart, grieving every step of the way. But they can’t really put off the inevitable any longer, and it’s Richard who takes the initiative, finally: in wooing sorrow let’s be brief, because that’s just prolonging the agony, putting off the anguish of our actual parting, as if the anticipation and the imagining is the wooing and the parting is the wedding. And that marriage, with grief, will be a long one because, paradoxically, our separation will last until death. There’s a whole raft of ideas and words clustering around here: ideas about death and divorce, the words and gestures of the marriage service, involving hands, and perhaps the idea of consummation, in both a sexual sense and as meaning an end point, something concluded, finished. We have to end this, the parting, the scene, and our marriage.

Then it swerves into Romeo and Juliet, basically, and surely an audience is meant to recognise this, and the terrible irony that it’s a scene of parting, not meeting, and surely it’s written for the same actors; to imagine the Queen as having played Juliet makes sense of the depth and complexity of the part, despite its relative compactness. They will only stop prolonging their conversation if they stop their mouths with a single kiss, and so dumbly part, unable to speak further. Here’s my kiss, he says, and I know that in giving to you I have your heart in return. Give me mine own again, she responds, Juliet, quick, bittersweet; it would be wrong for me to take your heart in return and so to kill you. Another kiss; so now I have mine own—heart—again, be gone that I may strive to kill it—my own heart—with a groan. Leave me to my grief, as Juliet says—but that’s in the balcony scene, as the lovers part only temporarily, full of hope and rapture.

We’ve just got to do this, says Richard, effectively; we make woe wanton, we’re merely messing around, playing games, with our grief by delaying. It’s foolish. Once more, adieu, the rest our sorrow will say on our behalf, expressing the intensity of our feelings, over and over and over, in groans and tears and sighs. The speed at which the end comes, I think, is still surprising, a touch of brutality as well as pragmatism. And one will go out one door, the other, another. The Queen won’t appear again, and Richard, only once more…