Enter Richard alone

RICHARD        I have been studying how I may compare

This prison where I live unto the world,

And for because the world is populous

And here is not a creature but myself,

I cannot do it. Yet I’ll hammer it out.           (5.5.1-5)

I started writing this blog (this is post number 239) at the beginning of September last year, in a hotel room in Christchurch, New Zealand, my home town, during two weeks of compulsory managed isolation—quarantine, to all intents and purposes—on a trip home at short notice, for family reasons. Not quite a prison—it was a perfectly nice hotel, especially when jetlagged, and I was even let out every day to walk round and round the exercise area, 60 laps or so, dodging bored toddlers. And the food was fine and everything was better once I’d rented a cafetiere and got hold of some proper coffee. I got a lot of reading done. But it’s still the closest I’ve ever been to prison and, barring some serious midlife crisis acting out, the closest I’ll ever be to prison. I worked on this speech with some students this time last year, when we were all new to Zoom, shell-shocked and isolated, and I spoke about it, via Zoom, in a lecture to teachers, back in the UK, while I was in my quarantine hotel room, midnight in New Zealand, Saturday morning in the UK. So it’s a speech, I think, that speaks to this moment we’re in. It’s one of the most astonishing speeches in all of Shakespeare.

Richard’s been absent from the play for three scenes, the two with the Yorks and the very short one with Exton, just ended. That last scene has been brief, but menacing; the York scenes have been tense, impassioned, high-stakes, at times high comedy, with huge energy generated and dissipated. This is a very different energy, Richard, alone, his first and last soliloquy in the play. There is no indication how long he’s been there, but some time, it seems. (Time is going to become key.) Richard has been the king of the elaborate conceit—the hollow crown, glistering Phaeton, the well with two buckets—but now he contemplates a failed simile, and his own inability to make language work for him, to free and so order his thoughts. I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world. It’s a reasonable project for a good Renaissance man, to pass the time in contemplation of the prison as microcosm, but Richard can’t do it. Perhaps it’s the solitude? No friends, no subjects, no doppelganger, no mirror—and for because the world is populous and here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Analogy fails, and this is an admission of defeat, of reason and imagination. I cannot do it. After those expansive, discursive opening lines, a halt, run aground on the half line. I cannot do it.

But he picks it up, after the mid-line pause. He’s going to try: yet I’ll hammer it out. Thought, imagination—writing, thinking—it’s work, labour, hammering, effortful, even violent. It’s an assertion of agency, creative agency. Thoughts are not butterflies or rainbows, words aren’t airy. They can be metal, stone, flesh, and thinking is making, thought is free. Richard is going to try, to hammer it out; he’s going to make something of this prison.