RICHARD        Thus play I in one person many people

And none contented. Sometimes am I king,

Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar

And so I am. Then crushing penury

Persuades me I was better when a king,

Then am I kinged again, and by and by

Think that I am unkinged again by Bolingbroke

And straight am nothing. But whate’er I be,

Nor I nor any man that but man is

With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased

With being nothing.                          (5.5.31-41)

Just pause and go back and read it again. Possibly more than once.

This moment contains multitudes, both in Richard’s conceit and in terms of Shakespeare’s career; this speech is a grain of sand that’s a world, a pearl, the seed of Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, and Cleopatra—and Prospero. The thought experiment has more or less failed, Richard suggests, making a world of his prison cell and peopling it with his thoughts. He’s tried, desperately, to hear and to speak in these different voices—thus play I in one person many people—but none of these voices, these imagined personas, has consoled him, reconciled him to his plight, or made him feel less alone. None of these people whose lives and situations I have imagined is contented; they’re all as unhappy and wretched as I am. Sometimes I am king (a flash of golden nostalgia; we were there, we saw his majesty and his fall), then treasons make me wish myself a beggar. The empty, grasping flattery, the tiny betrayals as much as the great: this is the hollow crown, the court of death, the cynical, inevitable skull beneath the gilded skin. (In the previous scene Bolingbroke had referred to the duelling Yorks as enacting a comic ballad, ‘The beggar and the king’; that farce here is turned to tragedy once more.) But to be a beggar is to be truly wretched, a state of crushing penury (poor naked wretches, of whom Richard has, like Lear, taken too little care): perhaps it is better, on balance, to be a king? (There is such scope here for wry, gentle self-deprecation, a shrug.) I am king again! Or rather kinged, a strange passivity in the phrase, the tragedy of primogeniture, the child king who had no choice. But to be kinged is to be able to be unkinged, every bit as helpless. And this is where we are: by and by I think that I am unkinged by Bolingbroke. Even this, the brutality of deposition, has a dreamlike quality: this speech is mesmeric not only in its conceits but in its grammar and syntax, its repetitive structures, the way in which its clauses wind across line breaks to end and restart on the half line. But it’s also brutal: he is unkinged—and straight am nothing, that very moment, right away. Not even a beggar. (The hollow crown can only become a zero.)

And there’s the rub. But whate’er I be, nor I nor any man that but man is with nothing shall be pleased till he be eased with being nothing. To be merely, or fully, human is to be reconciled to being nothing, not only insignificant, or mortal, or powerless, but a kind of existential nothingness—and to be OK with that. A bleak comfort.

(Speeches to which I cannot hope to do justice: an occasional series.)