RICHARD        I wasted time and now doth time waste me,

For now hath time made me his numb’ring clock:

My thoughts are minutes and with sighs they jar

Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch,

Whereto my finger like a dial’s point

Is pointing still in cleansing them from tears.        (5.5.49-54)

Richard’s first line here sounds startlingly modern: I frittered away time, squandered it, and now it’s wasting me, laying waste to me, destroying me. But the waiting, as time passes: it’s all I’ve got. Time hath made me his numbering clock, its dial marking the passing hours. My thoughts are minutes (this relentless barrage of conflicting, futile voices that he’s just been describing), and the sighs that his thoughts occasion are like the clock’s mechanical ticking, on and on, jarring their watches (and shaking his body in a shudder of grief?), here not in the sense of a time piece but rather the intervals of time, especially a time spent awake or on guard, as in the watches of the night. And it’s Richard’s eyes that are the outward watch, the face of the clock, perhaps, but also because his eyes are open, and he cannot sleep. (Richard is one of a long line of insomniac protagonists: Brutus, Hamlet, Macbeth—and Bolingbroke, in Henry IV.) If Richard’s face and eyes are the dial of the clock, then his finger is the dial’s point, its hand, constantly pointing at his eyes as he wipes away his tears, like a child without a handkerchief, or a grown man whose handkerchief is sodden. Richard cries and cries.