BUSHY            Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows

Which shows like grief itself but is not so.

For sorrow’s eyes, glazed with blinding tears,

Divides one thing entire to many objects,

Like perspectives, which rightly gazed upon

Show nothing but confusion—gazed awry,

Distinguish form. So your sweet majesty,

Looking awry upon your lord’s departure,

Finds shapes of grief more than himself to wail

Which, looked on as it is, is nought but shadows

Of what it is not. Then, thrice-gracious Queen,

More than your lord’s departure weep not. More’s not seen,

Or if it be, ’tis with false sorrow’s eye

Which for things true weeps things imaginary. (2.2.14-27)

 

This is one of the play’s many ‘moments’, a profound meditation on the experience of grief (and much beloved of historians of art and science)—but one would be hard pressed, seeing it in isolation as an extract, to remember who speaks these words: Bushy, hitherto a trivial, snarky reason to condemn the King for his weakness and bad choices. Character and even situation largely disappear here, as they do at other points in the play, because what matters most is the thought and its expression. (It’s not a sonnet, not at all, but it is a fourteen-line unit, with a similar propositional logic, especially with the so in the seventh line and then in the eleventh: for a speech about things being skewed, to skew, sort of, a sonnet is wildly clever.)

 

Shadows, eyes, tears, multiplication and division: all of these will come back again and again as the play develops. Bushy’s first point is straightforward: every substance of a grief, every real cause of sorrow, has twenty shadows, things which look like it but which lack real substance. (Shadow in early modern usage is interchangeable with reflection, and that’s probably what’s meant here.) When you weep, when sorrow’s eyes are glazed (like windows) with blinding tears, then what you look at is refracted into many objects, multiplied as if through a prism. (The window is important here: we have to imagine not the crystal-clear panes of a picture window, but the small, distorted, leaded panes of many late sixteenth-century casements.) It’s like looking at a perspective, here conflating an instrument with multiple prismatic lenses with anamorphic images, where the vanishing point is distorted so that the image only comes into focus when looked at from an oblique angle and a specific vantage point. (Exhibit A: Holbein’s Ambassadors, with its anamorphic skull. Exhibit B: this deeply strange portrait of Edward VI.) Grief’s like that, says Bushy, it distorts everything, until you get it (as it were) in perspective, look at it from the right angle. And you’re looking at your lord’s departure in such a way that it’s warping everything else; you’re finding other causes of grief that, ordinarily, would prove insubstantial, nothing to worry about, nought but shadows of what it is not. More’s not seen, or if it be, ’tis with false sorrow’s eye. There’s nothing else to worry about, it’s just that your true sorrow at the King’s absence makes you weep things imaginary, as if they were real too.

 

Thus lightweight Bushy gives a brilliant account of the experience of grief, of depression, like an all-consuming filter on the world.