QUEEN           It may be so, but yet my inward soul

Persuades me it is otherwise. Howe’er it be

I cannot but be sad: so heavy sad,

As, though on thinking on no thought I think,

Makes me with heavy nothing faint and shrink.

BUSHY            ’Tis nothing but conceit, my gracious lady.

QUEEN           ’Tis nothing less. Conceit is still derived

From some forefather grief. Mine is not so,

For nothing hath begot my something grief,

Or something hath the nothing that I grieve—

’Tis in reversion that I do possess—

But what it is, that is not yet known; what

I cannot name, ’tis nameless woe I wot. (2.2.28-40)

The Queen is not convinced by Bushy’s (admittedly persuasive, and stylishly formulated) psychological insights into the nature of grief; her unease is more profound, and begins to sound like an existential crisis, riddling and knotty in ways that her husband’s language will increasingly become, in his subsequent appearances in the play. It may be so, she says, but yet my inward soul persuades me it is otherwise. She cannot overcome her deep sense of foreboding, which cannot be confined simply to her sorrow at her husband’s absence. Her insights into the experience of grief and loss are as perceptive as Bushy’s, and more piercing, because they are more inward, less dependent on externals for their realisation. I cannot be anything but sad, I can’t help it, she says, attempting to qualify and explain her state even further: so heavy sad, so deeply depressed (one might say) that even though I can’t identify or articulate any cause, thinking on no thought, that nothingness, that blank still makes me faint and shrink, oppresses and diminishes me. The syntax here is knotty to the point of incomprehensibility, and what I’ve glossed here is one possibility, but I think that, perhaps even more to a modern ear, what the Queen describes is the drained, undirected, blankness of grief, the staring-into-space exhausted stasis of depression. (We might look for the seeds of Hamlet in Richard himself; we might also find them in his Queen.)

’Tis nothing but conceit, my gracious lady: Bushy is formal and polite, quite courtly; it’s just your imagination, a fancy (you’re just being over-emotional, woman)—but also, possibly, conceit in the rhetorical sense, responding to the Queen’s wordplay (which is properly conceited, ingenious, witty). (Bushy’s invocation of the perspective in the previous passage has also, in those terms, been conceited, almost metaphysically so.) That may be so, ’tis nothing less (than conceit), she retorts, because conceit (whether in the sense of fancy or witty intellectual construct) is still derived from some forefather grief. The conceit arises from something real; it expresses something real. And my grief is more real even than that: either my grief has really been begotten by nothing, and it’s real, or my non-existent grief has been begotten by something—in which case it’s also real. (I think.) I possess my grief in reversion, that is, as an heir yet to inherit; I will come to possess it fully in due course. But I don’t know what it is! I don’t know why I am so sad, heavy, sorrowful, woeful, grief-stricken, depressed. I can’t name it or describe it. But nameless woe I wot. I know it. It’s real.