RICHARD        As a long-parted mother with her child

Plays fondly with her tears and smiles in meeting,

So weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth,

And do thee favours with my royal hands.

Feed not thy sovereign’s foe, my gentle earth,

Nor with thy sweets comfort his ravenous sense,

But let thy spiders that suck up thy venom

And heavy-gaited toads lie in their way,

Doing annoyance to the treacherous feet

Which with usurping steps do trample thee.         (3.2.8-17)

Richard, as ever, teetering on the edge of the ridiculous (and there’s more to come in this speech)—but also, almost always, so rapturous, so full of artifice, so vivid, that one has to smile, and be moved and carried along with it. It’s parodiable, especially on the page (even as I’m reading it, I’m thinking: Richard’s stoned! He’s looking at a patch of dirt and going, this is just so AMAZING, so COOL, look at it, you guys)—but that’s unfair, and a bit cheap. He is overcome with emotion, like a mother reunited with her child after a long absence, smiling through her tears. Is he the mother or the child? Both, perhaps. And again he touches the earth, does it favours with his royal hands. (Is he kneeling, stooping, sitting on the ground? If the latter, then he’s already reduced, low, even childlike.) His evocation of the beauty of the earth, the land (and by extension, England) is framed in terms of pleading with it (or at least asking it) to offer no succour to his enemies. Feed not thy sovereign’s foe, my gentle earth. Don’t allow thy sweets, beauties (but also, perhaps, more literally food: the practicalities of feeding an army on the move) comfort his ravenous sense. Bolingbroke’s sense, his appetite, his desire is ravenous; although unnamed, he’s made a monster here, insatiable, threatening the gentle earth. Rather, Richard whimsically calls on the spiders (thought both to be poisonous and to absorb poison, hence suck up venom) and the heavy-gaited toads (also thought to be venomous) to assail the invaders, to do annoyance to the treacherous feet which with usurping steps do trample thee. Hard to sustain in performance, I think, that note of rapture, because the mental image can become very silly, a crack squad of arachnids and slow-moving, ungainly amphibians lying in wait to—what, bite Bolingbroke’s ankles? (Toads do not have teeth. Mental image of Mr Toad doing very, very slow commando roll.)

I mock (we could all do with a smile), but actually I think that, in performance, and in the context of the speech as a whole, rapture mostly wins out. The land, the earth, England is already super-charged with emotion in this play, and will only become more so.