Enter Salisbury
RICHARD Welcome, my lord. How far off lies your power?
SALISBURY Nor nea’er nor farther off, my gracious lord,
Than this weak arm. Discomfort guides my tongue
And bids me speak of nothing but despair.
One day too late, I fear me, noble lord,
Hath clouded all thy happy days on earth.
O call back yesterday, bid time return,
And thou shalt have twelve thousand fighting men;
Today, today, unhappy day too late,
O’erthrows thy joys, friends, fortune and thy state—
For all the Welshmen, hearing thou wert dead,
Are gone to Bolingbroke, dispersed and fled. (3.2.63-74)
Well that’s deflating. We have been giddily caught up in Richard’s gilded, fervid certainty, his divine untouchability, and then, bad news. Richard’s expecting word of an army come to meet him—How far off lies your power?—but Salisbury is alone. We may well have temporarily forgotten his brief scene with the Welsh captain only a few moments before (perhaps overtaken first by the brutality of the execution of Bushy and Green, and then by Richard’s ecstatic landfall)—but, recognising Salisbury, we should anticipate what he’s going to say. His power lies neither nearer nor farther off than his own weak arm. Salisbury is it. It pains him to speak it, discomfort guides my tongue; he brings news not of reinforcements, consolation, and reassurance, but desertion and despair.
We might remember now that he attempted to persuade the Welsh Captain to stay yet another day—and what he’d feared has indeed come to pass: Richard has returned one day too late, and that lost day hath clouded all thy happy days on earth. The clouds have very much appeared to obscure the glory of the sun. That one day has made all the difference. Salisbury’s despairing cry—O call back yesterday, bid time return—sounds almost as if he is lamenting the loss of a lover, but the impotent impossibility that he describes, of making time run backwards, is a stark contrast to Richard’s own assertions of his powers as the sun of righteousness, ordained by God. That day is gone, never to return—and so are twelve thousand fighting men. That single lost day has wrecked everything, overthrown Richard’s joys, friends, fortune, state. (State here is not the nation, but rather Richard’s estate, status, his power.) His luck has run out. The Welshmen, hearing that the king was dead, have dispersed and fled—or gone to Bolingbroke.
AWKWARD.
