RICHARD        For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground

And tell sad stories of the death of kings,

How some have been deposed, some slain in war,

Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,

Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed—

All murdered. For within the hollow crown

That rounds the mortal temples of a king

Keeps death his court, and there the antic sits,

Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,

Allowing him a breath, a little scene

To monarchize, be feared and kill with looks,

As if this flesh which walls about our life

Were brass impregnable, and humoured thus

Comes at the last and with a little pin

Bores through his castle wall—and farewell king.            (3.2.155-170)

 

This is a play in which (like and unlike Romeo and Juliet) a vertical axis—not least in that word deposed—is central, and here the shape of the scene, in the sense of the picture on the stage, the balance and proportions of its participants, is about to be radically altered. Kings sit on thrones, on daises; in the tournament scene (1.3), Richard made much of coming down to embrace Bolingbroke before the combat (We will descend and fold him in our arms). Richard’s lowering of himself here disrupts the codes of monarchy, and how it is represented on stage; it disrupts his own identity. What do his companions do? Must they sit too? The audience too must adjust their sightlines and their focus, especially if others remain awkwardly standing. This is no privy chamber with soft cushions, and neither is it the pastoral idyll of the forest, but rather an in-between place—a beach?—not a place for sitting, not a place to stay. And yet Richard sits upon the ground, abases, lowers himself (these terms and this action have moral and psychological weight). The ground: humus, humility; earth to earth, dust to dust.

 

The ground is to become a place not of action, doing, even planning, but telling, the sad stories of the death of kings. What’s being invoked here, in 1590s terms, is probably the Mirror for Magistrates, that much-enlarged anthology of stories, cautionary tales, told by the ghosts of kings, princes and so on, about their falls and their untimely ends. A modern audience might be reminded—as would those in the 1590s—of other history plays, and not just Shakespeare’s: Henry VI, deposed and murdered; Edward II, ditto; Richard III, haunted by ghosts… But this is a speech in which the agony, the essential tragedy of kingship, which has evolved through Shakespeare’s first tetralogy and the history plays of his contemporaries, has its first, and most eloquent, flowering, articulating a crisis which comes back again and again in this play, and which returns in Henry IV and Henry V. To be a king is to be perpetually conscious of death.

 

Here it all comes out. After that half-line—All murdered—it’s a single sentence, a single breath allowed, a tumble of horror and fear. The hollow crown echoes the hollow ground; it’s empty, already half-imagined as a grave. And as can become abundantly clear in performance, the crown is not simply empty, a circlet, but a space of negation, a zero. (Lear starts here.) What it turns out to contain is death. Death is king; this is all death’s show. (The dance of death is being invoked here, that image, familiar in poems, wall paintings, wood-cuts, engravings: death comes to all; in the dance, he takes the king’s hand, to demonstrate that the rulers of the earth cannot escape mortality.) Death is like the antic, the clown, the fool (who also appears in the dance) who grins and mocks at the state and pomp, the ceremony of the king, but yet allows him a breath, a little scene to monarchize, to play the king (for it is all a show). The king performs: he is feared, his looks can (he thinks) kill, but it is all self and vain, empty conceit, this enjoyment of power, this sense of princely invincibility. Because the king is mortal. His flesh is not brass impregnable, an inviolable fortress; his body is fallible, vulnerable, and death will always win. And at the last, having cruelly indulged the king’s fantasies of power, death comes, and ends it—with a little pin, pricking the bubble of worldly and deluded vanity. (A dagger, a sword; the dart of mortal illness. Death, here is thy sting.) And farewell king.