RICHARD        I’ll give my jewels for a set of beads,

My gorgeous palace for a hermitage,

My gay apparel for an almsman’s gown,

My figured goblets for a dish of wood,

My sceptre for a palmer’s walking staff,

My subjects for a pair of carvèd saints

And my large kingdom for a little grave,

A little, little grave, an obscure grave;

Or I’ll be buried in the king’s highway,

Some way of common trade where subjects’ feet

May hourly trample on their sovereign’s head,

For on my heart they tread now whilst I live,

And buried once, why not upon my head?(3.3.146-158)

The emotional contours of this speech (and the other half of it is still to come) are extraordinary, with Richard’s hearers (not least the audience) having to recalibrate again and again. The antithetical structures of the first few lines here initially make it seem quite straightforward, as the material accoutrements of kingship, by which Richard has hitherto set such store, are juxtaposed with their meaner counterparts, suggesting (in his customary all-or-nothing, zero-sum way) that the opposite of being a king is being a hermit, leading a life of asceticism and prayer. Richard does not do middle ground. And so he will exchange his jewels for rosary beads, his gorgeous palace (very unlike the rugged, battered fortress which he now occupies, and which he has, presumably, already lost) for a hermitage. He will give his gay apparel (and he is usually gorgeously, glitteringly dressed in this scene) for an almsman’s gown, dark and plain. (Clothing was a very common charitable gift or bequest to the poor throughout this period; it was often of decent, hard-wearing quality, but certainly not luxurious.) He will no longer drink wine from figured goblets, silver and gold, richly decorated, but rather eat and drink from plain wooden vessels. He will exchange his sceptre for a pilgrim’s walking stick, and all his subjects for statues of saints; instead of being knelt to, he will kneel in prayer. (And, just the two saintly statues.) He will give up riches, colour, texture, light for simple, sober things. And he will give up his large kingdom in exchange for a little grave, a little, little grave, an obscure grave…

Richard is speaking first and foremost to himself, persuading, almost seducing himself with this beautifully balanced, vivid speech, this aesthetic (as much as ascetic) fantasy of self-abnegation, a retreat from the hurly-burly of public life, retirement to a little place in the country. It reminds me of ‘The passionate man’s pilgrimage’, often attributed to Walter Raleigh: ‘Give me my scallop shell of quiet, | My staff of faith to walk upon, | My scrip of joy, immortal diet, | My bottle of salvation, | My gown of glory, hope’s true gage, | And thus I’ll take my pilgrimage…’ But it does also remind me a little of Mr Toad in the Wind in the Willows, when he discovers that he can as well be the object of fascination and admiration by acting with modesty and self-deprecation as he can by making speeches and singing songs of his own composition. Is Richard, too, an altered Toad?

It doesn’t really last, because the little grave, by repetition—a little, little grave, an obscure grave—becomes bathetic rather than pathetic, and then bitter, angry, anguished. Richard is partly enjoying this. (It is both genuine and not, but he is as transported by his own self-abasement as he is filled with real despair. There can be a note of Uriah Heep.) And in that list of things that he will give up, jewels, palace, garments, plate, sceptre and subjects, Richard does not name the crown, his obsession and his joy. And then there is anger. You’re killing me. You might as well bury me like a pauper, an outcast, in the king’s highway, where I can be walked all over by my subjects’ feet as they go about their common trade, their day-to-day subject lives. They’re the ones who have done this to me: they might as well trample on my head because even now they are treading on my heart. (His voice breaks.) And once I am buried, therefore, they can walk on my head too. This magnificent, gilded figure, high above the stage, imagines himself brought low, laid low, dead, buried, forgotten.