QUEEN Nimble mischance that art so light of foot,
Doth not thy embassage belong to me
And am I last that knows it? O thou think’st
To serve me last that I may longest keep
Thy sorrow in my breast. Come, ladies, go
To meet at London London’s King in woe.
What, was I born to this, that my sad look
Should grace the triumph of great Bolingbroke?
Gardener, for telling me these news of woe,
Pray God the plants thou graft’st may never grow. [Exeunt Queen and Ladies] (3.4.92-101)
Mischance, bad fortune, is usually quick to manifest itself, nimble and so light of foot, but here the Queen berates it for its slowness, even though its embassage, its message or report relates most to her. Why am I the last to know? Your intention is to serve me last, make me the last person to whom you do service (in delivering your message; she’s still addressing mischance) in order that I may longest keep thy sorrow in my breast, bear the burden of the woeful tidings that you bring. (The Queen’s speeches are harder to unpack even than Richard’s, in their elliptical, knotty syntax and abstract conceits.) A decision: come, ladies, let us go, to meet at London London’s King in woe. The repetition of London must be bitterly ironic here: London is Richard’s capital, and it is there, now, that he is being held prisoner; they must meet him in woe, and he is King only in (and of) woe. The Queen laments her plight: was I born to this, that my sad look should grace the triumph of great Bolingbroke? as if Richard had been defeated in battle, and his wife had become a trophy, the spoils of war, in a Roman triumph. (This, perhaps, stored away for Cleopatra, and her refusal to be paraded in Rome’s streets.) There’s a bitter near-homophone on grace/great, anticipating her final curse: Gardener, for telling me these news of woe, pray God the plants thou graft’st may never grow. Shooting the messenger indeed, but also, in these last three rhyming couplets, a shift for the Queen into an older, tragic, more primal mode, that of the complaining, lamenting women in Shakespeare’s earlier histories. The highly patterned, overwrought nature of her speeches already gives them a ritual quality; rhyme tips them fully into that mode, especially here with the doubled woe, grow/go, the sound of lamentation.
