RICHARD        Good sometimes Queen, prepare thee hence for France.

Think I am dead and that even here thou tak’st

As from my death-bed thy last living leave.

In winter’s tedious nights sit by the fire

With good old folks and let them tell thee tales

Of woeful ages long ago betid.

And ere thou bid good night, to ’quite their griefs,

Tell thou the lamentable tale of me

And send the hearers weeping to their beds;

For why the senseless brands will sympathize

The heavy accent of thy moving tongue

And in compassion weep the fire out,

And some will mourn in ashes, some coal-black,

For the deposing of a rightful king.             (5.1.37-50)

 

Sometimes Queen: you were a queen, but you’re not any more, not really. Prepare thee hence for France, again, the instruction to seek sanctuary, safety, a fresh start there; it’s all over. Think I am dead and that even here thou tak’st as from my death-bed thy last living leave. We’re never going to see each other again—and he is surely anticipating that his death is imminent—so, starting now, imagine that I’m dead already. I have to be dead to you from this moment; this is my death-bed, and you’ve just made your last farewells.

But don’t forget me. And here the speech pivots back to the imaginings of Richard’s hollow crown speech, where he asked his companions to join with him in telling sad stories of the death of kings. Richard’s vision for the Queen is at once proleptic and nostalgic: at some point in the future, he suggests, on a long, cold winter’s night, she will be sitting at a fireside with good old folks, and, as is the custom of such people, they will be telling tales of woeful ages long ago betid, the terrible things that happened in the past. But, before you bid good night, to ’quite, that is, requite, equal their griefs, their sad stories, tell thou the lamentable tale of me and send the hearers weeping to their beds. (It’s a vividly imagined scene, the good old folks capping each other’s stories of the hardships and sorrows of the past, not quite anticipating Monty Python’s ‘Four Yorkshiremen’—but it matters that they’re safe, and warm, and that the woes they describe are implicitly past, not present.) The Queen’s story, however, will be so full of sorrow and pity that they will weep uncontrollably. Richard already sees himself as the stuff of narrative, a lamentable tale, one of his own sad stories. There may be an echo of Sidney’s Sonnet 45 in Astrophil and Stella: ‘Then think, my dear, that you in me do read | Of lover’s ruin some sad tragedy. | I am not I; pity the tale of me’; it speaks to Richard’s tendency to self-aggrandisement, to seeing himself in literary or aesthetic terms, and to his existential crisis, ‘I am not I’. Not any longer.

Not only will the sympathetic listeners go weeping to their beds, but the fire itself will be moved. The senseless brands, the logs, will be so affected by the heavy accent, your doleful telling of this story, that they will weep the fire out in their compassion. Some (of the logs) will mourn in ashes, some coal-black: the conceit is ridiculous, bathetic, but also compellingly vivid, the mixture of ashy grey (ashes on the head as a sign of mourning, of penance, of mortality: remember man that thou art dust) and deepest black. (Shakespeare’s own Sonnet 73: ‘In me thou seest the glowing of such fire | That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, | As the death-bed whereon it must expire, | Consumed with that which it was nourished by’.) The hearers of the Queen’s sad story, and the fire itself, will all lament and mourn the deposing of a rightful king.