Or shall we play the wantons with our woes,
And make some pretty match with shedding tears?
As thus:--To drop them still upon one place,
Till they have fretted us a pair of graves
Within the earth; and, therein laid,--There lies
Two kinsmen digg'd their graves with weeping eyes.
Would not this ill do well?--Well, well, I see
I talk but idly, and you mock at me.--
Most mighty prince, my lord Northumberland,
What says King Bolingbroke? will his majesty
Give Richard leave to live till Richard die?
You make a leg, and Bolingbroke says ay."
Every one will admit that the poet himself speaks here, at least, from
the words "I'll give my jewels" to the words "Would not this ill do
well?" But the melancholy mood, the pathetic acceptance of the
inevitable, the tender poetic embroidery now suit the King who is
fashioned in the poet's likeness.
The next moment Richard revolts once more against his fate:
"Base court, where kings grow base,
To come at traitors' calls, and do them grace."
And when Bolingbroke kneels to him he plays upon words, as Gaunt did a
little earlier in the play misery making sport to mock itself. He says:
"Up, cousin, up; your heart is up, I know,
Thus high at least, although your knee be low"--
and then he abandons himself to do "what force will have us do."
The Queen's wretchedness is next used to heighten our sympathy with
Richard, and immediately afterwards we have that curious scene between
the gardener and his servant which is merely youthful Shakespeare, for
such a gardener and such a servant never yet existed. The scene
[Footnote: Coleridge gives this scene as an instance of Shakespeare's
"wonderful judgement"; the introduction of the gardener, he says,
"realizes the thing," and, indeed, the introduction of a gardener would
have this tendency, but not the introduction of this pompous, priggish
philosopher togged out in old Adam's likeness. Here is the way this
gardener criticises the King:
"All superfluous branches
We lop away, that bearing boughs may live;
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