The play is suffused with the sense of time. It begins to resemble a political currency:

• allotted,
• withheld,
• redistributed,
• and, ultimately, squandered.

Richard’s relationship with time is a key factor in the tragic downfall of his reign, deposition, and death.

In the play, catastrophe happens because people arrive too late, wait too long, mistake temporary things for permanent ones, or realise truths only after history has already moved on.

As the play opens, Richard seems under the illusion that his control over other people’s time is a pillar of the Divine Right doctrine he relies on so heavily (anticipating James I). He fixes a date for the trial between Mowbray and Bolingbroke (where one of them should die) without blinking. Then, when that day arrives, he redistributes years with the confidence of a man who believes time itself belongs to him.

Perhaps to silence him, Mowbray is severely punished:

The sly slow hours shall not determine
The dateless limit of thy dear exile.¹

Whereas Bolingbroke’s lesser sentence is quickly mitigated at the sight of Gaunt’s anguish:

Thy sad aspect

Hath from the number of his banished years

Plucked four away.

Even Bolingbroke seems too grimly amused by this ‘largesse’ to show any gratitude.

How long a time lies in one little word!

[…] such is the breath of Kings.

Richard believes he can govern time itself.

Gaunt quietly destroys the fantasy:

Richard Why uncle, thou hast many years to live.

Gaunt But not a minute, King, that thou canst give.

Richard’s judgement is as poor in this as anything else. No sooner has Bolingbroke quit the country that we learn that Gaunt is on his death-bed. Time now becomes something to be used performatively. The King callously jokes with his flatterers:

Let’s all go visit him.

Pray God we may make haste and come too late.

‘Time-honored Lancaster’ survives long enough to lambast his nephew. But Shakespeare shows that political power cannot stop time or delay consequence.

History does not wait for kings.

Richard’s timing is appalling, and this results in one of the most poignant episodes in the play. Losing the moment, he loses an entire army.

Shakespeare’s main source, Holinshed, tells us that 40,000 Welsh supporters waited fourteen days for their king to return from Ireland before dispersing, believing rumours that he was dead.²

An army big enough to make a difference melted away.

Not defeated. Not betrayed.

Simply absent too long …

Salisbury is left to lament:

O Call back yesterday, bid Time return.

But he is speaking to a man who is beginning to realise that:

‘Time hath set a blot upon my pride.’

Shakespeare repeatedly suggests that when it comes to power and kingship, legitimacy and authority depend upon timing.

Stay absent long enough, and history continues without you.

A man ‘out of time’ in both senses, Richard’s only soliloquy comes in the forgotten darkness of a cell at Pomfret Castle. By then, he fully realises that almost everything he believed was an illusion. But, of course, it is far too late.

I wasted time and now doth Time waste me.

Winners in Shakespeare’s tragedies are often those who seize the moment. Richard II is one of the victims, in a play where time doesn’t merely pass.

It passes judgment.

References

1. William Shakespeare, King Richard II, ed. by Charles R. Forker, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series (London: Thomson Learning, 2002) ↩︎
2. Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles, ed. by Michael Wood (London: The Folio Society, 2012). ↩︎