This issue’s title might suggest wounds, blood, and the frailty of human bodies. That’s not quite why we’re here, though, is it?
Can a country be sick?
Look again – carefully – at today’s image. John of Gaunt’s hand is stretched not in weakness, but in the fading strength of the supreme moment: the knowledge that age, sickness, and rank will grant him a hearing. He speaks the truth even to his monarch, ‘God’s appointed deputy’.1
Place yourself in the scene as one of the onlookers.
The elder, avoiding eye contact, seems full of shame at the (patriotic) truth Gaunt utters. His age suggests he has seen other, better times, perhaps under Edward III. Much like Gaunt. The younger is, perhaps, us: astonished by Gaunt’s daring in the face of an ‘absolute monarch’, his eyes are fixed on the king, waiting to see how he will respond to his dying uncle’s rebuke.
Gaunt ‘spanks’ his king.
In 2018, reaching this scene in my Shakespeare read-through, I described Gaunt’s ‘sceptred isle’ speech which precedes today’s quotation as both an extraordinary crie de cœur and probably the second most misquoted passage in Shakespeare.2 That piece considers Act II of the play in some depth.
Gaunt’s monologue is far from a paean to the kingdom under Richard. It’s an (uncomfortably familiar?) nostalgic elegy for faded glory, followed by this extended metaphor of a sick country:
He that made me knows I see thee ill;
Ill in myself to see, and in thee seeing ill.
Thy death-bed is no lesser than thy land
Wherein thou liest in reputation sick;
And thou, too careless patient as thou art,
Commit’st thy anointed body to the cure
Of those physicians that first wounded thee
In an age of absolute monarchy, when speaking against the crown could cost your life, this is daring stuff. In 1601, the Earl of Essex required three blows of the axe to fully remove his head. He was Elizabeth’s favourite – it might have been far worse.
Back to Richard II.
The fish rots from the head down.
In this play, Shakespeare shows us the symptoms early. Richard surrenders his authority within 250 lines:
We were not born to sue, but to command; Which since we cannot do …
Richard proves to be lyrical and sensitive. But he is also ‘comfortably numb‘.
Even if we warm to him towards the end, that weakness in what we might call his monarchical ‘immune system’ allows the illness to spread, until Henry Bolingbroke attempts a cure by removing the head itself. The later parts of the play, and 1 Henry IV, show how the scars remain. We have to wait until Henry V to see Gaunt’s vision of England, briefly, restored to something like health. All too briefly, when Henry leaves an infant as heir.
Richard II sits in an intertextual web that extends beyond Shakespeare’s own plays about weak kings or weak leaders. Just two examples for you: Marlowe explores the theme in Edward II (1592), and those familiar with Pratchett’s Lancre may recognise the feeling: when the ruler is wrong, the whole kingdom begins to tilt and suffer.3
In this play, the problem is not that England is sick.
It is that the sickness wears a crown.
Sources and Further Reading
Title: Pink Floyd, ‘Comfortably Numb’, The Wall (1979)
- references to Richard II: William Shakespeare, Richard II (ed. Charles R Forker, Arden Third Edition), (London: Thomson Learning, 2005) ↩︎
- https://boarsheadeastcheap.com/2018/04/13/pts-11-065-stop-being-such-a-dick-richard/ ↩︎
- Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters (London: Victor Gollancz, 1988) ↩︎
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