Shakespeare

The Bolingbroke Plays 131Ever since the beginning of language, probably, “nothing” has meant two things:“not anything” and “something called nothing.” Richard is saying here (not verygrammatically) that every human being, including himself, is discontented, notpleased with anything, until he becomes that something we call nothing, i.e., inthis context, dead. This double meaning becomes very central in King Lear later.In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the two worlds of the play, Theseus’s courtand Oberon’s wood, represent two aspects of the mind, the conscious, rational,daylight aspect and the dreaming and fantasizing aspect. One dwells in a worldof things and the other in a world of shadows; the shadow mind may live partlyin the imaginary, in what is simply not there, but it may live partly also in thegenuinely creative, bringing into existence a “transfigured” entity, to useHippolyta’s word, which is neither substantial nor shadowy, neither illusory norreal, but both at once. In Romeo and Juliet we got one tantalizing glimpse of thisworld in Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech, but what we see of it mostly is the worldcreated out of the love of the two young people, a world inevitably destroyed asthe daylight world rolls over it, but possessing a reality that its destruction doesnot disprove.Richard II is in a more complex social position, and has been caught in theparadox of the king, who, we remember, possesses both an individual and asacramental body. The latter includes all the subjects in his kingdom; the former,only himself. In the prison, however, an entire world leaps into life within hisown mind: the other world he was looking for in the mirror. He has as manythoughts as he has subjects, and, like his subjects, his thoughts are discontented,rebellious and conflicting. But the king’s two bodies are also God’s two realities,linked by the anointing of they king.The imagery changes as music sounds in the background: Richardcomments on the need for keeping time in music, and applies the word to hisown life: “I wasted time, and time doth now waste me.” From there twoconceptions of time unfold: time as rhythm and proportion, the inner grace oflife itself that we hear in music, and time as the mechanical progress of the clock,the time that Bolingbroke has kept so accurately until the clock brought him topower. Near the beginning of the play, John of Gaunt refuses to take activevengeance for Woodstock’s death on the Lord’s anointed. He leaves vengeanceto heaven, which will release its vengeance “when they see the hours ripe onearth.” The word “they” has no antecedent: John must mean something like “thegods,” but the image of ripening, and of acting when the time is “ripe,” brings ina third dimension of time, one that we don’t see in this play, or perhaps fullyanywhere else, although there are unconscious commitments to it like Edgar’s“ripeness is all.” There is a power in time, with its own rhythm and form: if wecan’t see it in action, perhaps it sees us, and touches the most sensitive people,such as Hamlet, with the feeling that it shapes our ends. If we did see it, perhapsthe world of history would burst like an eggshell and a new kind of life wouldcome forth.