Unstable identity in Shakespeare's Richard II

That which is now a horse, even with a thought

The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct

As water is in water.

. . . . .

Here I am Antony, Yet cannot hold this visible shape. . . .

(Antony and Cleopatra 4.14.9-14)1

ANTONY'S sudden, shaky sense of his own identity raises an issue that besets several of Shakespeare's tragic protagonists. In this essay I want to consider the character of Richard II as a case in point.2 to suggest that Richard's struggle to come to terms with the several aspects of his unique self not only lies at the heart of his personal tragedy but also symbolizes a shift from the relative stability of his medieval worldview to a more modern, relativistic, and disturbingly uncertain one. The psychic turmoil that the play dramatizes has traditionally given actors difficulty, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, because post-enlightenment audiences have been insufficiently cognizant of and sympathetic with the religious and theological assumptions about kingship that would have been taken for granted in Elizabethan and Jacobean times. Consequently, as theater history shows, more secular and even psychosexual strategies for expressing Richard's predicament have been appropriated as the usual means of expressing the character's weakness or shallowness in the face of political adversity. And the tendency has become increasingly prominent in an age when kings are disappearing altogether as national leaders and nowadays, for the most part at least, retain only ceremonial status. My thesis is that Richard's emotional volatility and psychological complexity, frequently discussed in other contexts, stem essentially from conflicts inherent in his dual role as king and man-as both rex imago Dei and as fallible mortal.

Much of Richard's psychic instability comes with his title as a monarch by divine right, for he regards the political attack upon him by Bolingbroke as a violation of the authority vested in him not by men but by God. The political theology of the king's two bodies, borrowed originally from the early concept of the Church as the Body of Christ and articulated and popularized in the writings of the legal scholar Edmund Plowden, became deeply implicated in the Tudor definition of monarchy. The King's natural body incorporated his humanity and was thus subject to the frailties and mortality of the flesh like that of any other man; but his body politic embodied the state and so set him apart from all others, being immortal and ubiquitous. If the doctrine were applied uncritically, particular actions of a king might be interpreted as possessing a mystical and almost unchallengeable authority. The historical Sir John Bushy is supposed to have claimed, for instance, that the "Laws are in the King's mouth, or sometimes in his breast" (qtd. by Kantorowicz 28, who discusses its provenance). Holinshed (III. 502) makes a version of this comment one of the items (no. 14) charged against Richard in Parliament. Thus Henry V in Shakespeare's play can speak of himself as double-- natured-a "god" that suffers "mortal griefs" and so is "twin-born" (Henry V 4.1.233, 241-42). In her first words to the Privy Councillors after her accession in 1558 Elizabeth I adopted the familiar vocabulary, speaking of her sorrow for the death of her sister Queen Mary as a function of her "bodye naturallye considered" but of her power to govern England as proceeding from her "bodye politique" (State Papers Domestic 1558-1566, I, art. 7; qtd. in Axton 38).

Kantorowicz sensitively interprets Richard II as a tragedy of royal christology during the course of which the title figure progressively confronts his peculiar crisis of identity: Richard's dual nature not only defines but magnifies his sufferings, forcing him in stages to come to terms with the fatal disuniting of his human from his mystical body as occasioned by his political situation, and pushing him ultimately to self-- deposition and self-annihilation. Kantorowicz speaks of the inevitable "duplications" inherent in kingship and shows how Richard struggles selfconsciously, even theatrically, with them: "Thus play I in one person many people" (5.5.31). According to this critic, the most prominent roles that Richard acts are those of "the King, the Fool, and the God"-these dissolving finally "in the Mirror," an emblem of death:

Those three prototypes of "twin-birth" intersect and overlap and interfere with each other continuously. Yet, it may be felt that the "King" dominates in the scene on the Coast of Wales (Ill.ii), the "Fool" at Flint Castle (III.iii), and the "God" in the Westminster scene (IV.i), with Man's wretchedness as a perpetual companion and antithesis at every stage. Moreover, in each one of those three scenes we encounter the same cascading: from divine kingship to kingship's "Name," and from the name to the naked misery of man. (26-27)

Kantorowicz's formulation reminds us of King Lear, Shakespeare's supreme embodiment in one colossal figure of the tragic nexus of king, fool and god, whose sufferings traverse the full range between the extremes of human misery, the degradation of man nakedly exposed on a heath, and the near-divinity of supreme earthly power sumptuously enrobed and crowned-as implied in Lear's phrase, "every inch a king" (4.6.107). And it should be remembered that James I, the monarch in whose reign Lear made its first appearance, announced to his parliament that "Kings are justly called Gods, for that they exercise a manner or resemblance of Divine power upon earth" (James 307). Also in Hamlet Claudius is ironically able to calm Laertes' rebellious rage with the assurance that "There's such divinity doth hedge a king / That treason can but peep to what it would, / Acts little of his will" (4.5.124-27). That Shakespeare's Richard is psychologically wedded to such a mystical concept of kingship (he believes at one point that God will protect him from merely human agents with a battalion of "glorious angel[s]" [3.2.61]) is obvious in his language-as, for' instance, in his reference to himself as the "deputy elected by the Lord," whom "worldly men cannot depose" (3.2.56-57) and in his several comparisons of himself to Christ. But the same idea is also supported by Gaunt, who uses similar terminology ("God's substitute, / His deputy anointed in His sight" [1.2.37-38]) and by Carlisle ("the figure of God's majesty, / His captain, steward, deputy elect, /Anointed, crowned, planted many years" [4.1.12628]). York refers to Richard as "the anointed King" (2.3.96) and even after his defection to Bolingbroke can still speak of him as "sacred" (3.3.9), a word that crops up more often in Richard II than in any other of Shakespeare's works. Bolingbroke himself partly endorses Richard's iconic conception of monarchy when, invoking imagery from the hierarchy of nature as enshrined in the Great Chain of Being, he envisages their meeting at Flint Castle as the "thund'ring shock" of a cataclysmic storm with Richard as the reigning element of "fire" or lightning and himself as "the yielding water" (3.3.56-58). Of course this sacral and absolutist emphasis reflects only one aspect of the play's complex political vision, but it must nevertheless be the starting point for any analysis of Richard's identity problems.