Richard II quotes

Enter King Richard, John of Gaunt, with other Nobles and Attendants.

Old John of Gaunt, time-honour’d Lancaster,

Hast thou, according to thy oath and band, Brought hither Henry Hereford thy bold son, Here to make good the boisterous late appeal, Which then our leisure would not let us hear, Against the Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Mowbray?

Wrath-kindled gentlemen, be ruled by me; Let’s purge this choler without letting blood: This we prescribe, though no physician; Deep malice makes too deep incision; Forget, forgive; conclude and be agreed;

Our doctors say this is no month to bleed.

Good uncle, let this end where it begun; We’ll calm the Duke of Norfolk, you your son.

Yea, but not change his spots: take but my shame, And I resign my gage. My dear dear lord, The purest treasure mortal times afford Is spotless reputation: that away,

Men are but gilded loam or painted clay.

A jewel in a ten-times-barr’d-up chest Is a bold spirit in a loyal breast. Mine honour is my life; both grow in one; Take honour from me, and my life is done: Then, dear my liege, mine honour let me try;

My dear dear lord, The purest treasure mortal times afford Is spotless reputation: that away, Men are but gilded loam or painted clay. A jewel in a ten-times-barr’d-up chest Is a bold spirit in a loyal breast.

Mine honour is my life; both grow in one; Take honour from me, and my life is done:

Then, dear my liege, mine honour let me try; In that I live and for that will I die.

Uncle, even in the glasses of thine eyes I see thy grieved heart: thy sad aspect Hath from the number of his banish’d years Pluck’d four away. To Bolingbroke. Six frozen winters spent, Return with welcome home from banishment.

How long a time lies in one little word!

Four lagging winters and four wanton springs End in a word: such is the breath of kings.

How long a time lies in one little word!

Four lagging winters and four wanton springs End in a word: such is the breath of kings.

I thank my liege, that in regard of me He shortens four years of my son’s exile: But little vantage shall I reap thereby;

Thy son is banish’d upon good advice, Whereto thy tongue a party-verdict gave: Why at our justice seem’st thou then to lour?

Things sweet to taste prove in digestion sour.

You urged me as a judge; but I had rather You would have bid me argue like a father. O, had it been a stranger, not my child, To smooth his fault I should have been more mild:

All places that the eye of heaven visits Are to a wise man ports and happy havens. Teach thy necessity to reason thus;

There is no virtue like necessity.

Think not the king did banish thee, But thou the king. Woe doth the heavier sit, Where it perceives it is but faintly borne. Go, say I sent thee forth to purchase honour And not the king exiled thee;

All places that the eye of heaven visits Are to a wise man ports and happy havens. Teach thy necessity to reason thus; There is no virtue like necessity.

Think not the king did banish thee, But thou the king.

Woe doth the heavier sit, Where it perceives it is but faintly borne. Go, say I sent thee forth to purchase honour And not the king exiled thee; or suppose Devouring pestilence hangs in our air And thou art flying to a fresher clime:

Suppose the singing birds musicians, The grass whereon thou tread’st the presence strew’d, The flowers fair ladies, and thy steps no more Than a delightful measure or a dance;

For gnarling sorrow hath less power to bite The man that mocks at it and sets it light.

O, who can hold a fire in his hand By thinking on the frosty Caucasus? Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite By bare imagination of a feast? Or wallow naked in December snow By thinking on fantastic summer’s heat? O, no!

For gnarling sorrow hath less power to bite The man that mocks at it and sets it light.

O, who can hold a fire in his hand By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?

Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite By bare imagination of a feast? Or wallow naked in December snow By thinking on fantastic summer’s heat? O, no! the apprehension of the good Gives but the greater feeling to the worse:

O, who can hold a fire in his hand By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?

Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite By bare imagination of a feast?

Or wallow naked in December snow By thinking on fantastic summer’s heat? O, no! the apprehension of the good Gives but the greater feeling to the worse: Fell sorrow’s tooth doth never rankle more Than when he bites, but lanceth not the sore.

Then, England’s ground, farewell; sweet soil, adieu; My mother, and my nurse, that bears me yet!

Where’er I wander, boast of this I can, Though banish’d, yet a trueborn Englishman.

Exeunt.

Where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain, For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain. He that no more must say is listen’d more Than they whom youth and ease have taught to glose;

More are men’s ends mark’d than their lives before: The setting sun, and music at the close, As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last,

Writ in remembrance more than things long past: Though Richard my life’s counsel would not hear, My death’s sad tale may yet undeaf his ear.

Methinks I am a prophet new inspired And thus expiring do foretell of him: His rash fierce blaze of riot cannot last,

For violent fires soon burn out themselves;

Small showers last long, but sudden storms are short; He tires betimes that spurs too fast betimes; With eager feeding food doth choke the feeder: Light vanity, insatiate cormorant, Consuming means, soon preys upon itself.

England, bound in with the triumphant sea, Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame, With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds:

That England, that was wont to conquer others, Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life, How happy then were my ensuing death!

Methinks I am a prophet new inspired And thus expiring do foretell of him: His rash fierce blaze of riot cannot last, For violent fires soon burn out themselves; Small showers last long, but sudden storms are short;

He tires betimes that spurs too fast betimes;

With eager feeding food doth choke the feeder: Light vanity, insatiate cormorant, Consuming means, soon preys upon itself.

Small showers last long, but sudden storms are short; He tires betimes that spurs too fast betimes; With eager feeding food doth choke the feeder: Light vanity, insatiate cormorant, Consuming means, soon preys upon itself.

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise,

This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall Or as a moat defensive to …

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall Or as a moat defensive to a house,

Against the envy of less happier lands, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings, Fear’d by their breed and famous by their birth, Renowned for their deeds as far from home, For Christian service and …

O, how that name befits my composition!

Old Gaunt indeed, and gaunt in being old:

Within me grief hath kept a tedious fast; And who abstains from meat that is not gaunt? For sleeping England long time have I watch’d; Watching breeds leanness, leanness is all gaunt: The pleasure that some fathers feed upon, Is my strict fast;

Can sick men play so nicely with their names?

No, misery makes sport to mock itself:

Since thou dost seek to kill my name in me, I mock my name, great king, to flatter thee.

Should dying men flatter with those that live?

No, no, men living flatter those that die.

Thou, now a-dying, say’st thou flatterest me.

Why, cousin, wert thou regent of the world, It were a shame to let this land by lease; But for thy world enjoying but this land, Is it not more than shame to shame it so?

Landlord of England art thou now, not king:

Thy state of law is bondslave to the law; And thou—

Wars have not wasted it, for warr’d he hath not, But basely yielded upon compromise That which his noble ancestors achieved with blows:

More hath he spent in peace than they in wars.

The Earl of Wiltshire hath the realm in farm.

yet again, methinks, Some unborn sorrow, ripe in fortune’s womb, Is coming towards me, and my inward soul With nothing trembles: at some thing it grieves, More than with parting from my lord the king.

Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows,

Which shows like grief itself, but is not so; For sorrow’s eye, glazed with blinding tears, Divides one thing entire to many objects; Like perspectives, which rightly gazed upon Show nothing but confusion, eyed awry Distinguish form:

’Tis nothing less: conceit is still derived From some forefather grief; mine is not so,

For nothing hath begot my something grief; Or something hath the nothing that I grieve:

’Tis in reversion that I do possess; But what it is, that is not yet known; what I cannot name; ’tis nameless woe, I wot.

Tut, tut!

Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle:

I am no traitor’s uncle; and that word “grace.” In an ungracious mouth is but profane. Why have those banish’d and forbidden legs Dared once to touch a dust of England’s ground? But then more “why?”

… this while hath revell’d in the night Whilst we were wandering with the antipodes, Shall see us rising in our throne, the east, His treasons will sit blushing in his face, Not able to endure the sight of day, But self-affrighted tremble at his sin.

Not all the water in the rough rude sea Can wash the balm off from an anointed king;

The breath of worldly men cannot depose The deputy elected by the Lord: For every man that Bolingbroke hath press’d To lift shrewd steel against our golden crown, God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay A glorious angel:

Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood With solemn reverence: throw away respect, Tradition, form and ceremonious duty, For you have but mistook me all this while:

I live with bread like you, feel want, Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus, How can you say to me, I am a king?

My lord, wise men ne’er sit and wail their woes, But presently prevent the ways to wail. To fear the foe, since fear oppresseth strength, Gives in your weakness strength unto your foe, And so your follies fight against yourself. Fear, and be slain;

No matter where; of comfort no man speak:

Let’s talk of graves, of worms and epitaphs; Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth,

Let’s choose executors and talk of wills: And yet not so, for what can we bequeath Save our deposed bodies to the ground?

Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke’s, And nothing can we call our own but death And that small model of the barren earth Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.

For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings:

How some have been deposed; some slain in war; Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed; Some poison’d by their wives; some sleeping kill’d; All murder’d:

O God, O God! that e’er this tongue of mine, That laid the sentence of dread banishment On yon proud man, should take it off again With words of sooth! O that I were as great As is my grief, or lesser than my name!

Or that I could forget what I have been, Or not remember what I must be now!

Swell’st thou, proud heart? I’ll give thee scope to beat, Since foes have scope to beat both thee and me.

What must the king do now? must he submit? The king shall do it: must he be deposed? The king shall be contented: must he lose The name of king? o’ God’s name, let it go:

I’ll give my jewels for a set of beads, My gorgeous palace for a hermitage,

My gay apparel for an almsman’s gown, My figured goblets for a dish of wood, My sceptre for a palmer’s walking-staff, My subjects for a pair of carved saints And my large kingdom for a little grave, A little little grave, an obscure grave;

must he lose The name of king? o’ God’s name, let it go: I’ll give my jewels for a set of beads, My gorgeous palace for a hermitage, My gay apparel for an almsman’s gown, My figured goblets for a dish of wood,

My sceptre for a palmer’s walking-staff, My subjects for a pair of carved saints And my large kingdom for a little grave,

A little little grave, an obscure grave; Or I’ll be buried in the king’s highway, Some way of common trade, where subjects’ feet May hourly trample on their sovereign’s head; For on my heart they tread now whilst I live;

My lord, in the base court he doth attend To speak with you; may it please you to come down.

Down, down I come; like glistering Phaethon, Wanting the manage of unruly jades.

In the base court? Base court, where kings grow base, To come at traitors’ calls and do them grace. In the base court? Come down? Down, court! down, king! For night-owls shriek where mounting larks should sing. Exeunt from above.

Down, down I come; like glistering Phaethon, Wanting the manage of unruly jades. In the base court? Base court, where kings grow base, To come at traitors’ calls and do them grace. In the base court? Come down? Down, court! down, king!

For night-owls shriek where mounting larks should sing.

Exeunt from above.

Down, down I come; like glistering Phaethon, Wanting the manage of unruly jades.

In the base court? Base court, where kings grow base, To come at traitors’ calls and do them grace.

In the base court? Come down? Down, court! down, king! For night-owls shriek where mounting larks should sing. Exeunt from above.

Well you deserve: they well deserve to have, That know the strong’st and surest way to get. Uncle, give me your hands: nay, dry your eyes;

Tears show their love, but want their remedies.

Cousin, I am too young to be your father, Though you are old enough to be my heir. What you will have, I’ll give, and willing too; For do we must what force will have us do. Set on towards London, cousin, is it so?

Cousin, I am too young to be your father, Though you are old enough to be my heir. What you will have, I’ll give, and willing too; For do we must what force will have us do. Set on towards London, cousin, is it so?

Then I must not say no.

Flourish. Exeunt.

Of sorrow or of joy?

Of neither, girl: For if of joy, being altogether wanting, It doth remember me the more of sorrow;

Or if of grief, being altogether had, It adds more sorrow to my want of joy: For what I have I need not to repeat; And what I want it boots not to complain.

… form and due proportion, Showing, as in a model, our firm estate, When our sea-walled garden, the whole land, Is full of weeds, her fairest flowers choked up, Her fruit-trees all unpruned, her hedges ruin’d, Her knots disorder’d and her wholesome herbs Swarming with caterpillars?

Hold thy peace: He that hath suffer’d this disorder’d spring Hath now himself met with the fall of leaf:

The weeds which his broad-spreading leaves did shelter, That seem’d in eating him to hold him up, Are pluck’d up root and all by Bolingbroke, I mean the Earl of Wiltshire, Bushy, Green.

But in the balance of great Bolingbroke, Besides himself, are all the English peers, And with that odds he weighs King Richard down. Post you to London, and you will find it so; I speak no more than every one doth know.

Nimble mischance, that art so light of foot,

Doth not thy embassage belong to me, And am I last that knows it? O, thou think’st To serve me last, that I may longest keep Thy sorrow in my breast. Come, ladies, go, To meet at London London’s king in woe.

Poor queen! so that thy state might be no worse, I would my skill were subject to thy curse. Here did she fall a tear; here in this place I’ll set a bank of rue, sour herb of grace:

Rue, even for ruth, here shortly shall be seen, In the remembrance of a weeping queen.

Exeunt.

Would God that any in this noble presence Were enough noble to be upright judge Of noble Richard! then true noblesse would Learn him forbearance from so foul a wrong.

What subject can give sentence on his king?

And who sits here that is not Richard’s subject? Thieves are not judged but they are by to hear, Although apparent guilt be seen in them;

I speak to subjects, and a subject speaks, Stirr’d up by God, thus boldly for his king. My Lord of Hereford here, whom you call king, Is a foul traitor to proud Hereford’s king: And if you crown him, let me prophesy:

The blood of English shall manure the ground, And future ages groan for this foul act;

Peace shall go sleep with Turks and infidels, And in this seat of peace tumultuous wars Shall kin with kin and kind with kind confound;

I hardly yet have learn’d To insinuate, flatter, bow, and bend my limbs: Give sorrow leave awhile to tutor me To this submission. Yet I well remember The favours of these men: were they not mine?

Did they not sometime cry, “all hail!” to me? So Judas did to Christ: but he, in twelve, Found truth in all but one; I, in twelve thousand, none.

God save the king! Will no man say amen? Am I both priest and clerk? well then, amen. God save the king! although I be not he; And yet, amen, if heaven do think him me. To do what service am I sent for hither?

Give me the crown. Here, cousin, seize the crown; Here cousin; On this side my hand, and on that side yours.

Now is this golden crown like a deep well That owes two buckets, filling one another,

The emptier ever dancing in the air, The other down, unseen and full of water: That bucket down and full of tears am I, Drinking my griefs, whilst you mount up on high.

Here cousin; On this side my hand, and on that side yours. Now is this golden crown like a deep well That owes two buckets, filling one another, The emptier ever dancing in the air, The other down, unseen and full of water:

That bucket down and full of tears am I, Drinking my griefs, whilst you mount up on high.

I thought you had been willing to resign.

My crown I am; but still my griefs are mine:

You may my glories and my state depose, But not my griefs; still am I king of those.

Part of your cares you give me with your crown.

Are you contented to resign the crown?

Ay, no; no, ay; for I must nothing be;

Therefore no no, for I resign to thee. Now mark me, how I will undo myself: I give this heavy weight from off my head And this unwieldy sceptre from my hand, The pride of kingly sway from out my heart;

Therefore no no, for I resign to thee. Now mark me, how I will undo myself: I give this heavy weight from off my head And this unwieldy sceptre from my hand, The pride of kingly sway from out my heart;

With mine own tears I wash away my balm, With mine own hands I give away my crown,

With mine own tongue deny my sacred state, With mine own breath release all duty’s rites: All pomp and majesty I do forswear; My manors, rents, revenues I forego; My acts, decrees, and statutes I deny: God pardon all oaths that are broke to me!

Nay, all of you that stand and look upon, Whilst that my wretchedness doth bait myself,

Though some of you with Pilate wash your hands Showing an outward pity; yet you Pilates Have here deliver’d me to my sour cross, And water cannot wash away your sin.

My lord, dispatch; read o’er these articles.

I have no name, no title, No, not that name was given me at the font, But ’tis usurp’d: alack the heavy day, That I have worn so many winters out, And know not now what name to call myself!

O that I were a mockery king of snow, Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke, To melt myself away in water-drops!

Good king, great king, and yet not greatly good, An if my word be sterling yet in England, Let it command a mirror hither straight, That it may show me what a face I have, Since it is bankrupt of his majesty.

O flattering glass, Like to my followers in prosperity, Thou dost beguile me! Was this face the face That every day under his household roof Did keep ten thousand men? was this the face That, like the sun, did make beholders wink?

Was this the face that faced so many follies, And was at last out-faced by Bolingbroke?

A brittle glory shineth in this face: As brittle as the glory is the face; Dashes the glass against the ground. For there it is, crack’d in a hundred shivers.

Was this face the face That every day under his household roof Did keep ten thousand men? was this the face That, like the sun, did make beholders wink? Was this the face that faced so many follies, And was at last out-faced by Bolingbroke?

A brittle glory shineth in this face: As brittle as the glory is the face;

Dashes the glass against the ground. For there it is, crack’d in a hundred shivers. Mark, silent king, the moral of this sport, How soon my sorrow hath destroy’d my face.

Say that again.

The shadow of my sorrow! ha! let’s see: ’Tis very true, my grief lies all within;

And these external manners of laments Are merely shadows to the unseen grief That swells with silence in the tortured soul; There lies the substance:

“Fair cousin”? I am greater than a king:

For when I was a king, my flatterers Were then but subjects; being now a subject, I have a king here to my flatterer.

Being so great, I have no need to beg.

Go, some of you convey him to the Tower.

O, good! convey? conveyers are you all, That rise thus nimbly by a true king’s fall.

Exeunt King Richard, some Lords, and a Guard.

A woeful pageant have we here beheld.

The woe’s to come; the children yet unborn. Shall feel this day as sharp to them as thorn.

You holy clergymen, is there no plot To rid the realm of this pernicious blot?

And he shall think that thou, which know’st the way To plant unrightful kings, wilt know again, Being ne’er so little urged, another way To pluck him headlong from the usurped throne.

The love of wicked men converts to fear; That fear to hate, and hate turns one or both To worthy danger and deserved death.

My guilt be on my head, and there an end. Take leave and part; for you must part forthwith.

My guilt be on my head, and there an end. Take leave and part; for you must part forthwith.

Doubly divorced! Bad men, you violate A twofold marriage, ’twixt my crown and me, And then betwixt me and my married wife.

Let me unkiss the oath ’twixt thee and me; And yet not so, for with a kiss ’twas made. Part us, Northumberland; I toward the north, Where shivering cold and sickness pines the clime; My wife to France:

Twice for one step I’ll groan, the way being short, And piece the way out with a heavy heart. Come, come, in wooing sorrow let’s be brief, Since, wedding it, there is such length in grief:

One kiss shall stop our mouths, and dumbly part; Thus give I mine, and thus take I thy heart.

Give me mine own again; ’twere no good part To take on me to keep and kill thy heart. So, now I have mine own again, be gone, That I might strive to kill it with a groan.

Alack, poor Richard! where rode he the whilst?

As in a theatre, the eyes of men, After a well-graced actor leaves the stage, Are idly bent on him that enters next,

Thinking his prattle to be tedious; Even so, or with much more contempt, men’s eyes Did scowl on gentle Richard; no man cried “God save him!” No joyful tongue gave him his welcome home: But dust was thrown upon his sacred head;

A woman, and thy aunt, great king; ’tis I. Speak with me, pity me, open the door:

A beggar begs that never begg’d before.

Our scene is alter’d from a serious thing, And now changed to “The Beggar and the King.” My dangerous cousin, let your mother in: I know she is come to pray for your foul sin.

Nay, do not say, “stand up;” Say, “pardon” first, and afterwards “stand up.” And if I were thy nurse, thy tongue to teach, “Pardon” should be the first word of thy speech. I never long’d to hear a word till now;

Say “pardon,” king; let pity teach thee how: The word is short, but not so short as sweet;

No word like “pardon” for kings’ mouths so meet.

Didst thou not mark the king, what words he spake, “

Have I no friend will rid me of this living fear?

” Was it not so?

And speaking it, he wistly look’d on me, And who should say, “I would thou wert the man That would divorce this terror from my heart;” Meaning the king at Pomfret. Come, let’s go: I am the king’s friend, and will rid his foe. Exeunt.

I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world:

And for because the world is populous And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it; yet I’ll hammer it out. My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul, My soul the father;

like silly beggars Who sitting in the stocks refuge their shame, That many have and others must sit there; And in this thought they find a kind of ease, Bearing their own misfortunes on the back Of such as have before endured the like.

Thus play I in one person many people, And none contented: sometimes am I king;

Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar, And so I am: then crushing penury Persuades me I was better when a king; Then am I king’d again: and by and by Think that I am unking’d by Bolingbroke, And straight am nothing:

So is it in the music of men’s lives. And here have I the daintiness of ear To check time broke in a disorder’d string; But for the concord of my state and time Had not an ear to hear my true time broke.

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;

For now hath time made me his numbering clock: My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch, Whereto my finger, like a dial’s point, Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears.

This music mads me; let it sound no more; For though it have holp madmen to their wits, In me it seems it will make wise men mad. Yet blessing on his heart that gives it me!

For ’tis a sign of love; and love to Richard Is a strange brooch in this all-hating world.

Enter a Groom of the Stable.

So proud that Bolingbroke was on his back! That jade hath eat bread from my royal hand; This hand hath made him proud with clapping him. Would he not stumble? would he not fall down,

Since pride must have a fall, and break the neck Of that proud man that did usurp his back?

Forgiveness, horse! why do I rail on thee, Since thou, created to be awed by man, Wast born to bear? I was not made a horse; And yet I bear a burthen like an ass, Spurr’d, gall’d and tired by jauncing Bolingbroke.