Richard II

Recently the phrase "let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings" popped into my head for no apparent reason. I was pretty sure it was from a play by Shakespeare, but which one? The internet provided an immediate answer: Richard II, act three, scene 2.

The speaker is the king, who has arrived on the coast of Wales after a campaign in Ireland, only to find that his army of 12,000 men, hearing that he was dead, has gone over to his cousin Bolingbroke, who is leading a rebellion against him, and that three of his principal supporters are dead. He realizes now that Bolingbroke will take his lands, his power, and his life. In despair, he speaks:

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 killed;
All murder'd: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
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?

Earlier in this scene, Richard has spoken of himself as a king by divine right, asserting that Not all the water in the rough rude sea / Can wash the balm off from an anointed king, but now he sheds this role and sees himself for what he is, a mortal man like any other. After I read this speech, I wondered if any of us can, as Richard finally does, shed our outer trappings - our masks, our robes, and our scripts - to reveal the person who is acting. Can we separate the actor from his roles and find the naked, silent person who lives with bread, feel wants, tastes grief, and needs friends? Can we distinguish ourselves as dancers from the dances we are dancing? Or are we simply a collection of roles, so that if we peeled them off, like the layers of an onion, nothing would remain?

I doubt that I reflected about roles and identity when I first read the play, as an English major in college. And if the idea had occurred to me, as I read it, that Death keeps his court around the temples of us all, not just of kings, and that he laughs at our pretensions, it was probably as an abstract, academic notion, with little if any personal relevance. So it is perhaps not surprising that when I came upon the play again, in search of the citation that sent me to it, I found it wholly unfamiliar, as if I had never read it. Its power, poignancy, and beauty had probably been lost on me, since I do remember other things I read in college, such as Johnson's introduction to his dictionary. But I was twenty when I read Richard II, too young and inexperienced to appreciate it. Great literature is sometimes wasted on the young.