Because Shakespeare’s Richard II depicts the deposition of a King who is on the throne by divine right, many have assumed that the play can tell us much about what is increasingly referred to as Shakespeare’s political theology—the extent to which theological concepts and beliefs underwrite or determine his political understanding.1 This chapter operates under that common critical assumption.
This chapter does not accept, however, the scholarly boundaries for exploring this political theology. Richard II scholarship limits the possible range of Shakespeare’s political theology by setting one boundary at the medieval religious notion that the king somehow embodied the divine in his very being (“the king’s two bodies”) and another boundary at what seems to be a protosecular early modern understanding that “the law” rather than the Divine was the ultimate sovereign, responsible for the making and unmaking of kings.2 According to most critics, Shakespeare either leans toward one boundary or the other, either backwards or forward in history. Or, alternately, he is considered to be resolutely but brilliantly ambiguous on the whole matter, looking both forward and backwards at once in accordance with his legendary double-eyedness.3
If, however, one even briefly assumes a broader range of possible religious and historical understandings, it will become clear that Shakespeare organizes the political theology in Richard II around Genesis 22. Critical terms, concepts, and images that shape Shakespeare’s political theology do not derive primarily from the medieval notion of the “king’s two bodies,” nor from the early modern English constitutional understanding of the “king-in-parliament,” nor from a prescient sense of a Realpolitik to come, but from the long interpretive tradition surrounding Genesis 22.4
As I suggested in the introduction, to interpret the call to kill Isaac simply as a test is insufficient. The call shatters all reason: it makes no sense, especially in that God already has promised Abraham that Isaac will inherit everything. It is particularly helpful to understand that strangeness in terms of the law. The call to kill Isaac requires Abraham to respond to God as a figure of the “Law” beyond the law, a Law that precedes rationality or even a basic sense of reciprocity.
This figure of the Law beyond the law that Abraham must obey certainly defies any postclassical Hobbesian sense of the law as a human-made system developed to forestall violence. This Law beyond the law defies economic thought itself and marks the distinctly religious and non-Greek world of Jerusalem, a Thought outside thought, something completely Other, something that calls but cannot be fully answered or understood.
As Kierkegaard puts it, Abraham must respond in “fear and trembling,” not knowing or fully understanding God’s call, the call of the Law beyond the law. The phrase “fear and trembling,” of course, comes from Paul in Philippians 2:12. Paul’s readings of Abraham’s life illuminate the absolute separation, the relation without relation, the nonrelation, between God and person embedded in Genesis 22. Abraham’s blindness even to himself and Genesis 22—the utter distance between God and human—partly informs a whole series of Pauline motifs perhaps familiar to readers of Shakespeare: faith versus works, wisdom in foolishness, knowing in full versus knowing in part, seeing face-to-face rather “through a glass, darkly” (1 Corintians 13:12), living as if the divine presence were here and so on.5 In many respects, Kierkegaard’s reading of Genesis 22 derives from Luther’s reading, which, in turn, derives from Paul. It is precisely this kind of Pauline or Kierkegaardian figure that Richard II seems to conjure in grappling with the play’s long-standing critical issues, such as the divine right of kings and sovereign violence.
Shakespeare’s attention to Genesis 22 is almost everywhere present in Richard II. The play opens, for example, with a king on the throne by divine right calling on a father, Old John of Gaunt, to “sacrifice” his son Henry Bolingbroke.
Old John of Gaunt, time-honored Lancaster,
Hast thou according to thy oath and bond
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
(1.1.1–6)
John of Gaunt is not asked to kill his son on the spot, of course. He is called to follow “his oath and bond” to bring “his bold son” to “make good” Bolingbroke’s charge that Mowbray acted in treason. Nonetheless, like Abraham, Gaunt ultimately answers the call to “sacrifice” his son in the affirmative. Henry IV famously gestures toward the “Holy Land” in the play’s concluding lines, but this play begins there as well—specifically on Mount Moriah.
Let us retrace the early course of events in order to better see how Shakespeare embeds this ancient religious command in the play’s opening. Gaunt presents Bolingbroke to Richard. After Richard listens to Bolingbroke and Mowbray, he tries to force a reconciliation between the two, knowing this reconciliation will fail. When this effort does fail, he remarks that he cannot “command” (1.1.196) any to “make . . . friends” (1.1.198). This faux failure sets the stage for a predetermined show: the famous ritual (non) combat between Mowbray and Bolingbroke. Richard directs the fight only to interrupt it and banish Mowbray for life and Bolingbroke for ten years—long enough to guarantee that the son will never see his old father, Gaunt, again. The decision to banish may appear to be spontaneous on Richard’s part, but Shakespeare quickly makes it clear that a decision to settle the conflict in this way had been made earlier.
In turn, this decision to banish initially appears well conceived and well crafted, politically speaking. Richard can dispose of Bolingbroke, who really wants to charge Richard with the death of his uncle Gloucester (Woodstock). And Richard also can get rid of Mowbray, the man who seems directly responsible for Gloucester’s death. But the politico-theological complexity of Bolingbroke’s banishment manifests itself at the moment of actual banishment: Shakespeare makes it clear that the decision to issue the banishments was made under the advice of the council, including John of Gaunt. Strikingly, Shakespeare tells the audience that the father had participated in the decision to banish, or sacrifice, his own son.
Audiences do not know exactly how or when the shared decision to banish Bolingbroke was reached. What they are led to consider, however, about Gaunt’s role in the banishment of Bolingbroke is provided in an earlier scene involving Gaunt and his sister-in-law, the Duchess of Gloucester. In 1.2, immediately before an audience watches the interrupted combat and Bolingbroke’s banishment, they watch the Duchess plead with Gaunt to revenge her husband and his brother, the Duke of Gloucester (Woodstock). Gaunt refuses because
God’s is the quarrel; for God’s substitute,
His deputy anointed in His sight,
Hath caused his death; the which if wrongfully
Let heaven revenge, for I may never lift
An angry arm against his minister.
(1.2.37–40, emphasis added)
Gaunt’s devotion to God, a devotion intertwined with his political understanding of kingship, prompts him to forego any revenge. The dramatist makes sure that audiences see Gaunt choosing this devotion to God over family just before depicting the banishment of Bolingbroke.
Inserting this scene here encourages audiences to assume that the legal/theological sensibility underpinning Gaunt’s choice was also employed in any conversation he had with the King and the council about Bolingbroke. Bolingbroke’s situation does not differ greatly from Woodstock’s in that both are potentially acting illegally against the King; and Gaunt must choose either to respect the inscrutable, unknowable divine “Other” that guarantees the crown—or to respond to his family. The parallel is marked. The seemingly absolute devotion to God that prohibits Gaunt from taking the part of his own brother against the King provides the context for understanding Gaunt’s subsequent participation in the banishment (sacrifice) of his own son. Even more, one could say his absolute respect for this absolute Other requires the sacrifice of a son. We can begin to see how John of Gaunt—like Abraham—is called.
Shakespeare invites audiences, through two early and distinct theatrical moments, to measure and understand Gaunt’s devotion to this “Other” against his devotion to family, his brother, and his son.
Intriguingly, Richard also initially hints at a comparable political theology involving a devotion to an absolute Justice measured against the life of a son—a son, of course, this “Sun” King does not have. When Mowbray questions the King’s impartiality because of his blood relationship to Bolingbroke, Richard responds:
Mowbray, impartial are our eyes and ears.
Were he my brother, nay, my kingdom’s heir,
As he is but my father’s brother’s son,
Now, by my scepter’s awe I make a vow,
Such neighbor nearness to our sacred blood
Should nothing privilege him nor partialize
The unstooping firmness of my upright soul.
(1.1.115–21)
Richard says that his devotion to the notion of perfect Justice embodied in his kingship would outweigh his devotion to a son and heir. If called to choose between this perfect Justice and his son, Richard claims he would sacrifice his son.
One could argue that these claims of devotion made by Gaunt and Richard are purely political performances designed to further their own ends. But even to the extent we are allowed to imagine Gaunt’s and Richard’s motivations as being purely Machiavellian in this way, the fact of the matter is that Shakespeare eventually shows their claims of devotion to involve profound sacrifices for both figures. Gaunt loses a son, and Richard loses the crown. And Shakespeare sets both losses in the context of claimed devotion to an absolutely-Other sense of Justice—a Law beyond the law.
Frankly, Shakespeare seems hardly interested in depicting Machiavels whose political scheming goes awry. This is Richard II, not Richard III. Even if we interpret both these characters as not actually believing in the political theology they espouse, Shakespeare makes clear through his depiction of events that their very claims of devotion to Justice over family have consequences. In other words, the political theology sketched by the characters matters more than the psychology critics might sketch for individual characters.
If anything, Shakespeare seems interested in exploring a much more common, everyday psyche than a purely Machiavellian one. He seems interested in both Gaunt and Richard’s simple inability to fully embrace the politico-theological claims they make. With Richard and Gaunt, Shakespeare presents men surprised and confused when events force them to act on the demands their stated political theologies commit them to. The actual moment of Bolingbroke’s banishment is telling. Gaunt breaks down completely. He simply cannot say with either political or religious equanimity—as he did about his brother Woodstock—“God’s is the quarrel.” Shakespeare devotes the rest of the scene to this emotional breakdown, the breakdown of this experienced and skilled courtier and diplomat.
While it seems normal that Gaunt might do something more than flinch at the actual banishment, we must acknowledge that Shakespeare makes it clear that this breakdown should be understood as a surprise, both to Gaunt himself and to Richard. Shakespeare gives the first, critical lines to the King: “Uncle, even in the glasses of thine eyes / I see thy grieved heart” (1.3.208–9). In what seems a gesture of familial mercy, Richard then cuts the length of Bolingbroke’s banishment from ten years to six (1.3.211–12). Gaunt initially attempts to recover the polished tone of professional diplomacy in making a dark but simple point:
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;
For, ere the six years that he hath to spend
Can change their moons and bring their times about;
My oil-dried lamp and time-bewasted light
Shall be extinct with age and endless night;
My inch of taper will be burnt and done,
And blindfold Death not let me see my son.
(1.3.216–24)
But Gaunt is only partially successful at masking his feelings. He explicitly rejects both the familial form and the content of Richard’s gesture, a rejection Richard cannot ignore. Richard replies, “Why, uncle, thou has many years to live” (1.3.225). Then he abandons courtiership entirely:
But not a minute, King, that thou canst give.
Shorten my days thou canst with sullen sorrow,
And pluck nights from me, but not lend a morrow;
Thou canst help Time to furrow me with age,
But not stop no wrinkle in his pilgrimage;
Thy word is current with him for my death,
But dead, thy kingdom cannot buy my breath.
(1.3.226–32)
Gaunt not only suggests the limitation of Richard’s powers—the fact that the King may be mistaking his divinely sanctioned position with divine power itself (a matter about to become increasingly important in the play)—but he also suggests that Richard’s banishment of Bolingbroke somehow brings about his own death, that Richard is killing him.
Gaunt’s sharp and apparently unexpected shift in tone and topic then prompts Richard, who heretofore had been every bit as diplomatic as Gaunt, to reveal that the father actually had a hand in the decision to banish the son. Richard makes the additional point that as King he acts well within and not, as Gaunt hinted, outside the law:
Thy son is banished upon good advice,
Whereto thy tongue a party verdict gave.
Why at our justice seem’st thou then to lour?
(1.3.233–35, emphasis added).
Richard insists here that he and Gaunt share a comparable sense of the law and justice, and perhaps a political theology. That Gaunt suddenly no longer seems to share this common sense of justice is what surprises and shocks Richard. And, again, Gaunt himself seems caught off guard by his own reaction, his own inability to honor the justice crafted in council.
Gaunt does not try to conceal his part in the decision to banish Bolingbroke, nor does he try to conceal his apparent sudden and profound change of heart about that decision. On the contrary, he reveals his innermost thoughts. At this very uncourtierlike moment he seems incapable of doing anything but speaking his innermost thoughts, even though those truths do not paint a particularly flattering self-portrait:
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.
A partial slander sought I to avoid
And in the sentence my life destroyed.
Alas, I looked when some of you should say
I was too strict, to make mine own away;
But you gave me leave to my unwilling tongue
Against my will to do myself this wrong.
(1.3.229–40)
Shakespeare conveys a most important piece of information here, both about Gaunt but also about the larger complexity and demands of his political theology. In refusing to challenge Richard’s justice on the basis of an unknowable, inscrutable, impossible, perfect sense of Justice (“God’s is the quarrel”), it seems, intriguingly, that Gaunt also clearly retains a very distinct sense that the unknowable, inscrutable, impossible Justice would, in fact, go his way.
That is, Gaunt’s stated devotion to the absolutely-Other, inscrutable Justice of God is not a Machiavellian cover but simply an all-too-human compromise. On reflection, one might note that we first caught some glimpse of Gaunt’s willingness to translate the otherness of God’s justice in a manner that suits his own interests when he expressed his hope for “hot vengeance” for Woodstock. Here, again, we glimpse this compromised nature of Gaunt’s commitment in his explanation of how he came to agree to Bolingbroke’s banishment. He agreed to the banishment in part to avoid the appearance of bias (“a partial slander”), but secretly he hoped that his friends would save him from himself. It turns out his stated commitment to God’s justice (“God’s is the quarrel”) has some notable limitations:
Alas, I looked when some of you should say
I was too strict, to make mine own away;
But you gave me leave to my unwilling tongue
Against my will to do myself this wrong.
(1.3.245)
I am not pointing out the compromised nature of Gaunt’s commitment to the distinctness of God’s justice to fault him, nor am I suggesting that Shakespeare faults him. On the contrary, one struggles to imagine a figure who would not (at least secretly) hope that their own self-interests would coincide with their own rendering of justice. It is almost impossible to imagine someone who would not hope or even expect that their sacrifice actually would be rewarded. In fact, Shakespeare seemingly wants to draw our attention not to a weakness on Gaunt’s part but to the very normality of Gaunt’s response; no father could avoid struggling in some way with contradictory demands between his politico-theological commitments and his own family.
The play seems to be dramatically realizing here a critical point: only an extraordinary person could be expected to sacrifice a child without any sense that the gesture would be compensated in some form. Only someone extraordinary could have the absolute devotion to the inscrutable laws of God alluded to by Gaunt earlier. We are led to ask two very simple questions: What could Richard have been expecting of Gaunt at the moment of Bolingbroke’s banishment that made possible such surprise? And what was Gaunt expecting of himself at this critical moment?
Based on their shared and expressed devotion to an inaccessible and absolute Justice, Richard and Gaunt are portrayed as expecting some manifestation of that absolute devotion, perhaps with Gaunt having a complete, near-divine equanimity regarding the loss of his son. Shakespeare leads us to imagine a more dignified, courtierlike version of the unhesitating zeal with which Gaunt’s brother York later offers his son, Aumerle, in his devotion to King Henry IV. Richard and Gaunt appear to imagine what can best be termed an “Abrahamic ideal,” a father willing to sacrifice a son for the call of an absolute and unknowable God. But, importantly, both Gaunt and Richard misrecognize the absoluteness of this demand of the Law beyond the law. Gaunt mistakenly conceived of the otherness of that Law as coinciding with his own self-interest, his love for Bolingbroke. He did not fully understand that such a commitment could actually take a son and what that would feel like.
Similarly, we begin to see here that the sonless “Sun” King does not fully understand that a true commitment to the absolute Justice that guarantees the crown might entail the loss of the crown itself. It is, in fact, what I would call Gaunt’s “transformative Abrahamic experience” that provides the audience with a new vantage point from which to see the King and the King’s claimed devotion to this “other” Justice which is distinct from his own familial feeling, his own self. Gaunt becomes a “prophet new inspired” (2.1.31). Infused with a certain after-the-fact fear and trembling, a certain after-the-fact awe and respect for the absolute otherness of the God that guarantees the crown, Gaunt can see that Richard II, too, lacks sufficient respect for this alterity. Like Gaunt before the banishment of Bolingbroke, Richard still believes that that otherness coincides with his self-interests; indeed, Richard famously believes that that otherness coincides with his very being. In some sense, Richard believes he embodies this divine alterity. This prompts Gaunt to charge Richard with conquering England “itself” (2.1.65), suggesting that Richard has become the “Landlord of England . . . now, not king / Thy state of law is bondslave to the Law” (2.1.113–14).6 This last remark infuriates Richard II (2.1.115) and begins to shatter his diplomatic façade.
As a prophet Gaunt sees clearly what Richard does not: that a monarch is not equivalent to the Law beyond the law, and that clinging to such a notion will bring disaster. But just because Shakespeare’s prophet sees this impending disaster, we should not assume, as so many have, that the playwright advocates or embraces a secular Realpolitik on the historical horizon. Despite his recognition of the flaws in Richard’s understanding of divine right theory, Shakespeare does not seem ready to separate the religious from the political.
The clear suggestion of the play’s opening acts is not that the crown is utterly divorced from the Divine, but that Richard II has misconstrued the relationship of the crown to the Divine. Hence the oft-noted sympathy Shakespeare generates for Richard, particularly in the deposition scene and then in the concluding scenes. The dramatic suggestion is not that there is no divine relation to the crown but that Richard has wildly overestimated the access he has to the Divine. Correspondingly, Shakespeare begins to suggest through Gaunt’s prophecy that a monarch should rule with a certain religious fear and trembling, a certain awe and unease with relation to the inscrutable, unknowable “Other” that provides the throne.7 A true and absolute devotion to the Law beyond the law requires an Abrahamic willingness to respond to that Law without expecting anything in return, a willingness to give oneself up and over to that Law without the slightest attention to self-interests, a willingness to give oneself up and over even if that costs one everything.
But how does one figure a sovereign so utterly willing to give himself up and over in fear and trembling, a sovereign who is so utterly submissive yet is still sovereign? A dramatic and political challenge emerges once Shakespeare stages Gaunt’s Abrahamic transformation, a transformation that involves both a self-critique and a ringing critique of Richard II: if both Gaunt and Richard misrecognize the absoluteness of the demand to respect the otherness of the Law beyond the law,” then how does one stage an appropriately contrasting figure? How does one begin to sketch a monarchical presence that has the requisite fear—and also trembles?
Before the deposition and Richard cedes the crown to Bolingbroke, he gives authority to Gaunt’s brother York. While recent criticism tends not to address the issue, Richard’s willingness to use York as a proxy during his military excursion in Ireland brings about the deposition, in part. York facilitates the passing of the crown to Bolingbroke, which is critical for tracing the Abrahamic influences on Shakespeare’s political theology (2.1.220). Criticism has concentrated mainly on York’s age, his weaknesses, and, ultimately, his role as some sort of comic relief rather than on his role as a pivotal political figure.8 I do not mean to condemn this concentration entirely. York certainly is old, weak, doddering, palsied, and, generically speaking, an altogether complicated figure. But in order to understand fully York’s age, feebleness, and generic complexity we need to resituate him in the Abrahamic context, which governs the play’s thought. In Abrahamic terms, York becomes a much more serious figure, a lens through which we can see Shakespeare’s political theology.
When Gaunt dies, York assumes the role of Richard’s chief critic. Richard’s plans to seize Gaunt’s lands to fund the war in Ireland prompt York’s initial criticisms. York reiterates much of his brother’s critique, explaining simply that Richard II cannot break the Law that guarantees his own crown without risking the crown itself:
Take Hereford’s rights away, and take from Time
His charters and his customary rights;
Let not tomorrow then ensue today;
Be not thyself; for how art thou a king
But by fair sequence and succession?
(2.1.195–98)
Failure to attend to that Law beyond the law, York prophecizes, will “pluck a thousand dangers” on the King’s head. And, on a more personal note, such inattention will “prick [York’s own] tender patience to those thoughts / which honour and allegiance cannot think” (2.1.207–8).
But York is not the savvy and articulate courtier that Gaunt was, and his criticisms lack the sharpness of Gaunt’s final speeches. For Richard, York hardly constitutes a threat. Many assume it is this supposed weakness that leads Richard to name York as governor in his absence immediately after York has warned that Richard’s actions will lead him to think thoughts “which honour and allegiance cannot think” (2.1.209). Ultimately, this undervaluation may have been a political mistake on Richard’s part and so, to the extent his decision has anything to do with his loss of the crown, it is considered, yet again, the King’s poor decision making that matters here and not York’s character.
However, if we begin to consider the possibility that Shakespeare is mapping out an Abrahamic kingship in response to Richard’s divine right theory, then York’s appointment becomes revelatory. In temporarily giving governorship to this particular figure, Richard II is not just making a calculated political decision—Richard is, in fact, giving the crown to the “just” person in terms of the utter selflessness already sketched out as a prerequisite for managing the royal prerogative: “Our uncle York Lord Governor of England, / For he is just and always loved us well” (2.1.220–21). York may not be a commanding presence, but he embodies the devotion to the divine Law beyond the law that both Richard and Gaunt incorrectly assumed they possessed. If I am correct that Gaunt becomes aware that his devotion to the Law beyond the law is less than absolute only at the banishment of Bolingbroke, and that Richard still mistakenly assumes his own being corresponds to this unknowable Law beyond the law, then York stands out as a stark contrast to both in that his respect for the otherness of the Law beyond the law is unquestionably absolute from start to (and we shall see) finish. And, consequently, we can speculate that Shakespeare imagines more at work than one would initially assume in this temporary transfer of power. In short, York figures the weak sovereign that helps Shakespeare resolve the dramatic and political paradox that Gaunt’s Abrahamic critique of Richard produced. In York, Shakespeare comes to dramatic terms with the impossible demand of the royal prerogative, the demand that a monarch simultaneously use exceptional sovereign power but utterly abandon his self-interests.
Shakespeare clearly marks York as an Abraham. Despite his frustration with Richard II, York notably accepts Richard’s command to become governor without question. Speaking to the Queen as he accepts his new role, York says:
Your husband, he is gone to save far off,
Whilst others come to make him lose at home.
Here am I left to underprop his land,
Who, weak with age, cannot support myself.
Now comes the sick hour that his surfeit made;
Now shall he try his friends that flattered him.
(2.2.80–85, emphasis added)
“Here I am,” the famous response of Abraham to God in Genesis 22, here marks York—as does his unquestioning and selfless responsiveness to authority. York, it starts to become clear, possesses Gaunt’s recently acquired Abrahamic understanding. Even more, York embodies the significance of Abraham in Shakespeare’s imagination.
Like Abraham, York is neither heroic nor tragic. In 2.3, when Bolingbroke arrives back in England, York sternly rebukes Bolingbroke for his “rebellion,” just as Gaunt had ruled against Bolingbroke’s challenge to the King via Mowbray. But Bolingbroke, intriguingly, does not give up on gaining some kind of support from York. He calls York his father and asks him if he, like his true father, would sacrifice his own son in this situation.
You are my father, for methinks in you
I see old Gaunt alive. O, then, my father,
Will you permit that I stand condemned
A wandering vagabond, my rights and royalties
Plucked from my arms perforce and given away
To upstart unthrifts? Wherefore was I born.
(2.3.117–22)
We need to keep in mind here that in Genesis 22 Isaac was also the heir to everything Abraham had earned, so his loss was also tied to property.
Bolingbroke then makes this even more personal, asking York about his own son, Aumerle:
You have a son, Aumerle, my noble cousin;
Had you first died, and he been thus trod down
He should have found his uncle Gaunt a father
To rouse his wrongs and chase him to the bay.
(2.3.123–27)
Bolingbroke asks what York would want to have happen to his son in this situation, a question York will answer rather emphatically in Act 5.
York is the mysterious means by which the crown will pass from Richard to Henry IV in a legitimate fashion. York prevents this transfer of power from reducing kingship to a mere power struggle, a mere matter of force of law. Like his brother Gaunt earlier, York remains steadfast in his devotion to Law:
My lords of England, let me tell you this:
I have had feeling of my cousin’s wrongs
And labored all I could do him right:
But in this kind to come, in braving arms,
Be his own carver, and cut out his way
To find out right with wrong—it may not be;
And you that do abet him in this kind
Cherish rebellion and are rebels all.
(2.3.140–47)
But York is in a weak position, and he could not resist Bolingbroke and his supporters even if he zealously wished to do so. Thus he finds himself in the role in which Bolingbroke sought to put him at the beginning of their conversation: a gracious uncle, torn between his devotion to Law (grace, his title, and responsibilities) and his family bond. Like Abraham, York is hopelessly caught in a contradiction, able only to respond: “Here I am.” He “welcomes” them neither as friends nor foes (2.3.170).
York does help Bolingbroke capture Bushy, Bagot, and Green—“the caterpillars of the commonwealth”—but his support for Bolingbroke remains carefully measured throughout. Even when we hear that York has “joined with Bolingbroke” (3.2.200), Shakespeare depicts the tension in this critical union. York reminds Northumberland to respect the crown and refer to Richard as “King Richard”:
It would beseem the Lord Northumberland
To say ‘King Richard.’ Alack the heavy day
When such a sacred king should hide his head!
(3.3.7–9)
In turn, Bolingbroke has to remind York not to express too much sympathy for Richard: “Mistake not, uncle, further than you should” (3.3.15). York cautions Bolingbroke, reiterating Gaunt’s initial concern that anyone claim or even assume access to the Divine that would guarantee the throne: “Take not, good cousin, further than you should, / Lest you mistake the heavens are over our heads” (3.3.16–17). What York presses us to consider is an Abrahamic model of kingship, a sovereign who moves toward the crown with a certain respect, a fear and trembling for what the “heavens” think about all this. Importantly, Henry IV accepts this model: “I know it, uncle, and oppose not myself / Against their will” (3.3.18–20). It is a mistake, I think, to disassociate Bolingbroke’s movement toward the crown from the temporary ascent of the distinctly Abrahamic York.
While no one has discussed these allusions to Abraham before, I cannot say that is because Shakespeare is particularly subtle about the matter. In Act 4 Bolingbroke announces the death of Norfolk, saying, “Sweet peace conduct his sweet soul to the bosom / Of Good old Abraham!” (4.1.104–5). Upon conjuring the image of “Good old Abraham”—a still-familiar dramatic presence to an Elizabethan audience and therefore not just a reference to old age—stage directions call for the entrance of York, who announces that Bolingbroke is now the King. In this play, Abraham and the Abrahamic willingness to give absolutely are intimately linked to divine and righteous kingship. We miss such allusions not because they are not clearly there, but because we have established strict scholarly boundaries—themselves based on a strict secular and religious divide—about what can and cannot be said about divine kingship.
These pronouncements precede the oft-discussed mirror-breaking scene and Richard’s relinquishing the crown. Richard’s loss of the crown prompts York’s son, Aumerle, to plot against the new King. After Richard II has been parted from his wife and sent to the tower, Aumerle appears in the home of his mother and father, the Duchess and Duke of York, where his father discovers his son’s treason and rushes to Henry IV to have his son condemned as a traitor. Aumerle’s mother struggles to stop her husband, but York is more impaired by his inability to get his boots on. This scene leads to an even stranger and potentially comic scene wherein the King forgives Aumerle, only to endure one parent pleading for his son’s death, and another pleading for his life.
The scene is utterly Shakespeare’s creation, and many have found it utterly bizarre, comic, or farcical—out of place in this otherwise solemn play—and very often it has been cut; it has been called, among other things, “geriatric slapstick.”9 Phyllis Rackin’s response is rather common: “What we have here is not simply a comic interlude in a serious play but a degradation of serious characters and serious action to comic status, and that degradation marks a crucial stage in the affective process the play orchestrates for his audience.”10 Rackin suggests this scene deliberately turns audience sympathy away from York:
His zealous efforts to have his own son condemned to death are grotesque rather than comfortably funny. As long as Richard held the throne and York remained torn by loyalties divided between the old king and the usurper, his character remained sympathetic even when his behavior was comic; we could laugh lovingly at a gently comic representation of our own emotional predicament in the face of the dilemma the play represents. However, once Bolingbroke becomes king, York becomes a caricature, a moral automaton who carries his new allegiance to such absurd lengths that we can no longer sympathize with him or it. We repudiate York, and in so doing we also repudiate whatever allegiance we have paid to Bolingbroke; for the single-minded and irrational lengths to which York carries his loyalty to the new king discredit his cause by unwitting parody.11
But when one attends to Genesis 22 it becomes clear that Shakespeare’s engagement with the story of Abraham and Isaac is no degradation but an effort to point audiences toward the most affectively moving dramatic scene in the cycle tradition so that they can track the difficult, torn emotions the deposition of Richard elicits back to a familiar biblical source. Astute critics, such as Harry Berger, have noted the connection to earlier, more serious moments in the play—without the context of Genesis 22: “The York/Aumerle episode, which ends in doggerelized comedy, is a compressed caricature, a skewed icon, of the Gaunt/Bolingbroke interaction. York screams for his son’s death, while Gaunt reluctantly consents to his son’s banishment.”12
In 5.2 the Duke is describing to the Duchess Bolingbroke’s arrival in London as the newly crowned Henry IV. York makes clear, again, that he is given over to the Law beyond the law, which makes the King:
Heaven hath a hand in these events,
To whose high will we bound our calm contents.
To Bolingbroke are we sworn subjects now,
Whose state and honor I for aye allow.
(5.2.37–40)
The Duchess announces Aumerle’s entrance: “Here comes my son Aumerle.” York responds:
Aumerle that was.
But that is lost for being Richard’s friend.
And, madame, you must call him Rutland now.
I am in parliament pledge for his truth
And lasting fealty to the new-made king.
(5.2.41–45)
The mother responds to a familial role, the father to a public.
In dealing with the paradox of the Law beyond the law Shakespeare engages the religious in the dramatic form he knows best: the cycle plays. The crucial role of the Duchess of York might obscure this particular borrowing. Very few of the extant Abraham and Isaac medieval cycle plays portray Sarah or even refer to her. The Northampton cycle (formerly known as the Dublin) is the only one. In the Northampton Abraham and Isaac, Sarah appears only briefly, but that brief appearance is important for 5.2 in Richard II in that her role clearly links the play to the long interpretive history of Genesis 22.13 In the Northampton play, Abraham returns from his encounter with an angel (not with God), calling for Isaac’s sacrifice. Sarah greets him fondly with Isaac (“her dear son”) at her side. Abraham immediately tells Sarah that he has to go to sacrifice. Then he turns to his servants to prepare his transportation:
And, therefore, sirs, maketh mine ass ready,
And Isaac, son, thou never yet me saw
Do no such observance,
Therefore array thee and go with me,
And learn how God should pleased be:
For, son, and ever thou think to thee,
Put ever God to honourance.14
Isaac immediately agrees, but Sarah objects, quite vehemently:
Yea! But I pray you, gentle fere,
As ever you have love me deare,
Let Isaac abide at home here,
For I kept not he went in the wind.
“Peace, dame, let be!” Abraham yells. “Do way!” he shouts to this interference. He tells her that the child needs to know “how God should be pleased.” Realizing she can’t stop him, Sarah turns her attention to the servants, insisting that Abraham’s horse be well trained and that Isaac suffer no unnecessary indignities in the journey. Abraham has to recapture the attention of the servants in this moment: “Get hither our horses and let us go hen. . . . Leapeth up! Have do, anon!” The staging is not specified. Are the servants diligently going about their business and only moderately distracted by Sarah, or do her elaborate attentions to Isaac’s comforts hold up the trip? Either way, the scene corresponds strikingly to York’s clumsy efforts to get his boots on, and to the way his servant must fend off the Duchess for him to get his job done.
What is especially telling about this dramatic borrowing is that Shakespeare chose to stage this particular play within the play in front of his version of the newly crowned monarch, Henry IV. Shakespeare hints that Abraham and Isaac is the play every monarch should watch or consider. Paradoxically, however, the strange and seemingly comic manner in which he inserts this episode into his otherwise solemn drama also reminds us, per the interpretive history of Genesis 22, that this is the play that defies interpretation—even by a divinely sanctioned monarch. Shakespeare’s Henry IV recognizes that a different play is being staged in front of him when York and the Duchess approach, but, as various source studies have often noted, he gives this minidrama a title that does not really fit: “Our scene is alt’red from a serious thing, / and now chang’d to the ‘Beggar and the King’” (5.3.79–80).15 Given all the prefatory Abrahamic allusions, one must assume that an early modern audience would have had a better sense of what the King was watching than he did. A knowing audience watches as the King utterly misrecognizes the play he is in—but this is to Shakespeare’s purpose. To presume to interpret Abraham and Isaac is to presume the same access to the absolutely Other presumed by Gaunt and Richard. Genesis 22, as Luther and so many others understood, must be observed but cannot be comprehended.
To respond wisely and properly to Abraham and Isaac, Henry IV can only embrace this unreadable scene as he does here: that is, he can only respond to it as a piece of foolishness. But an audience would recognize his ultimately patient response to the Duchess and her repeated demands to say “pardon” as an appropriate response to Pauline foolishness (“We are fools for Christ’s sake, but ye are wise in Christ [1 Corinthians 4:10]). The Duchess insists that the King pardon her son, Aumerle, but this is impossible: he has already pardoned Aumerle in exchange for Aumerle’s future loyalty. He does not have the capacity the Duchess imagines he does to forgive absolutely or, strictly speaking, to forgive in any sense; he already has done so. Still, at her insistence, Henry IV acts as if he does pardon Aumerle; he says his lines, he plays his part without any presumption that he has any relationship to the part she ultimately seeks to give him: that of a “god on earth” (5.3.136–37).
In this farcical short play, then, we see Shakespeare draw a model of Abrahamic kingship. The King has a relation to the Divine, which is, in fact, a nonrelation. Henry IV acts as a divine sovereign in granting this pardon without any hint that he has the actual proximity to the Divine that tormented and confused Richard.
Richard famously could not accept that when he looked into a glass he could not find a trace of the Divine—only his own image. The difference is that Henry can tolerate this mirror image, this distance between himself and the Divine, and Richard cannot. Indeed, in the famous mirror breaking scene it is Henry that—in an unusual moment of philosophizing or reflecting theologically—reminds Richard of the limits of the mirror.
RICHARD: Mark, silent King, the moral of this sport:
How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face.
BOLINGBROKE: The shadow of your sorrow hath destroyed
The shadow of your face.
(4.1.280–84)
Even Richard acknowledges the truth of this observation, somewhat surprised at Henry’s astuteness: “Say that again—‘The shadow of my sorrow’—ha, let’s see. / Tis very true” (4.1.283–85). In brief, in the scene with the Duke and Duchess of York, Henry IV plays his role as “god on earth”—like the God in the Abraham and Isaac play who will ultimately pardon Isaac—but he has absolutely no sense that his actions while playing this part are divinely inspired. On the contrary, Shakespeare makes it impossible for him in the context of the scene to even think of his actions as such.
Work out your salvation in fear and trembling, Paul advises, without knowing or presuming that your work will be sufficient for God. Many, like Kierkegaard, have taken this admonition so far as to mean that one cannot even presume God. How is this possible? How are we to imagine a figure willing to respond to God without responding, without believing even in secret that he will receive anything in return? Harder still, How are we to imagine a divinely sanctioned monarch who will adhere to this admonition to move toward God in fear and trembling without any sense that he is supposed to be a god on earth? This monarch does not yet see “face to face,” as Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 13, but, like his predecessor, Richard, through “a glass, darkly.”
The pronouncement of the Duchess of York, then, about Henry being a “god on earth” means nothing; it is, as so many have noted, a farce. And yet it means everything because it directs us toward the ideal sovereign figure who acts without acting, without knowing or believing—even in secret—that he is tethered to the Divine. The narrative that helps us understand this divine nonrelation is not the “king’s two bodies,” but Genesis 22.