May tear a passage through the flinty ribs 20
Of this hard world, my ragged1 prison walls,
And, for they cannot, die in their own pride.
Thoughts tending to content flatter them-
selves

That they are not the first of fortune's slaves,
Nor shall not be the last; like silly beggars,
Who, sitting in the stocks, refúge2 their shame,
That3 many have, and others must sit there;
And in this thought they find a kind of ease,
Bearing their own misfortune on the back
Of such as have before endur'd the like. ] 30
Thus play I, in one person, many people,
And none contented: sometimes am I king;
Then treason makes 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: [but whate'er I
am,

39

Nor I, nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleas'd, till he be eas'd
With being nothing.-Music do I hear? [Music.
Ha, ha! keep time:-how sour sweet music is,
When time is broke, and no proportion kept!
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:

50

72

king, When thou wert king; who, travelling towards York,

With much ado at length have gotten leave
To look upon my sometimes master's face.
O, how it yearn'd 10 my heart, when I beheld
In London streets, that coronation-day,
When Bolingbroke rode on roan Barbary!
That horse that thou so often hast bestrid,
That horse that I so carefully have dress'd! so
K. Rich. Rode he on Barbary? Tell me,
gentle friend,

How went he under him?

Groom. So proud as if he had disdain'd the ground.

K. Rich. 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

DRAMATIS PERSONE.

1. RICHARD II. was the second son of Edward, commonly called the Black Prince, the eldest son of Edward III. and Philippa or Philippine, daughter of William, Count of Hainault. Edward the Black Prince married Joan, known as the Fair Maid of Kent, widow of Sir Thomas Holland, one of the original Twenty-five Knights of the Garter, and only daughter and heir of Edmund of Woodstock, Earl of Kent (who was beheaded in 1330), the youngest son of Edward I., by his second wife, Margaret, the daughter of Philip III. and sister of Philip IV. of

France. Holinshed says that Joan "was also wife vnto the erle of Salisburie, and diuorsed from him" (vol. ii. p. 676). She bore her husband two sons, Edward, who died at Bordeaux, when only seven years old, in 1372; and Richard, born at Bordeaux, January 6th, 1366. On the "eight of June, being Trinitie sundaie" (according to Holinshed, vol. ii. p. 703), the Black Prince died. Edward III. immediately made young Richard, then in his tenth year, Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester and Cornwall. The king survived his eldest son little more than a year, dying on June 21st, 1377. He had previously made the ambitious John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, governor of

the kingdom. The people were very jealous of the influence of this nobleman, and not without reason; for there is little doubt that he tried all he could to induce the king to pass over the daughter of his elder brother, Lionel, Duke of Clarence, and to make him the next heir after Richard.

The young king was crowned on July 16th, 1377; but it was not till twelve years afterwards, on May 8th, 1389, that he can be said to have begun to reign. In the interim his two uncles, the Duke of Lancaster, and Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, practically governed; though a Council of Twelve had been appointed by the Lords to hold the supreme power during the king's minority. There is no doubt that much of the evil reputation which attaches to the reign of Richard II. is due to the grasping ambition and vindictive cruelty of his uncles. This play treats only of the events of the last two years of Richard's unhappy reign. The year before the play opens, 1397, the Duke of Gloucester had been murdered (see note 37); and, as Mr. Russell French remarks in his Shakspeariana Genealogica, it was this "deed of crime which in a great measure led the way to the complications, and final catastrophe, recorded in the drama" (p. 24). Richard was twice married; first, on January 14th, 1382, to Anne of Bohemia, known as The Good Queen Anne, daughter of Charles IV., Emperor of Germany. She died without issue on June 7th, 1394. In November, 1396, he married Isabel, who was then in her tenth year. The date of King Richard's death is generally fixed on the 14th February, 1400, St. Valentine's day; but the exact date, and the manner of it, are both uncertain (see note 317).

2. JOHN OF GAUNT (or Ghent), so called from the town in which he was born, in 1340, Duke of Lancaster, was the fourth son of Edward III. The first mention we find of him in history is as accompanying his father-in-law, Henry, Duke of Lancaster, and his brother Lionel, in the fleet which was prepared for the purpose of attacking the coast of Normandy in 1355. Next we find him, as Earl of Richmond, accompanying his father to Calais in the Michaelmas of the same year. Holinshed (vol. ii. p. 656) says: "This yeare also, about Michaelmasse, the king hauing summoned an armie to be readie at Sandwich, passed ouer to Calis with the same. There went ouer with him his two sonnes, Lionell of Antwerp earle of Vister, and John of Gant earle of Richmond." In May, 1359, he married his cousin, the Lady Blanch, daughter of Henry, Duke of Lancaster, at Reading, having obtained a dispensation from the pope. In the same year he distinguished himself, in the company of his father and his brothers, Lionel and Edmund, at some "solemne justs enterprised at London" (Holinshed, vol. ii. p. 671). At this time he was still known as Earl of Richmond; but on the death of his father-in-law Henry, Duke of Lancaster, in 1361, he succeeded to his titles of Earl of Derby and Duke of Lancaster. He accompanied the Black Prince in his expedition into Spain in 1367, and commanded the first division of his army. He was sent by his father in 1369 in command of an army into France to oppose the Duke of Burgundy. In 1370 his wife Blanch died. In the same year he took part in the siege of

Limoges; and was left Governor of Aquitaine by the Black Prince during his visit to England. In 1372 he married Constance, eldest daughter of Peter the Cruel, King of Castile; his brother Edmund, Earl of Cambridge, marrying her sister Isabel about the same time. Shortly after this marriage he returned to England, and assumed the title of King of Castile in right of his wife. In July, 1373, he was again sent over to Calais with an army. He reached Bordeaux at Christmas in the same year, when peace was concluded; and in July, the following year, he returned to England. He was one of the commissioners appointed to arrange a treaty of peace with France on behalf of the King of England at Bruges, 1375. In 1376 the House of Commons made a complaint against the Duke of Lancaster, Lord Latymer, Alice Perrers, and others; and they all appear to have been banished the court; but, after the death of the Black Prince, in June of the same year, they were recalled to court; and the Duke of Lancaster being appointed Governor of the Realm, continued so till the end of his father's reign. Having taken Wicliff under his protection, he supported him in his trial before the Archbishop of Canterbury in the next year, 1377. In the course of the trial he addressed a very rude speech to Courtenay, Bishop of London; the people took the bishop's part, attacked the duke's palace in the Savoy, reversed his arms, as if he had been a traitor, and would have killed him if they could have caught him. John of Gaunt did not forget this insult; and for some time there was ill blood between him and the citizens of London. The dispute between them was put an end to by the young king Richard, in 1377. In 1394, Constance, the second wife of John of Gaunt, died about the same time that the Good Queen Anne died, and also the wife of Henry Bolingbroke. In 1396 the duke married Catherine Swynford, "widow of Sir Otes Swynford, and eldest daughter and co-heir of Sir Payn Roet, Knight, Guienne King at Arms" (French, p. 25). The marriage gave great offence, as she had lived with him as his mistress. The children he had by her before his marriage were legitimatized under the name of Beaufort, one of the duke's castles in Anjou, where they were born. "Time-honoured" John of Gaunt seems to have maintained the chief power in the kingdom for the first twenty years of his nephew's reign. In 1390 he had been made Duke of Aquitaine. After the death of the Duke of Gloucester, in 1397, the Duke of Lancaster and his brother, the Duke of York, assembled an army of their dependants with the intention of revenging their brother's death; but they were reconciled to the king before any collision could take place. The banishment of Bolingbroke in 1398 showed that the king did not forget his grudge against his uncle; and how little good feeling he bore him was further manifested by the unjustifiable seizure of his goods immediately after his death, which took place at the Bishop of Ely's place in Holborn early in the following year, 1399. John of Gaunt was the friend and patron of Chaucer, whose wife was a sister of Catherine Swynford.

3. EDMUND OF LANGLEY (so called from his birthplace, Langley, near St. Albans), Duke of York, the fifth son of Edward III., was born in 1341. He "married first Isabel,