Richard II Appearances Quotes

Richard isn't particularly good at reading people or situations, especially before his fall from power. Here he claims that he understands Gaunt's pain, but it turns out that he's totally failed to understand Gaunt at all. His effort to make him feel better by reducing Henry Bolingbroke's banishment by four years fails pretty badly – Gaunt will be dead by then!

Gaunt jokes (in an incredibly sad way) that his body has come to match his name. Now that he's old, he's literally "gaunt" (thin and sickly looking).

Bushy tries to convince the queen that her sense of impending doom is misplaced – he says she's confusing shadows with substance. As usual, it's Bushy who's wrong. As we know, Richard will soon be deposed by Henry, which means the queen will soon be separated from her husband.

In a typical example of how the "flatterers" mislead Richard by shielding him from anything negative, Bushy tries to convince the queen that she's mistaken to think anything is wrong. His argument that sorrow is "false" or misleading is, well, false and misleading. Sorrow is the only thing that helps Richard or his queen finally see things the way they really are.

There's lots of discussion in this play of nature, and how to interpret natural "signs," which everyone assumes are happening in response to events at court. Here the Captain is saying that things look bad. The fact that the bay trees are withered and there are meteors both mean, to a lot of people, that the king is probably dead. Brain Snack: Shakespeare got this omen from Holinshed's Chronicles, a major literary source for the play.

The ability to read situations accurately, and to infer the truth from appearances, is critically important in this play. Here Scrope is about to give Richard some bad news. In order to do so, he needs to retrain Richard – whose judgment is warped by years of being flattered and lied to – to judge appearances correctly.

 Despite being trapped by Henry Bolingbroke's men, Richard still looks like a king, to York's eyes anyway. But York importantly mentions that the impression of power is just that – an impression, and a deceptive one. Two lines later, he regrets that "any harm should stain so fair a show!" By using the word show, York is highlighting how insubstantial Richard is and always has been.

After Richard loses his crown, he looks in a mirror and expects to see that his face has aged as a reflection of his sorrow and grief. This is evidence that Richard constantly confuses surface and substance. Here he confuses his face with his experience. It seems logical to him that his face should have wrinkles to provide evidence of his suffering.

As he continues to look into a mirror, Richard is surprised to find his face basically unchanged. Feeling that he's been deeply transformed by losing the crown, it troubles him that his face refuses to show his suffering, to provide an honest reflection of his reality. He accuses the glass of "flattering" him, of making him look healthier than he really is – much like his advisers did when he was still in power.

Here York describes how Henry Bolingbroke rode into London after seizing power from Richard II. This is an interesting reversal: instead of describing the spectacle of Bolingbroke himself, York describes the public's reaction to the spectacle. It's a clever move that keeps us from seeing Bolingbroke clearly. Instead, we see windows and eyes: things that are used to watch instead of the thing they're watching. In one sense, York's description is all appearances and no substance: he starts this passage by saying "you would have thought," meaning it didn't really happen the way he says. It turns out you would have thought the walls had been painted with images welcoming Bolingbroke. What does this mean? York seems to give us information without actually telling us anything at all.