Richard II Family Quotes

The play begins with Henry Bolingbroke's accusation that Mowbray killed the king's uncle, Thomas of Woodstock, the Duke of Gloucester. Of course, everybody at court knows that Richard was behind his uncle's death, but nobody can actually come right out and say that. But when Henry Bolingbroke compares Mowbray's actions to those of Cain (the biblical figure who murders his brother in the Book of Genesis), we catch his drift. We're also reminded that the conflicts in this play aren't just political – they're family matters.

This play is filled with fathers and sons. Certain characters in the play suggest that sons can reproduce or "regenerate" their fathers' courage (like Henry Bolingbroke does here). Other characters (like Richard) are put down for their failure to live up to their fathers' reputations. Here, Henry Bolingbroke asks his father to grant him the strength he had when he was a young man, so that he can defeat Mowbray in battle.

Gaunt compares the joy of looking at his children to eating yummy food. He faults Richard here for depriving him of the pleasure of his son Henry Bolingbroke's company. By doing so, Richard has made him "gaunt" (thin and weak), which is obviously a pun on his name. The idea is that when Richard banished Gaunt's son, he took away one of the things he most valued and turned him into a starved man who doesn't have long to live.

The glory of Edward III (Richard's grandfather and Gaunt's father) haunts the characters in the play, many of whom are descended from him. The theory on which the English monarchy is based – that power should be passed down through inheritance – fails with Richard II and opens up the dangerous possibility that there are other ways to choose a king. In fact, it raises the possibility, present throughout the play, that there is nothing "divine" about the king at all, and that bloodlines don't guarantee anything. Here, Gaunt wishes that Edward III could have foreseen how badly Richard would damage his family – in particular, how he would destroy his uncles, Edward's sons – and stopped him from inheriting the throne. The only way to do this would be to create another system of government. In effect, Gaunt wishes Edward III had implemented a different model of royal inheritance.

The pelican was thought to feed its blood to its offspring. Here Gaunt suggests that Richard is like a hungry, cannibalistic bird who, instead of respecting his father's blood and those who share it, feeds on it and gets drunk on the power it carries.

Brain Snack: Shakespeare's monarch, Queen Elizabeth I, often used the pelican as a symbol of the maternal relationship she had with her subjects. Check out this famous painting of Elizabeth known as the "Pelican Portrait." It features a brooch (a fancy pin) with a picture of, you guessed it, a mother pelican on it.

After Richard decides to seize Gaunt's property while Henry Bolingbroke is in exile, York unfavorably compares Richard to his father. Even though they look physically the same at around the same age, Richard's father had many good qualities Richard lacks, including a talent for punishing his enemies instead of his friends.

Puzzling over how to act, and whose side to take, York struggles between two different systems. One depends on hierarchy and loyalty to the king, who has no equal. The other is family. It's significant here that, at least according to the second system, Richard and Henry Bolingbroke are equals.

Although York invokes his power as the king's representative in the line before these, he's really appealing to Henry Bolingbroke not as a king but as an uncle. The key here is to emphasize the military might of the family. The Black Prince is compared to Mars, the Roman god of war. Gaunt, by wishing he could be as strong as he was in former years so as to properly punish his nephew for returning early, is incidentally showing the fact that the monarchy is militarily weak. Richard may be young, but he hardly has the reputation of a "young Mars" that his father had.

Northumberland's interpretation of Henry Bolingbroke's vow to the king actually does the opposite of what it should. Instead of stressing Bolingbroke's status as Richard's subject, Northumberland emphasizes all the ways in which they're descended from the same man, and therefore equal.

Richard expresses his real issue with Henry Bolingbroke: they share a bloodline. Still, Bolingbroke is breaking with tradition by seizing the crown: instead of the eldest son passing on the throne to his eldest son, Bolingbroke, a cousin, is stepping in. Richard invokes the old model of inheritance in order to show how Bolingbroke is breaking it. He tells Bolingbroke that he is too young to be his father – in other words, that Bolingbroke is messing with the system. By taking power, he is writing himself into history, not as Richard's son but as his heir. Because of his intervention, "son" and "heir" aren't synonyms anymore.